I knew that I was going off the levee, but I couldn't unlock my hands from the steering wheel or move my right foot onto the brake pedal. I felt myself trembling, my insides constricting, my back teeth grinding, as though all my nerve endings had been severed and painted with iodine. Then I heard lightning pop the levee and blow a spray of muddy water across my windshield.

Get out, I thought. Knock the door handle with your elbow and jump.

But I couldn't move.

The mist was as pink and thick as cotton candy and seemed to snap with electric currents, like a kaleidoscopic flickering of snakes' tongues. I felt the front wheels of the truck dip over the side of the levee, gain momentum with the weight in the rear end, then suddenly I was rumbling down an incline through weeds and broken cane, willow saplings and cattails, until the front wheels were embedded up to the axle in water and sand.

I don't know how long I sat there. I felt a wave of color pass through me, like nausea or the violent shudder that cheap bourbon gives you when you're on the edge of delirium tremens; then it was gone and I could see the reflection of stars on the water, the tips of the dead cypress silhouetted against the moon, and a campfire, where there should have been no fire, burning in a misty grove of trees on high ground thirty yards out from the levee.

And I knew that was where I was supposed to go.

As I waded through the lily pads toward the trees, I could see the shadows of men moving about in the firelight and hear their cracker accents and the muted sound of spoons scraping on tin plates.

I walked up out of the shallows into the edge of the clearing, dripping water, hyacinth vines stringing from my legs. The men around the fire paid me little notice, as though, perhaps, I had been expected. They were cooking tripe in an iron pot, and they had hung their haversacks and wooden canteens in the trees and stacked their rifle-muskets in pyramids of fives. Their gray and butternut-brown uniforms were sunbleached and stiff with dried salt, and their unshaved faces had the lean and hungry look of a rifle company that had been in the field a long time.

Then from the far side of the fire a bearded man with fierce eyes stared out at me from under a gray hat with gold cord around the crown. His left arm was pinned up in a black sling, and his right trouser leg flopped loosely around a shaved wooden peg.

He moved toward me on a single crutch. I could smell tobacco smoke and sweat in his clothes. Then he smiled stiffly, the skin of his face seeming almost to crack with the effort. His teeth were as yellow as corn.

"I'm General John Bell Hood. Originally from Kentucky. How you do, suh?" he said, and extended his hand.

Chapter 11

"Do you object to shaking hands?" he said.

“No. Not at all. Excuse me."

The heel of his hand was half-mooned with calluses, his voice as thick as wet sand. A holstered cap-and-ball revolver hung on his thigh.

"You look puzzled," he said.

"Is this how it comes? Death, I mean."

"Ask them."

Some of his men were marked with open, bloodless wounds I could put my fist in. Beyond the stacked rifles, at the edge of the firelight, was an ambulance wagon. Someone had raked a tangle of crusted bandages off the tailgate onto the ground.

"Am I dead?" I said.

"You don't look it to me."

"You said you're John Bell Hood."

"That's correct."

His face was narrow, his cheeks hollow, his skin grained with soot.

"I've read a great deal about you."

"I hope it met your approval."

"You were at Gettysburg and Atlanta. You commanded the Texas Brigade. They could never make you quit."

"My political enemies among President Davis's cabinet sometimes made note of that fact."

"What's the date?" I asked.

"It's April 21,1865."

"I don't understand. "

"Understand what?"

"Lee has already surrendered. The war's over. What are you doing here?"

"It's never over. I would think you'd know that. You were a lieutenant in the United States Army, weren 't you?"

"Yes, but I gave my war back to the people who started it. I did that a long time ago."

"No, you didn't. It goes on and on."

He eased himself down on an oak stump, his narrow eyes lighting with pain. He straightened his artificial leg in front of him. The hand that hung out of his sling had wasted to the size of a monkey's paw. A corporal threw a log into the campfire, and sparks rose into the tree branches overhead.

"It's us against them, my friend," he said. "There're insidious men abroad in the land." He swept his crutch at the marsh. "My God, man, use your eyes."

"The federals? "

"Are your eyes and ears stopped with dirt? "

"I think this conversation is not real. I think all of this will be gone with daylight."

"You're not a fool, Mr. Robicheaux. Don't pretend to be one."

"I've seen your grave in New Orleans. No, it's in Metairie. You died of the yellowjack."

"That's not correct. I died when they struck the colors, suh." He lifted his crutch and pointed it at me as he would a weapon. The firelight shone on his yellow teeth. "They'll try your soul, son. But don't give up your cause. Occupy the high ground and make them take it foot by bloody foot."

"I don't know what we're talking about."

"For God's sakes, what's wrong with you? Venal and evil men are destroying the world you were born in. Can't you understand that? Why do I see fear in your face?"

"/ think maybe I'm drunk again. I used to have psychotic episodes when I went on benders. I thought dead men from my platoon were telephoning me in the rain."

"You're not psychotic, lieutenant. No more than Sykes is."

"Elrod is a wet-brain, general."

"The boy has heart. He's not afraid to be an object of ridicule for his beliefs. You mustn't be either. I'm depending on you."

"I have no understanding of your words."

"Our bones are in this place. Do you think we 'II surrender it to criminals, to those who would use our teeth and marrow for landfill?"

"I'm going now, general."

"Ah, you'll simply turn your back on madness, will you? The quixotic vision is not for you, is it?"

"Something's pulling me back. I can feel it."

"They put poison in your system, son. But you'll get through it. You've survived worse. The mine you stepped on, that sort of thing."

"Poison?"

He shrugged and put a cigar in his mouth. A corporal lit it with a burning stick from the fire. In the shadows a sergeant was putting together a patrol that was about to move out. Their faces were white and wrinkled like prunes with exhaustion and the tropical heat.

"Come again," he said.

"I don't think so."

"Then goodnight to you, suh."

"Goodnight to you, general. Goodnight to your men, too."

He nodded and puffed on his cigar. There were small round hollows in his cheeks.

"General?"

"Yes, suh?"

"It's going to be bad, isn't it?"

"What?"

"What you were talking about, something that's waiting for me down the road."

"I don't know. For one reason or another I seem to have more insight into the past than the future." He laughed to himself. Then his face sobered and he wiped a strand of tobacco off his lip. "Try to keep this in mind. It's just like when they load with horseshoes and chain. You think the barrage will last forever, then suddenly there's a silence that's almost louder than their cannon. Please don't be alarmed by the severity of my comparison. Goodnight, lieutenant."

"Goodnight, general."

I waded through the shallows, into deeper water, back toward the levee. The mist hung on the water in wisps that were as dense as thick-bodied snakes. I saw ball lightning roll through the flooded trees and snap apart against a willow island; it was as bright and yellow as molten metal dipped from a forge. Then rain began twisting out of the sky, glistening like spun glass, and the firelight behind me became a red smudge inside a fog bank that billowed out of the marsh, slid across the water, and once again closed around my truck.