Devil's Dream (18 page)

By the campfire Ginral Jerry sat with his head thrown back against the bole of pine, snoring, though the whites of his eyes showed a little. Willie lay near him, feigning sleep. Forrest squinted at him for a second, judged the boy would be asleep for real in another two or three minutes or so.

He stretched on the blanket Jerry had unrolled for him, shifting hip and shoulders to loosen the sand underneath. Was there something to think about? No, it would keep.

Forrest twitched and smiled in his sleep. His hard hand thumped the dirt beyond the blanket’s edge. Sitting with his knees drawn up, Willie studied him cautiously until he had stilled. A cloud of mosquitoes hovered over Forrest’s head, looking for a way in through wild hair and beard. Willie got up and crept barefoot toward the horses, his boots clamped under one elbow and his pistol belt in the other hand.

The panther slipped from tree to tree through Forrest’s dream. On some other ridge the dogs were singing, but Forrest was nearer to his prey than the dogs were, and he could see plain as day despite the dark. That was because he was dreaming, of course. While his aunt inspected the dressing of the wounds on his mother’s back, Bedford set his mouth in a pale line, lifted the octagon-barreled rifle and the powder horn down from the pegs, and went on the big cat’s trail without a word, though his aunt called for him not to go. Sister Fanny knew better than to say anything, and the least ones were busy playing with the chicks on the puncheon floor. His mother said nothing. She was lying facedown with her chin hanging over the edge of the pallet, her eyes big and dark, biting her lower lip against the sting of the turpentine on the red furrows the panther had plowed down her back.

Outside the dogs found sign at once and raced after it bugling, but Bedford scarcely attended to their racket. It seemed to him that there was a clear lucid filament passing through the woods to join his mind to the mind of the panther so that he already knew when and where the animal would be brought to bay and had only to keep walking steadily toward that time and place, his eyes as wide and round as the moon would have been. But it was a moonless night.

· · ·

“H
ELL AND
I wasn’t shore it was you!” Willie said when he found Henri and Matthew in a clearing. “It’s loose niggers running all over these woods.”

Henri picked out Matthew’s profile against a patch of starlit sky. The boy’s lower jaw stuck out a little from the strain of clenching his teeth.

“Well, it’s true,” Willie said to their backs.

They rode on through a silence that slowly surrendered its edge. Thirty minutes on, Henri’s horse raised its head and flared its nostrils.

“We’re not far from the river,” Willie said quietly, and Henri guessed he could smell the water too.

It was Willie too who picked up the first flicker of movement by the boulder on the bank, or maybe he heard something, smelled something—of a sudden his whole body lined up behind the barrel of his pistol like a bird dog throws its whole self into its pointing nose. A man stood up slowly from the rock with his empty hands upraised and his head lowered. Against the dim quicksilver sheen of the Chattooga they could all see his body shaking.

“Massa!” The voice trembling too. “We ain’t go to do it. It was deh Yankees …”

There was the softer speech of the deepest Deep South, somewhat unaccustomed to Henri’s ear still. He strained his eyes against the shadow of the rock. There was something else there and Matthew had trained his pistol on it. Henri got down from his horse and struck a light. A woman sat in the shelter of the boulder, cradling a baby in a cloth sling against her breast. She was very young, and the child not three weeks old.

“Put up those pistols,” he told the boys, and cupped the flame to shine on his own face. “Stop acting like a slave,” he said. “I’m no man’s master but my own.”

“I
is
a slave,” the man said. But he straightened his back and stopped shaking.

Henri nodded to the woman by the rock, and snuffed his light. “Have you been with Colonel Streight?”

“Yassuh,” the man said. “Whole lotta folkses gone with him at fust. He say he gone care us to freedom.” The man looked out across the water. “He cain’t care nobody nowheh now. Half dem hoss sojahs
done landed on dey feets. Wo’ out till they cain’t keep they eyes open no mo’.” He laughed softly. “Dem mules dey got too mean to tote’m no way. And don’t you know dey jess plum tuckered. I seen one yestiddy walk spang into a tree.”

