Devil's Dream (34 page)

Henri followed him through a gap in the line, taking a long step over a corpse still twitching. It was the boy that had asked the question that morning, he thought, who’d been spared the firing squad at the last moment the day before. But he couldn’t pause now to look twice and make sure. From a wagon bed someone was sighting one of the new Spencer repeaters on Matthew. Henri’s own revolver was cold in his hand. He knew the idea was to take out the rifleman
before
he shot Matthew, but he felt he could not bring himself to do it until afterward. There was something about this enemy’s face. Though he did not wear a Fort Pillow badge, he had actually been at Fort Pillow. There he had told Henri his name.

Sam Green.

He must have cried the name out loud, for Green lowered his weapon and beckoned the two of them up into the wagon with him. Matthew, still moving stiffly, like an automaton, climbed up behind the right front wheel. Sam Green stretched out a hand to help him. Henri stuck his gun back into his belt and clambered up after. The wagon was loaded with sides of bacon and dried beans in burlap sacks. Somewhere there was a faint odor of coffee. Ginral Jerry would be overjoyed with such a find.

“How’ve you been,” Henri said. The three of them were stretched out now across the bean sacks, keeping their heads below the wagon rails, for there were more than a few bullets singing over them.

“All right, I guess.” Sam Green smoothed a palm over the breech of his Spencer. His palms were gray with callus that looked like limestone furrowed by water. “Just tryen to live.” Henri found himself trying to think about all the most extreme efforts he had made to live himself, all at the same time. He looked around for something to stop his thoughts. Matthew had turned from the other two men, his body molded over slabs of bacon. He was watching the fight through a crack between two warping boards.

“Hi bout y’all?” Sam Green said.

How about us, Henri thought. It occurred to him that in the end one might betray everything. So that in the end there was no other constant than betrayal. He raised his head to look out of the wagon and very quickly brought it back down.

“They’re fighting like there’s no tomorrow.”

“’Cause for us they ain’t. Kill or be killed. Not no mercy nowhere. That’s what they believes.”

Us or them, Henri thought, then asked him, “Do these Yankees treat you right?”

“Don’t know bout that.” Sam Green flattened further on his back. His eyes, tobacco-brown in the whites, looked up at the swiftly darkening sky. “They says we ain’t slaves no mo but they don’t treat us like we men. Don’t leave us drink outen they dipper. Don’t leave us drink outen they wells. We come across the country taken what we finds any ways we can take it.”

“And then they give you a bad name for it.”

“Tha’s jess about exactly what they do.” Sam Green chuckled softly. In the fairly near distance, a wounded horse screamed. Green turned sideways to squint through the wagon rails. “Colonel Bouton, now, he ain’t so much that way. He act like he count on us, most times. Go on and look at him over there now.”

Henri raised his head again. There indeed was Edward Bouton commanding with a sure authority, grim but graceful under a flood of fire. Black troops moved willingly to his order, opening their line to let the fleeing Federals through, then closing again to resist pursuit. They disputed every yard of their retreat.

A man with a Fort Pillow badge rushed up to the wagon looking for cartridges and screamed his frustration when he found only beans. With a butcher’s knife drawn he ran back to the fight. Horse-holders were struggling to hold mules panicking from the racket of battle. Bouton and his black soldiers were fighting ferociously on the right of their line.

“It’s hangen for him if y’all catches him, see?” Sam Green remarked. “Ain’t no tomorrow for him neither.” His head turned suddenly, as if to some specific sound Henri couldn’t pick out from the general barrage. Then he jumped out of the front of the wagon and unstaked the two mules hitched to the tongue. Something on
Bouton’s left had broken and a whole white Federal infantry unit was coming back at a panicked run. Sam Green clucked to his mules, tapped them with a length of cane. The wagon turned, jostling with others as they moved toward the bridge, some drivers lashing each other’s mules as they tried to advance. Sam Green, horribly exposed on the wagon box, murmured to his animals more calmly.

