"You're right, Mother. There he goes now. I'll see if I can straighten things out," Willie replied, looking through the back window.
He hurried out the door and touched Rufus Atkins on the sleeve.
"Oh, excuse me, I didn't mean to startle you, Mr. Atkins," he said. "I just wanted to tell you I'm sorry for the sharpness of my tongue. I pray one day you find the Holy Roman Church and then die screaming for a priest."
WHEN he came back into the house his mother said nothing to him, even though she had heard his remarks to Rufus Atkins through the window. But just before noon she found him in his reading place under a live oak by the bayou and pulled up a cane chair next to him and sat down with her palms propped on her knees.
"What ails you, Willie?" she asked.
"I was just a little out of sorts," he replied.
"You've decided, haven't you?" she said.
"What might that be?"
"Oh, Willie, you're signing up for the army. This isn't our war," she said.
"What should I do, stay home while others die?"
She looked emptily at the bayou and a covey of ducklings fluttering on the water around their mother.
"You'll get in trouble," she said.
"Over what?"
"You're cursed with the gift of Cassandra. For that reason you'll always be out of place and condemned by others."
"Those are the myths that our Celtic ancestors used to console themselves for their poverty," he replied.
She shook her head, knowing her exhortations were of little value. "I need you to fix the roof. What are your plans for today?" she asked.
"To take my clothes to Ira Jamison's laundry."
"And get in trouble with that black girl? Willie, tell me I haven't raised a lunatic for a son," she said.
HE put a notebook with lined pages, a pencil, and a small collection of William Blake's poems in his pants pockets and rode his horse down Main Street. The town had been laid out along the serpentine contours of Bayou Teche, which took its name from an Atakapa Indian word that meant snake. The business district stretched from a brick warehouse on the bend, with huge iron doors and iron shutters over the windows, down to the Shadows, a two-story, pillared plantation home surrounded by live oaks whose shade was so deep the night-blooming flowers in the gardens often opened in the late afternoon.
An Episcopalian church marked one religious end of the town, a Catholic church the other. On the street between the two churches shopkeepers swept the plank walks under their colonnades, a constable spaded up horse dung and tossed it into the back of a wagon, and a dozen or so soldiers from Camp Pratt, out by Spanish Lake, sat in the shade between two brick buildings, still drunk from the night before, flinging a pocketknife into the side of a packing case.
Actually the word "soldier" didn't quite describe them, Willie thought. They had been mustered in as state militia, most of them outfitted in mismatched uniforms paid for by three or four Secessionist fanatics who owned cotton interests in the Red River parishes.
The most ardent of these was Ira Jamison. His original farm, named Angola Plantation because of the geographical origins of its slaves, had expanded itself in ancillary fashion from the hilly brush country on a bend of the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge to almost every agrarian enterprise in Louisiana, reaching as far away as a slave market in Memphis run by a man named Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Willie rode his horse between the two buildings where the boys in militia uniforms lounged. Some were barefoot, some with their shirts off and pimples on their shoulders and skin as white as a frog's belly. One, who was perhaps six and a half feet tall, his fly partially buttoned, slept with a straw hat over his face.
"You going to sign up today, Willie?" a boy said.
"Actually Jefferson Davis was at our home only this morning, asking me the same thing," he replied. "Say, you boys wouldn't be wanting more whiskey or beer, would you?"
One of them almost vomited. Another threw a dried horse turd at his back. But Willie took no offense. Most of them were poor, unlettered, brave and innocent at the same time, imbued with whatever vision of the world others created for them. When he glanced back over his shoulder they were playing mumblety-peg with their pocketknives.
He was on a dirt road now, one that led southward into the sugarcane fields that stretched all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. He passed hog lot and slaughterhouse buzzing with bottle flies and a brick saloon with a railed bar inside, then a paint-skinned, two-story frame house with a sagging gallery that served as New Iberia's only bordello. The owner, Carrie LaRose, who some said had been in prison in the West Indies or France, had added a tent in the side yard, with cots inside, to handle the increase in business from Camp Pratt.
A dark-haired chub of a girl in front of the tent scooped up her dress and lifted it high above her bloomers. "How about a ride, Willie? Only a dollar," she said.
Willie raised himself in the saddle and removed his hat. "It's a terrible temptation, May, but I'd be stricken blind by your beauty and would never find my home or dear mother again," he said. The girl grinned broadly and was about to shout back a rejoinder, when she was startled by a young barefoot man, six and a half feet tall, running hard after Willie Burke.
The tall youth vaulted onto the rump of Willie's horse, grabbing Willie around the sides for purchase while Willie's horse spooked sideways and almost caved with the additional weight.