In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead (Dave Robicheaux 6)

"I don't understand what's happening. Why did your wounds open, what were you trying to warn me of? "

"It's my foolishness, son. Like you, I grieve over what I can't change. Was it Bacon that talked about keeping each cut green ? "

"Change what?"

"Our fate. Yours, mine. Care for your own. Don't try to emulate me. Look at what I invested my life in. Oh, we were always honorable—Robert Lee, Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, A. P. Hill—but we served venal men and a vile enterprise. How many lives would have been spared had we not lent ourselves to the defense of a repellent cause like slavery?"

"People don't get to choose their time in history, general."

"Well said. You're absolutely right." He swings the flat of his right hand and hits me hard on the arm, then rises on his crutch and straightens his tunic. "Now, gentlemen, if y'all will take the honeycombs out of your faces, let's be about this photographing business. I'm amazed at what the sciences are producing these days."

We stand in a group of eight. The enlisted men have Texas accents, powder-blackened teeth, and beards that grow like snakes on their faces. I can smell horse sweat and wood smoke in their clothes. Just as the photographer removes his straw hat and ducks his head under a black cloth at the back of the camera, I look down the long serpentine corridor of amber light again and see thousands of troops advancing on distant fields, their blue and red and white flags bent into the fusillade, their artillery crews laboring furiously at the mouths of smoking cannon, and I know the place names without their ever being spoken—Culp's Hill, Corinth, the Devil's Den, Kennesaw Mountain, the Bloody Lane—and a collective sound that's like no other in the world rises in the wind and blows across the drenched land.

The photographer finishes and stoops under his camera box and lifts the tripod up on his shoulder. The general looks into the freshening breeze, his eyes avoiding me.

"You won't tell me what's at hand, sir?" I say.

"What does it matter as long as you stay true to your principles?"

"Even the saints might take issue with that statement, general."

"I'll see you directly, lieutenant. Be of good heart."

"Don't let them get behind you," I say.

"Ah, the admonition of a veteran." Then his aides help him onto his horse and he waves his hat forward and says, "Hideeho, lads," but there is no joy in his voice.

The general and his mounted escort move down the incline toward my neighbor's field, the tails of their horses switching, the light arcing over them as bright and heated and refractive as a glass of whiskey held up to the sun.

When I woke in the morning the rain was falling evenly on the trees in the yard and a group of mallards were swimming in the pond at the foot of my property. The young sugarcane in my neighbor's field was pounded flat into the washed-out rows as though it had been trampled by livestock. Above the treeline in the north I saw a small tornado drop like a spring from the sky, fill with mud and water from a field, then burst apart as though it had never been there.

I WORKED UNTIL ALMOST EIGHT O'CLOCK THAT EVENING. Power was still off in parts of the parish; traffic signals were down; a rural liquor store had been burglarized during the night; two convenience stores had been held up; a drunk set fire to his own truck in the middle of a street; a parolee two days out of Angola beat his wife almost to death; and a child drowned in a storm drain.

Rosie had spent the day with her supervisor in New Orleans and had come back angry and despondent. I didn't even bother to ask her why. She had the paperwork on our case spread all over her desk, as though somehow rereading it and rearranging it from folder to folder would produce a different result, namely, that we could weld the cell door shut on Murphy Doucet and not have to admit that we were powerless over the bureaucratic needs of others.

Just as I closed the drawers in my desk and was about to leave, the phone rang.

"Dave, I think I screwed up. I think you'd better come home," Elrod said.

"What's wrong?"

"Bootsie went to town and asked me to watch Alafair. Then Alafair said she was going down to the bait shop to get us some fried pies."

"Get it out, Elrod. What is it?" I saw Rosie looking at me, her face motionless.

"I forgot Batist had already closed up. I should have gone with her."

I tried to hold back the anger that was rising in my throat.

"Listen, Elrod—"

"I went down there and she was gone. The door's wide open and the key's still in the lock—"

"How long's it been?"

"A half hour."

"A half hour?"