Forrest rode over and looked down. “What is this?” he said.
The boy stood up shakily. “Hit was another room we had.” He wiped his face on remains of a sleeve. “Cannonball knocked it down.”
“A cannonball,” Forrest said. “Y’all fight a battle here ever day?”
“Don’t look like whole lot to fight over,” Bill Forrest remarked. The boy’s eyes narrowed.
“Air you General Forrest?”
“I am.”
“I want to jine up with ye then.”
“Price!” snapped the older girl. “Don’t you—”
The boy was hefting the long awkward rifle.
“Whar’d ye get that buffalo gun?” Forrest asked him.
“I want to jine. I want to jine!”
“Price, is it,” Forrest said. “Well you must be the man I come to see.”
Henri looked at the sky, then the ground. Even on their last run into West Tennessee, Forrest wouldn’t have accepted a recruit like this. He didn’t look any more than twelve, though he might in fact be up in his teens, small for his age from living on slim pickings. In days gone by they’d culled thousands of good grown men from this part of the state, but now there were no more of them left.
“That all the gun ye got right thar?” Forrest said, and the boy nodded.
“Have ye got a pair of shoes?”
“Not right now I don’t,” Price said.
“Hit don’t matter,” Forrest said. “Oncet we get to Johnsonville we’ll fit ye out proper.”
The boy’s face brightened and then clouded. “I reckon I cain’t jest go off’n leave my sisters here.”
Henri looked at the older girl. She had a long jaw, like an ax blade. The boy did too but not yet so pronounced—probably the girl was older. Henry felt like he’d seen that jaw somewhere before.
The boy was thinking. “Y’all could go to the Washburns,” he said.
The girl transfixed him with a bony finger. “You ain’t tellen me whar to go nor what to do when I git thar neither.”
“Miss,” Forrest took off his hat. “I don’t believe you kin really stay here.”
“Why not?” The girl held his stare. Forrest fingered his hat brim and studied the cabin. The door had been stove in that very day by an eight-pound shot and the roof tree had caved in at the middle long before.
“Hit—Hit don’t look like a good place for young ladies to stay on their lonesome,” Forrest said. “Whar’s yore Mam and Pap?”
“Mam died,” the younger girl said, and shut her mouth on a tight white line.
“Fever,” the older one added. “And y’all took Pap a long time ago and he got kilt at Shiloh. Somebody sent us a letter about it. And y’all took Briley, that was not but last winter, and we don’t know if he’s kilt yet or not—we ain’t heard nothen.”
Briley. The long jaw. Henri couldn’t quite put it together where he’d seen it. “Briley’s all right,” Forrest was saying. “I believe he’s gone to Fort Heiman with Buford.”
Was he making this up, Henri wondered, but it was just as likely Forrest might actually know it.
“Tell me about these Washburns.”
“Well,” Price said. “The men’s all gone but hit’s a couple of niggers stayen with’m yet. And they still got two milk cows.”
“Two milk cows!” Forrest turned to Matthew. “Y’all still got that wagon?”
“Yessir,” Matthew said. “Back in the woods.”
“Take these young ladies to the Washburns then,” Forrest said. “I reckon they can tell ye how to go.” He turned to Price. “Young sir, you can come along with me.”
· · ·
“THAT SOW WAS OURN,” the elder girl said, as she slung her rag bundle into the wagon beside the carcass, and climbed in after it. Once settled she took a Bible with a dry-rotted black leather cover from under her elbow and centered it in the lap of her grubby skirt.
“Get up, May,” she said, but the younger girl had already dragged her own bundle in beside her.
“I expect your brother will get a piece of that pork,” Henri said. “And it sounds like you’ll find milk at the Washburns.”
“Oh, if we got to go the Washburns.” The girl stretched up toward Ben on the box. “Just go down that road yonder a piece. Hit’s in a bend of the river.”
Matthew was looking at the girl curiously. “What have you got against these Washburns.”
The girl sniffed. “Secesh, fer a start.”
“Secesh!” Henri blurted. “Your brother just joined the Confederate Army.”
