"Thank you," she said.
"Where was he fighting?"
he asked.
"On the rear guard."
"Well, those who serve there
are brave fellows. Good luck," he said.
Then a huge black man wearing
a shapeless hat and a Yankee coat
withouta shirt walked back
down
the road and grabbed the ankles of a blood slick butternut soldier
in the underbrush and dragged him into the open.
The black man pulled the
kerchief off his nose and mouth. "This 'un bounced off the pile," he
said.
"Thank you for telling me
that," the officer said.
"You ain't axed, boss. Better
come take a look," the black man said.
"What is it?" the officer
asked.
"He just opened his eyes."
WILLIE lay in the road, the
rain ticking in the leaves around him. He could hear men spading dirt
out of a pile and flinging it off the ends of their shovels. Abigail
was on her knees beside him, lifting his head, pressing the lip of a
canteen to his mouth.
"Where are you hit?" she asked.
"Don't know," he said.
She opened his shirt and felt
his legs and turned him on his side. She put her fingers in his hair
and felt the contours of his skull. Then she rebuttoned his shirt and
looked back over her shoulder at the Union officer.
"Were you knocked
unconscious?" she asked.
"I dreamed I was underground.
There was a little Negro boy next to me. Where am I hit?"
"You're not," she whispered.
She touched his lips with two fingers.
"What happened to the Negro
boy?" he said.
But she wasn't listening. Her
head was turned in the direction of the Union officer and the grave
diggers.
"It wasn't a dream, was it?"
he said.
"Don't say anything else," she
said.
She folded a clean rag into a
square and moistened it and laid it across his eyes, then rose to her
feet and approached the Union officer.
"I can take him back with me,"
she said.
The officer shook his head.
"He's a prisoner of war," he said.
She looked back at Willie,
then touched the officer on the arm. "Would you step over here with
me?" she said.
"Miss, I appreciate your
problem but"
"He's from New Iberia.
Let
him die at home," she said. She fixed
her eyes on the officer's.
"I don't have that kind of
authority."
"You send your own to a field
mortuary and bury others with no dignity at all. Are you a Christian
man, sir?"
"The Rebs made this damn war.
We didn't."
She stepped closer to him, her
face tilting up into his. Her eyes were so intense they seemed to
jitter in the sockets. "Will you add to the sad cargo I've seen here
today?" she said.
His stare broke. "Load him up
and get him out of here," he said.
On the way into New Iberia,
Willie passed out again.
HE awoke behind Abigail's
cottage, humped on the floor of the buggy. It was almost dark and he
could hear horses and wagons and men shouting at one another in the
street.
"What's going on?" he said.
"The Confederates are pulling
out of town," Abigail replied.
His face was filmed with
sweat, his hair in his eyes. During the ride back he had dreamed he was
buried alive, his body pressed groove and buttock and phallus and face
against the bodies of the dead, all of them sweltering inside their own
putrescence. His breath caught in his throat.
"My father was at the Goliad
Massacre," he said.
"The what?"
"In the Texas Revolution. He
was spared because he hid under the bodies of his friends. He had
nightmares until he died of the yellow jack in'39."
"You're not well, Willie. You
were having a dream."
He got out of the buggy and
almost fell. The trees were dark over his head and through the branches
he could see light in the sky and smoke rolling across the moon. The
tide was out on the bayou and a Confederate gunboat was stuck in the
silt. A group of soldiers and black men on the bank were using ropes
and mules to try to pull it free, their lanterns swarming with insects.
"Where's my mother?" Willie
said.
"She went out to the farm. The
Federals are confiscating people's livestock."
He started walking toward the front of Abigail's cottage and the
ground came
up and struck him in the face like a fist.
"Oh, Willie, you'll never grow
out of being a stubborn Irish boy," she said.
She got him to his feet and
walked him into the bathhouse and made him sit down on a wood bench.
She opened the valve on the cistern to fill the iron tub with rainwater.
"Get undressed," she said.
"That doesn't sound good," he
said, lifting his eyes, then lowering them.
"Do what I say."
She looked in the other
direction while he peeled off his shirt and pants and underwear. His
torso and legs were so white they seemed to shine, his ribs as
pronounced as whalebone stays in a woman's corset. He sat down in the
tub and watched the dirt on his body float to the surface.
"I'm going to get you some
clean clothes from next door. I'll be right back," she said.
He closed his eyes and let
himself slide under the water. Then he saw the face of the Negro child
close to his own, as though it were floating inside a bubble, the eyes
sealed shut. He jerked his head into the air, gasping for breath. In
that moment he knew the kind of dreams that would visit him the rest of
his life.
Abigail returned with a clean
shirt and a pair of socks and under-shorts and pants borrowed from the
neighbor.
"Put them on. I'll wait for
you in the house," she said.
"Where are the Federals?"
"Not far."
"Do you have a gun?"
"No."
"I need one."
"I think the war is over for
you."
"No, it's not over. Wars are
never over."
She looked at the manic cast
in his eyes and the V-shaped patch of tan under his throat and the
tanned skin and liver spots on the backs of his hands. He looked like
two different people inside the same body, one denied exposure to
light, the other burned by it.
"I'm going to fix you
something to eat," she said.
He watched her go out the
door and
cross the lawn
in the shadows and mount the back steps to
her cottage. The wind blew through the oaks and he could smell rain and
the moldy odor of blackened leaves and pecan husks in the yard. When he
rose from the tub the building tilted under his feet, as though
something were torn loose inside his head and would not right itself
with the rest of the world.
