Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Not long before, Gould had given up a pair of cannon to the Federals who charged him at Sand Mountain, during the long pursuit of Streight. I caint keep nobody on that’ll let that kind of a thing happen, Forrest said in his mind, as if explaining it to a third party, John Morton perhaps, That’s all they is to it and they ain’t gone be no argument about it.

  Gould’s importuning kept breaking into his thoughts. “General, do you not see that this order amounts to an imputation of cowardice?”

  “Hush a minute and listen to me,” Forrest said, and looked down into the lieutenant’s flushed face for the first time. “When you give up them cannon, son, the damyankees turned them right around—they hurt us with’m and hurt us bad and you know that the same as me. They kilt a whole mess of my boys with them guns afore we got’m back. I cain’t have no more of that, d’ye foller? Hit ain’t nothing to me if ye’re a coward or if’n—”

  “No man can accuse me of being a coward and both of us live.” Gould’s face had broken up into pink and white blotches and Forrest was just thinking the words peaches and cream when he saw, too late, a pistol-shaped object rising from under the lieutenant’s duster—maybe the hammer snagged on the fabric or maybe Gould had intended to fire through the cloth. Forrest caught the hot barrel and twisted it down and away from him. He knew he was hit though he hadn’t yet felt pain; the first sensation was the sticky warmth of blood running down the side of his leg. He had opened the penknife with his teeth at the same time as the twisting movement that took Gould’s pistol out of the compass of his body brought the two men toe-to-toe and without stopping he drove the longer blade of the knife between Gould’s ribs and ripped it sideways. The hallway filled with the sharp bitter smell of a punctured gut. Gould sighed and dropped his pistol. He staggered toward the western door, passing the men who’d flung out of the quartermaster’s office at the sound of the shot and now stood with their mouths hanging silently open. The bats, startled by the report, fluttered in and out among the rafters.

  Forrest went out the opposite door, unconsciously wiping the knife blade on his pants leg, then dropping the folded knife into his pocket. He was in Columbia, Tennessee, he remembered that, and there was a doctor across the street. He stepped down into the roadway, wincing. Now he could feel the stitch of pain around his waistline.

  HENRI WAS STANDING beside Benjamin’s wagon when Lieutenant Gould staggered out of the Masonic Hall, crumpled over the hand that clutched in his guts. A clear fluid, along with the blood, spilled through the cracks between his fingers, and the piercing chitterling smell was all wrong for the warm weather. The men from the quartermaster’s office overtook him and supported him by the elbows. None had gone after Forrest, for none yet realized that Forrest was hurt. They led Gould into a tailor’s shop across the way and set about making him comfortable, while a couple of other men ran further down the street to look for help.

  Henri looked up at Benjamin, who was sitting on the wagon box, slack reins across his knees. “What do you think happened.”

  “I ain’t know.” Benjamin shrugged and looked far off, between the revolving ears of his mule. “Might be Mist’ Forrest cut ’m.”

  “But there was a shot,” Henri said.

  “Might be they was,” Benjamin said. “Effen Mist’ Forrest shot ’m, he aint gone be walken away.”

  A bat flicked out the door of the hall and took a crooked trajectory into the leafiest crown of the nearby trees. Henri pushed himself up from the wagon rails and walked up the steps into the hall. Once his eyes adjusted to the dim he saw Gould’s pistol lying cockeyed where it had fallen. A blood spoor ran away from it, toward the door on the other side of the building where he’d first seen Gould appear. Drawing his own pistol, Henri moved to the eastern door and peered out around the frame. The blood trail continued across the street and up the steps to Doctor Yandell’s porch.

  THE SERVANTS HAD FLED, without a word, when they saw Forrest stalking toward them, his left trouser leg painting the porch steps with blood. Paying them no mind, Forrest rang the bell, then entered without waiting for any response. By the time Doctor Yandell came in, wide-eyed and shading his brow with one hand, Forrest had unfastened his britches and raised up his shirttail to display the wound.

  “Well?” he said, with a fierce hook of his black beard.

