James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

"I'm General John Bell Hood. Originally from Kentucky. How you do, suh?" he said, and extended his hand.

"Do you object to shaking hands?" he said.

“No. Not at all. Excuse me."

The heel of his hand was half-mooned with calluses, his voice as thick as wet sand. A holstered cap-and-ball revolver hung on his thigh.

"You look puzzled," he said.

"Is this how it comes? Death, I mean."

"Ask them."

Some of his men were marked with open, bloodless wounds I could put my fist in. Beyond the stacked rifles, at the edge of the firelight, was an ambulance wagon. Someone had raked a tangle of crusted bandages off the tailgate onto the ground.

"Am I dead?" I said.

"You don't look it to me."

"You said you're John Bell Hood."

"That's correct."

His face was narrow, his cheeks hollow, his skin grained with soot.

"I've read a great deal about you."

"I hope it met your approval."

"You were at Gettysburg and Atlanta. You commanded the Texas Brigade. They could never make you quit."

"My political enemies among President Davis's cabinet sometimes made note of that fact."

"What's the date?" I asked.

"It's April 21,1865."

"I don't understand. "

"Understand what?"

"Lee has already surrendered. The war's over. What are you doing here?"

"It's never over. I would think you'd know that. You were a lieutenant in the United States Army, weren 't you?"

"Yes, but I gave my war back to the people who started it. I did that a long time ago."

"No, you didn't. It goes on and on."

He eased himself down on an oak stump, his narrow eyes lighting with pain. He straightened his artificial leg in front of him. The hand that hung out of his sling had wasted to the size of a monkey's paw. A corporal threw a log into the campfire, and sparks rose into the tree branches overhead.

"It's us against them, my friend," he said. "There're insidious men abroad in the land." He swept his crutch at the marsh. "My God, man, use your eyes."

"The federals? "

"Are your eyes and ears stopped with dirt? "

"I think this conversation is not real. I think all of this will be gone with daylight."

"You're not a fool, Mr. Robicheaux. Don't pretend to be one."

"I've seen your grave in New Orleans. No, it's in Metairie. You died of the yellowjack."

"That's not correct. I died when they struck the colors, suh." He lifted his crutch and pointed it at me as he would a weapon. The firelight shone on his yellow teeth. "They'll try your soul, son. But don't give up your cause. Occupy the high ground and make them take it foot by bloody foot."

"I don't know what we're talking about."

"For God's sakes, what's wrong with you? Venal and evil men are destroying the world you were born in. Can't you understand that? Why do I see fear in your face?"

"/ think maybe I'm drunk again. I used to have psychotic episodes when I went on benders. I thought dead men from my platoon were telephoning me in the rain."

"You're not psychotic, lieutenant. No more than Sykes is."

"Elrod is a wet-brain, general."

"The boy has heart. He's not afraid to be an object of ridicule for his beliefs. You mustn't be either. I'm depending on you."

"I have no understanding of your words."

"Our bones are in this place. Do you think we 'II surrender it to criminals, to those who would use our teeth and marrow for landfill?"

"I'm going now, general."

"Ah, you'll simply turn your back on madness, will you? The quixotic vision is not for you, is it?"

"Something's pulling me back. I can feel it."

"They put poison in your system, son. But you'll get through it. You've survived worse. The mine you stepped on, that sort of thing."

"Poison?"

He shrugged and put a cigar in his mouth. A corporal lit it with a burning stick from the fire. In the shadows a sergeant was putting together a patrol that was about to move out. Their faces were white and wrinkled like prunes with exhaustion and the tropical heat.

"Come again," he said.

"I don't think so."

"Then goodnight to you, suh."

"Goodnight to you, general. Goodnight to your men, too."

He nodded and puffed on his cigar. There were small round hollows in his cheeks.

"General?"

"Yes, suh?"

"It's going to be bad, isn't it?"

"What?"

"What you were talking about, something that's waiting for me down the road."

"I don't know. For one reason or another I seem to have more insight into the past than the future." He laughed to himself. Then his face sobered and he wiped a strand of tobacco off his lip. "Try to keep this in mind. It's just like when they load with horseshoes and chain. You think the barrage will last forever, then suddenly there's a silence that's almost louder than their cannon. Please don't be alarmed by the severity of my comparison. Goodnight, lieutenant."

"Goodnight, general."

I waded through the shallows, into deeper water, back toward the levee. The mist hung on the water in wisps that were as dense as thick-bodied snakes. I saw ball lightning roll through the flooded trees and snap apart against a willow island; it was as bright and yellow as molten metal dipped from a forge. Then rain began twisting out of the sky, glistening like spun glass, and the firelight behind me became a red smudge inside a fog bank that billowed out of the marsh, slid across the water, and once again closed around my truck.

The air was so heavy with ozone I could almost taste it on my tongue; I could hear a downed power line sparking and popping in a pool of water and smell a scorched electrical odor in the air like the metallic, burnt odor the St. Charles streetcar makes in the rain. I could hear a nutria crying in the marsh for its mate, a high-pitched shriek like the scream of a hysterical woman. I remember all these things. I remember the mud inside my shoes, the hyacinth vines binding around my knees, the gray-green film of algae that clung to my khaki trousers like cobweb.

When a sheriff's deputy and two paramedics lifted me out of the truck cab in the morning, the sun was as white as an arc welder's flame, the morning as muggy and ordinary as the previous day, and my clothes as dry as if I had recently taken them from my closet. The only physical change the supervising paramedic noted in me was an incised lump the size of a darning sock over my right eye. That and one other cautious, almost humorous observation.

"Dave, you didn't fall off the wagon on your head last night, did you?" he asked. Then, "Sorry. I was just kidding. Forget I said that."

Our family physician, Dr. Landry, sat on the side of my bed at Iberia General and looked into the corner of my eye with a small flashlight. It was late afternoon now, Bootsie and Alafair had gone home, and the rain was falling in the trees outside the window.

"Does the light hurt your eyes?" he asked.

"A little. Why?"

"Because your pupils are dilated when they shouldn't be. Tell me again what you felt just before you went off the road."

"I could taste cherries and mint leaves and oranges. Then I felt like I'd bitten into an electric wire with my teeth."

He put the small flashlight in his shirt pocket, adjusted his glasses, and looked at my face thoughtfully. He was an overweight, balding, deeply tanned golf player, with rings of blond hair on his forearms.

"How do you feel now?" he said.

"Like something's torn in my head. The way wet cardboard feels when you tear it with your hands."

"Did you eat anything?"

"I threw it up."

"You want the good news? The tests don't show any booze in your system."

"How could there be? I didn't drink any alcohol."

"People have their speculations sometimes, warranted or not."