Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “He run off.” Jesse held up the uniform.

  “Well, that’s purty.” Bill turned his head and spat into the muddy street. “Much good it’ll do us.”

  “You got Hurlbut, I guess.”

  “I damn well did not. He never even slept here,” Bill said.

  “Buckland, then?”

  “That’s him back yonder I reckon,” Bill said, jerking his thumb to the north, where, a couple of blocks distant, Federal soldiers were being called to formation to advance on the raiders.

  “You don’t mean it, Brother Bill,” Jesse said. “We didn’t get a lick of what we come for.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Bill said. “This ought to fetch A. J. Smith back out of Mississippi, if I don’t miss my guess.”

  “We don’t mean to wait till he gets here do we?” Jesse said, peering around. The fog was still heavily swirling, but had turned very bright; soon the sun would cut through, and they’d all be exposed.

  “No, but where’s Bedford?”

  Jesse shrugged. “Wasn’t he laying back with Neely and them?”

  “When was he ever a one to lay back?”

  A rhetorical question. Henri opened his mouth to speak, but Dinkins, who’d crossed a leg over the pommel of his saddle to lace on the second shoe he had requisitioned, was ahead of him.

  “General Forrest was with us as far as Beale Street.”

  “Beale Street,” Bill Forrest ran a thumb along the bone beneath his beard. “You don’t say. …”

  “We got a passel of horses and prisoners here,” Jesse said. “I think we better get a move on, Bedford or not. He’s bound to be somewhere.”

  STUMBLING TOWARD the river and Fort Pickering, General Hurlbut blessed his guiding star that he’d spent the night with a friend, and his lady friends, instead of bunking in the Gayoso, but he cursed the corn whiskey he’d been drinking till late, and which made his head hammer louder than the cannon in the fort, which were blazing at nothing since no raiders were near.

  “Will you for Chrissake hold your fire?” Hurlbut yelled, and the guns hushed as he came to the gate. “They aren’t coming here! They’ve got no artillery. You won’t fight them off sitting inside this fort!”

  Inside the gate he found Washburn, his face purple as a beet, struggling to stuff his nightshirt into a pair of borrowed britches too small for him. An adjutant drew Hurlbut aside to report.

  “Well if that doesn’t beat …” Hurlbut narrowed his eyes at the furious Washburn, and spoke to the adjutant behind his hand. “They had him relieve me because I couldn’t keep Forrest out of West Tennessee, but it looks like he can’t keep Forrest out of his own damn bedroom.”

  FORREST OVERTOOK his brothers at a battery on the edge of town. They’d overrun it on the way in but couldn’t spare men to set a guard, and the Federal gunners had returned. Their nerves seemed none too steady, though. Forrest raised a whoop and a holler and rode down on them with a Navy six in one hand and saber in the other, piloting King Philip with his knees alone, as the warhorse stretched out his long neck and spread his yellow teeth to bite. The gunners dropped their matches and scattered without getting off a shot.

  “Brother, you look full of piss and vinegar,” Bill Forrest said.

  “Obliged,” Forrest said, panting. A couple of the riders were dismounting now to spike the cannon, while others herded horses and prisoners down the road running south out of town.

  “Whar’s them three generals,” Forrest said.

  “Missed’m,” said Bill.

  “You don’t mean it.” Forrest holstered his pistol and cocked a hand on his hip.

  “Well, maybe you run acrost them somewhere,” Bill said, looking at him hard. He was as big a man as his elder brother and some few believed him possibly the tougher of the two. “Wherever you was at.”

  Bill’s face was gray from the pain of his half-healed thigh wound, but Bedford was first to break the gaze.

  “Well look yonder, would ye.” He gestured with his blade. The Sixth Illinois was just turning the corner, in order of battle and stepping out smartly.

  “Aye,” Bill said. He swung his horse to face the enemy.

  Forrest studied him. “Ye look about blowed,” he remarked. “I’m fresher’n you are, I spec. Ye best herd them horses on down the road. We’ll give these folks their jollification and be right along—Ornery!” he called.

