THEY woke the next morning to sunlight that was like glass needles through the trees and the sounds of men and horses running, wagons banging over the ruts out on the Corinth Road, tin pots spilling out of the back of a mobile field kitchen.
They heard a single rifle shot in the distance, then a spatter of small-arms fire that was like strings of Chinese firecrackers exploding. They jumped from their blankets and ran back to the clearing where they had cooked their food and stacked their Enfields the previous night. The air was cinnamon-colored with dust and leaves that had been powdered by running feet. Their Enfields and haversacks lay abandoned on the ground.
The men from the 6th Mississippi were already moving northward through the trees, their bayonets fixed. Tige McGuffy was strapping his drum around his neck, his hands shaking.
"What happened to the 18th Lou'sana?" Jim said.
"Them Frenchies you come in with?" Tige said.
"Yes, where did they go?" Willie asked, his heart tripping.
"West, toward Owl Creek. A kunnel on horseback come in before dawn and moved them out. Where'd y'all go to?" Tige replied.
Willie and Jim looked at each other.
"I think we're seriously in the shitter," Jim said.
"How far is this Owl Creek?" Willie said.
Before Tige could answer a cannon shell arced out of the sky and exploded over the canopy. Pieces of hot metal whistled through the leaves and lay smoking on the ground. Tige hitched up his drum, a drumstick in each hand, and ran to join his comrades.
"Let's go, Jim. They're going to put us down as deserters for sure," Willie said.
Jim went back into the trees and retrieved their blankets while Willie repacked their haversacks. They started through the hardwoods in a westerly direction and ran right into a platoon of Tennessee infantry, jogging by twos, their rifle barrels canted at an upward angle, a redheaded, barrel-chested sergeant, with sweat rings under his arms, wheezing for breath at their side.
"Where might you two fuckers think you're going?" he said.
"You sound like you're from Erin, sir," Willie said.
"Shut your 'ole and fall in behind me," the sergeant said.
"We're with the 18th Lou'sana," Jim said.
"You're with me or you'll shortly join the heavenly choir. Which would you prefer, lad?" the sergeant said, raising the barrel of his carbine.
Within minutes men in gray and butternut were streaming from every direction toward a focal point where other soldiers were furiously digging rifle pits and wheeling cannon into position. Through the hardwoods Willie thought he saw the pink bloom of a peach orchard and the movements of blue-clad men inside it.
The small-arms fire was louder now, denser, the rifle reports no longer muted by distance, and he could see puffs of rifle smoke exploding out of the trees. A toppling minie ball went past his ear with a whirring sound, like a clock spring winding down, smacking against a sycamore behind his head.
Up ahead, a Confederate colonel, the Bonnie Blue flag tied to the blade of his sword, stood on the edge of the trees, his body auraed with sunlight and smoke, shouting, "Form it up, boys! Form it up! Stay on my back! Stay on my back! Forward, harch!"
There seemed to be no plan to what they were doing, Willie thought. A skirmish line had moved out into the sunlight, into the drifting smoke, then the line broke apart and became little more than a mob running at the peach orchard, yelling in unison, "Woo, woo, woo," their bayonets pointed like spears.
Willie could not believe he was following them. He wasn't supposed to be here, he told himself. His commanding officer was the chivalric Colonel Alfred Mouton, not some madman with a South Carolinian flag tied to his sword. Willie fumbled his bayonet out of its scabbard and paused behind a tree to twist it into place on the barrel of his Enfield.
The redheaded sergeant hit him in the back with his fist. "Move your ass!" the sergeant said.
Out in the sunlight Willie saw a cannonball skip along the ground like a jackrabbit, take off a man's leg at the thigh, bounce once, and cut another man in half.
The sergeant hit him again, then knotted his shirt behind the neck and shoved him forward. Suddenly Willie was in the sunlight, the sweat on his face like ice water, the peach orchard blooming with puffs of smoke. "Where was Jim?"
