"Come out, lads. None of us enjoys this. We'll make it as easy and dignified as possible," the Yankee officer at the door said.

"Come in and get us, darlin'," a prisoner in the back of the room said.

Clouds moved across the sun and the countryside dropped into shadow again, the cane in the field bending in the breeze, the air sweet with the smell of morning. Willie heard horses coming hard across a wood bridge, then the shouts of men and the ragged popping of small-arms fire.

Suddenly there were horsemen everywhere, over a hundred of them, dressed like beggars, some firing a pistol with each hand, the reins in their teeth. The prisoners surged out of the storehouse, knocking the captain to the ground, attacking his men.

A wheeled cannon on one corner of the prisoner of war compound lurched into the air, blowing a huge plume of smoke across the grass. One second later a load of grapeshot slapped against the walls of the red barn used as the execution site, accidentally cutting down a squad of Yankee soldiers in its path.

Willie bolted from the door of the storehouse and ran with dozens of other men toward the bayou, while mounted guerrillas and what looked like regular Confederate infantry fired into the Yankees who were trying to form up in the middle of the compound. A shirtless man on horseback thundered past him, the guerrilla leader with the pinned-up hat riding on the rump, clinging to the cantle. The guerrilla leader looked back at him, his face like an outraged jack-o'-lantern under his hat.

Willie heard the whirring sound of minie balls toppling past his head, then a sound like a dry slap when they struck a tree. He plunged through a woman's front yard, tearing down her wash as he ran, scattering chickens onto the gallery. He crashed through her front door and out the back into a grove of pecan trees, then the lunatic from the storehouse was running in tandum with him, his vinegary stench like a living presence he carried with him..

They dove into the bayou together, swimming as far as they could underwater, brushing across the sculpted points of submerged tree branches, a stray minie ball breaking the surface and zigzagging through the depths in a chain of bubbles.

Their feet touched bottom on the far side, then Willie and what he had come to think of as his lunatic companion were up on the bank, running through a cane field, the blades of the cane whipping past their shoulders.

They fell out of the cane field into a dry irrigation canal, breathless, collapsing on their knees in the shade of persimmon trees. Willie threw his arm around the shoulder of the lunatic.

"We made it, pard. God love you, even if you're a graduate of Bedlam and have nothing kind to say about His chosen people, that being the children of Erin," he said.

The lunatic sat back on his heels, his chest laboring, his blackened mouth hanging open. Willie fastened his hand on the man's collarbone, kneading it, grinning from ear to ear at his newfound brother-in-arms.

"Did you hear me? I bet you're a good soldier. You don't need to ride with brigands. Come with me and we'll find the 18th Louisiana and General Mouton," he said.

The lunatic's mouth formed into a cone and he pressed four stiffened fingers into his sternum as though he were silently asking Willie a burning question.

"You got the breath knocked out of you?" Willie said.

The lunatic shook his head. Willie cupped the lunatic's wrist and removed his fingers from his chest. A ragged exit wound the circumference of a thumb was drilled through his sternum. Willie caught him just as he fell on his side.

"The Yanks have fucked me with a garden rake, cabbage head. Watch out for yourself," the lunatic whispered.

"Hang on there, pard. Someone will be along for us directly. You'll see," Willie said.

The man did not speak again. His eyes stared hazily at the shadows the clouds made on the cane field and the mockingbirds swooping in and out of the shade. Then he coughed softly as though clearing his throat and died.

Willie rolled him onto his back, placed his ankles together, and covered his face with a palmetto fan. Then he buttoned the dead man's butternut coat over his wound and crossed his arms on his chest.

Other escaped prisoners ran past him, some of them armed now, all of them sweaty and hot, powdered with dust from the fields. He heard a rider behind him and turned just as the guerrilla leader reined his horse and glared down at him, his horse fighting the bit, spooking sideways.

The guerrilla hit the horse between the ears with his fist, then stood in the stirrups and adjusted his scrotum, making a face while he did it. The inside of his thighs were dark with sweat, as though he had fouled himself. "That's the body of my junior officer you're looting," he said.

Willie got to his feet.

"You're a damn liar," he said.

"I'll remember your face," the guerrilla said.

He galloped away, twisting his head to look over his shoulder one more time.

WILLIE wandered the rest of the day. The sky was plumed with smoke from burning houses and barns, and by noon a haze of dust and lint from the cane fields turned the sun into a pink sliver. He saw a Confederate rear guard form up in a woods and fire a volley across a field at a distant group of men, then break and run through a gully and board a rope-drawn ferryboat and pull themselves across the Vermilion River, all before he could reach them.

He saw wild dogs attack and tear apart a rabbit in an empty pasture. He passed Confederate deserters who had hidden in coulees or who walked on back roads with their faces averted. He saw four wagons loaded with Negroes and their possessions stopped at a crossroads, wondering in which direction they should go, while their children cried and one man tried to jerk an exhausted horse up on its legs. At evening he saw the same people, this time on the riverbank, without the means to cross to the other side, frightened at the boom of distant artillery. He rooted for food in the charred ruins of a cabin and licked the fried remains of pickled tomatoes off scorched pieces of a preserve jar.

He climbed into a mulberry tree and watched a column of Union infantry, supply wagons, and wheeled field pieces that took a half hour to pass. When night came the sky was black with storm clouds, the countryside dark except for the flicker of cannon fire in the north. He lost the Vermilion River, which he had been following, and entered a high-canopied woods that swayed in the wind, that had no undergrowth and was thickly layered with old leaves and was good for either walking or finding a soft, cool place that smelled of moss and wildflowers where he could lie down and once more sleep the sleep of the dead.

He paused under a water oak, unbuttoned his fly, and urinated into the leaves. Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement back in the trees and heard the sound of field gear clanking on men's bodies. He mounted the trunk of a tree that had fallen across a coulee and ran along the crest of it to the other side, right into a Union sergeant who aimed the.50 caliber muzzle of a Sharp's carbine at his face.

Willie raised his hands and grinned as though a stick were turned sideways in his mouth.

"I'm unarmed and offer no threat to you," he said.

The sergeant's kepi was low on his brow, one eye squinted behind his rear sight. He lowered his carbine and looked hard into Willie's face. The sergeant had dark red hair and wore a mustache and goatee and a silver ring with a tiny gold cross affixed to it on his marriage finger. Willie could hear him breathing heatedly in the dark.

"No threat, are you? How about a fucking nuisance?" he said.

"The pacifist turned soldier?" Willie said.

"And you, a bloody hemorrhoid," the sergeant replied.