"Well, you hear this. If I
catch you operating under a black flag, I'll take you before a provost
and you'll be off to your heavenly reward before the sun sets."
Hatcher nodded, his eyes
looking at nothing, a lump of cartilage flexing in his jaw. "One of
these days all this will be over," he said.
"Yes?"
"That's all. It'll be over and
my stripes and those acorns on your hat won't mean very much."
"I look forward to the day,
Hatch."
Willie watched Hatcher crunch
across the floor of the woods toward the train track, his spine
slightly bent, his clothes stiff with salt and dirt, his Henry repeater
cupped in a horizontal position, like a prehistoric creature carrying a
spear. Two other men joined him, both of them dressed in tattered
butternut, and the three of them crossed the railway embankment and
disappeared into the trees on the far side.
Willie wondered when Hatcher
would eventually muster up the nerve to frame Willie's back in his
rifle sights.
Someone touched him on the
shoulder.
"Major is asking for you,
Lieutenant," a soldier said. He could not have been over sixteen. There
were no buttons on his shirt and the cloth was held against his chest
by the crossed straps of his haversack and a bullet pouch. He wore a
domed, round-brimmed straw hat that sat on his head like a cake bowl.
"How is he?" Willie asked.
"He falls asleep and says
funny things," the boy answered.
Willie walked back through the
woods
to
a bayou
that
was spangled with sunlight
and
draped with air vines that hung from the trees. The major lay on a
blanket in the leaves, his head propped on a haversack stuffed with his
rubber coat.
Back in the shade, under a
mulberry tree clattering with bluejays, the feet of four dead soldiers
stuck out from the gum blankets that had been pulled over their bodies.
Their shoes had been taken and the blankets that covered them were
spotted with the white droppings of birds.
Both of the major's arms were
broken and hung uselessly at his sides. A bandage with a scarlet circle
the size of a half dollar in the center was tied just below his heart.
His muttonchop sideburns looked as thick as hemp on his jowls.
"I had a dream about snow.
Everything was white and a red dog was barking inside some trees," the
major said.
"We have a boat coming up the
bayou, sir. We'll have you back at battalion aid soon," Willie said.
"We shot the living hell out
of them, didn't we?"
"You bet," Willie said.
"I need to ask you something."
"Yes, sir."
"When we stopped that
steamboat on the Mis'sippi, the one carrying yellow jack?"
Willie let his eyes slip off
the major's face.
"Yes, sir, I remember it," he
said.
"I had a feeling you knew the
woman on board, the one with the Yankee accent."
"Could be, sir."
"I don't think those darkies
had yellow jack. I think they were escaped slaves."
"Lots of things are out of our
control, Major," Willie said. He was propped on one knee, his gaze
fixed on the air vines that fluttered in the wind.
"I worked my whole life as a
trainman. I owned nary a slave. I always thought slavery was a
mistake," the major said.
Willie nodded. "Yes, sir," he
said.
"Those who got through us on
the river? They might have joined
up with the
colored outfit we just shot up, the ones who put the ball under my
heart. That'd be
something,
wouldn't it?"
Willie's eyes returned to the
major's and he felt something drop inside him.
"It's nothing to worry about.
The boat will be here soon," the major said, and tried to smile.
"Sir" Willie began.
"Watch your back, Willie.
Hatcher and Captain Atkins are no good. They hate a young fellow such
as yourself."
Then the major widened his
eyes briefly and turned his face away, into the shadows, as though the
world of sunlight and the activity of the quick held little interest
for him.
When Willie got back to his
position inside the edge of the woods, he sat very still on a log and
waited for his head to stop spinning. Then he poured water out of his
canteen into his palm and wiped his face with it. The boxcars on the
track went in and out of focus and a pang like a shard of glass sliced
across the lining of his stomach. For a moment he thought he would lose
control of his sphincter muscle.
In the distance he saw snow
egrets and black geese rising from the canopy in the river bottoms,
then he heard the spatter of small-arms fire that meant Hatcher's group
had made contact with the black soldiers who had fled the train.
Both the men with Hatcher
carried captured Spencer rifles and bags of brass cartridges, and they,
along with Hatcher and his Henry repeater, were laying down a murderous
field of fire. The shooting went on for five minutes, then a field
piece roared deep in the river bottoms and the gum trees overhead
trembled with the shock and a cloud of smoke and grayish-orange dust
rose out of the leaves into the sunlight. A moment later the field
piece roared again and a second cloud of dust and smoke caught the
light and flattened in the wind.
Willie looked through his
spyglass at the observation balloon tethered by the railway track far
down the line. The bearded man in the wicker basket was using a pair of
handheld flags to semaphore a battery down below, one consisting of
three rifled twenty-pounder Parrotts that had been removed from a
scuttled Union gunboat.
One of the cannons fired, and
a shell arced over the spot in the river bottoms
where the dust
clouds had risen out of the
canopy.
The round
went
long
by thirty yards,
and
the
man in the basket leaned over the
side and whipped his flags in the air. The next round was short and the
man in the basket semaphored the ground again.
Then all three Confederate
cannons fired for effect, again and again, the fused shells whistling
shrilly only seconds before they struck.
Uprooted trees and columns of
dirt fountained into the air, and through the spyglass Willie could see
shoes and pieces of blue uniform mixed in with the dirt and palmetto
leaves.
The barrage went on for almost
a half hour. When Willie and his platoon marched across the railway
embankment and entered the bottoms, he saw a black soldier huddled on
the ground, trembling all over as though he had malaria, his forearms
pressed tightly against his ears. Deeper in the bottoms the ground was
pocked with craters, the dirt still smoking, and the trees were
decorated in ways he had not seen since Shiloh.
