Devil's Dream (41 page)

“Whoa, you,” he said, when King Philip shifted a leg or shivered, his low voice scrambled in his mouth. In the course of the war most
of his natural teeth had fell out and General Forrest had got him a fresh set of wooden ones, like what George Washington used to have. The wooden teeth were not very comfortable, but Jerry liked to wear them anyway, except when he needed to eat or talk.

When King Philip stirred, Jerry slipped a hand out of the brush’s strap to stroke the horse with his bare palm. Nestling against the warm hide of the horse, he muttered at the level of his breath
I’se free now
, and let that whisper shimmer, and then thought
My chirren free. My grandchirren be free
. He combed some burrs and loose hair out of King Philip’s mane and thought
My greatgrandchirren gone be free
, and stopped with that. There was something about the freedom of his great-grandchildren that always seemed to trouble him a little; he didn’t know why. Maybe it was because he didn’t have any great-grandchildren yet, that he knew of. He didn’t know what this trouble could be, though it was true that now some people appeared to be worse off free than they had been slave … but Forrest’s people did all right, except they were poor, but then everybody down South was poor, white or black, since the war. Only Jerry thought Forrest would be rich again soon. He seemed to already be working on that.

In the other stalls horses had begun to nicker and stamp. “Hesh, y’all,” Jerry said, slipping his hand back into the strap of the brush. “Be still.” He looked about—the boy who should have been dropping a handful of grain in their feed boxes had wandered off somewhere. That was one of his grandsons, Sophus. Through the open barn doors, Jerry caught sight of him up near the fence, shading his eyes from the rising sun to look at something that must be coming down the road.

He made to call Sophus back to the barn, but he couldn’t get his voice to carry very far past the wooden teeth, and it was awkward to take them out because he had the brush and comb strapped to his hands. As he considered this problem, he felt King Philip bunch up against him. There was a flash of blue on the road.

King Philip backed up, surged forward, made to rear. With a ripple of his long muscular neck he broke free of the hackamore.

“Whoa, you hoss,” Jerry said, shaking off the brush to reach for a hold of forelock or mane. King Philip shook free and charged for daylight.

“Shit far,” Jerry said. He had learned this expression from his master.

The barn doorway was secured with a two-by-six plank slid between the doorposts at waist height, but Sophus, going out, had left it barely caught on one side. The plank bent away like a twig as King Philip went through it, then sprang back to catch Jerry in the midsection, knocking him flat and knocking the wind clean out of him. In the split second he lay on the dusty clay floor, he caught sight of an old ax handle waiting there to be set with a new head, and he snatched it as he got up and ran. Scattering fence rails like splinters, King Philip had burst onto the road to attack the little party of Federal curiosity-seekers who’d come out in hope of a glimpse of that devil, Forrest.

They were getting more devilment than they’d counted on now. Like a certain number of other old soldiers, King Philip had not really accepted the notion that the war was now over. Blue cloth and brass buttons sent him clean out of his mind. Forrest didn’t ride him off the place anymore, since all North Mississippi was crawling with uniformed Yankees, and Forrest even did business with some of them. This bunch, though, was nothing but a bunch of
featherheadedlollygagginggoddamngolliwoggawkers
as Forrest would certainly have let them know, if he had been near.

King Philip had laid his ears back and bared his teeth and had his neck stretched so long and straight he looked more like a hydra than a horse. Sophus was yelling for Jerry from the raw bottom of his throat, and Jerry wanted to call back
stay way from dat hoss
but he couldn’t have got so much past his mouthful of wood if he’d had breath to holler, and he had none to spare. King Philip had knocked down one of the strange horses already and as the rider rolled clear he reared to attack another one with his front hooves. A third Yankee horse wheeled to kick, nearly throwing his rider in the process. A fourth horseman swung his mount away to make room to draw a pistol.

Jerry jumped over a couple of fence rails and knocked down the gun arm with the ax handle. The pistol fired wild when it struck in the ditch; the report drove King Philip still crazier. Jerry smacked a couple of the Federal horses with the ax handle to drive them back, then turned to put his body between King Philip and the enemy.

The big horse hesitated. The fallen Federal ran up and caught Jerry by the shoulder from behind. Reflexively Jerry batted him away with the iron comb he didn’t realize was still attached to his left hand. King Philip charged and the Yankee rolled under the belly of another horse to get away. Jerry dropped the ax handle to snatch at King Philip’s mane and came away with a handful of coarse hair.

Forrest, who’d been assisting a blacksmith at the forge, came burning up all soot-streaked, black beard jutting and eyes shooting sparks. As he passed Sophus he grabbed a rope the boy must have had the good sense to fetch from the barn. In a moment he had caught King Philip and brought the horse under some kind of control.

Jerry put his teeth in his bib pocket and took the rope’s end. He ran the curry comb lightly over King Philip’s spine. The big horse shuddered and subsided.

“Whoa, you,” Jerry set. “You jess settle down. War done over. You let these Yankee gemmun alone.”

For a moment they all watched each other, breathing. One blue-coat fondled his forearm where the ax handle had bruised it. Another nursed a red row of scratches from the iron teeth of the comb.

Lieutenant Hosea took off his hat.

“General Forrest?” he said.

Forrest folded his arms across his chest.

“Dear Lord,” Hosea said. “Your niggers fight for you. Your
horses
fight for you. No wonder you were so hard to whip.”

Forrest looked back at him, yellow gleam in his eye, and said, “I ain’t been whupped till yet.”

December 1853

A
SUNNY MORNING
, following a night of rain not quite cold enough to freeze. It was warmer now, though a chill breeze came off and on from the river. Forrest was walking back from the docks on the Memphis riverfront when something thumped into his leg. A little black boy, no more than two years old if that, rebounded from the collision and was gathering himself to run again when Forrest caught him up.

