Devil's Dream (33 page)

Above the pelting on his peaked square of canvas, Henri heard voices calling across the camp, and presently Bill Witherspoon raised a wet corner of his shebang.

“Come on, Hank, let’s have some fun!”

The rain was too heavy for Henri to make out Witherspoon’s lopsided grin. “What kind of fun,” he said.

“Pea-picking, corn-husking. Find out when we get there. We’re all going over to Stubbs Farm.”

Beside Henri, Matthew sat up, silent, alert, ready. He checked his pistols in the dark.

“It’s wet out there,” Henri said.

“No more than it is in here,” said Witherspoon. “Come on.”

Henri crawled out from under the dripping shebang and shook himself like a wet dog. He exchanged a glance with Matthew in the dark. They went to find their horses. In ten minutes they were riding south from Ripley, Mississippi, treetops sagging under the rain in the groves that fell away down the slopes from the ridge where the road ran. Witherspoon took up a song, his pale face raised into the rain.

Finally someone shut him up. Then the rain began to slack. On the western horizon was a glimmer of the quarter-moon and through gaps in the clouds came starlight enough to illuminate
their exchanges of fire with the Federals camped around Stubbs Farm. More fun than a pea-shelling, Witherspoon considered, except you couldn’t meet the girls. At daylight when they rejoined Forrest up at Boonetown, the weather had cleared completely and promised to be very hot, and they were able to say of a near certainty that the enemy was headed down the railroad line through Guntown toward Tupelo, Okolona and the fields of ripening corn on the black prairie there.

“Let’s get after’m,” Forrest said briefly. He looked haggard in the thin dawn light, his thin lips buried in tendril of his untrimmed beard. “Catch’m quick and hit’m hard.”

“General,” Colonel Rucker said. “He’s got eight thousand men over there already, and we have scarce got two.”

“When did that kind of a thang start to worry ye,” Forrest snapped. Then in a more considered tone, “It ain’t about how many they is. Never was—won’t never be. I’d take one of ourn over ten what they got, any day of the week and twicet on Sunday. Damyankees ain’t got thar yet today and they got yet a ways to go. It’s comen up hotter’n hell already and oncet they run five miles through that sucken mud they’ll be so beat we’ll ride right over’m.”

Where’s
there
, Henri thought, exchanging a glance with Witherspoon, and then he thought that maybe he knew. Forrest’s orders were to fall away south and join Stephen Lee, perhaps Chalmers also, to defend Okolona and the fields of unharvested grain. But considering last night’s reconnaissance they’d have a good chance to find the enemy at a much nearer point, somewhere between Stubbs Farm and Guntown. Last night he, Matthew, Witherspoon and the rest had returned toward Boonetown across a bridge over Tishomingo Creek, and passed through Brice’s Crossroads. There were thickets of blackjack oak all about to cover their approach.

A younger voice piped up. “General Forrest, sir?”

With a shade of impatience Forrest turned his head.

“They say hit’s a passel of niggers come out with the Yankees, gone carry you back to Memphis in chains like what you put on them. Say they gone burn you, and skin you alive.”

“Boy, that don’t make no sense,” Forrest replied. “They’ll need to skin me afore they burnt me, else they’ll not git much of a skin.”

No one laughed. Henri, reluctantly, turned his head toward the questioner: the same stripling who’d escaped the firing squad just the day before. His pinched dirty frightened face, like a rat with the plague among them.

“And then they’ll need to catch me before they kin carry out any part of that plan,” Forrest said.

“They say they gone kill everbody.” The lad’s voice began to shake. “Say they gone kill us all and take no prisoners.”

“They can say what they want to,” Forrest said, and made to turn his back.

“But do they mean it?”

Forrest rounded on him then. “How the hell should I know if a body means what he says or not? If I was to say it I’d damn sure mean it. That’s all I know. The rest we’ll find out when we git thar. And I mean to git thar quick.”

“All right,” the boy said, stepping back. “All right.”

They rode south from Booneville on a track west of the rail bed. Beyond the thickets further west Henri could hear the faint trickling of a stream. It was already very hot, as Forrest had predicted. Now and then a woodpecker tapped at a hollow tree; the staccato drumbeat carried a long way through still air.

“What about us,” Matthew said.

Henri looked over his shoulder.

“I mean what do you think they’d do to us.”

“They?”