The initial skirmish line wilted and crumpled in a withering volley from the orchard. A second line of men advanced behind the first, and, from a standing position, aimed and fired into the pink flowers drifting down from the peach trees. Willie heard the Irish sergeant wheezing, gasping for breath behind him. He waited for another fist in the middle of his back.
But when he turned he saw the sergeant standing motionless in the smoke, his mouth puckered like a fish's, a bright hole in his throat leaking down his shirt, his carbine slipping from his hand. "Get down, Willie!" he heard Jim shout behind him. Jim knocked him flat just as a wheeled Yankee cannon, in the middle of a sunken road, roared back on its carriage and blew a bucket of grapeshot into the Confederate line.
Men in butternut and gray fell like cornstalks cut with a scythe. The colonel who had carried the Bonnie Blue flag lay dead in the grass, his sword stuck at a silly angle in the soft earth. Some tried to kneel and reload, but a battery none of them could see rained exploding shells in their midst, blowing fountains of dirt and parts of men in the air. Many of those fleeing over the bodies of their comrades for the protection of the woods were vectored in a crossfire by sharpshooters rising from the pits on the far side ol the sunken road.
Then there was silence, and in the silence Willie thought he heard someone beating a broken cadence on a drumhead, like a fool who does not know a Mardi Gras parade has come to an end.
THROUGH the morning and afternoon thousands of men moved in and out of the trees, stepping through the dead who flanged the edge of the woods or lay scattered across the breadth of the clearing. Columns of sunlight tunneled through the smoke inside the woods, and the air smelled of cordite, horse manure, trees set on fire from fused shells, and humus cratered out of the forest floor. Willie had lost his haversack, cartridge box, the scabbard for his bayonet, and his canteen, but he didn't know where or remember how. He had pulled a cartridge pouch off the belt of a dead man who had already been stripped of his shirt and shoes. Then he had found another dead man in a ravine, with his canteen still hung from his neck, and had pulled the cloth strap loose from the man's head and uncorked the canteen only to discover it was filled with corn whiskey.
He had never been so thirsty in his life. His lips and tongue were black from biting off the ends of cartridge papers, his nostrils clotted with dust and bits of desiccated leaves. He watched a sergeant use his canteen to wash the blood from a wounded man's face and he wanted to tear the canteen from the sergeant's hands and pour every ounce of its contents down his own throat.
Jim's canteen had been split in half by a minie ball early in the morning, and neither of them had eaten or drunk a teaspoon of water since the previous night. They had collapsed behind a thick-trunked white oak, exhausted, light-headed, their ears ringing, waiting for the group of Tennessee infantry, to which they now belonged through no volition of their own, to re-form and once again move on the sunken road that the Southerners were now calling the Hornets' Nest.
The leaves on the floor of the forest were streaked with the blood of the wounded who had been dragged back to the ambulance wagons in the rear. Some men had talked about a surgeon's tent, back near the Corinth Road, that buzzed with green flies and contained cries that would live in a man's dreams the rest of his life.
Looking to the south, Willie could see horses pulling more cannons through the trees, twenty-four-pounders as high as a man, the spoked wheels knocking across rocks and logs. He pointed and told Jim to look at the cannons that were lumbering on their carriages through the hardwoods, then realized he could not hear.
He pressed his thumbs under his ears and swallowed and tried to force air through his ear passages, but it was to no avail. The rest of the world was going about its business, and he was viewing it as though he were trapped under a glass bell.
The cannons went past him, silently, through the leaves and scarred tree trunks, lumbering toward the peach orchard and the sunken road, as silently as if their wheels had been wrapped with flannel. He lay back against the trunk of the white oak and shut his eyes, more tired than he had ever been, convinced he could sleep through the Apocalypse. He could feel a puff of breeze on his cheek, smell water in a creek, hear his mother making breakfast in the boardinghouse kitchen at dawn's first light.
Then he heard a sound, like a series of doors slamming. He jerked his head up. Jim was standing above him, his lips moving, his consternation showing.
"What?" Willie said.