“He never ast my leave to do it neither,” the girl snapped. “Ain’t no good come of it. Jest everbody dead or gone and the ones that’s left is starven.”
She set her long jaw and stared down the road. Now it came to Henri where he’d seen that bleak regard before: on long-jawed Briley, that was him, standing beside the grave he’d been ordered to dig for himself when he and eighteen more West Tennessee recruits had been caught trying to skip off home last winter. Forrest had reprieved their death sentence at dawn, which meant that he might well remember who Briley was, and know where he was for that matter.
“Rebs ain’t brought nothen but trouble,” the girl said. “Besides hit ain’t right.”
Ben turned from the wagon box to look at her. “What ain’t right?” he said.
“Holt men in bondage.” The girl turned almost prim, tapping the crumbly cover the Bible with her nail. “Says it right here.”
“What page is that on?” Henri said.
“Jesus said. Hit’s on ever page.”
“Wait a minute,” Henri said, overcome with a strange effervescence of mirth. “This girl’s an abolitionist, Benjamin. A blackhearted abolitionist, I tell you.”
The girl wriggled all over and ducked her head. Henri thought maybe she almost blushed. He saw she had taken his words as a high compliment, possibly even a flirtatious one. The road now ran between two fields, one blanketed with a host of starlings like a dark snowfall.
“I’ll give ye black-hearted.” The girl picked up her head and jutted her jaw, like a horse that had got the bit in its teeth. “What y’all done over to Fort Pillow.”
“And that was what?”
“Kilt all them harmless niggers as was beggen for mercy.”
“Miss,” Matthew said. “It wasn’t quite like that. They were trying to kill us too.”
Harmless, Henri thought, well, not all the time. It was hard to construct a memory of the slaughter under the bluff because it had all been too confusing. It seemed to him though that some of the Yankee soldiers would surrender one minute, then pick up a gun and start firing the next …
“That ain’t how hit was named to me.” The girl looked at Henri. “Ain’t you a free nigger?”
Her eyes were almost colorless, like water. He found it oddly difficult to sustain her gaze. “I’ll answer to free,” he said.
“How bout y’all?” She had turned to the two men on the box. Henri noticed she hadn’t asked Matthew and Matthew had turned from the discussion to gaze off over the wagon’s tailgate at the receding field full of starlings.
Benjamin passed the reins to Ginral Jerry, who remained silent, facing forward, studying the bristly tails of the mules.
“Don’t ye want to be free?” the girl asked Ben. He studied her for a moment more, hitched around on the box to face her, one heavy arm hanging down into the wagon bed.
“Here’s a thing I been learned,” he finally said. “I was out here all by myself I might be free but I wouldn’t live long.”
“What about your brother?” Henri said, thinking this was how it was now, in this part of the country, where a tumbled-down one-room cabin housed two different kinds of partisan, and no one could tell whose Rangers were whose.
“Hell far.” The younger girl startled them with the froggy deep note of her voice. “He thinks the same as y’all do I reckon.” She snorted and turned to look backward at the starlings. “Rebel to the bone.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
June 1864
WITHIN A GLADE outside the town they buried two deserters in the rain. A third, a boy in his teens, had at the last moment been spared. Forrest, turning his head to one side to spit into the hoof-churned mud, rasped, Let the young’n live, and looked as if he might say more, but didn’t.
Afterward the boy helped them dig one grave for two. Henri didn’t know if he were friend or kin to the two grown men who’d just been shot or if the three of them had ended up in the bottom of the same sack through simple mischance alone. The boy’s face was wet as he worked, but maybe only from the downpour. Sticky mud clung to shovel blades and would not be shaken loose. When the grave had at last been filled, Benjamin led the boy away toward the shelter of the wagons. Ben’s face looked lined and weary from the digging. He said nothing, but guided the boy with a large hand set between his shoulder blades.
