“Git round the left,” he shouted at the remnants of the Seventh. “Take the damnjobbernowlyankees in the rear there. Git on with ye—if ye’re feart to be shot ye best go forward for I’m well and goddam ready to shoot ye in the back if ye don’t.”
Henri stared as the dapple gray reared up in the middle of the open field, under a hard rain of shrapnel and minié balls. There seemed no possibility that both horse and rider would not instantly be killed. But no. Forrest leaned forward, the horse’s front hooves regained the ground, and with a forward sweep of his blade he cried, “I’ll lead ye!” The yell went up, behind, then beside him as what was left of the Seventh rushed past Forrest toward the Federals at the fence. Forrest had turned his horse out of the line to ride back to Bell’s brigade, which appeared to be retreating before the Yankee reinforcements constantly arriving on the field.
“Come on I tell ye,” Forrest screamed. “I tell ye them sonsabitches is too tired to fight. They was whupped afore they got here. Now git over thar and finish’m off.” He swatted a man across the shoulders with the flat of his blade. Again the hair-raising yell tore across the field as Bell’s brigade charged to join the Seventh. Rebels were jumping the fence now, fighting the Yankees hand-to-hand; Henri glimpsed Witherspoon again for a moment, gleefully trumping a Federal saber with his pistol. Further back in the woods, the Yankee line re-formed for a few minutes, attempting a rally, then as ammunition ran low it shattered in confusion.
Henri’s ears rang in the weird, muffled silence that followed. Presently he began to hear woodpeckers resuming their work, but as if the sound was wrapped in cotton batting. Matthew was walking on rubbery legs back toward him from the battle line, his face streaked with blood and burnt powder, apparently unhurt. Henri discovered he was holding Matthew’s horse.
Forrest was riding toward them now, his sword hand low. His coat was draped across the saddlebow, and his once white shirt was transparent with sweat. Distant firing broke out behind him, a long way off, down in some hollow through the woods toward the creek.
“That’ll be Barteau.” Forrest grinned. Colonel C. R. Barteau, detached from Bell’s brigade, had gone the long way round the Federal left to intercept their line of march from Stubbs Farm.
“Where’s John Morton?” Forrest raised his sword point toward Henri. Matthew had just now remounted. Henri turned his horse aside. He remembered seeing Morton, who’d dragged his handful of cannon eighteen miles that morning, the last third of that distance at close to a run, coming to support Bell’s charge at the end of the most recent action.
“That way,” he said, and he and Matthew fell in behind the dapple gray as Forrest rode in the direction indicated. Shortly they came upon the eight small cannon known to everyone now as Morton’s Bull Pups; the battery was still taking fire from the Yankees. John Morton’s pleasant moon face popped up from behind a gun carriage.
“General Forrest,” Morton said. “You had better go further down the hill, for you are apt to be hit where you are now.”
Henri had never seen Forrest meet such advice as that with anything other than furious dismissal. Now he looked irritably about himself, swiping one of his hands through the air as if he could bat down bullets like flies. Then, dropping his hand to his knee, he nodded.
“All right, John. I may rest awhile.” He rode down the slope where Morton had pointed, and dismounted beneath an old hickory tree. Matthew caught up the loose reins of the dapple gray horse. Forrest took his coat from the saddlebow, scraped nut hulls aside with the edge of his boot, and spread out his coat between the roots of the tree. He lay down, closed his eyes and appeared to stop breathing.
Henri, Morton and Matthew exchanged a weird glance. Maybe, Henri thought, some missile had pierced Forrest’s heart without making any visible wound; maybe he would never rise again. They waited for a sign of his breath and saw none. Morton made to speak and didn’t. With a forefinger he pressed his lower lip against his bottom teeth.
Inside of two minutes, Forrest sprang up as if he’d been lying on tongues of blue flame.
“Time’s a-wasten,” he yelled. “This battle’s nigh whupped but we still got to whup it. Got to keep after’m, keep up the skeer! Why ain’t that whole line chargen already?”
