In the morning she pulled on a pair of work gloves and went outside with a burlap sack and began picking dead birds off the ground.

All of them were crows, their layered feathers traced with lines of tiny white parasites. They were as light as air in her hands, as though they had been hollowed out by disease, and she knew they had either starved to death or in their hunger broken their necks seeking food.

She dug a deep hole and buried the burlap sack and covered it with bricks so animals would not dig it up.

If birds could not find provender in a tropical environment like southern Louisiana, what must the rest of the South be like? she asked herself.

At noon she walked to the post office to get her mail, unable to rid herself of a sense of foreboding that made her wonder if she was coming down with a sickness. Mr. LeBlanc, the postmaster, stood up behind his desk at the rear of the building and put on his coat and came from behind the counter, an envelope in his hand. He had aged dramatically since the death of his son at Manassas Junction, but he never discussed his loss or showed any public sign of grief or indicated any bitterness toward those who had killed him. When Abigail looked at the deep lines in his face, she wanted to press his hands in hers and tell him it was all right to feel anger and rage against those who had caused the war, but she knew her statement would be met with silence.

Seated on a bench in the corner, hardly noticeable in the gloom, was a thin, solemn-faced boy in his early teens, wearing brown homespun, a Confederate-issue kepi, and oversized workshoes that had chaffed his ankles. A choke sack containing his belongings sat by his foot. Mr. LeBlanc studied him for a moment as though the boy were an ongoing problem he had not found a solution for. Then his attention shifted back to Abigail.

"Do you know any way to contact Willie Burke?" he asked.

"No, I've heard nothing from him in months," she replied.

"I received a telegraph message for him this morning. I don't quite know what to do. His mother died in New Orleans."

"Sir?" Abby said.

"She went there to file a claim as a British subject. Something about getting paid for livestock the Yankees appropriated at her farm. She contracted pneumonia and died in the hospital. Do you want to sign for the telegram?"

"No."

He looked at her blankly. "I guess I can hold on to it," he said.

"I'm sorry, Mr. LaBlanc. I'm just not thinking very clearly right now."

"I have a letter for you from Johnson Island, Ohio. Maybe it's a little brighter in content," Mr. LeBlanc said.

"You do?" she said, her face lighting.

"Of course," he said, smiling.

Before he could speak further, she hurried out the door, tearing at the envelope's seal with her thumb.

"Miss Abigail, would you talk with me for a minute or two after you've read your mail?" he called after her.

She sat on a bench under a colonnade where the stage passengers waited and read the letter that had been written in a prisoner of war camp in Ohio.

Dear Abby,

Thank you for sending me the hat and suit of clothes. They are the exact size and right color (gray) and have been sorely needed, as my uniform had deteriorated into rags. As always, you have proved remarkable in all your endeavors.

But your letters continue to confuse me. You seem to be harboring a guilt of some kind, as though you've done me injury. Nothing could be farther from the truth. You are a true and compassionate and loyal friend. Who could have a better spiritual companion than one such as yourself?

Do you hear from Willie? Even though he has seen much of war, I think he has never gotten over the death of our friend Jim Stubbefield.

She folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope without finishing it. Robert Perry's words were like acid on her skin. Not only did they exacerbate her guilt over her self-perceived infidelity, the term "spiritual companion" reduced her to a presumption, an adjunct in Robert's life rather than a participant.

Why had she stayed in Louisiana? she asked herself. But she already knew the answer, and it had to do with her father and it made, her wonder about her level of maturity. Sometimes she missed him in a way that was almost intolerable. In an unguarded moment, when the world surrounded her and her own resolve was not sufficient to deal with it, the image of his broad, jolly face and big shoulders and pipe-smelling clothes would invade her mind and her eyes would begin to film.

He was defrauded by his New York business partners and sued in Massachusetts by men who owed their very lives to him, but his spirits never dimmed and he never lost his faith in either God or humanity or the abolitionist movement, which he had championed all his life.

After his death she could not bear the New England winters in their family home up on the Merrimack, nor the unrelieved whiteness of the fields that seemed to flow into the horizon like the blue beginnings of eternity. The inside of the house had become a mausoleum, its hardwood surfaces enameled with cold, and by mid-January she had felt that her soul was sheathed in ice. In her mind she would re-create their clipper ship voyages to Spain, Italy, and Greece, and she would see the two of them together in late summer, hiking with backpacks on a red dirt road in Andalusia, the olive trees a dark green against a hillside of yellow grass that was sear and rustling in the heat. She and her father would hike all the way to the top of the mountain and sit in the warm shade of a Moorish castle, then fix lunch and eat it, while in the distance the azure brilliance of the Mediterranean stretched away as far as the eye could see.

It was a place she went back to again and again in her memory. It was a special place where she lived when she felt threatened, if the world seemed too much for her late and soon, like a cathedral in which she and her father were the only visitors.

When she came to south Louisiana during the yellow fever epidemic and smelled the salt breeze blowing off Lake Pontchartrain and saw roses blooming in December and palm trees rising starkly against the coastline, like those around Cadiz, she felt that the best memories in her life had suddenly been externalized and made real again and perhaps down a cobbled street in the old part of New Orleans her father waited for her at an outdoor cafe table under a balcony that was hung with tropical flowers.

Perhaps it was a foolish way to be, but her father had always taught her the greatest evil one person could do to another was to interfere in his or her destiny, and to Abigail that meant no one had a right to intrude upon either the province of her soul or her imagination or the ties that bound her to the past and allowed her to function in the present.

But now, in the drowsy shade of a colonnade in April 1865, at the close of the greatest epoch in American history, she wished she was on board a sailing ship, within sight ol Malaga, the palm trees banked thickly at the base of the Sierra Nevada, like a displaced piece of Africa, the troubles and conflicts of war-torn Louisiana far behind her.

"You all right, Miss Dowling?"

She looked up, startled, at Mr. LeBlanc. The boy in brown homespun and the Confederate-issue kepi stood behind him, his choke sack tied with a string around his wrist.

"This young fellow here says a preacher bought him a stage ticket to find Willie Burke," Mr. LeBlanc said.

The boy stared down the street, as though unconcerned about the events taking place around him.

"What's your name again?" Mr. LeBlanc asked.

"Tige McGuffy."

"Where did you know Mr. Willie from?" Mr. LeBlanc asked.

"Shiloh Church. I was with the 6th Mis'sippi. Me and him was both at the Peach Orchard."