Jim's lips were moving silently, then audible words came from his mouth in mid-sentence.
"-got us some water. That fellow from the 6th Mis'sippi we were talking to last night, the one who looked like he got hit across the face with a frying pan, he toted a whole barrel up here strapped to his back," Jim said.
He squatted down with a tin cup and handed it to Willie.
"Where's yours?" Willie asked.
"I had plenty. Drink up," Jim said, his eyes sliding off Willie's face.
There was a black smear of gunpowder on the cup's rim where Jim had drunk, but the water level in the cup was down only an inch. Willie drank two swallows, a little more than half the remaining water, and returned the cup to Jim.
"Finish it up, you ole beanpole, and don't be lying to your pal again," Willie said.
Jim sat down against the tree bark.
"You hit any of them today?" he asked.
"I couldn't see through the smoke most of the time, you?" Willie replied.
"Maybe. I saw a fellow behind a rick fence go down. A ball hit him in the face," Jim said. He looked into space, his jaw flexing. "I was glad."
Willie turned and looked at Jim's profile, a gunpowder burn on his right cheek, the bitter cast in his eye.
"They're no different from us, Jim," he said.
"Yes, they are. They're down here. We didn't go up there."
A young lieutenant strolled through the enlisted men sitting on the ground. He wore a goatee that looked like corn silk, and a wide-brimmed cavalry officer's hat, with a gold cord strung around the crown, a bared sword carried casually on his shoulder. Blood had drained from inside his coat onto the leather flap of his pistol holster.
"Our cannoneers are about to start banging doors again, gentlemen. Then we're going to have another run at it," he said.
"We been out there eleven times, suh," a private on the ground said.
"Twelve's a charm. Stuff your fingers in your ears," the lieutenant said, just as over twenty cannons fired in sequence, almost point-blank, into the sunken road and the woods beyond.
Then the cannon crews began to fire at will, the barrels and gun carriages lurching off the ground, the crews turning in a half-crouch from the explosion, their hands clamped over their ears. They swabbed out the barrels, then reloaded with more caseshot, canister, and grape. They snipped the fuses on explosive shells so they detonated as airbursts immediately on the other side of the sunken road. When they ran short of conventional ordnance, they loaded with lengths of chain, chopped-up horseshoes, chunks of angle iron and buckets of railroad spikes.
Through the smoke Willie and Jim could see bits of trees flying in the air, the staff of an American flag lopped in half, blue-clad men climbing out of their rifle pits, running for the rear, sometimes with a wounded comrade supported between them.
The barrage went on for thirty minutes. When it lifted, the sun looked like a broken egg yoke inside the smoke, the acrid smell of gunpowder so dense they could hardly breathe.
Willie and Jim advanced across the clearing with the others, once again the cry of the fox hunt rising hoarsely from their throats. They crossed the sunken road and stepped over the Federal dead who lay there and entered a woods where trees were split in two, as though divided by lightning, the bark on the southern side of the trunks hanging in white strips.
The ground was littered with Springfield rifle muskets, boxes of percussion caps, ramrods, haversacks, canteens, torn cartridge papers, entrenching shovels, kepis, bloody bandages, bayonets, cloth that had been scissored away from wounds, boots and shoes, newspaper and magazine pages that men had used to clean themselves.
Inside the smoke and broken trees and the fallen leaves that were matted together with blood was the pervasive buzzing of bottle flies. In the distance, over the heads of the Confederates who were out in front of him, Willie saw a white flag being waved by a Union officer in front of a silenced battery.
The firing ended as it had started, but in inverse fashion, like a string of Chinese firecrackers that pops with murderous intensity, then simply exhausts itself.
Willie and Jim slumped against a stone fence that was speckled with lichen and damp and cool-smelling in the shade. Even the sunlight seemed filtered through green water. Jim's eyes were bloodshot, his face like that of a coal miner who has just emerged from a mine shaft, his teeth startling white when he grinned.
