Then a huge black man wearing a shapeless hat and a Yankee coat
withouta shirt walked back down the road and grabbed the ankles of a blood slick butternut soldier in the underbrush and dragged him into the open.
The black man pulled the kerchief off his nose and mouth. "This 'un bounced off the pile," he said.
"Thank you for telling me that," the officer said.
"You ain't axed, boss. Better come take a look," the black man said.
"What is it?" the officer asked.
"He just opened his eyes."
WILLIE lay in the road, the rain ticking in the leaves around him. He could hear men spading dirt out of a pile and flinging it off the ends of their shovels. Abigail was on her knees beside him, lifting his head, pressing the lip of a canteen to his mouth.
"Where are you hit?" she asked.
"Don't know," he said.
She opened his shirt and felt his legs and turned him on his side. She put her fingers in his hair and felt the contours of his skull. Then she rebuttoned his shirt and looked back over her shoulder at the Union officer.
"Were you knocked unconscious?" she asked.
"I dreamed I was underground. There was a little Negro boy next to me. Where am I hit?"
"You're not," she whispered. She touched his lips with two fingers.
"What happened to the Negro boy?" he said.
But she wasn't listening. Her head was turned in the direction of the Union officer and the grave diggers.
"It wasn't a dream, was it?" he said.
"Don't say anything else," she said.
She folded a clean rag into a square and moistened it and laid it across his eyes, then rose to her feet and approached the Union officer.
"I can take him back with me," she said.
The officer shook his head. "He's a prisoner of war," he said.
She looked back at Willie, then touched the officer on the arm. "Would you step over here with me?" she said.
"Miss, I appreciate your problem but-"
"He's from New Iberia. Let him die at home," she said. She fixed her eyes on the officer's.
"I don't have that kind of authority."
"You send your own to a field mortuary and bury others with no dignity at all. Are you a Christian man, sir?"
"The Rebs made this damn war. We didn't."
She stepped closer to him, her face tilting up into his. Her eyes were so intense they seemed to jitter in the sockets. "Will you add to the sad cargo I've seen here today?" she said.
His stare broke. "Load him up and get him out of here," he said.
On the way into New Iberia, Willie passed out again.