Devil's Dream (2 page)

Henri crouched to lift the carcass of the doe and slung over the mule’s withers. The mule shied at the first movement, tossing his black maul-shaped head, but quieted once the load had settled. Henri vaulted up behind. The black man tossed him the lead rope and he leaned across the still warm body of the doe and into the mule’s neck to fasten the loose end to the hackamore for a makeshift bridle.

“Henry,” said the captain. “You must be hongry to run down a deer and kill it with a knife thataway.”

Henri, straight astride the mule’s back now, lifted the lead-rope reins an inch and nodded. The blue jay fledgling had about worn off—there’d not been much meat on those brittle bones.

“Ginral Jerry.” The captain turned to the old black man beside him. “Issue this man a hoecake please.”

Ginral Jerry as he was called reached into a saddlebag and tossed Henri a flat disc of cold cornbread. He raised his left hand just soon enough to catch it as it spun across his shoulder.

“Thank you,” he said. But the white captain had turned and was riding ahead, and the one he’d called Ginral Jerry paid him no mind either.

Henri broke off a piece of the cornbread between his side teeth and let it soften in his mouth a minute till he could chew it. The cake was hard as the stone he’d slept on the night before but he could taste a hint of bacon grease in it once he began to wear it down. He squeezed the mule’s sides with his knees to encourage him to match the horse’s trot. Three men rode abreast ahead of him, two in the rear. All five had as good of horses as any he had ever seen. He’d not get away from them along the riverside, though if ever they came into real mountains the mule might give him some advantage there. It was a good mule too, strong and sure-footed and a rarity being broke to carry fresh-killed meat. He didn’t think he wanted to get away but it was always good to have an idea in his mind how he might accomplish it.

It was beginning to get hot, and he could smell the sweat of men and of horses and the raw blood smell of the doe under the sun. He worked the last dry crumbs of cornbread down his throat. They had ridden no more than a mile when one of the white riders turned toward his captain and said, “That’s some kind of a foreigner you just now took up.”

The captain didn’t answer. Clop-clop went the hooves of the horses on the corduroy road. A minute passed and the same rider spoke again.

“He ain’t just only a foreigner but a nigger to boot.”

The captain didn’t bother to turn his head. Henri looked at the back of that white rider’s head, a greasy lock of brown hair spilling from under the hat and the red tip of a boil rising between the tendons of his neck. If I were you I’d let it go, he thought, just before the brown-haired rider spoke for the third time.

“Do you not see that man’s a nigger?”

“Well don’t let it worry ye, Monty.” Forrest said, and spat into the roadway. “That man’s a volunteer.”

September 1863

W
HEN
H
ENRI WOKE
he felt the eyes of the General on him, though it was yet too dark to see them or anything else, but he felt that Forrest had not closed his eyes all night. For three days they’d been fighting around Chickamauga Creek and yesterday the Federals finally broke and ran away as far as Chattanooga. Forrest was still in an evil temper because his superior, Braxton Bragg, had given no order to pursue.
The time to whup somebody
, Forrest said,
is when they runnen
, and how he hated to miss that chance.

Eight days before, at Tunnel Hill, Forrest had taken a bullet in the back at the end of a long fight with Federal infantry under Crittenden. The wound still made it difficult for him to lie down at his ease, but what irked him even more was that the sawbones Cowan had persuaded him to rally himself with a dram of whiskey when he was first hurt and it was a great point of pride with Forrest that he never ever took a drink.

And twenty-four thousand men between both armies killed for nothing. A battle that nobody won.
Unless ye calculate the Yankees won it because they kilt a couple thousand more than they lost
. And yet the Yankees had been driven from the field.

It was too early even for the birds. Away to the west a lone screech owl chittered loopily in a high branch of a dead tree. Henri couldn’t see the owl but he had marked the tree in his mind before he lay down. He could just begin to see the black sky fracturing along the edges of the leaves of the oak under which they sheltered.

“Henry,” said Forrest, just above a whisper.

“I’m here.”

“Saddle up.”

When the light had just begun to turn blue they were riding four hundred strong down the Lafayette-Rossville Road. Henri rode half a length back of Forrest’s right shoulder, his usual position, the place he liked best. There was not enough light yet to see it but he knew Forrest was biting his lips under his beard to master the pain of the wound in his back. By the time the birds did begin to sing, he had warmed to the saddle and loosened his jaws. At cockcrow they came upon a troop of Federal cavalry just outside of the village of Rossville.

“Well, boys,” Forrest said, grinning now and happy. “What say we give’m a dare?”

Now the light was cool gray and the mist just rising from low rolling pastures either side of the road. As they spurred up, the high wild skirling of the Rebel yell rose all around and above them, eerie as the shrieking of the predawn owl. Henri could not get his lips or throat or larynx to make that sound, any more than the men he rode with could ever manage to pronounce his name. He would only let his jaws drop open so that the screaming would meet no obstacle as it ran through him; it came from outside, certainly, but at the same time seemed to inhabit his whole body. Whenever he felt that cry ring in him, his blood turned cold and his eyes turned clear and fear was driven from his body and flew out ahead of him to stoop down on the enemy. That he stretched out along his horse’s neck during the charge was no more than a practical consideration. Forrest however stood straight up in his stirrups screaming his fury from the bottom of his gullet and ready to catch the bullets in his teeth and spit them back where they came from if anyone had the nerve to stand and fire.