The tall man, with the concave face, from the 6th Mississippi, walked past them, his body bent forward. A huge barrel was mounted on his back with leather straps that were looped around his shoulders. The barrel had been hit in four places across the middle with either grapeshot or minie balls, and four jets of water were spraying from the holes, crisscrossing one another as the man labored with his burden back toward the sunken road.
"How about a drink, pard?" Jim said.
"What's that you say?" the man asked. His jaws were slack, unshaved, his peculiar, smoke-blackened, indented face like that of a simian creature from an earlier time.
"You're leaking. Give us a cup before it's all gone," Willie said.
"Take the whole shithouse," the man said.
He slipped the leather straps off his back and slung the barrel on a rock, where the staves burst apart and the water patterned on the leaves, then became only a dark shadow in the dirt.
Willie and Jim stared at him in disbelief.
"Want to make something of hit?" he asked.
"No, sir, not us," Willie said.
The man rubbed his hand on his mouth and looked about him as though he didn't know where he was. A rivulet of dried blood ran from his ear canal into his whiskers.
"Where's the little fellow, what's-his-name, Tige?" Willie asked.
"Gone. Him and his drum, both gone," the man said.
"Gone where?" Willie asked.
"Into their cannon. Right into their goddamn cannon," the man said.
His eyes were wet, the whites filled with veins that looked like crimson thread, his teeth like slats in his mouth.
WHEN Willie and Jim found their outfit later in the afternoon, it was as though they had journeyed to a different war. Five hundred men of the 18th Louisiana were spread along the tree-dotted edge of a ravine, their blue jackets now turned inside out in order to show the white linings. In front of them, up a long green incline, was a hardwood forest unscarred by rifle or cannon fire, and inside the forest were three regiments of Federal infantry and batteries of wheeled artillery whose jack screws had been twisted to their maximum extension in order to point the cannon barrels straight down the slope.
Willie and Jim walked through the bottom of ravine, the leaves almost ankle-deep, their clothes rent, their saliva still black when they spat. Their friends stared at them quizzically, as though they were visitors from a foreign world. Willie and Jim knelt behind a tree on the northern rim and stared out at the scene in front of them.
The slope was partially in shadow now, the air cool with the hint of evening. When the wind blew down the slope Willie could see wild-flowers inside the grass. The depressed muzzle of a cannon stared down the slope at him like a blunt-edged iron instrument poised to enter the throat of a surgical patient.
Off to the left Rufus Atkins stood among the trees, with two other officers, his head nodding, his gloves pulled tautly through his belt, while Colonel Alfred Mouton moved his index finger on a map that was spread across his wrist and forearm. Then Corporal Clay Harcher walked past Willie, interdicting his line of vision.
"Where y'all been? Cap'n Atkins wrote y'all up as deserters," Hatcher said, stopping, his eyes, which reminded Willie of a rodent's, squinting in the gloom. He carried a Springfield rifle with a narrow brass tube mounted on top of the barrel.
"In the rear, catching up on our sleep. I see you've taken up the role of sniper. I think you've found yourself, Clay," Jim said.
Hatcher tried to stare them down, as he had tried on many other occasions, but the memory of his humiliation at their hands back at Camp Pratt was always in their eyes, their contempt and rejection of his authority like a salty cut on his soul. "What's going on, Hatcher?" Willie asked.
"We're taking that battery up there," Hatcher said, his chin out.
"They're quit. We punched through them at the sunken road," Willie said.
"Tell that to them blue-bellies up in the trees," Hatcher said. "Where are your coats?"
"We lost them," Willie said.
"You might as well. We had to turn ours inside out. The Orleans Guards started firing on us."
For a moment Hatcher felt like a brother-in-arms, a noncommissioned officer looking out for his men, Willie and Jim, but he looked at the black stains around their mouths, the sweat lines that had dried in the dust on their faces, and he knew they were different from him, better than him, and he knew also they had already passed a test inside the crucible that now waited for him up the slope.
