Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Did I say he ain’t?” Forrest was saying to Willis meanwhile.

  “Ain’t what?” Willis said.

  “Yore propitty,” Forrest said. The boy had gone stone quiet on his hip, like a rabbit caught out in an open field, hoping to hide himself in stillness.

  “He ain’t worth much all by hisself, little bit of a thing like that,” Forrest said. “Let’s see what you got that goes with him.”

  Tobacco-stained teeth framed the hole in Willis’s heavy jowls. After a moment he snapped his jaw shut, hung the rope’s end over one shoulder, and stuck the riding crop in a back pocket. He looked at his empty palms for a second, then raised his eyes to Forrest.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Come on.”

  Forrest hitched the boy up on his hip and followed. The riding crop jigged up and down in Willis’s back pocket as he walked. The boy hadn’t run so far, after all; Willis’s establishment was half a block around the corner from where he’d first appeared.

  Duffy, hanging around the gateposts, took a long step back when Forrest came in. He’d been with Bolton at the time of that killing, had backed up Bolton’s lies with his own, and he’d been a little shy of Forrest since the two of them met in court. Forrest didn’t bother to look at him twice.

  Willis’s pens weren’t much different from his own, except not so clean, which was a difference you could smell. The boy stayed quiet on Forrest’s hip, only his head searching and turning. They both watched Willis pull a wooden pin out of a hasp on one of the stalls. He turned and nodded to Forrest, almost expressionless as he pulled the door wide.

  Inside, a black girl crouched on a shock of straw, holding her head in both her hands. As the door came open, she jumped up with a rattle.

  The boy wriggled free of Forrest and ran to her, clutching her leg through her calico skirt. He let out a little sound like a cat would make. Or maybe it was her.

  Both their heads turned together to regard him. Her neck was long and she carried her head high. Dust motes, stirred up by her sudden movement, swirled in the air between them, sparking gold when they caught the shafts of sunlight planing in through the cracks in the broad boards of the stall. Or maybe it was those bright spots that sometimes filled his field of vision if he straightened up too quickly, from bending down low. He did feel a little dizzy as a matter of fact, though he couldn’t think of a reason why. The brown honey of her eyes and a look that went clean through him.

  “What’s his name?” Forrest heard himself asking.

  “Thomas.” The voice seemed to come out of nowhere and when it stopped on those two syllables he couldn’t remember the sound of it at all. Had she even opened her mouth to speak? Now he saw her catch her lower lip in her top teeth, then release it.

  He turned toward Willis. “What’s her name?”

  “Catharine.” Willis was peering at a paper he must have found in his pocket or somewhere. “Two a’s.”

  “Is that right?” Forrest said. “I’d not’ve took ye for such a keen speller.” He wasn’t much for spelling himself, if it came to that.

  Willis shrugged. “I can read how it’s wrote.” He glanced back at the paper. “Seventeen years old, born’n’raised in Terror Bone Parish—”

  Forrest raised up a finger to stop him, and stepped out of the stall into the bright chilly sunshine of the yard. He needed a minute to get his feet back under him—he knew that much, though he couldn’t quite figure what had knocked them out. He felt offbalance, somehow missing the slight weight of her son on his hip. It put him in mind of how he’d sometimes tote his daughter that same way. Though Fan, at five years old, was bigger … A picture flashed on him of Mary Ann in her mother’s buggy, stuck fast in the ford. The sweet opportunity he’d seen and tasted there. He pushed that image from him, staring at the pointed planks of Willis’s gate till his mind was blank, and then he stole another glance at Catharine. The long oval of her face tilted slightly upward, like a dark flower straining for the sun. Fiercely tight braids of her hair hung from beneath the point of her kerchief down between her shoulder blades. He could have her, he thought, with a lurching thrill. He had the money. Business was good.

  He might offer a thousand dollars. Throw in a hundred more for the boy. Thomas, she’d said. His mind reached to recapture the sound of her voice. He turned back and spoke through the doorway, searching to find her again in the dim.

  “Did you work in the house, where you come from?”

  “Yassuh, I did.” Her eyes didn’t drop when she answered him. Trouble there, maybe. For sure. She held his gaze until, to calculate, he had to look away himself. They did have need of a housemaid at home. He pushed away the thought of Mary Ann’s reaction when he presented her with one she hadn’t chosen.

  Duffy spat tobacco juice over the doorsill. “She worked in the bed where she come from,” he said.

  His guffaw cut off when Forrest turned his head half-toward him, not so far as to have to really look at Duffy but just enough to mark where he was.

  “I want to hear from you I’ll ast,” Forrest said.

  He looked at Catharine again now. Catharine. This time he did not meet her eyes, though he could feel they still lay on him. He looked at the point where the cords of her neck converged in the cupped hollow of her throat. A red button strained on a loose thread there. She was broad and firm through the hips and shoulders, plenty stout enough for field work. Any slave girl could say she had done house work if she thought that was what he wanted to hear, but maybe not this one. A girl with the boldness of her gaze might not be quite so handy with a lie.

  Care had been taken with her dress: the calico new, with a pale flowered pattern, and it almost looked to have been made to measure, cut to flatter the full breasts and slender waist. If she’d made it herself, she was a good seamstress. Recalling the neat small stitches that hemmed the boy’s smock, he opened his mouth to ask her if she sewed, then shut it without saying anything.

