Devil's Dream (13 page)

Henri rode in the other direction, though really he felt concerned for Matthew more than for Willie now. The white son was likable enough, but often reckless, and it was true he took a great many things for granted. Henri came into a clearing where some stragglers from Cheatham’s regiment were stripping dead Federals of their tunics. Jerry was trudging diagonally across, gunnysack slung over his shoulder, still damp.

“Seen Willie?” Henri called to him, and Jerry replied without turning his head, “No I ain’t.”

Henri licked at his transfixed thumbnail. It didn’t help. Ahead of him Benjamin sat on the box of the ammunition wagon he drove. His mule had lowered its head to crop at a patch of spring grass and wild garlic that somehow had survived the recent trampling. When Henri asked him after Willie, Benjamin merely shook his head. The mule dragged the wagon a wheel turn forward, pursuing the path of its grazing. Henri bit at the splinter again, and winced.

“Let me see that,” Ben said, and reached for the hurt hand. His touch was gentle, warmly soothing. Henri became aware of the breath of his horse between his thighs. Ben’s head cocked to one side as he inspected the wound. Henri looked at the scar that crooked out of his close-cropped hair and struck down like a lightning bolt across his temple and down past his ear.

“This’ll smart,” Ben said, unfolding his razor-sharp whittling knife from his bib pocket and in the same arced motion splitting Henri’s thumbnail above the buried thorn.

“Bleu diable,”
Henri hissed, just managing not to snatch his arm
away. How ashamed he felt to be whimpering over a splinter while other men were getting their limbs blown off by grapeshot, just over the next ridge. Through a rip that opened in his mind he saw General Joe Johnston climbing through the mist toward the dead tree on the crown of the bare hill, still holding in his right hand the tin cup he’d used to direct the latest Confederate attack.

A long shiver ran from Henri’s heels to his head.

“Huh,” said Ben, displaying the bloody splinter he had drawn. “You got the sight.”

Henri looked at the bubble of blood rising where Ben had cleaved his thumbnail. The new pain was fresher, brighter, somehow less troubling. It occurred to him that if Willie were dead he probably would have seen that too.

“Thank you,” he said to Ben. As he spoke he saw Willie coming toward him among a couple of other young Confederate blades, herding a coffle of Federal prisoners, calling orders to them and smiling in the pride of his authority. Henri was too far off to hear what Willie said, but he realized he didn’t really need to go closer.

Henri rode north over from one glade, thicket or pasture to the next, toward the hills above the Tennessee River, scanning the shifting horizons for Matthew. No battle lines had been clearly drawn anywhere but there appeared to have been hot fighting everywhere. It was late afternoon, the light beginning to turn amber, when he rode into the remnants of the peach orchard. Half the little trees were shredded by shrapnel and the ground was carpeted with pink blossoms that shifted, rustling, as Henri rode through. A little further on he passed a solitary riding boot standing by itself in a shallow ravine where Isham Harris had poured it empty of Joe Johnston’s blood.

Henri set his teeth and rode toward the rumble of cannon on the ridge. Soon he could make out the gray horse’s speckled and bluish hide moving along the slope below the Federal battery. A little nearer to him he saw Matthew sitting his horse and shading his eyes with one hand against the setting sun. When Henri rode up, Matthew lowered his hand and blinked at him.

“Go tell him Willie’s all right, if you want,” Henri said.

Matthew’s face rippled as he thought it over. Then he steered his horse up the hill. Henri watched him claim Forrest’s attention, saw
Forrest briefly lay his hand on Matthew’s shoulder. When the contact had broken, he rode up to join them.

“Did ye happen to see General Johnston back thar?” Forrest inquired.

Not exactly, Henri thought.

“Polk? Beauregard? Anything at all as looks like a
commander?”
Forest squinted toward where some fifty Federal cannon were fisted tight together on the ridge. “Goddammit! I can smell the river. If somebody would just send me a few more men we could tumble all them bastards over the banks afore dark.”

But instead the order came for them to fall back, and Forrest, grumbling bitterly, obeyed it. They camped a short way south near the banks of the river, just out of range of the gunboats that had shelled their retreat from the ridge of Pittsburgh Landing, where Grant’s army was making what looked like a last stand. As dusk thickened, those closest to Forrest’s bedroll ate crawdads hot and pink from Jerry’s skillet, too ravenous to bother picking meat from crunchy shell.