Back in the underbrush he saw
one of Hatcher's men cut the ear from a dead man's head, fold it in a
handkerchief, and place it carefully in a leather pouch.
So that's the way it goes, he
thought. You turn a blind eye to slaves escaping downriver, and later
they join up with the blue-bellies and perhaps drive a ball under your
friend's heart, and you trap the poor devils under a barrage that
paints the trees with their blood and nappy hair. Ah, isn't it all a
lovely business, he thought.
He wondered what Abigail would
have to say about his work and hers.
An hour later he passed out.
When he woke, he was in a tent and rain was ticking on the canvas.
Through the flap he saw two enlisted men digging a grave by the bayou.
The major lay next to the mound of dirt, his face covered with his gray
coat.
THE morning did not feel like
spring, Abigail thought. The air was hot and smelled of dust and trash
fires, the sky gray, the clouds crackling with electricity. Then her
neighbor's dogs began barking and she heard a banging noise down the
Teche, like a houseful of carpenters smacking nails down in green wood.
She walked out on the gallery and saw birds lifting out of the trees
all the way down the street as a long column of soldiers and wagons
rounded a bend in the distance and advanced toward the center of town.
The soldiers were unshaved,
gaunt as scarecrows, some of them without shoes, the armpits of their
butternut and gray uniforms white with salt, their knees patched like
the pants on beggars. Three wagons carrying wounded passed in front of
her. The teamsters in the wagon boxes were leaning forward, away from
their charges, with handkerchiefs tied across their faces. The wind
shifted, and she smelled the unmistakable odor of gangrene and of men
who had become incontinent and left to sit in their own excretions. She
saw no one with a surgeon's insignia in the column.
She walked out into the yard
just as a mounted officer rode his
horse to the head of
column. He wore a slouch hat, a sweat-peppered
gray shirt, no coat, and a
pistol in a shoulder holster on his chest. His face was narrow, his
skin as coarse and dark as if it had been rubbed with the dust from a
foundry.
He picked his hat off his head
by the crown and combed back his hair with his fingers.
"Still in our midst, are you?"
he said.
"This is where I live,"
Abigail replied.
"Bring as many ladies as you
can find up to the Episcopalian church," he said.
"You don't need to tell me my
obligations, Captain Atkins," she replied.
"There's nothing like hearing
a Yankee accent behind our own lines. But I'm sure you've been loyal to
the cause, haven't you?"
"Where is Willie Burke?"
"Can't rightly say. Saw him
puking his guts out last week. Don't think he was quite up to blowing
railroad spikes into freed niggers."
"What?"
"You haven't heard? The Yanks
give them uniforms and guns and permission to kill their previous
owners. We waylaid a whole train-load of them. Made good niggers out of
a goodly number."
Dry lightning rippled through
the clouds. Atkins replaced his hat on his head and looked up at the
sky.
"By the way, that was some of
General Banks' skirmishers shooting behind us," he said. "They say he
was a bobbin boy in one of your Massachusetts textile mills. Does not
like rich people. No, sir. So he's turned his men loose on the civilian
population. I hear they're a horny bunch. You might fasten on a
chastity belt."
She wouldn't let the level of
his insult register in her face, but the fact that he had insulted her
sexually, in public, indicated only one conclusion about her status in
the community: She was utterly powerless. She wanted to turn and walk
away, but instead she fixed her eyes on the exhaustion in the faces of
the enlisted men marching past her, the sores on the horses and mules,
a mobile field kitchen whose cabinet doors swung back and forth on
empty shelves.
"Captain Atkins, I suspect you
may be a gift from God," she said.
His head tilted sideways, an
amused question mark in the middle of his face.
"Sometimes
we're all
tempted to think of our own race as being
superior to others," she said.
"Then we meet someone such as yourself and immediately we're beset with
the terrible knowledge that there's something truly cretinous at work
in the Caucasian gene pool. Thank you for stopping by."
He studied her for a moment
and scratched his cheek, his gaze slightly out of focus. He touched his
horse with one spur and rode slowly toward the front of the column, his
head bent down as though he were lost in thought. Then he reined his
horse in a circle and rode back to Abigail's gate. He leaned with both
arms on the pommel, the leather creaking under his weight. His flat,
hazel eyes looked like they had been cut out of another face and pasted
on his own.
He pointed at her with a
dirt-rimmed fingernail. "A pox on you, you snooty cunt. Be assured your
comeuppance is in the making," he said.
When Abigail arrived at the
brick church at the far end of Main Street, the pews had been upended
against the walls and the injured placed in rows on the floor. She
peeled bandages from wounds that were rife with infection, scissored
the trousers and underwear off men who had fouled themselves, and
bathed their bodies with sponges and soap and warm water. A local
physician, untrained as a surgeon, created an operating table by
propping a door across two pews, then sawed limbs off men as though he
were pruning trees. After each patient was carried away, he threw a
bucket of water on the table and began on the next. There was no
laudanum, and Abigail had to hold the heel of her hand in one man's
mouth to keep him from biting through his tongue.
Outside, she heard men and
horses running in the street, their gear clanking, a wheeled cannon
bouncing off a parked wagon, then the spatter of small-arms fire in the
distance.
"Are you with the 18th?" she
asked a private who lay on a litter, a mound of bloody rags on the
floor beside him.
He nodded. His eyes were
receded in his face, his cheeks hollow. The bones in his chest looked
like sticks under his skin. One pants leg had been cut away, and a
swollen red line ran from a bandage on his thigh into his groin.