Abigail stood next to Willie.
"It's the officer from the burial detail," she said.
"Yes, it is. Poor
fellow," Willie said. He looked off into the pecan orchards by the lake
and up and down the road and out into the field.
"Who did this?" she
asked.
"They call themselves
guerrillas or irregulars. Most of them are criminals," he said.
"How do you know
Confederates didn't do it, Willie?" He paused before he
replied, a vein working in his neck.
"Because
these men still have
their
shoes on, and secondly we don't murderprisoners of war," he said.
"The stories about Negro
prisoners aren't true?" she said.
"I have to find my unit. Tell
my mother I'm sorry I couldn't find her."
"Me? You take care of your own
family. You stop this insanity," she said.
"The Yankees rape slave women
and burn people's farms. I've seen them do it, Abby. It doesn't matter
who starts a war. The only thing that matters is who finishes it."
His words came out with such
ferocity that his head throbbed and he became short of breath. He
thought he saw men moving through the trees but realized he was only
looking at shadows.
"I think the war is poisoning
your heart," she said.
The skin of his face felt as
though she had slapped it.
They rode back toward New
Iberia in silence, sullen, angry at each other, the most tender moment
in their day now only a decaying memory, each wondering if the other
was not either a stranger or an enemy.
WILLIE left her outside the
town limits and crossed through a cane field that was cut by the deep
tracks of wheeled cannons, then stole a pirogue from a dock and paddled
it across Bayou Teche to the far bank and walked through the yard of a
deserted plantation house to a pecan grove by the St. Martinville Road.
The whole countryside seemed
alive with movement, all of it the wrong kind. He saw Union soldiers
sacking the home of Jubal Labiche, a slave-owning free man of color who
operated a brick factory down the Teche and who had spent a lifetime
courting the favor of plantation whites. Jubal had sent his daughters
North to be educated, hoping they would marry there and rinse the
family veins of the African blood that had always denied him full
membership in white society. Now Union soldiers were stacking his
imported furniture for a bonfire, smashing his crockery, and tearing
his piano apart in the yard with an ax.
Freed slaves crisscrossed
the road, running from one house
to the next, like children
trick-or-treating
on Halloween, filling blankets and sheets with silverware,
candelabras, tailored men's suits and ballroom dresses. A solitary
artillery shell arced out of nowhere and exploded in a puff of pink
smoke high above the bayou, and no one gave it notice, as though it
were part of the celebration taking place below.
Willie backed away from the
road and followed the bayou upstream, crossing through backyards and
wash lines, keeping the trees and outbuildings between himself and the
road. He crossed a coulee that smelled of rainwater and night-blooming
flowers, then in a leaf-banked spot between a corn crib and a woodpile
he tripped across the body of a dead Confederate soldier.
The soldier, who had been shot
through the lungs, had probably been hit somewhere else and had crawled
there to die. His skin was gray, his mouth gaping at the moon, the
coughing of his blood still bright on the stones he had crawled across
before his death. A pair of brass binoculars hung from his neck on a
leather cord.
Willie removed the binoculars
and found a long, horn-handled folding knife in the dead soldier's back
pocket. He followed the blood trail backward to the edge of a cane
field, looking for a gun, then entered the cane and hunted through the
rows, but could find no weapons of any kind. He went back to the bayou,
into the shadows of the cypresses and live oaks, and continued walking
upstream toward St. Martinville, where he believed he would eventually
encounter the rear guard of his own army. He carried his tightly
rolled, blood-streaked, butternut uniform under his right arm.
Abigail had wanted him to
surrender, to join the increasing number of deserters who offered every
justification possible for leaving their brothers-in-arms to go it on
their own. Their arguments were hard to contend with. Hunger, malaria,
foot rot, leeches on a man's ankles and the eggs of crab lice in the
seams of his clothes were a poor form of pay for marching uphill into
canister or grape or repeater rifles the Yankees loaded on Sunday and
fired all week.
