“I don’t see that man here,” said Little, bristling.
“No you don’t.” Henri said wearily. “You don’t see a damn thing.”
Little subsided and raised a placating hand. “Henry,” he said. “I don’t mean you any offense.”
“Dear God,” Henri said. “I believe you might be fool enough to actually mean what you just said.”
Little opened his mouth but said nothing. He turned his head to spit to the back side of the log where he was sitting, and did not raise his eyes again.
“Let me see if I’m folleren you right,” Nath Boone said. “You come here because you want rile up our niggers to kill all the white folks?”
“You could put it that way. It’s a shame they won’t do it. Things don’t always work out like you plan.” Henri looked in the fire for a minute, then back to Boone. “On the other hand, you’re doing a really nice job of killing each other.”
He fell silent. The old language hummed in his head. Going backward had a gravity to it. You fell into that and kept falling. He thought of the giddy surge of black men rising. How it should have been that way for John Brown but was not. Should have been that way for himself but was not. At most of the plantations he had visited the slaves looked at him like he was some dark spirit come to steal their souls. Some did rise to his suggestion, but only a very few—young men, or hotheaded boys really, without attachments or the full knowledge of fear. There were many more willing to run than to fight. The memory of Africa had been bred right out of them.
Still, he was looking across the clearing into Matthew’s eyes, which burned yellowish like a cat’s in the dark. In the space behind those eyes at least, the flame of Henri’s thought found fuel.
Jerry then unveiled his skillet and a warm full baking smell embraced the men. Within the circle of the iron the biscuits, airy and golden, seemed to float.
“Thank God,” Kelley said, and surreptitiously wiped saliva from the corner of his mouth. No one said any more of a blessing than that. But when Jerry reached into his poke and drew out a pat of butter wrapped in damp leaves a sigh went round the group. When a honeycomb in a cracked white bowl appeared, that sigh became a moan.
Henri forced himself to eat slowly. So as not to burn his mouth, or choke. To make it last longer too, of course. He thought of the cassava he had used to eat (with luck) during his campaigns with Soulouque’s army. Cassava kept better and one could march longer on a smaller amount of that bread. But these light hot biscuits were very, very good. Henri was near weeping with joy as he ate his portion and he saw the other men were too. Only Jeffrey Forrest, waltzing the woman he held tight in his arms to the thin droning tune the Old Ones sustained, seemed unaware of the feast before them. Even the woman he held had tilted her weight toward Jerry’s pan, her soft eyes melting toward a few crumbs that remained there.
“Look here,” Little said suddenly. “Something is wrong with this biscuit, Jerry. Look, my jawbone goes right through it.”
Jerry wouldn’t look at him. Hunkered over the dying fire, he was scouring his iron skillet with white ash. “Listen at the haint fussen bout a biscuit,” Jerry said “Haint, you lucky to be getten biscuit at all.”
“But …” Little’s faintly transparent lips were trembling. He put the biscuit into his mouth and bit at it savagely, but the biscuit reappeared whole and unharmed in his palm beneath the point of his jaw.
Nath Boone choked, covered his mouth with his huge calloused hand, and scooted away from Little on the log.
“They ain’t nothen wrong with my biscuit,” Jerry said. “Sompn wrong with you.”
AFTER THE MEAL, while the others slept, Henri circled the top of the knoll like a dog following a fence round a yard. The fog that swirled around his knees was yellowish and smelled of burnt gunpowder. It seemed that the bloodstained river wrapped all around this hilltop now, and it also seemed to Henri that the water was rising. Wagons and guns and mules and men were getting sucked down in the bloody stream, where at first there was shouting and crashing and the concussion of gunfire, but as the water rose further it all grew quiet and corpses and wreckage revolved in silence.
By the hollow tree, Kelley hunkered over his heels, gazing intently at a space of packed earth between his knees. His mouth moved silently, Henri could see. He might have been praying. He might have been talking to himself in Chinese. Henri turned back to his view of the river, studying how bundles of blood-thread unraveled in the water without exactly ever dissolving.