That night Henri lay wakeful under the forked canvas of the shebang, knowing from Matthew’s stiffness beside him that Matthew wasn’t sleeping either. Moisture beaded on the underside of the sodden cloth, soon enough began to drip. Henri pushed his mind away from the two dead men and the young survivor. He would not learn their names or know their faces. Forrest had been in a savage mood for quite some time. The dismal weather might account for some of it. Braxton Bragg, still nominally his commander in spite of all, kept him annoyed with criticism of his recruiting methods, which were indeed sometimes a bit severe, as the grim events of that day confirmed. Since Fort Pillow, the Yankee papers had been painting him with ill repute. They made him out a mean vindictive cruel and unscrupulous man who often whipped his slaves to death and kept a black concubine in his house to quarrel with his wife. There were rumors too that Negro troops at Memphis had sworn blood vengeance against Forrest and all his men. Worst of all, Forrest’s plan to attack Sherman’s rear as Sherman moved from Nashville south toward Georgia had been thwarted by as many as ten thousand Federal troops who had come out from Memphis, under command of General Samuel Sturgis, to divert him. For the last eight days they had been playing hide and seek with Sturgis in the rain.
Above the pelting on his peaked square of canvas, Henri heard voices calling across the camp, and presently Bill Witherspoon raised a wet corner of his shebang.
“Come on, Hank, let’s have some fun!”
The rain was too heavy for Henri to make out Witherspoon’s lopsided grin. “What kind of fun,” he said.
“Pea-picking, corn-husking. Find out when we get there. We’re all going over to Stubbs Farm.”
Beside Henri, Matthew sat up, silent, alert, ready. He checked his pistols in the dark.
“It’s wet out there,” Henri said.
“No more than it is in here,” said Witherspoon. “Come on.”
Henri crawled out from under the dripping shebang and shook himself like a wet dog. He exchanged a glance with Matthew in the dark. They went to find their horses. In ten minutes they were riding south from Ripley, Mississippi, treetops sagging under the rain in the groves that fell away down the slopes from the ridge where the road ran. Witherspoon took up a song, his pale face raised into the rain.
Come on boys, let’s go find’m
Come on boys, let’s go find’m
Come on boys, let’s go find’m
Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.
Finally someone shut him up. Then the rain began to slack. On the western horizon was a glimmer of the quarter-moon and through gaps in the clouds came starlight enough to illuminate their exchanges of fire with the Federals camped around Stubbs Farm. More fun than a pea-shelling, Witherspoon considered, except you couldn’t meet the girls. At daylight when they rejoined Forrest up at Boonetown, the weather had cleared completely and promised to be very hot, and they were able to say of a near certainty that the enemy was headed down the railroad line through Guntown toward Tupelo, Okolona and the fields of ripening corn on the black prairie there.
“Let’s get after’m,” Forrest said briefly. He looked haggard in the thin dawn light, his thin lips buried in tendril of his untrimmed beard. “Catch’m quick and hit’m hard.”
“General,” Colonel Rucker said. “He’s got eight thousand men over there already, and we have scarce got two.”
“When did that kind of a thang start to worry ye,” Forrest snapped. Then in a more considered tone, “It ain’t about how many they is. Never was—won’t never be. I’d take one of ourn over ten what they got, any day of the week and twicet on Sunday. Damyankees ain’t got thar yet today and they got yet a ways to go. It’s comen up hotter’n hell already and oncet they run five miles through that sucken mud they’ll be so beat we’ll ride right over’m.”
Where’s there, Henri thought, exchanging a glance with Witherspoon, and then he thought that maybe he knew. Forrest’s orders were to fall away south and join Stephen Lee, perhaps Chalmers also, to defend Okolona and the fields of unharvested grain. But considering last night’s reconnaissance they’d have a good chance to find the enemy at a much nearer point, somewhere between Stubbs Farm and Guntown. Last night he, Matthew, Witherspoon and the rest had returned toward Boonetown across a bridge over Tishomingo Creek, and passed through Brice’s Crossroads. There were thickets of blackjack oak all about to cover their approach.
A younger voice piped up. “General Forrest, sir?”
With a shade of impatience Forrest turned his head.
