White Doves at Morning

  The sergeant stood up and touched the brim of his kepi. "Not much. Some miscreants giving a local fellow a bad time," he said.

  "Was that Willie Burke?" she asked, looking down the street.

  "Has a way of showing up all over the planet? Yes, I think that's his name."

  "Is he all right?"

  "Seems fine enough to me."

  The black girl had finished her taffy and was now standing a few feet away, her eyes uplifted to the sergeant's. He removed a penny from his pocket and gave it to her. "Get yourself one more, then you'd better find your mommy," he said.

  Abigail and the soldier looked at one another in the silence. "You sound as though you're from my neck of the woods," he said.

  "On the Merrimack, in Massachusetts. My name is Abigail Dowling," she said.

  "It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Abigail," he said. He stepped forward awkwardly and removed his kepi and shook her hand. He continued to stare at her, his lips seeming to form words that were somehow not connected to his thoughts. He grinned sheepishly at his own emotional disorganization.

  "Do you have a name?" she asked.

  "Oh, excuse me. It's Sergeant Earp. Quintinius Earp."

  She smiled, her head tilting slightly. A look of undisguised disappointment stole across his face.

  "Quintinius? My, what a beautiful Roman name," she said.

  When he grinned he looked like the happiest, most handsome and kindly man she had ever seen.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  UNDER a bright moon, deep inside the network of canals, bayous, oxbows, sand bogs, flooded woods, and open freshwater bays that comprised the Atchafalaya Basin, Robert Perry watched two dozen of his compatriots off-load crate after crate of Henry and Spencer repeaters from a steamboat that had worked its way up the Atchafalaya River from the Gulf of Mexico.

  The wind was balmy and strong out of the south, capping the water in the bays, puffing leaves out of the trees, driving the mosquitoes back into the woods. Some of the men wore pieces of their old uniforms-a sun-faded kepi, perhaps, a butternut jacket, a pair of dress-gray pants, with a purple stripe down each leg. With just a little imagination Robert was back in Virginia, at the beginning of Jackson's Shenandoah Campaign, reunited with the bravest fellows he had ever known, all of them convinced that honor was its own reward and that politics was the stuff of bureaucrats and death was a subject unworthy of discussion.

  In his mind's eye he could still see them, pausing among the hills in the early dawn to drink from a stream, to eat hardtack from their packs, or simply to remove their shoes and rub their feet. The fields and trees were strung with mist, the light in the valley a greenish yellow, as though it had been trapped inside an uncured whiskey barrel. Propped among the thousands of resting men were their regimental colors, the Cross of Saint Andrew, and the Bonnie Blue flag sewn with eleven white stars.

  The denigrators and revisionists would eventually have their way with history, as they always did, Robert thought, but for those who participated in the war, it would remain the most important, grand and transforming experience in their lives. And if a war could make a gift to its participants, this one's gift came in the form of a new faith: No one who was at Marye's Heights, Cemetery Ridge, or the Bloody Lane at Sharpsburg would ever doubt the courage and stoicism and spiritual resolve of which their fellow human beings were capable.

  Robert did not know all of the men who came into the Atchafalaya Basin either by boat or mule-drawn wagon that evening. Some were White Leaguers, others Kluxers; some probably belonged to both groups or to neither. How had he put it to Willie? You don't always choose your bedfellows in a war? But none of these looked like bad men; certainly they were no worse than the carpetbaggers appointed to office by the provisional governor.

  They had shot and butchered a feral hog and great chunks of meat were now broiling on iron stakes driven into the ground by a roaring fire under a cypress tree. The crates of Henry and Spencer lever-action repeaters and ammunition were stacked in the wagons now and within a week they would be distributed all over southern Louisiana. If events turned out badly, the Yankees had cast the die, not these fellows in the swamp, he told himself.

  But his thoughts were troubled. A guerrilla leader in a flop hat, a man named Jarrette, was squatting on his haunches by the fire, sawing at a shank of broiled meat, sticking it into his mouth with the point of his bowie knife. Some said he had ridden with Quantrill, a psychopath and arsonist whom Robert E. Lee had officially read out of the Confederate army. Jarrette spoke little, but the moral vacuity in his eyes was of a kind Robert Perry had seen in others, usually men for whom war became a sanctuary.

  The other men were eating now from tin plates, passing around three bottles of clear whiskey someone had produced from under a wagon seat. Their faces were happy in the firelight, the whiskey glittering inside the bottles they tilted to their mouths. In this moment, in their mismatched pieces of uniform, they looked as though they had stepped out of a photograph taken on the banks of the Rappahannock River.

  Then a man he recognized all too well walked out of the darkness and joined the others. His hair was greased and parted down the middle, his body egg-shaped and compact, his brow furrowed, the corners of his mouth downturned, as though he did not quite approve of whatever his eyes fell upon.

  The egg-shaped, narrow-shouldered man sat down on a log and unfolded a sheet of paper and began reading off the names of people in the community whose activities were, in his words, "questionable or meriting further investigation on our part."

  A two-shot nickel-plated derringer was stuck down tightly in the side of his belt.

