James Burke - White Doves at Morning

A Union sergeant, with dark red hair, wearing a kepi, was walking down the middle of the street, toward the riders, a double-barrel shotgun held at port arms.

"The five-cent hand-jobs down in the bottoms must not be available this evening," he said.

"Don't mix in hit, blue-belly," Jarrette said.

"Oh, I don't plan to mix in it at all, Captain Jarrette. But my lovely ten-gauge will. By blowing your fucking head off," the sergeant said. He lifted the shotgun to his shoulder and thumbed back the hammer on each barrel.

Jarrette stared into the shotgun, breathing through his mouth, snuffing down in his nose, as though he had a cold. "How you know my name?" he asked.

"You were with Cole Younger at Centralia. When he lined up captured Union boys to see how many bodies a ball from his new Enfield could pass through. Haul your sorry ass out of here, you cowardly sack of shit," the sergeant said.

Jarrette flinched, the blood draining out of his cheeks. He rubbed his palms on his thighs as though he needed to relieve himself. Then his face locked into a disjointed expression, the eyes lidless, the jaw hooked open, like a barracuda thrown onto a beach.

"That was Bill Anderson's bunch. I wasn't there. I didn't have nothing to do with hit," he said.

"I can always tell when you're lying, Jarrette. Your lips are moving," the sergeant said.

"Hit's Cap'n Jarrette. Don't talk to me like that. I wasn't there."

"In three seconds you're going to be the deadest piece of white trash ever to suck on a load of double-ought buckshot," the sergeant said.

"Cap?" said a man in a butternut jacket cut off at the armpits. "Cap, it's all right. He don't know what he's talking about."

But there was no sound except the wind in the trees. The man in the butternut jacket looked at the others, then reached over and turned Jarrette's horse for him.

Willie watched the seven horsemen ride quietly down the street, the shadows and their wide-brim flop hats smudging their features, their voices lost in the wind. The sergeant released the tension in the shotgun's hammers. He wore a silver ring with a gold cross soldered to it.

"You again. Everywhere I go," Willie said, wiping the blood from his nose.

"Oh, had them surrounded, did you?" the sergeant said.

Willie touched a barked place on his forehead. "No, I allow you're obviously a much more resourceful and adept man than I. Truth is, Sergeant, I regularly make a mess of things," he said.

The sergeant's face softened. "Wasn't much to it. I know Jarrette's name and what he is. Hold up a mirror to a fellow like that and he's undone by what he sees."

"What's your name?"

"Quintinius Earp."

"It's what?"

"Ah, I should have known your true, lovable self was never far behind. The name is Quintinius Earp, lately of Ripton, Vermont, now obliged to baby-sit ex-Rebs who can't keep their tallywhackers out of the clothes roller."

"Earp? As in 'puke'?"

"Correct, as in 'puke.' Would you do me a favor?"

"I expect."

"Go home. Pretend you don't know me. Piss on my grave. Dig up my bones and feed them to your dog. Go back to Ireland and take a job in the peat bogs. But whatever it is, get out of my life!"

"Could I buy you a drink?" Willie asked.

Sergeant Earp shut his eyes and made a sound in his throat as though a nail had just been hammered into his head.

ABIGAIL Dowling had been chopping wood for her stove and loading it into a box when she glanced through the side yard and saw a Yankee soldier armed with a shotgun disperse a group of men in front of her house. He had a red goatee and mustache and short muscular arms, and his dark blue jacket was pulled tightly down inside his belt so his shoulders and chest were molded as tautly as a statue's.

She set down the woodbox and walked through the side yard into the front. Down the street she saw a man walking away in the gloaming of the day, the back of his clothes gray with dust. The Union soldier had propped his shotgun against her fence and was buying a twist of taffy from a vendor. The soldier squatted down in front of a small Negro girl and untwisted the paper from the taffy and gave it to the girl.

"What happened out here?" Abigail said.

The sergeant stood up and touched the brim of his kepi. "Not much. Some miscreants giving a local fellow a bad time," he said.

"Was that Willie Burke?" she asked, looking down the street.

"Has a way of showing up all over the planet? Yes, I think that's his name."

"Is he all right?"

"Seems fine enough to me."

The black girl had finished her taffy and was now standing a few feet away, her eyes uplifted to the sergeant's. He removed a penny from his pocket and gave it to her. "Get yourself one more, then you'd better find your mommy," he said.

Abigail and the soldier looked at one another in the silence. "You sound as though you're from my neck of the woods," he said.

"On the Merrimack, in Massachusetts. My name is Abigail Dowling," she said.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Abigail," he said. He stepped forward awkwardly and removed his kepi and shook her hand. He continued to stare at her, his lips seeming to form words that were somehow not connected to his thoughts. He grinned sheepishly at his own emotional disorganization.

"Do you have a name?" she asked.

"Oh, excuse me. It's Sergeant Earp. Quintinius Earp."

She smiled, her head tilting slightly. A look of undisguised disappointment stole across his face.

"Quintinius? My, what a beautiful Roman name," she said.

When he grinned he looked like the happiest, most handsome and kindly man she had ever seen.

UNDER a bright moon, deep inside the network of canals, bayous, oxbows, sand bogs, flooded woods, and open freshwater bays that comprised the Atchafalaya Basin, Robert Perry watched two dozen of his compatriots off-load crate after crate of Henry and Spencer repeaters from a steamboat that had worked its way up the Atchafalaya River from the Gulf of Mexico.

The wind was balmy and strong out of the south, capping the water in the bays, puffing leaves out of the trees, driving the mosquitoes back into the woods. Some of the men wore pieces of their old uniforms-a sun-faded kepi, perhaps, a butternut jacket, a pair of dress-gray pants, with a purple stripe down each leg. With just a little imagination Robert was back in Virginia, at the beginning of Jackson's Shenandoah Campaign, reunited with the bravest fellows he had ever known, all of them convinced that honor was its own reward and that politics was the stuff of bureaucrats and death was a subject unworthy of discussion.

In his mind's eye he could still see them, pausing among the hills in the early dawn to drink from a stream, to eat hardtack from their packs, or simply to remove their shoes and rub their feet. The fields and trees were strung with mist, the light in the valley a greenish yellow, as though it had been trapped inside an uncured whiskey barrel. Propped among the thousands of resting men were their regimental colors, the Cross of Saint Andrew, and the Bonnie Blue flag sewn with eleven white stars.

The denigrators and revisionists would eventually have their way with history, as they always did, Robert thought, but for those who participated in the war, it would remain the most important, grand and transforming experience in their lives. And if a war could make a gift to its participants, this one's gift came in the form of a new faith: No one who was at Marye's Heights, Cemetery Ridge, or the Bloody Lane at Sharpsburg would ever doubt the courage and stoicism and spiritual resolve of which their fellow human beings were capable.

Robert did not know all of the men who came into the Atchafalaya Basin either by boat or mule-drawn wagon that evening. Some were White Leaguers, others Kluxers; some probably belonged to both groups or to neither. How had he put it to Willie? You don't always choose your bedfellows in a war? But none of these looked like bad men; certainly they were no worse than the carpetbaggers appointed to office by the provisional governor.