Jerry dressed Henri’s hurt thumb with spiderweb. At moonrise, Forrest clothed him and Matthew and Major Strange in blue coats salvaged from the dead during the day, and sent them to reconnoiter up the river. They met one post of Federal pickets who let them pass with scant examination. In the vague moonlight shining on the slow flat surface of the river they could see the brushy southern tip of the oval island opposite Pittsburgh Landing. Henri covered a bullet hole in the captured coat with the ball of his hurt thumb. It felt like all the crawdads he had swallowed had woken up to scrabble around the inside of his gut. Fresh Federal troops were ferrying across the river by the thousand.

“We got to jump’m afore day,” Forrest said when he heard the news. “Else they’ll do us like they done us at Donelson.” He thought for a moment. “Like we done ourselves.”

He left the camp alone and was gone for hours. The moon had traveled half the sky when Henri propped up on an elbow to hear Forrest muttering mostly to himself.

“Cain’t find nobody to listen to me.” Air puffed out of him as he settled on his back. “This battle’s our’n to piss away, and we done pissed it.”

· · ·

T
WO RAIN-SOGGY DAYS LATER
, General William Tecumseh Sherman and his infantry command set out in pursuit of Rebel soldiers retreating down the road from Shiloh toward Corinth—abandoning all of the ground they’d won in the first phase of the battle. The Federals were four miles out of their camp when they came upon a long wide hollow strewn with timber. The trees had been felled in this long swale the year before but never hauled off to the sawmill. Bark flaking from them, covered with a fresh growth of spring vine, the logs lay every which way, crisscrossed just as they’d first fallen.

On the ridge beyond appeared a couple of Rebel horsemen. Sherman raised his glass to his eye. The riders didn’t altogether look like white men, and that puzzled him for a moment, but they were Rebels sure enough. He had no way of telling how many cavalry lay on the far side of that ridge, but it hardly mattered. The swale of fallen timbers would make a charge impossible; his foot soldiers would certainly have the advantage there.

“Yankees,” Matthew called, trotting his horse down toward Forrest. “Lots of them.”

“How many?” Forrest reined his gray around, pulled down the brim.

“Fifteen hundred and maybe more,” Henri said. “I don’t know. They’re still coming out of the trees.”

Forrest coughed. “That’s five to one on us. I wonder where in Hell they keep coming from.” He had a hundred fifty of his own men on hand and two hundred other horsemen Breckenridge had assigned to him for the rearguard actions of the day. He began dismounting these men now and ordering to the cover of trees or boulders along the top of the ridge.

“Yankees can’t ride for … beans,” Matthew piped up. He was still astride his horse and exposed on the open backbone of the hill.

“Git down from thar, and mind out for sharpshooters,” Forrest snapped. Then he stopped to look down the hill. “No, wait a minute.”

The blue skirmishers below were losing all semblance of a line as they began picking their way across the mossy logs. And the Yankee horses balked at every timber, though they were only going at a walk.

“They cain’t ride worth a good goddamn, kin they?” Forrest whispered, grinning at Matthew and Henri. And then in a shout: “Mount up, boys—let’s go find’m.”

T
HAT BLASTED CATERWAULING
—Sherman couldn’t get used to it; much of it as he’d already heard, it still raised the hair on the back of his neck. Or maybe it was the impossible disaster spread before him: two or three hundred Rebel horse flying down the ridge into the swale where his men blundered among the logs, flinging up great gobbets of mud from their hooves and leaping among the fallen timbers as nimbly as giant cats. His skirmish line had already been slashed to pieces; and now his regular infantry was on a stumbling run to the rear, with the Rebel riders hard after them. One of the Rebels, tall in the saddle, pistol in one hand and blade in the other, came riding far out ahead of the rest, guiding his speckled gray horse with his knees as the animal jumped one log after another, gaining speed as he reached open ground and bore down on the infantry battle line Sherman had hastily regrouped two hundred yards behind his skirmishers.

As the speckled gray’s pumping shoulders smacked into the troops, a segment of the blue line collapsed and began to boil. Forrest had knocked down four or five Yankees with rounds from his Navy six before it clicked empty. The saber in his left hand whirled around and around like the blade of a windmill, till it snagged on a Yankee collarbone and sprang free with a jolt that numbed his fingers for a second. He drew a foot-long knife from his waistband—better for close quarters anyway. His horse made a tight turn on bunched hindquarters and now Forrest saw that his men had not followed him … perhaps because they had better sense. He was alone amid a thousand of the enemy, still cutting relentlessly with his left hand and using his empty pistol as a club.

