White Doves at Morning (13 page)

He splashed across the stream
and went deep into the hardwoods, where round boulders protruded from
the humus like the tops of toadstools. He paused long enough to thread
the scabbard of the bowie knife onto his own belt, then he cut
northward, running through the undergrowth and spiderwebs draped
between the tree trunks, gaining elevation now, the sun only a burnt
cinder between two hills.

He smelled tobacco smoke and
saw two blue-clad pickets, puffing on cob pipes, perhaps sharing a
joke, their kepis at a jaunty angle, their guns stacked against the
trunk of a walnut tree. They turned when they heard his feet running,
the smiles still on their faces. He shot one just below the heart, then
inverted the Enfield, never breaking stride, and swung the barrel like
a rounders bat, breaking the stock across the other man's face.

He pulled a .36 caliber navy
revolver from the belt of the man he had shot and kept running, across
the pebbled bottom of a creek and a stretch of damp, cinnamon-colored
soil that was printed with the tracks of grouse and wild turkeys, past
a dried-out oxbow where a grinding mill and waterwheel
had
rotted and started to cave into the s
treambed, through box elder and elm
trees, right into the back of a huge, black-bearded Union private, who
was urinating with his phallus held in both hands.

On the ground by his foot lay
a dirty handkerchief spread with vest watches, marriage and Masonic
rings, coins, a gold toothpick, cigars, tightly folded and compressed
currency, a clay pipe, a condom made from an animal's bladder, even
false teeth carved from whalebone.

The Union soldier almost lost
his footing, then righted himself, as though on the deck of a ship, and
pushed his phallus back inside his fly. His sleeves were rolled, and
the hair on the backs of his arms was peppered with grains of dirt. He
reached out casually for a Sharp's carbine that was hung by its strap
from a branch just behind him.

"Lose your way home, Johnny?"
he asked.

Willie cocked the pistol and
fired a ball into the middle of his forehead, saw the man disappear
momentarily inside the smoke, then heard the man's great deadweight
strike the ground.

It was almost dark and
lightning flickered inside the clouds that once again had sealed the
sky. He wandered for what seemed hours and saw feral hogs snuffing and
grunting among the dead, their snouts strung with lights. He heard the
heavy, iron-rimmed wheels of caissons and gun carriages and ammunition
and hospital wagons rumbling on the old Hamburg-Savannah Road. The wind
changed, and he smelled water in a stagnant pond somewhere, and another
odor with it that made him clear his mouth and spit.

After all the balls were gone
from his revolver, he used the knife at least twice in the woods,
clenching his hand on one man's throat while he drove the blade
repeatedly into the heart cavity. Another he hit from behind, a
whiskered signal corpsman with a terrible odor whom he ran upon and
seized around the neck and stabbed and left either wounded or dying at
the bottom of a rocky den overlooking the Tennessee River.

The clouds overhead were
marbled with lightning that rippled across the entirety of the sky.
Below the bluffs he could see dozens of paddle-wheelers on the river,
their cabins and pilothouses dark, their decks packed with men. He
heard gangplanks being lowered with ropes onto the bank, saw lanterns
moving about in the trees and serpentine columns of men wending their
way into a staging area where a hydrogen balloon rocked inside the net
that moored it to the ground.

He headed west away from the
river, and recrossed the Hamburt-Savvannah Road adn again smelled the
thick, heavy odor of ponded
  wate
r and sour mud, threaded with another
odor,
one that was salty and gray, like fish roe drying on stone or a hint of
copulation trapped in bedsheets.

Veins of lightning pulsed in
the clouds, and through the trees he saw a water pond, of a kind boys
would bobber-fish in for bluegill and sun perch. Except now the water
was red, as dark as a dye vat, and bodies floated in it, the clothes
puffed with air.