He sat on the wood bench and
dressed in the cotton shirt and brown pants Abigail had given him.
Civilian clothes felt strange on his body, somehow less than what a man
should wear, effete in some way he couldn't describe. He picked up his
uniform from the floor and rolled it into a cylinder and went inside
the cottage. "I have to find the 18th," he said.
"You'll go a half block before
you pass out again," she said.
"Colonel Mouton was shot
in the face at
Shiloh. But he was back at it the next day. You don't get to resign,
Abby."
"Who needs you more, Willie,
your mother or the damn army?" He smiled at her and began walking
toward the front door, knocking into the furniture, as rudderless as a
sleepwalker. She caught him by the arm and walked him into her bedroom
and pushed him into a sitting position on the mattress. The room was
dark, the curtains puffing in the wind.
"Lie down and sleep, Willie.
Don't fight with it anymore. It's like fighting against an electrical
storm. No matter what we do or don't do, eventually calamity passes out
of our lives," she said.
"Do you see Jim Stubbefield's
father?"
"Sometimes."
"He carried the guidon
straight uphill into their cannons. They blew his brains all over my
shirt. I'll never get over Jim. I hate the sons of bitches who caused
all this."
He felt her fingers stroking
his hair, then he put his arms around her hips and pulled her body
against his face and held her more tightly than was reasonable or
dignified, burying his face in her stomach, touching the backs of her
thighs now, raising his head to her breasts, gathering her dress in
both his hands.
She lay down with him, and he
kissed her mouth and eyes and neck and felt the roundness of her
breasts and put his hand between her thighs, without shame or even
embarrassment at the nakedness of his own need and dependence.
It was raining in the trees and the bayou, and he could smell grass
burning inside the rain
and hear
the cough of the mortar round cal
led
Whistling Dick. He climbed between
Abigail Dowling's thighs and kissed the tops of her breasts and put her
nipples in his mouth, then kissed the flat taper of her stomach and
raised himself up on his arms while she cupped his sex with her palm
and placed it inside her.
He came a moment later, early
on beyond any attempt at self-control, his eyes tightly shut. Inside
his mind he saw an endless field of dead soldiers under a night sky
rimmed by hills that looked like women's breasts. But even as his heart
twisted inside him and his seed filled her womb, he knew the safe
harbor and succor she had given him were an act of mercy, and the
tenderness in her eyes and the caress of her thighs and the kiss he now
felt on his cheek were the gifts granted to a needy supplicant and not
to a lover.
He lay next to her and looked
at the shadows on her face.
"I'm sorry my performance is
not the kind Sir Walter Scott would have probably been interested in
writing about," he said.
"Oh, no, you were fine," she
said, and touched the top of his hand.
He stared at the ceiling,
wondering why ineptitude seemed to follow him like a curse.
He heard a plank creak on the
front gallery and a knock on the door.
"Miss Abigail, the Yankees set
fire to the laundry. They attacked some girls in the quarters. You in
there, Miss Abby?" the voice of Flower Jamison said.
FLOWER had to wait outside
almost five minutes before Abigail Dowling finally came to the door.
Then she saw Willie Burke step out of the bedroom into the glow of the
living room lamp and her face tightened with embarrassment.
"I'm sorry. I reckon I caught
y'all at supper," she said.
"Come in, Flower," Abigail
said, holding back the door.
"How you do, Mr. Willie?"
Flower said.
"Hello, Flower. It's good to
see you again. Miss Abby says you've been doing splendidly with your
lessons." His voice was thick, his cheeks pooled with color, as though
he had a fever. His eyes did not quite meet hers.
"Thank you, suh," she said.
"What was that about the
laundry?" Abigail asked.
"Some Yankees came across the
fields and started pushing people out of the cabins. They drug a
corn-shuck mattress behind the laundry and chased down some girls and
drug them back there, too. When they were finished they lit a
cannonball and threw it through the kitchen"
.
"Where'd
they go?"
Willie
asked.
"To the saloon. They were
carrying all the rum out the door."
"Did you see other troops?
Soldiers in large numbers?" Willie asked.
"No," she said.
"You stay here tonight,"
Abigail said. "I'm going to take Mr. Willie to his mother's."
"Mr. Willie, you suppose to be
in reg'lar clothes like that?" Flower said.
"Not exactly," he replied.
"Suh, there's bad things going
on. Don't let them hurt you," she said.
"They're not interested in
people like me," he said.
"I hid in the coulee, but I
could hear what they were doing on the other side of the laundry. You
don't want them to catch you, suh."
"You be good, Flower. The next
time I see you, I'm going to have a new book for you," he said.
Please don't talk down to me,
she thought. "Yes, suh. Thank you," she said.
Abigail and Willie walked out
into the yard. Flower followed them as far as the gallery.
"Mr. Willie, put your uniform
on," she said.
He grinned at her, then
climbed into the buggy beside Abigail. Flower stood on the gallery and
watched them ride away toward the center of town.
Miss Abby, aren't you a
surprise? she thought.
The sky was red in the south,
and pieces of burnt cane, like black thread, drifted into the yard. A
riderless white horse cinched with a military saddle wandered in the
street, its hooves stepping on the reins. The shutters and doors of
every house on the street were latched shut.