PERHAPS obsession had sawed loose his fastenings to a reasonable view of the world, Willie thought. Or maybe he was diseased and pathologically flawed, to the extent he was no longer repelled by death and mortality and defeat and was instead drawn to the grave, to leaf-strewn arbors and green-stained markers fashioned from field-stones, where the air was vaporous and tannic and the light always amber and the voices of friends rose from the ground, whispering lessons he wanted to reach out and cup in his hand.

And what a companion he had chosen for his return to Shiloh-a one-eyed, barefoot, British-born minstrel named Elias Rachet who constantly plucked at a banjo and twanged on a Jew's harp and wore his shoes tied around his neck, in case, as he said, "we have to walk in nasty water and through cow turds and such."

The two of them stood in the early morning haze at the bottom of an incline that was dotted with wildflowers. At the top of the rise was a clump of hardwoods, dark with shadow, the canopy denting in the breeze. Willie thought he heard the iron-rimmed wheels of caissons knocking across rocks and the popping of flags in the wind, the jingle of a bridle and the nicker of a frightened horse in the trees. He yawned to clear his ears and turned in a circle and saw only the vastness of the forests and the dark, metallic-blue dome of sky overhead.

"Jim Stubbefield died right where the gray stones are at. See, there's five of them, just like big Indian arrow points that's been pressed down in the ground," Elias said, pointing. He leaned over and spit tobacco in the grass, then plucked at his banjo. The tremolo from his strings seemed to climb into his voice. "Lordy, I can still hear all our boys yelling. Would you go through it again, knowing what you know now?"

"Maybe."

"I tell myself the same thing. I always reckon God forgives liars and fools, being as He made so many of us," Elias said.

Elias was slat-toothed when he grinned, his face crinkling with hundreds of tiny lines. He looked away at a tea-colored creek that coursed through the edge of a woods. The wrinkles in his face flattened and his solitary eye became a blue pool of sadness. "I kilt a boy out there in them trees maybe wasn't over fifteen. He came busting down the hill and I whipped around and shot him right through the chest. A little bittyyankee drummer boy, much like your friend Tige."

Elias sat down on a large rock, his legssplayed, and picked at his banjo. His callused feet were rimmed with mud, his mouth down-turned, his jug head silhouetted against the pinkness on the bottom of the horizon.

"You're not going to cut bait on me, are you?" Willie asked.

"Both Jim's folks is passed?"

Willie nodded.

"Then I don't reckon they'll mind. I wish I was a darky," Elias said.

"Why's that?"

"'Cause I'd have an excuse for taking other people's orders all my life." Then he slapped the tops of his thighs and laughed and stomped his feet up and down in the grass. He laughed until a tear ran down from his empty eye socket. "Ain't this world a barrel of monkeys?"

"Take me to the grave," Willie said.

"Jim don't hold it against you 'cause you lived and he died."

Elias started to smile, then looked at Willie's expression and got up from the rock and arched a crick out of his back, his face deliberately empty.

The water in the creek was spring-fed and cold inside Willie's shoes as he and Elias waded across, a freshly carpentered, rope-handled box strung between them. The trees were widely spaced on the far side of the creek, the canopy thick, the ground gullied, crisp with leaves that had settled into the depressions scattered through the woods. Up the incline Elias studied an outcropping of rock that was cracked through the center by the trunk of a white oak tree.

He set down his end of the box. "We didn't have time to dig deep. Don't be surprised if animals has had their way with things," he said.

Willie opened the box and removed a shovel and a large square of sail canvas. He spread the canvas on the ground and began to dig at the base of the outcropping. The ground was carpeted with toadstools and mushrooms with purple skirts and moist from a spring farther up the incline. Overhead, squirrels clattered in the white oak and he felt himself begin to sweat inside his clothes. The soil he spaded to the side of the depression was dark and loose, like coffee grinds, and was churning with night-crawlers and smelled of decay and severed tree roots. The tip of Willie's shovel scraped across metal.

He got to his knees and began brushing the dirt from a copper-colored belt buckle embossedwith the letters CSA, then his fingers touched cloth and wood buttons and the skeletal outline of a rib cage, wrist bones, and fingers that were like polished white twigs.

"His shoes are gone. When we put him in the ground I was sure his shoes was on. I didn't let nobody take Jim's shoes, Willie," Elias said.

"I know you didn't," Willie said.

"Maybe it ain't Jim. There was shooting going on in the trees and people running everywhere."

Willie hollowed the dirt away from the corpse's shoulders and arms and sides, then brushed at the face, touching a piece of cloth that had moldered into the features. He picked up the bottom of the fabric and peeled it back from the chin and nose and forehead and looked down into a face whose skin had turned gray and had shrunken tautly against the skull. The mouth was open and a tin identification tag, still attached to a leather cord, was wedged perpendicularly between the front teeth. Willie clasped the tag between his thumb and index finger and lifted it from the dead man's mouth.

Willie spit on the tag and rubbed it clean on his pants, then read the name on it and wrapped it carefully with the frayed leather cord that had held it around Jim's neck and placed it in his shirt pocket and buttoned his shirt flap on top of it.

Then he took Jim out of the grave and laid him on the piece of canvas. He could not believe how light Jim was, how reduced in density and size he had become. There was no smell of corruption in Jim's body, no odor at all, in fact. The spring water had washed the blood from the wounds in his head, and the wind touched his hair and his mouth seemed to form a word.

Where have you been, you Irish groghead?

Had to take care of a few Yanks, run them out of New Iberia, set General Banks straight about a few things. Ready to go home, you ole beanpole?

"You're giving me the crawlies," Elias said.

Willie folded the corners of the canvas across Jim's body and face and lifted him in both arms, then laid him down in the wood box, with the knees propped against one wall, the head bent against another.

Then, on his hands and knees, he shoved the dirt back into the hole at the foot of the outcropping, packing it down, smoothing it, raking leaves across the topsoil. When he had finished, he glanced up at Elias and saw a mixture of pity and sadness in his face.

"He carried the guidon. He was braver than me. I loved Jim and care not if anyone calls me a ghoul. To hell with them," Willie said.

"Oh, Willie, would that I could change your soul as easy as I can rub the burnt cork on my skin," Elias replied.

IRA Jamison never got over being surprised by the way white trash thought. He assumed their basic problem was genetic. They were born in ignorance and poverty, with no more chance of success than a snowball in a skillet, but as long as they were allowed to feel they were superior to Africans, they remained happy and stupid and believed anything they were told.

They worked from dawn to dusk on other people's farms, bought at the company store, lived in cabins a self-respecting owl wouldn't inhabit, saw their children grow up with rickets and rotted teeth, and with great pride became cannon fodder in wars whose causes had nothing to do with their lives.