He turned his head and pretended to spit in order to show his lack of fear, even rubbing his shoe at a dry place in the leaves, then walked off, the weight of his scoped rifle balanced horizontally inside his cupped palm, rehearsing a scowling look of disdain for the next enlisted man who should wander into his ken.
Willie crunched through the leaves toward the place where Colonel Mouton and his staff were talking. Mouton wore a thick beard and a wide hat with a plum-colored plume in it and a long coat and knee-length calvary boots outside his pants. His coat was stiff on one side with dried mud splatter, one eye watery where a shaft of sunlight cut across his face. He stopped in mid-sentence. "What is it you want, Private?" he asked.
"We were in the Hornet's Nest, sir. The sunken road, over to the east. They surrendered," Willie said.
" We're aware of that. But thank you for coming forward," Mouton said.
"Sir?" Willie said.
"Yes?" Mouton said, distracted now, his eyes lifting for a second time from the map.
"They're whipped. We went at them twelve times and whipped them," Willie said.
"You need to go rejoin your comrades, Private," Mouton said.
Willie turned and walked away without saluting, glancing up the slope at the artillery pieces that waited for them inside the shadows and the cooling of the day, twenty-four-pounders loaded with the same ordnance Willie had seen used at the sunken road. He stopped behind a tree and leaned over, then slid down his rifle onto his knees, shutting his eyes, clasping the holy medal that hung from his neck.
The sun was low on the western horizon now, the sky freckled with birds. Colonel Mouton rode his horse out onto the green slope in front of the ravine and waited for his regiment to move out of the trees and join him in the failing light. A hawk glided over the glade, its shadow racing behind it, and seemed to disappear into the redness of the sun.
Mouton spoke first in French, then in English, repeating the same statements three times in three different positions so all would hear his words.
"The 16th Louisiana and the Orleans Guards were supposed to be on our flanks, gentlemen. Unfortunately they have not arrived. That means we have to kick the Yankees off that hill by ourselves. You are brave and fine men and it is my great honor to serve with you. Our cause is just and God will not desert us. In that spirit I ask you to come with me up that hill and show the invaders of our homeland what true courage is."
"God bless and love every one of you."
Then he raised his saber in the air, turned his horse northward, and began the long walk up the slope into an enfiladed box where they would be outnumbered three to one and fired upon from the front and both flanks simultaneously.
As Willie marched up the slope with Jim, his heart thudding in his chest, he kept waiting for the crack of the first rifle shot, the one that would ignite the firestorm for which no soldier could ever adequately prepare himself. His own stink rose from his shirt, and there was a creaking sound inside his head, as though he were deep underwater, beyond all the physical laws of tolerance, and the pressure was about to rupture his eardrums.
The standard bearer was in front of him, the white stars and crossed blue bars on a red field rippling and popping in the wind, the standard bearer tripping over a rock, righting himself, his kepi falling to the ground, stepped on by the man behind him.
But it was not a rifle shot that began the battle. A cannon lurched and burst with flame against the darkness of the trees, and suddenly there was sound and light in the midst of the 18th Louisiana that was like the earth-rending force inside a hurricane, like a wind that could tear arms and legs out of sockets, rip heads from torsos, disembowel the viscera, blow the body lifelessly across the ground, all of it with such a grinding inevitability that one simply surrendered to it, as he might to a libidinous and heavy-handed lover.
Colonel Mouton's horse twisted its head sideways, walleyed, whinnying, then went down, its rib cage pocked with grapeshot. Mouton separated himself from the saddle and rose to his feet, shot in the face, and tried to pull a revolver from his holster. He fell to one knee, his left hand searching in the air for support, then toppled forward into the grass.
A piece of case shot spun through the air and embedded four inches into the upper thigh of the standard bearer. He sagged on the flagstaff, like an elderly man grown weary of an arduous climb, then pivoted and looked imploringly into Jim's face.
"They sight on the guidon! Don't take it!" Willie said.
But Jim shifted his rifle to his left hand and slipped the staff from the grasp of the wounded man. With almost superhuman strength he held the colors aloft in the sunset with one hand, his Enfield gripped in the other, stepping over the fallen, while minie balls made whirring sounds past his ears.