“Kill that man,” Sherman screamed, standing up in his stirrups so abruptly the horse shied under him and he almost fell. Others nearer Forrest were also shouting
kill him kill the Rebel
and then a trooper pressed the muzzle of his carbine against Forrest’s side and squeezed. The muffled concussion was blunt as a fist banging into him, but Forrest felt his right leg go numb. That infuriated him
more than ever, for what if they’d really done him some serious harm? He dropped the empty pistol into his pocket and used his free hand to snatch the scruff of the man who had fired and drag him up behind his saddle, while the left hand slashed at the fingers of a hand that had grasped at his knee.

“Will no one kill that madman?” Sherman howled. Forrest had now broken into the clear, and Sherman saw that his men were holding their fire in fear of hitting one of their own, whom Forrest had hauled up behind him to use as a shield. When once out of range he threw the little man down, shook his fist at him, spurred up and rode on.

Sherman hurled his hat on the ground. “How did you let him get away?”

One of his troopers raised a hand to explain, waggling stumps of two of his fingers. “That was no mortal man,” he said. “That’s the Devil.”

“S
IR, ARE YOU HURT
?” Kelley called as Forrest cleared the ridge. The gray horse streamed blood from so many wounds it was hard to tell where Forrest himself was bleeding.

“I’ll live,” Forrest said, through his clenched teeth. “Effen I don’t die.”

Cowan came toward him. “Will you get down and let me see to your wound?” he said. “That leg’s not right.”

“I know it ain’t right,”
Forrest snarled. “Let me oncet git to Corinth and then ye can pick at it all ye want.”

“Will you not ride in a wagon at least?” Cowan said.

“Damn straight I will not,” Forrest said. “That’d hurt a lot more than it already does.”

Cowan broke from him and came toward Matthew and Henri.

“How bad is it,” Matthew blurted.

Cowan glanced back at the bloody man on the bleeding horse. “By the look of that leg he’s been hit in the spine.” He paused. “I wish you two would ride ahead and send for Mrs. Forrest to come to Corinth.”

“As bad as that?” Henri said.

“Mary Ann’s the only one can talk sense into him,” Cowan said. “And if not, she’ll want to bury him, of course.”

A
RRIVED AT LAST
in the Corinth square, Forrest made to turn his horse back the way he had come.

“What are you doing,” Kelley asked.

“I believe that damn Yankee has done me in,” Forrest said. “I need to go back yonder and kill him.”

Kelley snorted. “You’ve done all the killing you’re going to for one day.”

But Forrest was no longer paying attention to him, because his horse was melting underneath him, slowly collapsing to the right. Forrest reached down with his right hand and pulled his right foot clear of the stirrup and rolled away from the dead animal as it hit the ground. Lying on his back, he reached out a hand to touch the horse’s blood-stiffened mane. Then he used both arms to turn himself over. The others watched him as if in a trance. All knew he would strike any man who moved to help him. Forrest pushed himself to his knees. Then somehow he was not only standing but limping toward the door of the hotel across the square.

“How in the Sam Hill is he doing that?” Kelley wondered. “That leg wasn’t working a minute ago.”

Cowan looked at him. “I don’t have the least dreaming notion,” he said. “But I reckon I better go try and find out.”

M
ANY OF
F
ORREST’S ESCORT
spent the remains of the day and the evening lingering on the square between the courthouse and the white hotel. The whole town hummed with General Johnston’s death and the fear that the Yankee hosts would next strike there. Few had heard enough of Forrest to feel much alarm about his injuries. Presently Benjamin came with two mules, noosed rope around the gray’s hind legs, and hauled the dead horse out of the square, leaving a drag trail smeared with blood in the dust.

Mary Ann Forrest arrived on the night train and hastened into the hotel, greeting the men on the steps with a thin smile, not slowing
her quick step. Dr. Cowan had not been seen for hours. Now and then Willie came out the side door of the hotel, all the jolliness drained out of him, furtively taking a few drags at a cigar stump before he hurried back inside. Henri watched Matthew watching Willie’s brief appearances, without so much of his usual hostility this time.