“Where are you from?” Henri asked.

“Peck’s plantation. Over to Gadsden.” The man shrugged. “We’d go back theh now if we known the way.” He looked at Henri, eyes narrowing slightly. “Who y’all with?”

“Bedford Forrest.”

“Bedford Forrest?
He the wust man in all deh state. What dem seh. In all deh South, dey do seh.”

Henri smiled in the dark. “I’d rather be with him than against him.”

“Dem Yankees do seh Forrest after’m.”

“They’re right about one thing anyway,” Willie said from the saddle.

“Which way’s the ferry from here,” Henri said, and the man pointed east along the river. Out of the darkness the panther screamed again but the voice was cut off midway by a shot. Henri shuddered.

“Rabbit run ovah yo’ grave,” the man said, looking at Henri with the same curiosity. If anyone else had heard the sound they gave no sign.

A
T LAST HE FOUND
the big cat knotted in a high crotch of a leafless oak, just below the crown of the ninth hill he’d climbed since leaving the cabin. He sat cross-legged below the tree, the long rifle sticking straight up from his folded knees, waiting for the light to come. Presently the dogs caught up with him; he calmed them and made them wait quietly as he. At dawn the panther gathered itself, focused its hot yellow eyes. Its smell grew muskier. Bedford stood and leveled the gun as the panther screamed and flung itself at him. The dead weight bowled him over, one claw tearing a gash on his forearm, though he’d hit it square between the eyes and it was just convulsion working now. As the dogs raced a yelping circle around them he cut the cat’s throat and, deliciously, washed in the blood.

· · ·

H
ENRI HELD
the horses on the bank while Matthew and Willy, cooperating smoothly for once in their vexatious lives, poled the ferry midstream. They’d just begun to swim back to shore when Henri thought he heard hoofbeats away in the woods to the west. He scurried along the bank, not daring to call, beckoning furiously, and uselessly since the boys had their heads down and couldn’t see him. Sleek as otter they came out of the water and Henri hurried them and the horses into a clump of cedars, seconds before Streight’s scouts appeared on the riverbank.

Two hundred yards downriver, the ferryboat struck a snag and began to rotate as it drifted away. The Federal scouts stared after it dolefully. “There’s supposed to be a bridge at Gaylesville,” one of them said.

A
T NINE O’CLOCK
the next morning Forrest overtook Streight at Lawrence Plantation, where he’d stopped to try to feed his mounts and men. The Federals were inside twenty miles of Rome but one of Forrest’s detachments had beaten them to the bridge there. When Streight ordered his men into a battle line, they lay down on the ground and went to sleep, scarcely disturbed by the balls of Confederate skirmishers buzzing over like low-flying bumblebees.

“He’s a hard man to whup,” Forrest said, all the same. “Let’s see cain’t we fox him.” The numbers were still running a long way against him, though he knew Brother Bill and others who’d been captured would do all they could to inflate the enemy’s idea of his strength.

He looked behind him. What men he had left were drawn up in cover of a fringe of trees on a low ridge. To the left was a space where a gap in the tree line left about fifteen yards of bare hilltop. Forrest turned to Henri with a grin.

“Ornery!” he said. “How many cannon has kept up?”

Henri didn’t want to answer. Over his shoulder, Matthew spoke up: “Two.”

The shadow of a frown flicked across Forrest’s face. “Hit don’t
matter,” he said, and again showed his teeth. “I want ye to bring’m acrost that knob whar the Yankees can see. And I don’t mean just the one time neither.”

Streight’s men, Forrest saw when he went in to parley, were so beat they lay facedown snoring in the mud and the officers kicking them could not get them up. Streight himself looked like he might have some fight in him yet. He was burlier than Forrest, though not as tall, with a thin mustache and a heavy black beard. His hair receded on either side of a high pale forehead, leaving an island in the middle. Maybe his hair had been falling out faster the last few days, Forrest hoped. But there was a set to Streight’s blunt features that put him in mind of a snapping turtle.

