Willie wondered when Hatcher would eventually muster up the nerve to frame Willie's back in his rifle sights.

Someone touched him on the shoulder.

"Major is asking for you, Lieutenant," a soldier said. He could not have been over sixteen. There were no buttons on his shirt and the cloth was held against his chest by the crossed straps of his haversack and a bullet pouch. He wore a domed, round-brimmed straw hat that sat on his head like a cake bowl.

"How is he?" Willie asked.

"He falls asleep and says funny things," the boy answered.

Willie walked back through the woods to a bayou that was spangled with sunlight and draped with air vines that hung from the trees. The major lay on a blanket in the leaves, his head propped on a haversack stuffed with his rubber coat.

Back in the shade, under a mulberry tree clattering with bluejays, the feet of four dead soldiers stuck out from the gum blankets that had been pulled over their bodies. Their shoes had been taken and the blankets that covered them were spotted with the white droppings of birds.

Both of the major's arms were broken and hung uselessly at his sides. A bandage with a scarlet circle the size of a half dollar in the center was tied just below his heart. His muttonchop sideburns looked as thick as hemp on his jowls.

"I had a dream about snow. Everything was white and a red dog was barking inside some trees," the major said.

"We have a boat coming up the bayou, sir. We'll have you back at battalion aid soon," Willie said.

"We shot the living hell out of them, didn't we?"

"You bet," Willie said.

"I need to ask you something."

"Yes, sir."

"When we stopped that steamboat on the Mis'sippi, the one carrying yellow jack?"

Willie let his eyes slip off the major's face.

"Yes, sir, I remember it," he said.

"I had a feeling you knew the woman on board, the one with the Yankee accent."

"Could be, sir."

"I don't think those darkies had yellow jack. I think they were escaped slaves."

"Lots of things are out of our control, Major," Willie said. He was propped on one knee, his gaze fixed on the air vines that fluttered in the wind.

"I worked my whole life as a trainman. I owned nary a slave. I always thought slavery was a mistake," the major said.

Willie nodded. "Yes, sir," he said.

"Those who got through us on the river? They might have joined up with the colored outfit we just shot up, the ones who put the ball under my heart. That'd be something, wouldn't it?"

Willie's eyes returned to the major's and he felt something drop inside him.

"It's nothing to worry about. The boat will be here soon," the major said, and tried to smile.

"Sir-" Willie began.

"Watch your back, Willie. Hatcher and Captain Atkins are no good. They hate a young fellow such as yourself."

Then the major widened his eyes briefly and turned his face away, into the shadows, as though the world of sunlight and the activity of the quick held little interest for him.

When Willie got back to his position inside the edge of the woods, he sat very still on a log and waited for his head to stop spinning. Then he poured water out of his canteen into his palm and wiped his face with it. The boxcars on the track went in and out of focus and a pang like a shard of glass sliced across the lining of his stomach. For a moment he thought he would lose control of his sphincter muscle.

In the distance he saw snow egrets and black geese rising from the canopy in the river bottoms, then he heard the spatter of small-arms fire that meant Hatcher's group had made contact with the black soldiers who had fled the train.

Both the men with Hatcher carried captured Spencer rifles and bags of brass cartridges, and they, along with Hatcher and his Henry repeater, were laying down a murderous field of fire. The shooting went on for five minutes, then a field piece roared deep in the river bottoms and the gum trees overhead trembled with the shock and a cloud of smoke and grayish-orange dust rose out of the leaves into the sunlight. A moment later the field piece roared again and a second cloud of dust and smoke caught the light and flattened in the wind.

Willie looked through his spyglass at the observation balloon tethered by the railway track far down the line. The bearded man in the wicker basket was using a pair of handheld flags to semaphore a battery down below, one consisting of three rifled twenty-pounder Parrotts that had been removed from a scuttled Union gunboat.

One of the cannons fired, and a shell arced over the spot in the river bottoms where the dust clouds had risen out of the canopy. The round went long by thirty yards, and the man in the basket leaned over the side and whipped his flags in the air. The next round was short and the man in the basket semaphored the ground again.

Then all three Confederate cannons fired for effect, again and again, the fused shells whistling shrilly only seconds before they struck.

Uprooted trees and columns of dirt fountained into the air, and through the spyglass Willie could see shoes and pieces of blue uniform mixed in with the dirt and palmetto leaves.

The barrage went on for almost a half hour. When Willie and his platoon marched across the railway embankment and entered the bottoms, he saw a black soldier huddled on the ground, trembling all over as though he had malaria, his forearms pressed tightly against his ears. Deeper in the bottoms the ground was pocked with craters, the dirt still smoking, and the trees were decorated in ways he had not seen since Shiloh.

Back in the underbrush he saw one of Hatcher's men cut the ear from a dead man's head, fold it in a handkerchief, and place it carefully in a leather pouch.

So that's the way it goes, he thought. You turn a blind eye to slaves escaping downriver, and later they join up with the blue-bellies and perhaps drive a ball under your friend's heart, and you trap the poor devils under a barrage that paints the trees with their blood and nappy hair. Ah, isn't it all a lovely business, he thought.

He wondered what Abigail would have to say about his work and hers.

An hour later he passed out. When he woke, he was in a tent and rain was ticking on the canvas. Through the flap he saw two enlisted men digging a grave by the bayou. The major lay next to the mound of dirt, his face covered with his gray coat.

Chapter Fourteen

THE morning did not feel like spring, Abigail thought. The air was hot and smelled of dust and trash fires, the sky gray, the clouds crackling with electricity. Then her neighbor's dogs began barking and she heard a banging noise down the Teche, like a houseful of carpenters smacking nails down in green wood. She walked out on the gallery and saw birds lifting out of the trees all the way down the street as a long column of soldiers and wagons rounded a bend in the distance and advanced toward the center of town.

The soldiers were unshaved, gaunt as scarecrows, some of them without shoes, the armpits of their butternut and gray uniforms white with salt, their knees patched like the pants on beggars. Three wagons carrying wounded passed in front of her. The teamsters in the wagon boxes were leaning forward, away from their charges, with handkerchiefs tied across their faces. The wind shifted, and she smelled the unmistakable odor of gangrene and of men who had become incontinent and left to sit in their own excretions. She saw no one with a surgeon's insignia in the column.

She walked out into the yard just as a mounted officer rode his horse to the head of column. He wore a slouch hat, a sweat-peppered gray shirt, no coat, and a pistol in a shoulder holster on his chest. His face was narrow, his skin as coarse and dark as if it had been rubbed with the dust from a foundry.