"Sorry, I didn't know you had
your name carved on the bricks," Willie said.
"Shut up," the man said.
His eyes, hair and beard
looked as though he had been shot out of a cannon. He was barefoot and
wore no shirt under a butternut jacket that was stitched with gold
braid on the collar. His pants were cinched around his waist with a
rope and stippled with blood.
"You ever kill somebody with
your bare hands?" he asked. He pressed his face close to Willie's. The
inside of his mouth was black with gunpowder, his fetid breath worse
than an outhouse.
"Bare hands? Can't say I
have," Willie replied.
"You up for it? Tell me now.
Don't sass me, either."
"Could you be giving me a few
more details?" Willie asked.
"Clean the ham hocks out of
your mouth. Captain Jarrette is taking us out. Do you want to make a
run for it or die like a carp flopping on the ground? Give me an
answer," the man said.
"You were at the ambush on the
St. Martinville Road."
"Of all the people I try to
help, it turns out to be another stump from Erin. Anyone ever tell you
an Irishman is a nigger turned inside out?"
"I really don't care to die
next to a smelly lunatic. Do you have a plan, sir?" Willie said.
"Go back to your letter
writing, cabbage head," the man said.
The guerrilla turned away and
stared at the locked door and front wall of the storehouse, his arms
hanging like sticks from the ragged sleeves of his jacket, his pants
reaching only to his ankles. Outside, the sun broke on the eastern
horizon and a red glow filled the trees on the bayou and painted the
tips of the sugarcane in the fields. Through the window Willie heard
the sound of marching feet.
The sound grew louder and then
stopped in front of the storehouse. Someone turned an iron key in the
big padlock on the door and shot back the bolt through the rungs that
held it in place. The light from outside seemed to burst into the room
like a fistful of white needles. A
captain and two parallel
lines of enlisted men in blue, all wearing
kepis,
bayonets twist-grooved onto the muzzles of their rifles, waited to
escort the prisoners to the barn and the firing squad of eight that had
been camped in the pup tents by the bayou. In the distance Willie
thought he heard the rumble of thunder or perhaps horses' hooves on a
hard-packed road. Then he heard a solitary shout, like an angry man who
had mashed his thumb with a hammer.
"Come out, lads. None of us
enjoys this. We'll make it as easy and dignified as possible," the
Yankee officer at the door said.
"Come in and get us, darlin',"
a prisoner in the back of the room said.
Clouds moved across the sun
and the countryside dropped into shadow again, the cane in the field
bending in the breeze, the air sweet with the smell of morning. Willie
heard horses coming hard across a wood bridge, then the shouts of men
and the ragged popping of small-arms fire.
Suddenly there were horsemen
everywhere, over a hundred of them, dressed like beggars, some firing a
pistol with each hand, the reins in their teeth. The prisoners surged
out of the storehouse, knocking the captain to the ground, attacking
his men.
A wheeled cannon on one corner
of the prisoner of war compound lurched into the air, blowing a huge
plume of smoke across the grass. One second later a load of grapeshot
slapped against the walls of the red barn used as the execution site,
accidentally cutting down a squad of Yankee soldiers in its path.
Willie bolted from the door of
the storehouse and ran with dozens of other men toward the bayou, while
mounted guerrillas and what looked like regular Confederate infantry
fired into the Yankees who were trying to form up in the middle of the
compound. A shirtless man on horseback thundered past him, the
guerrilla leader with the pinned-up hat riding on the rump, clinging to
the cantle. The guerrilla leader looked back at him, his face like an
outraged jack-o'-lantern under his hat.
Willie heard the whirring
sound of minie balls toppling past his head, then a sound like a dry
slap when they struck a tree. He plunged through a woman's front yard,
tearing down her wash as he ran, scattering chickens onto the gallery.
He crashed through her front door and out the back into a grove of
pecan trees, then the lunatic from the storehouse was running in tandum
with him, his vinegary stench like a living presence he carried with
him.
.
They dove into the bayou
together, swimming as far as they could underwater, brushing across the
sculpted points of submerged tree branches, a stray minie ball breaking
the surface and zigzagging through the depths in a chain of bubbles.
Their feet touched bottom on
the far side, then Willie and what he had come to think of as his
lunatic companion were up on the bank, running through a cane field,
the blades of the cane whipping past their shoulders.
They fell out of the cane
field into a dry irrigation canal, breathless, collapsing on their
knees in the shade of persimmon trees. Willie threw his arm around the
shoulder of the lunatic.
"We made it, pard. God love
you, even if you're a graduate of Bedlam and have nothing kind to say
about His chosen people, that being the children of Erin," he said.
The lunatic sat back on his
heels, his chest laboring, his blackened mouth hanging open. Willie
fastened his hand on the man's collarbone, kneading it, grinning from
ear to ear at his newfound brother-in-arms.
"Did you hear me? I bet you're
a good soldier. You don't need to ride with brigands. Come with me and
we'll find the 18th Louisiana and General Mouton," he said.
The lunatic's mouth formed
into a cone and he pressed four stiffened fingers into his sternum as
though he were silently asking Willie a burning question.
"You got the breath knocked
out of you?" Willie said.
The lunatic shook his head.
Willie cupped the lunatic's wrist and removed his fingers from his
chest. A ragged exit wound the circumference of a thumb was drilled
through his sternum. Willie caught him just as he fell on his side.
"The Yanks have fucked me with
a garden rake, cabbage head. Watch out for yourself," the lunatic
whispered.
"Hang on there, pard. Someone
will be along for us directly. You'll see," Willie said.
The man did not speak again.
