ad rotted and started to cave into the streambed, through box elder and elm trees, right into the back of a huge, black-bearded Union private, who was urinating with his phallus held in both hands.
On the ground by his foot lay a dirty handkerchief spread with vest watches, marriage and Masonic rings, coins, a gold toothpick, cigars, tightly folded and compressed currency, a clay pipe, a condom made from an animal's bladder, even false teeth carved from whalebone.
The Union soldier almost lost his footing, then righted himself, as though on the deck of a ship, and pushed his phallus back inside his fly. His sleeves were rolled, and the hair on the backs of his arms was peppered with grains of dirt. He reached out casually for a Sharp's carbine that was hung by its strap from a branch just behind him.
"Lose your way home, Johnny?" he asked.
Willie cocked the pistol and fired a ball into the middle of his forehead, saw the man disappear momentarily inside the smoke, then heard the man's great deadweight strike the ground.
It was almost dark and lightning flickered inside the clouds that once again had sealed the sky. He wandered for what seemed hours and saw feral hogs snuffing and grunting among the dead, their snouts strung with lights. He heard the heavy, iron-rimmed wheels of caissons and gun carriages and ammunition and hospital wagons rumbling on the old Hamburg-Savannah Road. The wind changed, and he smelled water in a stagnant pond somewhere, and another odor with it that made him clear his mouth and spit.
After all the balls were gone from his revolver, he used the knife at least twice in the woods, clenching his hand on one man's throat while he drove the blade repeatedly into the heart cavity. Another he hit from behind, a whiskered signal corpsman with a terrible odor whom he ran upon and seized around the neck and stabbed and left either wounded or dying at the bottom of a rocky den overlooking the Tennessee River.
The clouds overhead were marbled with lightning that rippled across the entirety of the sky. Below the bluffs he could see dozens of paddle-wheelers on the river, their cabins and pilothouses dark, their decks packed with men. He heard gangplanks being lowered with ropes onto the bank, saw lanterns moving about in the trees and serpentine columns of men wending their way into a staging area where a hydrogen balloon rocked inside the net that moored it to the ground.
He headed west away from the river, and recrossed the Hamburt-Savvannah Road adn again smelled the thick, heavy odor of ponded water and sour mud, threaded with another odor, one that was salty and gray, like fish roe drying on stone or a hint of copulation trapped in bedsheets.
Veins of lightning pulsed in the clouds, and through the trees he saw a water pond, of a kind boys would bobber-fish in for bluegill and sun perch. Except now the water was red, as dark as a dye vat, and bodies floated in it, the clothes puffed with air.
He saw a figure, one with white ankles and feet, run from the pond through the woods, some thirsty and abandoned soul, he thought, who had probably tried to scoop clear water out of the reeds and had fouled his throat and was now running through the peach orchard they had raked with grapeshot earlier in the day. Willie kept going west, toward the Corinth Road, and found a bloodstained stub of bread that had been dropped in a glade scattered with mushrooms. He ate it as he walked, then heard someone moving in the trees and saw a miniature Confederate soldier in butternut and an oversized kepi, looking at him, his feet and face cut by thorns and branches, his pants hitched tightly under his ribs, a pair of drumsticks shoved through his belt.
"Is that you, Tige?" Willie asked.
The boy continued to stare at him, shifting from one foot to another, as though trying to take the weight off a stone bruise.
"You're one of the fellows who give me the mush and bacon. Where'd everybody go?" the boy said.
"Not sure. I ran everywhere there is and then ran out of space. Ran myself silly in the head while I was at it. So I turned around. Hop aboard," Willie said, turning his back for the boy to climb on.
But the boy remained motionless, breathing through his mouth, his eyes blinking inside the dust and sweat on his face.
"You got blood all over you. You're plumb painted with it," he said.
"Really?" Willie said. He wiped his cheek with the flat of his hand and looked at it.
"How far is Vicksburg if you float there on the river?" the boy asked.
"This river doesn't go there, Tige."
The boy crimped his toes in the dirt, the pain in his feet climbing into his face now, his strength and resolve draining from his cheeks.
"I gone all the way to the peach orchard," he said.
"I bet you did. My pal Jim was killed today. He was a lot like you. Too brave to know he was supposed to be afraid. He didn't know when to ask for help, either," Willie said.
"It don't seem fair."
"What's that?" Willie asked.
"We whupped them. But most all the fellows I was with is dead," the boy said.
"Let's find the road to Corinth. I'll tell you a story about the ancient Greeks while we walk," Willie said.
The boy climbed onto Willie's back and locked his arms around Willie's neck. His bones were so light they felt filled with air, like a bird's, rather than marrow. Then the two of them walked through a forest that was unmarked by war and that pattered with raindrops and smelled of wet leaves and spring and freshly plowed fields.
They rested on the wooded slope of a creek bed, then rose and continued on through trees until they could see cultivated acreage in the distance and lightning striking on the crest of a ridge. Willie set Tige down on a boulder that looked like the top of a man's bald head and arched a crick out of his back while the rain ticked on the canopy over their heads.
"So this Oedipus fellow was a king but he married his mother and blinded hisself and become a beggar, even though he could figure out riddles and was the brightest fellow around?" Tige said.