White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke

a cartridge pouch off the belt of a dead man who had already been stripped of his shirt and shoes. Then he had found another dead man in a ravine, with his canteen still hung from his neck, and had pulled the cloth strap loose from the man's head and uncorked the canteen only to discover it was filled with corn whiskey.
    He had never been so thirsty in his life. His lips and tongue were black from biting off the ends of cartridge papers, his nostrils clotted with dust and bits of desiccated leaves. He watched a sergeant use his canteen to wash the blood from a wounded man's face and he wanted to tear the canteen from the sergeant's hands and pour every ounce of its contents down his own throat.
    Jim's canteen had been split in half by a minie ball early in the morning, and neither of them had eaten or drunk a teaspoon of water since the previous night. They had collapsed behind a thick-trunked white oak, exhausted, light-headed, their ears ringing, waiting for the group of Tennessee infantry, to which they now belonged through no volition of their own, to re-form and once again move on the sunken road that the Southerners were now calling the Hornets' Nest.
    The leaves on the floor of the forest were streaked with the blood of the wounded who had been dragged back to the ambulance wagons in the rear. Some men had talked about a surgeon's tent, back near the Corinth Road, that buzzed with green flies and contained cries that would live in a man's dreams the rest of his life.
    Looking to thesouth, Willie could see horses pulling more cannons through the trees, twenty-four-pounders as high as a man, the spoked wheels knocking across rocks and logs. He pointed and told Jim to look at the cannons that were lumbering on their carriages through the hardwoods, then realized he could not hear.
    He pressed his thumbs under his ears and swallowed and tried to force air through his ear passages, but it was to no avail. The rest of the world was going about its business, and he was viewing it as though he were trapped under a glass bell.
    The cannons went past him, silently, through the leaves and scarred tree trunks, lumbering toward the peach orchard and the sunken road, as silently as if their wheels had been wrapped with flannel. He lay back against the trunk of the white oak and shut his eyes, more tired than he had ever been, convinced he could sleep through the Apocalypse. He could feel a puff of breeze on his cheek, smell water in a creek, hear his mother making breakfast in the boardinghouse kitchen at dawn's first light.
    Then he heard a sound, like a series of doors slamming. He jerked his head up. Jim was standing above him, his lips moving, his consternation showing.
    "What?" Willie said.
    Jim's lips were moving silently, then audible words came from his mouth in mid-sentence.
    "—got us some water. That fellow from the 6th Mis'sippi we were talking to last night, the one who looked like he got hit across the face with a frying pan, he toted a whole barrel up here strapped to his back," Jim said.
    He squatted down with a tin cup and handed it to Willie.
    "Where's yours?" Willie asked.
    "I had plenty. Drink up," Jim said, his eyes sliding off Willie's face.
    There was a black smear of gunpowder on the cup's rim where Jim had drunk, but the water level in the cup was down only an inch. Willie drank two swallows, a little more than half the remaining water, and returned the cup to Jim.
    "Finish it up, you ole beanpole, and don't be lying to your pal again," Willie said.
    Jim sat down against the tree bark.
    "You hit any of them today?" he asked.
    "I couldn't see through the smoke most of the time, you?" Willie replied.
    "Maybe. I saw a fellow behind a rick fence go down. A ball hit him in the face," Jim said. He looked into space, his jaw flexing. "I was glad."
    Willie turned and looked at Jim's profile, a gunpowder burn on his right cheek, the bitter cast in his eye.
    "They're no different from us, Jim," he said.
    "Yes, they