White Doves at Morning

THREE days later he sat under a shade tree and waited his turn to enter a wide galleried, notched and pegged house outside of St. Martinville. Inside the living room, behind a flat oak desk, sat General Nathaniel Banks. His dark hair looked like wire, coated in grease, stacked in layers, his upper lip like the bill on a duck. Outside the house, spread across two acres of pasture, upward of three hundred captured men milled about, most in patchwork butternut and gray uniforms. The prisoner compound was marked off with laths and string to which strips of rag were tied. Brass field pieces loaded with grape were positioned on the four corners of the square, and pickets armed with rifle-muskets or Spencer repeaters were posted at twenty-yard intervals along the string, or what came to be known as the "Deadline." Threaded in among the deserters and captured soldiers were members of the group Willie had seen ambush the squad of Federals on the St. Martinville Road, including the apparent leader, the man in a pinned-up cavalry hat and skintight pants with a gold stripe down each leg.

A Union sergeant tapped the sole of Willie's shoe with his own. "Your turn inside," he said.

"Really, now? After three days I get to meet the Massachusetts bobbin boy?" Willie said.

The sergeant's kepi made a damp line across the back of his dark red hair. He wore a goatee and a poor excuse for a mustache and a silver ring with a tiny cross affixed to it on his marriage finger. He started to speak, then touched at a place on his lip and gazed off into space as though a thought had escaped his mind.

Willie got to his feet and started toward the house. Beyond the Deadline he saw a weathered red barn and seven or eight soldiers with rifle-muskets in the shade along the side wall, their weapons propped butt-down in the dirt.

The sergeant pulled Willie's sleeve.

"Listen, the general is handling these interviews because he lost some good men to a gang of cutthroats. You look to be a decent man. Use your head in there, Reb," he said.

"You have problems of conscience?" Willie said.

"A good man don't have to prove it," the sergeant said.

"You've lost me, Yank. Say again?"

"I think you're one on whom words are easily wasted," the sergeant said. He escorted Willie inside the house, where Willie stood in front of General Banks.

The general's boots and dark blue uniform were splattered with dried mud. He had tangled eyebrows and deep-set eyes that seemed filled with either conflicting or angry thoughts, and the skin at the top of his forehead was a sickly white. The odor of horse liniment and wood smoke and unrinsed soap emanated from his clothes. He peered down his nose at a list of names on a sheet of paper. By his left hand was Willie's crumpled uniform.

"Who are you? Or rather what are you?" he asked.

"First Lieutenant William Burke, 18th Louisiana Volunteers, at your service, sir."

"And these rags here are your uniform?"

"That appears to be the case, sir."

The general lifted up the uniform, revealing a pair of brass binoculars and a folding, horn-handled knife under it.

"These are your knife and your field glasses?" he asked.

"No, I took them off a dead man, probably a forward artillery observer. One of ours."

The general's eyes lingered on a neutral spot in space, then looked at Willie again, the cast in them somehow different now.

"Can you tell me why you're out of uniform?" he asked.

"I was prematurely stuffed into one of your burial wagons. The dead have a way of leaking their shite and other fluids all over their companions, sir."

The general drummed his fingers on the table, gazed out the window, brushed at his nose with his knuckle.

"You look like a civilian to me, Mr. Burke, a good fellow at the wrong place at the wrong time, one probably willing to sign an oath of allegiance and go about his way," he said.

"It's First Lieutenant Willie Burke, sir. I was at Shiloh and Corinth and a half-dozen places since. I'll not be signing a loyalty oath."

"Damn it, man, you were out of uniform!"

"I gave you a reasonable explanation, too!" Willie replied.

It was quiet inside the room. The wind ruffled the papers on the general's desk. Through the window Willie could see the weathered red barn in the distance and a sergeant who was ordering the line of seven or eight enlisted men around to the back side. One of them was arguing, and the sergeant grabbed him by his blouse and shoved him against the wall.

"Take a seat outside in the hall, Lieutenant. I'll continue our talk in a few minutes," he said.

The sergeant who had escorted Willie inside the house walked him into the breezeway and pointed at a chair for him to sit in. Then he shook his finger reprovingly in Willie's face.