"You have something you want
to say, Flower?" he asked.
"Not really."
"You bear me a grudge?" he
said.
"Miss Carrie in there knows
prophecy. Some people say Mr. Willie Burke got the same gift. But folks
such as me don't have that gift," she said.
"You're not making a whole lot
of sense."
"I cain't read the lines in
somebody's palm. But I know you're gonna come to a bad end. It's
because you're evil. And you're evil because you're cruel. And you're
cruel because inside you're afraid."
He stared into the distance,
his fists on his hips, his weight resting casually on one leg. Rain was
blowing off the Gulf, like spun glass across the sun. He shook his head.
"I tell you the truth, Flower,
you're the damnedest nigger I've ever known and the best piece of rough
stock I ever took to bed. That said, would you please get the hell out
of here?" he said.
As she rode away in the buggy,
she looked back over her shoulder and saw Rufus Atkins counting out a
short stack of coins into the palm of each of the paddy rollers. A
shaft of sunlight fell on the broad grin of the feebleminded man. His
teeth were as yellow as corn, his eyes filled with a liquid glee.
WILLIE Burke no longer knew if
the humming sound in his head was caused by the mosquito eggs in his
blood or the dysentery in his bowels. The dirt road along the bayou was
yellow and hard-packed and the dust from the retreating column drifted
into his face. He wore no socks and the leather in his shoes had
hardened and split and rubbed blisters across his toes and on his
heels. He watched the retreating column disappear around a bend, then
ordered his men to fall out and form a defensive line along a coulee
that fed into the bayou.
He lay below the rim of the
embankment and peered back down the road. Houses were burning in the
distance, and when he pressed his ear against the ground he thought he
could hear the rumble of wheeled vehicles in the south, but he could
see no sign of Union soldiers.
Where were they? he asked
himself. Perhaps sweeping south of New Iberia to capture the salt mines
down by the Gulf, he thought. It was shady where he lay on the
embankment, and he could smell wild-flowers and water in the bottom of
the coulee and for what seemed
just a second he laid his
head down in the coolness of the grass and
closed his eyes.
An enlisted man shook him by
his arm.
"You all right, Lieutenant?"
he asked.
"Sure I am," Willie said, his
head jerking up. The side of his face was peppered with grains of dirt.
He raised himself on his arms and looked down the road at the row of
oaks and cypress trees that lined the bayou. He felt light-headed,
disconnected in a strange way from the scene around him, as though it
belonged somehow inside the world of sleep and he belonged in another
place.
He could see a curtain of
black smoke rising from the fields in the south now, which told him he
had been right in his speculation that the Yankees' main force would
concentrate on capturing the salt mines and, at worst, he and his men
would not have to deal with more than a diversionary probe.
He looked at the empty road
and the cinders rising in the sky from the fields and the wind blowing
across the tops of the oak trees and wondered if he would see his
mother and Abigail Dowling that evening. Yes, he most certainly would,
he told himself. He would bathe in an iron tub and have fresh clothes
and he would eat soup and perhaps even bread his mother had baked for
him.
He thought about all these
things and did not see the Yankee gunboat that came around a bend in
the bayou, emerging from behind trees into the gold-purple light of the
late afternoon, its port side lined with a half dozen cannons.
He saw a sailor jerk a lanyard
at the rear of a Parrott gun, then a shell sucked past his ear and
exploded against a tree trunk behind him, showering the coulee with
leaves and branches and bits of metal and the sudden glare of the sun.
Then he was running down the coulee with the others, away from the
bayou and the gunboat that was now abreast of them, close enough for
him to see the faces of the gun crews and the sharpshooters on top of
the pilothouse.
The row of cannons fired in
sequence, turning the boat against its rudder, blowing smoke across the
water. He felt himself lifted into the air, borne above the treetops
into a sky that was the color of a yellow bruise, his concerns of a
second ago no longer of consequence. He struck the earth with a
shuddering, chest-emptying impact that was oddly painless, and in a
dark place that semed outside of time thought he heard the sound of
dirt falling around him like dry rain
click
ing on a wood box.
ABIGAIL drove her buggy
along
the bayou road and passed a house with twin brick chimneys whose roof
had been pocked by a stray cannon shell that had exploded inside and
blown the windows onto the lawn. She passed families of Negroes and
poor whites who were walking into town with bundles on their heads, and
a barefoot Confederate soldier who sat on a log, without gun, hat or
haversack, his head hanging between his knees. His teeth were black
with gunpowder and a rag was tied across the place where his ear had
been.
"Can I change your dressing,
sir?" she asked.
"I haven't give it any real
thought," he replied.
"Do you know where Willie
Burke is?"
"Cain't say as I recall him,"
the soldier replied.
"Lieutenant Burke. He was on
the rear guard."
"This hasn't been a day to be
on rear guard. Them sons ..."
The soldier did not finish his
sentenc
e.
"You wouldn't have any food on you, would you, ma'am?"
She fed the soldier and
cleaned the wound on the side of his head and wrapped it with a fresh
bandage, then drove farther down the Teche. She expected to see
ramparts, batteries of Napoleon or Parrott guns arcing shells into the
sky, sharpshooters spread along the lip of a coulee, or mounted
officers with drawn sabers cantering their horses behind advancing
infantry. Instead, a ragged collection of butternut soldiers was firing
behind trees into the distance at no enemy she could see, then
retreating, reloading on the ground, and firing again. The air inside
the trees was so thick with musket and shotgun smoke that the soldiers
had to walk out into the road to see if their fusillade had found a
mark.
