Devil's Dream (23 page)

Bedford Forrest reached him almost before he had landed, tearing the knees out of both pants legs as he skidded to his brother’s side, and Doctor Cowan was there too, searching for a pulse in Jeff’s left wrist. The death tremor made the left hand flutter in Cowan’s grasp like a captured bird. Forrest cradled his brother’s head, caressing the pale face as it quickly cooled, stroking the fine silky beard and mustache, while his lap filled up with blood. It looked to Henri like blood might burst out from his eyes. The charge had stopped and the firing had stopped—even the Yankees had stopped firing from the hilltop—and Forrest’s men stood mute with their hats in the hands.

Forrest looked at Doctor Cowan and the doctor shook his head. Forrest slipped free the thong of the doubloon Jeffrey wore around his neck and put it over his own head. He covered his brother’s face with his hat and stood up. Henri saw his eyes turn yellow, saw his whole body ripple and compress. The bugle sounded. Perhaps Forrest
had ordered the sound to occur. He leapt onto his horse without touching the saddle and ran screaming headlong upon the enemy.

Matthew stooped, unfolding a white handkerchief from his pocket. It occurred to Henri to wonder how he had saved it clean and whole through the last months of running and fighting, as if he had preserved it for this doom. He lifted the hat and spread the white cloth over his dead uncle’s face and lowered the hat back down. Major Strange was helping Doctor Cowan to his feet saying
We must go after him, Doctor, or he will surely be killed
, and Cowan:
He won’t be the only one killed—you know if he only loses a horse he won’t stop until he has killed a Yankee bare-handed and young Jeff was his favorite brother
.

There were days when being already dead wasn’t much comfort, and today appeared to be one of them. Henri found himself riding with Matthew, Cowan and Major Strange up the hill into the teeth of the enemy, well out in front of McCulloch’s brigade, which had just sounded a charge behind them. Though only a handful of the escort had gone with Forrest in his first mad rush, they’d broken clean through the first Federal line, and the point they’d punctured was a melee. Forrest stood with his legs locked straight in the stirrups, his horse trampling corpses of men he’d shot down, and by then his pistols must have been empty for he was slicing one enemy trooper to ribbons with the double-edged sword in his left hand while simply choking another to death with his right. Meanwhile half a dozen of the enemy were reaching to pull him down from the back but just before that could happen the wave of McCulloch’s charge washed over them.

Forrest tucked his bloody sword under his elbow like an umbrella and set about reloading his pistols as he charged after the Yankees fleeing through the barns of Ivy’s Hill and down the other side of it. They were running pell-mell up the road toward Pontotoc till suddenly they struck a point where the Federals had drawn three lines across a field. Forrest drove into them without a pause, but within the first few seconds of contact his horse was downed by five bullets, the saddle shattered by as many more, and Forrest ran forward on foot firing his pistols with both hands until Benjamin had brought him another mount. No sooner was he well astride than the new horse too was slain in a crossfire and Forrest went down, dead
himself maybe, lost anyway to Henri’s sight. Henri was trying to get to Matthew, who had got himself into a tangle his father would have been proud of, emptying his pistols into a dozen odd Federal troopers surrounding him, then socking them with his elbows and the shoulders of his quickly turning horse. Sound of screaming just to the rear and King Philip’s iron-gray hide broke through the line like the skin of a breaching whale, Jerry not so much bringing him to Forrest as being dragged by him hollering
Whoa goddamn slow down you hellion
while King Philip’s neck stretched out straight as a snake’s reaching to bite through any blue cloth that he saw. That was what they were all screaming about Henri would have supposed but he paid no mind for he still could not reach Matthew and there was one of Smith’s troopers carefully lining up a pistol to shoot him dead and the boy empty-handed facing the hollow of the barrel with that eerie calm of one who knows that death is now inevitable. Dark cylinder turning with scenes of the past and more yet to come. Still Henri could not reach him. He would not. But the Yankee’s aim began to waver. Then Henri saw that there was a fountain of blood where the Yankee’s head had been and there was Forrest astride King Philip wiping his sword blade clean on the back of the dead man’s coat as he swung again toward the second Yankee line. Matthew settled himself in the saddle, plucked the pistol from the dead man’s hand just before he fell, and rode on further into the fight.

May 1865

U
NDER A THIN SPRING RAIN
, Major Anderson rode out with Forrest from the town of Meridian, Mississippi. They had nowhere in particular to go and nothing special to do when they got there. Sometime that day paroles were supposed to be signed for them and all their men who had a few days before consented to surrender, but neither Anderson nor Forrest could exert any influence on that event. Their object was to take the air and exercise their horses, though since the failure of their enterprise to fight off Wilson’s fourteen thousand cavalry with less than half that number, the horses were so played out they could hardly lift their hooves from the mud, while the men, as Forrest would put it, not excluding himself, were
wore right down to a nubbin
.

They trotted doggedly out into the countryside, halting briefly at the edge of a blighted farm, its fence rails carried off for bonfires, livestock scattered or scavenged by soldiers of either or both sides, a cotton field coming up in hogweed. Forrest clicked his tongue and rode on. Presently the road ran into the woods. Forrest’s head was lowered under a slouch hat, rainwater running from the front and back of the brim. Now and then he massaged his upper arm with the other hand: the half-healed saber cut from the fighting around Selma the month before. Forrest had killed the Yankee horseman who’d cut him but it took him longer than usual to get it done.