It was almost too dark to see anything now. Red flashes from the muzzles of the guns. Some black soldiers now had joined the flight, sailing past like bats in the gloaming, some ripping off Fort Pillow badges as they ran. Others fought on desperately. Sam Green patiently maneuvered the wagon onto the first boards of the bridge. Then the tiny movement he’d been so carefully conserving altogether stopped. Ahead of them the bridge was blocked by a wagon jammed crossways.

Sam Green craned his neck to peer ahead of him, then behind. Henri followed the direction of his backward glance. In the darkness by the tree line a muzzle flashed red and he saw the ball lift from the barrel and arc toward them like a meteorite, growing till it blotted out the sky. A kind of astral music accompanied it, ringing, shimmering: the music of the spheres. The bullet moved with a terrible dark lethargy toward them, but Henri could not seem to move any faster. He wanted to snatch Green out of the way, while his arms felt like they were trapped in molasses. He was himself bound to the pace of this world that embraced him in its awful slowness. The bullet lumbered into Sam Green’s left temple before Henri could reach him, and he pulled him down among the sacks already dead.

Matthew rolled over and opened Green’s collar, feeling around his throat for a pulse. Henri watched blood soaking through the burlap under the dead man’s head, trickling down among hard pellets of white beans. Events resumed their previous hectic speed. Some of the routed Federals were pausing to set supply wagons on fire before flinging themselves into Tishomingo Creek. Some of Forrest’s units had crossed ahead of them, upstream, and were picking the Yankees off as they tried to come out of the water on the other side.

Then Forrest himself rode clattering onto the bridge, eyes flashing
yellow like a wildcat’s.
“BytheblackflamenassholeoftheDevilhisselftheseshitsuckendamnyankees’re burnen my wagons
, Goddammit!” he shouted.

Oh, Henri thought, they’re your wagons now.

“Git up, son,” Forrest said to Matthew. “You can’t jest lay thar. That man is dead.”

Matthew took his hand from Sam Green’s throat and straightened as if waking from a dream. “Where’s Willie,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Henri said. “I haven’t seen him. I don’t think he’s here.”

Forrest had already passed them, was directing a squad of men to heave the jammed wagon out of its place and tumble it over into the stream. More men of their company flowed over Sam Green’s wagon, carrying away the bacon and beans, automatic as a file of ants. Sam Green’s body flopped onto a few wisps of straw that still lay on the stripped boards of the wagon bed. Then Benjamin’s grave face appeared above the rails. Matthew got out and took the reins of the two horses Benjamin had led back to them. Benjamin pulled Sam Green’s ankles to straighten his body, then folded the dead man’s hands across his breastbone. Other men were already lifting the wagon clear of the bridge, releasing it above the creek. It fell straight down, the wheels grooving into the surface of the water. Henri was somehow back in his saddle without quite knowing how he had got there. He leaned to see water filling the wagon bed, so that Green’s body floated calm and free for a moment, still within the frame of the rails. Then the wagon spiraled away in the current and was gone.

F
ORREST AND
his men pursued in relays, some chasing Federals up the road to Ripley and picking up prisoners from the exhausted enemy falling down by the roadside, while others rested and ate boiled beans and bacon from the captured wagons. Forrest himself was still on the trail of Sturgis’s scattered remnants when daylight picked out the party he led. There was not much of the joy of victory on his countenance.

“Why don’t you look happy,” Anderson asked him. “We’ve had a big day.”

“We ought to had all of’m,” Forrest said shortly.

“I’ll say we got plenty,” Nath Boone said. “And still picken up more.”

Forrest’s hard eyes were scanning the ground like the eyes of a hunter looking for sign. Others of his men kept dismounting to collect discarded packs and weapons. Now and then on the roadway appeared one of those
Remember Fort Pillow
badges men had torn from their uniforms as they fled.

