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"It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Abigail," he said. He stepped forward awkwardly and removed his kepi and shook her hand. He continued to stare at her, his lips seeming to form words that were somehow not connected to his thoughts. He grinned sheepishly at his own emotional disorganization.
"Do you have a name?" she asked.
"Oh, excuse me. It's Sergeant Earp. Quintinius Earp."
She smiled, her head tilting slightly. A look of undisguised disappointment stole across his face.
"Quintinius? My, what a beautiful Roman name," she said.
When he grinned he looked like the happiest, most handsome and kindly man she had ever seen.
Chapter Twenty-five
UNDER a bright moon, deep inside the network of canals, bayous, oxbows, sand bogs, flooded woods, and open freshwater bays that comprised the Atchafalaya Basin, Robert Perry watched two dozen of his compatriots off-load crate after crate of Henry and Spencer repeaters from a steamboat that had worked its way up the Atchafalaya River from the Gulf of Mexico.
The wind was balmy and strong out of the south, capping the water in the bays, puffing leaves out of the trees, driving the mosquitoes back into the woods. Some of the men wore pieces of their old uniforms-a sun-faded kepi, perhaps, a butternut jacket, a pair of dress-gray pants, with a purple stripe down each leg. With just a little imagination Robert was back in Virginia, at the beginning of Jackson's Shenandoah Campaign, reunited with the bravest fellows he had ever known, all of them convinced that honor was its own reward and that politics was the stuff of bureaucrats and death was a subject unworthy of discussion.
In his mind's eye he could still see them, pausing among the hills in the early dawn to drink from a stream, to eat hardtack from their packs, or simply to remove their shoes and rub their feet. The fields and trees were strung with mist, the light in the valley a greenish yellow, as though it had been trapped inside an uncured whiskey barrel. Propped among the thousands of resting men were their regimental colors, the Cross of Saint Andrew, and the Bonnie Blue flag sewn with eleven white stars.
The denigrators and revisionists would eventually have their way with history, as they always did, Robert thought, but for those who participated in the war, it would remain the most important, grand and transforming experience in their lives. And if a war could make a gift to its participants, this one's gift came in the form of a new faith: No one who was at Marye's Heights, Cemetery Ridge, or the Bloody Lane at Sharpsburg would ever doubt the courage and stoicism and spiritual resolve of which their fellow human beings were capable.
Robert did not know all of the men who came into the Atchafalaya Basin either by boat or mule-drawn wagon that evening. Some were White Leaguers, others Kluxers; some probably belonged to both groups or to neither. How had he put it to Willie? You don't always choose your bedfellows in a war? But none of these looked like bad men; certainly they were no worse than the carpetbaggers appointed to office by the provisional governor.
They had shot and butchered a feral hog and great chunks of meat were now broiling on iron stakes driven into the ground by a roaring fire under a cypress tree. The crates of Henry and Spencer lever-action repeaters and ammunition were stacked in the wagons now and within a week they would be distributed all over southern Louisiana. If events turned out badly, the Yankees had cast the die, not these fellows in the swamp, he told himself.
But his thoughts were troubled. A guerrilla leader in a flop hat, a man named Jarrette, was squatting on his haunches by the fire, sawing at a shank of broiled meat, sticking it into his mouth with the point of his bowie knife. Some said he had ridden with Quantrill, a psychopath and arsonist whom Robert E. Lee had officially read out of the Confederate army. Jarrette spoke little, but the moral vacuity in his eyes was of a kind Robert Perry had seen in others, usually men for whom war became a sanctuary.
The other men were eating now from tin plates, passing around three bottles of clear whiskey someone had produced from under a wagon seat. Their faces were happy in the firelight, the whiskey glittering inside the bottles they tilted to their mouths. In this moment, in their mismatched pieces of uniform, they looked as though they had stepped out of a photograph taken on the banks of the Rappahannock River.
Then a man he recognized all too well walked out of the darkness and joined the others. His hair was greased and parted down the middle, his body egg-shaped and compact, his brow furrowed, the corners of his mouth downturned, as though he did not quite approve of whatever his eyes fell upon.
The egg-shaped, narrow-shouldered man sat down on a log and unfolded a sheet of paper and began reading off the names of people in the community whose activities were, in his words, "questionable or meriting further investigation on our part."
A two-shot nickel-plated derringer was stuck down tightly in the side of his belt.
"It looks like you've got the dirt on some right suspicious folk, Mr. McCain," Robert said.
" 'Dirt' is a word of your choosing, not mine," McCain replied. Robert sat down on the log next to him.
"Do you mind?" he asked, lifting the sheet of paper from McCain's hands. "Which outfit did you serve in?"
"I was exempted from service, although that was not my preference," McCain replied.
"How is it you were exempted, sir?" Robert asked.
"Provider of war materials and sole support of a family."
"Some used to call those fellows 'the Druthers.' They'd druther not fight," Robert said. Then he popped the sheet of paper between his hands and studied the list before McCain could reply. "Well, I see you have the name of Willie Burke down here. That disturbs me."
"It should. He's a nigger lover and he regularly insults the leadership of the Knights of the White Camellia," McCain said
"That sounds like Willie, all right. There's a little boy in town, a veteran of the 6th Mississippi, who says Willie told off Bedford Forrest. Can you believe that? May I see your gun?" Robert said.
Without waiting for an answer he lifted the derringer from McCain's belt. The nickel plate on it was new, unscratched, the pearl handles rippling with color in the firelight. Robert broke open the breech and looked at the two brass cartridges inserted in the chambers. He snicked the breech shut.
"Fine hideaway," he said, and tossed the derringer into the fire.
"What are you doing?" McCain said.
