Devil's Dream (37 page)

Now they were leaving the ragged southern border of the town, where moonlight splintered through the skeletons of new-framed houses, on streets as yet unnamed. The road they walked tended in the direction of Hernando. He had a mental glimpse of Mary Ann’s eyes, flicking at him for a moment over the top of the poetry book
where’s the eye however blue …
But he could not turn back from the other woman who still walked a pace or two ahead of him, glancing back now over her shoulder, her dark visage calm and serious, perhaps a hint of a smile tucked into her collarbone where he couldn’t really see.

The moon a day or so past full, an oblong rather than a circle. A rag of cloud slipped across the lower half of it, hurrying back toward Memphis. She was leading him on, each dip of her step pulling his foot forward as if they were linked by some invisible magnetic shackle. Or it was the force of his intention propelling her forward; how to know? He tried again to think of returning, but could not imagine any sort of future. As near as five minutes from now was a black hole. Deep gravity seemed to be pulling him down, although in fact the road was ascending, climbing to the gateposts of Elmwood Cemetery, which were coming up pale before them in the moonlight.

As they entered he wondered how she knew her way; was it possible she’d come here freely? Certainly she seemed sure of her direction. He overtook her now and walked beside her, on her right, near enough he could have reached for her hand. In the way of such things they’d come to call her Catharine Forrest, he thought, and her children would be called Forrest too, if he didn’t sell her or sell
them. In time of need or simply for profit he might sell a saddle horse, even a fine one he’d known huge and bold and rippling between his legs …

“Ain’t you afeart?” he asked her. For a moment he seemed to be asking it of himself. But Bedford Forrest had not been afraid of anything since when he was twelve he got first word that his father was dead. He couldn’t remember many times before that either.

“Feart of what?” Her voice low, a hint of laughter in it maybe.

“Haints.” By damn, by Satan’s horny cloven hooves, he might as well be twelve again and trying to spark some scrawny girl in a gunny sack for a dress.

Catharine’s laugh came low and husky. “This buryen ground too young fo’ haints.” He saw the white of her teeth as she smiled in the dark. “Not no
scary
ones, no way.”

It was true—Elmwood had been dedicated just two years before and thus far was most commonly used as a park. Of a Sunday he’d driven the rambles himself, with Mary Ann and the children and sometimes a grandmother. He’d not known of niggers coming here much, though Catharine seemed to know her way.

The air was heavy with crape myrtle aroma, and all the dogwoods were in bloom; white quatrefoil leaves trembling up to the moon. The giddy myrtle scent caught in the back of his gullet. He followed her under a spray of dogwood and stopped beside a waist-high marble slab.

She turned to face him. His fingertips trailed the surface of the stone, dipped into indentations of the letters there. “You’re not afraid,” he said.

“Of haints?”

“Of me.”

Again the warm syrup of her laughter. “You think I don’t know what a man is?” She shook back her hair and stood with her back arched, hands cocked at her waist. “I seen how you looks at me. I knows what you wants.”

“But what do you want?” It could not be himself who said these words—asking a black slave wench what she wanted.

She loosed some hidden clasp and all at once the dress fell from her, pooling at her feet. When she stepped out of it, toward him, the warm loamy scent of her seemed to wash over him already.

“What I can git,” she told him.

And with a smile, though her almond eyes were not entirely smiling. She looked to him sleek as a seal in the fractured moonlight that fell through the dogwood. Her breasts rose toward him as she breathed. He had not touched her yet, not ever, not even when he’d seen her the first time, chained to a ring on a post of that stall. In a flash before he reached for her he wondered why he would choose this. To be no longer master of anyone, and least of all himself.