“The black troops with the Yankees. That wear those badges—
Remember Fort Pillow.”

Henri slowed his horse so that he and Matthew fell a few lengths behind Witherspoon and the other white men of their company. “I doubt many of this bunch were ever at Fort Pillow,” he said. “They couldn’t have been. You know that.” He paused for a moment, recalling the river at sunset, running with blood; at the edges of the great blood slick, threads of blood unraveled in the water, tendrils trying to reach or root in something.

“What is it that they say they remember?” Henri asked. “What really happened or what somebody told them did?”

For a moment Matthew said nothing. He glanced back once at Benjamin, who had left the wagons to Jerry and the other teamsters
and was riding in the rear with the arms of a cavalryman in his belt and on his saddlebow. What really had happened at Fort Pillow, Henri was wondering now. Was there still any autonomous fact of that action, or only the story he’d told himself?

“I don’t want to fight my own people,” Matthew said.

“Matthew,” Henri said.
“Mathieu
. You’ve come to the wrong war.”

Directly, Ben clucked his tongue.

“You talk like you know who your own people are,” Henri said, stopping himself from a backward glance at Ben. It struck him that maybe he was being more quarrelsome than comforting, as the crackle of rifle fire began to rip through the blackjack thicket ahead of them. Some of the Federals appeared to be armed with the new Spencer repeating carbines, but these were wont to jam in the heat of a fight, while the Navy sixes seldom misfired. And Forrest appeared to be correct that the brushy terrain did everything to conceal how few the Rebels were, at this point, in comparison to the enemy.

Henri could not make out the crossroads or the bridge through the thickets. Indeed there was more than one pair of roads that crossed in these few acres east of Tishomingo Creek. As best he could recall from riding a similar route in darkness the night before, the bridge would be maybe half a mile distant. He circled north, with Matthew and Ben, in the direction of the Baldwin Road. They had got separated from Witherspoon, last seen clubbing a Federal trooper with a jammed repeater he’d snatched from another of the enemy.

The booming of two Federal batteries fell away behind them to the south. They were angling, Henri thought, toward the Federal left flank, though it was almost impossible to locate the lines in this heavily wooded ground. Of three hundred fifty men of the Seventh Tennessee, only seventy-five were still on their feet by this time. They fought dismounted now, struggling with Federals firing from cover of a brush fence at the south side of a trampled pasture. More and more Union flags appeared in the woods behind as the Federals brought reinforcements across Tishomingo Creek. Somehow the fighting had already gone on for most of the morning and the Rebels looked as if they were starting to tire.

Then Forrest came cantering up on a dapple gray horse he
favored. He’d shed his coat and rolled his sleeves; the double-edged saber flashed in his left hand.

“Git round the left,” he shouted at the remnants of the Seventh. “Take the damnjobbernowlyankees in the rear there. Git on with ye—if ye’re feart to be shot ye best go forward for I’m well and goddam ready to shoot ye in the back if ye don’t.”

Henri stared as the dapple gray reared up in the middle of the open field, under a hard rain of shrapnel and minié balls. There seemed no possibility that both horse and rider would not instantly be killed. But no. Forrest leaned forward, the horse’s front hooves regained the ground, and with a forward sweep of his blade he cried, “I’ll lead ye!” The yell went up, behind, then beside him as what was left of the Seventh rushed past Forrest toward the Federals at the fence. Forrest had turned his horse out of the line to ride back to Bell’s brigade, which appeared to be retreating before the Yankee reinforcements constantly arriving on the field.

“Come on I tell ye,” Forrest screamed. “I tell ye them sonsabitches is too tired to fight. They was whupped afore they got here. Now
git
over thar and finish’m off.” He swatted a man across the shoulders with the flat of his blade. Again the hair-raising yell tore across the field as Bell’s brigade charged to join the Seventh. Rebels were jumping the fence now, fighting the Yankees hand-to-hand; Henri glimpsed Witherspoon again for a moment, gleefully trumping a Federal saber with his pistol. Further back in the woods, the Yankee line re-formed for a few minutes, attempting a rally, then as ammunition ran low it shattered in confusion.

Henri’s ears rang in the weird, muffled silence that followed. Presently he began to hear woodpeckers resuming their work, but as if the sound was wrapped in cotton batting. Matthew was walking on rubbery legs back toward him from the battle line, his face streaked with blood and burnt powder, apparently unhurt. Henri discovered he was holding Matthew’s horse.

