Anderson and Kelley where just leaving the shelter as Matthew came up, and Forrest seemed to have slipped into a brown study. King Philip, tethered on a long lead to the cedar tree, snorted and pulled at the rope when Matthew approached, then when he recognized him, lowered his head.
Matthew stopped outside the dripping edge of canvas. He took off his hat and let the rain soak into the thick curls of his hair. Forrest, head bowed, fidgeting with something inside his collar, did not seem to be aware of him, but after a moment he spoke without looking up.
“Come on, boy, get out the rain.”
Matthew ducked inside the shelter. Forrest glanced at a stool by his side.
“D’ye care to set?”
Matthew remained on his feet. Forrest had pulled the rawhide lace from his throat and was turning the drilled doubloon between his thumb and forefinger.
“I’m sorry,” Matthew said.
Forrest looked up at him sharply. “What about?”
“You lost your brother,” Matthew said. “Jeffrey.” My Uncle Jeffrey he didn’t say.
“A condoleyance call!” Forrest said. “Ye taken yore time getten round to it, son. Hit’s nigh on six months since Jeff was kilt.”
“I know how you cared for him, the best of all.” Matthew swallowed. “Everybody knows it.”
“Well that don’t mean everbody needs to go chatteren about it,” Forrest said. He clasped the doubloon in his palm for a second, then dropped it back down the front his shirt. “How about them thousand men we got kilt back yonder at Harrisburg? You sorry about them too?”
“How would I not be?”
“Huh …” But Forrest seemed to have slipped back into his reverie. “I reckon that makes a mess of sorry folks about now. By damn it didn’t have to go that way! If—just—if I known as much West Point horseshit as what them other officers do, Yankees’d whup me every day I find’m.”
Matthew remained standing in silence. A trickle of rainwater dried on his back. Of a sudden Forrest looked up and noticed him again.
“Ye fought a hard fight that day, Matthew,” he said. “The day when my brother got kilt. I seen ye and I recollect hit. Ye done right well.”
“Thank you sir,” Matthew said. “I try to do my best.”
Forrest studied him closely now. “Well, was it anything else on yore mind?”
“How’s your foot?” Matthew said.
“Hit’s a goddamn embarrassment is how it is,” Forrest snapped. “Hoppen around like a clown in a minstrel show.”
“They say Sherman believes you’re dead of lockjaw.”
“Sherman! He’d dearly love it if I was. I tell ye I hope to let him know hit’ll take more to kill me than a hole in the goddamn toe.”
Forrest glared at his upraised foot. “Hurts like the devil though, I’ll grant ye that. I been hurt twicet as serious and had half the pain.” He looked up again. “I’ll wager ye didn’t come up here about my toe.”
Matthew side-stepped to avoid a drip. A swag in the canvas made him hold his head low.
“I seen how ye fought hard that day,” Forrest repeated. “What is it that you’re fighten for?”
“I want you to recognize me.” Matthew pried his jaw open and spoke in a rush.
“Recognize you?”
“Own me. Own up to me, I mean.”
“Huh,” Forrest said. “Well, hit’s a limit. Ole Miss’ll only stand for so much. She cain’t he’p it. She’s made thataway.” He turned his head and looked off through the rain. “What is it ye want I got power to give?”
Matthew said nothing. It seemed to him that he couldn’t think. In place of thought was the drip of rain on canvas.
“Well, ye come up here of yore own accord,” Forrest said. “I never sent for ye.”
You sent to bring me out of Louisiana, Matthew thought.
“Own …” Forrest said. “Son, I’ve owned hogs and horses and mules. I’ve owned land and slaves. Bought’m and sold’m. Et’m or lost’m.” He hitched up in the chair, wincing as his foot dragged back across the keg. “I’ll tell ye one thing. All that ye really can own is yore actions.”
“Your actions,” Matthew said.
“Yes,” Forrest said. “Because that’s the only thing that’s truly in yore hand.”