Sheets of silvery rain poured over him. His long duster, once bone-white, had evolved into a colorless patchwork that seemed to be held together by nothing more than grime and dried blood. When Anderson urged his horse alongside he could see Forrest’s lips working, under the hat brim and inside his beard. He would be
composing something, probably. Though
indisposed to the use of the pen
, as Kelley put it from time to time, Forrest was choosy of the words he wanted in a document and Anderson often had the task of setting them down on paper.

They’d reached a crossroads and Forrest reined up. Anderson waited what seemed a long slow time; he’d never seen Forrest undecided about where he wanted to go.

“Which way, General?”

Forrest hacked out a rough simulacrum of a laugh. “If one goes to Hell and t’other to Mexico, hit don’t make me no difference,” he said.

Inside his clammy, rain-soaked garments, Anderson’s spine got even chillier than before. There were notions abroad of Confederate soldiers haring off to join the Mexican Revolution, but Forrest had seemed to pay them no mind. When invited to carry on the fight west of the Mississippi he turned it down cold.
Nothing but murder
he called that scheme, and any man who entertained it
a fit subject for a lunatic asylum
.

Forrest was still talking, perhaps to himself. “Never yet had to study what to do I just done it.” No, he was talking to Anderson after all, flashing him a quick bitter grin. “Anytime I run acrost one of them fellers as fit by note, I whupped him fore he got his tune pitched right. Swallered him whole whilst he set thar a-studyen. But now … by damn hit’s been too many in that style been worken on our side.”

Forrest looked along one fork of the road, then the other. “Cain’t afford to think about it,” he muttered. “I’m most give out, but I hate to give up. In my life I ain’t never give up, not on a thing that mattered. By damn I jest hate the thought of it.”

“Then don’t give up on your men, General.”

Forrest looked at him so sharply Anderson had to harden himself not to flinch.

“I ain’t never done no sech of a thing,” he said.

“I know it,” Anderson said. “Well then, I don’t need to tell you, the most of them aren’t going off to Mexico. Maybe John Morton and a few of the hotheads, but most won’t run off and leave all their folks and they need you to show them—”

“How to lose,” Forrest said.

“Just … how to
do.”
Anderson said. “Like you always have done.”

“Well, you’re right.” Forrest removed his hat to shake off some water, then put it back on. “I reckon I known it all along. I don’t mean to leave my folks neither. Men nor women. White nor black. All I own I’ll own up to.”

“Then what do you say we get out of this rain?”

“All right, Charles.” There was a touch of the old warmth now in Forrest’s bearded grin. “Let’s find us a dry spot and spell out what to say to’m.”

April 1858

F
ORREST RODE
down the Memphis waterfront on the black stallion he’d named Satan. Mary Ann didn’t care for that name but he’d felt that none other would suit. Between his knees the animal boiled with a dark energy, stepping high and wanting to run. Forrest held the horse in with his left hand, leaving enough give in the reins that Satan wouldn’t harden his mouth on the bit, and kept his right hand free for tipping his hat, for once he turned from the river into Beale Street he knew most of the merchants and tradesmen whose establishments lined the western blocks. An acquaintance hailed him with news of a boatload of slaves out of Virginia that had just come downriver, and Forrest raised a finger to signify that he’d look in on his return.

At the corner of Causey Street a blind black man sat on an empty packing case, plucking a long-necked banjo slowly: a short repetitive cycle of notes. The strings were tuned down and the skin head was slack and the hollow slipperiness of the tune connected with an unquiet sensation Forrest had in his entrails. What he might feel at the start of a hunt or the brink of a fight or when he came to a gaming table and felt the first clicking of dice bones in the hollow of his hand.

The banjo faded as he walked the black horse south. In these few blocks of one- and two-room clapboard houses it was quieter than on Beale Street, and he needn’t tip his hat, though most of the blacks who peopled this quarter probably knew Mister Forrest by sight. A woman looked up from the wash pots in her swept yard with a flash of frank curiosity in her face, in the instant before she ducked her kerchiefed head away. Forrest felt his stomach settle. Here he came
in broad daylight, bang down the middle of the street, riding the finest horse that he owned, head held high and his hat square on top of it.

The house he was bound for was built some stouter than most, with a waist-high stake fence around the yard and a gate with iron hinges and latch. Left of the gate was a hitching post and to the left of that, Jerry sat on the box of his wagon, his big hands lying loose on his knees, eyes hidden in the shade of his cap, still as a lizard soaking in the warmth of the afternoon sun. In the wagon bed behind, the boy sat facing the other way, stiff as a post, a bundle and stick tucked under his heels and his wrists and ankles sticking a little too far from the cuffs of his clothing.

Forrest dismounted and hitched his horse. “Matthew,” he said. “Why ain’t you gone inside?”

The boy looked past him, his eyes lighting up when they fell upon Satan. When the eyes returned to Forrest they were vacant. Forrest shook his head and turned toward the house, laying his hand on the top rail of the gate. Two railroad tie steps led up to a shallow plank stoop under the overhang of the roof. There on a puncheon stool sat Catharine, nursing the new baby under a light cotton shawl. Her chin was up and her eyes didn’t lower. Two proud women, Forrest thought, and wondered again if south of Beale Street would be far south enough. He felt as if the unglazed windows of the several houses behind him were all drilling holes into his back.