White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke Page A

peculiar, smoke-blackened,
indented face like that of a simian creature from an earlier time.
    "You're leaking. Give us a cup
before it's all gone," Willie said.
    "Take the whole shithouse,"
the man said.
    He slipped the leather straps
off his back and slung the barrel on a rock, where the staves burst
apart and the water patterned on the leaves, then became only a dark
shadow in the dirt.
    Willie and Jim stared at him in disbelief.
    "Want to make something of
hit?" he asked.
    "No, sir, not us," Willie said.
    The man rubbed his hand on his
mouth and looked about him as though he didn't know where he was. A
rivulet of dried blood ran from his ear canal into his whiskers.
    "Where's the little fellow,
what's-his-name, Tige?" Willie asked.
    "Gone. Him and his drum, both
gone," the man said.
    "Gone where?" Willie asked.
    "Into their cannon. Right into
their goddamn cannon," the man said.
    His eyes were wet, the whites
filled with veins that looked like crimson thread, his teeth like slats
in his mouth.

    WHEN Willie and Jim found
their outfit later in the afternoon, it was as though they had
journeyed to a different war. Five hundred men of the 18th Louisiana
were spread along the tree-dotted edge of a ravine, their blue jackets
now turned inside out in order to show the white linings. In front of
them, up a long green incline, was a hardwood forest unscarred by rifle
or cannon fire, and inside the forest were three regiments of Federal
infantry and batteries of wheeled artillery whose jack screws had been
twisted to their maximum extension in order to point the cannon barrels
straight down the slope.
    Willie and Jim walked through
the bottom of ravine, the leaves almost ankle-deep, their clothes rent,
their saliva still black when they spat. Their friends stared at them
quizzically, as though they were visitors from a foreign world. Willie
and Jim knelt behind a tree on the northern rim and stared out at the
scene in front of them.
    The slope was partially in
shadow now, the air cool with the hint of evening. When the wind blew
down the slope Willie could see wild-flowers inside the grass. The
depressed muzzle of a cannon stared down the slope at him like a
blunt-edged iron instrument poised to enter the throat of a surgical
patient.
    Off to the left Rufus Atkins
stood among the trees, with two other officers, his head nodding, his
gloves pulled tautly through his belt, while Colonel Alfred Mouton
moved his index finger on a map that was spread across his wrist and
forearm. Then Corporal Clay Harcher walked past Willie,
interdicting his line of vision.
    "Where y'all been? Cap'n
Atkins wrote y'all up as deserters," Hatcher said, stopping, his eyes,
which reminded Willie of a rodent's, squinting in the gloom. He carried
a Springfield rifle with a narrow brass tube mounted on top of the
barrel.
    "In the rear, catching up on
our sleep. I see you've taken up the role of sniper. I think you've
found yourself, Clay," Jim said.
    Hatcher tried to stare them
down, as he had tried on many other occasions, but the memory of his
humiliation at their hands back at Camp Pratt was always in their eyes,
their contempt and rejection of his authority like a salty cut on his
soul. "What's going on, Hatcher?" Willie asked.
     "We're taking that
battery up there," Hatcher said, his chin out.
    "They're quit. We
punched through them at the sunken road," Willie said.
    "Tell that to them
blue-bellies up in the trees," Hatcher said. "Where are your coats?"
    "We lost them," Willie said.
    "You might as well. We had to
turn ours inside out. The Orleans Guards started firing on us."
    For a moment Hatcher felt like
a brother-in-arms, a noncommissioned officer looking out for his men,
Willie and Jim, but he looked at the black stains around their mouths,
the sweat lines that had dried in the dust on their faces, and he knew
they were different from him, better than him, and he knew also they
had already passed a test inside the crucible that now waited for him
up