Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “It was Ginral Forrest give me leave,” Ben said. “He don’t spend time writen out no passes.”

  Henri and Matthew were watching Boone, who’d been in a changeable humor since his brother Alfred had got killed up in Somerset about two months before. Boone’s bushy eyebrows were pushing together like maybe he had a headache coming on.

  Strickland was looking at Boone too. “Does it worry you how this boy won’t lower his head when he speaks to you? Jest keeps staring right bang in your eyes.”

  Boone considered, pulling up his horse’s head from a patch of half-frozen weed in the ditch. “Hit’s Forrest’s nigger after all,” he said. “I expect he’s been whupped for it.”

  “Been whupped plenty,” Ben put in.

  “Don’t seem to have cured ye,” Strickland said.

  “Well now,” said Nath Boone. “I’ve noticed he looks the Old Man in the eye that same way too.”

  “White gemmun,” Ben said suddenly. “Here’s why I come. You know he caught that buncha white boys trying to sneak off back to Jackson where they was just rounded up last week. You know he made ’m stand by those graves till sunup with the men with the rifles to shoot ’m dead right by there too.”

  Henri considered. He remembered the same scene queasily himself. The new recruits all had come from West Tennessee, where in the fourth year of the war he was finding men a little less willing to follow the Confederate battle flag than they had been on his previous canvassing trip a year before. A man, a boy, might sooner follow Forrest than most, as Forrest was reputed to win all his fights. They’d taken more than three thousand new men south from Jackson, but scarcely a third of these had a firearm—the lot of them were as green as fresh rawhide and just as happy to run as fight. Henri could picture one such, Briley. How did he come to remember that name? Scarce out of his teens, the boy stood spindly, propped on the shovel at the head of the grave Forrest had ordered all the deserters he’d caught to dig for themselves, eyes rolling white and his lantern jaw trembling.

  “Well,” said Boone, “he didn’t shoot’m finally, did he? Hit’s just tryen to skeer’m out of runnen away.”

  Strickland looked at Ben just as hard as he was looking at him. “It don’t seem to have cured you.”

  “I ain’t runnen nowhar,” Ben said quickly. “I axed for a change of duty is all. Them boys standen in they graves don’t sit right by me. I’ll take my chance I get shot by the Yankees effen I can ride with you. Best way I can figure to get that other bidness outa my craw.”

  “Well,” said Boone, “that’s your plan, you cain’t go running around empty-handed.”

  Benjamin smiled, wrinkling the pale bolt of scar that struck down from his temple onto his cheekbone. A swatch of his tattered blanket wrapped forward from the roll behind his saddle. When he flipped it off (softly so as not to spook the white mule) they could all see one Navy six in his belt and another in his hand—the latter had been trained on Strickland’s rib cage throughout the conversation.

  After a rather long pause, Boone let out a chuckling sigh. “Put that thing up till we find us some Yankees,” he said. “And make yourself welcome to join this party.”

  THROUGH THE CHILL of that night they rode with the rags of their blankets wrapped around their shoulders. Dark of the moon, so they could barely see each other’s horses, except for Ben’s white mule, which stood out plainly. The blacks who began to fill the road around them were invisible, some headed east and others west. Some muttered low that the Yankees were coming and others cried deliriously that they were free at last! But none of them seemed to know where they were going. Henri felt his sense of himself as a separate being melting into the milling throng of them all; he was sinking into this dark stream, diffusing into its crosscurrents. He might have slept some in the saddle; if so he was awakened by the crump of cannon in the distance ahead.

  The eastern horizon was red with burning. Still a couple of hours to dawn. Boone called a halt and after a quick whispered conference they left the road and picked their way along the bank of the Tallahatchie till they reached the town of New Albany at first light. There’d been no burning here nor was there any real sign of disorder, though the ways through town were deeply rutted by wagon and gun carriage wheels and trampled by many boots and hooves. Dung from the draft animals lay barely cool. The buildings were all shuttered and barred and no one struck a light within nor ventured out to ask their business.