Willie heard the mortal wound before he saw it, a plopping sound, a minie fired from the woods that struck Jim's brow and blew out the back of his head.
He saw the battle flag tilt, then the cloth fall across his own face, blinding him. When he ripped it aside and flung it from his hand, Jim lay on his side in the grass, an unbriused buttercup an inch from his sightless eyes.
Suddenly he could no longer hear the roar of the guns or the air-bursts over his head. But inside his own mind he heard himself speak Jim's name.
Jim? Hey, you ole beanpole, get up. We've got fish to catch, dances to go to. This is all a lark, not worth our dying for.
The sound of the war came back, like a locomotive engine blowing apart. The ends of his fingers were wet with Jim's blood, his shirt splattered with Jim's brain matter.
In fifteen minutes two hundred and forty members of the 18th Louisiana, just short of half, were casualties. They retreated back down the slope, dragging their wounded with them, many of their weapons left on the field.
But Willie did not go with them. He picked up his Enfield and slipped Jim's bowie knife and scabbard from his belt, and ran in a crouch toward the sunset and the trees that bordered Owl Creek. A cannon shell screamed past his head, its breath like a hot scorch on his neck.
He splashed across the stream and went deep into the hardwoods, where round boulders protruded from the humus like the tops of toadstools. He paused long enough to thread the scabbard of the bowie knife onto his own belt, then he cut northward, running through the undergrowth and spiderwebs draped between the tree trunks, gaining elevation now, the sun only a burnt cinder between two hills.
He smelled tobacco smoke and saw two blue-clad pickets, puffing on cob pipes, perhaps sharing a joke, their kepis at a jaunty angle, their guns stacked against the trunk of a walnut tree. They turned when they heard his feet running, the smiles still on their faces. He shot one just below the heart, then inverted the Enfield, never breaking stride, and swung the barrel like a rounders bat, breaking the stock across the other man's face.
He pulled a.36 caliber navy revolver from the belt of the man he had shot and kept running, across the pebbled bottom of a creek and a stretch of damp, cinnamon-colored soil that was printed with the tracks of grouse and wild turkeys, past a dried-out oxbow where a grinding mill and waterwheel had rotted and started to cave into the streambed, through box elder and elm trees, right into the back of a huge, black-bearded Union private, who was urinating with his phallus held in both hands.
On the ground by his foot lay a dirty handkerchief spread with vest watches, marriage and Masonic rings, coins, a gold toothpick, cigars, tightly folded and compressed currency, a clay pipe, a condom made from an animal's bladder, even false teeth carved from whalebone.
The Union soldier almost lost his footing, then righted himself, as though on the deck of a ship, and pushed his phallus back inside his fly. His sleeves were rolled, and the hair on the backs of his arms was peppered with grains of dirt. He reached out casually for a Sharp's carbine that was hung by its strap from a branch just behind him.
"Lose your way home, Johnny?" he asked.
Willie cocked the pistol and fired a ball into the middle of his forehead, saw the man disappear momentarily inside the smoke, then heard the man's great deadweight strike the ground.
It was almost dark and lightning flickered inside the clouds that once again had sealed the sky. He wandered for what seemed hours and saw feral hogs snuffing and grunting among the dead, their snouts strung with lights. He heard the heavy, iron-rimmed wheels of caissons and gun carriages and ammunition and hospital wagons rumbling on the old Hamburg-Savannah Road. The wind changed, and he smelled water in a stagnant pond somewhere, and another odor with it that made him clear his mouth and spit.
After all the balls were gone from his revolver, he used the knife at least twice in the woods, clenching his hand on one man's throat while he drove the blade repeatedly into the heart cavity. Another he hit from behind, a whiskered signal corpsman with a terrible odor whom he ran upon and seized around the neck and stabbed and left either wounded or dying at the bottom of a rocky den overlooking the Tennessee River.