If men deserted under those
circumstances, it was only human and no one who had not paid the same
dues had any right to condemn them, Willie thought. But by the same
token few of them would probably ever make peace with themselves. They
would always feel less about who they had become, robbed by their own
hand of the deeds
they had performed
honorably, and excluded from the
comradship of the best and bravest nun they
would ever know.
Why was it so difficult for
Abby to understand that?
Because she doesn't love you,
his mind answered.
He had come to her like a
beggar. He was not only a recipient of sexual charity, he was an object
of pity and, in her own words, a man who had let the war poison his
heart.
He sat down on top of an
overturned pirogue and put his face in his hands. He could smell the
odor of the dead Confederate soldier on his palms.
FIVE miles farther up the
bayou he knelt among a cluster of palmettos behind a rick fence and
used the dead soldier's binoculars to watch a scene that seemed created
by the inhabitants of an outdoor mental asylum. A stack of furniture,
oil paintings, and mattresses was burning in the backyard of a
plantation home and black women dressed in brocaded evening gowns and
Sunday hats with ostrich plumes on them danced in the firelight to a
tune played by a bare-chested fiddler with braided hair, who wore a
necklace strung with human fingers around his throat.
Between twenty and thirty
white men in civilian clothes were passing rum bottles in wicker
baskets from hand to hand and cooking a pig spitted on a trace chain
over a bed of coals. Down by the bayou, a man was copulating with a
black woman against the back wall of a stable, his white buttocks
glowing with moonlight, her legs wrapped around him.
Willie focused his binoculars
on the faces of the white men but recognized none of them. Some were
armed with muskets, others with shotguns and hatchets, at least two
with bows and feathered arrows. He had heard of both jayhawkers and
guerrillas operating in Louisiana, the guerrillas under the command of
a man named Jarrette, a Missourian who had ridden with Quantrill and
Bloody Bill Anderson. The man apparently in charge of the group in the
plantation yard wore a long sword in a metal scabbard and a butternut
shirt and sky blue skintight pants, with a gold stripe down each leg.
His hair was copper-colored, tangled on his shoulders, his face oily
and poached in the firelight, the front of his hat pinned up on the
crown so that he looked like he was facing into a gale.
They must be jayhawkers,
Willie thought, deserters,
conscription
evaders, criminals of
every stripe who hid in the swamps and preyed upon all comers.
Certainly these seemed to be getting along well enough with freed
slaves.
But guerrilla or jayhawker, it
didn't matter. They both fought under a black flag and extended no
mercy and took no prisoners.
The white man copulating with
the Negro woman finished with her and reached down to pull up his
trousers. When he did, the firelight caught his face and Willie
recognized one of the manacled convicts who had almost buried him alive.
He was stuck. He couldn't
cross the yard of the plantation without being seen, nor could he
retrace his steps without risk of running into Federals who were
undoubtedly advancing up the Teche toward St. Martinville. He climbed
into a coulee and lay back against the incline and rested his arm
across his eyes for what he thought would be no more than a few
minutes. He could hear the black women dancing around the fire and
ducks wimpling the water in the shallows and a bell clanging on a cow
somewhere in a field. In seconds the war seemed to disappear like light
draining out of his bedroom at the back of his mother's house.
An hour later he woke to the
sound of running feet. The bonfire in the yard had collapsed into a
pile of blackened wood, and the wind was kicking up cinders from it
into the sky. The men in the yard were running into a pecan orchard,
spreading along the same rick fence that rimmed the coulee where he had
slept, some sprinting across the road into more trees. A drunken black
woman tried to hold onto the arm of a man with a blue rag tied around
his head. He shoved her in the face, knocking her back across a log. In
less than two minutes the men from the yard had become motionless,
their bodies and weapons absorbed by the shadows, their hats slanted
down on their faces so their skin would not reflect light.