  Henri spurred up, as Bill Forrest, biting his pale lower lip, turned around and rode to the rear. The newly shod Dinkins came along on his right. Henri looked back once, a little wistfully, at Ginral Jerry, who was driving the wagon away down the road, now loaded with sacks of meal and kegs of whiskey. Ahead, the Federals came marching toward them, pale and sweaty, clutching their muskets. Left of their line rode their commander, tall on a big black horse.

  “Whar’s John Morton,” Forrest inquired.

  “You sent him back to Oxford,” Henri reminded him. And the cannon all the men called the Bull Pups had gone with their commander.

  “That I did. Well then …” But the gunners had figured it out on their own. The first of their two cannon fired, tearing a hole in the Federal line. As the sun burned through the fog, Henri felt his horse rock forward, following King Philip into the charge. Somewhere behind them, the second cannon coughed. Forrest’s double-edged blade whined in the wind. Colonel Starr crashed down from the black horse, wrapping his good arm around a deep gash on his shoulder. A couple of infantrymen came to bear him up. The rest had scattered for cover of the buildings, some flinging down their weapons as they ran.

  “Fall back,” Forrest called, signaling. The sun gleamed on the whetted edges of his saber, braided now with blood. Henri and Dinkins wheeled their horses and retreated.

  Forrest stood in his stirrups, beaming in the sudden sunlight. There was a joyful aspect on him that Henri had not seen in a long time.

  “What’s got into him, I wonder?” Dinkins said. “He ain’t lost a horse all day.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  September 1863

  HE’S HIT.” Willie’s voice seemed to quaver as he said it, and Cowan, looking where the boy pointed, saw Forrest’s long back waver in the saddle. Heat shimmer? It wasn’t hot enough for that. Cowan’s whole field of vision trembled, then came clear for him to see the blood-slick soaking through Forrest’s coat and spreading over the left hindquarter of his horse. Forrest had been gesturing with his sword to troopers he had just dismounted on the slopes of Tunnel Hill, but now as he swayed in the saddle Cowan saw that he might fall. He rode up quickly and put his own shoulder under Forrest’s left armpit as the sword arm sagged and Forrest slumped into him.

  “Huh,” Forrest said, turning his head to look at Cowan from an inch away, the light in his eyes abruptly fading.

  “Good Lord,” said Cowan. “Help me! Willie, we’ve got to get him down.”

  Willie was reaching, ineffectually, for Forrest’s shoulder on the other side; meanwhile Matthew had come up from somewhere and caught the reins of Forrest’s horse beneath the bit. Anderson appeared, dismounted, and took some of Forrest’s weight on his own back as Forrest came down from the saddle. Cowan jumped down from his horse, leaving it for Willie to hold. He turned up the tail of Forrest’s coat and pressed the butt of his palm against the blood spurt.

  A bullet, awkward as a bumblebee, whined between his head and Forrest’s and flumped into a cedar trunk a few steps up the hill. For hours they’d been in a running fight with two divisions under Crittenden, who’d crossed Chickamauga Creek at the Red House bridge … thus cutting themselves off from the rest of the Yankee army. Forrest had seen the golden chance to wipe them out altogether but he didn’t have a quarter the force required to do it by himself, and no reply had come to his urgent messages to Bragg. Tunnel Hill was the first place terrain favored them to make a stand. Where they’d stopped now, shallow ridges of limestone jutted out among the cedars—pale chips of rock scattering from them as more Yankee bullets buzzed in from down the
slope. Cowan jerked his head, aiming the point of his beard to a thicker clump of trees not far above them, and Anderson helped him drag Forrest toward this shelter.

  “Look in my saddlebag,” Cowan called back to Willie. “There ought to be some—” Willie was running up already with the saddlebags slung over his shoulder. The points of the little black mustache he had recently grown stood out against the sudden pallor of his face.

  Cowan was probing the wound for a projectile and not finding one; he groped behind himself into one of the bags and pulled out a wad of clean cotton rag. A flask came out with the rest and clanked against the limestone shelf where Forrest was being supported as Cowan staunched his wound. Matthew’s coppery face leaned gravely in, close against Willie’s pale one.

