Devil's Dream (30 page)

A cheer went up. Willie slowed the horse to a canter as he brought him around in the next intersection, then came trotting back, preening his mustache with the thumb of his free hand. Hands reached up to pat his knees. Some people were counting out money to pay their bets. Witherspoon leaned sideways in the saddle to shake hands with Willie. Forrest dropped Mary Ann’s hand and strode down the gate. He fixed Willie with a cocked forefinger.

“William! Go and walk that horse till he’s good and cool. And I mean do hit yoreself, hear me? Don’t ye hand it to nobody else to do for ye.”

“Yes sir,” Willie said, his triumph now just slightly muted. Forrest had already turned from him and was walking up the slope of the greensward toward Mary Ann, his face the same struggling mix of annoyance and excitement. She took his arm and they stood there a moment more, watching the crowd dissolve.

“Well, he’s too big to whup I reckon,” Forrest said, a little ruefully. “I’d dock his pay but ain’t nobody drawen none!” He shook his head. “That boy cain’t think of a thing more fun than a war.”

O
N THE MORNING
of the tenth day of his leave at LaGrange, Forrest woke to a muttering he took at first to be the sound of a light rain. But when he opened his eyes the windows streamed with sunshine. It was a little too warm in the bedroom, from embers of the fire Mary Ann had insisted on lighting the night before. Now she knelt before the window, her bare toes snug on the oval carpet, her knees pressing through the cotton of her gown onto the bare poplar boards beneath the windowsill.

That muttering he’d heard was prayer. For a moment he watched her between the bedposts, the bluish tint of her eyelids shifting as her eyes looked one way or another into the world of the unseen. Sunlight flowed through her yellow hair.

He got up quickly and pulled on trousers and his boots. She did not ordinarily pray where he could hear her and it troubled him to see her do it now.

But now she tied off her amens, he supposed, and rose to face him with a fragile smile. “You don’t look like you mean to tarry.”

“Time’s up,” Forrest said, shrugging into his tunic. “I got to git on to see that man I aim to see.”

“I know it,” she said, lowering her eyes for just a moment before she raised them back to his. “My love goes with you.” She tightened a blue ribbon at the throat of her gown. “And my prayers.”

Forrest looked away from her, though he was not a man who flinched.

“General Forrest.” She took a barefoot step toward him. “Have you never thought to pray?”

“You know the answer,” he said shortly. “I ain’t never got down on my knees and hung my head to beg nobody for nothen. And I never—” He stopped. “The Lord he’ps those as he’ps themselves,” he said. “Momma used to say that sometimes. I reckon it’s the only prayer I know. And I say it standing on my own two feet.”

He paused and thought for a minute more. “I don’t want to be beholden to nobody.”

Mary Ann raised her head. “Not even to God.”

“To God least of all,” Forrest told her.

She nodded. “So be it, then.”

He had taken two steps toward the door when he turned back suddenly to catch her in his arms.

“I’m not about to leave you like that,” he said. He lifted her chin with the ball of a finger. “I love you with all I got in me, Mary Ann, and I’ll come back to you forever, while I live.”

She tucked her cheek into his collarbone and they stood so for a moment there. Presently Forrest broke the embrace and left the room without waiting to look into her face again.

T
HE FIRE
in General Forrest’s bedroom had burned to ash. Jerry was suffering a touch of arthritis, so Henri and Matthew carried in fresh wood. Matthew tumbled down his load every which way on the hearthstone, but in spite of the clatter Mrs. Forrest didn’t seem to look at him.

She stood at the end of the neatly made half-tester bed, in a gown, and plain cotton slippers, and a shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders. It was scarcely cold enough for a fire at all but she
held herself as if she were chilled, though without shrinking or stooping. She was straight and supple as a willow, her chin high and her gaze flowing out through the front windows and over the downward flow of the lawn.