  "It looks like you've got the dirt on some right suspicious folk, Mr. McCain," Robert said.

  " 'Dirt' is a word of your choosing, not mine," McCain replied. Robert sat down on the log next to him.

  "Do you mind?" he asked, lifting the sheet of paper from McCain's hands. "Which outfit did you serve in?"

  "I was exempted from service, although that was not my preference," McCain replied.

  "How is it you were exempted, sir?" Robert asked.

  "Provider of war materials and sole support of a family."

  "Some used to call those fellows 'the Druthers.' They'd druther not fight," Robert said. Then he popped the sheet of paper between his hands and studied the list before McCain could reply. "Well, I see you have the name of Willie Burke down here. That disturbs me."

  "It should. He's a nigger lover and he regularly insults the leadership of the Knights of the White Camellia," McCain said

  "That sounds like Willie, all right. There's a little boy in town, a veteran of the 6th Mississippi, who says Willie told off Bedford Forrest. Can you believe that? May I see your gun?" Robert said.

  Without waiting for an answer he lifted the derringer from McCain's belt. The nickel plate on it was new, unscratched, the pearl handles rippling with color in the firelight. Robert broke open the breech and looked at the two brass cartridges inserted in the chambers. He snicked the breech shut.

  "Fine hideaway," he said, and tossed the derringer into the fire.

  "What are you doing?" McCain said.

  "No, no, don't get up," Robert said, resting his arm across McCain's shoulders. "Those are peashooter rounds in there. I doubt they could do any serious harm. Let's see what happens."

  The derringer rested between two red-hot logs, which were crumbling into ash. One cartridge detonated and a bullet clattered through the top of a tree. The recoil flipped the derringer backward, burying it in a pile of soft ash.

  "Don't know where it's aimed now, do we? I guess it's a bit like attacking across an open field against a rifle company that's set up inside a woods. You feel a terrible sort of nakedness, not knowing which fellow is about to park one in your liver," Robert said.

  McCain pushed himself to his feet and jumped back into the darkness. The pistol popped again, this time driving the bullet into a log.

  Robert stared silently into the flames,
the list of names pinned between his arm and thigh. The other men formed a semicircle behind him, looking at one another, kicking at the ground, their food forgotten.

  "How about a drink of liquid mule shoe, Robert?" one man said.

  "I think I'll be having no more of this, but thanks just the same," he said.

  He picked up the list of names and held it loosely in his fingers. The breeze puffed the fire alight so that he only had to lean forward slightly to drop the list onto the flames.

  "You're our friend, but don't challenge us, Robert," another man said.

  Robert flattened the sheet of paper on his thigh and removed a pencil stub from his pocket and blackened out one name on the list. Then he folded the paper and stuck it under the log.

  "Good night and God bless you all," he said, rising to his feet. "But the man who brings injury to my pal Willie Burke will wish Billy Sherman had heated a train rail and wrapped it around his throat."

  PERHAPS obsession had sawed loose his fastenings to a reasonable view of the world, Willie thought. Or maybe he was diseased and pathologically flawed, to the extent he was no longer repelled by death and mortality and defeat and was instead drawn to the grave, to leaf-strewn arbors and green-stained markers fashioned from field-stones, where the air was vaporous and tannic and the light always amber and the voices of friends rose from the ground, whispering lessons he wanted to reach out and cup in his hand.

  And what a companion he had chosen for his return to Shiloh-a one-eyed, barefoot, British-born minstrel named Elias Rachet who constantly plucked at a banjo and twanged on a Jew's harp and wore his shoes tied around his neck, in case, as he said, "we have to walk in nasty water and through cow turds and such."

  The two of them stood in the early morning haze at the bottom of an incline that was dotted with wildflowers. At the top of the rise was a clump of hardwoods, dark with shadow, the canopy denting in the breeze. Willie thought he heard the iron-rimmed wheels of caissons knocking across rocks and the popping of flags in the wind, the jingle of a bridle and the nicker of a frightened horse in the trees. He yawned to clear his ears and turned in a circle and saw only the vastness of the forests and the dark, metallic-blue dome of sky overhead.

  "Jim Stubbefield died right where the gray stones are at. See, there's five of them, just like big Indian arrow points that's been pressed down in the ground," Elias said, pointing. He leaned over and spit tobacco in the grass, then plucked at his banjo. The tremolo from his strings seemed to climb into his voice. "Lordy, I can still hear all our boys yelling. Would you go through it again, knowing what you know now?"

  "Maybe."

  "I tell myself the same thing. I always reckon God forgives liars and fools, being as He made so many of us," Elias said.

  Elias was slat-toothed when he grinned, his face crinkling with hundreds of tiny lines. He looked away at a tea-colored creek that coursed through the edge of a woods. The wrinkles in his face flattened and his solitary eye became a blue pool of sadness. "I kilt a boy out there in them trees maybe wasn't over fifteen. He came busting down the hill and I whipped around and shot him right through the chest. A little bitty yankee drummer boy, much like your friend Tige."

