White Doves at Morning

"In three seconds you're going to be the deadest piece of white trash ever to suck on a load of double-ought buckshot," the sergeant said.

"Cap?" said a man in a butternut jacket cut off at the armpits. "Cap, it's all right. He don't know what he's talking about."

But there was no sound except the wind in the trees. The man in the butternut jacket looked at the others, then reached over and turned Jarrette's horse for him.

Willie watched the seven horsemen ride quietly down the street, the shadows and their wide-brim flop hats smudging their features, their voices lost in the wind. The sergeant released the tension in the shotgun's hammers. He wore a silver ring with a gold cross soldered to it.

"You again. Everywhere I go," Willie said, wiping the blood from his nose.

"Oh, had them surrounded, did you?" the sergeant said.

Willie touched a barked place on his forehead. "No, I allow you're obviously a much more resourceful and adept man than I. Truth is, Sergeant, I regularly make a mess of things," he said.

The sergeant's face softened. "Wasn't much to it. I know Jarrette's name and what he is. Hold up a mirror to a fellow like that and he's undone by what he sees."

"What's your name?"

"Quintinius Earp."

"It's what?"

"Ah, I should have known your true, lovable self was never far behind. The name is Quintinius Earp, lately of Ripton, Vermont, now obliged to baby-sit ex-Rebs who can't keep their tallywhackers out of the clothes roller."

"Earp? As in 'puke'?"

"Correct, as in 'puke.' Would you do me a favor?"

"I expect."

"Go home. Pretend you don't know me. Piss on my grave. Dig up my bones and feed them to your dog. Go back to Ireland and take a job in the peat bogs. But whatever it is, get out of my life!"

"Could I buy you a drink?" Willie asked.

Sergeant Earp shut his eyes and made a sound in his throat as though a nail had just been hammered into his head.

ABIGAIL Dowling had been chopping wood for her stove and loading it into a box when she glanced through the side yard and saw a Yankee soldier armed with a shotgun disperse a group of men in front of her house. He had a red goatee and musta

che and short muscular arms, and his dark blue jacket was pulled tightly down inside his belt so his shoulders and chest were molded as tautly as a statue's.

She set down the woodbox and walked through the side yard into the front. Down the street she saw a man walking away in the gloaming of the day, the back of his clothes gray with dust. The Union soldier had propped his shotgun against her fence and was buying a twist of taffy from a vendor. The soldier squatted down in front of a small Negro girl and untwisted the paper from the taffy and gave it to the girl.

"What happened out here?" Abigail said.

The sergeant stood up and touched the brim of his kepi. "Not much. Some miscreants giving a local fellow a bad time," he said.

"Was that Willie Burke?" she asked, looking down the street.

"Has a way of showing up all over the planet? Yes, I think that's his name."

"Is he all right?"

"Seems fine enough to me."

The black girl had finished her taffy and was now standing a few feet away, her eyes uplifted to the sergeant's. He removed a penny from his pocket and gave it to her. "Get yourself one more, then you'd better find your mommy," he said.

Abigail and the soldier looked at one another in the silence. "You sound as though you're from my neck of the woods," he said.

"On the Merrimack, in Massachusetts. My name is Abigail Dowling," she said.