"Take your hand off my basket."
"Sorry, Miss Abigail. I got my
orders." He winked at her, then pulled the basket from her hand and
swung it up behind the buggy seat. He reached for the other basket.
"He has also ordered you to
stop molesting women in this community," she said.
"What are you talking about?"
Atkins asked.
"The telegraph message he sent
you."
"He didn't send me a telegraph
message. He told me something
about not letting the
overseers impregnate any of the wenches. But be didn't send me a
telegraph message."
She stared at him blankly.
Atkins laughed to himself.
"Look, Miss Dowling, I don't know what kind of confusion you're under,
but Marse Jamison is giving the niggers a little self-government so's
he can get himself installed in Jefferson Davis' cabinet. Davis is
famous for the nigger councils on his plantations. Is this what you're
talking about?"
"Give my back my basket," she
said.
"By all means. Excuse me for
stopping. But your nose was so high up in the air I thought you might
walk into a post and knock yourself unconscious," he said.
He dropped her grocery basket
in the mud and drove off, popping his buggy whip above the back of his
horse.
TWO weeks later the
Confederate War Department notified the parents of Robert Perry their
son had been separated from his regiment during the Battle of Manassas
Junction and that he was alive and well and back among his comrades.
That same night, while the
moon was down, Abigail Dowling rowed a runaway slave woman and her two
small children to a waiting boat, just north of Vermilion Bay. All
three of them were owned by Ira Jamison.
IN THE spring of the following
year, 1862, Willie and Jim marched northward, at the rear of the
column, along a meandering road through miles of cotton acreage,
paintless shacks, barns, corn cribs, smokehouses, privies, tobacco
sheds cobbled together from split logs, and hog pens whose stench made
their eyes water.
The people were not simply
poor. Their front porches buzzed with horseflies and mosquitoes. The
hides of their draft animals were lesioned with sores. The beards of
the men grew to their navels and their clothes hung in rags on their
bodies. The children were rheumy-eyed and had bowed legs from rickets,
their faces flecked with gnats. The women were hard-bitten,
dirt-grained creatures from the fields, surly and joyless and resentful
of their childbearing and apt to take an ax to the desperate man who
tried to put a fond hand on their persons.
Willie looked around him and
nodded. So this is why we came to Tennessee, he thought.
Two months earlier he and Jim
had been on leave from the 18th Louisiana at Camp Moore and had stood
in front of a saloon on
upper St. Charles Avenue in
New Orleans, dipping beer out of a
bucket, watching other
soldiers march under the canopy of live oaks, past columned homes with
ceiling-high windows and ventilated green shutters, regimental bands
playing, the Stars and Bars and Bonnie Blue flags flying, barefoot
Negro children running under the colonnades, pretending they were
shooting one another with broomsticks and wood pistols.
It was a false spring and the
air was balmy and filled with the smells of boiled crawfish and crabs
and pralines. The sky was ribbed with pink clouds, and palm fronds and
banana trees rattled in the breeze off Lake Pontchartrain. Out on the
Mississippi giant paddle-wheelers blew their whistles in tribute to the
thousands of soldiers turning out of St. Charles into Canal, the silver
and gold instruments of the bands flashing in full sunlight now, the
mounted Zouaves dressed like Bedouins in white turbans and baggy
scarlet pants.
Women threw flowers off the
balconies into the columns of marching men. Prostitutes from Congo
Square winked at them from under their parasols and sometimes hoisted
their skirts up to their thighs and beyond.
"Maybe there's something
glorious about war after all," Jim said.
"We might have to rethink that
statement later on, Jim," Willie replied.
"I hear a trip to Congo Square
is two dollars," Jim said.
"The fee for the doctor to
stick an eight-inch hot needle up your pole is an additional three,"
Willie said.
"If I had a lady like Abigail
Dowling on my mind, I'd have the same elevated sentiments." Jim looked
at the prostitutes hiking their skirts across the boulevard and sucked
his teeth philosophically. "But I'm afraid my virginity is going to die
a beautiful and natural death in old New Orleans tonight."
Now New Orleans was surrounded
by Federal gunboats and the city's surrender was expected any day.
Where were Louisiana's troops?
Willie asked himself.
In Tennessee, protecting hog
farmers and their wives, one glance at whom would make any man
seriously consider a life of celibacy, Willie said to himself.
As the column crested a rise
he could see the great serpentine length of the army he was marching
in, the mismatched gray and butternut uniforms, some regiments,
like his own, actually wearing blue jackets, all of them heading
toward a distant woods on the west bank of the Tennessee River.
But his deprecating thoughts
about his surroundings and the governance of the Confederate military
were not the true cause of his discontent. Nor did he think any longer
about the heaviness of the Enfield rifle on his shoulder or the
blisters on his feet or the dust that drifted back from the wheels of
the ambulance wagons.
In the pit of his stomach was
an emptiness he could not fill or rid himself of. When the sun broke
through the clouds that had sealed the sky for days, lighting the
hardwood forest in the distance, a bilious liquid surged out of his
stomach into the back of his mouth and his bowels slid in and out of
his rectum. A vinegary reek rose from his armpits into his nostrils,
not the smell of ordinary sweat that comes from work or even tramping
miles along a hard-packed dirt road, but the undisguised glandular
stench of fear.
"What day is it?" Willie said.
"Saturday, April 5," Jim
replied. "Why's that?"
"I don't know. I don't know
why I asked. What's that place up yonder called?"
"To my knowledge, it doesn't
have a name. It's a woods."
"That's foolishness, Jim.
Every place has a name."
"There's nothing there except
a Methodist church house. It's called Shiloh. That's it. Shiloh
Church," Jim said.