  From New Albany they turned to the south; the Yankees’ trail led toward Pontotoc, but they skirted it on a parallel path toward the railroad. In the warmth of the rising sun Henri pulled a nubbin of pone from his pouch, broke it in two to share with Matthew, and put it crumb by crumb in his mouth, holding it there till it softened enough to be swallowed. As they went on they crossed more large parties of wandering blacks and by daylight they could see more plainly that most of these were women and children. They spoke most freely to Benjamin, who had no shred of Confederate gray about him, letting him know that their menfolk had taken horses and mules from their places to ride after the Yankees—going to Okolona, they thought. Henri studied Benjamin as he spoke to one woman or another; there was a natural courtesy to his manner with all of them.

  All through the morning a haze had been building on the southern horizon and it grew darker the nearer they approached. By the time they struck the railroad south of Verona, Henri thought he could taste the burning in the back of his throat. They were in Mississippi bottomland now, the black-earth country, where every farmer was required to keep a crib beside the tracks, lipping full of beans and bacon and flour and corn to supply the troops of the Confederacy. With no hesitation, Ben broke the hasp on one with a broken bayonet he carried in his belt, and began to load the white mule with provender.

  “Get it while you can, boys,” Boone said, following Ben’s suit.

  “What about the train?” Strickland objected.

  “Ain’t gone to be no train today.”

  Strickland shaded his eyes toward the southern horizon. “You think that’s Okolona down there?”

  “Queen of the Prairie, the Injuns called it,” Boone said, turning in the same direction. “That’ll be whatever’s left of it, if I don’t miss my guess.”

  He turned to the others. “Boys, I believe we better split up. Y’all three go on and have a look at the Yankees. Me’n Billy’ll swing around and see if we don’t find Jeff Forrest down by West Point.”

  “Are you serious?” Henri said.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Boone said. “Jest wrap your blanket over your uniform. Ain’t nobody gone pay you no mind. Every stray nigger in five counties is down there already, accorden to what we hear. They ain’t gone to bother about three more.”

  Henri looked at him.

  “Or come on with us, if you druther,” Boone said. “Ben don’t mind scouting the Yankees, do you, Ben? You want a change of duty that’s just what you got.”

  “I’m going with Benjamin,” Matthew said.

  “Fine,” said Henri. “Ainsi soit-il.”

  THE THREE OF THEM set out south along the railroad, their blankets wrapped close around them, Indian-style. Even in the afternoon it was frosty enough they could see their breath, and the snorts of the horses made crystal flowers in the chilly air. South of Pontotoc the track had been torn up ahead of them and the rails and ties scattered about like outsize matchsticks—as thorough an uprooting as Forrest himself accomplished whenever he led such operations over ground that the enemy held.

  Nearer to Okolona they came upon black men still at the work, lightly supervised by handfuls of Yankee soldiers here and there. The white soldiers made Henri uneasy and he felt perhaps that Matthew was too. Their uniforms were so tattered by now they could scarce be recognized, but their horses were still good, a little too good, maybe, for riders who preferred to pass unnoticed. On the other hand Henri began to take note that many of the black men were just as well mounted, on horses they’d taken from the stables round about. War
had not breathed on this region before today, so the land was still fat, the horses sleek and glossy.

  All the same they swung east of the track, to steer away from the Federal soldiers, though lines of fire now stood on the horizons all around. The blacks were pulling up track and burning the supply cribs under the direction of the Federal soldiers but they did not limit themselves to that. And what would you call them today? Henri wondered—not slaves, not runaways, not free men. They had passed into a kind of limbo and no one knew in what state they’d emerge beyond it. Today they galloped through tongues of flame and tendrils of smoke with the tails of their confiscated horses streaming out behind them.

  A great spirit of destruction soared over this land, and Henri’s heart flew up to meet it. He rode with his knees guiding his horse, his palms turned up and arms raised high. At his right hand Matthew’s upturned face was bathed in a similar exaltation. “Koupé têt,” Henri called to him. “Boulé kay.” He knew the boy thrilled to the words even though he didn’t understand them. They had paused before a grand white-columned house whose brick was cracking under the heat of the fire that swirled between the open front and back doorways of the entrance hall, and rocketed up the helix of the spiral staircase. Soot-streaked blacks kicked their heels through heaps of ash in the yard, singing out a joyous rage. A Yankee officer cantered up to three of them, pale-faced.