April 1863

M
ELEE.
A ricochet whine brought Henri to a heightened state of consciousness, focused as if on the rust-red pain of a wasp sting. The horses bunched, Forrest’s charger jostling Henri’s mount. A string of curses
why that slipslidenfleabittenwormriddeneggsuckenliv-erblownhorsestealengraverobben son of Satan I’ll tie his skinny legs around his neck in a sweet bow knot afore I’m done …
It seemed the shooting came from all sides now, three hundred and sixty degrees of a circle closing in. The point of Forrest’s double-ground sword stuck up, revolved, as if to cut little crescents from the clouds in the blue sky overhead.

Henri looked at Forrest’s magnificent bay war horse and couldn’t think of the animal’s name, couldn’t seem to remember if this was the fifth or the fifteenth horse Forrest would have shot from under him—and was that an event that had already happened, or was it still to come?

From the rear or what had been their rear a cannon coughed up thunder and grapeshot. Henri was shocked to a slightly clearer sense of the occasion and its time and place. It was spring, green grass and the pillowy fresh air told him that much, the fields so lush their horses risked foundering if they overgrazed. Last night Ginral Jerry had come into camp with half a dozen young rabbits slung over his shoulder, so dazed with spring fever, Jerry had claimed, he had only to snatch them up by their ears.

The pitch of the ringing in Henri’s ears shifted, and near him he saw a corporal clap a hand around his upper arm. Blood leaked through the cracks between his fingers as the gray cloth stained. To
the corporal’s woebegone expression Forrest bit off a few words. “Hold yer horse in, son, ye ain’t bad hurt till yet.”

Smoke to the west—the Yankees had been burning barns and fields. A courier came galloping in amongst them: “Stanley’s run over Armstrong’s rear! Captured a mess of guns, and Captain Freeman!”

“Is he in Armstrong’s rear goddamn him!” But for once Henri had a suspicion that Forrest’s battle joy might be just slightly feigned. “By the bloody burning horns of the Devil that’s jest whar I been tryen to git him all day! Come on, boys, we’ll be in
his
rear terrectly—”

The event assembled itself in Henri’s mind. Today they were in Middle Tennessee, south of Franklin on the Lewisburg Pike, riding out from Spring Hill for a reconnaissance coordinated with Van Dorn. In this region the road was embraced by bends of the Harpeth River, one of which the Federal General Stanley had unexpectedly crossed, overrunning Freeman’s hastily formed battery before he could get off a shot, then moving into Armstrong’s rear. The Confederates would have been set for a rout if Forrest had not rallied his escort to charge back on the attackers—by the first shock of contact most of the riders had persuaded themselves that Stanley really had fallen into a trap set by Forrest, and their wildcat shrieking turned triumphant:

Yyyyyyaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!

They’d overrun Freeman’s cannons now, though not the Federals who were rushing back toward the river crossing with their prisoners. Forrest, his bearded face in a genuine battle blaze, leaned toward Henri from his saddle and said, “Ornery, did I git around to tellen ye the time this puts me in mind of—” while on the other side of him Matthew turned his horse in closer, risking a collision to capture the anecdotal pearl—

Harried by their mounted captors, prisoners from Freeman’s battery ran or tried to run in a herky-jerky slow motion across the field to the water maples lining the riverbank. Something bad was going to happen or already had. Freeman was heavy, used to riding with his caissons; he could not keep the pace. He sank to one knee, blowing in the sodden grass, a Federal soldier turned back, raised a
pistol; the captured surgeon there at Freeman’s side threw up one of his hands—Forrest was going to finish his story later, or no, he had already finished it, at Parker’s Crossroads in December, about four months before. Was the past the part that had already happened, the future still to come? That battle would be, had been similar to this one, at least in some of its particulars …

They’d spent the days around Christmas tearing up railroad track up and down the line between Jackson and Union City, rolling kettledrums and building ghost campfires each night to make their weakness look like strength. Forrest had come into West Tennessee short of two thousand men, and made the Federals believe he had ten times that many. In fact the Federals in the region outnumbered him by five to one and were doing their clumsy best to hem him in against their gunboats on the Tennessee River. Forrest, meanwhile, slipped east toward McKenzie, meaning to hook around and strike the railroad again south of Jackson, if he could avoid a fight till then.

