White Doves at Morning

by James Lee Burke

  "What day is it?" Willie said.

  "Saturday, April 5," Jim replied. "Why's that?"

  "I don't know. I don't know why I asked. What's that place up yonder called?"

  "To my knowledge, it doesn't have a name. It's a woods."

  "That's foolishness, Jim. Every place has a name."

  "There's nothing there except a Methodist church house. It's called Shiloh. That's it. Shiloh Church," Jim said.

  THEY camped late that afternoon in a clearing among trees on the edge of a ravine. The floor of the forest and the sides of the ravine were layered with leaves that had turned gray under the winter snow and were now dry and powdery under their feet. The sun was an ember in the west, the trees bathed in a red light like the radiance from a smithy's forge.

  Willie sat on a log and pulled off his shoes and massaged his feet. The odor from his socks made him avert his face and hold his breath. All around him men were stacking their weapons, breaking rations out of their haversacks, kicking together cook fires. The wind was blowing off the river, and the canopy of hickory and chestnut and oak trees flickered against the pinkness of the sky. In the knock of axes, the plunking of a banjo being tuned, the smell of corn mush and fatback frying, it was not hard to pretend they were all young fellows and good friends assembling for a camp meeting or coon hunt.

  Maybe that's all it would be, Willie thought. Just another long stroll across the countryside, a collective exercise that would be unmemorable once the grand illusion became obvious to them all.

  Jim poured water from his canteen into a big tin cup, then carefully measured out two spoonfuls of real coffee into the water, not chicory and ground corn, and set it to boiling on a flat stone in the center of his cook fire. His face looked composed and thoughtful as he squatted by the fire, his skin sun-browned, his sideburns shaggy, the road dust on his face streaked where his sweat had dried.

  Willie went to the field kitchen and got a pan of corn mush, his unlaced shoes flopping on his feet, then squatted next to Jim and greased the bottom of a small frying pan with a piece of salt bacon and poured the mush on top of it and stuck the pan in the coals.

  "What's the first thing you're going to do when we get back home?" he asked Jim.

  "Start my own shipwright business. Build the first clipper ship to come out of New Iberia, Lou'sana," Jim said.

  "Steam is making museum pieces of the clippers, Jim."

  "That's good. I won't have competitors," Jim said.

  Willie lowered his head so his voice wouldn't travel.

  "Are you scared?" he asked.

  "If you was as scared as I am, you'd run for home. I'm just too scared to get my legs moving," Jim said.

  "You put on a good act, you ole beanpole. But I don't think you're scared of anything," Willie replied.

  Jim stood up with his tin cup of boiling coffee and poured half of it into Willie's cup. He rubbed Willie on the top of the head.

  "No blue-bellies can do in the likes of us," he said.

  "That's right, by God. Here, our mush is ready," Willie said.

  "I can't eat. I think I got a stomach cold. Can't hold anything down," Jim said, walking into the shadows so Willie could not see his face.

  The sun dipped below the hills and suddenly the woods were cooler the sky the color of coal dust, without moon or stars, the tree branches knocking together overhead, to the north there were fires on the bluffs above the river and Willie thought he could feel the vibrations of gun carriages and caissons through the ground.

  Five men and a drummer boy from the 6th Mississippi, in butternut pants and homespun shirts, were sitting around a fire, six feet away, smoking cob pipes, laughing at a joke.

  "Who's out there?" Willie asked them, nodding toward the north.

  " 'Who's out there?' Where the hell you been, boy?" a tall man with a concave face said.

  "Corinth."

  "Them bluffs and ravines is crawling with Yankees. They been out there for weeks," the man said.

  "Why not leave them be?" Willie asked.

  "We done turned that into a highly skilled craft, son. But the word is we're going at them tomorrow," the man said.

  Willie felt his stomach constrict and sweat break on his forehead. He went out of the firelight, into the trees, and vomited.

  Fifteen minutes later Jim came back to the fire and sat down on the log beside Willie, his sheathed bowie knife twisting against the log's bark. Willie sniffed the air.

  "What have you been up to?" he asked.

  Jim opened his coat to reveal a half-pint, corked bottle stuck down in his belt. The clear liquid it contained danced in the firelight.

  "This stuff will blow the shoes off a mule," he said.

  Three soldiers with a banjo, fiddle, and Jew's harp were playing a dirge by the edge of the ravine. The men from the 6th Mississippi were lying on their blankets or in their tents, and the drummer boy sat by himself, staring into the fire, his drum with crossed sticks on top resting by his foot. He wore an oversized kepi, and his scalp was gray where his hair had been bowl-cut above his ears. His dour face, with downturned mouth and impassive eyes, was like a miniature painting of the Southern mountain man to whom sorrow and adversity are mankind's natural lot.

  "You get enough to eat?" Jim said to him.

  "Pert' near as much as I want," the boy replied.

  "Then I guess we'd better throw away this mush and bacon here," Jim said.

  "Hit don't matter to me," the little boy said, his face as smooth and expressionless as clay in the light from the fire.