“Blood on the moon,” Kelley said, bracing his hands to the small of his back and stretching from his long hunker on the ground. “Or to put it more clearly, the sun became black as a sack of goat hair, and the moon became as blood.”
Henri looked at him. There was no moon. It was daylight, after a fashion—the damp misty no-time and no-place of this hilltop. Kelley looked at him still, in rather a friendly fashion.
“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that story you told.”
Henri studied him until he understood what he must be talking about.
“That was no story,” he said. “That was the truth.”
“Ah,” Kelley said. From a grubby handkerchief he unfurled a fragile pair of spectacles which he settled fastidiously onto his nose. He looked into the palm of his empty hand as though something were printed there. “I once had read something of your Tuissant le Overture,” he said. “It seems to me that he must have died—oh, around the turn of the last century.”
Henri watched him. Kelley furled his spectacles back into the cloth and tucked them cautiously into his breast pocket.
“This proposition that you’re his son,” he said. “Why, you’d have to be sixty-five years old, Henri! At the very least. And I’d scarce take you for forty.”
“You people think you know what time is because you invented watches,” Henri said.
Kelley put a finger on his lower lip and appeared to be thinking this last remark over. Henri got a grip on himself. “A man may get a child in other ways than with blood and spunk,” he said. “A man may have a son of his spirit.”
Kelley dropped his hand from his face and looked at Henri with fresh interest.
“A child of God, you may call yourself,” Henri said.
“That’s from a song you people sing.”
Henri looked away from him, shaking his head. Gaps had begun to open in the mist and through them he could see that the bloodstained water was now beginning to recede. On the long shelves of limestone emerging from the flood, there appeared to be etched events from either the past or the future: Fort Pillow, Parker’s Crossroads, Chickamauga … Was it the future that hadn’t happened yet? Or was that the past?
Henri said, “I didn’t know you people knew about Toussaint.”
“Ah well,” said Kelley. “We didn’t really want to know about him, but some of us did. I believe he may have been the most remarkable nigger to have ever lived, as a matter of fact. But it wouldn’t do to talk too much about him here—only get our niggers all stirred up.”
Kelley did not seem much perturbed by the look Henri was burning on him now. “Let’s say it’s true you were with John Brown,” he said. “What would have happened if he had succeeded? Do you suppose a pack of Africans can make a nation? No, they must revert to savagery, and you will have nothing but war and destruction. As you described it under your chieftain—the one who rules Haiti today.”
Henri shaded his eyes with one hand, squinting at reflections from the receding water below the knoll. “Pardon me, Mister Kelley,” he said, “But what exactly do you think you’ve got here and now?”
“A judgment on us, possibly,” Kelley said. “I have considered that.” He regarded Henri with his eyes pale blue behind the speckled lenses. “But what about you?” he said. “Monty has a point, don’t he? I mean, the Yankees are fielding black regiments now. Why aren’t you leading one of them?”
“Because that’s not what happened,” Henri said.
A white owl flew in out of the mist and settled on a limb of the dead tree. It preened its yellowish feathers and shrugged. Henri turned away when the owl’s large black eyes fell upon him.
“The Romans believed it meant death,” Kelley said. “An owl looking at you, I mean.”
“That’s nothing to me.” Henri swallowed a laugh. “Are you sure he’s not looking at you?” He knew Kelley would survive the war but more than likely Kelley didn’t know that.
“And the owl, and the nighthawk, and the cuckoo and the hawk after his kind, and the little owl and the cormorant and the great owl, and the swan, and the pelican, and the gyre eagle. All abominations,” Kelley said. “According to Leviticus, eleven sixteen.”
“He only meant you’re not supposed to eat them,” Henri said. When he looked at the owl again its eyes were closed.
“Bedford Forrest is a man I can follow,” he said. “I don’t know if I can really tell you why that is.”