  “Make it stop,” he panted. “This—General Smith never ordered this. We’re supposed to destroy railroad and depots and supplies, not burn down the whole state of Mississippi. Even Sherman didn’t order this.”

  Henri looked at him. “No human hand can make this stop.”

  The Yankee officer gazed blankly at him for a few seconds more, then wheeled his horse and rode away. Presently the three of them prodded their mounts and set off, a bit more slowly, in the same direction the bluecoat had taken. The notion of strategy he had introduced was cutting into Henri’s transport of elation. He felt the leaden weight of Sherman, waiting for Smith to meet him at Meridian, wanting to rip the belly out of the whole South like a wild dog eating the viscera of its kill. Forrest knew full well that this was Sherman’s dear intention, and Forrest had it in mind to thwart it if he could. It was for that that Sherman hated and feared Forrest and would if possible have him killed.

  “Koupé têt,” Henri said again in a lower tone; he didn’t really feel it now. “Boulé kay.” It didn’t feel the same.

  “What’s that mean?” Matthew said, and Henri felt that the glow of the moment before had left him too.

  “Cut off heads,” Henri said. “Burn down houses.” He sighed. “I’ll tell you later.”

  As they rode into Okolona he began automatically to calculate numbers of cannon and wagons and men. Either side of them Matthew and Benjamin were doing the same, Henri felt sure. As Nath Boone predicted, bewilderment in the town was so general that the Yankees took no note of their passage.

  But at the south edge of Okolona, Henri pulled his horse up sharply.

  “Can somebody please tell me why we’re going back to Nathan Bedford Forrest right now?”

  Benjamin looked at him sidelong. “They’s some as would like to ax you the same question.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” Henri said. “Right now I’m asking you.”

  Benjamin touched a fingertip to the source of the scar on his temple. “Them niggers haven a big time now,” he said. “Tomorrow they won’t know what to do. Fulla fight as they is, they ain’t got nobody to lead’m.”

  “Why not us?” Henri said.

  “I ain’t taken that up today.” Ben faced south along the road. “Get along, mule. Let’s us go see can we find Jeff Forrest.”

  The mule’s ears revolved in a backward circle. Henri’s and Matthew’s mounts fell in on either side.

  “Freedom comen,” Benjamin said. “One way or t’other. It gone come hard.” He met Henri’s eyes straight on this time. “I don’t know what you hold to in this world. I got my wife down to Coahoma. Nancy, her name—I hope she all right. Yankees come there, they ain’t gone take no better care of that place than they done these’ns around here.”

  “Let it all burn, then,” Henri said.

  Benjamin smiled into himself. “Time was, my mind was bad like that,” he said. “Back when Ole Bedford put this knot upside my head.” Again he traced the scar’s zigzag with his fingertip. “Oh yes, I seen you looken at it. He flown out and done it before he thought.”

  “You wouldn’t call him ‘Ole Bedford’ if he was in earshot.”

  “Reckon I might not.” Ben clucked to the mule. “You know, he rough and rageous sometimes, but he don’t study meanness like some buckra do. He might have whupped me some more stripes that day, but he ain’t done it. No, once he cooled down, he laid back till he known what my trouble come from. Aunt Sarah spoke and told him how I been sold off from my Nancy and she left with folks not treaten her right. He up and bought back my Nancy then and carried her down to Coahoma together with me.”

  The smoke had cleared where they were riding now, along the banks of a good-sized creek that ran south. The hangover from the burning and riot around Okolona had left Henri feeling heavy and dull. He could no longer backtrack the way through all the crossroads that brought him to where he was now. When he looked at Matthew across the mule’s rump he seemed to see clockwork turning inside the boy’s head. If it wasn’t for Matthew he might not go back today, he thought. But he wasn’t sure why Matthew was going back either.

  “I ain’t sayen I loves that man,” Ben told them. “Ain’t nobody love a slave-trader. Even they own people don’t. But I seen him give his word to a black man same as he would to a white and I ain’t never seen him break it.”

