Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Rosen-ears!” Lieutenant Dinkins called out brightly, slipping up to the wagon to peel back a green shuck.

  “Git yo’ dirty paws offa that corn,” Ginral Jerry told him. Dinkins hunched his shoulders and pretended to slink away. Forrest looked toward them from where he stood with Chalmers on the lowest of the courthouse steps, his boots slathered to the top with tar-black Mississippi mud.

  “That ain’t no rosen-ears,” he said. “That’s hoss-corn.”

  “General,” Chalmers called his attention back. “What do you mean for me to do while you are gone?”

  “Play like we ain’t gone nowhere.” Forrest’s dark eyes turned toward Henri. “Well, Ornery? Air ye ready to go?”

  Go where, Henri thought. He said nothing. He had been riding around the country all day.

  Forrest’s whole face brightened. He grinned through his beard, then let out a wild cackle that brought every ragged soldier lounging under the eaves around the square to his feet, whether booted or bare.

  “Come on, boys,” Forrest whooped. “We’re a-goen to Memphis!”

  · · ·

  THE RAIN PICKED UP as night fell and the column moved west on the road toward Panola, two by two. Henri rode beside the wagon, watching water stream off the brim of his hat, trying not to listen to the growling of his stomach.

  “Cornbread,” Lieutenant Dinkins said suddenly. “By Godfrey, I smell cornbread.”

  “Leave your dreaming,” Henri said.

  “No, Hank, but I swear I do. Hot pone at two o’clock and not three hundred yards forward.”

  “Hesh up,” Ginral Jerry said from the wagon. “You maken me think I smells it too.”

  But around the next bend of the road they came upon a couple of dozen women of the country standing under a brush arbor by a long trestle table, handing up pieces of cornbread to every man as they passed. Henri got a chunk the size of his fist. It had a drip of molasses on it to boot. The burst of saliva at the back of his mouth was painful when he took the first bite.

  “Glory be,” Dinkins said, with real reverence, before he stopped his mouth with cornbread. Henri forced himself to eat slowly. He liked riding near Dinkins, who was a cheerful soul. Scarce twenty years old, he still managed to live the war as a frolic. He never seemed to know that his feet were blistered to his iron stirrups, bleeding through the socks that were all he had to cover them. The rain poured down. Henri rode on, content with the bread still warm in his belly.

  “When we once get to Memphis,” Dinkins said softly, “I mean to have me a buttermilk biscuit.”

  IT WAS STILL DARK when they reached Panola, but the rain had stopped at last and the birds were starting to tune up in shrubs and trees by the side of the road. They stopped to shed horses and men too weak to continue. Forrest sent back two cannon as well. The two remaining needed double teams to drag them through the mud. They crossed the Tallahatchie River with the rising sun warm on their faces and continued north, a slingshot west of the railroad track. Men who hadn’t seen the sun for days cheered up as their clothes began to dry, and started to brag of all they’d do in Memphis.

  Above Senatobia, Forrest pulled up his horse and glared at swollen Hickahala Creek. On the far side a flatboat had drifted into a flooded field and snagged on a couple of hackberries in a fence row. Captain Bill reined up beside his brother.

  “Where do you reckon Smith is at?” he said.

  “Sixty miles back of us by this time,” Forrest said. “I ain’t worried about Smith. But we cain’t set here and wait for this crik to go down.” He turned toward the corn wagon. “Henry!”

  In an hour’s time they’d stripped plank from every gin mill and shack for a mile around and were making a bridge lashed together with grapevine, using the salvaged flatboat for a pontoon. Forrest spent the delay culling out more men and horses that couldn’t hold the pace. He sent about fifty more back under command of John Morton, calculating this detachment should serve as a decoy if Smith had scouts alert enough to have spotted his quick movement north. In two more hours they’d trundled across the creek, toting their last pair of cannon by hand.

  Seven miles on they struck the same situation at Coldwater River, a ford too flooded for them to cross. This water was wider and it needed more time to makeshift a bridge. A red fox came out of a canebrake along the bank and watched them as they worked. Henri watched back, a little uneasy. A fox was a shy creature normally speaking, and it was the season of hydrophobia. But this fox seemed in perfect possession of itself, sitting down quietly and licking its paws. When it had looked its fill it got up and went calmly back into the cane with the red brush of its tail waving high.

