White Doves at Morning

"Sounds good to me," the third man said.

They walked Flower into the bedroom, releasing her arms when they reached the bed, waiting, the night air outside filled with the singing of tree frogs.

"You want to undress or should we do it for you?" the first man said. He turned his head, lifted his mask briefly, and spit out the window. "Enjoy it, gal. We ain't bad men. Just doin' a piece of work."

For the next half hour she tried to find a place in her mind that was totally black, without light or sound or sensation of any kind, safe from the incessant coughing of a consumptive man an inch from her ear and the smell of chewing tobacco and testosterone that now seemed ironed on her skin. When the last man lifted his weight from her, the cloth across his face swung out from his mouth and his teeth made her think of kernels of yellow corn.

Chapter Seventeen

ABIGAIL and Willie rode in her buggy to his mother's small farm by Spanish Lake, five miles outside of town. The house was dark inside the overhang of the oak trees, and the animals were gone from the pens and the barn. The front door of the house gaped open, the broken latch hanging by a solitary nail. A dead chicken lay humped on the gallery, its feathers fluttering in the wind. Willie stepped inside the doorway and lit a candle on the kitchen table. The rows of dishes and cups and jars of preserves on the shelves were undisturbed, but the hearthstones had been prized out of the fireplace and several blackened bricks chipped loose with a sharp tool from inside the chimney.

"I've heard tell about jayhawkers in the area," Abigail said.

"This bunch wore blue uniforms. Jayhawkers would have taken the food," he replied.

His words lingered in the air, the syllables touched with an angry stain she couldn't associate with the boy she used to know.

The entire rural landscape seemed empty of people as well as livestock. The ground was powdered with white ash, the pecan orchards sculpted in the moonlight, the sky full of birds that never seemed to touch the earth. They passed Camp Pratt and looked at the deserted barracks and the wind wrinkling the surface of the lake. Across the water there was a red glow in the bottom of the sky. Briefly they heard the popping of small-arms fire, then it was quiet again and there was no sound except the wind and the creaking of the trees. "I'm sure your mother's all right," Abigail said. He didn't speak for a long time. She looked at the profile of his face, the darkness in his eyes, the way his civilian clothes seemed inappropriate on his body.

"Do you regret this evening?" he asked.

"Pardon?" she said, looking straight ahead.

"You hear right well w

hen you choose to."

"I don't do anything I don't wish to," she said. She could feel the intensity of his eyes on the side of her face.

"You're a damn poor liar, Abby."

"I know of no greater arrogance than for a man to tell a woman what she feels."

"Perhaps my experience is inadequate," he replied. The buggy rumbled across a wood bridge that spanned a coulee. A large, emaciated dog with a bad hind leg climbed out from under the bridge and ran crookedly into a cane field, a red bone in its mouth. "Hold up," Willie said.

He got down in the road and walked to the crest of the coulee. At the bottom of the slope, among the palmettos, were the bodies of three Union soldiers. Two lay facedown in the water, an entry wound in the back of each of their heads, the hair blown back against the scalp by the closeness of the muzzle blast. The third man lay on his side on the far bank, one eye staring back at Willie, the other covered by a black leather patch. The wrists of all three men had been tied behind them. Their weapons were gone and their pockets had been pulled inside out.

Abigail stood next to Willie. "It's the officer from the burial detail," she said.

"Yes, it is. Poor fellow," Willie said. He looked off into the pecan orchards by the lake and up and down the road and out into the field.

"Who did this?" she asked.

"They call themselves guerrillas or irregulars. Most of them are criminals," he said.

"How do you know Confederates didn't do it, Willie?" He paused before he replied, a vein working in his neck.

"Because these men still have their shoes on, and secondly we don't murderprisoners of war," he said.

"The stories about Negro prisoners aren't true?" she said.

"I have to find my unit. Tell my mother I'm sorry I couldn't find her."

"Me? You take care of your own family. You stop this insanity," she said.

"The Yankees rape slave women and burn people's farms. I've seen them do it, Abby. It doesn't matter who starts a war. The only thing that matters is who finishes it."

His words came out with such ferocity that his head throbbed and he became short of breath. He thought he saw men moving through the trees but realized he was only looking at shadows.