Devil's Dream (10 page)

By December 28 the goose had worn off enough that Henri’s pistols rode more comfortably in his belt. Forrest had parted from Mary Ann at Hopkinsville, and he and his men were riding up the road to Sacramento, following a report of five hundred Federal cavalry in those parts. The people in the little town of Rumsey came out in a state of high excitement to see them pass, children and dogs racing at the heels of the horses for a quarter-mile, and a young woman came riding out on a horse almost as fine as Forrest’s own. All the men took off their hats as she overtook them (she was an able rider too) and as she passed Henri a blue ribbon slipped loose from her strawberry hair. Private Terry, riding a length behind Forrest, caught it with a shout. But the girl had eyes for the commander only. She
rode beside him, loose hair shimmering in reddish streaks on the wind. Forrest bowed to her from the saddle, and for a moment their two horses seemed to waltz.

Then Captain Bill Forrest came pelting back along the road with word that the Federal rear guard was just around the bend ahead, and someone, maybe Captain Starnes, called out, “Will somebody send that wild filly home before she gets herself killed out here?” But the girl was gone; she’d jumped her sleek gelding over a rail fence and was cantering away across a field of corn stubble. Terry, staring after her, flourished her blue-ribbon favor in his fist, but the girl did not look back, and Forrest had forgotten her altogether, was hissing orders for Starnes and Kelley to leave the road on either side to flank the Federals, now forming to advance. Forrest himself drew out his saber with his right hand and stood up in the stirrups as he yelled for a charge on the Federal center.

Henri rode in his wake, closing his left hand over the reins, drawing a Navy Colt with his right. His horse was good but not the best in the vanguard. Private Terry and Captain Merriweather were well out in front of him, neck and neck with Forrest practically, when Henri saw the back of Merriweather’s head come off just in time to duck and to miss it splashing into his own face. Merriweather crashed down dead in the road and his horse shied off into a thicket of blackberry bramble. Henri, still leaning low, got off a shot between his horse’s ears, aiming as best he could at a clutch of brass buttons and a patch of blue, not seeing the effect. Forrest’s saber had somehow traveled from his right hand to his left and was running through the Federal Captain Bacon as Forrest shot another man off to his right with a six-shooter. Bacon had barely time to fall dead from his horse before Forrest barreled into the Federal Captain Davis, a second too late to stop him killing Private Terry with his saber (Terry had ridden between the two at a moment when Forrest’s head was turned the other way), too close and too quick to bring his blade to bear; Forrest struck Davis with all his weight and the weight of his horse, flinging the Federal Captain hard to the ground and riding through him till his mount tripped over another fallen Federal horse and fell, sending Forrest flying twenty feet forward over its head. Henri swept by, carried by his own momentum, firing his revolver into another melee surrounding Starnes; Forrest had already rolled to his feet, or
had landed on his feet like a cat, and Starnes hurled his empty revolver at the back of a fleeing Federal—they were all on the run now.

Henri pulled up his horse and turned. Forrest stood in the roadway, saber sheathed somehow, training his pistol on Captain Davis, who clutched his broken shoulder with one hand as the other weakly signaled his submission. Forrest’s face had turned the color of hot iron and the two little scars above his right eyebrow glowed like two red chinks in a stove, but his eyes burned liquid yellow. “A wild Indian!” Kelley yelled, bursting from a thicket left of the road. “No, a panther. My God, do we even know this man?”

“Name of the Lord, Chaplain,” Starnes said cheerfully, dismounting to recover the pistol he had thrown. But Henri was thinking of something else he had seen. Forrest, still aiming his pistol firmly with one hand, had crouched by the still warm corpse of Private Terry and touched the boy briefly with the other, on the wrist just below the fist still gripping the blue scrap of ribbon, and when he did so his face was pale and tranquil as a dreamer’s. Henri didn’t know when it had time to happen but he knew that it had.

“I’m no chaplain,” Kelley was saying. “A chaplain is a useless thing in war. I’ll fight when the fight’s on and preach when it ain’t.” He watched Forrest carefully as his burning eyes cooled and he lowered his pistol, finally accepting Davis’s surrender.

G
INRAL
J
ERRY HUNKERED
over a greenwood fire, turning hot grease in his iron skillet, tilting the crackling fat to the rim so the aroma drifted toward Forrest where he lay on a pallet of green boughs, resting from the wound he’d taken that last day of Shiloh. It was rather strange that he lay on his back since it was there the bullet had struck him, low and dangerously near to the spine. On the packed ground beside was a bare saber and on the other side a Navy six. His hands were folded over his breastbone and his cheeks sunken, skin waxy and pale, though Henri knew he was not dead. His nostrils flared slightly at the odor of the sack sausage Jerry was slicing into the sizzling grease, but his eyes stayed shut, shifting in dream beneath the lids.

Ginral Jerry worked cornmeal mush in a tin cup. Matthew sat on his heels beside him, balancing a bowl of pastel-colored birds’ eggs he had been climbing trees to forage. Henri heard rustling in the brush, over the brow of the hill behind the hollow tree, and he got up to investigate, covering the six-shooter in his belt with the palm of his hand. Montgomery Little and Nath Boone were climbing toward him, one holding back a snag of blackberry bramble for the other to pass. Henri was a little surprised to see them there since Little didn’t die till Thompson Station in 1863 and Boone, in fact, survived the war.

“My my,” Boone said, “Don’t that just smell good.” And Little: “Y’all mighty handy at foraging.”