  This bridge was longer, and thinner on planks. The horses went fetlock deep, boards bending under them as the men led them cautiously over, and one of the two remaining cannon nearly foundered the whole rig.

  “Best leave this wagon,” Major Strange said. “I do believe it’s too heavy to make it across.”

  “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll leave this corn,” snapped Forrest, who had been pacing the bank like a caged wolf for the last hour. “Horses are all half-starved as it is—they got to have a feed afore we go to Memphis.”

  “Suit yourself,” Major Strange said. “This wagon is apt to sink and the bridge along with it.”

  “Unload it then.” Forrest was already reaching into the bed, wrapping his long arms around near a bushel of corn in the shuck. “Come on, boys. Step lively.”

  Matthew was quick to grab an armload and follow. Henri did the same and others fell in behind them. Matthew was near as tall as Forrest, and had the same long back and long legs, Henri noticed, as he crept over the bridge behind the two of them.

  “Any man drops an ear is swimmen to git it,” Forrest announced, without turning his head.

  In fifteen minutes the empty wagon had crossed and been reloaded. By dusk that day they were riding into Hernando, where the people came out hallooing to greet them, and not only because it was Forrest’s hometown. Smokehouses were opened to them all over the place, and as the cooking began the men fell to shelling corn for the horses. Men cooked bacon wound around sticks, holding hoecakes beneath to catch the dripping.

  Legs hanging off the back of the empty wagon, Dinkins chewed happily, jaws glossy with fat. “One thing I like about the Old Man—” He looked around to be sure Forrest wasn’t in earshot. “If he eats, we eat too.”

  They’d come a long way in a large hurry, with twenty-five miles yet to travel to reach Memphis. Forrest gave his men two hours leisure. He rested between his two brothers, stretched on the ground. Captain Bill snored. Colonel Jesse fidgeted with a nickel watch and chain. Forrest himself lay with his shoulders propped on the shaggy bole of a cedar, eyes half-shut, with just the whites showing, though it seemed to Henri, who had stretched in the back of the empty wagon, that somehow Forrest was still seeing whatever was there. Matthew, who still showed childish ways once in a while, was playing mumblety-peg with a couple of Hernando boys by the light of a sliver of moon. Since Willie Forrest had been left behind with Chalmers at Oxford, Matthew had seemed easier in his mind.

  When the church bell rang out nine o’clock they set off again, with much gaiety—too much maybe, as Forrest kept having to shush their singing. Peas, Peas, Peas, Peas, Eating Goober Peas! No sooner had Matthew been shut up than Dinkins would take it up again, or somebody else further back in the column. But four miles out from Memphis the fog from the river began to roll over them and they marched the rest of the way in strict silence.

  All quiet on a Sunday morning, a good two hours before dawn. Forrest called his commanders in: Captain Bill, Colonel Jesse, Colonel Neely. In low harsh whispers the plan was reviewed. With ten men picked from the troop they called the Forty Thieves, Bill Forrest, still wincing at times from the thighbone he’d got broken by a bullet at Sand Mountain, crept further up the Hernando road. When the first picket challenged them, Bill called that he was bringing in Rebel prisoners. With that ruse he was ab
le to get close enough to knock the Federal silently down with the butt of his Navy six. When they reached the second line of pickets, one of them got off a shot, and Forrest’s men returned fire. Yaaaiiiieee! the Rebel yell went up; it always made Henri’s short hairs rise with it. He might scream himself till his throat was raw, yet never hear the sound of his own voice.

  Forrest was holding in King Philip, a restless horse said to be as good as two men in pitched battle. He jostled into the bugler Gaus and ordered him to sound the charge. But the horn was almost lost in the yelling and pounding of hooves. They charged right into a muddy slough past the corner of Mississippi and Kerr Street, bogged down for a moment, soon pulled through.

