Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Forrest sent them out now to keep harrying Streight, while he remained on the bank of Black Creek to superintend the crossing of his cannon. The creek was so deep the guns and their carriages were completely submerged and he could only judge where they were by watching the angle of the ropes and obscure swirls on the starlit surface of the water. Someone had broken open a case of wet biscuit that Streight’s men had lost in the haste of their crossing. Forrest chewed his square of hardtack slowly, absently brushing crumbs from his beard. In the trees behind him a couple of screech owls carried on their weird throaty whistling. The last of his men on the far bank had gone up to the ford that Emma had showed him, to carry their powder across high and dry. At least it wasn’t raining now, as it had been for several days of the chase. He only wished it were raining on Streight.

  In the morning they overtook Streight at Gadsden, where Forrest’s scouts let him know that the Federals had had no more than thirty minutes to forage and round up fresh mounts. Too hoarse for shouting, Forrest signaled the charge by windmilling his left arm. Cannon brought a bass line up under the rebel yell as they galloped into the town. Streight ordered a few small commissaries set afire before his men made their hasty departure. Some of Forrest’s men jumped down to help the townsfolk douse the flames. Unperturbed by fire or smoke, Ginral Jerry emerged from a burning depot with four sides of bacon hanging across his shoulders by the heavy wires that had swung them to the rafters. Two of them were burning at their fatty corners, wreathing Jerry’s skinny hips in cheerful yellow flames. Matthew batted at the bacon fire with the remains of his hat.

  “Let that alone, son,” Jerry grumbled as he swung the bacon up into the wagon and began smothering the fire with straw still wet from the Black Creek crossing. “You want sumpn to do go fetch me that mule yonder … This’n here’s about give out.”

  Matthew looked over where Jerry had aimed his jaw. One of the ugliest mules he’d ever seen was tossing his ax head in a corner of two houses. The “U.S.” brand on his hindquarter was still raw.

  “That thing is wild as a bobcat,” Matthew said.

  “Sho he is,” Jerry said. “You think a Yankee know how to gentle a mule?”

  Matthew did have a way of quieting an animal, and he had just got a hand on the mule’s forelock when Willie Forrest caught its lip in the loop of a twitch and began dragging it to Jerry’s wagon that way.

  “You didn’t need to do that,” Matthew said.

  Willie spat on the ground and said without looking back. “You’d of took all day the way you were about it.”

  The mule reared in the traces as Jerry set about hitching it. “You ain’t hardly broke at all, is you?” he said to the animal. Then as he noticed Matthew and Willie glaring at each other, “Whynt y’all go find some Yankees to quarrel with?”

  AT BLOUNT PLANTATION, fifteen miles out of Gadsden, Streight stopped again to try to feed his men and stock. They’d barely got their rations out when the rear guard was driven in upon them and Streight was forced to form a battle line.

  It was mid-morning when the battle joined, just beginning to get hot. Forrest ordered a charge on the Yankee center, which bowed but a little and finally held. “Goddamn his liver and lights to the Devil!” Forrest screamed. “Sonofabitch knows how to fight.”

  “Amen to that,” Kelley responded, and then when Forrest sent him a fishy look, “Well, what do you want me say?”

  “We’ll turn his right for him,” Forrest said. He gave the order, but Streight’s right held stubbornly as the center had, and Forrest called a halt, to wait for a few more of his men to arrive on the field. The Federals had him outnumbered by near three to one, though Forrest was pretty sure Streight didn’t know it.

  By the time they were set to press the attack, Streight had rolled up his line and was withdrawing again, leaving only skirmishers to cover his rear. They’d been skirmishing all the way across from Gadsden, anyway. In a barn lot on Blount Plantation, Forrest skipped down from his horse to inspect a scatter of cartridges fanned out from a box. The damp paper unraveled from the one he picked up.

  “He’s got his powder wet, God rot him,” Forrest said. “Well, now we’ll see.”

  Along with skirmishers the woods and pastures they crossed were sprinkled with runaway mules and with packs of the slaves that had been following Streight’s camp all the way from East Port, some of them. Forrest told these latter to go home, if they could find the way. “This ain’t no time to go see-en the world,” he told them.