The clouds overhead were marbled with lightning that rippled across the entirety of the sky. Below the bluffs he could see dozens of paddle-wheelers on the river, their cabins and pilothouses dark, their decks packed with men. He heard gangplanks being lowered with ropes onto the bank, saw lanterns moving about in the trees and serpentine columns of men wending their way into a staging area where a hydrogen balloon rocked inside the net that moored it to the ground.
He headed west away from the river, and recrossed the Hamburt-Savvannah Road adn again smelled the thick, heavy odor of ponded water and sour mud, threaded with another odor, one that was salty and gray, like fish roe drying on stone or a hint of copulation trapped in bedsheets.
Veins of lightning pulsed in the clouds, and through the trees he saw a water pond, of a kind boys would bobber-fish in for bluegill and sun perch. Except now the water was red, as dark as a dye vat, and bodies floated in it, the clothes puffed with air.
He saw a figure, one with white ankles and feet, run from the pond through the woods, some thirsty and abandoned soul, he thought, who had probably tried to scoop clear water out of the reeds and had fouled his throat and was now running through the peach orchard they had raked with grapeshot earlier in the day. Willie kept going west, toward the Corinth Road, and found a bloodstained stub of bread that had been dropped in a glade scattered with mushrooms. He ate it as he walked, then heard someone moving in the trees and saw a miniature Confederate soldier in butternut and an oversized kepi, looking at him, his feet and face cut by thorns and branches, his pants hitched tightly under his ribs, a pair of drumsticks shoved through his belt.
"Is that you, Tige?" Willie asked.
The boy continued to stare at him, shifting from one foot to another, as though trying to take the weight off a stone bruise.
"You're one of the fellows who give me the mush and bacon. Where'd everybody go?" the boy said.
"Not sure. I ran everywhere there is and then ran out of space. Ran myself silly in the head while I was at it. So I turned around. Hop aboard," Willie said, turning his back for the boy to climb on.
But the boy remained motionless, breathing through his mouth, his eyes blinking inside the dust and sweat on his face.
"You got blood all over you. You're plumb painted with it," he said.
"Really?" Willie said. He wiped his cheek with the flat of his hand and looked at it.
"How far is Vicksburg if you float there on the river?" the boy asked.
"This river doesn't go there, Tige."
The boy crimped his toes in the dirt, the pain in his feet climbing into his face now, his strength and resolve draining from his cheeks.
"I gone all the way to the peach orchard," he said.
"I bet you did. My pal Jim was killed today. He was a lot like you. Too brave to know he was supposed to be afraid. He didn't know when to ask for help, either," Willie said.
"It don't seem fair."
"What's that?" Willie asked.
"We whupped them. But most all the fellows I was with is dead," the boy said.
"Let's find the road to Corinth. I'll tell you a story about the ancient Greeks while we walk," Willie said.
The boy climbed onto Willie's back and locked his arms around Willie's neck. His bones were so light they felt filled with air, like a bird's, rather than marrow. Then the two of them walked through a forest that was unmarked by war and that pattered with raindrops and smelled of wet leaves and spring and freshly plowed fields.
They rested on the wooded slope of a creek bed, then rose and continued on through trees until they could see cultivated acreage in the distance and lightning striking on the crest of a ridge. Willie set Tige down on a boulder that looked like the top of a man's bald head and arched a crick out of his back while the rain ticked on the canopy over their heads.
"So this Oedipus fellow was a king but he married his mother and blinded hisself and become a beggar, even though he could figure out riddles and was the brightest fellow around?" Tige said.
"That pretty well sums it up," Willie said.
"Them ancient Greeks didn't have real high standards when it come to smarts, did they?" Tige replied.
Willie was sitting on a log, his legs spread, grinning at Tige, when he heard the jingle of bridle chains, the creak of saddle leather, the thud of shoed hooves on damp earth. He looked at Tige's face and saw the alarm in it as Tige focused on a presence behind Willie's head.