“But maybe I know what you mean,” Kelley said. “He takes whoever comes his way one at a time.”
“It could be I’m not meant to lead but to follow,” Henri said. “That might be why I couldn’t get the slaves to rise.”
“Or it could be that God’s design is for black people to be ruled and governed by white,” Kelley said. “Mister Jefferson said so in his book, or rather he suspected so. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in endowments both of body and mind. A great many others have thought so too.”
“Do you really believe all that horseshit?” Henri said.
“I don’t know,” Kelley said. “I think probably I believed it before I ever thought much about it, but the more I think about it the less sense it makes.”
The owl poked up its tail feathers and crapped out a small dry pellet of mouse hair and bone. The pellet made no sound when it struck the dirt beneath the tree.
“And you?” Kelley said. “You think we’re all niggers under the skin, didn’t you just say so?”
“We’re all blood and bone under the skin,” Henry said. “And a little gristle. You’ve seen as much of that these last few years as anyone.”
“That notion has been growing in me, though,” Kelley said, in no way derailed from the track of his previous thought. “I’m beginning to doubt that a soul has a color, in God’s eye.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
September 1863
UNDER THE SHADE of a great magnolia, Henri stretched on his back in Jerry’s wagon bed, his head pillowed on fresh sweet straw. He’d just had a tremendous dinner served to him and Jerry and Matthew in Bellevue’s kitchen: fried ham and turnip greens and black-eyed peas and biscuits with cold butter and peach preserves. So now he dozed, full and heavy, opening one eye now and again to watch the pale undersides of the waxy green leaves above him shivering whenever a breeze passed through them. It was twilight and the doves were calling, their liquid voices burbling as they left the ground for the eaves of the mansion or the branches of the four magnolias that framed the white-columned portico.
Matthew sprawled facedown beside him, snoring in the straw. Beside him was a snarl of half-mended harness, a spool of pack thread and an awl. Jerry sat on the wagon box, brushing dried mud from Forrest’s riding boots.
“I don’t believe he’s had theseyear boots off in six months,” Jerry said. “Not by the way they smells …”
At the sound of tramping in the street, Henri pulled himself up by a wagon rail. A cartridge popped and Matthew shot up like a rocket, clawing a revolver from his belt before his sleep-glazed eyes were well open. Henri pushed the barrel down and away from him.
“It can’t be anything,” he said. “There’s not a Yankee in a hundred miles of here.”
But he climbed out of the wagon and peered down the slope from the house to the street. The view was obscured by a high boxwood hedge. Behind him the front door of the house swung open and Doctor Cowan came trotting down the steps, buttoning his coat. Henri and Matthew straggled after him, to the gate of the spear-point iron fence that enclosed Bellevue’s front lawn.
“I heard it but I didn’t believe it,” Cowan said. “Boys, it’s the Nancy Harts.”
Down the street came marching some forty women, all ages and sizes but most appearing to be in their twenties, most wearing their everyday dresses and hats but a couple of them got up in hoop skirts. They were armed with a motley of old shotguns and muskets from the previous century, barrels lashed to the stocks with rusting wire. Their leader, a young woman with a flushed face and hair beginning to come loose from the pins under her hat, wore a Revolutionary War sword belted to her slender hips. The scabbard’s point dragged a furrow in the dirt behind her.
“Did you ever …” Cowan said, and Henri admitted that he never did.
“THE HELL?” Forrest stood in his shirttail, bare toes curling on the board floor, gazing across the portico roof at the end of the queer parade. A threesome of spotted dogs trotted at the heels of the last pair of women in the passing column. He glanced over his shoulder, then looked back toward the street. Mary Ann sat up in the bed, closing her gown at her throat with one hand.
“It’s the Nancy Hart Home Guard,” she said. “Nancy Morgan and Mary Cade Heard got it up between them.”
Forrest shot her a queer look. “How many battles has they fit?”