He saw a figure, one with
white ankles and feet, run from the pond through the woods, some
thirsty and abandoned soul, he thought, who had probably tried to scoop
clear water out of the reeds and had fouled his throat and was now
running through the peach orchard they had raked with grapeshot earlier
in the day. Willie kept going west, toward the Corinth Road, and found
a bloodstained stub of bread that had been dropped in a glade scattered
with mushrooms. He ate it as he walked, then heard someone moving in
the trees and saw a miniature Confederate soldier in butternut and an
oversized kepi, looking at him, his feet and face cut by thorns and
branches, his pants hitched tightly under his ribs, a pair of
drumsticks shoved through his belt.

"Is that you, Tige?" Willie
asked.

The boy continued to stare at
him, shifting from one foot to another, as though trying to take the
weight off a stone bruise.

"You're one of the fellows who
give me the mush and bacon. Where'd everybody go?" the boy said.

"Not sure. I ran everywhere
there is and then ran out of space. Ran myself silly in the head while
I was at it. So I turned around. Hop aboard," Willie said, turning his
back for the boy to climb on.

But the boy remained
motionless, breathing through his mouth, his eyes blinking inside the
dust and sweat on his face.

"You got blood all over you.
You're plumb painted with it," he said.

"Really?" Willie said. He
wiped his cheek with the flat of his hand and looked at it.

"How far is Vicksburg if you
float there on the river?" the boy asked.

"This river doesn't go there,
Tige."

The
boy
crimped
his
toes in
the
dirt, the
pain in his feet climbing
into
his
face now, his strength and resolve draining from his cheeks.

"I gone all the way to the
peach orchard," he said.

"I bet you did. My pal Jim was
killed today. He was a lot like you. Too brave to know he was supposed
to be afraid. He didn't know when to ask for help, either," Willie said.

"It don't seem fair."

"What's that?" Willie asked.

"We whupped them. But most all
the fellows I was with is dead," the boy said.

"Let's find the road to
Corinth. I'll tell you a story about the ancient Greeks while we walk,"
Willie said.

The boy climbed onto Willie's
back and locked his arms around Willie's neck. His bones were so light
they felt filled with air, like a bird's, rather than marrow. Then the
two of them walked through a forest that was unmarked by war and that
pattered with raindrops and smelled of wet leaves and spring and
freshly plowed fields.

They rested on the wooded
slope of a creek bed, then rose and continued on through trees until
they could see cultivated acreage in the distance and lightning
striking on the crest of a ridge. Willie set Tige down on a boulder
that looked like the top of a man's bald head and arched a crick out of
his back while the rain ticked on the canopy over their heads.

"So this Oedipus fellow was a
king but he married his mother and blinded hisself and become a beggar,
even though he could figure out riddles and was the brightest fellow
around?" Tige said.

 "That pretty well sums
it up," Willie said.

"Them ancient Greeks didn't
have real high standards when it come to smarts, did they?" Tige
replied.

Willie was sitting on a log,
his legs spread, grinning at Tige, when he heard the jingle of bridle
chains, the creak of saddle leather, the thud of shoed hooves on damp
earth. He looked at Tige's face and saw the alarm in it as Tige focused
on a presence behind Willie's head.

Willie stood up from the log,
drawing the bowie from its scabbard, letting it hang by his thigh. He
looked up at a bareheaded specter of a man in a brass-buttoned gray
coat that was pushed back over the scrolled hilt of a cavalry saber.

"Light it up, Sergeant," the
mounted man in the gray coat said.

The sargent who walked beside him scratched a lucifer match on a
candle lamp and touched the flame to three wicks inside it and lifted
the
bail above his head. The
shadows leapt back
into the trees and Willie saw the gold stars of a colonel sewn on the
horseman's collar, the hair deeply receded at the temples, the severity
of a hawk in his face.

Other mounted officers
appeared out of the undergrowth and overhang, and farther back in the
trees lean, dismounted men in slouch hats and kepis were leading their
horses by the bridles, pulling them up the slope of a coulee that
snaked along the edge of a cornfield.