  Presently the road they were following made a dogleg turn through a dense stand of pines. At the second bend the Federals had raised a barricade. Gun barrels glinted amongst the brush and timber. It seemed logical to turn from that situation and cross an open field where an invitingly thin-looking line of skirmishers waited in the knee-high grass just short of a low rise.

  “Hold up,” Forrest said. “We been bit thataway one time too many.” He shaded his eyes with his hand and stared toward the horizon of the field. “Boone!” he called sharply. “I want you to ride a hunnert men through those pines to the left thar. He’s filled’m up with sharpshooters, I don’t miss my guess. Knock down anything blue and don’t leave’m time to draw a bead, d’ye hear me? Mister Kelley, you do the same on the right. And then we’ll see what’s t’other side of that-air rise.”

  Once gunfire and screaming had taken a good hold in the pines, Forrest slapped his mount with the flat of his sword and led the charge across the field. The skirmishers melted away, firing hardly a shot. The five hundred riflemen lying in wait beyond the grassy crest of the rise were struck from three directions and demolished, their commander killed. Some few survivors ran pell-mell toward Rome, flinging down their guns and ammunition.

  At dusk they pulled up by a copse of oaks on the crown of a hill. There they’d stay, Forrest told them, to feed and rest their horses and themselves. He was satisfied Streight had been buffaloed into another all-night march, so best they should be fresh when they jumped back on his trail next morning. Only he would need a few details and scouts to go ahead. Somebody had to be sure to beat Streight to the bridge across the Coosa River to Rome. And there was a ferry crossing somewhere on the Chattooga River, which still lay between the Yankees and the Coosa.

  “I’ll go,” Matthew said.

  “Boy, you don’t know this country …” Forrest looked at him, considering. “I ain’t sending you alone no way.”

  “I’ll go with him.” Henri couldn’t believe he’d just heard himself say that. In his mind he had already fallen off his mount into a blind ten-hour sleep.

  “I’ll go,” Willie Forrest said then, forcing his voice husky and deep.

  “The hell you will,” Forrest grunted. “You stay right here by me.”

  Ginral Jerry gave Henri and Matthew a cup of warm mush each as they set out, tilting the skillet to flavor the cups with grease of the half-cooked bacon. They rode into the thickening dark, licking cornmeal from their fingers.

  “Nom du diable,” Henri said, as he licked out the cup and shoved it down in a cloth bag strung to his saddle skirt. “How did you talk me into this?”

  “I never said a word about you,” Matthew pointed out.

  “I must have been dreaming,” Henri muttered to himself. He thought it over in the midst of a yawn. Like the rest of the men he had not slept more than a snatch in three days. “Maybe I’m dreaming the whole thing still.”

  Matthew’s faint chuckle was interrupted by the scream of a panther well away in the woods to their left. They pulled up their horses and looked toward each other, though no feature of either could be seen in the darkness under the pines. Then Henri clucked softly to his mount and they rode on.

  FORREST TOURED his camp as dusk turned to dark, swapping a word or a laugh with anyone he happened to meet. Men were falling asleep with their bacon and biscuit still in their hands. He reminded himself that Streight had been spooked into running all night in no clear direction, that tomorrow his own men woul
d be fresh to hit the Yankees again when they caught them.

  By the campfire Ginral Jerry sat with his head thrown back against the bole of pine, snoring, though the whites of his eyes showed a little. Willie lay near him, feigning sleep. Forrest squinted at him for a second, judged the boy would be asleep for real in another two or three minutes or so.

  He stretched on the blanket Jerry had unrolled for him, shifting hip and shoulders to loosen the sand underneath. Was there something to think about? No, it would keep.

  Forrest twitched and smiled in his sleep. His hard hand thumped the dirt beyond the blanket’s edge. Sitting with his knees drawn up, Willie studied him cautiously until he had stilled. A cloud of mosquitoes hovered over Forrest’s head, looking for a way in through wild hair and beard. Willie got up and crept barefoot toward the horses, his boots clamped under one elbow and his pistol belt in the other hand.