He yanked Morton to him by the upper part of his sleeve. “John,” he said. He was holding Morton almost as close as a lover, while with the other hand he gestured. “I want ye to run yore Bull Pups straight down that road, and keep’m barken right in their faces, hear me? Give’m hell, John.”
“Sir,” Morton said, “the guns are subject to be captured if I rush forward that way without support.”
“Artillery was made to be captured,” Forrest snapped. He gave Morton’s upper arm a squeeze and added, with his ragged grin, “I’d admire to see anybody capture yourn.”
THE DAY WAS WANING. As the sun dropped away to the west, long rays of bloody light came slantwise through the darkening boles of the trees. They were driving a wedge between the Pontotoc and Baldwyn roads. To his left, Henri could hear the Bull Pups cough and roar, spitting grapeshot at the Yankees at point-blank range.
Somehow another two hours passed. Where the two roads met at Brice’s Crossroads, the Yankees made another stand. Forrest’s men charged them till they broke and scattered back to Tishomingo Creek. Henri and Matthew were both carried along in the rush to pursue. Some distance ahead of them a cry went up.
“Here’s the damn niggers!”
The black companies they’d all been hearing about had been kept back to guard a cluster of supply wagons drawn up just west of the creek bank. They formed up now in good close order to meet the Rebel rush. The white patches standing out sharp against the blue tunics must be the Remember Fort Pillow badges. Excellent target, Henri thought, but his pistols stayed holstered in his belt.
What about us? Matthew had said. The black companies were covering the retreat of the white Federals fleeing from the crossroads of the creek, and doing a determined job of it too. Though the skirl of the Rebel yell filled Henri’s ears, the momentum of the charge had been blunted. Matthew, inexplicably, got down from his horse and began walking into the melee, stiff-legged and empty-handed. Henri got down himself, handed the reins of his horse to Benjamin, who had just come up behind, and followed. He was so frightened he wanted to puke. Though their uniforms were so tattered as to be unrecognizable, there could be little doubt about whom they’d rode in with. Yet Matthew seemed to walk robed in his father’s untouchability.
Henri followed him through a gap in the line, taking a long step over a corpse still twitching. It was the boy that had asked the question that morning, he thought, who’d been spared the firing squad at the last moment the day before. But he couldn’t pause now to look twice and make sure. From a wagon bed someone was sighting one of the new Spencer repeaters on Matthew. Henri’s own revolver was cold in his hand. He knew the idea was to take out the rifleman before he shot Matthew, but he felt he could not bring himself to do it until afterward. There was something about this enemy’s face. Though he did not wear a Fort Pillow badge, he had actually been at Fort Pillow. There he had told Henri his name.
Sam Green.
He must have cried the name out loud, for Green lowered his weapon and beckoned the two of them up into the wagon with him. Matthew, still moving stiffly, like an automaton, climbed up behind the right front wheel. Sam Green stretched out a hand to help him. Henri stuck his gun back into his belt and clambered up after. The wagon was loaded with sides of bacon and dried beans in burlap sacks. Somewhere there was a faint odor of coffee. Ginral Jerry would be overjoyed with such a find.
“How’ve you been,” Henri said. The three of them were stretched out now across the bean sacks, keeping their heads below the wagon rails, for there were more than a few bullets singing over them.
“All right, I guess.” Sam Green smoothed a palm over the breech of his Spencer. His palms were gray with callus that looked like limestone furrowed by water. “Jus
t tryen to live.” Henri found himself trying to think about all the most extreme efforts he had made to live himself, all at the same time. He looked around for something to stop his thoughts. Matthew had turned from the other two men, his body molded over slabs of bacon. He was watching the fight through a crack between two warping boards.
“Hi bout y’all?” Sam Green said.
How about us, Henri thought. It occurred to him that in the end one might betray everything. So that in the end there was no other constant than betrayal. He raised his head to look out of the wagon and very quickly brought it back down.
“They’re fighting like there’s no tomorrow.”
“’Cause for us they ain’t. Kill or be killed. Not no mercy nowhere. That’s what they believes.”
Us or them, Henri thought, then asked him, “Do these Yankees treat you right?”
