Devil's Dream (14 page)

In the small hours Forrest sent for Kelley to come and bring a pen and paper. Some speculated on the courthouse steps that Kelley had been called to administer last rites or to take down Forrest’s testament or both. But Kelley, if he came out again, came by a different door. The first man out of the hotel at dawn was Ginral Jerry, shambling and shuffling, head bowed down (but then he normally walked so, Henri thought), eyes red and a little rheumy (but didn’t he always look so?).

How is he? Will he make it?
The men clustered round.

“He still kicken,” Jerry said. “Ole Miss wif him now.” He slipped through the others and walked toward the wagons where mules stood sleeping still in harness in a side street off the square.

The next man to appear was Cowan, raising a smashed minié ball high in a pair of forceps. The surgeon had washed his hands, Henri saw, but there was a crust of dried blood beneath his nails. The lump of crushed lead passed from hand to hand. “Is he going to live?” somebody said.

“I think so,” Cowan said. “Ask me, he’s too mean to die.”

Cowan went into the hotel to sleep. On the outskirts of Corinth, the roosters were crowing. The first real sunlight was staining the hotel facade when Kelley came up to the courthouse and dropped a bundle of newspapers on the lower step. He raised a hand to quiet the men spluttering questions at him, picked up a paper and folded it open.

“Hear this,” he began.

When he had finished Kelley smiled faintly and handed the paper to Nath Boone, who stood tracing the words with a fingertip, lips moving slightly. When he got to the end he dropped the paper against his thigh. “Ain’t it the truth?” he said to all. “Hit’s nobody can tell
us
what fun is.”

August 1857

M
ARY
A
NN HAD LAIN DOWN
through the worst of the late-summer afternoon heat, but could not sleep. Where men perspired, ladies must merely glow, and yet she felt herself to be sweating like a horse through the thin sheets between which she restlessly reclined. It was near four in the afternoon when she began to hear the household coming back to life on the floors below. She sat up and arranged her clothing and went down. On her way to the porch she collected a basket of pecans lately sent to the Forrest family as a compliment from friends in Georgia, and a pie pan to hull the nuts into.

Forrest’s sister Fanny was paying them a visit and had already settled herself on the porch with a bucket full of green beans to break. There too Mary Ann found Doctor Cowan, who sat on a rocker rolling an unlit cigar between his slender fingers.

“Too hot to smoke,” he said ruefully, glancing up as Mary Ann came out to join them.

“Ain’t it the truth,” she answered, aware of her just brushed hair already going lank against her forehead. “I can scarce draw a breath.”

She settled herself to crack and pick nuts, rocking gently as she worked—all three of them rocked, for the small motion stirred up the ghost of a breeze. Around the borders of the front yard a half-dozen magnolia saplings sagged, their limbs seeming almost too weak to support the glossy dark green leaves. A planting of grass in the yard had died out and the surface was going back to dirt. Too late for a watering to renew it.

Nut meats ticked against the tin. In the slave pens next door a commotion broke out. The sharply raised voice of John Forrest, a thump, a grunt, slap of a strap against something. A moment after these sounds had subsided, the high wooden gate of the pen creaked open and Catharine came out, unperturbed and moving languidly, carrying a twig broom. She came into the Forrests’ front yard by the waist-high picket gate and began to sweep dead leaves and dust across the surface of sere yellow grass.

Mary Ann folded her hands over the nuts. “There are times,” she remarked, “when I do wish my dear husband might take up some other line of work.”

Bite your tongue, she thought at once, forbearing to steal a glance at Fanny. It was the heat that made her feel quarrelsome, she thought.

“I don’t know …” Doctor Cowan raised a bushy eyebrow toward her. “Well, some of the family have thought so too, I reckon—You know your mother did.”

“I know she does still,” Mary Ann said, aware of a wry twist in her lips.

Cowan crossed his eyes on the tip of his cigar, then tucked it away in his breast pocket. “I won’t deny I felt the same in the beginning,” he said. “Everybody despises a slave-trader. It’s like he was a man defiled. But then there’s nobody in this country that don’t depend on slavery—”

“Now that’s a leaf right out of his book,” Mary Ann said.

Cowan rocked, reflecting. “Well, but leave the slaves a minute. Consider this. You may buy yourself a fine horse. Trained up and schooled to the last inch, till all you practically have to do is think where you want her to go, and there she goes, before you even need to touch her with your hand or heel.”

Mary Ann considered her own mare Nelly, whom Bedford Forrest had given her—the quick sensitive grace of all her movements. Animal knowledge. Half-consciously she watched the slave girl move through the yard, her back straight, head slightly inclined, expending the precise bare minimum of effort required to keep the dry broom whisking. Oh, and she was glowing, certainly; her sweat-darkened calico twinned with her hot flesh like sealskin.

“Who knows and cares for that mare the best?” Cowan said. “The one who uses her and rides her? Or the one who broke her and trained her to your service?”

How the Devil should I know? Mary Ann stopped herself from saying. Instead, feeling a cross knot tighten in the center of her forehead, she set aside the tin pan, stood up and dumped an apronful of broken nut shells onto a patch of yard Catharine had just swept.

“Hmmm. Perhaps it’s a little too warm, this afternoon, for philosophy.” Cowan smacked his palms on the knees of his trousers, then pushed himself out of his chair. “Ladies. I believe I may attempt a stroll.”