The wind blew rain across the canvas, then subsided. “I seen you and Willie don’t fight so much no more.” Not since Roderick died, Matthew thought.
“I won’t deny, hit pleases me,” Forrest said. “Fer hit warn’t never no use in that struggle. Ye cain’t stomp yore blood outen him no more than he can stomp it outen you. A thing ye cain’t he’p, hit’s no use to fight it. Ain’t no use think on it neither.”
Well, thought Matthew, but how do you stop?
“Ye take what ye’re given,” Forrest said. “Fer ye ain’t got no choice.”
“You choose,” Matthew said.
“Is that what ye think?” Forrest laughed harshly, and drew his foot in, so the heel of it rested on the damp ground. “I reckon I think so myself, most times. But don’t ye know hit ain’t always that way.” He leaned forward, studying through sheets of rain a dozen-odd troopers leading horses round the bottom of the hill, then sat back and passed one hand briefly over his eyes.
“Hit’s sometimes,” he said. “If I give myself to the doen of a thing I don’t know nothen of a minute before nor of what’s to come after. All I got is what’s right now. You got that in ye too, Matthew, I seen it. Hit’s biggern both us, it is. Hit don’t always come out but it’s in there.”
Forrest strained to lift his bad foot back to the powder keg again. Matthew moved to help him but Forrest, teeth gritted, waved him away. He settled and waited for the pain to pass before he spoke again.
“You want a free paper?” he said. “I’ll write ye one. Only reason I ain’t till yet is I got it in mind you’re better off, the way it is now, if folks suppose you belong to me. And—it ain’t no paper on earth as can make ye a white man. Not in this world we’re liven in now.”
“You’ve given free papers to some,” Matthew said.
Forrest looked at him directly, a studying look, for the first time in their conversation. “That I have,” he said. “But them, they warnt none of my blood, don’t ye see?”
Matthew saw no use in saying that he didn’t see. He knew it was a compliment, maybe an honor from Forrest’s point of view, but he didn’t see what use it was to him.
“I reckon I ain’t give ye the satisfaction ye come fer,” Forrest said. “Tell you one thing I know—you won’t never be free of me. No more’n I could be free of you.”
Matthew watched him silently, like an animal watching from the dark hollow of a tree. Beyond the shelter, night was falling now, with the rain, and Forrest gazed into the dark.
“I’m tellen ye the truth as I know it,” he said.
“And you always know every bit of the truth.”
“Only God could know all of it,” Forrest said. “If there is a God.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I didn’t say that,” Forrest said. “I jest don’t want God to go messen in my business.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
November 1864
HENRI DIDN’T QUITE KNOW where he was when he woke on a pile of empty gunny sacks in the back of Ben’s wagon—somewhere in Alabama: Florence? Montgomery? He propped up on an elbow, opening his sleep-sticky eyes on the carved wildcats going at each other from either side of Ben’s wagon seat. There was a real-life scuffle happening too, between men, not animals, there at the front of the wagon. Somebody from General Hood’s quartermaster corps was trying to unhitch one of Ben’s mules, and when Ben kept batting his hands off the harness, the white soldier wheeled on him, raising a fist—
“You don’t quit foolen with me nigger I swear—”
Ben simply stepped back and pulled a Navy six from under his shirttail. The other man stopped short with his mouth hanging open. Slowly he backed away from the wagon,
tripping once before he reached the shade of an overhang where Major Landis, whom Hood had sent to commandeer some of Forrest’s mules, was standing and watching the scene.
“He thrown down on me with a gun—that nigger yonder!” He bumped the major’s elbow and pointed.
Ben’s revolver was no longer in evidence by that time; he stood indifferently as if inspecting the harness of his double-teamed mules. Henri got out of the wagon, flicking shreds of burlap from the rags of his clothes, and stood beside him. Matthew was already there and so were John Morton and Witherspoon.
Before he hove into their sight, they could already hear Forrest in full cry—“By damn if he did I ordered him to do it—by damn that’s my nigger and I’ll answer for him and I won’t stand fer nobody messen with him—d’ye hear what I say?”
