"Ain't no law against it. Not that I know of," Pinky answered.

"Sixteen of my men were ambushed and butchered on the St. Martinville Road. I think you're one of the men who looted the bodies," the general said.

"Not me. No, suh."

From behind the red barn there was a volley of rifle fire, then a cloud of smoke drifted out into the sunlight.

"Jesus God!" Pinky said.

"How did you come by five Spanish pieces-of-eight?" the general asked.

"Is that a firing squad out there, suh?"

"How did you come by the reals?"

"It's kind of private."

"Not anymore."

"Done a chore for a man. Me and two others."

"What might that be?" the general asked.

The man named Pinky blew his nose in a handkerchief.

"We was s'pposed to-" he began. But his voice faltered.

"Supposed to do what?"

"Fix an uppity nurse who don't know her place. I never stole in my life. Man who says so is a liar."

"Start over again."

"There's a Captain Atkins paid us to put the spurs to a troublesome white woman. She wasn't home so we give it to a darky instead. Three of us topped her. That's the long and the short of it. I ain't looted no dead Yankees."

"Sergeant, take this man to the provost-marshal. The paperwork will follow," the general said.

"Y'all sending me back home?" Pinky said. His eyes blinked as he waited for the general's response.

A half hour later Willie was standing once again in front of the general. Through the window he saw two Yankee soldiers escorting Pinky Strunk behind the barn, gripping him by each arm. He was arguing with them, twisting his face from one to the other.

"Sixteen of my men were butchered, their throats slit, their ring fingerscut off their hands. Don't be clever with me," the general said.

"The killers of your men are out yonder in the compound, General. Pinky Strunk isn't one of them," Willie said.

"Then you'd damn well better point them out."

A ragged volley of rifle fire exploded from behind the barn.

"Would you have a chew of tobacco on you, sir?" Willie asked.

That evening he stood at the barred window of a brick storehouse on the bank of Bayou Teche and watched the sun descend in a cloud of purple smoke in the west. It was cool and damp-smelling inside the storehouse, and the oaks along the bayou were a dark green in the waning light, swelling with wind, the air heavy with the fecund odor of schooled-up bream popping the surface of the water among the lily pads.

Other men sat on the dirt floor, some with their heads hanging between their knees. They were looters, rapists, guerrillas, jayhawkers, grave robbers, accused spies, or people who just had very bad luck. In fact, Willie believed at that moment that the nature of the crimes they had committed was less important than the fact that anarchy had spread across the land and the deaths of these men would restore some semblance of order to it.

At dawn, the general had said.

How big a price should anyone have to pay to retain his integrity? Willie asked himself. How did he come to this juncture in his life?

Arrogance and pride, his mind answered.

He could hear his heart pounding in his ears.

FLOWER Jamison did not sleep the night she was raped. She bathed in the iron tub behind Abigail Dowling's cottage, then put back on the same clothes she had worn before the attack and sat alone in the darkness, looking out on the street until Abigail returned home. "What happened?" Abigail asked, staring at the splintered door in the kitchen.

"Three men broke in and raped me," Flower replied.

"Federals broke in here? You were ra-"

"They were civilians. They were looking for you. They took me instead."

"Oh, Flower."

"What one man more than any other wants to hurt you? A man who hates you, who's cruel through and through?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do," Flower said.

"Rufus Atkins threatened me. Out there, in the street. Yesterday," Abigail said.

Flower nodded her head.

"I saw him give money to three men behind Carrie LaRose's house earlier today."

"That doesn't prove anything."

"Yes, it does. I saw a man's yellow teeth under his mask. I heard the coins clink in their pants. It was them."

"Are you hurt inside?"

"They hurt me everywhere," she replied.

She refused to use the bed Abigail offered her and sat in the chair all night. Before dawn, without eating breakfast, she left the cottage and walked down Main and stood under the wood colonnade in front of McCain's Hardware. She wiped the film off the window with her hand in several places and tried to see inside. Then she walked out in the country to the laundry where she had worked. It and the cabins behind it were burned to the ground.

She walked back up the road to the back door of Carrie LaRose's bordello. She had to knock twice before Carrie came to the door.

"What you mean banging on my do' this early in the morning?" Carrie said.

"Need to earn some money," Flower said.

Carrie looked out at the fog on the fields and the blackened threads of sugarcane on her lawn, as though the morning itself might contain either an omen or threat. She wore glass rings on the fingers of both hands and a housecoat and a kerchief on her head and paper curlers in her hair that made Flower think of a badly plucked chicken inside a piece of cheesecloth.

"Doing what?" Carrie asked.

"Cleaning, washing, ironing, anything you want. I can sew, too. The Yankees are calling us contrabands. That means the Southerners cain't own us anymore."

"Already got somebody to do all them things."

"I can write letters for you. I know how to subtract and add sums."

"Want money? You know how to get it," Carrie said.

"Thank you for your time, Miss Carrie."

"Don't give me a look like I'm hard, no."

"You ain't hard. You just for sale."

"You like a pop in the face?" Carrie said.

Flower looked.it the plank table under the live oak where Captain Rufus Atkins had counted out a short stack of heavy coins in the palms of the paddy rollers only yesterday afternoon.

"I axed for a job. You don't have one. I won't bother you anymore," Flower said.

"Wait up, you," Carrie said. She fitted the thickness of her hand under Flower's chin and turned it back and forth, exposing her throat to the light. "Who give you them marks?"

"I need a job, Miss Carrie."

"Abigail Dowling ain't gonna let you go hungry. You wanting money for somet'ing else, ain't you?"

Flower turned and walked down the steps and into the fog rolling out of the fields. It felt damp and invasive on her skin, like the moist touch of a soiled hand on her arm.

SHE wandered the town until noon, without direction or purpose. Many of the shops along Main Street had been broken open and looted, except the hardware store, which the owner, a man named Todd McCain, had emptied of its goods before the Yankees had come into town during the night. In fact, McCain had taken the extra measure of turning the cash register toward the glass window so passersby could see that the compartments in the drawer contained no money.

Yankee soldiers, some of them still drunk, slept under the trees on the bayou. She sat on a wood bench by the drawbridge and watched a steamboat loaded with blue-clad sharpshooters lounging behind cotton bales work its way upstream toward St. Martinville. The sharpshooters waved at her, and one pointed at his fly and held his hands apart as though showing her the size of an enormous fish.

The Episcopalian church, which had been a field hospital for Confederate wounded, had now been converted into a stable, the pews pushed together to form feed troughs. Flower watched the sun climb in the sky, then disappear among the tree branches over her head. She slept with her head on her chest and dreamed of a man holding a white snake in his hand. He grinned at her, then placed the head of the snake in his mouth and held it there while he unbuttoned and removed his shirt.