"Are you scared?" he asked.
"If you was as scared as I am, you'd run for home. I'm just too scared to get my legs moving," Jim said.
"You put on a good act, you ole beanpole. But I don't think you're scared of anything," Willie replied.
Jim stood up with his tin cup of boiling coffee and poured half of it into Willie's cup. He rubbed Willie on the top of the head.
"No blue-bellies can do in the likes of us," he said.
"That's right, by God. Here, our mush is ready," Willie said.
"I can't eat. I think I got a stomach cold. Can't hold anything down," Jim said, walking into the shadows so Willie could not see his face.
The sun dipped below the hills and suddenly the woods were cooler the sky the color of coal dust, without moon or stars, the tree branches knocking together overhead, to the north there were fires on the bluffs above the river and Willie thought he could feel the vibrations of gun carriages and caissons through the ground.
Five men and a drummer boy from the 6th Mississippi, in butternut pants and homespun shirts, were sitting around a fire, six feet away, smoking cob pipes, laughing at a joke.
"Who's out there?" Willie asked them, nodding toward the north.
" 'Who's out there?' Where the hell you been, boy?" a tall man with a concave face said.
"Corinth."
"Them bluffs and ravines is crawling with Yankees. They been out there for weeks," the man said.
"Why not leave them be?" Willie asked.
"We done turned that into a highly skilled craft, son. But the word is we're going at them tomorrow," the man said.
Willie felt his stomach constrict and sweat break on his forehead. He went out of the firelight, into the trees, and vomited.
Fifteen minutes later Jim came back to the fire and sat down on the log beside Willie, his sheathed bowie knife twisting against the log's bark. Willie sniffed the air.
"What have you been up to?" he asked.
Jim opened his coat to reveal a half-pint, corked bottle stuck down in his belt. The clear liquid it contained danced in the firelight.
"This stuff will blow the shoes off a mule," he said.
Three soldiers with a banjo, fiddle, and Jew's harp were playing a dirge by the edge of the ravine. The men from the 6th Mississippi were lying on their blankets or in their tents, and the drummer boy sat by himself, staring into the fire, his drum with crossed sticks on top resting by his foot. He wore an oversized kepi, and his scalp was gray where his hair had been bowl-cut above his ears. His dour face, with downturned mouth and impassive eyes, was like a miniature painting of the Southern mountain man to whom sorrow and adversity are mankind's natural lot.
"You get enough to eat?" Jim said to him.
"Pert' near as much as I want," the boy replied.
"Then I guess we'd better throw away this mush and bacon here," Jim said.
"Hit don't matter to me," the little boy said, his face as smooth and expressionless as clay in the light from the fire.
"Come over here and bring your pan," Jim said.
The boy dusted off the seat of his pants and sat on a stump by Willie. He watched while Willie filled his pan, then he ate the mush with a spoon, his thumb and index finger all the way up the handle, scraping the food directly into his mouth.
"What's your name?" Willie asked.
"Tige McGuffy," the boy said.
"How old might you be, Tige?" Willie asked.