“Don’t know bout that.” Sam Green flattened further on his back. His eyes, tobacco-brown in the whites, looked up at the swiftly darkening sky. “They says we ain’t slaves no mo but they don’t treat us like we men. Don’t leave us drink outen they dipper. Don’t leave us drink outen they wells. We come across the country taken what we finds any ways we can take it.”
“And then they give you a bad name for it.”
“Tha’s jess about exactly what they do.” Sam Green chuckled softly. In the fairly near distance, a wounded horse screamed. Green turned sideways to squint through the wagon rails. “Colonel Bouton, now, he ain’t so much that way. He act like he count on us, most times. Go on and look at him over there now.”
Henri raised his head again. There indeed was Edward Bouton commanding with a sure authority, grim but graceful under a flood of fire. Black troops moved willingly to his order, opening their line to let the fleeing Federals through, then closing again to resist pursuit. They disputed every yard of their retreat.
A man with a Fort Pillow badge rushed up to the wagon looking for cartridges and screamed his frustration when he found only beans. With a butcher’s knife drawn he ran back to the fight. Horse-holders were struggling to hold mules panicking from the racket of battle. Bouton and his black soldiers were fighting ferociously on the right of their line.
“It’s hangen for him if y’all catches him, see?” Sam Green remarked. “Ain’t no tomorrow for him neither.” His head turned suddenly, as if to some specific sound Henri couldn’t pick out from the general barrage. Then he jumped out of the front of the wagon and unstaked the two mules hitched to the tongue. Something on Bouton’s left had broken and a whole white Federal infantry unit was coming back at a panicked run. Sam Green clucked to his mules, tapped them with a length of cane. The wagon turned, jostling with others as they moved toward the bridge, some drivers lashing each other’s mules as they tried to advance. Sam Green, horribly exposed on the wagon box, murmured to his animals more calmly.
It was almost too dark to see anything now. Red flashes from the muzzles of the guns. Some black soldiers now had joined the flight, sailing past like bats in the gloaming, some ripping off Fort Pillow badges as they ran. Others fought on desperately. Sam Green patiently maneuvered the wagon onto the first boards of the bridge. Then the tiny movement he’d been so carefully conserving altogether stopped. Ahead of them the bridge was blocked by a wagon jammed crossways.
Sam Green craned his neck to peer ahead of him, then behind. Henri followed the direction of his backward glance. In the darkness by the tree line a muzzle flashed red and he saw the ball lift from the barrel and arc toward them like a meteorite, growing till it blotted out the sky. A kind of astral music accompanied it, ringing, shimmering: the music of the spheres. The bullet moved with a terrible dark lethargy toward them, but Henri could not seem to move any faster. He wanted to snatch Green out of the way, while his arms felt like they were trapped in molasses. He was himself bound to the pace of this world that embraced him in its awful slowness. The bullet lumbered into Sam Green’s left temple before Henri could reach him, and he pulled him down among the sacks already dead.
Matthew rolled over and opened Green’s collar, feeling around his throat for a pulse. Henri watched blood soaking through the burlap under the dead man’s head, trickling down among hard pellets of white beans. Events resumed their previous hectic speed. Some of the routed Federals were pausing to set supply wagons on fire before flinging themselves into Tishomingo Creek. Some of Forrest’s units had crossed ahead of them, upstream, and were picking the Yankees off as they tried to come out of the water on the other side.
Then Forrest himself rode clattering onto the bridge, eyes flashing yellow like a wildcat’s. “BytheblackflamenassholeoftheDevilhisselftheseshitsuckendamnyankees’re burnen my wagons, Goddammit!” he shouted.
Oh, Henri thought, they’re your wagons now.
“Git up, son,” Forrest said to Matthew. “You can’t jest lay thar. That man is dead.”
Matthew took his hand from Sam Green’s throat and straightened as if waking from a dream. “Where’s Willie,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Henri said. “I haven’t seen him. I don’t think he’s here.”
