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 saddlebag 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.