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"I think the war is poisoning your heart," she said.
The skin of his face felt as though she had slapped it.
They rode back toward New Iberia in silence, sullen, angry at each other, the most tender moment in their day now only a decaying memory, each wondering if the other was not either a stranger or an enemy.
WILLIE left her outside the town limits and crossed through a cane field that was cut by the deep tracks of wheeled cannons, then stole a pirogue from a dock and paddled it across Bayou Teche to the far bank and walked through the yard of a deserted plantation house to a pecan grove by the St. Martinville Road.
The whole countryside seemed alive with movement, all of it the wrong kind. He saw Union soldiers sacking the home of Jubal Labiche, a slave-owning free man of color who operated a brick factory down the Teche and who had spent a lifetime courting the favor of plantation whites. Jubal had sent his daughters North to be educated, hoping they would marry there and rinse the family veins of the African blood that had always denied him full membership in white society. Now Union soldiers were stacking his imported furniture for a bonfire, smashing his crockery, and tearing his piano apart in the yard with an ax.
Freed slaves crisscrossed the road, running from one house to the next, like children trick-or-treating on Halloween, filling blankets and sheets with silverware, candelabras, tailored men's suits and ballroom dresses. A solitary artillery shell arced out of nowhere and exploded in a puff of pink smoke high above the bayou, and no one gave it notice, as though it were part of the celebration taking place below.
Willie backed away from the road and followed the bayou upstream, crossing through backyards and wash lines, keeping the trees and outbuildings between himself and the road. He crossed a coulee that smelled of rainwater and night-blooming flowers, then in a leaf-banked spot between a corn crib and a woodpile he tripped across the body of a dead Confederate soldier.
The soldier, who had been shot through the lungs, had probably been hit somewhere else and had crawled there to die. His skin was gray, his mouth gaping at the moon, the coughing of his blood still bright on the stones he had crawled across before his death. A pair of brass binoculars hung from his neck on a leather cord.
Willie removed the binoculars and found a long, horn-handled folding knife in the dead soldier's back pocket. He followed the blood trail backward to the edge of a cane field, looking for a gun, then entered the cane and hunted through the rows, but could find no weapons of any kind. He went back to the bayou, into the shadows of the cypresses and live oaks, and continued walking upstream toward St. Martinville, where he believed he would eventually encounter the rear guard of his own army. He carried his tightly rolled, blood-streaked, butternut uniform under his right arm.
Abigail had wanted him to surrender, to join the increasing number of deserters who offered every justification possible for leaving their brothers-in-arms to go it on their own. Their arguments were hard to contend with. Hunger, malaria, foot rot, leeches on a man's ankles and the eggs of crab lice in the seams of his clothes were a poor form of pay for marching uphill into canister or grape or repeater rifles the Yankees loaded on Sunday and fired all week.
If men deserted under those circumstances, it was only human and no one who had not paid the same dues had any right to condemn them, Willie thought. But by the same token few of them would probably ever make peace with themselves. They would always feel less about who they had become, robbed by their own hand of the deeds they had performed honorably, and excluded from the comradship of the best and bravest nun they would ever know.
Why was it so difficult for Abby to understand that?
Because she doesn't love you, his mind answered.
He had come to her like a beggar. He was not only a recipient of sexual charity, he was an object of pity and, in her own words, a man who had let the war poison his heart.
He sat down on top of an overturned pirogue and put his face in his hands. He could smell the odor of the dead Confederate soldier on his palms.
FIVE miles farther up the bayou he knelt among a cluster of palmettos behind a rick fence and used the dead soldier's binoculars to watch a scene that seemed created by the inhabitants of an outdoor mental asylum. A stack of furniture, oil paintings, and mattresses was burning in the backyard of a plantation home and black women dressed in brocaded evening gowns and Sunday hats with ostrich plumes on them danced in the firelight to a tune played by a bare-chested fiddler with braided hair, who wore a necklace strung with human fingers around his throat.
Between twenty and thirty white men in civilian clothes were passing rum bottles in wicker baskets from hand to hand and cooking a pig spitted on a trace chain over a bed of coals. Down by the bayou, a man was copulating with a black woman against the back wall of a stable, his white buttocks glowing with moonlight, her legs wrapped around him.
Willie focused his binoculars on the faces of the white men but recognized none of them. Some were armed with muskets, others with shotguns and hatchets, at least two with bows and feathered arrows. He had heard of both jayhawkers and guerrillas operating in Louisiana, the guerrillas under the command of a man named Jarrette, a Missourian who had ridden with Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. The man apparently in charge of the group in the plantation yard wore a long sword in a metal scabbard and a butternut shirt and sky blue skintight pants, with a gold stripe down each leg. His hair was copper-colored, tangled on his shoulders, his face oily and poached in the firelight, the front of his hat pinned up on the crown so that he looked like he was facing into a gale.
They must be jayhawkers, Willie thought, deserters, conscription evaders, criminals of every stripe who hid in the swamps and preyed upon all comers. Certainly these seemed to be getting along well enough with freed slaves.
But guerrilla or jayhawker, it didn't matter. They both fought under a black flag and extended no mercy and took no prisoners.
The white man copulating with the Negro woman finished with her and reached down to pull up his trousers. When he did, the firelight caught his face and Willie recognized one of the manacled convicts who had almost buried him alive.
He was stuck. He couldn't cross the yard of the plantation without being seen, nor could he retrace his steps without risk of running into Federals who were undoubtedly advancing up the Teche toward St. Martinville. He climbed into a coulee and lay back against the incline and rested his arm across his eyes for what he thought would be no more than a few minutes. He could hear the black women dancing around the fire and ducks wimpling the water in the shallows and a bell clanging on a cow somewhere in a field. In seconds the war seemed to disappear like light draining out of his bedroom at the back of his mother's house.
An hour later he woke to the sound of running feet. The bonfire in the yard had collapsed into a
pile of blackened wood, and the wind was kicking up cinders from it into the sky. The men in the yard were running into a pecan orchard, spreading along the same rick fence that rimmed the coulee where he had slept, some sprinting across the road into more trees. A drunken black woman tried to hold onto the arm of a man with a blue rag tied around his head. He shoved her in the face, knocking her back across a log. In less than two minutes the men from the yard had become motionless, their bodies and weapons absorbed by the shadows, their hats slanted down on their faces so their skin would not reflect light.
Down the road walked sixteen blue-clad soldiers in single file, their equipment clanking in the darkness, some of them with their rifles carried horizontally across their shoulders like broom handles. An arrow zipped through the darkness from behind a tree trunk, and the lead soldier stumbled and fell to the ground as though he had stepped in a hole and lost his balance. The other soldiers stopped and stared stupidly into the shadows, just before a volley of shotgun and musket fire from both sides of the road tore into their file.
The men forn the plantation yard swarmed out of the shadows with bayonets, knives and hatchets, warbling the Rebel yell as they ran.
I guess you're not jayhawkers after all, Willie thought.
He leapt from the coulee and bolted across the backyard of the plantation toward St. Martinville. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the guerrillas at work in the road, chopping with their steel instruments like sugar harvesters cutting cane in the fall.
Two hours later, as the stars went out of the sky and the horizon turned gray in the east, his breath and his legs gave out simultaneously as though all his blood had suddenly been drained from his veins. He fell to his knees and crawled underneath an overturned rowboat inside a leaf-strewn stand of persimmon trees. With his uniform rolled under his cheek, he slept the sleep of the dead.
When he awoke the sun was a white flame in his eyes and the Yankee enlisted men who pointed their rifles in his face asked if he would mind accompanying them to a prisoner of war compound just up the road.