  The panther slipped from tree to tree through Forrest’s dream. On some other ridge the dogs were singing, but Forrest was nearer to his prey than the dogs were, and he could see plain as day despite the dark. That was because he was dreaming, of course. While his aunt inspected the dressing of the wounds on his mother’s back, Bedford set his mouth in a pale line, lifted the octagon-barreled rifle and the powder horn down from the pegs, and went on the big cat’s trail without a word, though his aunt called for him not to go. Sister Fanny knew better than to say anything, and the least ones were busy playing with the chicks on the puncheon floor. His mother said nothing. She was lying facedown with her chin hanging over the edge of the pallet, her eyes big and dark, biting her lower lip against the sting of the turpentine on the red furrows the panther had plowed down her back.

  Outside the dogs found sign at once and raced after it bugling, but Bedford scarcely attended to their racket. It seemed to him that there was a clear lucid filament passing through the woods to join his mind to the mind of the panther so that he already knew when and where the animal would be brought to bay and had only to keep walking steadily toward that time and place, his eyes as wide and round as the moon would have been. But it was a moonless night.

  · · ·

  “HELL AND I wasn’t shore it was you!” Willie said when he found Henri and Matthew in a clearing. “It’s loose niggers running all over these woods.”

  Henri picked out Matthew’s profile against a patch of starlit sky. The boy’s lower jaw stuck out a little from the strain of clenching his teeth.

  “Well, it’s true,” Willie said to their backs.

  They rode on through a silence that slowly surrendered its edge. Thirty minutes on, Henri’s horse raised its head and flared its nostrils.

  “We’re not far from the river,” Willie said quietly, and Henri guessed he could smell the water too.

  It was Willie too who picked up the first flicker of movement by the boulder on the bank, or maybe he heard something, smelled something—of a sudden his whole body lined up behind the barrel of his pistol like a bird dog throws its whole self into its pointing nose. A man stood up slowly from the rock with his empty hands upraised and his head lowered. Against the dim quicksilver sheen of the Chattooga they could all see his body shaking.

  “Massa!” The voice trembling too. “We ain’t go to do it. It was deh Yankees …”

  There was the softer speech of the deepest Deep South, somewhat unaccustomed to Henri’s ear still. He strained his eyes against the shadow of the rock. There was something else there and Matthew had trained his pistol on it. Henri got down from his horse and struck a light. A woman sat in the shelter of the boulder, cradling a baby in a cloth sling against her breast. She was very young, and the child not three weeks old.

  “Put up those pistols,” he told the boys, and cupped the flame to shine on his own face. “Stop acting like a slave,” he said. “I’m no man’s master but my own.”

  “I is a slave,” the man said. But he straightened his back and stopped shaking.

  Henri nodded to the woman by the rock, and snuffed his light. “Have you been with Colonel Streight?”

  “Yassuh,” the man said. “Whole lotta folkses gone with him at fust. He say he gone care us to freedom.” The man looked out across the water. “He cain’t care nobody nowheh now. Half dem hoss sojahs done landed on dey feets. Wo’ out till they cain’t keep they eyes open no mo’.” He laughed softly. “Dem mules dey got too mean to tote’m no way. And don’t you know dey jess plum tuckered. I seen one yestiddy walk spang into a tree.”

  “Where are you from?” Henri asked.

  “Peck’s plantation. Over to Gadsden.” The man shrugged. “We’d go back theh now if we known the way.” He looked at Henri, eyes narrowing slightly. “Who y’all with?”

  “Bedford Forrest.”

  “Bedford Forrest? He the wust man in all deh state. What dem seh. In all deh South, dey do seh.”

  Henri smiled in the dark. “I’d rather be with him than against him.”

  “Dem Yankees do seh Forrest after’m.”

  “They’re right about one thing anyway,” Willie said from the saddle.

  “Which way’s the ferry from here,” Henri said, and the man pointed east along the river. Out of the darkness the panther screamed again but the voice was cut off midway by a shot. Henri shuddered.

  “Rabbit run ovah yo’ grave,” the man said, looking at Henri with the same curiosity. If anyone else had heard the sound they gave no sign.

