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So that's the way it goes, he thought. You turn a blind eye to slaves escaping downriver, and later they join up with the blue-bellies and perhaps drive a ball under your friend's heart, and you trap the poor devils under a barrage that paints the trees with their blood and nappy hair. Ah, isn't it all a lovely business, he thought.
He wondered what Abigail would have to say about his work and hers.
An hour later he passed out. When he woke, he was in a tent and rain was ticking on the canvas. Through the flap he saw two enlisted men digging a grave by the bayou. The major lay next to the mound of dirt, his face covered with his gray coat.
Chapter Fourteen
THE morning did not feel like spring, Abigail thought. The air was hot and smelled of dust and trash fires, the sky gray, the clouds crackling with electricity. Then her neighbor's dogs began barking and she heard a banging noise down the Teche, like a houseful of carpenters smacking nails down in green wood. She walked out on the gallery and saw birds lifting out of the trees all the way down the street as a long column of soldiers and wagons rounded a bend in the distance and advanced toward the center of town.
The soldiers were unshaved, gaunt as scarecrows, some of them without shoes, the armpits of their butternut and gray uniforms white with salt, their knees patched like the pants on beggars. Three wagons carrying wounded passed in front of her. The teamsters in the wagon boxes were leaning forward, away from their charges, with handkerchiefs tied across their faces. The wind shifted, and she smelled the unmistakable odor of gangrene and of men who had become incontinent and left to sit in their own excretions. She saw no one with a surgeon's insignia in the column.
She walked out into the yard just as a mounted officer rode his horse to the head of column. He wore a slouch hat, a sweat-peppered gray shirt, no coat, and a pistol in a shoulder holster on his chest. His face was narrow, his skin as coarse and dark as if it had been rubbed with the dust from a foundry.
He picked his hat off his head by the crown and combed back his hair with his fingers.
"Still in our midst, are you?" he said.
"This is where I live," Abigail replied.
"Bring as many ladies as you can find up to the Episcopalian church," he said.
"You don't need to tell me my obligations, Captain Atkins," she replied.
"There's nothing like hearing a Yankee accent behind our own lines. But I'm sure you've been loyal to the cause, haven't you?"
"Where is Willie Burke?"
"Can't rightly say. Saw him puking his guts out last week. Don't think he was quite up to blowing railroad spikes into freed niggers."
"What?"
"You haven't heard? The Yanks give them uniforms and guns and permission to kill their previous owners. We waylaid a whole train-load of them. Made good niggers out of a goodly number."
Dry lightning rippled through the clouds. Atkins replaced his hat on his head and looked up at the sky.
"By the way, that was some of General Banks' skirmishers shooting behind us," he said. "They say he was a bobbin boy in one of your Massachusetts textile mills. Does not like rich people. No, sir. So he's turned his men loose on the civilian population. I hear they're a horny bunch. You might fasten on a chastity belt."
She wouldn't let the level of his insult register in her face, but the fact that he had insulted her sexually, in public, indicated only one conclusion about her status in the community: She was utterly powerless. She wanted to turn and walk away, but instead she fixed her eyes on the exhaustion in the faces of the enlisted men marching past her, the sores on the horses and mules, a mobile field kitchen whose cabinet doors swung back and forth on empty shelves.
"Captain Atkins, I suspect you may be a gift from God," she said.
His head tilted sideways, an amused question mark in the middle of his face.
"Sometimes we're all tempted to think of our own race as being superior to others," she said. "Then we meet someone such as yourself and immediately we're beset with the terrible knowledge that there's something truly cretinous at work in the Caucasian gene pool. Thank you for stopping by."
He studied her for a moment and scratched his cheek, his gaze slightly out of focus. He touched his horse with one spur and rode slowly toward the front of the column, his head bent down as though he were lost in thought. Then he reined his horse in a circle and rode back to Abigail's gate. He leaned with both arms on the pommel, the leather creaking under his weight. His flat, hazel eyes looked like they had been cut out of another face and pasted on his own.
He pointed at her with a dirt-rimmed fingernail. "A pox on you, you snooty cunt. Be assured your comeuppance is in th
e making," he said.
When Abigail arrived at the brick church at the far end of Main Street, the pews had been upended against the walls and the injured placed in rows on the floor. She peeled bandages from wounds that were rife with infection, scissored the trousers and underwear off men who had fouled themselves, and bathed their bodies with sponges and soap and warm water. A local physician, untrained as a surgeon, created an operating table by propping a door across two pews, then sawed limbs off men as though he were pruning trees. After each patient was carried away, he threw a bucket of water on the table and began on the next. There was no laudanum, and Abigail had to hold the heel of her hand in one man's mouth to keep him from biting through his tongue.
Outside, she heard men and horses running in the street, their gear clanking, a wheeled cannon bouncing off a parked wagon, then the spatter of small-arms fire in the distance.
"Are you with the 18th?" she asked a private who lay on a litter, a mound of bloody rags on the floor beside him.
He nodded. His eyes were receded in his face, his cheeks hollow. The bones in his chest looked like sticks under his skin. One pants leg had been cut away, and a swollen red line ran from a bandage on his thigh into his groin.
