Devil's Dream (32 page)

He turned toward the wagon and called to Ben, who had got down to address his pair of mules. “What you doen? We got us a hog.”

“Seen if a mule can eat acorns,” Ben said.

“Can they?” Henri called.

“They can but they won’t.”

A gunshot exploded and Henri crouched and looked for his horse, who had shied away—he crawled two yards forward and caught the trailing reins.

“Hog thieves! Hog thieves!”

At the edge of the trees a starveling boy was reloading an ancient firearm with an octagon barrel twice as long as he was tall. A girl in a ragged skirt assisted him, standing on a stump to ram in the charge.

“Hold up,” Ben called from the wagon. “We got money to pay.” He waved a fistful of brown Confederate scrip he’d grabbed from a bushel basket of the stuff in the back of the wagon.

“Just as soon have that many dead leaves,” the boy called, struggling to steady the long wavering barrel, till the girl stooped and put her shoulder under it. “Ain’t worth no different.”

The rifle cracked. By hazard the bullet cut the cord and the sow flopped down onto the steaming heap of her innards. A second later the air was as full of flying bullets as if it was a wasps’ nest that had been knocked down. Jerry covered himself behind the hog and Henri scrambled onto his horse, following Matthew, who had mounted a beat sooner. The two of them circled behind the wagon, where Ben crouched behind the box, groping for a pistol hidden in a heap of burlap rags. In a moment they had swung out into the open, and Henri found the children again, crawling low and dragging their rifle across a field of corn stubble toward a derelict cabin on the other side. There were three of them, now, two girls and the boy.

With Matthew he cantered back into the trees, now taking the half-dozen horsemen who’d fired on them from the rear. Matthew was screaming like a banshee, firing his Navy six to good effect. Two riderless horses burst out of the woods, galloping toward a line of bluecoats advancing unevenly across another boggy field.

Henri shouted to Matthew, rode back through the trees to the wagon.

“Who’s that?” Ben called from behind the box.

“I don’t know. Rangers.”

“Whose Rangers?”

“How would I know? But there’s regular Yankee army in back of them.”

Ben sat up, eyes widening. “They ain’t supposed to be here.” “We’re not supposed to be here. Nobody is.” Except maybe those children, Henri thought. They might belong. “How many Yankees?” “I don’t know. Thirty. Matthew?”

“I didn’t stay to count them either,” Matthew said. “Too many is all I know.”

“We need to get somewhere,” Henri said.

“Ain’t leaving this meat,” Jerry hissed from where he lay embracing the dead sow.

“Wait a minute,” Henri said. “If they were coming this way they’d already be here.”

As this thought surfaced there was a deep
boom
of a heavy gun, and the rumbling of hooves off to the north.
Yaaiiiiiiyaaaiiiiiih!
came the yell.

“That’s ours,” Matthew said, and with Henri he rode to the tree line in time to see the charge of Bill Forrest and his Forty Thieves parting around the cabin, then rejoining to bear down on the Yankee line, which had stopped, aghast, halfway across the cornfield. A gunner bent over his touch hole and the cannon boomed once more, but when he raised up he saw the rest of the bluecoats had broken and run and a rider knocked him down with a sword cut before he could get organized to follow them.

As the pursuit faded into the trees, they saw Bedford Forrest himself, outdistancing his brother. In a moment the pair of them came trotting back. Beside the abandoned eight-pounder they halted their horses.

“Purty little thing,” Bill said.

“Ain’t it the truth?” Forrest grunted. “Let’s hope John Morton can get some use outen it.”

Not far from the cabin he got down to study the insignia on one
of the bluecoats that had fallen there, then squinted up at his brother. “Whar’n hell ye reckon they come from?”

“Dunno.” Bill Forrest turned his head to spit on the muddy, hoof-churned ground. “Paducah, maybe.”

Henri and Matthew had ridden up beside them to study the corpse. In a moment all four of them became aware that the two girls and the boy were sitting up staring at them like a family of owls caught out in the daylight. They’d sheltered in a shallow hole below a squatty stone chimney that stood on its lonesome a few yards from the cabin’s side door.

Forrest rode over and looked down. “What is this?” he said.

The boy stood up shakily. “Hit was another room we had.” He wiped his face on remains of a sleeve. “Cannonball knocked it down.”

“A cannonball,” Forrest said. “Y’all fight a battle here ever day?”

