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"Hang on there, pard. Someone will be along for us directly. You'll see," Willie said.
The man did not speak again. His eyes stared hazily at the shadows the clouds made on the cane field and the mockingbirds swooping in and out of the shade. Then he coughed softly as though clearing his throat and died.
Willie rolled him onto his back, placed his ankles together, and covered his face with a palmetto fan. Then he buttoned the dead man's butternut coat over his wound and crossed his arms on his chest.
Other escaped prisoners ran past him, some of them armed now, all of them sweaty and hot, powdered with dust from the fields. He heard a rider behind him and turned just as the guerrilla leader reined his horse and glared down at him, his horse fighting the bit, spooking sideways.
The guerrilla hit the horse between the ears with his fist, then stood in the stirrups and adjusted his scrotum, making a face while he did it. The inside of his thighs were dark with sweat, as though he had fouled himself. "That's the body of my junior officer you're looting," he said.
Willie got to his feet.
"You're a damn liar," he said.
"I'll remember your face," the guerrilla said.
He galloped away, twisting his head to look over his shoulder one more time.
WILLIE wandered the rest of the day. The sky was plumed with smoke from burning houses and barns, and by noon a haze of dust and lint from the cane fields turned the sun into a pink sliver. He saw a Confederate rear guard form up in a woods and fire a volley across a field at a distant group of men, then break and run through a gully and board a rope-drawn ferryboat and pull themselves across the Vermilion River, all before he could reach them.
He saw wild dogs attack and tear apart a rabbit in an empty pasture. He passed Confederate deserters who had hidden in coulees or who walked on back roads with their faces averted. He saw four wagons loaded with Negroes and their possessions stopped at a crossroads, wondering in which direction they should go, while their children cried and one man tried to jerk an exhausted horse up on its legs. At evening he saw the same people, this time on the riverbank, without the means to cross to the other side, frightened at the boom of distant artillery. He rooted for food in the charred ruins of a cabin and licked the fried remains of pickled tomatoes off scorched pieces of a preserve jar.
He climbed into a mulberry tree and watched a column of Union infantry, supply wagons, and wheeled field pieces that took a half hour to pass. When night came the sky was black with storm clouds, the countryside dark except for the flicker of cannon fire in the north. He lost the Vermilion River, which he had been following, and entered a high-canopied woods that swayed in the wind, that had no undergrowth and was thickly layered with old leaves and was good for either walking or finding a soft, cool place that smelled of moss and wildflowers where he could lie down and once more sleep the sleep of the dead.
He paused under a water oak, unbuttoned his fly, and urinated into the leaves. Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement back in the trees and heard the sound of field gear clanking on men's bodies. He mounted the trunk of a tree that had fallen across a coulee and ran along the crest of it to the other side, right into a Union sergeant who aimed the.50 caliber muzzle of a Sharp's carbine at his face.
Willie raised his hands and grinned as though a stick were turned sideways in his mouth.
"I'm unarmed and offer no threat to you," he said.
The sergeant's kepi was low on his brow, one eye squinted behind his rear sight. He lowered his carbine and looked hard into Willie's face. The sergeant had dark red hair and wore a mustache and goatee and a silver ring with a tiny gold cross affixed to it on his marriage finger. Willie could hear him breathing heatedly in the dark.
"No threat, are you? How about a fucking nuisance?" he said.
"The pacifist turned soldier?" Willie said.
"And you, a bloody hemorrhoid," the sergeant replied.
"Indignant, are we? I tell you what, Yank, within a span of five days you fellows have blown me up with an artillery shell, almost buried me alive, and tried to send me before a firing squad. Would you either be done with it and kindly put a ball between my eyes or go back home to your mother in the North and be the nice lad I'm sure you are."
"Don't tempt me."
"I'm neither a spy nor a guerrilla. Your general treated me unjustly back there. I reckon you know it, too."
Willie could hear the calluses on the sergeant's hands tightening on the stock of his carbine. Then the sergeant stepped back in the leaves, an air vine trailing across his kepi, and pointed the carbine's barrel away from Willie's chest.
"Pass by, Reb. When you say your prayers this night, ask that in the next life the Good Lord provide you with a brain rather than an elephant turd to think with," he said.
"Thank you for the suggestion, Yank. Now, would you be knowing where the 18th Louisiana Vols are?" Willie said.
"You ask the enemy the whereabouts of your own outfit?"
"No offense meant."
The sergeant looked at him incredulously. "My guess is somewhere north of Vermilionville," he said.
"Thank you."
"What's your name again?" the sergeant asked.