Forrest was riding toward them now, his sword hand low. His coat was draped across the saddlebow, and his once white shirt was transparent with sweat. Distant firing broke out behind him, a long way off, down in some hollow through the woods toward the creek.

“That’ll be Barteau.” Forrest grinned. Colonel C. R. Barteau,
detached from Bell’s brigade, had gone the long way round the Federal left to intercept their line of march from Stubbs Farm.

“Where’s John Morton?” Forrest raised his sword point toward Henri. Matthew had just now remounted. Henri turned his horse aside. He remembered seeing Morton, who’d dragged his handful of cannon eighteen miles that morning, the last third of that distance at close to a run, coming to support Bell’s charge at the end of the most recent action.

“That way,” he said, and he and Matthew fell in behind the dapple gray as Forrest rode in the direction indicated. Shortly they came upon the eight small cannon known to everyone now as Morton’s Bull Pups; the battery was still taking fire from the Yankees. John Morton’s pleasant moon face popped up from behind a gun carriage.

“General Forrest,” Morton said. “You had better go further down the hill, for you are apt to be hit where you are now.”

Henri had never seen Forrest meet such advice as that with anything other than furious dismissal. Now he looked irritably about himself, swiping one of his hands through the air as if he could bat down bullets like flies. Then, dropping his hand to his knee, he nodded.

“All right, John. I may rest awhile.” He rode down the slope where Morton had pointed, and dismounted beneath an old hickory tree. Matthew caught up the loose reins of the dapple gray horse. Forrest took his coat from the saddlebow, scraped nut hulls aside with the edge of his boot, and spread out his coat between the roots of the tree. He lay down, closed his eyes and appeared to stop breathing.

Henri, Morton and Matthew exchanged a weird glance. Maybe, Henri thought, some missile had pierced Forrest’s heart without making any visible wound; maybe he would never rise again. They waited for a sign of his breath and saw none. Morton made to speak and didn’t. With a forefinger he pressed his lower lip against his bottom teeth.

Inside of two minutes, Forrest sprang up as if he’d been lying on tongues of blue flame.

“Time’s a-wasten,” he yelled. “This battle’s nigh whupped but we
still got to whup it. Got to keep after’m, keep up the skeer! Why ain’t that whole line chargen already?”

He yanked Morton to him by the upper part of his sleeve. “John,” he said. He was holding Morton almost as close as a lover, while with the other hand he gestured. “I want ye to run yore Bull Pups straight down that road, and keep’m barken right in their faces, hear me? Give’m hell, John.”

“Sir,” Morton said, “the guns are subject to be captured if I rush forward that way without support.”

“Artillery was made to be captured,” Forrest snapped. He gave Morton’s upper arm a squeeze and added, with his ragged grin, “I’d admire to see anybody capture yourn.”

T
HE DAY WAS WANING.
As the sun dropped away to the west, long rays of bloody light came slantwise through the darkening boles of the trees. They were driving a wedge between the Pontotoc and Baldwyn roads. To his left, Henri could hear the Bull Pups cough and roar, spitting grapeshot at the Yankees at point-blank range.

Somehow another two hours passed. Where the two roads met at Brice’s Crossroads, the Yankees made another stand. Forrest’s men charged them till they broke and scattered back to Tishomingo Creek. Henri and Matthew were both carried along in the rush to pursue. Some distance ahead of them a cry went up.

“Here’s
the damn niggers!”

The black companies they’d all been hearing about had been kept back to guard a cluster of supply wagons drawn up just west of the creek bank. They formed up now in good close order to meet the Rebel rush. The white patches standing out sharp against the blue tunics must be the
Remember Fort Pillow
badges. Excellent target, Henri thought, but his pistols stayed holstered in his belt.

What about us?
Matthew had said. The black companies were covering the retreat of the white Federals fleeing from the crossroads of the creek, and doing a determined job of it too. Though the skirl of the Rebel yell filled Henri’s ears, the momentum of the charge had been blunted. Matthew, inexplicably, got down from his horse and began walking into the melee, stiff-legged and empty-handed. Henri got down himself, handed the reins of his horse to Benjamin, who
had just come up behind, and followed. He was so frightened he wanted to puke. Though their uniforms were so tattered as to be unrecognizable, there could be little doubt about whom they’d rode in with. Yet Matthew seemed to walk robed in his father’s untouchability.