Devil's Dream (40 page)

“And today he
damn well
won’t hear what’d fix it.”

“Well, now,” Major Strange said as he stroked his long beard. “He might have been better disposed to you if you hadn’t offered to tie his quartermaster’s legs around his neck.”

“Might have been don’t make no matter.” Forrest was talking to Major Strange, though Henri had his horse and himself positioned right between them. “We’ll need ever last mule we got fore this is over and done with and Hood will too, to get his wreckage hauled away. Hit’s his whole damn army getten itself blown to smithereens down there.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” Major Strange said sorrowfully. “Just as well we’re not down there with them.”

“Ye think so?” Forrest looked sharply at Major Strange, looking right through Henri. “Well … ye might say that. Hell ye might say Hood has saved my life by sending me way around to Hell and gone and this far out of the action. Only single question I got—Why he’d have wanted to?”

The winter wind blew in their faces.

To the west, the grumble of gunfire rose and fell. The shallow trench so hurriedly dug by Schofield’s men before the Carter house was now beginning to fill with blood. Henri knew this though he couldn’t see it from where he sat.

“He might have known he’d need you more another day,” he said. But they were running out of days.

Forrest shot an irritable look straight through Henri to Major Strange. “What’s that ye say?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Major Strange replied.

He can’t see me, Henri thought. A bolt of cold shot down his spine. And he always sees everybody, for better or worse; he sees every man and knows him.

H
IS HEAD ROCKED
sharply back, painlessly but very hard. He lifted his hands to both sides of his head, but was afraid to touch it. He merely framed it airily with his fingertips. A hollow ran through his head from front to back with a brown wren flying backward through it, a discreet and modest little bird.

Forrest was riding out ahead of him still, ahead of them all, standing up straight in the saddle, slashing and screaming defiance and rage. It appeared to Henri now that the slit in the world’s fabric which Forrest galloped effortlessly through was now this very same echoing hollow passage through his own head.

His limbs were weakening, the grip of his knees on the plunging horse began to loosen, to give way. He snatched at the wild-flying reins and missed, then clutched at the saddlebow. Beginning to fall, he kicked free of one stirrup, but the other was caught. In terror, he knew he was sure to be dragged. Then something else surrendered, a stirrup leather broke; in one flighty instant Henri was airborne.

Then darkness, or rather a pearly mist, and still no pain.

As he came to, he smelled cooking first. Fatback sweating grease on hot iron. His eyes didn’t seem to work right yet, or else he just somehow couldn’t open them. He felt about with the flats of his hands and seemed to be lying on one of those limestone shelves he favored whenever he could find them. All over the hills of Tennessee they were usually easy enough to discover.

Apart from a distant high-pitched ringing, both his ears seemed to work all right. He could hear the first hectic notes of “Devil’s Dream” on a fiddle nearby. Who was it used to fiddle that tune so?

Henri sat up, tucking his legs up under him, and looked about
the edges of his pallet of stone, for scorpions or centipedes or stinging woolly worms or snakes. He could see now, well enough. Satisfied there were no venomous creepy-crawlies in his range, he stretched his legs and lowered his bare feet into the dirt beyond the stone. The dust between his toes was cool, but not unpleasantly so. If he had not lost his boots in the fall then someone must have removed them while he was laid out here.

Ginral Jerry tended a small hot, almost smokeless fire, over which he was cooking coldwater cornbread, a single hoecake that occupied the whole circumference of the pan. He hunkered, tail-bone hanging over his heels, flicking the hoecake now and then with a clean chip so that it would not stick.

The cornbread had a nubby surface and a faint bluish cast, like the limestone shelf where Henri had reposed. He knew it would be not quite as hard as limestone when at last he bit into his piece, and it would be just fleetingly sweet from the white corn it was made of—Jerry had not got his hands on sugar, honey, or molasses for weeks. Henri’s mouth began to water, and he swallowed a time or two.

The boy was still fiddling. Faster than before. This was a tune meant to pick up speed as it advanced. A challenge to see how fast you could work the bow without dropping a note. Young William Lipscomb had the fiddle now. Had it always been he who played “Devil’s Dream”? Lipscomb was killed or was to be killed at the age of eighteen, in the course of a skirmish on a rainy night when Forrest, profiting from the dark and the wet, sprang a surprise attack with a few of his escort on a much larger Federal cavalry unit under Cabron. November 1864: Forrest had been on his way to join John Bell Hood as he marched the Army of Tennessee from Atlanta toward Nashville, leaving Sherman unhampered to lay waste to Georgia. Lately Forrest had equipped his escort with the new Spencer repeating rifles and that and the fact that his men were well camouflaged in their wet rubber slickers made up for the disadvantage in numbers. The escort routed Cabron’s men as they struggled to raise their tents in the rain, took fifty-odd prisoners and still more small arms. Riding away with a smaller group yet, Forrest was accosted by a company of Federals who tried to take him prisoner—one had touched a gun barrel to Forrest’s breastbone, but Major Strange clipped his arm so the shot went wild. In that whirl of confusion
in the rain and dark, young Lipscomb caught the bullet that killed him a day or so later. William Wood was also killed in that brief engagement at Fouché Springs. He sat now on a stump looking up at young Lipscomb, tapping a toe and rattling pebbles in the cup of his hand to mark time.

In the hollow of the dead tree the usual candle burned. But there were far more candles than usual, waxed down all amongst the roots of the tree. Some special service must be owed to the Old Ones today. From the branches dangled small cloth packets, bound up with snatches of red and black string. On the trunk of the tree people had pinned up keys and small rusty padlocks, bills of the worthless Confederate money, burnt cartridge paper, locks of hair, ribbons and love letters from home.