As Matthew shoveled ash into a tin scuttle, a few coals came to a dusty red life. Henri pushed them between the andirons with the poker, laid a splinter or two of kindling and three chunks of red oak. He crouched on his hands and knees and blew an orange flame up from the coals. When he sat back on his heels, Matthew was already leaving the room with the scuttle, transparently as a ghost might have done, and Mary Ann Forrest was looking at Henri with a small flicker of interest in her eyes.

Dites-moi, Henri
, she said.
Pourquoi est-ce vous qui m’apporte du bois ce matin?

Henri got to his feet as gracefully as he could manage.
Parce que je voudrais vous servir, Madame
.

The countrified flavor of her French, which she had probably acquired at some finishing school in Nashville, amused him a little. Of course his own would have sounded provincial in Paris. He wanted to hear her again in his tongue, but her next words to him were in English.

“You may be a colored man, Henri, but you are certainly no servant.”

“No ma’am. I have never been a servant, nor a slave.” He inclined his head. “But I would serve you all the same.”

“Then you are gallant.” She turned and took a step toward him, and he admired the smoothness of her movement, how her head floated above her shawled shoulders, like a vase delicately balanced there. The women of his own country acquired such grace by carrying water on their heads. Perhaps Mary Ann had circled the parlors of her school in the same manner, balancing a book instead of a jar. Her lips were redder than he remembered, but then her husband had just left her. Henri lowered his head and poked at the fire. It was unwise to look at a white woman directly for too long, most especially the wife of General Forrest.

“Ah.” She came nearer to him now, but only to spread her hands above the hearth. “Thank you—it is a grateful warmth.”

Henri seemed to feel the glow of her body as much as the heat of the freshening flames. That was no more circumspect than the other thing. He crouched and began to collect the sticks Matthew had scattered and set them into the old ham boiler where they were stored before burning.

“You are distinctly tidier than … your companion.”

“Matthew?” Henri said. “I didn’t know you would acknowledge him, even with your eyes.”

That part slipped out. Henri stopped his breath.

“Oh,” said Mary Ann, turning more tightly toward the fire. “That one may be better off if I don’t see him.”

Henri considered how this answer might be both wrong and right. No doubt it was a strictly truthful one, from her perspective. An admirable woman, Henri thought. He began to search his mind for a safe way of getting out of this room.

“Arise,” Mary Ann said. The hint of playfulness returned to her tone.

Henri stood up.
“A votre service.” “Vous êtes sérieux?”

Their eyes met for a moment, before Henri looked down. “As serious as you,” he said. But he had seen she was not really playing.

“Well then.” She walked from the fireplace toward the window, dropping her hands and letting them float freely at her sides. “General Forrest is going to call upon General Bragg. To put it more plainly, he is going to pick a dangerous quarrel with him.”

“Madame, what would you?”

“I would have someone—” She caught her lower lip in her top teeth, then released it. Henri observed this action in the faint reflection of the sunlit windowpane. She turned toward him.

“Go with him, I suppose.”

“I’ve heard that Doctor Cowan means to go.”

“Yes, but Doctor Cowan can’t control him.”

A harsh, involuntary laugh barked out of Henri’s throat. “You know nobody can control him. And I … I can’t control anything. All I can do is watch.”

“Witness.” She had found his eyes again.

“Indeed,
Madame
, I have witnessed many things.” He looked away and so did she.

“Very well,” she told him. “Go witness this one.”

I
T TURNED OUT
that Forrest had not yet departed for his rendezvous with General Bragg. Henry contrived to get himself and Matthew sent to deliver a dispatch to the headquarters at Missionary Ridge. Arriving late, they’d passed the night there, and as nothing particular pressed them to return, they lingered still. The air was clear and the view was fine and they had got a very generous supper among a company of men they knew, whom General Bragg had recently transferred from Forrest’s command to General Wheeler’s.

Henri was sitting on a broken caisson, resting his back on the bark of a pin oak, dozing with one eye open, when Forrest rode over a crest of the ridge, his dark coat wrapped around him like a storm cloud and his deep-set eyes two holes into the black empty depths of the universe. Doctor Cowan rode to his left, wordless and pale as if he were on his way to a funeral that might be his own.