“I won’t surrender unless you show me your force,” he said.

“That’ll be blood on your head, then,” Forrest said. “Yore own boys’ blood. I got men enough to whup ye outen yore boots.”

He shifted his weight to his heels as he saw Streight was peering over his shoulder. He’d set his back to his own line, so that Streight could see the progress of his supposed artillery, and by now the single pair of cannon must have crossed that gap more than a dozen times. Forrest’s officers had amplified the stratagem by marching a few dozen men around the same circuit, till their numbers appeared to mount in the hundreds.

“All right, then,” Streight breathed.

“That’s the way,” Forrest said, and pointed to a tree. “Ye can jest have yore boys stack their guns right thar.”

There were not quite four hundred of Forrest’s men who had kept up with him still, and when they came forward to take charge of the captured arms, Streight dashed his hat onto the ground. “Give me back my guns and we’ll fight it out.”

Forrest laughed and tapped him on the shoulder.

“You tricked me,” Streight said bitterly. “You lied.”

“I’ll tell ye what.” Forrest’s voice hardened. “I never ast ye to come down here no-way. I’m sorry if ye feel ye been hard used.”

July 1863

W
HEN POSSIBLE
Henri liked to find a rock to sleep on, though of course he often couldn’t do it. But there were plenty of limestone shelves all over North Georgia and North Alabama and West Tennessee. If it was dry he didn’t mind the hardness of it, and he believed a stone pallet gave him a little advantage over whatever might come crawling while he slept. One dawn he’d opened his eyes on the sight of Nath Boone cautiously pouring a copperhead out of his boot. Another time it was a shout that roused him and there was Willie Forrest, gabbling and shuddering as he flung a foot-long writhing red millipede from his clothes.

If Henri slept well, the slab of stone would turn beneath him, rising and falling like a plank on billows of the ocean, or even sail away into the wind, so that he dreamed the drifting flight of a fringed palm leaf, long enough and plenty for him to stretch out his whole body on the air. There were no such leaves where he slept now, but he knew them well in the country he came from. They had leaves like that in Louisiana too.

Often when he left a dream like that it took more than a moment for him to understand where he had landed in the living world. This morning they were riding hard, but he didn’t feel the verve of pursuit. They must not be chasing then. He began to feel sure that they were running. Here was a town of some description. Cowan, Tennessee, in fact—clawed out of not much in the Cumberland foothills about ten years before, called into being by a railroad coming through. Forrest’s wife’s family had been on this ground for fifty years or so, when there were farms and not much town. Before that it was Indians.

The riders splashed across a fork of Boiling Creek, and soon after clattered over the railroad track. A ways out of Cowan, a tunnel had been blasted through the mountain to let the railroad through, and the last few days there had been talking of blowing it up, so as to stop the Yankees using it to chase Bragg south to Chattanooga. But then the Confederates needed that passway just as much. “Hit’s more than a notion to tear that thang down,” Forrest said, “and builden it back won’t be no easier.”

They rode by the log courthouse, not stopping to parley. A clerk in his shirtsleeves popped out the door and stood staring after them, arms akimbo—then turned and raised one hand to shade his eyes as he looked back along the way they had come. Then he darted inside and banged the door. Others in the hamlet were barring shut their houses, reasoning that Yankees must be hard on the heels of such a precipitate Confederate flight.

The last few days they’d been fighting running battles with the forward-most detachments of Rosecrans’s Federal cavalry. Fighting and running. Forrest liked running into the thick of the enemy—not away. But Bragg and his whole army had been outmaneuvered and flushed from the East Tennessee Valley; Bragg’s command was scuttling south across the Tennessee River to find shelter in the mountains back of Chattanooga. At the evening halt, Forrest would draw Bragg’s name in the dirt with the toe of his boot and spit on the word before he slept. “What a sorry ass they done give me to cover.” He said that like it was a prayer.