“Don’t look like whole lot to fight over,” Bill Forrest remarked. The boy’s eyes narrowed.

“Air you General Forrest?”

“I am.”

“I want to jine up with ye then.”

“Price!” snapped the older girl. “Don’t you—”

The boy was hefting the long awkward rifle.

“Whar’d ye get that buffalo gun?” Forrest asked him.

“I want to jine. I want to jine!”

“Price, is it,” Forrest said. “Well you must be the man I come to see.”

Henri looked at the sky, then the ground. Even on their last run into West Tennessee, Forrest wouldn’t have accepted a recruit like this. He didn’t look any more than twelve, though he might in fact be up in his teens, small for his age from living on slim pickings. In days gone by they’d culled thousands of good grown men from this part of the state, but now there were no more of them left.

“That all the gun ye got right thar?” Forrest said, and the boy nodded.

“Have ye got a pair of shoes?”

“Not right now I don’t,” Price said.

“Hit don’t matter,” Forrest said. “Oncet we get to Johnsonville we’ll fit ye out proper.”

The boy’s face brightened and then clouded. “I reckon I cain’t jest go off’n leave my sisters here.”

Henri looked at the older girl. She had a long jaw, like an ax blade. The boy did too but not yet so pronounced—probably the girl was older. Henry felt like he’d seen that jaw somewhere before.

The boy was thinking. “Y’all could go to the Washburns,” he said.

The girl transfixed him with a bony finger.
“You
ain’t tellen me whar to go nor what to do when I git thar neither.”

“Miss,” Forrest took off his hat. “I don’t believe you kin really stay here.”

“Why not?” The girl held his stare. Forrest fingered his hat brim and studied the cabin. The door had been stove in that very day by an eight-pound shot and the roof tree had caved in at the middle long before.

“Hit—Hit don’t look like a good place for young ladies to stay on their lonesome,” Forrest said. “Whar’s yore Mam and Pap?”

“Mam died,” the younger girl said, and shut her mouth on a tight white line.

“Fever,” the older one added. “And y’all took Pap a long time ago and he got kilt at Shiloh. Somebody sent us a letter about it. And y’all took Briley, that was not but last winter, and we don’t know if he’s kilt yet or not—we ain’t heard nothen.”

Briley. The long jaw. Henri couldn’t quite put it together where he’d seen it. “Briley’s all right,” Forrest was saying. “I believe he’s gone to Fort Heiman with Buford.”

Was he making this up, Henri wondered, but it was just as likely Forrest might actually know it.

“Tell me about these Washburns.”

“Well,” Price said. “The men’s all gone but hit’s a couple of niggers stayen with’m yet. And they still got two milk cows.”

“Two milk cows!” Forrest turned to Matthew. “Y’all still got that wagon?”

“Yessir,” Matthew said. “Back in the woods.”

“Take these young ladies to the Washburns then,” Forrest said. “I reckon they can tell ye how to go.” He turned to Price. “Young sir, you can come along with me.”

· · ·

“T
HAT SOW WAS OURN,”
the elder girl said, as she slung her rag bundle into the wagon beside the carcass, and climbed in after it. Once settled she took a Bible with a dry-rotted black leather cover from under her elbow and centered it in the lap of her grubby skirt.

“Get up, May,” she said, but the younger girl had already dragged her own bundle in beside her.

“I expect your brother will get a piece of that pork,” Henri said. “And it sounds like you’ll find milk at the Washburns.”

“Oh, if we
got
to go the Washburns.” The girl stretched up toward Ben on the box. “Just go down that road yonder a piece. Hit’s in a bend of the river.”

Matthew was looking at the girl curiously. “What have you got against these Washburns.”

The girl sniffed. “Secesh, fer a start.”

“Secesh!”
Henri blurted. “Your brother just joined the Confederate Army.”

“He never ast my leave to do it neither,” the girl snapped. “Ain’t no good come of it. Jest everbody dead or gone and the ones that’s left is starven.”

She set her long jaw and stared down the road. Now it came to Henri where he’d seen that bleak regard before: on long-jawed Briley, that was him, standing beside the grave he’d been ordered to dig for himself when he and eighteen more West Tennessee recruits had been caught trying to skip off home last winter. Forrest had reprieved their death sentence at dawn, which meant that he might well remember who Briley was, and know where he was for that matter.

“Rebs ain’t brought nothen but trouble,” the girl said. “Besides hit ain’t right.”

