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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.