  Elias sat down on a large rock, his legs splayed, and picked at his banjo. His callused feet were rimmed with mud, his mouth down-turned, his jug head silhouetted against the pinkness on the bottom of the horizon.

  "You're not going to cut bait on me, are you?" Willie asked.

  "Both Jim's folks is passed?"

  Willie nodded.

  "Then I don't reckon they'll mind. I wish I was a darky," Elias said.

  "Why's that?"

  "'Cause I'd have an excuse for taking other people's orders all my life." Then he slapped the tops of his thighs and laughed and stomped his feet up and down in the grass. He laughed until a tear ran down from his empty eye socket. "Ain't this world a barrel of monkeys?"

  "Take me to the grave," Willie said.

  "Jim don't hold it against you 'cause you lived and he died."

  Elias started to smile, then looked at Willie's expression and got up from the rock and arched a crick out of his back, his face deliberately empty.

  The water in the creek was spring-fed and cold inside Willie's shoes as he and Elias waded across, a freshly carpentered, rope-handled box strung between them. The trees were widely spaced on the far side of the creek, the canopy thick, the ground gullied, crisp with leaves that had settled into the depressions scattered through the woods. Up the incline Elias studied an outcropping of rock that was cracked through the center by the trunk of a white oak tree.

  He set down his end of the box. "We didn't have time to dig deep. Don't be surprised if animals has had their way with things," he said.

  Willie opened the box and removed a shovel and a large square of sail canvas. He spread the canvas on the ground and began to dig at the base of the outcropping. The ground was carpeted with toadstools and mushrooms with purple skirts and moist from a spring farther up the incline. Overhead, squirrels clattered in the white oak and he felt himself begin to sweat inside his clothes. The soil he spaded to the side of the depression was dark and loose, like coffee grinds, and was churning with night-crawlers and smelled of decay and severed tree roots. The tip of Willie's shovel scraped across metal.

  He got to his knees and began brushing the dirt from a copper-colored belt buckle embossed with the letters CSA, then his fingers touched cloth and wood buttons and the skeletal outline of a rib cage, wrist bones, and fingers that were like polished white twigs.

  "His shoes are gone. When we put him in the ground I was sure his shoes was on. I didn't let nobody take Jim's shoes, Willie," Elias said.

  "I know you didn't," Willie said.

  "Maybe it ain't Jim. There was shooting going on in the trees and people running everywhere."

  Willie hollowed the dirt away from the corpse's shoulders and arms and sides, then brushed at the face, touching a piece of cloth that had moldered into the features. He picked up the bottom of the fabric and peeled it back from the chin and nose and forehead and looked down into a face whose skin had turned gray and had shrunken tautly against the skull. The mouth was open and a tin identification tag, still attached to a leather cord, was wedged perpendicularly between the front teeth. Willie clasped the tag between his thumb and index finger and lifted it from the dead man's mouth.

  Willie spit on the tag and rubbed it clean on his pants, then read the name on it and wrapped it carefully with the frayed leather cord that had held it around Jim's neck and placed it in his shirt pocket and buttoned his shirt flap on top of it.

  Then he took Jim out of the grave and laid him on the piece of canvas. He could not believe how light Jim was, how reduced in density and size he had become. There was no smell of corruption in Jim's body, no odor at all, in fact. The spring water had washed the blood from the wounds in his head, and the wind touched his hair and his mouth seemed to form a word.

  Where have you been, you Irish groghead?

  Had to take care of a few Yanks, run them out of New Iberia, set General Banks straight about a few things. Ready to go home, you ole beanpole?

  "You're giving me the crawlies," Elias said.

  Willie folded the corners of the canvas across Jim's body and face and lifted him in both arms, then laid him down in the wood box, with the knees propped against one wall, the head bent against another.

  Then, on his hands and knees, he shoved the dirt back into the hole at the foot of the outcropping, packing it down, smoothing it, raking leaves across the topsoil. When he had finished, he glanced up at Elias and saw a mixture of pity and sadness in his face.

  "He carried the guidon. He was braver than me. I loved Jim and care not if anyone calls me a ghoul. To hell with them," Willie said.

  "Oh, Willie, would that I could change your soul as easy as I can rub the burnt cork on my skin," Elias replied.

  IRA Jamison never got over being surprised by the way white trash thought
. He assumed their basic problem was genetic. They were born in ignorance and poverty, with no more chance of success than a snowball in a skillet, but as long as they were allowed to feel they were superior to Africans, they remained happy and stupid and believed anything they were told.

  They worked from dawn to dusk on other people's farms, bought at the company store, lived in cabins a self-respecting owl wouldn't inhabit, saw their children grow up with rickets and rotted teeth, and with great pride became cannon fodder in wars whose causes had nothing to do with their lives.

  Then a day came when, through chance or accident, the great scheme of things crashed on their heads like an asteroid.

  What better example than Clay Hatcher, Ira Jamison thought. A man who had lived most of his life with expectations of a reward that most people would consider a punishment. More specifically, a lifetime spent coveting a desiccated, worm-eaten house that had so little structural value a man with heavy boots could kick it into kindling.