1.


A lone anhinga took flight, up up above palmetto and pine,
an absolute marvel to men eating morning biscuits aboard the troopship below.
They were invaders from Lincoln's North, silent, ever so silent,
along the River St. Mark's.
Alerted by native telegraph (whippoorwill, mockingbird), young
Billy Sam Jackson MacHugh removed the squirrel gun from its wall pegs,
kissed his sleeping Ma and strode forth to say goodbye
to his dead Pa's mule.

Boys and old men from Woodville, Crawfordville and Tallahassee
amassed the home militia at the natural bridge near the headwaters.
He owned no slaves. He read the Bible and taught Sunday school.
Someone had said the bluebelly Yankees
had come to take his land.

The setting red ball of sun seemed to his Ma, and possibly the mule,
that the towhead lad might never return.

Dawn found Billy Sam in a cornfield full of crows. Johnson,
a corporal from Wakulla, with whom he had intimately lain during the long night,
was dead and bloating with rot-gas. Silence prevailed upon the cold plain of battle.
Billy Sam took up Johnson's short saber and walked up the red clay trace
toward the field hospital. He passed through a grove of sable palm
and began to miss his Ma's swamp cabbage fritters.
She used red and red-bell peppers, butter biscuit flour and hog-grease shortning.

He found the surgeon's tent empty, its white tarp flapping in a gusty breeze
from the south, with olfactory illusions of a distant Gulf of Mexico.
There was laudanum.

By late afternoon he located the bivouac, men washing from portable basins,
smoking clay pipes, corn cobs too, gathered in victory. Billy Sam waved,
passing them by.

For a mile, he could smell the smokehouse: tangy, weighted aromas.
He left the red clay trace and, with Johnson's short saber, he cut
through a palmetto glade where the soil turned to sand. He knew the place.
It had no name, Spanish nor English, but Billy Sam called it Lost Lake.
The black man there could remember his own mama's Yoruban tongue.
Wild pigs were his specialty. He asked Billy Sam,
"Watchu got to trade fo' this mighty fine meal?" There was laudanum.

Half-risen, the tangerine sun opened God's eye and saw Hazel MacHugh
awake from a dream. She sat up in bed with a persistant pain in her lower belly.
All through the dream she was lying on her back and looking up at early corn.
Awake, she smiled. Her son lived! and the Battle at Natural Bridge had been won.
Praise the Lord!

On the shore of Lost Lake, Billy Sam sat on a pine log and enjoyed the sunrise.
There was sand in his ear and a fire-ant bite on his shin.

Crackers called them pig trails because instinctively the beasts knew the best routes
toward a common destination. These were beaten paths. Billy Sam wended
into savanna, up a subtle piedmont, passing under drooping mimosa.
There would be a burial mound next to the haunted slough that fed Indian Lake.
On the bluff beyond the broad waters stood a white-painted pinewood house,
grand in the manner of primitive Carpenter's Gothic, with a high cupola
and a telescope.

Narrow as her split-rail fence, Agnes Culpepper wore a red-checkered apron
over blue denim bib overalls (hogwashers, Billy Sam called them). She blew
frizzy strands of gray hair from her brow and watched his approach
from beneath the visor of her hand. Billy Sam saluted as he entered
the vast arbor of muscadine and scuppernong.
"Howdy, ma'am."
"Young Billy, good day!"

Saffron pillows filled with eider down captured his head and he was out.
When he awoke, Agnes gave him a hot blend of spiced chicory and coffee,
black and strong. He was wearing someone else's clothes. She sat
in a hickory chair by the bed. Curtains billowed from an open window
in the dusty breeze. In her hand was Johnson's short saber, crusted blood
along the groove.
"It belonged to a fellow about my age," Billy Sam began. "And he told me
he was from Wakulla."
"How did he die?"
"By Springfield ball."
"Did you know him well?"
"I did. Oh, Auntie, he told me such a tale. About the volcano."

A warm west wind with elements of a gathering storm gently furled
the gingham gown about her legs. She walked with Billy Sam
into the ripe arbor. A blister of troubled air
stalked the horizon like a great blue crab
with legs of lightning. Agnes picked two scuppernongs, handed one to Billy Sam
and ate the other.
"We will have a good wine."
"I believe so."
"The Yankees were defeated."
"Evidently so. It was all like the dream I drift in now."
"Stay with me."



2.



(to be continued)