Ben turned from the wagon box to look at her. “What ain’t right?” he said.

“Holt men in
bondage.”
The girl turned almost prim, tapping the crumbly cover the Bible with her nail. “Says it right here.”

“What page is that on?” Henri said.

“Jesus said. Hit’s on ever page.”

“Wait a minute,” Henri said, overcome with a strange effervescence of mirth. “This girl’s an abolitionist, Benjamin. A blackhearted abolitionist, I tell you.”

The girl wriggled all over and ducked her head. Henri thought maybe she almost blushed. He saw she had taken his words as a high compliment, possibly even a flirtatious one. The road now ran between two fields, one blanketed with a host of starlings like a dark snowfall.

“I’ll give ye black-hearted.” The girl picked up her head and jutted her jaw, like a horse that had got the bit in its teeth. “What y’all done over to Fort Pillow.”

“And that was what?”

“Kilt all them harmless niggers as was beggen for mercy.”

“Miss,” Matthew said. “It wasn’t quite like that. They were trying to kill us too.”

Harmless, Henri thought, well, not all the time. It was hard to construct a memory of the slaughter under the bluff because it had all been too confusing. It seemed to him though that some of the Yankee soldiers would surrender one minute, then pick up a gun and start firing the next …

“That ain’t how hit was named to me.” The girl looked at Henri. “Ain’t you a free nigger?”

Her eyes were almost colorless, like water. He found it oddly difficult to sustain her gaze. “I’ll answer to free,” he said.

“How bout y’all?” She had turned to the two men on the box. Henri noticed she hadn’t asked Matthew and Matthew had turned from the discussion to gaze off over the wagon’s tailgate at the receding field full of starlings.

Benjamin passed the reins to Ginral Jerry, who remained silent, facing forward, studying the bristly tails of the mules.

“Don’t ye
want
to be free?” the girl asked Ben. He studied her for a moment more, hitched around on the box to face her, one heavy arm hanging down into the wagon bed.

“Here’s a thing I been learned,” he finally said. “I was out here all by myself I might be free but I wouldn’t live long.”

“What about your brother?” Henri said, thinking this was how it was now, in this part of the country, where a tumbled-down one-room
cabin housed two different kinds of partisan, and no one could tell whose Rangers were whose.

“Hell far.” The younger girl startled them with the froggy deep note of her voice.
“He
thinks the same as y’all do I reckon.” She snorted and turned to look backward at the starlings. “Rebel to the bone.”

June 1864

W
ITHIN A GLADE
outside the town they buried two deserters in the rain. A third, a boy in his teens, had at the last moment been spared. Forrest, turning his head to one side to spit into the hoof-churned mud, rasped,
Let the young’n live
, and looked as if he might say more, but didn’t.

Afterward the boy helped them dig one grave for two. Henri didn’t know if he were friend or kin to the two grown men who’d just been shot or if the three of them had ended up in the bottom of the same sack through simple mischance alone. The boy’s face was wet as he worked, but maybe only from the downpour. Sticky mud clung to shovel blades and would not be shaken loose. When the grave had at last been filled, Benjamin led the boy away toward the shelter of the wagons. Ben’s face looked lined and weary from the digging. He said nothing, but guided the boy with a large hand set between his shoulder blades.

That night Henri lay wakeful under the forked canvas of the shebang, knowing from Matthew’s stiffness beside him that Matthew wasn’t sleeping either. Moisture beaded on the underside of the sodden cloth, soon enough began to drip. Henri pushed his mind away from the two dead men and the young survivor. He would not learn their names or know their faces. Forrest had been in a savage mood for quite some time. The dismal weather might account for some of it. Braxton Bragg, still nominally his commander in spite of all, kept him annoyed with criticism of his recruiting methods, which were indeed sometimes a bit severe, as the grim events of that day confirmed. Since Fort Pillow, the Yankee papers had been painting him with ill repute. They made him out a
mean vindictive cruel and
unscrupulous
man who often whipped his slaves to death and kept a black concubine in his house to quarrel with his wife. There were rumors too that Negro troops at Memphis had sworn blood vengeance against Forrest and all his men. Worst of all, Forrest’s plan to attack Sherman’s rear as Sherman moved from Nashville south toward Georgia had been thwarted by as many as ten thousand Federal troops who had come out from Memphis, under command of General Samuel Sturgis, to divert him. For the last eight days they had been playing hide and seek with Sturgis in the rain.