  "Come over here and bring your pan," Jim said.

  The boy dusted off the seat of his pants and sat on a stump by Willie. He watched while Willie filled his pan, then he ate the mush with a spoon, his thumb and index finger all the way up the handle, scraping the food directly into his mouth.

  "What's your name?" Willie asked.

  "Tige McGuffy," the boy said.

  "How old might you be, Tige?" Willie asked.

  "Eleven, pert' near twelve," the boy said.

  "Well, we're mighty pleased to meet you, Tige McGuffy," Willie said.

  "This mush with bacon is a treat. I ain't never quite had it prepared like that," Tige said. "How come you was puking out in the trees?"

  "Don't rightly know, Tige," Willie said, and for the first time that day he laughed.

  Out on the edge of the firelight the musicians sang,

  "White doves come at morning

  Where my soldier sleeps in the ground.

  I placed my ring in his coffin,

  The trees o'er his grave have all turned brown."

  Jim stood up and flung a pine cone at them.

  "Put a stop to that kind of song!" he yelled.

  As the campfires died in the clearing, Jim and Willie took their blankets out in the trees and drank the half-pint of whiskey Jim had bought off a Tennessee rifleman.

  Jim made a pillow by wrapping his shoes in his haversack, then lay back in his blankets, gazing up at the sky.

  "A touch of the giant-killer sure makes a fellow's prospects seem brighter, doesn't it?" he said.

  Willie drew his blanket up to his shoulders and propped his head on his arm.

  "Wonder how a little fellow like Tige ends up here," he said.

  "He'll get through it. We'll all be fine. Those Yankees better be afraid of us, that's all I can say," Jim said.

  "Think so?" Willie said.

  Jim drank the last ounce in the whiskey bottle. "Absolutely," he replied."Good night, Willie."

  "Good night, Jim."

  They went to sleep, their bodies warm with alcohol, with dogwood and redbud trees in bloom at their heads and feet, the black sky now dotted with stars.

  Chapter Seven

  THEY woke the next morning to sunlight that was like glass needles through the trees and the sounds of men and horses running, wagons banging over the ruts out on the Corinth Road, tin pots spilling out of the back of a mobile field kitchen.

  T
hey heard a single rifle shot in the distance, then a spatter of small-arms fire that was like strings of Chinese firecrackers exploding. They jumped from their blankets and ran back to the clearing where they had cooked their food and stacked their Enfields the previous night. The air was cinnamon-colored with dust and leaves that had been powdered by running feet. Their Enfields and haversacks lay abandoned on the ground.

  The men from the 6th Mississippi were already moving northward through the trees, their bayonets fixed. Tige McGuffy was strapping his drum around his neck, his hands shaking.

  "What happened to the 18th Lou'sana?" Jim said.

  "Them Frenchies you come in with?" Tige said.

  "Yes, where did they go?" Willie asked, his heart tripping.

  "West, toward Owl Creek. A kunnel on horseback come in before dawn and moved them out. Where'd y'all go to?" Tige replied.

  Willie and Jim looked at each other.

  "I think we're seriously in the shitter," Jim said.

  "How far is this Owl Creek?" Willie said.

  Before Tige could answer a cannon shell arced out of the sky and exploded over the canopy. Pieces of hot metal whistled through the leaves and lay smoking on the ground. Tige hitched up his drum, a drumstick in each hand, and ran to join his comrades.

  "Let's go, Jim. They're going to put us down as deserters for sure," Willie said.

  Jim went back into the trees and retrieved their blankets while Willie repacked their haversacks. They started through the hardwoods in a westerly direction and ran right into a platoon of Tennessee infantry, jogging by twos, their rifle barrels canted at an upward angle, a redheaded, barrel-chested sergeant, with sweat rings under his arms, wheezing for breath at their side.

  "Where might you two fuckers think you're going?" he said.

  "You sound like you're from Erin, sir," Willie said.

  "Shut your 'ole and fall in behind me," the sergeant said.

  "We're with the 18th Lou'sana," Jim said.

  "You're with me or you'll shortly join the heavenly choir. Which would you prefer, lad?" the sergeant said, raising the barrel of his carbine.

  Within minutes men in gray and butternut were streaming from every direction toward a focal point where other soldiers were furiously digging rifle pits and wheeling cannon into position. Through the hardwoods Willie thought he saw the pink bloom of a peach orchard and the movements of blue-clad men inside it.

  The small-arms fire was louder now, denser, the rifle reports no longer muted by distance, and he could see puffs of rifle smoke exploding out of the trees. A toppling minie ball went past his ear with a whirring sound, like a clock spring winding down, smacking against a sycamore behind his head.

  Up ahead, a Confederate colonel, the Bonnie Blue flag tied to the blade of his sword, stood on the edge of the trees, his body auraed with sunlight and smoke, shouting, "Form it up, boys! Form it up! Stay on my back! Stay on my back! Forward, harch!"

