[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.
Page 185
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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.
Chapter Twenty-five
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
Page 186
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]