  “General Forrest …” Yandell seemed not to know where the sentence should proceed.

  Where was Cowan when you wanted him Goddammit, Forrest was thinking just behind his teeth. Ye cain’t hardly trust the first goddamn one of these here other sawbones. “I need ye to tell me if this here bullet hole is like to cause me airy serious problem.”

  Doctor Yandell bowed toward the wound. The ball had struck just above Forrest’s hip and it seemed to the doctor that it had pierced the external oblique abdominal muscle, whence it would enter the lower abdomen. The wound’s dark mouth was fringed with dark shreds of Forrest’s woolen trousers and lighter ones from the lieutenant’s duster.

  “Yes, General,” Doctor Yandell gulped. “I must tell you that has the look of a dangerous wound. You must get to the hospital as soon as may be, for in this hot weather it may carry you off. But first if you would stretch out on this divan so that I may—”

  “What!” Forrest was already fastening his trousers, though blood spilled over his waistband. “You don’t mean to tell me that yaller dog bastard has done kilt me. Not by all the fire and brimstone in Hell!”

  HIS VOICE CARRIED easily across the street where Henri lurked still in the entryway of the Masonic Hall, raised pistol hidden behind the door frame. Forrest burst out of Yandell’s front door and bore down on him like a cyclone. His face was black as a thunderhead. His burning eyes seemed to center on Henri’s pistol, even though he surely couldn’t see it through the building wall, but as he crossed the threshold Forrest wrenched the weapon from him without even looking to see where it was, then stormed on down the hallway.

  From Forrest’s hot eyes at that moment, Henri was left with a stream of dots across his own vision, as if he’d stared directly at the sun. Whenever this raging spirit took hold of the general there were only two people on earth who could calm him. Mary Ann his wife might do it, with a word or a touch or a glance. His mother, Mariam, would lay her hands upon his shoulders and hold his burning eyes with hers. When she spoke his name, Bedford Forrest would return to himself and the rage that seized his being would be gone. Henri had been especially struck with this power Mariam Forrest had, to lay on hands as a mambo sometimes might, when a stubborn angry spirit would not give up the human horse that gave him body in the world.

  It was soothing too how Mariam might almost rhyme with Mary Ann. But neither of these women was on hand today. Henri followed Forrest across the street, keeping half a dozen paces back, but still pulled forward by the vortex of the other man’s movement. Forrest kicked open the door of the tailor’s shop. Lieutenant Gould had been stretched out across a sewing table, and the men from the quartermaster’s office were trying to staunch his wound with wads of cotton batting which the tailor had in store. Doctor Wittke had also come to attend him. All scattered when Forrest burst into the room, roaring and drawing back the hammer of Henri’s revolver with his thumb, except for Wittke, who only stepped back and said, calmly enough, “General, you have no need to kill him now, for he will surely die of the wound he has already had of you.”

  When Gould jumped up to run away the blood from his stab wound spurted out in such a jet that Wittke had to step aside so that it would not splash on his clothes. Forrest leveled the pistol and pulled the trigger and the box of the little room filled up with powder fumes. Over the deafening concussion Forrest was howling, “No damn speckled sonofabitch can kill me and live!”

  Gould had fallen sideways across the back doorstep. All thought him shot dead until he jumped up, ran across the back yard, sprang over the waist-high fence that enclosed it and kept on, flinging his heels up high behind him. Forrest, with as much agility, pu
rsued, letting off a couple more uncharacteristically wild shots as he closed the distance.

  Cautiously, Henri stepped down into the back yard of the tailor shop, which was half–grown up in dandelions going to seed. His eye was on the wall of the house across the alley, where Forrest’s first stray round had flaked a corner off a brick. Young Sammy Milton sat on his tailbone below, holding his left leg up by the ankle and peering at the underside of his calf, where the ricochet had left a red furrow.

  “That’s nothing to worry about,” Henri remarked. “Only a crease. You’re barely even bleeding, Sam.”