  A burst of cardinals flew up from a thicket some fifty yards ahead, and then came a snapping sound, like dry sticks breaking. It took Henri longer than it should have to work out that the whine past his head was a bullet. Matthew and Benjamin had already dragged their animals down the creek bank into cover.

  Those were graybacks crouched to fire out of the tangle of leafless black branches. They must have happened on Jeff Forrest’s men. Henri wanted to shout over to them but his horse was crabbing sideways, hooves slipping on the bank of the creek. With one hand he shortened the reins while raising the other empty as if to catch a bullet. A voice he knew sang out of the thicket and then Nath Boone came riding toward him with Jeff Forrest by his side. The youngest of the Forrest brothers, Jeffrey resembled the rest while looking somehow a little milder, with a more delicate turn to his mouth and a gentler cast to his eye.

  “Henry? Matthew? Is that y’all?” Boone slapped his hat against his thigh. “I’ll tell ye what, we like to not known ye—they’s too many crazy niggers runnen around these parts.”

  · · ·

  FOR MOST of the next day Jeffrey Forrest’s brigade skirmished with the Yankee troopers, falling back constantly with the hope of drawing Smith into a soggy pocket formed by Sakatonchee Creek and the Tombigbee River. By mid-afternoon, Bedford Forrest had arrived on the west bank of the creek. Henri and Matthew crossed at Ellis’s Bridge to report the strength of Sooy Smith to him: near ten thousand mounted men and more than thirty cannon. Forrest had come across hard and fast from Grenada with no more than twenty-five hundred men—and most of them the green recruits from West Tennessee—to head Smith off from his meeting with Sherman at Meridian.

  That night he got word that some of the Yankees had crossed Sakatonchee Creek a few miles north of his camp west of the bridge. With sixty men of his escort he raced upstream to fall upon a small detachment of Smith’s men, with a much larger number of their black camp-followers, who were burning a plantation at Siloam. In half an hour he’d made thirty prisoners and scattered the blacks, though the buildings still burned, and the slave quarters too.

  “Damn-fool niggers burnen down they own houses,” Forrest shouted. “What in the slobberen blue blazes of Hell do they think they want to do that for?”

  “T
hey want to be free,” Matthew said furiously. He’d been boiling over with that, Henri knew, since their ride through Okolona.

  Forrest wheeled as if he’d strike the boy. His face was brick-red in the firelight. Matthew stood his ground, unflinching. Henri watched Forrest gradually getting a grip on himself.

  “Free,” he said. “You call that free?”

  Matthew stared back out of eyes deep-set as Forrest’s own.

  “What is that ye want from me, boy?”

  Henri watched Matthew watching Forrest, alert as a fox. The idea of Forrest not being free to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted to turned over and over behind his eyes.

  Matthew turned and walked toward his horse. Forrest stood facing him as he mounted, cocking his two fists on his hips. “The world ain’t made accorden to my notions,” he said. “I just have to live in it. Fight in it. Die in it. No different from you.”

  Matthew turned in the saddle. The horse side-stepped and Matthew patted its neck as he looked back.

  “Go on, blood,” Forrest said. “Make yore ownself free.”

  FORREST had expected reinforcements from Stephen Lee, but these didn’t come. Still, winning with a third of his enemy’s force was nothing new to him by now. He wanted to draw Smith further down into the cul-de-sac of the two streams, but Smith was just barely too shy to be drawn. The morning after the raid on Siloam, Smith engaged Jeff Forrest’s brigade east of Ellis’s Bridge. Forrest reinforced his brother as fast as he could from the west side of the creek and after two hours’ fighting Smith was in retreat, meaning to choose his own ground to defend.

  “Keep up the skeer!” Forrest cried, one more time, ordering out small squads of his escort to press the receding Yankee rear. Matthew rode in the forefront of these, with Henri barely able to keep up with him and maybe not entirely willing to—he felt cold and empty as a washed-out jug since their tour of the riot around Okolona—but Matthew was burning, burning, or it was Forrest’s words that burned inside him. Make yore ownself free.