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HE awoke behind Abigail's cottage, humped on the floor of the buggy. It was almost dark and he could hear horses and wagons and men shouting at one another in the street.
"What's going on?" he said.
"The Confederates are pulling out of town," Abigail replied.
His face was filmed with sweat, his hair in his eyes. During the ride back he had dreamed he was buried alive, his body pressed groove and buttock and phallus and face against the bodies of the dead, all of them sweltering inside their own putrescence. His breath caught in his throat.
"My father was at the Goliad Massacre," he said.
"The what?"
"In the Texas Revolution. He was spared because he hid under the bodies of his friends. He had nightmares until he died of the yellow jack in'39."
"You're not well, Willie. You were having a dream."
He got out of the buggy and almost fell. The trees were dark over his head and through the branches he could see light in the sky and smoke rolling across the moon. The tide was out on the bayou and a Confederate gunboat was stuck in the silt. A group of soldiers and black men on the bank were using ropes and mules to try to pull it free, their lanterns swarming with insects.
"Where's my mother?" Willie said.
"She went out to the farm. The Federals are confiscating people's livestock."
He started walking toward the front of Abigail's cottage and the ground came up and struck him in the face like a fist.
"Oh, Willie, you'll never grow out of being a stubborn Irish boy," she said.
She got him to his feet and walked him into the bathhouse and made him sit down on a wood bench. She opened the valve on the cistern to fill the iron tub with rainwater.
"Get undressed," she said.
"That doesn't sound good," he said, lifting his eyes, then lowering them.
"Do what I say."
She looked in the other direction while he peeled off his shirt and pants and underwear. His torso and legs were so white they seemed to shine, his ribs as pronounced as whalebone stays in a woman's corset. He sat down in the tub and watched the dirt on his body float to the surface.
"I'm going to get you some clean clothes from next door. I'll be right back," she said.
He closed his eyes and let himself slide under the water. Then he saw the face of the Negro child close to his own, as though it were floating inside a bubble, the eyes sealed shut. He jerked his head into the air, gasping for breath. In that moment he knew the kind of dreams that would visit him the rest of his life.
Abigail returned with a clean shirt and a pair of socks and under-shorts and pants borrowed from the neighbor.
"Put them on. I'll wait for you in the house," she said.
"Where are the Federals?"
"Not far."
"Do you have a gun?"
"No."
"I need one."
"I think the war is over for you."
"No, it's not over. Wars are never over."
She looked at the manic cast in his eyes and the V-shaped patch of tan under his throat and the tanned skin and liver spots on the backs of his hands. He looked like two different people inside the same body, one denied exposure to light, the other burned by it.