His eyes stared hazily at the shadows the clouds made on the cane field
and the mockingbirds swooping in and out of the shade. Then he
coughed softly as though clearing his throat and
died.
Willie rolled him onto his
back, placed his ankles together, and covered his face with a palmetto
fan. Then he buttoned the dead man's butternut coat over his wound and
crossed his arms on his chest.
Other escaped prisoners ran
past him, some of them armed now, all of them sweaty and hot, powdered
with dust from the fields. He heard a rider behind him and turned just
as the guerrilla leader reined his horse and glared down at him, his
horse fighting the bit, spooking sideways.
The guerrilla hit the horse
between the ears with his fist, then stood in the stirrups and adjusted
his scrotum, making a face while he did it. The inside of his thighs
were dark with sweat, as though he had fouled himself. "That's the body
of my junior officer you're looting," he said.
Willie got to his feet.
"You're a damn liar," he said.
"I'll remember your face," the
guerrilla said.
He galloped away, twisting his
head to look over his shoulder one more time.
WILLIE wandered the rest of
the day. The sky was plumed with smoke from burning houses and barns,
and by noon a haze of dust and lint from the cane fields turned the sun
into a pink sliver. He saw a Confederate rear guard form up in a woods
and fire a volley across a field at a distant group of men, then break
and run through a gully and board a rope-drawn ferryboat and pull
themselves across the Vermilion River, all before he could reach them.
He saw wild dogs attack and
tear apart a rabbit in an empty pasture. He passed Confederate
deserters who had hidden in coulees or who walked on back roads with
their faces averted. He saw four wagons loaded with Negroes and their
possessions stopped at a crossroads, wondering in which direction they
should go, while their children cried and one man tried to jerk an
exhausted horse up on its legs. At evening he saw the same people, this
time on the riverbank, without the means to cross to the other side,
frightened at the boom of distant artillery. He rooted for food in the
charred ruins of a cabin and
licked the fried remains of
pickled tomatoes off scorched pieces of a preserve jar.
He climbed into a mulberry
tree and watched a column of Union infantry, supply wagons, and wheeled
field pieces that took a half hour to pass. When night came the sky was
black with storm clouds, the countryside dark except for the flicker of
cannon fire in the north. He lost the Vermilion River, which he had
been following, and entered a high-canopied woods that swayed in the
wind, that had no undergrowth and was thickly layered with old leaves
and was good for either walking or finding a soft, cool place that
smelled of moss and wildflowers where he could lie down and once more
sleep the sleep of the dead.
He paused under a water oak,
unbuttoned his fly, and urinated into the leaves. Out of the corner of
his eye he saw movement back in the trees and heard the sound of field
gear clanking on men's bodies. He mounted the trunk of a tree that had
fallen across a coulee and ran along the crest of it to the other side,
right into a Union sergeant who aimed the .50 caliber muzzle of a
Sharp's carbine at his face.
Willie raised his hands and
grinned as though a stick were turned sideways in his mouth.
"I'm unarmed and offer no
threat to you," he said.
The sergeant's kepi was low on
his brow, one eye squinted behind his rear sight. He lowered his
carbine and looked hard into Willie's face. The sergeant had dark red
hair and wore a mustache and goatee and a silver ring with a tiny gold
cross affixed to it on his marriage finger. Willie could hear him
breathing heatedly in the dark.
"No threat, are you? How about
a fucking nuisance?" he said.
"The pacifist turned soldier?"
Willie said.
"And you, a bloody
hemorrhoid," the sergeant replied.
"Indignant, are we? I tell you
what, Yank, within a span of five days you fellows have blown me up
with an artillery shell, almost buried me alive, and tried to send me
before a firing squad. Would you either be done with it and kindly put
a ball between my eyes or go back home to your mother in the North and
be the nice lad I'm sure you are."
"Don't tempt me."
"I'm neither a spy nor a
guerrilla. Your general treated me unjustly back there. I reckon you
know it, too."
Willie could
hear the
calluses on the sergeant's hands tightening on
the stock of his
carbine. Then the sergeant stepped back in the leaves, an air vine
trailing across his kepi, and pointed the carbine's barrel away from
Willie's chest.
"Pass by, Reb. When you say
your prayers this night, ask that in the next life the Good Lord
provide you with a brain rather than an elephant turd to think with,"
he said.
"Thank you for the suggestion,
Yank. Now, would you be knowing where the 18th Louisiana Vols are?"
Willie said.
"You ask the enemy the
whereabouts of your own outfit?"
"No offense meant."
The sergeant looked at him
incredulously. "My guess is somewhere north of Vermilionville," he said.
"Thank you."
"What's your name again?" the
sergeant asked.
"Willie Burke."
"Get into another line of
work, Willie Burke," he said.
FLOWER Jamison had always
thought the beginning and end of the war would be marked by definite
dates and events, that great changes would be effected by the battles
and the thousands of men she had seen march through New Iberia, and the
historical period in which she was living would survive only as a
compartmentalized and aberrant experience that fitted between bookends
for people to study in a happier time.
But the changes she saw in
1864 and early 1865 were transitory in nature. The Yankee soldiers
camped behind the Episcopalian church pursued the Confederates through
Vermilionville and up into the Red River parishes, taking with them the
money they spent in bordellos, saloons, and on the washerwomen by the
bayou.
Many freed slaves returned to
the plantations and owners they had fled and begged for food and
shelter and considered themselves lucky if they were paid any wages at
all. Others who preferred privation and even death from hunger over a
return to the old ways were on occasion given a choice between the
latter or execution.
Emancipation Day came to be
known by people of color as June 'Teenth. Emancipated into what? Flower
wondered.