White Doves at Morning Read online

Jim's lips were moving silently, then audible words came from his mouth in mid-sentence.

  "-got us some water. That fellow from the 6th Mis'sippi we were talking to last night, the one who looked like he got hit across the face with a frying pan, he toted a whole barrel up here strapped to his back," Jim said.

  He squatted down with a tin cup and handed it to Willie.

  "Where's yours?" Willie asked.

  "I had plenty. Drink up," Jim said, his eyes sliding off Willie's face.

  There was a black smear of gunpowder on the cup's rim where Jim had drunk, but the water level in the cup was down only an inch. Willie drank two swallows, a little more than half the remaining water, and returned the cup to Jim.

  "Finish it up, you ole beanpole, and don't be lying to your pal again," Willie said.

  Jim sat down against the tree bark.

  "You hit any of them today?" he asked.

  "I couldn't see through the smoke most of the time, you?" Willie replied.

  "Maybe. I saw a fellow behind a rick fence go down. A ball hit him in the face," Jim said. He looked into space, his jaw flexing. "I was glad."

  Willie turned and looked at Jim's profile, a gunpowder burn on his right cheek, the bitter cast in his eye.

  "They're no different from us, Jim," he said.

  "Yes, they are. They're down here. We didn't go up there."

  A young lieutenant strolled through the enlisted men sitting on the ground. He wore a goatee that looked like corn silk, and a wide-brimmed cavalry officer's hat, with a gold cord strung around the crown, a bared sword carried casually on his shoulder. Blood had drained from inside his coat onto the leather flap of his pistol holster.

  "Our cannoneers are about to start banging doors again, gentlemen. Then we're going to have another run at it," he said.

  "We been out there eleven times, suh," a private on the ground said.

  "Twelve's a charm. Stuff your fingers in your ears," the lieutenant said, just as over twenty cannons fired in sequence, almost point-blank, into the sunken road and the woods beyond.

  Then the cannon crews began to fire at will, the barrels and gun carriages lurching off the ground, the crews turning in a half-crouch from the explosion, their hands clamped over their ears. They swabbed out the barrels, then reloaded with more caseshot, canister, and grape. They snipped the fuses on explosive shells so they detonated as airbursts immediately on the other side of the sunken road. When they ran short of conventional ordnance, they loaded with lengths of chain, chopped-up horseshoes, chunks of angle iron and buckets of railroad spikes.

  Through the smoke Willie and Jim could see bits of trees flying in the air, the staff of an American flag lopped in half, blue-clad men climbing out of their rifle pits, running for the rear, sometimes with a wounded comrade supported between them.

  The barrage went on for thirty minutes. When it lifted, the sun looked like a broken egg yoke inside the smoke, the acrid smell of gunpowder so dense they could hardly breathe.

  Willie and Jim advanced across the clearing with the others, once again the cry of the fox hunt rising hoarsely from their throats. They

  crossed the sunken road and stepped over the Federal dead who lay there and entered a woods where trees were split in two, as though divided by lightning, the bark on the southern side of the trunks hanging in white strips.

  The ground was littered with Springfield rifle muskets, boxes of percussion caps, ramrods, haversacks, canteens, torn cartridge papers, entrenching shovels, kepis, bloody bandages, bayonets, cloth that had been scissored away from wounds, boots and shoes, newspaper and magazine pages that men had used to clean themselves.

  Inside the smoke and broken trees and the fallen leaves that were matted together with blood was the pervasive buzzing of bottle flies. In the distance, over the heads of the Confederates who were out in front of him, Willie saw a white flag being waved by a Union officer in front of a silenced battery.

  The firing ended as it had started, but in inverse fashion, like a string of Chinese firecrackers that pops with murderous intensity, then simply exhausts itself.

  Willie and Jim slumped against a stone fence that was speckled with lichen and damp and cool-smelling in the shade. Even the sunlight seemed filtered through green water. Jim's eyes were bloodshot, his face like that of a coal miner who has just emerged from a mine shaft, his teeth startling white when he grinned.

  The tall man, with the concave face, from the 6th Mississippi, walked past them, his body bent forward. A huge barrel was mounted on his back with leather straps that were looped around his shoulders. The barrel had been hit in four places across the middle with either grapeshot or minie balls, and four jets of water were spraying from the holes, crisscrossing one another as the man labored with his burden back toward the sunken road.

  "How about a drink, pard?" Jim said.

  "What's that you say?" the man asked. His jaws were slack, unshaved, his peculiar, smoke-blackened, indented face like that of a simian creature from an earlier time.