Ginral Jerry showed them the whites of his eyes and said nothing, setting small white hoecakes into the grease. Henri looked the other way. Boone was all right but he was a little wary of Little, who’d
been the one to point out to Forrest that Henry wasn’t exactly a white man, back when their paths first crossed that morning on the Brandenburg road. His
Y’all
meant
you people
meant
you niggers
maybe.

“How’s the Old Man?” Boone’s shadow fell across Forrest’s pallet.

“He resten,” Ginral Jerry said. “He ain’t got no appetite.”

“A shame,” said Little. “When for once there’s something to feed him.”

Ginral Jerry’s eyes showed a little white. He pushed hoecake and sausage to the walls of the skillet. Matthew leaned forward and broke the tiny birds’ eggs one by one into the hot black ring of bare metal. They bubbled up quickly and were done almost at once.

Ginral Jerry served a portion onto a clean shake of wood and ran it under Forrest’s nose. When the commander didn’t stir, he set it down on Forrest’s chest, above his folded fingertips. Then he passed food around to the others.

“One?” said Little, looking at his miniature fried egg.

“One,” Ginral Jerry replied.

“They ain’t very big.”

“They ain’t very many of’m neither,” Jerry told him.

Little subsided. “Lord we ask you to bless this food. And to preserve our lives for your service.” He glanced toward the Roman, who whispered in Latin, eyes half-shut, clicking beads around the circle with his thumb.

They ate.

Forrest’s portion rose up and down on his chest with his slow breath. Little watched the regular movement. Henri felt that the white man was not sated and that his hungry attention would soon shift to him.

He opened the cylinder on his pistol and shook the cartridges out in his hand. Idly he spun the cylinder with his thumb, peering as if he meant to clean it. At the end of one tube of oiled metal he saw a vignette of Forrest, raising the head of his dead brother who’d just been shot, and in another he assiduously turned a grindstone against the edge of a long blade. Here was Henri himself, diving out an upstairs window of a Louisville tavern, and there he was again, running barefoot and breathless after a young doe.

“Well, Hank,” Little said. “I’ve oftentimes wondered.”

Henri sighed. He reloaded his pistol, snapped it shut, and tossed the chip of wood from which he’d eaten onto the fire.

“What exactly were you up to that day we found you on the road?”

Nath Boone, squinting a little, picked at his teeth with a wisp of straw.

“You had the look of … a runaway. Maybe?” Little said. “But you seem like an educated man.”

“Run away from where,” Henri said. “I was born free. The same as yourself. Well, not exactly. I’m not from this country.”

“I can tell that much from the way you talk,” Little said. “But why would a free nigger want to run South?”

“You don’t know where I was coming from, do you,” Henri said. “The world is round, if you haven’t heard that. And it’s bigger than you seem to think.”

Little opened his hands palm up on his knees. The fingers were long and slender, though calloused. “I’m just asking is all,” he said.

Henri got up and walked widdershins around the bare top of the knoll. The blackberry patch had vanished in fog. Through an aureole of the mist, a long way off and a long way down, he saw Forrest riding, riding, one hand holding a six-gun high and the other reached forward to stop the wound in the throat of his horse. When he passed behind the hollow tree he looked down again and saw the weary remnants of the Army of Tennessee marching over winter-hardened ground toward the trench south of Franklin where six thousand of them were to die. The air was full of the reedy music of Old Ones.

Henri walked back into the circle of men. “I came to raise a revolution,” he said. “Kill the white men and set the black men free.”

Little’s mouth had opened, round and dark. “A nigger rebellion.”

“A revolution, I said.”

“And kill the white people?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Then why in the hell are you fighting with us?”

“Who knows?” Henri said. “But I get to kill white people almost every day.”

Little looked over at Forrest where he breathed softly on his bed of green limbs. “What about him?”

“I don’t know about him,” Henri said. “He’s hard to kill.”

“And me?” Little was on his feet suddenly, as if something had stung him. “You think I’m easy?”

Easier than you want to be, Henri thought, but he didn’t say it. He felt sad for Little, who would soon be dead, and regretted having upset him. An Old One was blowing a flute in his ear, drilled out of one of Little’s own rib bones, and Little couldn’t even hear it.

Jerry was scraping his skillet with a bundle of twigs. “Y’all white folks done et,” he said. “Now you mise well go on about yo bidness.”

Little opened his mouth again. Nath Boone flicked his straw away and stood up. “Come on, Monty,” he said. “Don’t devil these people. There’s trouble enough.”

“All right, then,” Little said. He looked at Jerry. “We thank y’all for sharing your food.”

The two white men walked away from the hilltop. Two paces off the brow of the knoll the mist had swallowed them completely. Henri stood still, feeling his hands swing from his wrists like a pair of cannon balls hanging from chain. Matthew, sitting back on his heels again, was staring at him openly. Ginral Jerry was looking anywhere else. Forrest’s breath was just barely audible, a faint hiss like a bellows sustaining a coal.

May 1861

A
T SUNRISE
Forrest stepped down from the squared-off log that served as a back step for his house in Coahoma County and strode out toward the cotton fields. It was already warm and he wore no jacket, just linsey breeches and a pullover shirt with the lace hanging loose at the throat. He beat a straw hat against his thigh as he walked.

When he came out of the grove of oaks that shaded his house he was walking down a double row of cabins in the quarters. There were twelve of them, sound buildings all, the gaps between the logs chinked tight and the plank doors and shutters properly whitewashed. Benjamin had built them, one by one as they were needed, drafting help as he required it from among the middle-sized boys in the quarters. There was one of those boys might make a pretty fair carpenter himself before he was through. Benjamin had steadied up right well since Nancy had been returned to him, and they’d got three more children besides the one she’d been carrying when Forrest went to buy her back from Coldwater.