  Bill Forrest ran right over a small artillery post and turned his horsemen down Gayoso Street toward the river. Neely swept through an encampment of Federals east of the road, routing sleepy soldiers till after they had run for some distance they rallied at the State Female College and began to shoot back. Dinkins came racing back from that engagement with a huge grin and a pair of new shoes swinging around his neck by their laces, just snatched from a Yankee soldier’s tent pole.

  Memphis women were cheering the raiders from their windows, throwing up their sashes and leaning out. Some even dashed out onto the street. One leapt up at Dinkins and gave him a buss, then sprang back abashed at her own audacity—a tousled honey-blonde still warm and flushed from her sleep, tittering around the fingers she’d stuck in her mouth. Pink nipples pressed against the damp cotton of her nightgown, looking out like a second pair of eyes. Ginral Jerry, who’d driven the empty wagon into town on the chance he’d find something to fill it with, gave the gaping Dinkins a nudge.

  “Go on,” he said. “Ax her if she got a biscuit.”

  Jesse Forrest pounded across Desoto Street to Union to storm the headquarters of General Washburn there. Washburn tumbled out the window in his nightshirt and ran like a rabbit to Fort Pickering, half a mile off on the South Bluffs. Colonel Jesse captured his dress uniform but without any general inside. Captain Bill rode his charger straight into the lobby of the Gayoso Hotel and wheeled, swinging his sword around the chandelier, while his men burst into General Hurlbut’s room. But that officer, to his great good fortune, happened to be spending that night elsewhere. Bill’s men tore into every room in the building, looking for Hurlbut and rounding up whatever members of his staff they could.

  Day should have broken, but fog smothered the sun. It muffled gunfire, shouts and hard riding, to the advantage of the raiders. Forrest overtook Henri and Ginral Jerry and Dinkins at the corner of Beale Street. He was not in that state of possession he usually entered during a battle, Henri noticed. His eyes had not turned that wildcat yellow, though he did seem to be looking for something. Three or four blocks toward the river they could hear men shouting and women shrieking and glass breaking out of the windows of the Gayoso Hotel. But Forrest was looking the other way, at a woman languidly crossing Beale Street, leading two small boys along by the hands. A bigger lad trotted along behind. Henri couldn’t make out her face through the mist, but no white woman ever walked like that.

  “Tom,” she called back in a low husky voice. “Why doan you hold the ginnal’s horse?”

  The biggest boy caught King Philip’s reins just behind the bit. The horse tossed his head once, then subsided. Forrest turned his head to the others.

  “You boys go on. I’ll be right behind ye.”

  As they moved off, Matthew sat up in the wagon bed, and stared back at the boy holding the horse. The woman had moved close against Forrest’s saddle skirt, and the pair of them were silhouetted in silver by the mist.

  “That’s curious,” Dinkins was saying. “Most of the time he’s right out in front of us.”

  “Well,” Ginral Jerry told him. “You best not worry bout it.”

  “YOU LOOK RIGHT PROSPEROUS,” Forrest said, gazing down at the smooth dark oval of her face, shaped by the blue dotted kerchief she wore knotted to the top of her forehead. Tongue-tied for a moment, he studied her full cheeks and deep eyes, gone ghostly in the mist. She had pressed herself up against his booted leg so that he could feel the whole warmth of her front working through the leather, but the real heat was in her eyes when she looked up at him.

  “An’ you, Ginnal Forrest … you po’ as a snake nigh bout.” She gripped his thigh above the knee, and the thrill of that touch shot clean up his backbone. “All skin and bone, Mista Forrest.” She smiled. Her voice had the same saucy lilt he remembered. Sound teeth and a sweet breath. He’d remarked that from the very first.

  “Hit’s still some gristle left on my bones,” he joked at her. “A scrap of meat here and there if it should be wanted.”

  “Seein’s believen,” she said, reaching for his arm to draw him down. “So climb down off that horse and rest yo laigs a spell.”

  Forrest unstirruped his right foot and let his seat go slack. He could hear the commotion from the Gayoso Hotel still, and another big disturbance down Union Street. More firing could be heard from the vicinity of Female College, better organized, but it seemed to stay in one place. He swung down to the muddy roadbed.

