Devil's Dream (21 page)

F
ORREST LIMPED
into the house where he’d taken a room, with a couple of doctors cautiously trailing him. Once they’d had the chance to examine him properly, they let him know his wound was not so dangerous as it first seemed. The bullet had not cut into his vitals but lodged instead in the flesh of his hip, whence it could be safely extracted. Then Forrest rose up and drove the doctors off. “Let it alone then, why don’t ye?” he shouted. “Hit’s nothen but a damn little pistol ball!” But the rage had left him altogether now, and his humor turned darkly inward.

Lieutenant Gould, whose wound did fester in the summer heat, was two or three days about his dying. The doctors kept him mostly quiet with morphine. Sometimes in the night he screamed. John Morton kept him company when he could, for they were friends from boyhood. Leave out the war and they were hardly more than boys now.

“Goddammit!” Forrest erupted, when Morton came to him. “Don’t I know what a sorry situation hit is? If he’d shown that much spunk on Sand Mountain we’d not never had no quarrel in the first place.”

Morton, whose pale round face was bluish with the small veins
underneath the skin, spoke to him again in a low tone. Forrest took off his hat and looked into the crown as if maybe there was a crystal ball up in there.

“All right, John, all right,” he said. “I’ll go along with ye if that’s what ye want.”

When Forrest was most uncomfortably seated at the bedside, Lieutenant Gould groped for his hand and held it, and then in his weak dying voice he made a little speech he plainly had stored up in his mind ahead of time, saying he was sorry for what he had done, that the affair was begun in a reckless moment but if it had to end with one of them dead he was happy it should be him and not Forrest to die—it was better for the country that way.

Then Forrest looked Gould in the eye, and said in a voice that didn’t quite crack, “I jest wish the whole thing never come about, son—don’t ye know they ain’t no way on earth I could be glad about doen in one of my own?” Gould didn’t say anything more after that, but kept his weak clasp on Forrest’s left hand, while Forrest covered his eyes with his right. The other men in the room looked at each other strangely. Forrest never spoke about wishes. He only said what wasn’t, or what was.

After a time, young Gould drifted off, and Forrest got up and went out of the sickroom like Morton and the others there were invisible to him. In the night he woke crying, though he didn’t know that he was. The saltiness running through his beard into the corners of his mouth only puzzled him. He had dreamed of three women on a brow of a bald hill in the nighttime. His mother, Mariam, leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. Her front was covered with a crumpled cloth but her rawboned arms and her shoulders were bare, her strong square hands turned palm-up to him. Mary Ann had settled behind her, with such a tender and sorrowful expression on her face; she was laving the scars that the panther had left, while behind her, where Mary Ann did not have to see her, Catharine stood holding the basin ready.
Her
face was lost in shadow, but he could see she wore a deep blue cloth tied over her head, with white specks on it shining bright as the stars beyond the hill.

It was him or me, Momma
, Forrest said.
It was him or me
.

Oh now Bedford, don’t take on
. Her eyes deep and dark in the hollows of her head.
I know it was. I know
.

And he knew that she knew just how half-true that was. Awake now, he understood that Gould had died while he was dreaming. He could feel the skin of his cheeks crinkling as the salt dried to the skin, and the itch of the healing wound in his hip. The real trouble was he sometimes thought he would not, could not ever die.

January 1865

T
HEY RESTED
against each other in the darkness of a borrowed clapboard house, winter wind sawing at the frame of their attic room. An iron grate in the floor released a little heat from the woodstove simmering in the room below.

“Does it still hurt?” Mary Ann said. For a moment she couldn’t even remember which one of his many old wounds she had referred to.

Forrest shifted against her, spread his large warm hand across the small of her back. “Right now nothen hurts,” he said.

She fingered a lock of his hair in the dark. Right now she didn’t feel the cold at all, but she had felt a stab of it when meeting him after months of absence she saw how white his hair had grown.

“I’ll never have you all the time,” she said, or maybe only thought. “But when I’ve got you I’ve got all of you there is.”

February 1864

O
N HIS HASTY RETURN
from rounding up five thousand recruits in West Tennessee, Forrest was quick to send Henri and Matthew out on a scout: Federal General Sooy Smith was leading a couple of thousand cavalry south from Collierville, Tennessee. Bedford kept Willie Forrest back by him, but sent two other men of his escort—Nath Boone, who now had the rank of lieutenant, and a man named Billy Strickland, who would not be killed till the fight around Pulaski at the end of the year.

They set out from Oxford late in the day, heading more or less due east. A good deal earlier, Jeffrey Forrest had been sent, in command of quite a serious force, with the idea of intercepting Smith’s advance somewhere south along the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, and the scouts’ orders were to find and join him if they could. Bedford Forrest, who knew that Sooy Smith was taking his orders from William Tecumseh Sherman, supposed that once Smith struck the railroad below Corinth he’d keep ripping it up all the way to Meridian and maybe further. Sherman was setting out from Vicksburg to cut his own slash across this Confederate breadbasket, so more than likely he meant to join Smith at Meridian or nearby.

Henri had not ridden so far with his party when they heard a jingle of harness behind. With a couple of hisses exchanged between them, they pulled their horses out of the road and into a clump of cedars to see what might be coming along the road. Benjamin was following, riding the strongest white mule of his wagon bareback, forcing the animal into a reluctant but rapid trot.

