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His eyes, hair and beard looked as though he had been shot out of a cannon. He was barefoot and wore no shirt under a butternut jacket that was stitched with gold braid on the collar. His pants were cinched around his waist with a rope and stippled with blood.
"You ever kill somebody with your bare hands?" he asked. He pressed his face close to Willie's. The inside of his mouth was black with gunpowder, his fetid breath worse than an outhouse.
"Bare hands? Can't say I have," Willie replied.
"You up for it? Tell me now. Don't sass me, either."
"Could you be giving me a few more details?" Willie asked.
"Clean the ham hocks out of your mouth. Captain Jarrette is taking us out. Do you want to make a run for it or die like a carp flopping on the ground? Give me an answer," the man said.
"You were at the ambush on the St. Martinville Road."
"Of all the people I try to help, it turns out to be another stump from Erin. Anyone ever tell you an Irishman is a nigger turned inside out?"
"I really don't care to die next to a smelly lunatic. Do you have a plan, sir?" Willie said.
"Go back to your letter writing, cabbage head," the man said.
The guerrilla turned away and stared at the locked door and front wall of the storehouse, his arms hanging like sticks from the ragged sleeves of his jacket, his pants reaching only to his ankles. Outside, the sun broke on the eastern horizon and a red glow filled the trees on the bayou and painted the tips of the sugarcane in the fields. Through the window Willie heard the sound of marching feet.
The sound grew louder and then stopped in front of the storehouse. Someone turned an iron key in the big padlock on the door and shot back the bolt through the rungs that held it in place. The light from outside seemed to burst into the room like a fistful of white needles. A captain and two parallel lines of enlisted men in blue, all wearing kepis, bayonets twist-grooved onto the muzzles of their rifles, waited to escort the prisoners to the barn and the firing squad of eight that had been camped in the pup tents by the bayou. In the distance Willie thought he heard the rumble of thunder or perhaps horses' hooves on a hard-packed road. Then he heard a solitary shout, like an angry man who had mashed his thumb with a hammer.
"Come out, lads. None of us enjoys this. We'll make it as easy and dignified as possible," the Yankee officer at the door said.
"Come in and get us, darlin'," a prisoner in the back of the room said.
Clouds moved across the sun and the countryside dropped into shadow again, the cane in the field bending in the breeze, the air sweet with the smell of morning. Willie heard horses coming hard across a wood bridge, then the shouts of men and the ragged popping of small-arms fire.
Suddenly there were horsemen everywhere, over a hundred of them, dressed like beggars, some firing a pistol with each hand, the reins in their teeth. The prisoners surged out of the storehouse, knocking the captain to the ground, attacking his men.
A wheeled cannon on one corner of the prisoner of war compound lurched into the air, blowing a huge plume of smoke across the grass. One second later a load of grapeshot slapped against the walls of the red barn used as the execution site, accidentally cutting down a squad of Yankee soldiers in its path.
Willie bolted from the door of the storehouse and ran with dozens of other men toward the bayou, while mounted guerrillas and what looked like regular Confederate infantry fired into the Yankees who were trying to form up in the middle of the compound. A shirtle
ss man on horseback thundered past him, the guerrilla leader with the pinned-up hat riding on the rump, clinging to the cantle. The guerrilla leader looked back at him, his face like an outraged jack-o'-lantern under his hat.
Willie heard the whirring sound of minie balls toppling past his head, then a sound like a dry slap when they struck a tree. He plunged through a woman's front yard, tearing down her wash as he ran, scattering chickens onto the gallery. He crashed through her front door and out the back into a grove of pecan trees, then the lunatic from the storehouse was running in tandum with him, his vinegary stench like a living presence he carried with him..
They dove into the bayou together, swimming as far as they could underwater, brushing across the sculpted points of submerged tree branches, a stray minie ball breaking the surface and zigzagging through the depths in a chain of bubbles.
Their feet touched bottom on the far side, then Willie and what he had come to think of as his lunatic companion were up on the bank, running through a cane field, the blades of the cane whipping past their shoulders.
They fell out of the cane field into a dry irrigation canal, breathless, collapsing on their knees in the shade of persimmon trees. Willie threw his arm around the shoulder of the lunatic.
"We made it, pard. God love you, even if you're a graduate of Bedlam and have nothing kind to say about His chosen people, that being the children of Erin," he said.
The lunatic sat back on his heels, his chest laboring, his blackened mouth hanging open. Willie fastened his hand on the man's collarbone, kneading it, grinning from ear to ear at his newfound brother-in-arms.
"Did you hear me? I bet you're a good soldier. You don't need to ride with brigands. Come with me and we'll find the 18th Louisiana and General Mouton," he said.
The lunatic's mouth formed into a cone and he pressed four stiffened fingers into his sternum as though he were silently asking Willie a burning question.
"You got the breath knocked out of you?" Willie said.
The lunatic shook his head. Willie cupped the lunatic's wrist and removed his fingers from his chest. A ragged exit wound the circumference of a thumb was drilled through his sternum. Willie caught him just as he fell on his side.
"The Yanks have fucked me with a garden rake, cabbage head. Watch out for yourself," the lunatic whispered.
