White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke Page A

baggy
scarlet pants.
    Women threw flowers off the
balconies into the columns of marching men. Prostitutes from Congo
Square winked at them from under their parasols and sometimes hoisted
their skirts up to their thighs and beyond.
    "Maybe there's something
glorious about war after all," Jim said.
    "We might have to rethink that
statement later on, Jim," Willie replied.
    "I hear a trip to Congo Square
is two dollars," Jim said.
    "The fee for the doctor to
stick an eight-inch hot needle up your pole is an additional three,"
Willie said.
    "If I had a lady like Abigail
Dowling on my mind, I'd have the same elevated sentiments." Jim looked
at the prostitutes hiking their skirts across the boulevard and sucked
his teeth philosophically. "But I'm afraid my virginity is going to die
a beautiful and natural death in old New Orleans tonight."
    Now New Orleans was surrounded
by Federal gunboats and the city's surrender was expected any day.
    Where were Louisiana's troops?
Willie asked himself.
    In Tennessee, protecting hog
farmers and their wives, one glance at whom would make any man
seriously consider a life of celibacy, Willie said to himself.
    As the column crested a rise
he could see the great serpentine length of the army he was marching
in, the mismatched gray and butternut uniforms, some regiments,
 like his own, actually wearing blue jackets, all of them heading
toward a distant woods on the west bank of the Tennessee River.
    But his deprecating thoughts
about his surroundings and the governance of the Confederate military
were not the true cause of his discontent. Nor did he think any longer
about the heaviness of the Enfield rifle on his shoulder or the
blisters on his feet or the dust that drifted back from the wheels of
the ambulance wagons.
    In the pit of his stomach was
an emptiness he could not fill or rid himself of. When the sun broke
through the clouds that had sealed the sky for days, lighting the
hardwood forest in the distance, a bilious liquid surged out of his
stomach into the back of his mouth and his bowels slid in and out of
his rectum. A vinegary reek rose from his armpits into his nostrils,
not the smell of ordinary sweat that comes from work or even tramping
miles along a hard-packed dirt road, but the undisguised glandular
stench of fear.
    "What day is it?" Willie said.
    "Saturday, April 5," Jim
replied. "Why's that?"
    "I don't know. I don't know
why I asked. What's that place up yonder called?"
    "To my knowledge, it doesn't
have a name. It's a woods."
    "That's foolishness, Jim.
Every place has a name."
    "There's nothing there except
a Methodist church house. It's called Shiloh. That's it. Shiloh
Church," Jim said.

    THEY camped late that
afternoon in a clearing among trees on the edge of a ravine. The floor
of the forest and the sides of the ravine were layered with leaves that
had turned gray under the winter snow and were now dry and powdery
under their feet. The sun was an ember in the west, the trees bathed in
a red light like the radiance from a smithy's forge.
    Willie sat on a log and pulled
off his shoes and massaged his feet. The odor from his socks made him
avert his face and hold his breath. All around him men were stacking
their weapons, breaking rations out of their haversacks, kicking
together cook fires. The wind was blowing off the river, and the canopy
of hickory and chestnut and oak trees flickered against
the pinkness of the sky. In the
knock of axes, the
plunking of a banjo being tuned, the smell of corn mush and fatback
frying, it was not hard to pretend they were all young fellows and good
friends assembling for a camp meeting or coon hunt.
    Maybe that's all it would be,
Willie thought. Just another long stroll across the countryside, a
collective exercise that would be unmemorable once the grand illusion
became obvious to them all.
    Jim poured water from his
canteen into a big tin cup, then carefully measured out two spoonfuls
of real coffee into the water, not chicory and ground