"The Rebs made this damn war. We didn't."

She stepped closer to him, her face tilting up into his. Her eyes were so intense they seemed to jitter in the sockets. "Will you add to the sad cargo I've seen here today?" she said.

His stare broke. "Load him up and get him out of here," he said.

On the way into New Iberia, Willie passed out again.

HE awoke behind Abigail's cottage, humped on the floor of the buggy. It was almost dark and he could hear horses and wagons and men shouting at one another in the street.

"What's going on?" he said.

"The Confederates are pulling out of town," Abigail replied.

His face was filmed with sweat, his hair in his eyes. During the ride back he had dreamed he was buried alive, his body pressed groove and buttock and phallus and face against the bodies of the dead, all of them sweltering inside their own putrescence. His breath caught in his throat.

"My father was at the Goliad Massacre," he said.

"The what?"

"In the Texas Revolution. He was spared because he hid under the bodies of his friends. He had nightmares until he died of the yellow jack in'39."

"You're not well, Willie. You were having a dream."

He got out of the buggy and almost fell. The trees were dark over his head and through the branches he could see light in the sky and smoke rolling across the moon. The tide was out on the bayou and a Confederate gunboat was stuck in the silt. A group of soldiers and black men on the bank were using ropes and mules to try to pull it free, their lanterns swarming with insects.

"Where's my mother?" Willie said.

"She went out to the farm. The Federals are confiscating people's livestock."

He started walking toward the front of Abigail's cottage and the ground came up and struck him in the face like a fist.

"Oh, Willie, you'll never grow out of being a stubborn Irish boy," she said.

She got him to his feet and walked him into the bathhouse and made him sit down on a wood bench. She opened the valve on the cistern to fill the iron tub with rainwater.

"Get undressed," she said.

"That doesn't sound good," he said, lifting his eyes, then lowering them.

"Do what I say."

She looked in the other direction while he peeled off his shirt and pants and underwear. His torso and legs were so white they seemed to shine, his ribs as pronounced as whalebone stays in a woman's corset. He sat down in the tub and watched the dirt on his body float to the surface.

"I'm going to get you some clean clothes from next door. I'll be right back," she said.

He closed his eyes and let himself slide under the water. Then he saw the face of the Negro child close to his own, as though it were floating inside a bubble, the eyes sealed shut. He jerked his head into the air, gasping for breath. In that moment he knew the kind of dreams that would visit him the rest of his life.

Abigail returned with a clean shirt and a pair of socks and under-shorts and pants borrowed from the neighbor.

"Put them on. I'll wait for you in the house," she said.

"Where are the Federals?"

"Not far."

"Do you have a gun?"

"No."

"I need one."

"I think the war is over for you."

"No, it's not over. Wars are never over."

She looked at the manic cast in his eyes and the V-shaped patch of tan under his throat and the tanned skin and liver spots on the backs of his hands. He looked like two different people inside the same body, one denied exposure to light, the other burned by it.

"I'm going to fix you something to eat," she said.

He watched her go out the door andcross the lawn in the shadows and mount the back steps to her cottage. The wind blew through the oaks and he could smell rain and the moldy odor of blackened leaves and pecan husks in the yard. When he rose from the tub the building tilted under his feet, as though something were torn loose inside his head and would not right itself with the rest of the world.

He sat on the wood bench and dressed in the cotton shirt and brown pants Abigail had given him. Civilian clothes felt strange on his body, somehow less than what a man should wear, effete in some way he couldn't describe. He picked up his uniform from the floor and rolled it into a cylinder and went inside the cottage. "I have to find the 18th," he said.

"You'll go a half block before you pass out again," she said.

"Colonel Mouton was shot in the face at Shiloh. But he was back at it the next day. You don't get to resign, Abby."

"Who needs you more, Willie, your mother or the damn army?" He smiled at her and began walking toward the front door, knocking into the furniture, as rudderless as a sleepwalker. She caught him by the arm and walked him into her bedroom and pushed him into a sitting position on the mattress. The room was dark, the curtains puffing in the wind.

"Lie down and sleep, Willie. Don't fight with it anymore. It's like fighting against an electrical storm. No matter what we do or don't do, eventually calamity passes out of our lives," she said.

"Do you see Jim Stubbefield's father?"

"Sometimes."

"He carried the guidon straight uphill into their cannons. They blew his brains all over my shirt. I'll never get over Jim. I hate the sons of bitches who caused all this."

He felt her fingers stroking his hair, then he put his arms around her hips and pulled her body against his face and held her more tightly than was reasonable or dignified, burying his face in her stomach, touching the backs of her thighs now, raising his head to her breasts, gathering her dress in both his hands.

She lay down with him, and he kissed her mouth and eyes and neck and felt the roundness of her breasts and put his hand between her thighs, without shame or even embarrassment at the nakedness of his own need and dependence.

It was raining in the trees and the bayou, and he could smell grass burning inside the rain and hear the cough of the mortar round called Whistling Dick. He climbed between Abigail Dowling's thighs and kissed the tops of her breasts and put her nipples in his mouth, then kissed the flat taper of her stomach and raised himself up on his arms while she cupped his sex with her palm and placed it inside her.

He came a moment later, early on beyond any attempt at self-control, his eyes tightly shut. Inside his mind he saw an endless field of dead soldiers under a night sky rimmed by hills that looked like women's breasts. But even as his heart twisted inside him and his seed filled her womb, he knew the safe harbor and succor she had given him were an act of mercy, and the tenderness in her eyes and the caress of her thighs and the kiss he now felt on his cheek were the gifts granted to a needy supplicant and not to a lover.

He lay next to her and looked at the shadows on her face.

"I'm sorry my performance is not the kind Sir Walter Scott would have probably been interested in writing about," he said.

"Oh, no, you were fine," she said, and touched the top of his hand.

He stared at the ceiling, wondering why ineptitude seemed to follow him like a curse.

He heard a plank creak on the front gallery and a knock on the door.

"Miss Abigail, the Yankees set fire to the laundry. They attacked some girls in the quarters. You in there, Miss Abby?" the voice of Flower Jamison said.