Willie stared, intrigued, at
the man with the hawklike face. On his last leave in New Orleans he had
seen his picture in the window of a photographer's studio on Canal
Street. There was no mistaking who he was, nor misinterpreting the
inflexible posture, the martial light in the eyes, the adversarial
expression that seemed untempered by problems of conscience.

"You don't seem aware of
military protocol," the colonel said.

"Private Willie Burke at your
orders, sir," Willie said, removing his kepi, bowing in a thespian
fashion. "That young gentleman yonder is my pal Tige McGuffy, of the
6th Mississippi."

"I'm very happy to make your
acquaintance," the colonel said. There was a lump of chewing tobacco in
his jaw, and his mouth looked like a ragged hole inside his triangular,
untrimmed beard. He leaned in the saddle and spat a long brown stream
into the leaves. "You look to be wounded."

"Not me, sir. They killed my
pal Jim Stubbefield, though. You didn't happen to know him, did you?"
Willie replied.

The colonel wiped his lips
with his wrist. "No, I didn't. Where's your regiment?" he asked.

"I haven't seen them in a
while. But I'm glad you raised the subject. Perhaps you could tell me
the names of the thumb-sucking incompetent sods who got Colonel Mouton
shot in the face and the 18 th Louisiana destroyed," Willie said.

The sergeant turned with the
candle lamp, staring incredulously at Willie, waiting for the colonel's
command. But the colonel waved a finger in disapproval. "You been out
yonder?" he asked Willie, nodding toward the north, his horse resting
one hoof.

"That I have. They've been
reinforced up to their eyes and I suspect
at daybreak they may
kick a
telegraph pole up your ass," Willie replied.

"I see," the colonel said,
dismounting, the
tiny
rowel on his spur tinkling when his boot
touched the ground. He opened a saddlebag and removed a folded map,
then studied Willie's face, which in the candlelight and rain looked
like yellow and red tallow that had started to melt. "Can you point out
where these Yankees are staging up?"

"I think I'm either bent for
the firing squad or being on my way with Tige here, Colonel."

"Matters not to me. But it
will to the men we may lose tomorrow," the colonel said.

Willie thought about it. He
yawned to clear the popping sound from his ears. He felt as though he
were sliding to the bottom of a black well, the invective he had
delivered a senior officer echoing in his head like words spoken in a
dream. When he closed his eyes the ground seemed to move under his
feet. He took the map from the colonel's hand, then returned it to him
without opening it.

"Colonel Forrest, is it?"
Willie said, blowing out his breath.

"That's correct."

"This light is mighty poor.
Will one of your fellows take care of Tige, perhaps carry him to the
Corinth Road?" he said.

"It will be our pleasure," the
colonel said.

"They're going to rip us
apart, sir. I saw them offload maybe a hundred mortars," Willie said,
then realized he had just used the word "us."

The colonel bit off a chew of
plug tobacco and handed the plug to Willie.

"I don't doubt you're a brave
man and killed the enemy behind his own lines today. Wars get won by
such as yourself. But don't ever address me profanely or
disrespectfully again. I won't have you shot.
I'll
do it
myself," he said.

Then the colonel directed an
aide to build a fire under a canvas tarp and to bring up dry clothes
and bread and a preserve jar of strawberry jam for Willie and Tige, and
bandages and salve for Tige's feet, and that quickly Willie found
himself back in the mainstream of the Confederate army, about to begin
the second day of the battle of Shiloh.

THE first day Abigail Dowling
reported to work as a volunteer nurse at the Catholic hospital on St.
Charles Avenue, she realized her experience with the treatment of
yellow fever had not adequately prepared her for contrasts.

At first it was heartening to
see the Union ironclads anchored on the river, plated and slope-sided,
their turreted cannons an affirmation of the North's destructive
potential, the American flag popping from the masts. But somehow the
victory of her own people over the city of New Orleans rang hollow. She
had anticipated seeing anger in the faces of the citizenry, perhaps
feelings of loss and sorrow, but instead she saw only fear and she
didn't know why.