White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke [Burke, James Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780743466622
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2002-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

WILLIE Burke no longer knew if the humming sound in his head was caused by the mosquito eggs in his blood or the dysentery in his bowels. The dirt road along the bayou was yellow and hard-packed and the dust from the retreating column drifted into his face. He wore no socks and the leather in his shoes had hardened and split and rubbed blisters across his toes and on his heels. He watched the retreating column disappear around a bend, then ordered his men to fall out and form a defensive line along a coulee that fed into the bayou.

He lay below the rim of the embankment and peered back down the road. Houses were burning in the distance, and when he pressed his ear against the ground he thought he could hear the rumble of wheeled vehicles in the south, but he could see no sign of Union soldiers.

Where were they? he asked himself. Perhaps sweeping south of New Iberia to capture the salt mines down by the Gulf, he thought. It was shady where he lay on the embankment, and he could smell wildflowers and water in the bottom of the coulee and for what seemed just a second he laid his head down in the coolness of the grass and closed his eyes.

An enlisted man shook him by his arm.

“You all right, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“Sure I am,” Willie said, his head jerking up. The side of his face was peppered with grains of dirt. He raised himself on his arms and looked down the road at the row of oaks and cypress trees that lined the bayou. He felt light-headed, disconnected in a strange way from the scene around him, as though it belonged somehow inside the world of sleep and he belonged in another place.

He could see a curtain of black smoke rising from the fields in the south now, which told him he had been right in his speculation that the Yankees’ main force would concentrate on capturing the salt mines and, at worst, he and his men would not have to deal with more than a diversionary probe.

He looked at the empty road and the cinders rising in the sky from the fields and the wind blowing across the tops of the oak trees and wondered if he would see his mother and Abigail Dowling that evening. Yes, he most certainly would, he told himself. He would bathe in an iron tub and have fresh clothes and he would eat soup and perhaps even bread his mother had baked for him.

He thought about all these things and did not see the Yankee gunboat that came around a bend in the bayou, emerging from behind trees into the gold-purple light of the late afternoon, its port side lined with a half dozen cannons.

He saw a sailor jerk a lanyard at the rear of a Parrott gun, then a shell sucked past his ear and exploded against a tree trunk behind him, showering the coulee with leaves and branches and bits of metal and the sudden glare of the sun.

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