“They say hit’s a passel of niggers come out with the Yankees, gone carry you back to Memphis in chains like what you put on them. Say they gone burn you, and skin you alive.”
“Boy, that don’t make no sense,” Forrest replied. “They’ll need to skin me afore they burnt me, else they’ll not git much of a skin.”
No one laughed. Henri, reluctantly, turned his head toward the questioner: the same stripling who’d escaped the firing squad just the day before. His pinched dirty frightened face, like a rat with the plague among them.
“And then they’ll need to catch me before they kin carry out any part of that plan,” Forrest said.
“They say they gone kill everbody.” The lad’s voice began to shake. “Say they gone kill us all and take no prisoners.”
“They can say what they want to,” Forrest said, and made to turn his back.
“But do they mean it?”
Forrest rounded on him then. “How the hell should I know if a body means what he says or not? If I was to say it I’d damn sure mean it. That’s all I know. The rest we’ll find out when we git thar. And I mean to git thar quick.”
“All right,” the boy said, stepping back. “All right.”
They rode south from Booneville on a track west of the rail bed. Beyond the thickets further west Henri could hear the faint trickling of a stream. It was already very hot, as Forrest had predicted. Now and then a woodpecker tapped at a hollow tree; the staccato drumbeat carried a long way through still air.
“What about us,” Matthew said.
Henri looked over his shoulder.
“I mean what do you think they’d do to us.”
“They?”
“The black troops with the Yankees. That wear those badges—Remember Fort Pillow.”
Henri slowed his horse so that he and Matthew fell a few lengths behind Witherspoon and the other white men of their company. “I doubt many of this bunch were ever at Fort Pillow,” he said. “They couldn’t have been. You know that.” He paused for a moment, recalling the river at sunset, running with blood; at the edges of the great blood slick, threads of blood unraveled in the water, tendrils trying to reach or root in something.
“What is it that they say they remember?” Henri asked. “What really happened or what somebody told them did?”
For a moment Matthew said nothing. He glanced back once at Benjamin, who had left the wagons to Jerry and the other teamsters and was riding in the rear with the arms of a cavalryman in his belt and on his saddlebow. What really had happened at Fort Pillow, Henri wa
s wondering now. Was there still any autonomous fact of that action, or only the story he’d told himself?
“I don’t want to fight my own people,” Matthew said.
“Matthew,” Henri said. “Mathieu. You’ve come to the wrong war.”
Directly, Ben clucked his tongue.
“You talk like you know who your own people are,” Henri said, stopping himself from a backward glance at Ben. It struck him that maybe he was being more quarrelsome than comforting, as the crackle of rifle fire began to rip through the blackjack thicket ahead of them. Some of the Federals appeared to be armed with the new Spencer repeating carbines, but these were wont to jam in the heat of a fight, while the Navy sixes seldom misfired. And Forrest appeared to be correct that the brushy terrain did everything to conceal how few the Rebels were, at this point, in comparison to the enemy.
Henri could not make out the crossroads or the bridge through the thickets. Indeed there was more than one pair of roads that crossed in these few acres east of Tishomingo Creek. As best he could recall from riding a similar route in darkness the night before, the bridge would be maybe half a mile distant. He circled north, with Matthew and Ben, in the direction of the Baldwin Road. They had got separated from Witherspoon, last seen clubbing a Federal trooper with a jammed repeater he’d snatched from another of the enemy.
The booming of two Federal batteries fell away behind them to the south. They were angling, Henri thought, toward the Federal left flank, though it was almost impossible to locate the lines in this heavily wooded ground. Of three hundred fifty men of the Seventh Tennessee, only seventy-five were still on their feet by this time. They fought dismounted now, struggling with Federals firing from cover of a brush fence at the south side of a trampled pasture. More and more Union flags appeared in the woods behind as the Federals brought reinforcements across Tishomingo Creek. Somehow the fighting had already gone on for most of the morning and the Rebels looked as if they were starting to tire.
Then Forrest came cantering up on a dapple gray horse he favored. He’d shed his coat and rolled his sleeves; the double-edged saber flashed in his left hand.
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