Devil's Dream (25 page)

As Roderick lofted over the third and last fence that separated them from the fight, Matthew caught sight of Captain Montgomery Little, six-shooter upraised, turning his astonished gaze their way. A fissure of silence opened in the roar of battle and Matthew looked through it at Captain Little again; he had lost his pistol now and both his arms worked frantically like the legs of a beetle turned on its back and though still standing he had been shot dead—it was only that he didn’t know it yet. With his free hand Matthew groped around his waist for a weapon, exchanging a blurry glance with Henri, who seemed to be muscling his own horse around in a vain effort to intercept them. Roderick, his neck stretched long, had caught sight of Forrest and was rushing to join him where he fought two-handed, hammering a Federal trooper down from the saddle with the butt of his empty pistol in his fist. The noise of battle came back with an explosion, which might just have been the shock as Matthew plowed into the ground. He sat up and saw Roderick lying a little in back of him, dead of a fourth bullet, one foreleg spasmodically lifting and loosening.

The fighting seemed to have ended now, with Yankees laying down their arms, signaling surrender with pocket handkerchiefs; somewhere was a larger truce flag on a stick. Forrest dismounted and stooped to reach for the dead horse, but stopped just short of touching him. Willie pounded up, mouth wide open and face chalk-pale.

“Thought I done tolt ye to carry him back.” Forrest sank back on his boot heels, wrapping his arms across his chest. Willie, too winded to make any reply, folded at the waist and braced his hands on his knees.

“It’s a shame. D’ye hear me?”

Matthew, feeling himself to be included now, thumbed a last trickle of blood away from his nose, and got up to one knee.

“A
goddamn
shame.” Forrest shook his head. “Well. Hit cain’t be mended.” He turned and stalked off toward the area where the prisoners were being gathered up.

Willie coughed and straightened, gasping. “You hurt?” he said.

Shaking his head, Matthew got to his feet. Willie’s chest rose and
fell. He tried the black points of his mustache with a fingertip and looked down at Roderick’s still body.

“That horse was a better man than either one of us,” Willie said.

Without thinking Matthew offered his hand across the carcass. It was like he could see Willie’s first thought—
you don’t shake hands with a nigger
—and by the time Willie decided to reach for the man inside the skin, Matthew had already turned away, stooping to bloody himself from the dead horse’s wounds and make his hand untouchable to anyone.

April 1864

T
HEY HAD BEEN FIGHTING
around Fort Pillow for hours by the time Forrest himself rode in, grim and weary from more than a day and a night in the saddle—he had ridden over seventy miles since the day before. Henri led him out a fresh horse. Chalmers had launched the first attack on the fort near dawn, and as soon as they swept the pickets from the outer works they had overrun the Federal horse pen and captured the stock. The Federals were just a little more than seven hundred, too few to man the outer works even with the fresh black troops that had just been sent from Memphis, and they had quickly fallen back to the second line of defense, a zigzag breastworks on the top of the hill, with its rear open to the junction of Coal Creek and the Mississippi River.

With a grunt, Forrest swung astride the captured horse. Captain Anderson joined him for a scout of the perimeter. Henri fully intended to stay where he was, but Forrest beckoned him to follow. Henri climbed onto a brown jenny mule that had caught his eye in the Federal stock pen. The outermost works of Fort Pillow encompassed several hilltops and the terrain was cut this way and that by ravines. Henri liked the jenny’s sure step over the rough ground and he felt too that she had some particular instinct for self-preservation.

It would have been a pleasant spring morning, bright but cool. Outside the stock pen the hillsides were speckled with tiny white star-shaped flowers and the yolky yellow of new dandelions. Moving in a semicircle southeast from the Mississippi, they passed Ginral Jerry, just out of range of the guns of the fort, going along at a crouch and gathering the bitter greens. Chalmers had posted sharpshooters
on the hills inside the outermost works and they were steadily exchanging fire with the Federals in the inner defenses.

Forrest rode halfway up the hillside and turned to face the river again, gathering the reins with one hand and shading his eyes with the other, though the sun was mostly in his back. Behind the zigzag breastworks, atop a bluff at the river’s edge, there was a U-shaped inner fort, refurbished with fresh dug earth, with slits for six cannon belching lead in their direction. They were out of cannon range where they were, but a couple of Federal long rifles carried further. Forrest’s unfamiliar horse was restless with the whistle of the balls, kept squirming sideways and trying to sit down. Henri stroked his jenny’s trembling neck, along the lines of the blue-hair cross that grew across her shoulders.

“Goddammit this oughtent to take
all goddamn
day!” Forrest remarked. “They ain’t that many of the scalawags in there nohow. We need to move some more riflemen up to make them sonsabitches put they goddamn heads down.”

“Look there,” Anderson said, and pointed down the slope. “McCulloch wants you.”

Henri could not tell if it was McCulloch or not, but someone was signaling from the zigzag breastworks, which McCulloch’s brigade had taken sometime before Forrest arrived. They rode up toward him. Forrest’s horse’s hooves tore up the grass and lost purchase in the loosened dirt. He arrived at McCulloch’s post at a scramble, and dismounted, tossing Henri the reins of his horse.

The horseshoe ring of the inner fort was no more than three hundred yards from the crest of the ridge, but still a few degrees above the point where they stood. The Confederates had reversed the log breastworks to give themselves some cover, and McCulloch’s riflemen were keeping up a frequent fire to discourage the Federals from taking clear aim from the top of the earthen parapet opposite. Beyond the fort Henri could see a Federal gunboat steaming along the river toward them.

