"Do you know Lieutenant Willie Burke?" she asked. He thought about it and pushed a thumb under his right ear, as though it were filled with water or a pocket of air. "Yes, ma'am, I do," he said.

"Where is he?"

"I think a boat or Whistling Dick got him."

"What?"

The boy's head jerked at a sound behind him. "Oh Lord Jesus, here it comes," he said, and ran for the trees at the side of the road.

The mortar round reached the apex of its trajectory and chugged out of the sky, exploding in the yard of a plantation across the bayou. Abigail saw Negroes running from a cabin toward the back of the main house, some of them clutching children.

She had to use her whip to force her horse farther down the road. The retreating Confederates were behind her now, around a bend, and the road ahead was empty, whirling with dust when the wind gusted, the sky yellow as sulfur, ripe with the smell of salt, creaking with gulls that had been blown inland by a storm. She rode on another mile, her heart racing, then saw blue-clad foot soldiers come around a curve and fall out on each side of the road, lounging under shade trees, completely indifferent to her presence.

She passed through them, her eyes straight ahead. On a cedar-lined knoll above a coulee two filthy white men in leg irons with wild beards and a group of black men in cast-off Union uniforms were digging a pit. Next to it was a tarpaulin-covered wagon. A cloud went across the sun and raindrops began clicking on the trees and the water in the coulee and the tarpaulin stretched across the wagon.

A young, dark-haired Union lieutenant, with a mustache and clean-shaved cheeks, wearing a patch over one eye and a kepi, approached her buggy.

"You look like you're lost," he said.

"I live in New Iberia, but I've served with the Sanitary Commission in New Orleans. I'm looking for a Southern officer who's been listed as missing in action."

"We're a burial detail. The two men in chains are convicts. I recommend you not get within arm's length of them," the officer said.

The wind gusted out of the south, flapping the tarp on the wagon. An odor like incinerated cowhides struck her nostrils. The lieutenant walked back to his horse and returned with a pair of saddlebags draped over his forearm. He untied the flap on one of the bags and shook fifteen or twenty wooden and tin identification tags onto the carriage seat.

"These are the Rebs we've buried in the last week. I haven't been through the effects of the people in the wagon," he said. His eyes lost their focus and he gazed down the bayou, his face turned into the breeze.

"You said 'people.'"

"A number of them may be civilians, but I can't be sure. Some Rebs were in a house we raked with grape. It caught fire."

She picked up each identification tag individually and examined the name and rank on it. Some of the tags were scratched with Christian crosses on the back. Some of them stuck to her fingers.

"His name isn't among these. I'd like to look in the wagon," she said.

"I don't think that's a good idea," the officer said.

"I don't care what you think."

The officer rotated his head on his neck as though his collar itched him, then brushed at a nostril with one knuckle.

"Suit yourself," he said, and extended his hand to help her down from the buggy.

The officer gestured at the two convicts, who lifted the tarp by its corners and peeled it back over its contents.

The dead were stacked in layers. The faces of some had already grown waxy, the features uniform and no longer individually defined. Others bore the expression they had worn at the exact moment of their deaths, their hands still clutching divots of green grass. The body of a sergeant had been tied with a shingle across the stomach to press his bowels back inside the abdominal cavity. Those who had died in a fire were burned all the way to the bone. A Negro child lay on top of the pile, as though he had curled up there and gone to sleep. The convicts were watching her face with anticipation. "Want to put your hand in there?" one of them said. "Shut up," the officer said.

"Where are your own dead?" Abigail asked.

"In a field mortuary," the officer replied.

"Does the little boy's family know?" she asked.

"I didn't have time to ask," he replied.

"Didn't have time?" she said.

The officer turned back to the convicts and the black laborers. "Get them in the ground," he said.

One of the convicts picked the Negro boy off the pile by the front of his pants and lifted him free of the wagon. The boy's head and feet arched downward, his stomach bowing outward. His eyes were sealed as tightly as a mummy's. The convict flung him heavily into the pit. "You bastard," Abigail said.

"Show some care there," the officer said to the convict. "And, madam, you need to step out of the way or take your sensibilities down the road."

She stood aside and watched the laborers and the convicts lay the bodies of the dead side by side in the bottom of the pit. The black men and the convicts had all tied kerchiefs across their faces, and some of the black men had wrapped rags around their hands before they began pulling the dead out of the wagon by their feet and arms. The rain dripped through the canopy overhead and began to pool in the bottom of the pit.

But none of the dead, as least those who were recognizable, resembled Willie Burke.

"I hope you find him," the officer said.

"Thank you," she said.

"Where was he fighting?" he asked.

"On the rear guard."

"Well, those who serve there are brave fellows. Good luck," he said.

Then a huge black man wearing a shapeless hat and a Yankee coat without a shirt walked back down the road and grabbed the ankles of a blood slick butternut soldier in the underbrush and dragged him into the open.

The black man pulled the kerchief off his nose and mouth. "This 'un bounced off the pile," he said.

"Thank you for telling me that," the officer said.

"You ain't axed, boss. Better come take a look," the black man said.

"What is it?" the officer asked.

"He just opened his eyes."

WILLIE lay in the road, the rain ticking in the leaves around him. He could hear men spading dirt out of a pile and flinging it off the ends of their shovels. Abigail was on her knees beside him, lifting his head, pressing the lip of a canteen to his mouth.

"Where are you hit?" she asked.

"Don't know," he said.

She opened his shirt and felt his legs and turned him on his side. She put her fingers in his hair and felt the contours of his skull. Then she rebuttoned his shirt and looked back over her shoulder at the Union officer.

"Were you knocked unconscious?" she asked.

"I dreamed I was underground. There was a little Negro boy next to me. Where am I hit?"

"You're not," she whispered. She touched his lips with two fingers.

"What happened to the Negro boy?" he said.

But she wasn't listening. Her head was turned in the direction of the Union officer and the grave diggers.

"It wasn't a dream, was it?" he said.

"Don't say anything else," she said.

She folded a clean rag into a square and moistened it and laid it across his eyes, then rose to her feet and approached the Union officer.

"I can take him back with me," she said.

The officer shook his head. "He's a prisoner of war," he said.

She looked back at Willie, then touched the officer on the arm. "Would you step over here with me?" she said.

"Miss, I appreciate your problem but-"

"He's from New Iberia. Let him die at home," she said. She fixed her eyes on the officer's.

"I don't have that kind of authority."

"You send your own to a field mortuary and bury others with no dignity at all. Are you a Christian man, sir?"