  “That’s all right for you to say,” Milton squeaked. Henri kept going down the alley.

  Four houses over from the tailor’s, Gould had run out of breath and blood and lay facedown in a patch of bitterweed. Onlookers made a semicircle behind Forrest, who probed the body with the toe of his boot.

  “Kin ye credit this sorry little piece of shit has put the final end to me?”

  “No,” said Henri, swinging his leg over another thigh-high fence to come from the alley into the yard where the others were gathered.

  Forrest rounded on him. The black hole of the pistol barrel aimed with his eyes. Henri tried to count the shots Forrest had let off during the chase: possible as many as four but certainly less than six. The rage was still on him but it did not burn so brightly as before. And after all Henri already knew that no dark cylinder of Forrest’s six held his own death today.

  “What’s that ye say?”

  “No,” said Henri. “Nobody has put an end to you yet, General. You are not hurt so bad as you believe.”

  Forrest’s eyes enclosed him then, large and dark as craters on the moon. As if they could pierce and probe out all his secrets, especially those Henri most fervently wished to remain undiscovered. He tried to return the stare with the same penetration, to know even as he was also known. But Forrest was a long puzzle. A hard one. A chanpwel might shed her skin and take the air and shrink herself enough to slip between the atoms building Forrest’s skull and discover all the workings there—but what if there should be no workings? No machinery at all, but only intermittent flashes of a thunderous light?

  “Ye mean to tell me I won’t die today,” Forrest had said.

  “I do mean that. You won’t.”

  When Forrest finally broke the gaze, Henri breathed deep, then noticed the general was holding his pistol out toward him by the barrel. Henri took it, looked at it briefly, then thrust it back into one of the holsters Forrest had found for him that first day, while they were smuggling guns out of Louisville.

  Forrest turned away and left the yard. It was then that someone noticed that Lieutenant Gould was still just barely breathing.

  “You seen that.” As others began to scatter from the scene, Benjamin had slipped up to Henri and stopped with his big handsome head cocked to one side, looking at Henri crossways. “You seen the Old Man wa’nt gone die this time.”

  “He’s not hurt bad as he thinks, that’s all,” Henri said, and looked down at the ground—it was true what he said but Ben was still lofting the question toward him with the crooked angle of his look, for both of them knew Henri hadn’t told the part of the truth that Benjamin wanted to hear.

  FORREST LIMPED into the house where he’d taken a room, with a couple of doctors cautiously trailing him. Once they’d had the chance to examine him properly, they let him know his wound was not so dangerous as it first seemed. The bullet had not cut into his vitals but lodged instead in the flesh of his hip, whence it could be safely extracted. Then Forrest rose up and drove the doctors off. “Let it alone then, why don’t ye?” he shouted. “Hit’s nothen but a damn little pistol ball!” But the rage had left him altogether now, and his humor turned darkly inward.

  Lieutenant Gould, whose wound did fester in the summer heat, was two or three days about his dying. The doctors kept him mostly quiet with morphine. Sometimes in the night he screamed. John Morton kept him company when he could, for they were friends from boyhood. Leave out the war and they were hardly more than boys now.

  “Goddammit!” Forrest erupted, when Morton came to him. “Don’t I know what a sorry situation hit is? If he’d shown that much spunk on Sand Mountain we’d not never had no quarrel in the first place.”

  Morton, whose pale round face was bluish with the small veins underneath the skin, spoke to him again in a low tone. Forrest took off his hat and looked into the crown as if maybe there was a crystal ball up in there.

  “All right, John, all right,” he said. “I’ll go along with ye if that’s what ye want.”

  When Forrest was most uncomfortably seated at the bedside, Lieutenant Gould groped for his hand and held it, and then in his weak dying voice he made a little speech he plainly had stored up in his mind ahead of time, saying he was sorry for what he had done, that the affair was begun in a reckless moment but if it had to end with one of them dead he was happy it should be him and not Forrest to die—it was better for the country that way.