  AT LAST HE FOUND the big cat knotted in a high crotch of a leafless oak, just below the crown of the ninth hill he’d climbed since leaving the cabin. He sat cross-legged below the tree, the long rifle sticking straight up from his folded knees, waiting for the light to come. Presently the dogs caught up with him; he calmed them and made them wait quietly as he. At dawn the panther gathered itself, focused its hot yellow eyes. Its smell grew muskier. Bedford stood and leveled the gun as the panther screamed and flung itself at him. The dead weight bowled him over, one claw tearing a gash on his forearm, though he’d hit it square between the eyes and it was just convulsion working now. As the dogs raced a yelping circle around them he cut the cat’s throat and, deliciously, washed in the blood.

  · · ·

  HENRI HELD the horses on the bank while Matthew and Willy, cooperating smoothly for once in their vexatious lives, poled the ferry midstream. They’d just begun to swim back to shore when Henri thought he heard hoofbeats away in the woods to the west. He scurried along the bank, not daring to call, beckoning furiously, and uselessly since the boys had their heads down and couldn’t see him. Sleek as otter they came out of the water and Henri hurried them and the horses into a clump of cedars, seconds before Streight’s scouts appeared on the riverbank.

  Two hundred yards downriver, the ferryboat struck a snag and began to rotate as it drifted away. The Federal scouts stared after it dolefully. “There’s supposed to be a bridge at Gaylesville,” one of them said.

  AT NINE O’CLOCK the next morning Forrest overtook Streight at Lawrence Plantation, where he’d stopped to try to feed his mounts and men. The Federals were inside twenty miles of Rome but one of Forrest’s detachments had beaten them to the bridge there. When Streight ordered his men into a battle line, they lay down on the ground and went to sleep, scarcely disturbed by the balls of Confederate skirmishers buzzing over like low-flying bumblebees.

  “He’s a hard man to whup,” Forrest said, all the same. “Let’s see cain’t we fox him.” The numbers were still running a long way against him, though he knew Brother Bill and others who’d been captured would do all they could to inflate the enemy’s idea of his strength.

  He looked behind him. What men he had left were drawn up in cover of a fringe of trees on a low ridge. To the left was a space where a gap in the tree line left about fifteen yards of bare hilltop. Forrest turned to Henri with a grin.

  “Ornery!” he said. “How many cannon has kept up?”

  Henri didn’t want to answer. Over his shoulder, Matthew spoke up: “Two.”

&nbs
p; The shadow of a frown flicked across Forrest’s face. “Hit don’t matter,” he said, and again showed his teeth. “I want ye to bring’m acrost that knob whar the Yankees can see. And I don’t mean just the one time neither.”

  Streight’s men, Forrest saw when he went in to parley, were so beat they lay facedown snoring in the mud and the officers kicking them could not get them up. Streight himself looked like he might have some fight in him yet. He was burlier than Forrest, though not as tall, with a thin mustache and a heavy black beard. His hair receded on either side of a high pale forehead, leaving an island in the middle. Maybe his hair had been falling out faster the last few days, Forrest hoped. But there was a set to Streight’s blunt features that put him in mind of a snapping turtle.

  “I won’t surrender unless you show me your force,” he said.

  “That’ll be blood on your head, then,” Forrest said. “Yore own boys’ blood. I got men enough to whup ye outen yore boots.”

  He shifted his weight to his heels as he saw Streight was peering over his shoulder. He’d set his back to his own line, so that Streight could see the progress of his supposed artillery, and by now the single pair of cannon must have crossed that gap more than a dozen times. Forrest’s officers had amplified the stratagem by marching a few dozen men around the same circuit, till their numbers appeared to mount in the hundreds.

  “All right, then,” Streight breathed.

  “That’s the way,” Forrest said, and pointed to a tree. “Ye can jest have yore boys stack their guns right thar.”

  There were not quite four hundred of Forrest’s men who had kept up with him still, and when they came forward to take charge of the captured arms, Streight dashed his hat onto the ground. “Give me back my guns and we’ll fight it out.”

  Forrest laughed and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “You tricked me,” Streight said bitterly. “You lied.”

  “I’ll tell ye what.” Forrest’s voice hardened. “I never ast ye to come down here no-way. I’m sorry if ye feel ye been hard used.”