Down the road walked sixteen
blue-clad soldiers in single file, their equipment clanking in the
darkness, some of them with their rifles carried horizontally across
their shoulders like broom handles. An arrow zipped through the
darkness from behind a tree trunk, and the lead soldier stumbled and
fell to the ground as though he had stepped in a hole and lost his
balance. The other soldiers stopped and stared stupidly into the
shadows, just before a volley of shotgun and musket fire from both
sides of the road tore into their file.
The men forn the plantation
yard swarmed
out
of
the
shadows with
bayonets, knives
and hatchets, warbling the Rebel yell as they ran.
I guess you're not jayhawkers
after all, Willie thought.
He leapt from the coulee and
bolted across the backyard of the plantation toward St. Martinville. He
looked back over his shoulder and saw the guerrillas at work in the
road, chopping with their steel instruments like sugar harvesters
cutting cane in the fall.
Two hours later, as the stars
went out of the sky and the horizon turned gray in the east, his breath
and his legs gave out simultaneously as though all his blood had
suddenly been drained from his veins. He fell to his knees and crawled
underneath an overturned rowboat inside a leaf-strewn stand of
persimmon trees. With his uniform rolled under his cheek, he slept the
sleep of the dead.
When he awoke the sun was a
white flame in his eyes and the Yankee enlisted men who pointed their
rifles in his face asked if he would mind accompanying them to a
prisoner of war compound just up the road.
THREE days later he sat under
a shade tree and waited his turn to enter a wide galleried, notched and
pegged house outside of St. Martinville. Inside the living room, behind
a flat oak desk, sat General Nathaniel Banks. His dark hair looked like
wire, coated in grease, stacked in layers, his upper lip like the bill
on a duck. Outside the house, spread across two acres of pasture,
upward of three hundred captured men milled about, most in patchwork
butternut and gray uniforms. The prisoner compound was marked off with
laths and string to which strips of rag were tied. Brass field pieces
loaded with grape were positioned on the four corners of the square,
and pickets armed with rifle-muskets or Spencer repeaters were posted
at twenty-yard intervals along the string, or what came to be known as
the "Deadline." Threaded in among the deserters and captured soldiers
were members of the group Willie had seen ambush the squad of Federals
on the St. Martinville Road, including the apparent leader, the man in
a pinned-up cavalry hat and skintight pants with a gold stripe down
each leg.
A Union sergeant tapped
the
sole of Willie's shoe with his own. "Your turn inside," he said.
"Really, now? After three days
I get to meet the Massachusetts bobbin boy?" Willie said.
The sergeant's kepi made a
damp line across the back of his dark red hair. He wore a goatee and a
poor excuse for a mustache and a silver ring with a tiny cross affixed
to it on his marriage finger. He started to speak, then touched at a
place on his lip and gazed off into space as though a thought had
escaped his mind.
Willie got to his feet and
started toward the house. Beyond the Deadline he saw a weathered red
barn and seven or eight soldiers with rifle-muskets in the shade along
the side wall, their weapons propped butt-down in the dirt.
The sergeant pulled Willie's
sleeve.
"Listen, the general is
handling these interviews because he lost some good men to a gang of
cutthroats. You look to be a decent man. Use your head in there, Reb,"
he said.
"You have problems of
conscience?" Willie said.
"A good man don't have
to prove it," the
sergeant said.
"You've lost me, Yank.
Say again?"
"I think you're one on whom
words are easily wasted," the sergeant said. He escorted Willie inside
the house, where Willie stood in front of General Banks.
The general's boots and dark
blue uniform were splattered with dried mud. He had tangled eyebrows
and deep-set eyes that seemed filled with either conflicting or angry
thoughts, and the skin at the top of his forehead was a sickly white.
The odor of horse liniment and wood smoke and unrinsed soap emanated
from his clothes. He peered down his nose at a list of names on a sheet
of paper. By his left hand was Willie's crumpled uniform.