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 clicking 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 sentence. "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 ca
re 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.
"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."
James Lee Burke - White Doves at Morning Page 19