  His legs were a little rubbery under him as he came down, for he’d scarcely been out of the saddle for the two days. In the guise of supporting him she ran a hand over the placket of his trousers. “Aw now, you tellen me the truth!” With her free hand she turned the brass knob on the door, which opened inward, as he knew. He knew the layout of the room but it was black dark inside with the windows shuttered, and she latched the door firmly when they had stepped in. The niggerish smell was like home to him. The bed was real low, he remembered too late, catching an ankle on it and beginning to fall back, rebounding from the sagging hammock of rope that spanned the frame, supporting a pad of old blankets. Aw now honey she was murmuring, catching him up a little with her arms as she pressed him further down with the weight of her body pressing into his. Somehow in the dark she had undone her bodice so that her firm chocolatey breasts caressed his cheek, and had unfastened his trouser buttons too, reaching around to grasp the goat tuft of hair at the base of his spine—thas you aright she whispered, thas old Bedford sho nuff. Bowled over by the warm weight of her, he felt her slide back down his belly, and as he held the long ropy strands of her hair he felt her take him up into her long warm lips as eagerly as a hungry calf seizing on a milk cow’s teat. Something Mary Ann could never have conceived. The piercing memory of his wife helped him hold back from going over the edge too soon and she also was measuring his every twitch with her wise tongue’s point, withdrawing just before it was too late, cradling him and lifting his balls, mocking him in the same husky tone. Aint you gone take yo boots off, Ginnal?

  You aint giving me no chance to, Forrest groaned, and that was true. Still holding him where it counted with one hand, she wriggled free of the rest of her clothing and threaded him into her, bucked once and rolled toward him, pressing his back into the sagging web and the blankets. Her heavy lips lowered to cushion his thin ones, the quick tongue darting, while both his spurs went rattling on the floorboards. Now he could hear cannon fire from Fort Pickering, and he thought how vastly his men were outnumbered here, how they’d need to get out right quick once the Yankees got organized, and that thought too helped him to hold on where he was, as her rolling thighs and rasping tongue were rising to the crux. He got purchase with one of his boots on the floor so he could turn the two of them as one and now was driving deep into the sag of the rope bed as both her legs rose up to wrap around his back and bring him tighter in—Oh Catharine, he breathed out then, but she only pressed her mouth against his bearded throat, and got her hand on his tail-tuft again to bring him even nearer. He remembered the fox, that afternoon, watching them from out of the cane, its remote composure, a vixen maybe, as if he were now buried to his hilt in her rough red brush, and like a vixen she caught the skin of his shoulder between the points of her teeth and clenched there, stopping her voice, for she never cried out at the very
moment, there was only the rush of her breath and the clench and release of her every muscle, as his hot milk burst into her molasses.

  Small arms fire came nearer now, circling in several minor skirmishes. Forrest heard King Philip snort and whinny and fight the reins his small minder held. He sat up, fumbling with the fastenings of his garments. She had one hand on his shoulder still, not to hold him back but to urge him on. He stood up feeling for his pistols—one had come loose in the bed and she handed it to him with a sly smile, grip forward. More children were giggling somewhere, over the sill of the inner door or maybe just outside. Forrest would have liked to glimpse them in good light if there was time for it. King Philip snorted, tried to rear—he needed no rider to go to a battle. Thomas paid out a length of rein, savvy enough not to let the big horse break it. Forrest laid a hand on his head as he took the reins back, the bone warm and solid through the cropped curls, white eyes looking up at him. Catharine still wore a warm satisfied smile as she smoothed her kerchief back over her head. She stood embracing the doorpost warmly as he remounted his horse.

  “Glad to have you, Ginnal Forrest. Stay longer when you come next time.”

  JESSE FORREST came thundering back down from Union Street to the Gayoso, chivying along a handful of Washburn’s staff he had made prisoner. His men broke into any stable they passed and brought along whatever horses they could find. Women were still leaning out the windows in their nightdresses to cheer the raiders, or coming down to the street to run after them.

  “No time to tarry!” Jesse called, squinting back over his shoulder at the brightening sky. Half an order, half a recommendation. Bill Forrest was rallying the Forty Thieves in front of the Gayoso. From the direction of Fort Pickering, a cannon thumped.

  “Where’s Washburn, Brother,” Bill said.