“I think somebody’s going to get killed,” Matthew hissed.

Both Henri’s eyes were open now, and both he and Matthew had rolled quietly to their feet. Forrest swung down from his dappled gray horse while it was still walking forward and dropped the reins on the ground without looking as he strode toward Braxton Bragg’s tent. Cowan dismounted to bring up his rear. Matthew ran to catch up the reins of the dappled gray and Cowan’s mount and bring them to a halt.

An aide-de-camp popped out of Bragg’s tent, pushing both palms forward as if he meant to block Forrest’s approach. Henri saw Forrest’s eyes assume their feral yellow glow, saw his body begin its automatic compression and coil. But the aide somehow melted out of his way before anything had touched him. Through the raised tent flap Henri saw Bragg starting up from behind his camp table, mouth open, one hand falling to his hip as Forrest transfixed him with an index finger which looked dark with blood. The same forefinger, Henri thought, that Forrest had used to close the hole in his horse’s jugular on the fourth day of Chickamauga.

Cowan followed him in, and the tent flap fell behind them. The
walls of the tent shuddered and appeared to glow red, as if everything inside were burning. During one of his crossings of the Central South before the war, Henri had come upon a black bear mauling a coon dog. The sounds that were now coming out of the tent were just the same grumble and crunch and roar of that bear—only he didn’t hear the screams of the dog this time.

At last Forrest stalked out of the tent, black in the face and still shaking with rage. Doctor Cowan stood just out of his reach, watching him carefully, as if in case Forrest should fall in an apoplectic seizure, Cowan would nick a vein with a scalpel in time to stop his heart or brain from exploding. But in a few minutes Forrest’s face had simmered down to something like its normal shade.

“If you meant to get yourself drummed out of this army,” Cowan said quietly, “I expect you might just have done it this time.”

Forrest shook his head. “He’ll never say a word about it.” He took the reins of the dappled gray, just barely registering Matthew with his eyes. Before he swung into the saddle, he spat on the ground. “He’ll be the last man to mention it, and mark my word, he’ll take no action in the matter. I will ask to be relieved and transferred to a different field and he will not oppose it.”

To that Cowan made no reply and no further word was spoken as the two men rode away, the hoofbeats of their horses fading down the ridge toward the river and the lowland.

F
ORREST HAD GONE
on into Mississippi by the time Doctor Cowan rejoined his cousin at LaGrange. He reached the big house at the close of the day, and Mary Ann served him a bourbon and water, with a last green sprig of mint of the season, before she inquired what her husband had said to Bragg.

“Well.” Cowan sipped, tilted his glass to capture a ray of sunset, swallowed. “To the best of my recollection …

“I am not here to pass civilities or compliments with you, but on other business. You commenced your cowardly persecution of me soon after the battle of Shiloh, and you have kept it up ever since. You did it because I reported to Richmond facts, while you reported damned lies. You robbed me of my command in Kentucky and gave it to one of your favorites—men that I armed and equipped from the enemies of our country. In a spirit of revenge and
spite, because I would not fawn upon you as others did, you drove me into West Tennessee in the winter of 1862 with improper arms and without sufficient ammunition, although I had made repeated applications for the same. You did it to ruin me and my career. When in spite of all this I returned with my command well equipped by captures, you began again your work of spite and persecution and have kept it up, and now this second brigade, organized and equipped without thanks to you or the government, a brigade which has won a reputation for successful fighting second to none in the army, taking advantage of your position as the commanding general in order to humiliate me, you have taken these brave men from me. I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it. You may as well not issue any more orders to me, for I will not obey them, and I will hold you personally responsible for any further indignities you may endeavor to inflict upon me. You have threatened to arrest me for not obeying your orders promptly. I dare you to do it, and I say to you that if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.”

By the time he got to the end of his recitation, Mary Ann was laughing softly, in spite of herself. “Did he say it as pretty as that?” she said. “Is that just how he put it?”

“No,” Cowan said, and nuzzled his drink. “He didn’t put it exactly that way.”

December 1862