  “Hand me up that whiskey,” Cowan said to the boys. “I think we got the bleeding stopped.”

  “Never tetched hit,” Forrest said blearily. “Never will.”

  Major Strange ran up, eyes widening as he took in the situation, then dashed back down, calling out, “Hold’m, boys!” Troopers who’d been anxiously peering up to see the condition of their general lowered their heads to the work of fighting once more.

  “Don’t want no goddamn whiskey no-way,” Forrest said.

  In the course of the summer Cowan had been obliged to lance a boil on Forrest’s backside, which he counted as his most dangerous duty in the war so far. Forcing whiskey on the man might rival it. He spun the cap off the flask with his thumb.

  “You’ve lost a lot of blood,” he said. “If you don’t—”

  Forrest fainted, slumping back into Anderson’s arms, and a low cry came from Matthew or Willie, perhaps both of them. Cowan jammed the rim of the flask against Forrest’s teeth and tipped it up. Some ran out, spilling over his knuckles, but some had run in for he saw the Adam’s apple pump. He handed the flask back to Willie and picked up Forrest’s limp left hand, running his fingertips to the inside of the wrist.

  Forrest’s eyes came open and he coughed and struggled to sit up straighter. “Ye don’t need to go holden my hand,” he said. “I ain’t so bad off as that till yet.”

  “All right,” Cowan said. “What if I’m just hunting a pulse?”

  “I’ll let ye know I got a damn pulse,” Forrest said. “I ain’t no baby needs a nursen.”

  “No,” said Cowan. “But comes a day in your life when you need to let somebody take care of you if you don’t want to die. And nothing you can do about it.”

  “I’m obliged to ye,” Forrest said, “for that thought.”

  And never mind stopping another hole in you, Cowan said to himself. Behind them Matthew rose, then offered a hand to help Willie up. It was remarkable how the notorious hostility between the two seemed to have dwindled in the last few months.

  Forrest clambered to his feet and reached around to feel the bandage on his back.

  “I’ll counsel you to let that plug alone,” Cowan said. “You don’t have a lot of blood left in you.”

  Forrest grinned at him. There was a bit of whisky-shine in his eyes, for he was truly unaccustomed to it. Matthew handed him his sword, and Forrest closed his hand on the hilt.

  “Whar’s my horse at?” he said. “Don’t tell me I had another horse shot out from under me this mornen.”

  Willy pointed to where the horse stood snuffling at the stony dirt.

  “That much to the good then.” Forrest winced slightly as he stooped to gather the reins from the ground. “Ain’t I done tolt ye not to let the leathers trail thataway?” he snapped. “Well, never mind. Hit’s still a fight on our hands, ain’t it.”

  Cowan watched him as he mounted, then began to repack his saddlebag. He thought of other times when there was nothing Forrest could do about whatever it was. There weren’t very many but it hurt to recall them. He took a small dram of whiskey for himself before he put the flask away.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  April 1863

  THE GIRL SWUNG up behind him without missing a beat. In the doorway across the yard her mother dropped her picking basket and raised a hand to the corner of her mouth.

  “Emma, what do you mean?” she said. “You cain’t just be a-goen off with such a man as that.”

  “Momma …” she began, but Forrest had already swung his horse around in the direction the girl had shown before she mounted. She hung her chin over his right shoulder and pressed her whole long torso snug against his back. In her middle teens, she must have been, and a likely-looking gal, though he had barely looked at her before she jumped on, being more interested in what she had to say.

  “Go along the back side of that branch,” she told him, her breath teasing the whorls of his ear as she stretched her arm to show him a line of trees that followed a gulley eastward toward Black Creek. The sun was going down behind them, and the lush green of the pasture was washed in a golden light. He squeezed King Philip in the flanks and brought him into a long easy canter. The girl moved smoothly with Forrest’s movement, like a vine wrapped into a tree in the wind. He remembered the young horsewoman who had ridden a ways with them toward their first fight in Sacramento a couple of years ago. This one would cut as fine a figure in the saddle, he was sure. But there had been no time to saddle her own horse.