Forrest had already passed them, was directing a squad of men to heave the jammed wagon out of its place and tumble it over into the stream. More men of their company flowed over Sam Green’s wagon, carrying away the bacon and beans, automatic as a file of ants. Sam Green’s body flopped onto a few wisps of straw that still lay on the stripped boards of the wagon bed. Then Benjamin’s grave face appeared above the rails. Matthew got out and took the reins of the two horses Benjamin had led back to them. Benjamin pulled Sam Green’s ankles to straighten his body, then folded the dead man’s hands across his breastbone. Other men were already lifting the wagon clear of the bridge, releasing it above the creek. It fell straight down, the wheels grooving into the surface of the water. Henri was somehow back in his saddle without quite knowing how he had got there. He leaned to see water filling the wagon bed, so that Green’s body floated calm and free for a moment, still within the frame of the rails. Then the wagon spiraled away in the current and was gone.
FORREST AND his men pursued in relays, some chasing Federals up the road to Ripley and picking up prisoners from the exhausted enemy falling down by the roadside, while others rested and ate boiled beans and bacon from the captured wagons. Forrest himself was still on the trail of Sturgis’s scattered remnants when daylight picked out the party he led. There was not much of the joy of victory on his countenance.
“Why don’t you look happy,” Anderson asked him. “We’ve had a big day.”
“We ought to had all of’m,” Forrest said shortly.
“I’ll say we got plenty,” Nath Boone said. “And still picken up more.”
Forrest’s hard eyes were scanning the ground like the eyes of a hunter looking for sign. Others of his men kept dismounting to collect discarded packs and weapons. Now and then on the roadway appeared one of those Remember Fort Pillow badges men had torn from their uniforms as they fled.
“I’ll say one thing, them ornery ole niggers can fight—when they back’s to the wall.” Forrest shook his head, the point of his beard jerking side to side above the hardpack of the road. “If not for them we’d have et up every last scrap of this army.” In his mind already he was contemplating a letter to be sent to the Federal General Washburn at Memphis, a few jagged phrases which Anderson would later compose into more polite language: … all the Negro troops stationed in Memphis took an oath on their knees, in the presence of Major General Hurlbut and other officers of your army, to avenge Fort Pillow, and that they would show my troops no quarter. … A large majority of the prisoners we have captured from that command have voluntarily stated that they expected us to murder them. … Both sides acted as though neither felt safe in surrendering, even when further resistance was useless.
While Tecumseh Sherman on the news of Brice’s Crossroads would be writing to the U.S. Secretary of War … Forrest is the Devil, and I think he has got some of our troops under
cower. I have two officers at Memphis who will fight all the time, A. J. Smith and Mower. … I will order them to make up a force and go out to follow Forrest to the death, if it costs ten thousand lives and breaks the Treasury. There will never be peace in Tennessee until Forrest is dead. …
By afternoon of the day after the battle they were riding near the town of Salem when some of the men with Forrest remarked their general had gone to sleep in the saddle. His change of state was just barely noticeable; he still held himself straight, but a bit more limber; his eyes had closed; now and then his head rolled to one side or the other with the movement of the dapple gray horse, then righted itself but without the eyes opening.
“But someone must wake him,” Anderson said.
“Go on, then,” Nath Boone replied. “Help yoreself! You know he’s apt to swop your head off afore he knows right well who you are.”
Anderson shook his head and took no further action. They rode on, without saying anything more about Forrest’s situation, until the dapple gray horse, who was also sleepwalking, blundered full-on into a tree. Forrest slipped down as slack as if his clothes were empty, rolled to his back, and continued his slumber uninterrupted. Men gathered quietly under the tree and watched him as he slept.
CHAPTER THIRTY
August 1864
MATTHEW FOUND FORREST at the top of a knoll, beneath an ancient cedar tree. Jerry and Benjamin had stretched a rag of canvas across low branches of the cedar, to block the tepid summer drizzle, and Forrest was there in a reasonably dry spot, sitting on a ladder-back chair with most of the rungs broken out of the back, his wounded foot raised on a powder keg in front of him. He’d been hurt at Harrisburg three weeks before and though he no longer needed to ride in a buggy, he had a bad limp made all the worse by his being too stubborn to carry a cane. When he mounted a horse he could only get one foot in a stirrup, but that didn’t seem to hamper him much.
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