The picket gate didn’t catch, but drifted open slowly once Cowan had gone out. A lean tawny dog paused to look in, eyes dull with the heat and tongue lolling over black gums.

“Git, you.” Catharine stepped over to shake her broom at it, and snapped the gate firmly shut as the dog trotted off. Then she returned to sweeping up the nutshells, with the same faintly indolent grace as before, expressionless. There was nothing about her comportment that Mary Ann could have fairly called sullen. The futility of her spite lumped in her throat. Though she might have given the girl some new command, she simply watched as Catharine swept her liquid way toward the magnolias at the far end of the yard.

“Don’t you know he loves you?”

“I know it,” Mary Ann said, before she thought to ransack her memory for where in the previous conversation this question might spring from—they’d been talking about horses, hadn’t they … or had Fanny Forrest just read something straight out of her mind. She was Forrest’s twin, and looked much like him if you took away the beard, tall and rawboned and with the same strong features thrusting from her face—good-natured but somewhat abrupt in her manner, “plain-spoke” as she’d have put it herself.

“But now sometimes I wonder about it too.”

A couple of sparrows had landed in the shade of the magnolias now lengthening toward the porch across the yard. Mary Ann watched the little brown birds pecking in the dirt.

“Well,” Fanny said. “I know he loves you. More’n anything he’s got. More’n me or Mamma, or anybody really.”

She rocked, considering; her beans were done. “Except Fan, I reckon. How he loved little Fan … Too much, maybe.”

“Can a person love too much?”

Fanny didn’t respond to that. Mary Ann was watching Catharine, who had tucked up her broom and left the yard, and was moving at her molasses-smooth pace back toward the board gate into the slave pen.

“Suppose he loves her?” Mary Ann blurted.

“Well,” Fanny said. “Suppose he doesn’t.”

“Then he lies with her without loving her,” Mary Ann said. “And which way would I rather?”

“Sister,” said Fanny. “If it’s a thing you cain’t know, you might be better off not to think about it.”

August 1864

T
HE RAIN HAD SLACKED
a little when Henri came back into Oxford with a wagonload of corn foraged from the farmland east of the town. With Ginral Jerry and a handful of others from Forrest’s escort he’d spent the better part of the day playing hide and go seek with Federals of A. J. Smith’s command who were also scouring the country for supplies, and with better success since they were four times as numerous.

“Rosen-ears!” Lieutenant Dinkins called out brightly, slipping up to the wagon to peel back a green shuck.

“Git
yo’ dirty paws offa that corn,” Ginral Jerry told him. Dinkins hunched his shoulders and pretended to slink away. Forrest looked toward them from where he stood with Chalmers on the lowest of the courthouse steps, his boots slathered to the top with tar-black Mississippi mud.

“That ain’t no rosen-ears,” he said. “That’s hoss-corn.”

“General,” Chalmers called his attention back. “What do you mean for me to do while you are gone?”

“Play like we ain’t gone nowhere.” Forrest’s dark eyes turned toward Henri. “Well, Ornery? Air ye ready to go?”

Go where, Henri thought. He said nothing. He had been riding around the country all day.

Forrest’s whole face brightened. He grinned through his beard, then let out a wild cackle that brought every ragged soldier lounging under the eaves around the square to his feet, whether booted or bare.

“Come on, boys,” Forrest whooped. “We’re a-goen to Memphis!”

· · ·

T
HE RAIN PICKED UP
as night fell and the column moved west on the road toward Panola, two by two. Henri rode beside the wagon, watching water stream off the brim of his hat, trying not to listen to the growling of his stomach.

“Cornbread,” Lieutenant Dinkins said suddenly. “By Godfrey, I smell cornbread.”

“Leave your dreaming,” Henri said.

“No, Hank, but I swear I do. Hot pone at two o’clock and not three hundred yards forward.”

“Hesh up,” Ginral Jerry said from the wagon. “You maken me think I smells it too.”

But around the next bend of the road they came upon a couple of dozen women of the country standing under a brush arbor by a long trestle table, handing up pieces of cornbread to every man as they passed. Henri got a chunk the size of his fist. It had a drip of molasses on it to boot. The burst of saliva at the back of his mouth was painful when he took the first bite.

“Glory be,” Dinkins said, with real reverence, before he stopped his mouth with cornbread. Henri forced himself to eat slowly. He liked riding near Dinkins, who was a cheerful soul. Scarce twenty years old, he still managed to live the war as a frolic. He never seemed to know that his feet were blistered to his iron stirrups, bleeding through the socks that were all he had to cover them. The rain poured down. Henri rode on, content with the bread still warm in his belly.

“When we once get to Memphis,” Dinkins said softly, “I mean to have me a buttermilk biscuit.”

I
T WAS STILL DARK
when they reached Panola, but the rain had stopped at last and the birds were starting to tune up in shrubs and trees by the side of the road. They stopped to shed horses and men too weak to continue. Forrest sent back two cannon as well. The two remaining needed double teams to drag them through the mud. They crossed the Tallahatchie River with the rising sun warm on
their faces and continued north, a slingshot west of the railroad track. Men who hadn’t seen the sun for days cheered up as their clothes began to dry, and started to brag of all they’d do in Memphis.