Chapter Three

BY AFTERNOON of the same day the telegraph had carried the news of the bombardment of Fort Sumter to New Iberia, and Camp Pratt, out on Spanish Lake, was suddenly filled with young men who stood in long lines before the enlistment tables, most of them Acadian boys who spoke no English and had never been farther from Bayou Teche than the next parish. The sky was blue through the canopy of oak trees that covered the camp, the lake beaten with sunlight, the four-o'clocks blooming in the shade, the plank tables in front of the freshly carpentered barracks groaning with platters of sausage, roast chickens, boudin, smoked ducks, crab gumbo, dirty rice, and fruit pies that had been brought in carriages by ladies who lived in the most elegant plantation homes along the bayou.

Willie's tall friend, Jim Stubbefield, sat barefoot in his militia uniform, his back against a cypress tree by the water's edge, and drank from a cup of buttermilk and looked with puzzlement at the festive atmosphere in the camp. He turned to a young man in civilian clothes sitting next to him and said, "Robert, I think the fates are not working properly here. I enlisted two months ago and no one seemed to notice."

His friend was named Robert Perry. His hair grew over his collar and was the color of mahogany, his face handsome, his blue eyes never troubled by fear or self-doubt or conflict with the world around him.

"I'm sure it was just an oversight on the community's part," he said.

Jim continued to stare in a bemused way at the enlistment lines, then his gaze locked on one individual in particular and he chewed on a piece of skin on his thumb and spit it off his tongue.

"I think I've made a mistake," he said.

"A man with your clarity of vision? Seems unlikely," Robert said.

"Look there. Willie's joining up. Maybe at my urging."

"Good for Willie," Robert said.

"I doubt Willie has it in him to shoot anyone," Jim said.

"Do you?"

"If they come down here, I figure they've asked for it."

"I doubt if it was easy for Willie to come here. Don't rob him of his self-respect," Robert said, rising to his feet, pressing a palm down on Jim's shoulder.

"Your father owns over a hundred and eighty niggers, Robert. You ought not to be lecturing to the rest of us."

"You're entirely right, Jim," Robert said. He winked at Jim and walked toward the recruitment table, where Willie Burke had just used quill and ink to enter his name among a long list of French and Spanish and Anglo-Saxon ones, many of them printed by an enlistment officer and validated by an X.

But Robert soon realized Jim's premonitions about their friend were probably correct, that the juncture of Willie Burke and the Confederate army would be akin to a meeting of a wrecking ball and a crystal shop.

Captain Rufus Atkins stepped out of a tent, in a gray uniform and wide-brimmed ash-colored hat with a gold cord and a pair of tiny gold icons tied around the crown. A blond man, his hair as greasy as tallow, wearing a butternut uniform with corporal's chevrons freshly sewn on the sleeves, stood behind him. The corporal's name was Clay Hatcher.

"Where do you think you're going, young Willie?" Atkins asked.

"Back home," Willie answered.

"I think not," Atkins replied. He looked out at the lake and the moss blowing in the trees, the four-o'clocks riffling in the shade. "One of the privies needs dipping out. After you finish that, spread a little lye around and that will be it until this evening. By the way, are you familiar with the poetry of William Blake?"

"Never heard of him," Willie replied.

"I see. Better get started, young Willie. Did you bring a change of clothes?" Atkins said.

"Excuse me, sir, but I didn't join the army to ladle out your shit-holes. On that subject, can you clear up a question that has bedeviled many in the community? Is it true your mother was stricken with the bloody flux when you were born and perhaps threw the infant away by mistake and raised the afterbirth instead?"

The corporal to the side of Rufus Atkins pressed his wrist to his mouth to stop from snickering, then glanced at Atkins' face and sucked in his cheeks.

"Let me gag and buck him, Cap'n," he said.

Before Atkins could answer, Robert Perry walked up behind Willie.

"Hello, Captain!" Robert Perry said.

"How do you do, Master Robert?" Atkins said, bowing slightly and touching his hat. "I saw you signing up earlier. I know your father is proud."

"My friend Willie isn't getting off to a bad start in the army, is he?" Robert said.

"A little garrison duty, that's all," Atkins said.

"I'm sure if you put him in my charge, there will be no trouble," Robert said.

"Of course, Master Robert. My best to your father," Atkins said.

"And to your family as well, sir," Robert said, slipping his hand under Willie's arm.

The two of them walked back toward the lake to join Jim Stubbefield at the cypress tree. Willie felt Robert's hand tighten on his arm.

"Atkins is an evil and dangerous man. You stay away from him," Robert said.

"Let him stay away from me," Willie replied.

"What was that stuff about William Blake?"

"I have a feeling he found a book I gave to a Negro girl."

"You did what?" Robert said.

"Oh, go on with you, Robert. You don't seem bothered by the abolitionist tendencies of Abigail Dowling," Willie said.

"I love you dearly, Willie, but you're absolutely hopeless, unteachable, beyond the pale, with the thinking processes of a stump, and I suspect an extra thorn in Our Savior's crown," Robert said.

"Thank you," Willie said.

"By the way, Abigail is not an abolitionist. She's simply of a kind disposition," Robert said.

"That's why she circulated a petition begging commutation for John Brown?" Willie said. He heard his friend make a grinding noise in his throat.

THAT evening Willie bathed in the clawfoot tub inside the bathhouse on the bayou, then dried off and combed his hair in a yellowed mirror and dressed in fresh clothes and walked outside into the sunset and the breeze off the Gulf. The oaks overhead were draped with moss, their limbs ridged with lichen, and the gardenias and azaleas were blooming in his mother's yard.

Next door, in a last patch of yellow sunshine, a neighbor was boiling crabs in an iron pot on a woodfire. The coolness of the evening and the fecund heaviness of the bayou and a cheerful wave from his neighbor somehow made Willie conclude that in spite of the historical events taking place around him all was right with the world and that it should not be the lot of a young man to carry its weight upon his shoulders.

He strolled down East Main, past the Shadows and the wide-galleried, gabled overseer's house across the street, past other homes with cupolas and fluted columns that loomed as big as ships out of the floral gardens that surrounded them.

He paused in front of a shotgun cottage with ventilated green shutters set back in live oak and pine trees, its windows lighted in the gloom, a gazebo in the side yard threaded with bougainvillea. He heard a wind chime tinkle in the breeze.

The woman who lived inside the cottage was named Abigail Dowling. She had come to New Iberia from Massachusetts as a nurse during a yellow fever epidemic and had stayed, working both in the clinic and teaching in a private school down the street. Her hair was thick, chestnut-colored, her skin without blemish, her bosom and features such that few men, including ones in the company of their wives, could prevent themselves from casting furtive glances at.

But for many her ways were suspect, her loyalties questionable, her candor intimidating. On one occasion Willie had asked her outright about rumors he'd heard.