“Well …” Mary Ann slipped her feet to the hearth rug beside the half-tester bed and crossed to the window to join him. She glanced a bit wistfully at the ashes in the black marble fireplace. Her bare feet felt chilly once they’d walked off the rug. It was not quite cold enough for a fire, but she’d ordered one for last night notwithstanding, and she had it in mind to order another. Senator Hill had taken his wife to their place in Athens, leaving the Forrests the run of Bellevue and command of its servants—in honor of Forrest’s first leave in eighteen months. Mary Ann had not stopped anywhere quite so fine as this in a very long time and she wanted to try all the mansion’s amenities before the whole situation melted away.
“They knocked down a hornets’ nest with a stray ball once,” she told him. “That engagement was counted a defeat, I believe. And then they killed a neighbor’s cow, which one might consider a Pyrrhic victory I suppose. But all that was in the early days, when they were still learning how to shoot.”
Forrest looked at her sidelong, suppressing a snort. Though she was not quite touching him he could feel the blowsy warmth of her, fresh from the bedding.
“Mrs. Morgan called this morning, as a matter of fact,” Mary Ann said. “With Mrs. Heard. They’d be honored if you would review their troops.”
“Review them? Review them? Ain’t they no West Pint mollycoddle slinken around as kin review a gang of women soldiers? In all my life I don’t know if I ever heard such a goddamn knee-knocken pack of—”
“Stop!” Mary Ann bumped him with her hip; if the gesture was playful, her voice had hardened. “You oughtn’t to mock them, Mister Forrest. There’s not been an able-bodied man in LaGrange since eighteen sixty-one. Nancy Morgan’s husband went off to war before they’d been married more than six months, and her scarce twenty-one years old. And there’s Mary Heard running two plantations all on her lonesome and a hundred slaves between them. This militia business keeps their spirits up, if nothing else. And who knows if it won’t come in handy before all’s said and done?”
“You want me to review’m, Miz Forrest?” He drew her to him, feeling the round heat of breast and belly come willingly against his side through the thin cloth. “All right then—Ladies, stand to arms!”
“What I want you to do is come back to bed.” She ran her slim fingers up under his shirttail. “It’s been too long and I can’t get—.”
“It’s been fifteen minutes,” Forrest muttered, though happy enough to follow where she led. It was an excellent featherbed too—made of the finest, softest down—though already in need o
f a thorough good beating and airing.
NEXT MORNING FORREST, his boots and uniform well brushed, stood more or less at attention in the square of LaGrange, with Mary Ann beside him in a Sunday dress just slightly shiny at the elbows, watching the Nancy Hart Home Guard drill. Though he had small patience with such exercises even when performed by professional fighting men, he kept a straight face throughout the proceedings. When First Sergeant Adelie Bull demonstrated how she could shoot the pips out of a playing card at thirty paces, Forrest broke into a genuine smile.
“Lieutenant Morgan, Lieutenant Heard—” he said as those ladies presented their arms, “Now by the long scaly tail of the D—” Mary Ann elbowed him.
“By the beard and the belly of G—”
This time a sharp look was sufficient.
“By all that’s holy if I may say so, I’d sooner be commanded by the pair of you than that shilly-shallying milksop Braxton Bragg.”
Though the two young women looked as much pleased as perplexed, Mary Ann piloted him quickly away, through a circle of onlookers around the square. Matthew was there with a couple of his usual companions and it struck Forrest, not for the first time, how his wife could practically walk through the boy without seeming to see hide nor hair of him.
“You’ve scandalized those poor young ladies,” Mary Ann said, once she’d hauled him into the Bellevue parlor. “Or frightened them, even—I worry you have.”
“I swan they took it as a compliment,” Forrest said. “As for them to be frightened, why we all ought to be.”
Mary Ann walked to the rosewood piano, struck a cluster of notes, and revolved back toward him on the embroidered stool. “What do you mean?”
Forrest had said more than he meant to but he saw there was no retreat. Charge then.
“All right,” he said. “If what we got now is women for soldiers, I reckon I might as well take counsel with you.”
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