THEY camped late that
afternoon in a clearing among trees on the edge of a ravine. The floor
of the forest and the sides of the ravine were layered with leaves that
had turned gray under the winter snow and were now dry and powdery
under their feet. The sun was an ember in the west, the trees bathed in
a red light like the radiance from a smithy's forge.
Willie sat on a log and pulled
off his shoes and massaged his feet. The odor from his socks made him
avert his face and hold his breath. All around him men were stacking
their weapons, breaking rations out of their haversacks, kicking
together cook fires. The wind was blowing off the river, and the canopy
of hickory and chestnut and oak trees flickered
against
the pinkness of the
sky. In the
knock of axes, the
plunking of a banjo being tuned, the smell of corn mush and fatback
frying, it was not hard to pretend they were all young fellows and good
friends assembling for a camp meeting or coon hunt.
Maybe that's all it would be,
Willie thought. Just another long stroll across the countryside, a
collective exercise that would be unmemorable once the grand illusion
became obvious to them all.
Jim poured water from his
canteen into a big tin cup, then carefully measured out two spoonfuls
of real coffee into the water, not chicory and ground corn, and set it
to boiling on a flat stone in the center of his cook fire. His face
looked composed and thoughtful as he squatted by the fire, his skin
sun-browned, his sideburns shaggy, the road dust on his face streaked
where his sweat had dried.
Willie went to the field
kitchen and got a pan of corn mush, his unlaced shoes flopping on his
feet, then squatted next to Jim and greased the bottom of a small
frying pan with a piece of salt bacon and poured the mush on top of it
and stuck the pan in the coals.
"What's the first thing you're
going to do when we get back home?" he asked Jim.
"Start my own shipwright
business. Build the first clipper ship to come out of New Iberia,
Lou'sana," Jim said.
"Steam is making museum pieces
of the clippers, Jim."
"That's good. I won't have
competitors," Jim said.
Willie lowered his head so his
voice wouldn't travel.
"Are you scared?" he asked.
"If you was as scared as I am,
you'd run for home. I'm just too scared to get my legs moving," Jim
said.
"You put on a good act, you
ole beanpole. But I don't think you're scared of anything," Willie
replied.
Jim stood up with his tin cup
of boiling coffee and poured half of it into Willie's cup. He rubbed
Willie on the top of the head.
"No blue-bellies can do in the
likes of us," he said.
"That's right, by God. Here,
our mush is ready," Willie said.
"I can't eat. I think I got a
stomach cold. Can't hold anything down," Jim said, walking into the
shadows so Willie could not see his face.
The sun dipped below the hills
and suddenly the woods were cooler the
sky the
color of coal dust, without
moon or stars, the tree
branches knocking toget
her overhead, to the north there were
fires on the
bluffs above the river and Willie thought he could feel the vibrations
of gun carriages and caissons through the ground.
Five men and a drummer boy
from the 6th Mississippi, in butternut pants and homespun shirts, were
sitting around a fire, six feet away, smoking cob pipes, laughing at a
joke.
"Who's out there?" Willie
asked them, nodding toward the north.
" 'Who's out there?' Where the
hell you been, boy?" a tall man with a concave face said.
"Corinth."
"Them bluffs and ravines is
crawling with Yankees. They been out there for weeks," the man said.
"Why not leave them be?"
Willie asked.
"We done turned that into a
highly skilled craft, son. But the word is we're going at them
tomorrow," the man said.
Willie felt his stomach
constrict and sweat break on his forehead. He went out of the
firelight, into the trees, and vomited.
Fifteen minutes later Jim came
back to the fire and sat down on the log beside Willie, his sheathed
bowie knife twisting against the log's bark. Willie sniffed the air.
"What have you been up to?" he
asked.
Jim opened his coat to reveal
a half-pint, corked bottle stuck down in his belt. The clear liquid it
contained danced in the firelight.
"This stuff will blow the
shoes off a mule," he said.
Three soldiers with a banjo,
fiddle, and Jew's harp were playing a dirge by the edge of the ravine.
The men from the 6th Mississippi were lying on their blankets or in
their tents, and the drummer boy sat by himself, staring into the fire,
his drum with crossed sticks on top resting by his foot. He wore an
oversized kepi, and his scalp was gray where his hair had been bowl-cut
above his ears. His dour face, with downturned mouth and impassive
eyes, was like a miniature painting of the Southern mountain man to
whom sorrow and adversity are mankind's natural lot.
"You get enough to eat?" Jim
said to him.
"Pert' near as much as I
want," the boy replied.
"Then I guess we'd better
throw away this mush and bacon here," Jim said.
"Hit don't
matter to
me,"
the little boy s
aid, his face as
smooth and expressionless as clay in
the light from the fire.
"Come over here and bring your
pan," Jim said.
The boy dusted off the seat of
his pants and sat on a stump by Willie. He watched while Willie filled
his pan, then he ate the mush with a spoon, his thumb and index finger
all the way up the handle, scraping the food directly into his mouth.
"What's your name?" Willie
asked.
"Tige McGuffy," the boy said.
"How old might you be, Tige?"
Willie asked.
"Eleven, pert' near twelve,"
the boy said.
"Well, we're mighty pleased to
meet you, Tige McGuffy," Willie said.
"This mush with bacon is a
treat. I ain't never quite had it prepared like that," Tige said. "How
come you was puking out in the trees?"
"Don't rightly know, Tige,"
Willie said, and for the first time that day he laughed.
Out on the edge of the
firelight the musicians sang,
"White
doves come at morning
Where my soldier sleeps in the
ground.
I placed my ring in his coffin,
The trees o'er his grave have
all turned brown."