White Doves at Morning

"We have a boat coming up the bayou, sir. We'll have you back at battalion aid soon," Willie said.

"We shot the living hell out of them, didn't we?"

"You bet," Willie said.

"I need to ask you something."

"Yes, sir."

"When we stopped that steamboat on the Mis'sippi, the one carrying yellow jack?"

Willie let his eyes slip off the major's face.

"Yes, sir, I remember it," he said.

"I had a feeling you knew the woman on board, the one with the Yankee accent."

"Could be, sir."

"I don't think those darkies had yellow jack. I think they were escaped slaves."

"Lots of things are out of our control, Major," Willie said. He was propped on one knee, his gaze fixed on the air vines that fluttered in the wind.

"I worked my whole life as a trainman. I owned nary a slave. I always thought slavery was a mistake,"

the major said.

Willie nodded. "Yes, sir," he said.

"Those who got through us on the river? They might have joined up with the colored outfit we just shot up, the ones who put the ball under my heart. That'd be something, wouldn't it?"

Willie's eyes returned to the major's and he felt something drop inside him.

"It's nothing to worry about. The boat will be here soon," the major said, and tried to smile.

"Sir-" Willie began.

"Watch your back, Willie. Hatcher and Captain Atkins are no good. They hate a young fellow such as yourself."

Then the major widened his eyes briefly and turned his face away, into the shadows, as though the world of sunlight and the activity of the quick held little interest for him.

When Willie got back to his position inside the edge of the woods, he sat very still on a log and waited for his head to stop spinning. Then he poured water out of his canteen into his palm and wiped his face with it. The boxcars on the track went in and out of focus and a pang like a shard of glass sliced across the lining of his stomach. For a moment he thought he would lose control of his sphincter muscle.

In the distance he saw snow egrets and black geese rising from the canopy in the river bottoms, then he heard the spatter of small-arms fire that meant Hatcher's group had made contact with the black soldiers who had fled the train.

Both the men with Hatcher carried captured Spencer rifles and bags of brass cartridges, and they, along with Hatcher and his Henry repeater, were laying down a murderous field of fire. The shooting went on for five minutes, then a field piece roared deep in the river bottoms and the gum trees overhead trembled with the shock and a cloud of smoke and grayish-orange dust rose out of the leaves into the sunlight. A moment later the field piece roared again and a second cloud of dust and smoke caught the light and flattened in the wind.

Willie looked through his spyglass at the observation balloon tethered by the railway track far down the line. The bearded man in the wicker basket was using a pair of handheld flags to semaphore a battery down below, one consisting of three rifled twenty-pounder Parrotts that had been removed from a scuttled Union gunboat.

One of the cannons fired, and a shell arced over the spot in the river bottoms where the dust clouds had risen out of the canopy. The round went long by thirty yards, and the man in the basket leaned over the side and whipped his flags in the air. The next round was short and the man in the basket semaphored the ground again.

Then all three Confederate cannons fired for effect, again and again, the fused shells whistling shrilly only seconds before they struck.

Uprooted trees and columns of dirt fountained into the air, and through the spyglass Willie could see shoes and pieces of blue uniform mixed in with the dirt and palmetto leaves.

The barrage went on for almost a half hour. When Willie and his platoon marched across the railway embankment and entered the bottoms, he saw a black soldier huddled on the ground, trembling all over as though he had malaria, his forearms pressed tightly against his ears. Deeper in the bottoms the ground was pocked with craters, the dirt still smoking, and the trees were decorated in ways he had not seen since Shiloh.

Back in the underbrush he saw one of Hatcher's men cut the ear from a dead man's head, fold it in a handkerchief, and place it carefully in a leather pouch.