Nath Boone and Strickland swarmed into the road, their pistols raised skyward, turning their horses to block the mule’s way.

“Boy, state your business,” Strickland said.

Ben looked straight at him through the long ears of his mule.

“I come out to jine this scout with y’all.”

“Is that right,” said Strickland. “Let me see your pass.”

“It was Ginral Forrest give me leave,” Ben said. “He don’t spend time writen out no passes.”

Henri and Matthew were watching Boone, who’d been in a changeable humor since his brother Alfred had got killed up in Somerset about two months before. Boone’s bushy eyebrows were pushing together like maybe he had a headache coming on.

Strickland was looking at Boone too. “Does it worry you how this boy won’t lower his head when he speaks to you? Jest keeps staring right bang in your eyes.”

Boone considered, pulling up his horse’s head from a patch of half-frozen weed in the ditch. “Hit’s Forrest’s nigger after all,” he said. “I expect he’s been whupped for it.”

“Been whupped plenty,” Ben put in.

“Don’t seem to have cured ye,” Strickland said.

“Well now,” said Nath Boone. “I’ve noticed he looks the Old Man in the eye that same way too.”

“White gemmun,” Ben said suddenly. “Here’s why I come. You know he caught that buncha white boys trying to sneak off back to Jackson where they was just rounded up last week. You know he made ’m stand by those graves till sunup with the men with the rifles to shoot ’m dead right by there too.”

Henri considered. He remembered the same scene queasily himself. The new recruits all had come from West Tennessee, where in the fourth year of the war he was finding men a little less willing to follow the Confederate battle flag than they had been on his previous canvassing trip a year before. A man, a boy, might sooner follow Forrest than most, as Forrest was reputed to win all his fights. They’d taken more than three thousand new men south from Jackson, but scarcely a third of these had a firearm—the lot of them were as green as fresh rawhide and just as happy to run as fight. Henri could picture one such, Briley. How did he come to remember that name? Scarce out of his teens, the boy stood spindly, propped on the shovel at the head of the grave Forrest had ordered all the deserters he’d caught to dig for themselves, eyes rolling white and his lantern jaw trembling.

“Well,” said Boone, “he didn’t shoot’m finally, did he? Hit’s just tryen to skeer’m out of runnen away.”

Strickland looked at Ben just as hard as he was looking at him. “It don’t seem to have cured
you.”

“I ain’t runnen nowhar,” Ben said quickly. “I axed for a change of duty is all. Them boys standen in they graves don’t sit right by me. I’ll take my chance I get shot by the Yankees effen I can ride with you. Best way I can figure to get that other bidness outa my craw.”

“Well,” said Boone, “that’s your plan, you cain’t go running around empty-handed.”

Benjamin smiled, wrinkling the pale bolt of scar that struck down from his temple onto his cheekbone. A swatch of his tattered blanket wrapped forward from the roll behind his saddle. When he flipped it off (softly so as not to spook the white mule) they could all see one Navy six in his belt and another in his hand—the latter had been trained on Strickland’s rib cage throughout the conversation.

After a rather long pause, Boone let out a chuckling sigh. “Put that thing up till we find us some Yankees,” he said. “And make yourself welcome to join this party.”

T
HROUGH THE CHILL
of that night they rode with the rags of their blankets wrapped around their shoulders. Dark of the moon, so they could barely see each other’s horses, except for Ben’s white mule, which stood out plainly. The blacks who began to fill the road around them were invisible, some headed east and others west. Some muttered low that the Yankees were coming and others cried deliriously that they were free at last! But none of them seemed to know where they were going. Henri felt his sense of himself as a separate being melting into the milling throng of them all; he was sinking into this dark stream, diffusing into its crosscurrents. He might have slept some in the saddle; if so he was awakened by the crump of cannon in the distance ahead.

The eastern horizon was red with burning. Still a couple of hours to dawn. Boone called a halt and after a quick whispered conference they left the road and picked their way along the bank of the Tallahatchie till they reached the town of New Albany at first light.
There’d been no burning here nor was there any real sign of disorder, though the ways through town were deeply rutted by wagon and gun carriage wheels and trampled by many boots and hooves. Dung from the draft animals lay barely cool. The buildings were all shuttered and barred and no one struck a light within nor ventured out to ask their business.

From New Albany they turned to the south; the Yankees’ trail led toward Pontotoc, but they skirted it on a parallel path toward the railroad. In the warmth of the rising sun Henri pulled a nubbin of pone from his pouch, broke it in two to share with Matthew, and put it crumb by crumb in his mouth, holding it there till it softened enough to be swallowed. As they went on they crossed more large parties of wandering blacks and by daylight they could see more plainly that most of these were women and children. They spoke most freely to Benjamin, who had no shred of Confederate gray about him, letting him know that their menfolk had taken horses and mules from their places to ride after the Yankees—going to Okolona, they thought. Henri studied Benjamin as he spoke to one woman or another; there was a natural courtesy to his manner with all of them.

All through the morning a haze had been building on the southern horizon and it grew darker the nearer they approached. By the time they struck the railroad south of Verona, Henri thought he could taste the burning in the back of his throat. They were in Mississippi bottomland now, the black-earth country, where every farmer was required to keep a crib beside the tracks, lipping full of beans and bacon and flour and corn to supply the troops of the Confederacy. With no hesitation, Ben broke the hasp on one with a broken bayonet he carried in his belt, and began to load the white mule with provender.