Witherspoon cupped a hand to Henri’s ear and said, “I expect they can hear him clear down to Atlanta.” Henri masked a smile.
“Go back to your quarters,” Forrest bellowed at Landis, “and don’t you come here again or send nobody about no mules neither one. Tell yore goddamn quartermaster if he bothers me anymore about any mules I’ll come down to his office and tie his long legs in a double bowknot around his neck and choke him to death with his own scrawny shins …”
Forrest’s beard stabbed the air as his lower jaw snapped open and shut. “I whupped the enemy and captured every mule wagon and ambulance in my command, I ain’t ast the government for wagons nor stock in the last two years—my teams air a-goen as they are or they ain’t goen at all.”
There were threads of white in the beard now, Henri noticed, and they hadn’t been there when Forrest first overtook him on the Brandenburg road in 1861.
THEY’D COME to Alabama still flush from laying waste to Sherman’s depots at Johnsonville, though that triumph didn’t make much difference now, since Sherman had taken Atlanta and could take whatever else he wanted from the fat of the Georgia land. Still, Forrest had enjoyed good luck recruiting since he’d come this way.
General Hood had recoiled from Sherman and was marching north with what remained of the Army of Tennessee after the lost engagements around Atlanta (and there was a good deal left of that army still), intending to take Nashville back from the Yankees, then storm on to join Lee in Virginia. Some thought this plan brilliant, others insane. On the side of Hood’s good sense, he’d just sent for Forrest to command all of his cavalry—if Forrest didn’t get himself cashiered for insubordination.
Not all Hood’s existing cavalry was overjoyed by the new commander. One knight grumbled bitterly to his diary, “… a man having no pretension to gentility—a negro trader, a gambler—… Forrest may be & no doubt is, the best Cav. officer in the West, but I object to a tyrannical, hotheaded vulgarian’s commanding me.”
As the blue-tinged smoke of Forrest’s oration dissipated, Ben’s shoulders sank, and he turned back to his team. He scooped a weak mixture of shriveled corn and lint from a pocket and gave each mule the smallest taste. Henri watched him. Benjamin had showed nothing at all during the altercation over the mules, but now it seemed a shadow lay across his face.
He looked at Henri over a blue cross on a mule’s back. “You known they wa’nt gone hang me there.”
Henri shook his head. “Bedford Forrest wouldn’t let that happen.”
“Bedford Forrest don’t rule the entire world and all what’s in it,” Ben said.
Henri blew a puff of air. “What’s eating you?”
“Got trouble in mind cause I cain’t see what’s comen. I know sump’n is but I cain’t see it. You know what you know ’cause you got the sight.”
Henri shook his head again. He wanted to say it wasn’t like that but he couldn’t think how to say what it was like.
His mind was still worrying over this problem when he found himself walking with Ben and Matthew toward the center of Hood’s great camp. Toward the center there was speech-making from the senior officers, with boasts of grand victories soon to come, but on the fringes the tattered soldiers amused themselves as best they might. Those with instruments picked and sang. Someone had set up a shell game on a barrel and men stood around betting for the sheer fun of it with pebbles or with wads of the worthless Confederate scrip—buttons were too valuable to gamble with now.
Henri paused to watch the dry pea disappearing, reappearing, almost always popping back into view where you didn’t expect. It’s like that, he thought, a little like that. Ben was looking at him, narrowly. Matthew had pushed ahead through the crowd, for General Hood was calling Forrest to the rostrum now.
Henri opened his mouth, closed it. He went through the loopholes in the crowd that Matthew’s passage had left half-open. Ben came behind him. Closer to the platform the men thickened in clusters, like butter beginning to clump in a churn, but here in a pocket was a card game going, on the splintered top of an empty caisson. Henri stopped and watched the cards moving under the bitten nails of the dealer’s hands. It’s a little like that too, he thought of saying, or less like cards dealt with deliberation than the whole pack scattered in a fall, each with some event wriggling on its surface but with no thread to string them all together. He could choose to pick up any card spilled from the pack. He saw that Ben was watching him again and it crossed his mind that Ben himself must have some feel for what people were thinking, or at least for what Henri was thinking, once in a while anyway.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s hear what the old man’s got to say.”
