Flower continued to stare at him, surprised at her own boldness. He stopped his conversation with the paddy rollers in mid-sentence and looked back at her, then set his cup down on the table and walked toward her, the leaves from the oak tree puffing into the great vault of yellow-purple sky behind him.

He wore boots and tight, gray cavalry pants with gold stripes down the legs, a wash-faded checkered shirt, and a slouch hat sweat-stained around the crown. A canvas cartridge belt with loops designed for the new brass-cased ammunition was buckled at an angle on his narrow hips.

"You have something you want to say, Flower?" he asked.

"Not really."

"You bear me a grudge?" he said.

"Miss Carrie in there knows prophecy. Some people say Mr. Willie Burke got the same gift. But folks such as me don't have that gift," she said.

"You're not making a whole lot of sense."

"I cain't read the lines in somebody's palm. But I know you're gonna come to a bad end. It's because you're evil. And you're evil because you're cruel. And you're cruel because inside you're afraid."

He stared into the distance, his fists on his hips, his weight resting casually on one leg. Rain was blowing off the Gulf, like spun glass across the sun. He shook his head.

"I tell you the truth, Flower, you're the damnedest nigger I've ever known and the best piece of rough stock I ever took to bed. That said, would you please get the hell out of here?" he said.

As she rode away in the buggy, she looked back over her shoulder and saw Rufus Atkins counting out a short stack of coins into the palm of each of the paddy rollers. A shaft of sunlight fell on the broad grin of the feebleminded man. His teeth were as yellow as corn, his eyes filled with a liquid glee.

Chapter Fifteen

WILLIE Burke no longer knew if the humming sound in his head was caused by the mosquito eggs in his blood or the dysentery in his bowels. The dirt road along the bayou was yellow and hard-packed and the dust from the retreating column drifted into his face. He wore no socks and the leather in his shoes had hardened and split and rubbed blisters across his toes and on his heels. He watched the retreating column disappear around a bend, then ordered his men to fall out and form a defensive line along a coulee that fed into the bayou.

He lay below the rim of the embankment and peered back down the road. Houses were burning in the distance, and when he pressed his ear against the ground he thought he could hear the rumble of wheeled vehicles in the south, but he could see no sign of Union soldiers.

Where were they? he asked himself. Perhaps sweeping south of New Iberia to capture the salt mines down by the Gulf, he thought. It was shady where he lay on the embankment, and he could smell wild-flowers and water in the bottom of the coulee and for what seemed just a second he laid his head down in the coolness of the grass and closed his eyes.

An enlisted man shook him by his arm.

"You all right, Lieutenant?" he asked.

"Sure I am," Willie said, his head jerking up. The side of his face was peppered with grains of dirt. He raised himself on his arms and looked down the road at the row of oaks and cypress trees that lined the bayou. He felt light-headed, disconnected in a strange way from the scene around him, as though it belonged somehow inside the world of sleep and he belonged in another place.

He could see a curtain of black smoke rising from the fields in the south now, which told him he had been right in his speculation that the Yankees' main force would concentrate on capturing the salt mines and, at worst, he and his men would not have to deal with more than a diversionary probe.

He looked at the empty road and the cinders rising in the sky from the fields and the wind blowing across the tops of the oak trees and wondered if he would see his mother and Abigail Dowling that evening. Yes, he most certainly would, he told himself. He would bathe in an iron tub and have fresh clothes and he would eat soup and perhaps even bread his mother had baked for him.

He thought about all these things and did not see the Yankee gunboat that came around a bend in the bayou, emerging from behind trees into the gold-purple light of the late afternoon, its port side lined with a half dozen cannons.

He saw a sailor jerk a lanyard at the rear of a Parrott gun, then a shell sucked past his ear and exploded against a tree trunk behind him, showering the coulee with leaves and branches and bits of metal and the sudden glare of the sun. Then he was running down the coulee with the others, away from the bayou and the gunboat that was now abreast of them, close enough for him to see the faces of the gun crews and the sharpshooters on top of the pilothouse.

The row of cannons fired in sequence, turning the boat against its rudder, blowing smoke across the water. He felt himself lifted into the air, borne above the treetops into a sky that was the color of a yellow bruise, his concerns of a second ago no longer of consequence. He struck the earth with a shuddering, chest-emptying impact that was oddly painless, and in a dark place that semed outside of time thought he heard the sound of dirt falling around him like dry rain clicking on a wood box.

ABIGAIL drove her buggy along the bayou road and passed a house with twin brick chimneys whose roof had been pocked by a stray cannon shell that had exploded inside and blown the windows onto the lawn. She passed families of Negroes and poor whites who were walking into town with bundles on their heads, and a barefoot Confederate soldier who sat on a log, without gun, hat or haversack, his head hanging between his knees. His teeth were black with gunpowder and a rag was tied across the place where his ear had been.

"Can I change your dressing, sir?" she asked.

"I haven't give it any real thought," he replied.

"Do you know where Willie Burke is?"

"Cain't say as I recall him," the soldier replied.

"Lieutenant Burke. He was on the rear guard."

"This hasn't been a day to be on rear guard. Them sons…" The soldier did not finish his sentence. "You wouldn't have any food on you, would you, ma'am?"

She fed the soldier and cleaned the wound on the side of his head and wrapped it with a fresh bandage, then drove farther down the Teche. She expected to see ramparts, batteries of Napoleon or Parrott guns arcing shells into the sky, sharpshooters spread along the lip of a coulee, or mounted officers with drawn sabers cantering their horses behind advancing infantry. Instead, a ragged collection of butternut soldiers was firing behind trees into the distance at no enemy she could see, then retreating, reloading on the ground, and firing again. The air inside the trees was so thick with musket and shotgun smoke that the soldiers had to walk out into the road to see if their fusillade had found a mark.

She heard a metallic cough down the bayou, like a rusty clot breaking loose inside a sewer pipe, then there was silence followed by a chugging sound ripping across the sky. The mortar round exploded in the bayou behind her and bream and white perch rained down through the top of a cypress and flopped on the ground.

A shirtless boy with his pants tucked inside cavalry boots that fit him like galoshes paused by the wagon and stared at her. He carried a flintlock rifle and a powder horn on a leather string that cut across his chest. His skin was gray with dust, his arms thin and rubbery, without muscular tone.

"There's Yankees down there, ma'am," he said.

"I don't see any," she said.

"You ain't suppose to see them. When you can see them, you put a ball in one of them." He grinned at his own joke and looked at the birds in the sky.