slid down the side of the house, covering the windows with tangles of branches and leaves.
I heard Alafair cry out in her sleep. I lit a candle, placed it in a saucer on top of her bookcase, which was filled with her collection of Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, and got in bed beside her. She wore her Houston Astros baseball cap and had pulled the sheet up to her chin. Her brown eyes moved back and forth as though she were searching out the sounds of the storm that seeped through the heavy cypress planks in the roof. The candlelight flickered on all the memorabilia she had brought back from our vacations or that we had saved as private signposts of the transitions she had made since I had pulled her from the submerged upside-down wreck of a plane off Southwest Pass: conch shells and dried starfish from Key West, her red tennis shoes embossed with the words Left and Right on the toes, a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill from Disney-world, her yellow T-shirt printed with a smiling purple whale on the front and the words Baby Orca that she had fitted over the torso of a huge stuffed frog.
'Dave, the field behind the house is full of lightning,' she said. 'I can hear animals in the thunder.'
'It's Mr. Broussard's cattle. They'll be all right, though. They'll bunch up in the coulee.'
'Are you scared?'
'Not really. But it's all right to be scared a little bit if you want to.'
'If you're scared, you can't be standup.'
'Sure you can. Standup people don't mind admitting they're scared sometimes.'
Then I saw something move under the sheet by her feet.
'Alf?'
'What?' Her eyes flicked about the ceiling as though she were watching a bird fly from wall to wall.
I worked the sheet away from the foot of the bed until I was staring at Tripod's silver-tipped rump and black- ringed tail.
'I wonder how this fellow got in your bed, little guy,' I said.
'He probably got out of his cage on the back porch.'
'Yeah, that's probably it. He's pretty good at opening latched doors, isn't he?'
'I don't think he should go back out there, do you, Dave? He gets scared in the thunder.'
'We'll give him a dispensation tonight.'
'A dis-What?'
'Never mind. Let's go to sleep, little guy.'
'Goodnight, big guy. Goodnight, Tripod. Goodnight, Frogger. Goodnight, Baby Squanto. Goodnight, Curious George. Goodnight, Baby Orca. Goodnight, sea shells. Goodnight-'
'Cork it, Alf, and go to sleep.'
'All right. Goodnight, big guy.'
'Goodnight, little guy.'
In my sleep I heard the storm pass overhead like freight trains grinding down a grade, then suddenly we were in the storm's eye, the air as still as if it had been trapped inside a jar; leaves drifted to the ground from the trees, and I could hear the cries of seabirds wheeling overhead.
The bedroom windows shine with an amber light that might have been aged inside oak. I slip on my khakis and loafers and walk out into the cool air that smells of salt and wet woods, and I see the general's troops forming into long columns that wind their way into other columns that seem to stretch over an infinitely receding landscape of hardwood forests fired with red leaves, peach orchards, tobacco acreage, rivers covered with steam, purple mountain ridges and valleys filled with dust from ambulance and ammunition wagons and wheeled artillery pieces, a cornfield churned into stubble by horses' hooves and men's boots, a meandering limestone wall and a sunken road where wild hogs graze on the bodies of the dead.
The general sits on a cypress stump by my coulee, surrounded by enlisted men and his aides. A blackened coffeepot boils amidst a heap of burning sticks by his foot. The officers as well as enlisted men are eating honeycombs peeled from inside a dead oak tree. The general's tunic is buttoned over his bad arm. A civilian in checkered trousers, high-top shoes, braces, and a straw hat is setting up a big box camera on a tripod in front of the group.
The general tips his hat up on his forehead and waves me toward him.
'A pip of a storm, wasn't it?' he says.
'Why are you leaving?'
'Oh, we're not gone just yet. Say, I want to have your photograph taken with us. That gentleman you see yonder is the correspondent for the Savannah Republican. He writes an outstanding story, certainly as good as this Melville fellow, if you ask me.'
'I don't understand what's happening. Why did your wounds open, what were you trying to warn me of? '
'It's my foolishness, son. Like you, I grieve over what I can't change. Was it Bacon that talked about keeping each cut green? '
'Change what?'
'Our fate. Yours, mine. Care for your own. Don't try to emulate me. Look at what I invested my life in. Oh, we were always honorable-Robert Lee, Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, A. P. Hill-but we served venal men and a vile enterprise. How many lives would have been spared had we not lent ourselves to the defense of a repellent cause like slavery?'
'People don't get to choose their time in history, general.'
'Well said. You're absolutely right.' He swings the flat of his right hand and hits me hard on the arm, then rises on his crutch and straightens his tunic. 'Now, gentlemen, if y'all will take the honeycombs out of your faces, let's be about this photographing business. I'm amazed at what the sciences are producing these days.'
We stand in a group of eight. The enlisted men have Texas accents, powder-blackened teeth, and beards that grow like snakes on their faces. I can smell horse sweat and wood smoke in their clothes. Just as the photographer removes his straw hat and ducks his head under a black cloth at the back of the camera, I look down the long serpentine corridor of amber light again and see thousands of troops advancing on distant fields, their blue and red and white flags bent into the fusillade, their artillery crews laboring furiously at the mouths of smoking cannon, and I know the place names without their ever being spoken-Culp's Hill, Corinth, the Devil's Den, Kennesaw Mountain, the Bloody Lane-and a collective sound that's like no other in the world rises in the wind and blows across the drenched land.
The photographer finishes and stoops under his camera box and lifts the tripod up on his shoulder. The general looks into the freshening breeze, his eyes avoiding me.
'You won't tell me what's at hand, sir?' I say.
'What does it matter as long as you stay true to your principles?'
'Even the saints might take issue with that statement, general.'
'I'll see you directly, lieutenant. Be of good heart.'
'Don't let them get behind you,' I say.
'Ah, the admonition of a veteran.' Then his aides help him onto his horse and he waves his hat forward and says, 'Hideeho, lads,' but there is no joy in his voice.
The general and his mounted escort move down the incline toward my neighbor's field, the tails of their horses switching, the light arcing over them as bright and heated and refractive as a glass of whiskey held up to the sun.
When I woke in the morning the rain was falling evenly on the trees in the yard and a group of mallards were swimming in the pond at the foot of my property. The young sugarcane in my neighbor's field was pounded flat into the washed-out rows as though it had been trampled by livestock. Above the treeline in the north I saw a small tornado drop like a spring from the sky, fill with mud and water from a field, then burst apart as though it had never been there.
I WORKED UNTIL ALMOST EIGHT O'CLOCK THAT EVENING. Power was still off in parts of the parish; traffic signals were down; a rural liquor store had been burglarized during the night; two convenience stores had been held up; a drunk set fire to his own truck in the middle of a street; a parolee two days out of Angola beat his wife almost to death; and a child drowned in a storm drain.
Rosie had spent the day with her supervisor in New Orleans and had come back angry and despondent. I