  Then Forrest looked Gould in the eye, and said in a voice that didn’t quite crack, “I jest wish the whole thing never come about, son—don’t ye know they ain’t no way on earth I could be glad about doen in one of my own?” Gould didn’t say anything more after that, but kept his weak clasp on Forrest’s left hand, while Forrest covered his eyes with his right. The other men in the room looked at each other strangely. Forrest never spoke about wishes. He only said what wasn’t, or what was.

  After a time, young Gould drifted off, and Forrest got up and went out of the sickroom like Morton and the others there were invisible to him. In the night he woke crying, though he didn’t know that he was. The saltiness running through his beard into the corners of his mouth only puzzled him. He had dreamed of three women on a brow of a bald hill in the nighttime. His mother, Mariam, leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. Her front was covered with a crumpled cloth but her rawboned arms and her shoulders were bare, her strong square hands turned palm-up to him. Mary Ann had settled behind her, with such a tender and sorrowful expression on her face; she was laving the scars that the panther had left, while behind her, where Mary Ann did not have to see her, Catharine stood holding the basin ready. Her face was lost in shadow, but he could see she wore a deep blue cloth tied over her head, with white specks on it shining bright as the stars beyond the hill.

  It was him or me, Momma, Forrest said. It was him or me.

  Oh now Bedford, don’t take on. Her eyes deep and dark in the hollows of her head. I know it was. I know.

  And he knew that she knew just how half-true that was. Awake now, he understood that Gould had died while he was dreaming. He could feel the skin of his cheeks crinkling as the salt dried to the skin, and the itch of the healing wound in his hip. The real trouble was he sometimes thought he would not, could not ever die.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  January 1865

  THEY RESTED against each other in the darkness of a borrowed clapboard house, winter wind sawing at the frame of their attic room. An iron grate in the floor released a little heat from the woodstove simmering in the room below.

  “Does it still hurt?” Mary Ann said. For a moment she couldn’t even remember which one of his many old wounds she had referred to.

  Forrest shifted against her, spread his large warm hand across the small of her back. “Right now nothen hurts,” he said.

  She fingered a lock of his hair in the dark. Right now she didn’t feel the cold at all, but she had felt a stab of it when meeting him after months of absence she saw how white his hair had grown.

  “I’ll never have you all the time,” she said, or maybe only thought. “But when I’ve got you I’ve got all of you there is.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  February 1864

  ON HIS HASTY RETURN from rounding up five thousand recruits in West Tennessee, Forrest was quick to send Henri and Matthew out on a scout: Federal General Sooy Smith was leading a couple of thousand cavalry south fr
om Collierville, Tennessee. Bedford kept Willie Forrest back by him, but sent two other men of his escort—Nath Boone, who now had the rank of lieutenant, and a man named Billy Strickland, who would not be killed till the fight around Pulaski at the end of the year.

  They set out from Oxford late in the day, heading more or less due east. A good deal earlier, Jeffrey Forrest had been sent, in command of quite a serious force, with the idea of intercepting Smith’s advance somewhere south along the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, and the scouts’ orders were to find and join him if they could. Bedford Forrest, who knew that Sooy Smith was taking his orders from William Tecumseh Sherman, supposed that once Smith struck the railroad below Corinth he’d keep ripping it up all the way to Meridian and maybe further. Sherman was setting out from Vicksburg to cut his own slash across this Confederate breadbasket, so more than likely he meant to join Smith at Meridian or nearby.

  Henri had not ridden so far with his party when they heard a jingle of harness behind. With a couple of hisses exchanged between them, they pulled their horses out of the road and into a clump of cedars to see what might be coming along the road. Benjamin was following, riding the strongest white mule of his wagon bareback, forcing the animal into a reluctant but rapid trot.

  Nath Boone and Strickland swarmed into the road, their pistols raised skyward, turning their horses to block the mule’s way.

  “Boy, state your business,” Strickland said.

  Ben looked straight at him through the long ears of his mule.

  “I come out to jine this scout with y’all.”

  “Is that right,” said Strickland. “Let me see your pass.”