Year-end weather was miserable with icy rain. Crossing the Obion River they had to use captured sacks of coffee and flour to give the wagon wheels traction through the mud—a sacrifice which depressed the quartermasters. But they still had plunder enough to slow them down and when Forrest saw he was on a collision course with the Federals south of McLemoresville, he concluded to give them a whuppen if they wanted one. The Clarksburg and McLemoresville roads crossed in the front yard of the Reverend John Parker’s house; Forrest sent his brother Bill with his Forty Thieves to lure the Federals under Dunham toward the crossroads. On the morning of New Year’s Eve, he opened fire on Dunham’s line, first with a single cannon rushed to a ridge above the Federal position, and then with Freeman’s and John Morton’s batteries working in close concert. By afternoon the artillery barrage and a couple of charges had separated Dunham from his own cannon and trapped him in a timber lot a little ways south of the Parker house. Forrest sent in a demand for surrender and was resting and waiting for a reply when rifle fire broke in their rear.

A courier rode up with his horse in a lather to announce that fresh Federal troops under Sullivan had broken in among Forrest’s horse-holders in the peach orchard on the back side of the Parker
house. Dunham must have been stalling for this development; from having his enemy surrounded Forrest was now pinned between two lines of hostile infantry.

“What’ll we do, General?” the messenger panted, and Forrest snapped back at him,
“Charge both ways.”

He drew out the double-edged sword he’d taken at Trenton a week or so back, and spurred up his horse to ride to the rear. Henri followed him, with Kelley and Anderson. At their heels ran men who’d dismounted to do battle with Dunham’s infantry, now desperate to recover their horses from the Federal surprise, but this movement looked less like a charge than a panic.

In the peach orchard there was a sudden flurry of skirmishing, but Forrest was directing a retreat rather than a real charge, as some of his men did recover their horses; there was still a path open to safety to the east. Sweeping the sword with his left arm, Forrest pointed them the way. As the troops began filtering out of the trees, he steered his horse nearer to Henri’s.

“Ornery, did I never tell ye?” he began. “Back when I was naught but a shirttail boy, I had me a little spotted pony we called him Whiskey. Smarter’n a whip and mean as a snake. Did I kill me some snakes back in them days? Seem like Bedford County was all over snakes then, specially in the springtime. Copperheads, rattlers, cottonmouth too we used to see … I wouldn’t kill a black snake though, account of a black snake keeps down varmints.”

Raising his sword, he twisted in the saddle to shout a command to Dibrell, who was forming up men for retreat along the road toward Lexington. Then he returned to Henri with his ordinary speaking tone.

“It warnt all work back in them days, when we still had that farm on Caney Spring Creek, back afore my Daddy died. Work aplenty, but we had good play times too. They was other boys had ponies round that way and we used to ride all over the county. Hit wasn’t hardly fenced up then, not like it is now.

“They was one time a pack of dogs took after us. Nigh on a dozen of’m I wouldn’t be surprised, and big, ugly too … the biggest stood might near tall as our ponies. They got to running us and made our ponies run.”

By now almost all their men had cleared the orchard. Forrest drew up his horse before a corpse splayed on its back: the young cavalier who’d objected to his sharpening the back side of the captured blade at Trenton.

There was something unlucky about peach orchards, Henri thought, remembering Joe Johnston’s bloody boot. At this season the branches were wiry and bare; horseshoes had scuffed up a few bony pits. Forrest dismounted and planted his sword in the ground by the dead youth’s head.

“Well now, Orville,” he said. “How’d ye git yoreself kilt back here? I’d sooner thought to find ye forward, up front with the flags.”

Kelley and Anderson exchanged a glance across his empty saddle. Forrest crouched, considered, then turned back the dead man’s lapel. A whiff of lavender came with the handkerchief he drew from the inside pocket, as if it might have been a lady’s favor. Forrest opened the cloth and covered the dead face. He stood up and shook the dirt from his sword.