White Doves at Morning

"Sure I am," Willie said, his head jerking up. The side of his face was peppered with grains of dirt. He raised himself on his arms and looked down the road at the row of oaks and cypress trees that lined the bayou. He felt light-headed, disconnected in a strange way from the scene around him, as though it belonged somehow inside the world of sleep and he belonged in another place.

He could see a curtain of black smoke rising from the fields in the south now, which told him he had been right in his speculation that the Yankees' main force would concentrate on capturing the salt mines and, at worst, he and his men would not h

ave to deal with more than a diversionary probe.

He looked at the empty road and the cinders rising in the sky from the fields and the wind blowing across the tops of the oak trees and wondered if he would see his mother and Abigail Dowling that evening. Yes, he most certainly would, he told himself. He would bathe in an iron tub and have fresh clothes and he would eat soup and perhaps even bread his mother had baked for him.

He thought about all these things and did not see the Yankee gunboat that came around a bend in the bayou, emerging from behind trees into the gold-purple light of the late afternoon, its port side lined with a half dozen cannons.

He saw a sailor jerk a lanyard at the rear of a Parrott gun, then a shell sucked past his ear and exploded against a tree trunk behind him, showering the coulee with leaves and branches and bits of metal and the sudden glare of the sun. Then he was running down the coulee with the others, away from the bayou and the gunboat that was now abreast of them, close enough for him to see the faces of the gun crews and the sharpshooters on top of the pilothouse.

The row of cannons fired in sequence, turning the boat against its rudder, blowing smoke across the water. He felt himself lifted into the air, borne above the treetops into a sky that was the color of a yellow bruise, his concerns of a second ago no longer of consequence. He struck the earth with a shuddering, chest-emptying impact that was oddly painless, and in a dark place that semed outside of time thought he heard the sound of dirt falling around him like dry rain clicking on a wood box.

ABIGAIL drove her buggy along the bayou road and passed a house with twin brick chimneys whose roof had been pocked by a stray cannon shell that had exploded inside and blown the windows onto the lawn. She passed families of Negroes and poor whites who were walking into town with bundles on their heads, and a barefoot Confederate soldier who sat on a log, without gun, hat or haversack, his head hanging between his knees. His teeth were black with gunpowder and a rag was tied across the place where his ear had been.

"Can I change your dressing, sir?" she asked.

"I haven't give it any real thought," he replied.

"Do you know where Willie Burke is?"

"Cain't say as I recall him," the soldier replied.

"Lieutenant Burke. He was on the rear guard."

"This hasn't been a day to be on rear guard. Them sons..." The soldier did not finish his sentence. "You wouldn't have any food on you, would you, ma'am?"

She fed the soldier and cleaned the wound on the side of his head and wrapped it with a fresh bandage, then drove farther down the Teche. She expected to see ramparts, batteries of Napoleon or Parrott guns arcing shells into the sky, sharpshooters spread along the lip of a coulee, or mounted officers with drawn sabers cantering their horses behind advancing infantry. Instead, a ragged collection of butternut soldiers was firing behind trees into the distance at no enemy she could see, then retreating, reloading on the ground, and firing again. The air inside the trees was so thick with musket and shotgun smoke that the soldiers had to walk out into the road to see if their fusillade had found a mark.

She heard a metallic cough down the bayou, like a rusty clot breaking loose inside a sewer pipe, then there was silence followed by a chugging sound ripping across the sky. The mortar round exploded in the bayou behind her and bream and white perch rained down through the top of a cypress and flopped on the ground.

A shirtless boy with his pants tucked inside cavalry boots that fit him like galoshes paused by the wagon and stared at her. He carried a flintlock rifle and a powder horn on a leather string that cut across his chest. His skin was gray with dust, his arms thin and rubbery, without muscular tone.

"There's Yankees down there, ma'am," he said.

"I don't see any," she said.

"You ain't suppose to see them. When you can see them, you put a ball in one of them." He grinned at his own joke and looked at the birds in the sky.

"Do you know Lieutenant Willie Burke?" she asked. He thought about it and pushed a thumb under his right ear, as though it were filled with water or a pocket of air. "Yes, ma'am, I do," he said.

"Where is he?"

"I think a boat or Whistling Dick got him."

"What?"

The boy's head jerked at a sound behind him. "Oh Lord Jesus, here it comes," he said, and ran for the trees at the side of the road.

The mortar round reached the apex of its trajectory and chugged out of the sky, exploding in the yard of a plantation across the bayou. Abigail saw Negroes running from a cabin toward the back of the main house, some of them clutching children.

She had to use her whip to force her horse farther down the road. The retreating Confederates were behind her now, around a bend, and the road ahead was empty, whirling with dust when the wind gusted, the sky yellow as sulfur, ripe with the smell of salt, creaking with gulls that had been blown inland by a storm. She rode on another mile, her heart racing, then saw blue-clad foot soldiers come around a curve and fall out on each side of the road, lounging under shade trees, completely indifferent to her presence.

She passed through them, her eyes straight ahead. On a cedar-lined knoll above a coulee two filthy white men in leg irons with wild beards and a group of black men in cast-off Union uniforms were digging a pit. Next to it was a tarpaulin-covered wagon. A cloud went across the sun and raindrops began clicking on the trees and the water in the coulee and the tarpaulin stretched across the wagon.

A young, dark-haired Union lieutenant, with a mustache and clean-shaved cheeks, wearing a patch over one eye and a kepi, approached her buggy.

"You look like you're lost," he said.