Willie stood up from the log, drawing the bowie from its scabbard, letting it hang by his thigh. He looked up at a bareheaded specter of a man in a brass-buttoned gray coat that was pushed back over the scrolled hilt of a cavalry saber.
"Light it up, Sergeant," the mounted man in the gray coat said.
The sargent who walked beside him scratched a lucifer match on a candle lamp and touched the flame to three wicks inside it and lifted the bail above his head. The shadows leapt back into the trees and Willie saw the gold stars of a colonel sewn on the horseman's collar, the hair deeply receded at the temples, the severity of a hawk in his face.
Other mounted officers appeared out of the undergrowth and overhang, and farther back in the trees lean, dismounted men in slouch hats and kepis were leading their horses by the bridles, pulling them up the slope of a coulee that snaked along the edge of a cornfield.
Willie stared, intrigued, at the man with the hawklike face. On his last leave in New Orleans he had seen his picture in the window of a photographer's studio on Canal Street. There was no mistaking who he was, nor misinterpreting the inflexible posture, the martial light in the eyes, the adversarial expression that seemed untempered by problems of conscience.
"You don't seem aware of military protocol," the colonel said.
"Private Willie Burke at your orders, sir," Willie said, removing his kepi, bowing in a thespian fashion. "That young gentleman yonder is my pal Tige McGuffy, of the 6th Mississippi."
"I'm very happy to make your acquaintance," the colonel said. There was a lump of chewing tobacco in his jaw, and his mouth looked like a ragged hole inside his triangular, untrimmed beard. He leaned in the saddle and spat a long brown stream into the leaves. "You look to be wounded."
"Not me, sir. They killed my pal Jim Stubbefield, though. You didn't happen to know him, did you?" Willie replied.
The colonel wiped his lips with his wrist. "No, I didn't. Where's your regiment?" he asked.
"I haven't seen them in a while. But I'm glad you raised the subject. Perhaps you could tell me the names of the thumb-sucking incompetent sods who got Colonel Mouton shot in the face and the 18 th Louisiana destroyed," Willie said.
The sergeant turned with the candle lamp, staring incredulously at Willie, waiting for the colonel's command. But the colonel waved a finger in disapproval. "You been out yonder?" he asked Willie, nodding toward the north, his horse resting one hoof.
"That I have. They've been reinforced up to their eyes and I suspect at daybreak they may kick a telegraph pole up your ass," Willie replied.
"I see," the colonel said, dismounting, the tiny rowel on his spur tinkling when his boot touched the ground. He opened a saddlebag and removed a folded map, then studied Willie's face, which in the candlelight and rain looked like yellow and red tallow that had started to melt. "Can you point out where these Yankees are staging up?"
"I think I'm either bent for the firing squad or being on my way with Tige here, Colonel."
"Matters not to me. But it will to the men we may lose tomorrow," the colonel said.
Willie thought about it. He yawned to clear the popping sound from his ears. He felt as though he were sliding to the bottom of a black well, the invective he had delivered a senior officer echoing in his head like words spoken in a dream. When he closed his eyes the ground seemed to move under his feet. He took the map from the colonel's hand, then returned it to him without opening it.
"Colonel Forrest, is it?" Willie said, blowing out his breath.
"That's correct."
"This light is mighty poor. Will one of your fellows take care of Tige, perhaps carry him to the Corinth Road?" he said.
"It will be our pleasure," the colonel said.
"They're going to rip us apart, sir. I saw them offload maybe a hundred mortars," Willie said, then realized he had just used the word "us."
The colonel bit off a chew of plug tobacco and handed the plug to Willie.
"I don't doubt you're a brave man and killed the enemy behind his own lines today. Wars get won by such as yourself. But don't ever address me profanely or disrespectfully again. I won't have you shot. I'll do it myself," he said.
Then the colonel directed an aide to build a fire under a canvas tarp and to bring up dry clothes and bread and a preserve jar of strawberry jam for Willie and Tige, and bandages and salve for Tige's feet, and that quickly Willie found himself back in the mainstream of the Confederate army, about to begin the second day of the battle of Shiloh.