  There seemed to be no plan to what they were doing, Willie thought. A skirmish line had moved out into the sunlight, into the drifting smoke, then the line broke apart and became little more than a mob running at the peach orchard, yelling in unison, "Woo, woo, woo," their bayonets pointed like spears.

  Willie could not believe he was following them. He wasn't supposed to be here, he told himself. His commanding officer was the chivalric Colonel Alfred Mouton, not some madman with a South Carolinian flag tied to his sword. Willie fumbled his bayonet out of its scabbard and paused behind a tree to twist it into place on the barrel of his Enfield.

  The redheaded sergeant hit him in the back with his fist. "Move your ass!" the sergeant said.

  Out in the sunlight Willie saw a cannonball skip along the ground like a jackrabbit, take off a man's leg at the thigh, bounce once, and cut another man in half.

  The sergeant hit him again, then knotted his shirt behind the neck and shoved him forward. Suddenly Willie was in the sunlight, the sweat on his face like ice water, the peach orchard blooming with puffs of smoke. "Where was Jim?"

  The initial skirmish line wilted and crumpled in a withering volley from the orchard. A second line of men advanced behind the first, and, from a standing position, aimed and fired into the pink flowers drifting down from the peach trees. Willie heard the Irish sergeant wheezing, gasping for breath behind him. He waited for another fist in the middle of his back.

  But when he turned he saw the sergeant standing motionless in the smoke, his mouth puckered like a fish's, a bright hole in his throat leaking down his shirt, his carbine slipping from his hand. "Get down, Willie!" he heard Jim shout behind him. Jim knocked him flat just as a wheeled Yankee cannon, in the middle of a sunken road, roared back on its carriage and blew a bucket of grapeshot into the Confederate line.

  Men in butternut and gray fell like cornstalks cut with a scythe. The colonel who had carried the Bonnie Blue flag lay dead in the grass, his sword stuck at a silly angle in the soft earth. Some tried to kneel and reload, but a battery none of them could see rained exploding shells in their midst, blowing fountains of dirt and parts of men in the air. Many of those fleeing over the bodies of their comrades for the protection of the woods were vectored in a crossfire by sharpshooters rising from the pits on the far side ol the sunken road.

  Then there was silence, and in the silence Willie thought he heard someone beating a broken cadence on a drumhead, like a fool who does not know a Mardi Gras parade has come to an end.

  THROUGH the morning and afternoon thousands of men moved in and out of the trees, stepping through the dead who flanged the edge of the woods or lay scattered across the breadth of the clearing. Columns of sunlight tunneled through the smoke inside the woods, and the air smelled of cordite, horse manure, trees set on fire from fused shells, and humus cratered out of the forest floor. Willie had lost his haversack, cartridge box, the scabbard for his bayonet, and his canteen, but he didn't know where or remember how. He had pulled a cartridge pouch off the belt of a dead man who had already been stripped of his shirt and shoes. Then he had found another dead man in a ravine, with his canteen still hung from his neck, and had pulled the cloth strap loose from the man's head and uncorked the canteen only to discover it was filled with corn whiskey.

  He had never been so thirsty in his life. His lips and tongue were black from biting off the ends of cartridge papers, his nostrils clotted with dust and bits of desiccated leaves. He watched a sergeant use his canteen to wash the blood from a wounded man's face and he wanted to tear the canteen from the sergeant's hands and pour every ounce of its contents down his own throat.

  Jim's canteen had been split in half by a minie ball early in the morning, and neither of them had eaten or drunk a teaspoon of water since the previous night. They had collapsed behind a thick-trunked white oak, exhausted, light-headed, their ears ringing, waiting for the group of Tennessee infantry, to which they now belonged through no volition of their own, to re-form and once again move on the sunken road that the Southerners were now calling the Hornets' Nest.

  The leaves on the floor of the forest were streaked with the blood of the wounded who had been dragged back to the ambulance wagons in the rear. Some men had talked about a surgeon's tent, back near the Corinth Road, that buzzed with green flies and contained cries that would live in a man's dreams the rest of his life.

  Looking to the south, Willie could see horses pulling more cannons through the trees, twenty-four-pounders as high as a man, the spoked wheels knocking across rocks and logs. He pointed and told Jim to look at the cannons that were lumbering on their carriages through the hardwoods, then realized he could not hear.

  He pressed his thumbs under his ears and swallowed and tried to force air through his ear passages, but it was to no avail. The rest of the world was going about its business, and he was viewing it as though he were trapped under a glass bell.

  The cannons went past him, silently, through the leaves and scarred tree trunks, lumbering toward the peach orchard and the sunken road, as silen
tly as if their wheels had been wrapped with flannel. He lay back against the trunk of the white oak and shut his eyes, more tired than he had ever been, convinced he could sleep through the Apocalypse. He could feel a puff of breeze on his cheek, smell water in a creek, hear his mother making breakfast in the boardinghouse kitchen at dawn's first light.

  Then he heard a sound, like a series of doors slamming. He jerked his head up. Jim was standing above him, his lips moving, his consternation showing.

  "What?" Willie said.