She heard a metallic cough
down the bayou, like a rusty clot breaking loose inside a sewer pipe,
then there was silence followed by a chugging sound ripping across the
sky. The mortar round exploded in the bayou behind her and bream and
white perch rained down through the top of a cypress and flopped on the
ground.
A shirtless boy with his pants
tucked inside cavalry boots that fit him like galoshes paused by
the wagon and stared at her. He carried a flintlock rifle and a
powder horn on a leather string that cut across his chest. His skin was
gray with dust, his arms thin and rubbery, without muscular tone.
"There's Yankees down there,
ma'am," he said.
"I don't see any," she
said.
"You ain't suppose to see
them. When you can see them, you put a ball in one of them." He grinned
at his own joke and looked at the birds in the sky.
"Do you know Lieutenant Willie
Burke?" she asked. He thought about it and pushed a thumb under his
right ear, as though it were filled with water or a pocket of air.
"Yes, ma'am, I do," he said.
"Where is he?"
"I think a boat or Whistling
Dick got him."
"What?"
The boy's head jerked at a
sound behind him. "Oh Lord Jesus, here it comes," he said, and ran for
the trees at the side of the road.
The mortar round reached the
apex of its trajectory and chugged out of the sky, exploding in the
yard of a plantation across the bayou. Abigail saw Negroes running from
a cabin toward the back of the main house, some of them clutching
children.
She had to use her whip to
force her horse farther down the road. The retreating Confederates were
behind her now, around a bend, and the road ahead was empty, whirling
with dust when the wind gusted, the sky yellow as sulfur, ripe with the
smell of salt, creaking with gulls that had been blown inland by a
storm. She rode on another mile, her heart racing, then saw blue-clad
foot soldiers come around a curve and fall out on each side of the
road, lounging under shade trees, completely indifferent to her
presence.
She passed through them, her
eyes straight ahead. On a cedar-lined knoll above a coulee two filthy
white men in leg irons with wild beards and a group of black men in
cast-off Union uniforms were digging a pit. Next to it was a
tarpaulin-covered wagon. A cloud went across the sun and raindrops
began clicking on the trees and the water in the coulee and the
tarpaulin stretched across the wagon.
A young, dark-haired Union
lieutenant, with a mustache and clean-shaved cheeks, wearing a patch
over one eye and a kepi
, approached
her buggy.
"You look like you're lost,"
he said.
"I live in New Iberia, but
I've served with the Sanitary Commission in New Orleans. I'm looking
for a Southern officer who's been listed as missing in action."
"We're a burial detail. The
two men in chains are convicts. I recommend you not get within arm's
length of them," the officer said.
The wind gusted out of the
south, flapping the tarp on the wagon. An odor like incinerated
cowhides struck her nostrils. The lieutenant walked back to his horse
and returned with a pair of saddlebags draped over his forearm. He
untied the flap on one of the bags and shook fifteen or twenty wooden
and tin identification tags onto the carriage seat.
"These are the Rebs we've
buried in the last week. I haven't been through the effects of the
people in the wagon," he said. His eyes lost their focus and he gazed
down the bayou, his face turned into the breeze.
"You said 'people.'"
"A number of them may be
civilians, but I can't be sure. Some Rebs were in a house we raked with
grape. It caught fire."
She picked up each
identification tag individually and examined the name and rank on it.
Some of the tags were scratched with Christian crosses on the back.
Some of them stuck to her fingers.
"His name isn't among these.
I'd like to look in the wagon," she said.
"I don't think that's a good
idea," the officer said.
"I don't care what you think."
The officer rotated his head
on his neck as though his collar itched him, then brushed at a nostril
with one knuckle.
"Suit yourself," he said, and
extended his hand to help her down from the buggy.
The officer gestured at the
two convicts, who lifted the tarp by its corners and peeled it back
over its contents.
The dead were stacked in
layers. The faces of some had already grown waxy, the features uniform
and no longer individually defined. Others bore the expression they had
worn at the exact moment of their deaths, their hands still clutching
divots of green grass. The body of a
sergeant had been
tied with a shingle
across
the
stomach to
press
his
bowels back inside the abdominal cavity. Those who had died in a fire
were burned all the way to the bone. A Negro child lay on top of the
pile, as though he had curled up there and gone to sleep. The convicts
were watching her face with anticipation. "Want to put your hand in
there?" one of them said. "Shut up," the officer said.
"Where are your
own dead?" Abigail asked.
"In a field mortuary," the
officer replied.
"Does the little boy's
family know?" she asked.
"I didn't have time to
ask," he replied.
"Didn't have time?" she
said.
The officer turned back to the
convicts and the black laborers. "Get them in the ground," he said.
One of the convicts picked the
Negro boy off the pile by the front of his pants and lifted him free of
the wagon. The boy's head and feet arched downward, his stomach bowing
outward. His eyes were sealed as tightly as a mummy's. The convict
flung him heavily into the pit. "You bastard," Abigail said.
"Show some care there," the
officer said to the convict. "And, madam, you need to step out of the
way or take your sensibilities down the road."
She stood aside and watched
the laborers and the convicts lay the bodies of the dead side by side
in the bottom of the pit. The black men and the convicts had all tied
kerchiefs across their faces, and some of the black men had wrapped
rags around their hands before they began pulling the dead out of the
wagon by their feet and arms. The rain dripped through the canopy
overhead and began to pool in the bottom of the pit.
But none of the dead, as least
those who were recognizable, resembled Willie Burke.
"I hope you find him," the
officer said.