“I’ll say one thing, them ornery ole niggers can
fight
—when they back’s to the wall.” Forrest shook his head, the point of his beard jerking side to side above the hardpack of the road. “If not for them we’d have et up every last scrap of this army.” In his mind already he was contemplating a letter to be sent to the Federal General Washburn at Memphis, a few jagged phrases which Anderson would later compose into more polite language:
… all the Negro troops stationed in Memphis took an oath on their knees, in the presence of Major General Hurlbut and other officers of your army, to avenge Fort Pillow, and that they would show my troops no quarter. … A large majority of the prisoners we have captured from that command have voluntarily stated that they expected us to murder them. … Both sides acted as though neither felt safe in surrendering, even when further resistance was useless
.

While Tecumseh Sherman on the news of Brice’s Crossroads would be writing to the U.S. Secretary of War
… Forrest is the Devil, and I think he has got some of our troops under cower. I have two officers at Memphis who will fight all the time, A. J. Smith and Mower. … I will order them to make up a force and go out to follow Forrest to the death, if it costs ten thousand lives and breaks the Treasury. There will never be peace in Tennessee until Forrest is dead. …

By afternoon of the day after the battle they were riding near the town of Salem when some of the men with Forrest remarked their general had gone to sleep in the saddle. His change of state was just barely noticeable; he still held himself straight, but a bit more limber; his eyes had closed; now and then his head rolled to one side or the other with the movement of the dapple gray horse, then righted itself but without the eyes opening.

“But someone must wake him,” Anderson said.

“Go on, then,” Nath Boone replied. “Help yoreself! You know he’s apt to swop your head off afore he knows right well who you are.”

Anderson shook his head and took no further action. They rode on, without saying anything more about Forrest’s situation, until the dapple gray horse, who was also sleepwalking, blundered full-on into a tree. Forrest slipped down as slack as if his clothes were empty, rolled to his back, and continued his slumber uninterrupted. Men gathered quietly under the tree and watched him as he slept.

August 1864

M
ATTHEW FOUND
F
ORREST
at the top of a knoll, beneath an ancient cedar tree. Jerry and Benjamin had stretched a rag of canvas across low branches of the cedar, to block the tepid summer drizzle, and Forrest was there in a reasonably dry spot, sitting on a ladder-back chair with most of the rungs broken out of the back, his wounded foot raised on a powder keg in front of him. He’d been hurt at Harrisburg three weeks before and though he no longer needed to ride in a buggy, he had a bad limp made all the worse by his being too stubborn to carry a cane. When he mounted a horse he could only get one foot in a stirrup, but that didn’t seem to hamper him much.

Anderson and Kelley where just leaving the shelter as Matthew came up, and Forrest seemed to have slipped into a brown study. King Philip, tethered on a long lead to the cedar tree, snorted and pulled at the rope when Matthew approached, then when he recognized him, lowered his head.

Matthew stopped outside the dripping edge of canvas. He took off his hat and let the rain soak into the thick curls of his hair. Forrest, head bowed, fidgeting with something inside his collar, did not seem to be aware of him, but after a moment he spoke without looking up.

“Come on, boy, get out the rain.”

Matthew ducked inside the shelter. Forrest glanced at a stool by his side.

“D’ye care to set?”

Matthew remained on his feet. Forrest had pulled the rawhide
lace from his throat and was turning the drilled doubloon between his thumb and forefinger.

“I’m sorry,” Matthew said.

Forrest looked up at him sharply. “What about?”

“You lost your brother,” Matthew said. “Jeffrey.” My Uncle Jeffrey he didn’t say.

“A condoleyance call!” Forrest said. “Ye taken yore time getten round to it, son. Hit’s nigh on six months since Jeff was kilt.”

“I know how you cared for him, the best of all.” Matthew swallowed. “Everybody knows it.”

“Well that don’t mean everbody needs to go chatteren about it,” Forrest said. He clasped the doubloon in his palm for a second, then dropped it back down the front his shirt. “How about them thousand men we got kilt back yonder at Harrisburg? You sorry about them too?”