James Lee Burke - White Doves at Morning

by White Doves At Morning(Lit)

  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.

  "Who are you? Or rather what are you?" he asked.

  "First Lieutenant William Burke, 18th Louisiana Volunteers, at your service, sir."

  "And these rags here are your uniform?"

  "That appears to be the case, sir."

  The general lifted up the uniform, revealing a pair of brass binoculars and a folding, horn-handled knife under it.

  "These are your knife and your field glasses?" he asked.

  "No, I took them off a dead man, probably a forward artillery observer. One of ours."

  The general's eyes lingered on a neutral spot in space, then looked at Willie again, the cast in them somehow different now.

  "Can you tell me why you're out of uniform?" he asked.

  "I was prematurely stuffed into one of your burial wagons. The dead have a way of leaking their shite and other fluids all over their companions, sir."

  The general drummed his fingers on the table, gazed out the window, brushed at his nose with his knuckle.

  "You look like a civilian to me, Mr. Burke, a good fellow at the wrong place at the wrong time, one probably willing to sign an oath of allegiance and go about his way," he said.

  "It's First Lieutenant Willie Burke, sir. I was at Shiloh and Corinth and a half-dozen places since. I'll not be signing a loyalty oath."

  "Damn it, man, you were out of uniform!"

  "I gave you a reasonable explanation, too!" Willie replied.

  It was quiet inside the room. The wind ruffled the papers on the general's desk. Through the window Willie could see the weathered red barn in the distance and a sergeant who was ordering the line of seven or eight enlisted men around to the back side. One of them was arguing, and the sergeant grabbed him by his blouse and shoved him against the wall.

  "Take a seat outside in the hall, Lieutenant. I'll continue our talk in a few minutes," he said.

  The sergeant who had escorted Willie inside the house walked him into the breezeway and pointed at a chair for him to sit in. Then he shook his finger reprovingly in Willie's face.

  "I come from a religious family, but I had to learn the only real pacifist is a dead Quaker. I decided to make an adjustment. Do you get my meaning?" he said.

  "It escapes me," Willie said.

  The sergeant went outside and returned with a frightened man who had a pie-plate face, arms like bread dough, and rows of tiny yellow teeth.

  Willie had seen him around New Iberia. What was his name? He was simpleminded and did janitorial work. Pinky? Yes, that was it. Pinky Strunk. What was he doing here?

  Through the open door Willie could hear the general questioning him.

  "You were in possession of five Spanish reals. That's a lot of money for a workingman to have clanking in his pocket," the general said.

  "Ain't no law against it. Not that I know of," Pinky answered.

  "Sixteen of my men were ambushed and butchered on the St. Martinville Road. I think you're one of the men who looted the bodies," the general said.

  "Not me. No, suh."

  From behind the red barn there was a volley of rifle fire, then a cloud of smoke drifted out into the sunlight.

  "Jesus God!" Pinky said.

  "How did you come by five Spanish pieces-of-eight?" the general asked.

  "Is t
hat a firing squad out there, suh?"

  "How did you come by the reals?"

  "It's kind of private."

  "Not anymore."

  "Done a chore for a man. Me and two others."

  "What might that be?" the general asked.

  The man named Pinky blew his nose in a handkerchief.

  "We was s'pposed to-" he began. But his voice faltered.