“General,” McCulloch said. “Look yonder if you would.” He pointed down to his left, where the ravine behind them curled around the ridge toward the Mississippi. A string of log cabins lined a cove between them and the inner fort.

“I believe a charge would carry that place,” McCulloch said. “And from there we can distress their artillerymen a good deal.”

“If them cannon don’t blow ye to smithereens first,” Forrest said.

“Just look at the angle,” McCulloch said. “If we once gain the cabins they won’t be able to bring those guns to bear.”

Forrest squinted down the hill and nodded. It was the sort of move he favored, bold and no more risky than it needed to be.

“Get after’m,” he said briefly. He pulled a nickel-backed watch from his pocket and glanced at the face: not quite eleven.

“General,” Anderson called. “Mister Nolan would like a word.”

The crash of cannon from the fort almost drowned out what they were saying. Henri’s jenny shuddered, revolving her long ears. Nolan clambered up the slope at a crouch, then straightened to cup his mouth to Forrest’s ear. He wore a buckskin jacket with the hair still on the hide, except for patches where the bristles had worn away from the greasy, sour-smelling leather. Of course the rest of Forrest’s men were scarcely in any better trim. Their gray was ragged and many went shoeless now. Their numbers were thin when they started from Georgia and they had been taking up recruits as they could, over three weeks of a crazy looping progress all up and down West Tennessee. They’d swept in Nolan four days before, along with a couple dozen of his riders, raiders, deserters, bushwhackers—nobody knew what they really were and the same went double for Mister Nolan himself. But then it was no time to be choosy, and if Forrest had been as choosy as that he’d have left Henri standing by the Brandenburg road three years before.

They were following Nolan now, continuing the same southeast sweep they’d begun before, on the far side of the zigzag breastworks from the inner fort, across this cheerlessly bare ground, which had all been clear-cut to open fields of fire. Their way was complicated by stumps and logs that still lay where they had been felled. Some undergrowth had begun to return, buck bushes and blackberry bramble, worthless for cover. Anderson’s horse stumbled, jumping one of the many shallow gullies. The volume of the cannonade swelled as the Federal gunboat began to lob up shells from the Mississippi.

Forrest seemed oblivious to it. Now and then he reined up his
horse to beckon sharpshooters to nearer positions. The Federal riflemen, meanwhile, had corrected their tendency to overshoot and were beginning to bring their rounds much closer to the scouting party. Anderson was just turning to Forrest to say who knew what when a ball crashed through the forehead of Forrest’s horse. The animal reared, went into convulsions, and fell over backward, rolling over the rider.

Henri jumped down and sheltered himself beside the shoulder of his jenny, holding her close under the jaw and stroking her velvet nostrils in hope of keeping her calm. He watched Forrest’s mount as it kicked itself to death in the ditch where it had fallen, the geyser of blood slowing to a trickle between its eyes. A hullo went up from the Confederate lines to the west and Henri looked over to see Matthew rushing pell-mell toward them astride a fresh horse he was bringing to Forrest. The boy rode well, though he’d not taken time to put his feet in the stirrups. But Forrest had maybe been crushed to death, it appeared. Or no, Anderson was helping him up from the springy clump of buck bushes that had cushioned his fall. Forrest pressed one hand to his side, then straightened.

“For God’s sake, General!” Anderson said. “If you must carry on, let’s do it on foot.”

“I’m as like to get shot afoot as on horseback,” Forrest snarled. “And I can see one hell of a whole lot better from the saddle.”

And he got up as quickly as Matthew hopped down. The boy looked up at him, panting, his eyes wide and a little glassy. His caramel-color face had paled a shade.

“Git outa here!” Forrest told him out of the side of his mouth. “Git back under cover. Henry, carry him back to the line.”

Gladly
, Henri thought in a prayerful silence. He sprang onto the jenny and stretched down a hand for Matthew to scramble up behind him. Forrest and Anderson had resumed their course, following Nolan northeast toward Cold Creek. The fire on their party had paused for a moment, thanks to McCulloch’s rush on the cabins in the cove. Henri rode gratefully toward cover.

“He never even looked at me,” Matthew hissed into his ear.

“Calm down,” Henri advised him. “It might just be he doesn’t want to see you killed.”

· · ·

A
N HOUR LATER
Forrest returned, on foot after all (for his second horse had been shot out from under him too), limping from the effects of his first fall, and in a still more prickly humor than before.

“Got holt of yore penstaff?” he asked Anderson. “Good, set this down.
You lowdown bellycrawlen horsethieven niggerstealen passel of murderen rapen renegades have got your sorry ass in a slipknot now! I’d as lief kill ever man in the place, contraband niggers and bushwhackers too, and if ye ain’t got the good sense to give up and quit I will damn well do it and do it barehanded for I don’t mean to waste no more powder on ye!”

“Yes sir.” Anderson held his paper to the light. “Let me just read that back.”

Here Anderson paused to clear his throat, while Henri’s mouth opened like the mouth of a fish; he had to make a conscious effort to close it. In the course of the morning he had seen Major Booth arrive in the land of the Old Ones, struck in the heart by a long lucky shot, while inspecting the inner fort’s batteries.

“Close enough, I reckon,” Forrest said as Anderson folded the letter. He reached into his watch pocket but instead of the watch he produced the drilled coin on its leather thong, which he looked at for a moment before raising his eyes to Captain Goodman.

“Well, git ye a white rag and carry that note on over,” he said.

Goodman saluted and reached for the paper. Forrest put the coin back into his pocket. “Henry,” he said.