  When he reached down to check his pistols he grazed the bare skin of her knee. She must have hitched up most of her skirt when she got astride behind him. But she didn’t start at the touch, or giggle as a light-minded woman might have done. She only tightened the whole of herself deeper into him and the horse.

  For the last two days his mind had been burning, but now it was calm and clear. Out of the corner of his mind’s eye he seemed to see a panther on a fast lope up the round of a hill among the gray boles of winter trees. He shook his head and looked at the real world before him.

  “The ford’s not far,” Emma told him. “We had best get down, General Forrest, for the Yankees may can see us from the other bank.”

  She dropped down herself and walked out ahead of him, stooping just slightly to keep her head below the snarl of bramble on the west bank of Black Creek. There was plenty of small arms firing a couple of hundred yards downstream, where the Federals led by Streight had burned the bridge once they had crossed, using rails from Emma’s family’s fences to start the blaze. As the deeper voice of a cannon belled out among the pistols and the muskets, she parted stalks of cane to look out on the water. He pictured her mother stooping to rake the wild greens she’d been gathering back into the basket she had dropped. Don’t be uneasy, he had told her. I’ll be a-bringen yore gal back safe.

  He drew Emma back by her sleeve and said, “I’m proud to have ye fer a pilot, but I’ll not make a breastworks of ye.” Indeed a few spent balls had begun to plop among the slender cane leaves where they were hid.

  “Right there it is.” Emma stood close behind him now, pointing over the creek to a point on the far bank where cane divided around a slope of clay. Black Creek was swollen with spring rain, running fast and deep down by the burning bridge, but here it looked wider and slower too. “There’s a sand bar from one side to the other,” she breathed to him. “Our cows come across it mornen and night. It’s not hardly chest deep on a cow.”

  “Well, ain’t that fine?” Forrest said, nodding as he turned back to where he’d hitched his horse to a sapling. He saw his brother Jeffrey riding up, under cover of the trees along the branch where Emma had brought him, the Spanish doubloon on its thong winking at his throat. Behind him, the ball of the setting sun dug into the far fence row. With Brother Jeff came Henri and Matthew and a handful of Bill Forrest’s scouts, whom people liked to call the Forty Thieves.

  “Ain’t ye shown up at jest the right time?” Forrest grinned at them. “Right thar’s yore crossen. Run the boys on over and keep up the skeer. I need to take this handsome young lady home, and I’ll be with ye.”

  He mounted and stretched down an arm for Emma, who hardly seemed to need it as she sprang up. Again the old panther loped ac
ross a corner of his mind. All his men took off their hats as he rode the girl back the way they’d come.

  “Tell me yore name,” he said as she slipped down. He could feel eyes on them from the windows of the house, and he felt that she knew he’d heard her name before, knew that he only wanted it to hear it now in her own voice.

  “Emma,” he said. “There’s a good man of mine layen dead thar on yore Momma’s stoop. There’s bound to be a churchyard round here somewhere and I wish ye’d see he gets a fitten burial.”

  She nodded, lowering her head a moment before she looked up at him again. The red light of sunset lay across her cheekbone.

  “I wish ye would give me a lock of yore hair,” he said.

  Smiling, she lifted a chestnut strand, then cocked an eyebrow. He leaned from the saddle and cut it with his belt knife and wound the lock around his finger. By the time he figured out that neither of them knew what to do next she had broken away and was running back toward the light of her doorway as a much younger child might have done.

  He tucked the lock into his watch pocket and rode back toward the creek bank with a fond smile half-hidden under his beard. It was good dark now and about half of his men still fit to fight had already crossed the ford she’d shown them. He shortened his stirrups to keep his boots dry.

  The Federals broke within a few minutes once Forrest’s men rode down on them screaming out of the dark. Streight had left no more than a few there anyway, a screen for his rear as he stumbled toward Rome, which was still some fifty miles away, across the state line from Alabama into Georgia. They’d been fighting a running battle for three days now with scarcely a break.

  The rush had been hard on Forrest’s command too. He’d set out with more than a thousand men but only six hundred had kept up the pace. They’d come more than a hundred miles since they started. Bill Forrest was hurt and captured at Sand Mountain, and of his Forty Thieves some twenty were still standing.