White Doves at Morning Page 10

  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 water 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 saddl
ebag 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.

  Chapter Eight

  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.

  The hospital was two stories, constructed of brick that was webbed with ivy, set far back under live oak trees, with a scrolled-iron veranda on the second story. Two wings extended out toward the street, creating a garden-like area in the center that was planted with pink and gray caladium, banks of philodendrons and elephant ears, climbing roses, banana trees, bamboo, crepe myrtle and azaleas, whose blooms puffed in the wind and tumbled on the grass.

  She walked with a white-clad nun down a long wood hallway that glowed from hours of polishing done by women who prayed inside sweltering habits while they scrubbed floors on their hands and knees. The intermittent statues of the saints, daily dusted from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their feet, could have been the votive patrons of cleanliness and order. Then Abigail passed a Union sentry and entered the ward for Confederate prisoners who had survived surgery in field hospitals and had been shipped south from Shiloh on commandeered riverboats.

  Abigail fought to keep her face empty of expression when she looked upon the men in the rows of beds, the covered ceramic slop jars set neatly in front of each bed. Field surgeons had often sawed the limb right at the trunk, offering no chance for a prosthesis. Some men had only sockets for eyes, a scooped-out hole for a nose, a mouth without a jaw, a tube of useless flesh for an arm or leg after the bone had been removed.

  The lucky ones had stumps that ended in puckered scar tissue that was still pink with circulation. But some had been condemned to die the death of the damned twice, their limbs cut without benefit of ether or laudanum by a field surgeon using a saw he cleaned on an old shirt soaked in whiskey. Then, when they thought their ordeal was over, they discovered that gangrene had taken hold under their bandages and their swollen flesh had turned the color of an eggplant.

  "Some of the nuns put rosewater on a handkerchief and pretend they have a cold," the sentry at the door told her. His accent was a distorted echo of her own, Boston or New York or Rhode Island, a man who had probably operated a dray or worked in a fish market or at the firehouse.

  "I'm not bothered by it," she replied.

  "Come back at night. When we have to close the windows because of the mosquitoes and they start pitching around in their sleep, knocking over slop jars and yelling out and such," he said.

  The sentry was thin and nice-looking, with startling blue eyes, a fresh haircut and a trimmed mustache. A bayonet was fixed on the rifle that was popped butt-down between his feet.

  "Yesterday, when I got off the boat, I heard a great commotion by the Mint," she said.

  "The Rebs tore down our flag and ripped it up in the street. They're not gracious losers."

  "I see," she said.

  "One of them is about to get a taste of General Butler today. You know what the general said? 'They don't respect our stars, they'll feel our stripes.' Pretty clever, if you ask me," the sentry said.

  "I don't quite follow you," she said.

  "Go down to the Mint this evening and get an eyeful."

  She started to walk away.

  "Don't feel sorry for these Rebs, ma'am. They've lorded it over the darkies all their lives and never had to work like the rest of us. Now, they're going to get their comeuppance. If you want to see an example of His Southern Highness, check behind the screens at the end of the room," the sentry said.

  Later, as she was carrying out slop jars to the lime pit in back, she glanced through an opening between two mobile partitions fashioned from mosquito netting. Propped up on pillows by the window was a bare-chested and handsome man wrapped with bandages across his rib cage and lower back and shoulder. The bandages on the rib cage were spotted with two dark red circles the size of quarters.

  The shutters on the window were open, and the dappled light that filtered through the philodendron shifted across his face like gold leaves floating on water. His eyelids looked as thin as paper, traced with tiny blue veins. His breath was so shallow he seemed barely alive.

  "Colonel Jamison?" she said.

  He turned his head on the pillow and opened his eyes, his brow furrowed, like a man waking from an angry dream. His lips were dry and gray, and he seemed to rethink a troubling idea in his head, then correct the expression in his face, as though by choice he could manifest the personae he wanted to present to the world.

  "Miss Abigail? You have a way of showing up in the most unexpected fashion," he said.

  "You were taken prisoner at Shiloh?" she said.

  "Truth be known, I don't remember it very well. For sure, they planted three balls in me. Would you mind putting a teaspoon of lemon water in my mouth?"

  When she picked up the bowl from the nightstand his mouth opened and waited like a communicant's. She placed the teaspoon of

  crushed ice and mint leaves and lemon on his tongue. His throat made

  a dry, clicking sound when he swallowed and for just a moment color seemed to bloom in his cheeks. On the nightstand were a gilded leather-bound Bible and a saucer with three conically shaped.36 caliber pistol rounds on it.

  She tried to remember the name of his regiment. Was it the Orleans Guards?

  "Do you have news of a soldier named Willie Burke? He was with the 18th," she said.

  A shadow seemed to slide across Jamison's brow.

  "On the first day we were supposed to be on their flank. There was a great deal of confusion. They went up the slope on their own."

  "Do you know of Willie?" she asked again.

  "No, I know no one by that name. I was wounded the following day. If I live through th
is war, I'll always be associated with the destruction of the 18th Louisiana. I hope the balls they dug out of my flesh somehow atone for my failure."

  She studied his face and could not decide if what she saw there was remorse or self-pity. His fingers touched hers.

  "I apologize for my behavior in your home, Miss Abigail. I'm an aging widower and sometimes give in to romantic inclinations that are the product of my years," he said.

  His eyes tried to hold hers, but she turned from him and picked up a partially covered wooden bucket filled with encrusted bandages. An odor rose into her nostrils that made the skin of her face stretch against the bone.