  "You're leaking. Give us a cup before it's all gone," Willie said.

  "Take the whole shithouse," the man said.

  He slipped the leather straps off his back and slung the barrel on a rock, where the staves burst apart and the water patterned on the leaves, then became only a dark shadow in the dirt.

  Willie and Jim stared at him in disbelief.

  "Want to make something of hit?" he asked.

  "No, sir, not us," Willie said.

  The man rubbed his hand on his mouth and looked about him as though he didn't know where he was. A rivulet of dried blood ran from his ear canal into his whiskers.

  "Where's the little fellow, what's-his-name, Tige?" Willie asked.

  "Gone. Him and his drum, both gone," the man said.

  "Gone where?" Willie asked.

  "Into their cannon. Right into their goddamn cannon," the man said.

  His eyes were wet, the whites filled with veins that looked like crimson thread, his teeth like slats in his mouth.

  WHEN Willie and Jim found their outfit later in the afternoon, it was as though they had journeyed to a different war. Five hundred men of the 18th Louisiana were spread along the tree-dotted edge of a ravine, their blue jackets now turned inside out in order to show the white linings. In front of them, up a long green incline, was a hardwood forest unscarred by rifle or cannon fire, and inside the forest were three regiments of Federal infantry and batteries of wheeled artillery whose jack screws had been twisted to their maximum extension in order to point the cannon barrels straight down the slope.

  Willie and Jim walked through the bottom of ravine, the leaves almost ankle-deep, their clothes rent, their saliva still black when they spat. Their friends stared at them quizzically, as though they were visitors from a foreign world. Willie and Jim knelt behind a tree on the northern rim and stared out at the scene in front of them.

  The slope was partially in shadow now, the air cool with the hint of evening. When the wind blew down the slope Willie could see wild-flowers inside the grass. The depressed muzzle of a cannon stared down the slope at him like a blunt-edged iron instrument poised to enter the throat of a surgical patient.

  Off to the left Rufus Atkins stood among the trees, with two other officers, his head nodding, his gloves pulled tautly through his belt, while Colonel Alfred Mouton moved his index finger on a map that was spread across his wrist and forearm. Then Corporal Clay Harcher walked past Willie, interdicting his line of vision.

  "Where y'all been? Cap'n Atkins wrote y'all up as deserters," Hatcher said, stopping, his eyes, which reminded Willie of a rodent's, squinting in the gloom. He carried a Springfield rifle with a narrow brass tube mounted on top of the barrel.

  "In the rear, catching up on our sleep. I see you've taken up the role of sniper. I think you've found yourself, Clay," Jim said.

  Hatcher tried to stare them down, as he had tried on many other occasions, but the memory of his humiliation at their hands back at
Camp Pratt was always in their eyes, their contempt and rejection of his authority like a salty cut on his soul. "What's going on, Hatcher?" Willie asked.

  "We're taking that battery up there," Hatcher said, his chin out.

  "They're quit. We punched through them at the sunken road," Willie said.

  "Tell that to them blue-bellies up in the trees," Hatcher said. "Where are your coats?"

  "We lost them," Willie said.

  "You might as well. We had to turn ours inside out. The Orleans Guards started firing on us."

  For a moment Hatcher felt like a brother-in-arms, a noncommissioned officer looking out for his men, Willie and Jim, but he looked at the black stains around their mouths, the sweat lines that had dried in the dust on their faces, and he knew they were different from him, better than him, and he knew also they had already passed a test inside the crucible that now waited for him up the slope.

  He turned his head and pretended to spit in order to show his lack of fear, even rubbing his shoe at a dry place in the leaves, then walked off, the weight of his scoped rifle balanced horizontally inside his cupped palm, rehearsing a scowling look of disdain for the next enlisted man who should wander into his ken.

  Willie crunched through the leaves toward the place where Colonel Mouton and his staff were talking. Mouton wore a thick beard and a wide hat with a plum-colored plume in it and a long coat and knee-length calvary boots outside his pants. His coat was stiff on one side with dried mud splatter, one eye watery where a shaft of sunlight cut across his face. He stopped in mid-sentence. "What is it you want, Private?" he asked.

  "We were in the Hornet's Nest, sir. The sunken road, over to the east. They surrendered," Willie said.

  " We're aware of that. But thank you for coming forward," Mouton said.

  "Sir?" Willie said.

  "Yes?" Mouton said, distracted now, his eyes lifting for a second time from the map.

  "They're whipped. We went at them twelve times and whipped them," Willie said.