“Well, hello.”

The boy was dressed in just a rag of osnaburg, with holes cut in it to make a smock. The cloth was grimy but the child was clean. His hair was cut close against his scalp and his arms and legs were glossy, well fleshed.

“Now who do you belong to?” Forrest said. He ran his thumb over a ringworm circle on the boy’s shoulder where it emerged from the smock. The worm was dead and the mark of it looked to be half-healed; there was a faint odor of a coal oil poultice when he lifted his thumb away.

“Somebody been taken care of you, anyhow,” Forrest said. He’d noticed too that the neck and arm holes in the smock had been neatly hemmed; never mind the cloth itself was worn to near-transparency.

The boy twisted in his arms and kicked at him with both bare feet.

“Quit that,” Forrest said. “Fore ye break yore toe.”

The boy squirmed and looked with white eyes toward the river, where a boat horn blew a long low hoot. “Now where did ye drop from?”

Wordless, the boy gaped at him, revealing a flash of sound-looking teeth, then puckered his lips tight shut.

“Cat got yore tongue, hah?” Forrest said. “Well I reckon ye didn’t just fall from the moon.”

He looked in the direction the boy was refusing to look, and saw R. J. Willis come huffing around the corner, all in a lather, a rope leash in one hand and a short braided riding crop in the other. Forrest swung the boy to his left hip and set his right leg forward. Willis stopped for a second when he saw them, then came on at a slower pace.

“You don’t mean to use all that on a little ole shirttail boy,” Forrest said. He was wearing a pistol on his right hip and he touched it briefly through the coat flap beneath which it was hidden.

“Goddamn runaway needs to be tied.” Willis halted about three paces away. “Needs to be taught a good lesson too.”

“I got him, don’t I?” Forrest said. “He ain’t goen nowhar.”

“That there’s my propitty, Forrest,” Willis said. “Hand him over.”

Forrest looked about himself. Women with their shopping baskets were tucking pale faces away in their bonnets as they discreetly left the street, and the shopkeepers stood well away from their windows. In one of the shops a plank shutter banged closed, though it was well short of the dinner hour. Disputes between slave-traders could turn very salty. Forrest himself had been a witness in the case where Bolton shot poor McMillan, claiming McMillan had sold him a free nigger. He still felt troubled when he thought of that business, for McMillan had been uneasy about going to see Bolton in the first place, and Forrest had advised him to go, and not seen till later he ought to have gone with him. He had traveled with McMillan once in a while, running coffles upriver from New Orleans in the early summer, when the heat made unhealthy to keep too many slaves in the barracoons down there, and he’d been struck by the fact that McMillan never carried a pistol and never seemed to need one to govern the people he was transporting.

Bolton must also have known McMillan generally went unarmed, for he shot him in cold blood and threw down a knife afterward to make a claim he’d been attacked. McMillan had lived long enough to tell this story; they carried him back to Forrest’s house to finish his dying. In the back of his mind Forrest had
thought Bolton too much a coward to do what he did—a poor risk to misjudge a man that way. Though Forrest and others testified to the murder, Bolton went free. As for the free nigger, it turned that he really was free and could prove it to boot, so he had been turned loose a good while before, and whoever had paid for him lost his money. There was no use thinking about any of it really.

“Did I say he ain’t?” Forrest was saying to Willis meanwhile.

“Ain’t what?” Willis said.

“Yore propitty,” Forrest said. The boy had gone stone quiet on his hip, like a rabbit caught out in an open field, hoping to hide himself in stillness.

“He ain’t worth much all by hisself, little bit of a thing like that,” Forrest said. “Let’s see what you got that goes with him.”

Tobacco-stained teeth framed the hole in Willis’s heavy jowls. After a moment he snapped his jaw shut, hung the rope’s end over one shoulder, and stuck the riding crop in a back pocket. He looked at his empty palms for a second, then raised his eyes to Forrest.

“All right, then,” he said. “Come on.”

Forrest hitched the boy up on his hip and followed. The riding crop jigged up and down in Willis’s back pocket as he walked. The boy hadn’t run so far, after all; Willis’s establishment was half a block around the corner from where he’d first appeared.

Duffy, hanging around the gateposts, took a long step back when Forrest came in. He’d been with Bolton at the time of that killing, had backed up Bolton’s lies with his own, and he’d been a little shy of Forrest since the two of them met in court. Forrest didn’t bother to look at him twice.

Willis’s pens weren’t much different from his own, except not so clean, which was a difference you could smell. The boy stayed quiet on Forrest’s hip, only his head searching and turning. They both watched Willis pull a wooden pin out of a hasp on one of the stalls. He turned and nodded to Forrest, almost expressionless as he pulled the door wide.

Inside, a black girl crouched on a shock of straw, holding her head in both her hands. As the door came open, she jumped up with a rattle.

The boy wriggled free of Forrest and ran to her, clutching her
leg through her calico skirt. He let out a little sound like a cat would make. Or maybe it was her.

Both their heads turned together to regard him. Her neck was long and she carried her head high. Dust motes, stirred up by her sudden movement, swirled in the air between them, sparking gold when they caught the shafts of sunlight planing in through the cracks in the broad boards of the stall. Or maybe it was those bright spots that sometimes filled his field of vision if he straightened up too quickly, from bending down low. He did feel a little dizzy as a matter of fact, though he couldn’t think of a reason why. The brown honey of her eyes and a look that went clean through him.

“What’s his name?” Forrest heard himself asking.

“Thomas.” The voice seemed to come out of nowhere and when it stopped on those two syllables he couldn’t remember the sound of it at all. Had she even opened her mouth to speak? Now he saw her catch her lower lip in her top teeth, then release it.

He turned toward Willis. “What’s
her
name?”