Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Catharine turned toward the front window again. “You looks at him once you knows where he come from.”

  “That’s about the size of it.” Forrest sat back. “Well, he done cost me all I could give and then some. He don’t seem to want much to do with me and I don’t know what to do with him. You can jest picture how Ole Miss would cotton to him at home.”

  “So you aims to drop him on me.”

  “I got him schooled to a saddle-maker on Beale Street. Fore you know it he’ll be bringen home good money.”

  Catharine rocked back in her seat and laughed harshly. The baby stirred and she stroked his head with her palm. Black curls were already coming in on the milk-chocolate scalp.

  “I’ll see your young’ns learn a trade also,” Forrest said. “When it oncet comes time.”

  Catharine gazed back at him evenly. “Will they be free?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Forrest said. “What I’d like to know is will I ever be.”

  She laughed again but there seemed to be no bitterness in it this time. The baby was sleeping now and she drew him carefully away from the breast. The nipple stood up dark and thick and polished with spit, and she didn’t cover it even after she had laid the baby in the box in the corner. She looked at Forrest with her hands on her hips and the one breast pointing at him, her handsome head held high.

  “A fancy gal you say. Nawlins.”

  “They warnt a thing I could do to stop that at the time.” Forrest narrowed his vision into her ginger eyes. “I stopped it happenen to you.”

  “I knows it,” Catharine said. “I was right there when you laid down yo money and bought me for yo self.”

  When she opened the door to the second room there was a flood of light from the windows in the west wall. Through the doorway he could see in the bright pool of sunlight a bed with a quilt made of worn-out work pants with the legs slit and sewn together in Vs. Catharine shrugged her whole upper body and when she turned toward him again she was bare to her navel. Yet what seemed to capture his eye the most was the way the tendon of her neck was centered so perfectly in the cup of her collarbone. It struck him like an arrow to his core.

  “Come on, you big ugly mean ole buckra,” she said. “Le’s see how you claims what you owns.”

  SOMEONE had cranked the bed ropes good and tight and for the next two hours they needed to be. Forrest was roused from a thick oily sleep by young voices laughing and a splattering sound from the street. He sat up to peer out the window. Outside, Matthew and Thomas tittered and pointed as the black horse Satan hosed down the street with a great foamy piss.

  Catharine caught his shoulder and pulled him back. “Lay down,” she said. “I don’t want’m to see us.”

  Forrest stretched out on his back, not entirely at ease. He could hear his watch ticking in some pocket of his discarded clothes. A warm hand on his belly. She burrowed against him.

  “I wish you belonged to me all the time,” she said.

  “I know it.” Forrest looked into the shadows of the ceiling. “Ain’t nobody gets all they wish for.”

  IN THE GLOAMING he rode north across town toward the home where his white family lived, with an idea forming just below the surface of his mind. Mary Ann was out in the side garden, snipping off buttercups with a small pair of scissors. She straightened and stood willowy as a sapling, holding the yellow flowers in both her hands and looking intently after him as he and the black horse passed. He could feel the look lingering on him after he had gone by, and for a wonder it didn’t feel bad. A lot of poison had drained from the space between them since Catharine’s departure from the household.

  Jerry met him at the stable and took the reins of the black horse as Forrest got down. In the last blue light of the evening, a bat flickered across the stable yard as Jerry led Satan into his stall. Forrest went into the house, where he found Mary Ann arranging her flowers in a little clear vase full of water. From that she turned to light the lamp on the sideboard. For the time being there was no house servant to do such tasks and he felt happy enough that there wasn’t. It put him in mind of when they’d lived leaner, in their first dogtrot cabin down at Hernando.

  “Miz Forrest,” he said. “I got me a notion.”

  She looked at him coolly, the soft light of the oil flame gilding the down on her left cheek.

  “I about had enough of traden in folks,” Forrest said. “Got my eye on a piece down to Coahoma. That’s cotton country. We could build a brick house with white columns out front and live like the big bugs do.”

  “All right,” she said. Her voice was cool as her regard. But she might have been hiding a smile as she turned from him.

