"What happened out there?" she asked.
"We divided our numbers and tried to fight on both sides of the bayou. They chewed us up. They been running us for six days."
"Do you know where Willie Burke is?"
"Lieutenant Burke?"
"Yes."
"Captain Atkins put him on rear guard."
"You mean now?"
"Yes, ma'am," the soldier said.
"Captain Atkins recently saw Lieutenant Burke?" she said.
But the soldier's eyes had lost interest in her questions.
"Fix my arms and my feet," he said.
"Pardon?"
"You know what I mean. Fix me," he said.
She started to speak, then gave up the pretense, the lie, that was in reality an insult to the dying. She folded his arms across his chest and lifted his good leg and pressed it close to the other, then tied his ankles with a strip of rag. His tin identification disk, with a leather thong looped through a hole at the top, was clenched tightly in his palm.
"Do you want me to write a letter to someone?" she asked.
"No, no letter," he said. His eyes filled with a terrible intensity and roved the vaulted ceiling above him, where a bird was battering itself against the glass windows, trying to escape into the treetops outside. "I stole money from a poor man once. I had a wife and wasn't good to her. I did mean things to others when I was a boy."
"I bet you were forgiven of your sins a long time ago," she said.
"Lean close," he said.
She bent down over his face, turning her ear to his mouth. His breath touched her skin like a moist feather.
"When I'm dead, set my tag so it's up and down between my teeth and knock my jaws shut," he whispered.
She nodded.
"If you got your tag in your mouth, they got to put your name on a marker," he said.
"I'll make sure. I promise," she said.
"I'm scared, ma'am. Ain't nobody ever been as scared as I am right now."
She raised her head and gazed down at him, but whatever conclulion he had reached about the unchartcred course of his life or the fear that had beset him in his last moments had already drifted out of his face like ash off a dead fire.
The bird he had been watching dipped under the arch of the front doorway and lifted into the sky, its wings throbbing.
THE next day Flower Jamison rose before sunup and lit her wood-stove and fixed coffee that was made from chicory and ground acorns. Then she lit the lamp on her table and in the misty coolness between false dawn and the moment when the sun would break above the horizon she removed from under her bed the box of books and writing materials given her by both Willie Burke and later by Abigail Dowling and opened the writing tablet in which she kept her daily journal.
She no longer hid her books or her ability to read them from white people. But her fear of her literacy being discovered did not leave her as a result of any decision or conscious act of her own. It had simply gone away as she looked about her and saw both privation and the cost of war on distant battlefields indelibly mark the faces of those who had always exercised complete power and control over her life. She could not say that she felt compassion or pity for them. Instead, she had simply come to realize that the worst in her life was probably behind her, and adversity and struggle and powerlessness were about to become the lot of the plantation owners who had seemed anointed at birth and placed beyond the reach of the laws of mortality and chance and accident.
At least that is what she thought.
Outside her window the new cane was green and wet inside the mist and she could hear it rustling when the wind blew from the south. She placed her dictionary next to her writing tablet and began writing, pausing on every fourth or fifth word to look up a spelling: