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.

They 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.