  Forrest walked out onto the front stoop and greeted his brother John, who sat within the orb of detachment his evening dose of laudanum provided him. Above the roofs across the way, the stars were beginning to come out, and another bat flicked between the tree-tops, snapping up mosquitoes. Forrest breathed into the darkness gathering before him. He felt like a weight had been lifted from him, maybe not all the way, but some. He knew it wasn’t exactly freedom, but he did feel lighter than before.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  March 1863

  FORREST COULDN’T at first understand why his horse was melting underneath him, and this in the midst of a charge at full gallop. They were just now beginning to turn the Yankee flank. But now Roderick stumbled again; Forrest looked down and saw the horse pumping blood from the withers. Well Hell-far he thought, might have shouted or screamed. Over his shoulder he saw Willie overtaking him and waved him to a halt as he slid down.

  “Lemme have yore horse, son, I got to—I don’t want—” Forrest now took in that Roderick was bleeding not from just one wound but three. “—don’t want to lose this one, God-damn—” He was up in Willie’s saddle almost before the boy had vacated it. “Take him back and see to him.” During his last full-on engagement Forrest had had two good horses shot from under him in one day, but he was more partial to Roderick than to either of them. This horse would follow him around the camps, like an overgrown dog as some of the men said, nuzzling his coat collar or nipping at his sleeve, and often as not Forrest would find him a lump of linty sugar or a handful of grain.

  Roderick reared, hooves raking the air, wanting to follow as Forrest spurred Willie’s horse forward to the fight again. Matthew rode up then and turned his own horse into Roderick’s shoulder to bring him back to earth.

  “Help me get him back, will you? He’s hurt.”

  Matthew got down and went to Roderick’s other side, hooking two fingers through the ring of his bit. The big horse shuddered, calmed a little. Willie looked balefully over his shoulder as they began leading Roderick away.

  “Just about to whip’m too,” he said.

  “I know that,” said Matthew. “Looks like we’ll both miss it.”

  They were back among the horse-holders by then, for a good number of Forrest’s troopers had dismounted to get themselves in the rear of Coburn’s position. The Yankee colonel had struck into them where the road to Columbia passed through Thompson’s Station; he had near three thousand men in his command, but now, as the fight went into its fifth hour, Forrest and Van Dorn between them had got him crammed into a corner.

  Willie hauled off Roderick’s saddle and stood back to look at the three seeping wounds. “Don’t look too deep, none of’m,” he muttered. “Let your head down, won’t you?”

  Matthew moved toward Ben, who was coming from his wagon with rags and a blue glass bottle of liniment. Willie had just pulled the bridle loose from Roderick’s ears when a surge of battle noise made all three of them turn: a volley, shouts and the brute smack of horses slamming into each other as Forrest’s charge found its target. Roderick shook the bit out of his teeth, whinnied and lunged forward.

  “Whoa, get him!” Willie shouted.

  “I thought you had him!” Matthew caught Roderick’s forelock and was dragged off his feet, crooked fingers raking back over t
he mane—he knotted both hands in tight and managed to pull himself awkwardly up, flopping belly-down across the horse’s back at first and then getting a leg over, but his seat was still loose when Roderick went airborne to clear a fence and Matthew almost flipped off over his tail, then when the horse landed buckled forward so hard his nose slammed into Roderick’s hot neck. He straightened up, locked one hand in the mane and wiped blood clear of his face with the other.

  With no bridle, no halter, not so much as a piece of string, there was nothing he could do to stop the horse or even turn him, and squeezing with his knees only made Roderick run faster—he’d gone into the air again, sailing over a second fence, with a hollow pock as the top of his hoof struck a post. They were going back to the fight anyway. In spite of the wind he could feel the hair rising on his forearms and the back of his neck and he knew that Forrest must feel this way when he rode into battle: surrendered to an uncontrollable force that utterly filled him as it flung him forward. He felt that it was Forrest’s blood in him that surged.

  As Roderick lofted over the third and last fence that separated them from the fight, Matthew caught sight of Captain Montgomery Little, six-shooter upraised, turning his astonished gaze their way. A fissure of silence opened in the roar of battle and Matthew looked through it at Captain Little again; he had lost his pistol now and both his arms worked frantically like the legs of a beetle turned on its back and though still standing he had been shot dead—it was only that he didn’t know it yet. With his free hand Matthew groped around his waist for a weapon, exchanging a blurry glance with Henri, who seemed to be muscling his own horse around in a vain effort to intercept them. Roderick, his neck stretched long, had caught sight of Forrest and was rushing to join him where he fought two-handed, hammering a Federal trooper down from the saddle with the butt of his empty pistol in his fist. The noise of battle came back with an explosion, which might just have been the shock as Matthew plowed into the ground. He sat up and saw Roderick lying a little in back of him, dead of a fourth bullet, one foreleg spasmodically lifting and loosening.

  The fighting seemed to have ended now, with Yankees laying down their arms, signaling surrender with pocket handkerchiefs; somewhere was a larger truce flag on a stick. Forrest dismounted and stooped to reach for the dead horse, but stopped just short of touching him. Willie pounded up, mouth wide open and face chalk-pale.

  “Thought I done tolt ye to carry him back.” Forrest sank back on his boot heels, wrapping his arms across his chest. Willie, too winded to make any reply, folded at the waist and braced his hands on his knees.

  “It’s a shame. D’ye hear me?”

  Matthew, feeling himself to be included now, thumbed a last trickle of blood away from his nose, and got up to one knee.

  “A goddamn shame.” Forrest shook his head. “Well. Hit cain’t be mended.” He turned and stalked off toward the area where the prisoners were being gathered up.

  Willie coughed and straightened, gasping. “You hurt?” he said.

  Shaking his head, Matthew got to his feet. Willie’s chest rose and fell. He tried the black points of his mustache with a fingertip and looked down at Roderick’s still body.

  “That horse was a better man than either one of us,” Willie said.

  Without thinking Matthew offered his hand across the carcass. It was like he could see Willie’s first thought—you don’t shake hands with a nigger—and by the time Willie decided to reach for the man inside the skin, Matthew had already turned away, stooping to bloody himself from the dead horse’s wounds and make his hand untouchable to anyone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  April 1864

  THEY HAD BEEN FIGHTING around Fort Pillow for hours by the time Forrest himself rode in, grim and weary from more than a day and a night in the saddle—he had ridden over seventy miles since the day before. Henri led him out a fresh horse. Chalmers had launched the first attack on the fort near dawn, and as soon as they swept the pickets from the outer works they had overrun the Federal horse pen and captured the stock. The Federals were just a little more than seven hundred, too few to man the outer works even with the fresh black troops that had just been sent from Memphis, and they had quickly fallen back to the second line of defense, a zigzag breastworks on the top of the hill, with its rear open to the junction of Coal Creek and the Mississippi River.

  With a grunt, Forrest swung astride the captured horse. Captain Anderson joined him for a scout of the perimeter. Henri fully intended to stay where he was, but Forrest beckoned him to follow. Henri climbed onto a brown jenny mule that had caught his eye in the Federal stock pen. The outermost works of Fort Pillow encompassed several hilltops and the terrain was cut this way and that by ravines. Henri liked the jenny’s sure step over the rough ground and he felt too that she had some particular instinct for self-preservation.

  It would have been a pleasant spring morning, bright but cool. Outside the stock pen the hillsides were speckled with tiny white star-shaped flowers and the yolky yellow of new dandelions. Moving in a semicircle southeast from the Mississippi, they passed Ginral Jerry, just out of range of the guns of the fort, going along at a crouch and gathering the bitter greens. Chalmers had posted sharpshooters on the hills inside the outermost works and they were steadily exchanging fire with the Federals in the inner defenses.

  Forrest rode halfway up the hillside and turned to face the river again, gathering the reins with one hand and shading his eyes with the other, though the sun was mostly in his back. Behind the zigzag breastworks, atop a bluff at the river’s edge, there was a U-shaped inner fort, refurbished with fresh dug earth, with slits for six cannon belching lead in their direction. They were out of cannon range where they were, but a couple of Federal long rifles carried further. Forrest’s unfamiliar horse was restless with the whistle of the balls, kept squirming sideways and trying to sit down. Henri stroked his jenny’s trembling neck, along the lines of the blue-hair cross that grew across her shoulders.

  “Goddammit this oughtent to take all goddamn day!” Forrest remarked. “They ain’t that many of the scalawags in there nohow. We need to move some more riflemen up to make them sonsabitches put they goddamn heads down.”

  “Look there,” Anderson said, and pointed down the slope. “McCulloch wants you.”

  Henri could not tell if it was McCulloch or not, but someone was signaling from the zigzag breastworks, which McCulloch’s brigade had taken sometime before Forrest arrived. They rode up toward him. Forrest’s horse’s hooves tore up the grass and lost purchase in the loosened dirt. He arrived at McCulloch’s post at a scramble, and dismounted, tossing Henri the reins of his horse.

  The horseshoe ring of the inner fort was no more than three hundred yards from the crest of the ridge, but still a few degrees above the point where they stood. The Confederates had reversed the log breastworks to give themselves some cover, and McCulloch’s riflemen were keeping up a frequent fire to discourage the Federals from taking clear aim from the top of the earthen parapet opposite. Beyond the fort Henri could see a Federal gunboat steaming along the river toward them.

  “General,” McCulloch said. “Look yonder if you would.” He pointed down to his left, where the ravine behind them curled around the ridge toward the Mississippi. A string of log cabins lined a cove between them and the inner fort.

  “I believe a charge would carry that place,” McCulloch said. “And from there we can distress their artillerymen a good deal.”

  “If them cannon don’t blow ye to smithereens first,” Forrest said.

  “Just look at the angle,” McCulloch said. “If we once gain the cabins they won’t be able to bring those guns to bear.”

  Forrest squinted down the hill and nodded. It was the sort of move he favored, bold and no more risky than it needed to be.

  “Get after’m,” he said briefly. He pulled a nickel-backed watch from his pocket and glanced at the face: not quite eleven.

  “General,” Anderson called. “Mister Nolan w
ould like a word.”

  The crash of cannon from the fort almost drowned out what they were saying. Henri’s jenny shuddered, revolving her long ears. Nolan clambered up the slope at a crouch, then straightened to cup his mouth to Forrest’s ear. He wore a buckskin jacket with the hair still on the hide, except for patches where the bristles had worn away from the greasy, sour-smelling leather. Of course the rest of Forrest’s men were scarcely in any better trim. Their gray was ragged and many went shoeless now. Their numbers were thin when they started from Georgia and they had been taking up recruits as they could, over three weeks of a crazy looping progress all up and down West Tennessee. They’d swept in Nolan four days before, along with a couple dozen of his riders, raiders, deserters, bushwhackers—nobody knew what they really were and the same went double for Mister Nolan himself. But then it was no time to be choosy, and if Forrest had been as choosy as that he’d have left Henri standing by the Brandenburg road three years before.

  They were following Nolan now, continuing the same southeast sweep they’d begun before, on the far side of the zigzag breastworks from the inner fort, across this cheerlessly bare ground, which had all been clear-cut to open fields of fire. Their way was complicated by stumps and logs that still lay where they had been felled. Some undergrowth had begun to return, buck bushes and blackberry bramble, worthless for cover. Anderson’s horse stumbled, jumping one of the many shallow gullies. The volume of the cannonade swelled as the Federal gunboat began to lob up shells from the Mississippi.

  Forrest seemed oblivious to it. Now and then he reined up his horse to beckon sharpshooters to nearer positions. The Federal riflemen, meanwhile, had corrected their tendency to overshoot and were beginning to bring their rounds much closer to the scouting party. Anderson was just turning to Forrest to say who knew what when a ball crashed through the forehead of Forrest’s horse. The animal reared, went into convulsions, and fell over backward, rolling over the rider.