In fact the Federal horsemen did get off a ragged volley or two before they turned to run. They had those new Spencer repeaters. Henri heard the whistle of a ball passing through the space his head had occupied before he’d leaned forward into the charge, and then he saw another pass through the muscular neck of Forrest’s horse a hand’s reach away, on his right just ahead. A fountain of blood leapt up after it.

That horse would collapse on its next stride, Henri saw, and he knew that Forrest would not be pleased at this turn of events, since only two days before he had lost another good horse in the same situation—an
excellent mount which had been a gift to him from the citizens of Rome, Georgia, in gratitude for his having captured a division of Federal raiders just before they could reach and pillage that town.

“Shitsonofabitchsuckingspawnofthehornedevilsbilenassholeinhell!”
Forrest exclaimed. “Goddamme to the eternal fires of
Belial
if I give up another horse before I bury the Yankee sonofabitch that shot him!” He leaned over and plugged the wound with the ball of his right index finger. The blood geyser stopped and the horse galloped on as if unaware of the injury.

Henri sat up straight, astounded. The Federals were no longer firing; their horse tails were receding to the point where the road met the horizon. Forrest, finger properly inside his horse’s pulse, continued the pursuit until a fissure opened in the world of space and time and Forrest’s horse left the ground altogether to jump through it. The door was still there, a rent in the world’s fabric, with the rest of Forrest’s cavalry refusing the jump and passing to one side or the other of the tall narrow ogive as if they hadn’t even seen it. The passage had the look of a mirror now, like a high pier glass in a rich man’s hall. When Henri rode to it he could not see anything beyond it, not Forrest or his warhorse or the fleeing Federals, but no more did the ogive reflect himself or his own horse—it only showed white cottony clouds hurrying across the lightening sky. He caught his breath and swallowed hard—then he whipped up his horse and went through on the trail of his general.

B
UT HE DIDN’T SEE
F
ORREST
or his wounded horse on the other side—instead he was riding alone through mist on a surface of fog on which the hooves of his own horse made no sound. He must have passed over to the place where the Old Ones abided. But everyone know that the Old Ones were dead.

He sawed his horse to a rough halt and clutched at his skull, which seemed intact. His horse was hot between his legs and was breathing hard, as it had the right to.

And now he noticed he was back on solid ground: a bare knoll with one hollow tree on it like the screech owl’s tree from the night before, but different too—the rent in the trunk held the same
swirling mist as the mirrored passway he had come through to be here. Ginral Jerry was hunkered over a small greenwood fire, cooking fatback in an old iron skillet.

Henri hobbled his horse and walked around to the other side of the tree and looked down between the roots. There indeed was Forrest well out ahead of the rest of his troop and riding down hard on the outskirts of Rossville, closing on the last Federal horseman ahead of him. His right hand was taken up with stopping the wound in the neck of his horse but his left arm was free to lash out with his saber and split the coat of the Yankee horseman from the collar to the tail. The Yankee shrieked his terror and slammed his heels to the sides of his horse, but Forrest only laughed the more wildly and chopped the heavy blade down again, now opening a red gash alongside the bare knobs of the other man’s backbone, and this time the Yankee screamed like a girl.

“That hoss ain’t gwineter hold up forever,” Ginral Jerry said, turning meat with a chip of greenwood. “No matter what he do.”

August 1845

A
S SOON AS HE
had come to the riverbank Forrest understood that Ned would never get that buggy free, the way he was going about it. Ned was a sensible nigger, smart with a horse, but he couldn’t both push from behind and drive from the box at the same time, and the ladies in the buggy were not helping any. They rocked on the leather cushions whenever Ned heaved and the horse thrashed in the shafts, and the silk orbs of their parasols (one blue, one green) bobbed with the wasted motion.

On the far bank, two young gentlemen in their Sunday best sat their horses in the shade of a stand of water maples, waving now and then to encourage the ladies, waiting for the Sons of Ham to sort out the problem—those whose lot it was to labor in the muck. Rodham and Burke—Forrest knew them by sight, from Hernando and Memphis. He glanced at them once as he tied his horse to a low-hanging branch of a live oak and waded out into the stream.

“Well, Neddy, hit don’t look like ye’re gitten nowhar.”

“Nawsuh, I ain’t.” Ned flashed his teeth and ducked his head. He had a fine set of teeth, though up in his forties. A stout nigger for his age, though the job was too much for him. He was up to his waist in the slough. To Forrest, who stood nearly six foot two, it was no more than thigh deep.

“Let’s study a better way to set about it,” he told Ned. By then he had come to the buggy’s left door, and he held up both his hands to the passenger there.

“Ma’am, if ye don’t mind.”

The elder lady peered out through the shivering white fringe of her parasol. “What is it that you mean to do?”

“I mean to carry ye over to yonder bank.” He pointed with his long arm. “Then I’ll tote Miss Montgomery over thar after ye. Then we’ll git yore buggy loose and ye can git back on yore way.”

On the far bank a jay was chattering. Forrest turned his head toward the sound and saw the blue and white wing flash out of the maple leaves. Had the lady still not made up her mind?

“Ma’am,” he said. “Ye best fold up that brolly.”