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"I can't eat. I think I got a stomach cold. Can't hold anything down," Jim
said, walking into the shadows so Willie could not see his face.
The sun dipped below the hills and suddenly the woods were cooler the sky the
color of coal dust, without moon or stars, the tree branches knocking together
overhead, to the north there were fires on the bluffs above the river and
Willie thought he could feel the vibrations of gun carriages and caissons
through the ground.
Five men and a drummer boy from the 6th Mississippi, in butternut pants and
homespun shirts, were sitting around a fire, six feet away, smoking cob pipes,
laughing at a joke.
"Who's out there?" Willie asked them, nodding toward the north.
" 'Who's out there?' Where the hell you been, boy?" a tall man with a concave
face said.
"Corinth."
"Them bluffs and ravines is crawling with Yankees. They been out there for
weeks," the man said.
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"Why not leave them be?" Willie asked.
"We done turned that into a highly skilled craft, son. But the word is we're
going at them tomorrow," the man said.
Willie felt his stomach constrict and sweat break on his forehead. He went out
of the firelight, into the trees, and vomited.
Fifteen minutes later Jim came back to the fire and sat down on the log beside
Willie, his sheathed bowie knife twisting against the log's bark. Willie
sniffed the air.
"What have you been up to?" he asked.
Jim opened his coat to reveal a half-pint, corked bottle stuck down in his
belt. The clear liquid it contained danced in the firelight.
"This stuff will blow the shoes off a mule," he said.
Three soldiers with a banjo, fiddle, and Jew's harp were playing a dirge by
the edge of the ravine. The men from the 6th Mississippi were lying on their
blankets or in their tents, and the drummer boy sat by himself, staring into
the fire, his drum with crossed sticks on top resting by his foot. He wore an
oversized kepi, and his scalp was gray where his hair had been bowl-cut above
his ears. His dour face, with downturned mouth and impassive eyes, was like a
miniature painting of the Southern mountain man to whom sorrow and adversity
are mankind's natural lot.
"You get enough to eat?" Jim said to him.
"Pert' near as much as I want," the boy replied.
"Then I guess we'd better throw away this mush and bacon here," Jim said.
"Hit don't matter to me," the little boy said, his face as smooth and
expressionless as clay in the light from the fire.
"Come over here and bring your pan," Jim said.
The boy dusted off the seat of his pants and sat on a stump by Willie. He
watched while Willie filled his pan, then he ate the mush with a spoon, his
thumb and index finger all the way up the handle, scraping the food directly
into his mouth.
"What's your name?" Willie asked.
"Tige McGuffy," the boy said.
"How old might you be, Tige?" Willie asked.
"Eleven, pert' near twelve," the boy said.
"Well, we're mighty pleased to meet you, Tige McGuffy," Willie said.
"This mush with bacon is a treat. I ain't never quite had it prepared like
that," Tige said. "How come you was puking out in the trees?"
"Don't rightly know, Tige," Willie said, and for the first time that day he
laughed.
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Out on the edge of the firelight the musicians sang,
"White doves come at morning
Where my soldier sleeps in the ground.
I placed my ring in his coffin,
The trees o'er his grave have all turned brown."
Jim stood up and flung a pine cone at them.
"Put a stop to that kind of song!" he yelled.
As the campfires died in the clearing, Jim and Willie took their blankets out
in the trees and drank the half-pint of whiskey Jim had bought off a Tennessee
rifleman.
Jim made a pillow by wrapping his shoes in his haversack, then lay back in his
blankets, gazing up at the sky.
"A touch of the giant-killer sure makes a fellow's prospects seem brighter,
doesn't it?" he said.
Willie drew his blanket up to his shoulders and propped his head on his arm.
"Wonder how a little fellow like Tige ends up here," he said.
"He'll get through it. We'll all be fine. Those Yankees better be afraid of
us, that's all I can say," Jim said.
"Think so?" Willie said.
Jim drank the last ounce in the whiskey bottle. "Absolutely," he replied."Good
night, Willie."
"Good night, Jim."
They went to sleep, their bodies warm with alcohol, with dogwood and redbud
trees in bloom at their heads and feet, the black sky now dotted with stars.
Chapter Seven
THEY woke the next morning to sunlight that was like glass needles through the
trees and the sounds of men and horses running, wagons banging over the ruts
out on the Corinth Road, tin pots spilling out of the back of a mobile field
kitchen.
They heard a single rifle shot in the distance, then a spatter of small-arms
fire that was like strings of Chinese firecrackers exploding. They jumped from
their blankets and ran back to the clearing where they had cooked their food
and stacked their Enfields the previous night. The air was cinnamon-colored
with dust and leaves that had been powdered by running feet. Their Enfields
and haversacks lay abandoned on the ground.
The men from the 6th Mississippi were already moving northward through the
trees, their bayonets fixed. Tige McGuffy was strapping his drum around his
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