Well, soldiers—Forrest cleared his throat. I come here to jine ye. I’m gone to show ye the way into Tennessee. My conscripts are goen and I know Hood’s veterans can go. I come down here with three hunnert and fifty men. I got thirty-five hunnert conscripts now. Since May I fought in ever county in West Tennessee. …
“You ever see anything ain’t gone happen?” Ben said. “Ain’t never gone happen?”
“No,” Henri said. “I don’t think so.”
I fought in the streets of Memphis, Forrest was saying, and the women run out in their nightclothes to see us, and they will do it again in Nashville…
Ben took hold of Henri’s forearm and looked into his eyes. Henri could feel Ben’s human warmth coming toward him through the palms of his hands, and he realized that he didn’t have that vitality in him anymore, and that Ben could probably feel that too.
I have fought a battle ever twenty-five days …
“I don’t see you dead,” Henri said to Ben. “I don’t see that. But you don’t want to make this run to Nashville.”
“All right.” Ben let go his arm. “I believe you tellen me the right thing to do. I’ll just cut out and go back to Coahoma.”
“Best leave your mules.”
“Leave the mules and the wagon too.” Ben smiled. “Walk till I git thar.” He hesitated. “Hope to see you.”
You won’t, Henri thought. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “You’re headed in the right direction. There’s a river of blood to get across before anybody in this crowd makes it to Nashville.”
Both of them turned their eyes to Forrest, who was saying, with an air of glee, I have seen the Mississippi run blood fer two hunnert yards, and I’m gone to see it again …
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
April 1854
THIS APRIL EVENING, close and sweet—in the course of the afternoon it had rained, hard and suddenly, driving the women into their houses, the men into barns and outbuildings, or under trees for shelter if they were caught in the wagons well out on the roads. When the rain had ended it grew much cooler, cool but somehow electrically close. Forrest sat at the end of a horsehair sofa, listening to the low clear voice of Mary Ann spooling poetry out of a book she held in a yellow orb of light from a whale oil lamp.
Then let winged Fancy wander
Through the thoughts still spread beyond her
Open wide the mind’s cage door.
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar
O Sweet Fancy! Let her loose:
&nb
sp; Summer’s joys are spoilt by use
And the enjoying of the Spring
Fades as does its blossoming;
Autumn’s red-lipp’d fruitage too,
Blushing through the mist and dew,
Cloys with tasting; What do then?
The thick blue scent of lilac fumed in the half-open windows. In the short time since Forrest had settled in the Adams Street compound, the women had planted tight rows of lilac and broad trellises of fast-climbing wisteria, with the idea of screening 85 Adams, where the family lived, from 87 Adams, where the slave pens were, and both by sight and by the dense luxurious scent of erect or inverted cones of blue flowers …
Fancy high-commission’d—send her!
She has vassals to attend her:
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth has lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray:
All the heaped Autumn’s wealth,
With a still mysterious stealth:
She will mix these pleasures up
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shalt quaff it—
Bedford’s brother John appeared entranced, his head rolled back on the high cushion of his armchair, eyes lidded and lips faintly parted, as if the limpid stream of words had eased his pain, or as if the heavy scent of the blue flowers muted it. Doubtless the laudanum also played its part.
Thou shalt, at one glance behold,
The daisy and the marigold;
White-plum’d lilies, and the first
Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst
Shaded hyacinth, always
Sapphire queen of the mid-May
And every leaf and every flower
Pearled with the self-same shower.
Mrs. Montgomery shifted on the opposite end of the horsehair sofa. Biting a thread, she held her embroidery hoop at arm’s length and studied it critically. An outline of a bluebird there, a couple of its wings filled in with thread, perched in a cluster of flowers and lurid bright red fruit.
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