Henri stood up. He was terribly hungry. He felt a hole through his midsection like the hole through his head, but so much bigger that a buzzard could have flown through without grazing a wing tip.

Mist roiled around the bald crown of the hill. The bone flutes and gourd rattles of the Old Ones had joined in the fiddle tune. They had handfuls of teeth in their shakers today. Through a gap in the mist strode R. H. Auman and Jacob Cruse, both killed at Chickamauga on the same day as Henri. They tipped their hats to him as they walked by. Jeffrey Forrest beckoned them to join the dance.

Henri himself did not feel like dancing, though the music tickled and jumped in his head. He looked down at himself, at his bare sunken ribs. He was still poorer than the day Forrest first found him by the roadside in Kentucky. No shoes and no shirt, just a red wanga bundle round his neck on a string. His butternut trousers were rags to the knee. His weapons were nowhere. He was done with the war.

Out of the mist climbed Felix Hicks, a quartermaster slain not long after Brice’s Crossroads—he’d asked to ride with Forrest’s escort to attack A. J. Smith, just for the adventure of it. Auman handed Hicks a gourd. He drank, and passed it on to Henri. The gourd held cool water with a faint taste of field mint. Where was there mint now, in all this country? The horses had eaten or trampled it all.

He handed the gourd to Tommy Brown, just coming up the hill with Bill Green, both of them killed near Lynchburg in 1864. They’d surrendered already, but when a Union officer ordered them shot
on the spot, Green snatched his pistol and killed him with it. In the next few seconds they were both gunned down. Henri walked around the crown of the hill, not quite dancing, though his step grew buoyantly light and his hips just barely began to flow with the music. The Old Ones had tipped up hollow logs and were drumming. Henri raised another gourd of water that had come into his hands, saluting the four directions with a splash. From the east, more of the dead kept arriving: Jim Shoffner, Bobby Reeves, Bill Robinson, Jacob Holt, Alf Boone, Pone Green, who was killed at Tuscaloosa. C. C. McLemore. Sammy Scales and P. S. Dean.

Here came John J. Neal, shot down as he rode with a dispatch from Forrest to Hood. The message said what?—
Don’t come. Death is waiting
. More than six thousand men to be felled in one day.

Now, from this now, Henri peered into the mist, knowing that beyond it he might see the Army of Tennessee hurling itself to total destruction against Schofield’s fortified line south of Franklin. Blood running in the trenches ten inches deep. Forrest almost biting his own lips off in his frustration that Hood would not order him to flank Schofield out of his hastily dug works, preferring to charge, head-on, to his ruin.

Here came Will Strickland, killed near Pulaski on Christmas Day, 1864, while he helped Forrest cover Hood’s wretched retreat from the carnage of Franklin and Nashville—the last shredded remnants of that army slipping across the rivers to the west. Forrest had been fond of Strickland, who’d come without leave from an infantry regiment to join the escort—liked him so well that he sent seven men back to the Twenty-seventh Tennessee to replace him. Green recruits they might have been but still there were seven of them.

There were Union boys coming in now too. Henri did not know their names, though he recognized many of their faces. They had not only met at sword’s point. Sometimes they’d find each other in some smokehouse or cornfield, hollow and famished, together in that as they scavenged for food. By the war’s end, one in every ten able-bodied men in the Union states would have been, had already been killed in some battle. In the Confederacy, it would be one in four.

Jerry could not possibly feed so many! But Henri had a chunk of
warm pone in his fist, and when he looked at the skillet there was some left there. Not a lot, but there was some.

What a faithful service Jerry had made. No matter what had already happened he always managed to feed them something. And the dead were always, endlessly hungry. Henri was grateful. He wanted to weep, but the dead have no tears.

Some of the new arrivals seemed to look at him strangely. Henri scratched his head. There were burrs in his hair. With his bare chest, bare feet, tattered trousers held up with frayed rope, he must look like a contraband, a runaway slave.

His cornbread was finished. Last gravelly crumbs in the back of his craw. He would always be hungry but he wanted to rest. He went back to the limestone shelf and stretched out. Around him the fiddling and drumbeat grew distant.

He covered his face with his forearm to block out the pale light of the sky. But his arm was transparent; he could see right through it. He could see straight through his own eyelids too. The hilltop was empty. Nobody was there. He himself was not there. There was no one but Jerry, serving the dead.

May 1865

J
ERRY LOOPED
a piece of soft old rope around King Philip’s big head for a hackamore. After the war there were not enough ready-made halters to go around. He stroked the velvet of King Philip’s nostrils and clucked to him as he tied him to an iron ring in the hall of the barn, then went to clean his stall.

There wasn’t such of a whole lot to do because this task was done every day; still Jerry grunted every time he bent to fork up a clump of wet straw and manure. During the war he had often got wet and slept cold and now he had a touch of that arthuritis in both his knees and his right hip. The place on his hip worked around to the back sometimes.

He racked the pitchfork in the barrow and shook out a little lime powder on the damp spots in the stall. Once they had dried, he would scatter fresh straw. But now he got a stiff brush and a metal comb and went to work on King Philip’s mane and tail and coat. Being so near the big hot-blooded horse would warm and ease the arthuritis pains that came and went with the morning dew, and it also seemed to soothe and loosen his mind. He had give up his commission same as General Forrest had, so people didn’t call him Ginral Jerry no more, but mostly just plain Jerry, though some did call him Mister Forrest, since he didn’t have any other last name but Forrest and that was a name that carried respect. He was free too, now that the war was over, and although the state of freedom had not much changed the way he lived, he liked to think about it and did so several times a day.