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"Don't say anything else," she said.
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She folded a clean rag into a square and moistened it and laid it across his
eyes, then rose to her feet and approached the Union officer.
"I can take him back with me," she said.
The officer shook his head. "He's a prisoner of war," he said.
She looked back at Willie, then touched the officer on the arm. "Would you
step over here with me?" she said.
"Miss, I appreciate your problem but-"
"He's from New Iberia. Let him die at home," she said. She fixed her eyes on
the officer's.
"I don't have that kind of authority."
"You send your own to a field mortuary and bury others with no dignity at all.
Are you a Christian man, sir?"
"The Rebs made this damn war. We didn't."
She stepped closer to him, her face tilting up into his. Her eyes were so
intense they seemed to jitter in the sockets. "Will you add to the sad cargo
I've seen here today?" she said.
His stare broke. "Load him up and get him out of here," he said.
On the way into New Iberia, Willie passed out again.
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.
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"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.
"I'm going to fix you something to eat," she said.
He watched her go out the door and cross the lawn in the shadows and mount the
back steps to her cottage. The wind blew through the oaks and he could smell
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rain and the moldy odor of blackened leaves and pecan husks in the yard. When
he rose from the tub the building tilted under his feet, as though something
were torn loose inside his head and would not right itself with the rest of
the world.
He sat on the wood bench and dressed in the cotton shirt and brown pants
Abigail had given him. Civilian clothes felt strange on his body, somehow less
than what a man should wear, effete in some way he couldn't describe. He
picked up his uniform from the floor and rolled it into a cylinder and went
inside the cottage. "I have to find the 18th," he said.
"You'll go a half block before you pass out again," she said.
"Colonel Mouton was shot in the face at Shiloh. But he was back at it the next
day. You don't get to resign, Abby."
"Who needs you more, Willie, your mother or the damn army?" He smiled at her [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]