  "You need to go rejoin your comrades, Private," Mouton said.

  Willie turned and walked away without saluting, glancing up the slope at the artillery pieces that waited for them inside the shadows and the cooling of the day, twenty-four-pounders loaded with the same ordnance Willie had seen used at the sunken road. He stopped behind a tree and leaned over, then slid down his rifle onto his knees, shutting his eyes, clasping the holy medal that hung from his neck.

  The sun was low on the western horizon now, the sky freckled with birds. Colonel Mouton rode his horse out onto the green slope in front of the ravine and waited for his regiment to move out of the trees and join him in the failing light. A hawk glided over the glade, its shadow racing behind it, and seemed to disappear into the redness of the sun.

  Mouton spoke first in French, then in English, repeating the same statements three times in three different positions so all would hear his words.

  "The 16th Louisiana and the Orleans Guards were supposed to be on our flanks, gentlemen. Unfortunately they have not arrived. That means we have to kick the Yankees off that hill by ourselves. You are brave and fine men and it is my great honor to serve with you. Our cause is just and God will not desert us. In that spirit I ask you to come with me up that hill and show the invaders of our homeland what true courage is."

  "God bless and love every one of you."

  Then he raised his saber in the air, turned his horse northward, and began the long walk up the slope into an enfiladed box where they would be outnumbered three to one and fired upon from the front and both flanks simultaneously.

  As Willie marched up the slope with Jim, his heart thudding in his chest, he kept waiting for the crack of the first rifle shot, the one that would ignite the firestorm for which no soldier could ever adequately prepare himself. His own stink rose from his shirt, and there was a creaking sound inside his head, as though he were deep underwater, beyond all the physical laws of tolerance, and the pressure was about to rupture his eardrums.

  The standard bearer was in front of him, the white stars and crossed blue bars on a red field rippling and popping in the wind, the standard bearer tripping over a rock, righting himself, his kepi falling to the ground, stepped on by the man behind him.

  But it was not a rifle shot that began the battle. A cannon lurched and burst with flame against the darkness of the trees, and suddenly there was sound and light in the midst of the 18th Louisiana that was like the earth-rending force inside a hurricane, like a wind that could tear arms and legs out of sockets, rip heads from torsos, disembowel the viscera, blow the body lifelessly across the ground, all of it with such a grinding inevitability that one simply surrendered to it, as he might to a libidinous and heavy-handed lover.

  Colonel Mouton's horse twisted its head sideways, walleyed, whinnying, then went down, its rib cage pocked with grapeshot. Mouton separated himself from the saddle and rose to his feet, shot in the face, and tried to pull a revolver from his holster. He fell to one knee, his left hand searching in the air for support, then toppled forward into the grass.

  A piece of case shot spun through the air and embedded four inches into the upper thigh of the standard bearer. He sagged on the flagstaff, like an elderly man grown weary of an arduous climb, then pivoted and looked imploringly into Jim's face.

  "They sight on the guidon! Don't take it!" Willie said.

  But Jim shifted his rifle to his left hand and slipped the staff from the grasp of the wounded man. With almost superhuman strength he held the colors aloft in the sunset with one hand, his Enfield gripped in the other, stepping over the fallen, while minie balls made whirring sounds past his ears.

  Willie heard the mortal wound before he saw it, a plopping sound, a minie fired from the woods that struck Jim's brow and blew out the back of his head.

  He saw the battle flag tilt, then the cloth fall across his own face, blinding him. When he ripped it aside and flung it from his hand, Jim lay on his side in the grass, an unbriused buttercup an inch from his sightless eyes.

  Suddenly he could no longer hear the roar of the guns or the air-bursts over his head. But inside his own mind he heard himself speak Jim's name.

  Jim? Hey, you ole beanpole, get up. We've got fish to catch, dances to go to. This is all a lark, not worth our dying for.

  The sound of the war came back, like a locomotive engine blowing apart. The ends of his fingers were wet with Jim's blood, his shirt splattered with Jim's brain matter.

  In fifteen minutes two hundred and forty members of the 18th Louisiana, just short of half, were casualties. They retreated back down the slope, dragging their wounded with them, many of their weapons left on the field.

  But Willie did not go with them. He picked up his Enfield and slipped Jim's bowie knife and scabbard from his belt, and ran in a crouch toward the sunset and the trees that bordered Owl Creek. A cannon shell screamed past his head, its breath like a hot scorch on his neck.

  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 h
ad rotted and started to cave into the streambed, 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.