  Mary Ann would quiz her on all such points. He squeezed the idea of that interview out of his head with the rest. Hell, he thought, she was young enough—she could learn whatever she didn’t know. From the grace of her stance alone he felt sure this girl would not be clumsy at anything.

  He looked at her hands, long-fingered and slim. If she’d worked the fields of Terrebonne Parish, her palms would be scarred with a thousand cuts from cane leaves, but they looked smooth from where he stood. Maybe Duffy was guessing right or even actually knew something. A fancy girl wouldn’t normally sell upriver. But this one was mighty black for the New Orleans bordello trade, where there were plenty of women for sale you couldn’t tell from white without a keen look at the fingernails and ankles, without a special occult sense for what the Frenchmen called jenny say quoi.

  Willis took out his riding crop, flicked the loop against the heel of his hand, stooped slightly to raise Catharine’s skirt from her calf.

  “Let that alone,” Forrest said. “I can see all I need to.”

  Willis shrugged, withdrew the crop.

  You ought to at least look in her mouth, Forrest told himself, knowing that he wasn’t going to. He’d seen a shackle on her left leg when Willis picked up her hem with his crop, and that offended him because you didn’t use more restraint than you needed—start with less and edge up to what you might turn out to really need—and that went for a slave as well as a horse. Only a fool would ruin the mouth of a good horse with yanking a bit on it too hard, too often, and what kind of fool put iron on a leg like that?

  As if he were explaining it to someone, he thought, there’s some things ye jest cain’t explain. He didn’t want that skirt to be raised to his eyes till she might be willing to lift it for him herself. But then he realized he couldn’t imagine a circumstance when that would ever happen. Cain’t afford to think about it, he told himself. That thought crossed his mind from time to time, in the business of buying and selling folks. I’ll jest figger it out oncet I’ve bought her.

  “Twelve hundred dol
lars for her and the boy,” he heard himself say.

  Now it was Willis’s turn to spit tobacco. “Ain’t for sale,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Been sold a’ready.”

  “Who to?”

  “Mister Hill,” Willis said. “Left me his note and tolt me he’d stop back today with the money.”

  “Well, Hell,” Forrest said. “That’s Forrest and Hill, ain’t it? That’s the same like you already sold her to me.”

  “If you say so,” Willis said. “Must be I lost count of the firms you’re involved in.”

  Forrest searched his face for insulting intent and decided it wasn’t worth finding it there. It was easy enough to stare Willis down, much easier than the black girl on his chain. And it wouldn’t be the same, not really, he knew that. If he wanted her now he’d have to buy her back out of the partnership, and that would be noticeable, on top of the rest.

  “I ain’t never said Hill bought the boy,” Willis remarked.

  Forrest looked at him. He and Hill had an understanding not to bust up families, or at least he thought they had it, though it hadn’t been written nor spoke too plain. Breaking up families worried your mind, and it was better business not to, he had learned—everything worked out better if you went on and paid the extra at the start. In this case it made no sense at all to buy the girl separate. Unless Hill meant to sell her for fancy.

  “All right,” Willis said. “He did buy the boy.”

  Forrest nodded. “That’s fine,” he said, and reached into his pocket to bring out a sack of gold coins. “I reckon I’ll jest settle with ye now,” he said. “Save Mister Hill that extry trip.”

  Willis looked at him uneasily, stirring the loop of the crop in the palm of his hand.

  “You don’t mean to say my word ain’t good enough,” Forrest said. “Here’s the money. Let me see that note.”

  Hill had got the pair for a thousand, some less than Forrest had first meant to offer. Of course he’d probably pay the difference in buying the both of them back from the firm. He watched till Willis had counted out the sum, then turned to Catharine again.

  “You’re coming with me,” he said, and explored her face for some sign of consent, but he couldn’t tell anything one way or the other. What would I do if I were her? He’d never pictured being a woman, much less a black woman who was a slave.

  “Strike off that chain,” he said to Willis.

  Soon the hammer rang and the shackle jumped free. Forrest’s mind went reeling again, as Catharine stepped clear of the sundered iron ring and he raised his eyes once more to meet hers. He couldn’t have said what he really wanted, but he knew he was going to take the gamble. He knew he would risk everything, for this.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  September 1863

  RIVER OF BLOOD, somebody said, as they crossed the stream. It might have been Matthew who’d asked the question that river of blood was the answer to. That’s what Chickamauga meant in Indian, somebody said. Henry, Forrest thought it might have been—Ornery as he preferred to say it—that colored feller that kept company with Matthew, that some thought looked a little like an Indian himself, and who sometimes acted like he knew what Indians used to think.

  It was a stretch to call the Chickamauga a river, though it made a right good-sized creek. They’d crossed over Reed’s Bridge to the west and been happy to find the bridge was there—defended by a handful of Yankee pickets, who offered some hand-to-hand fighting across the planks, though not enough of them were killed to make the stream run red. Forrest reckoned the Indians must have passed some time killing each other here, back when Indians were numerous in these parts, and strong. Blood in this water would flow more or less north, the threads of it twisting and tangling along the winds and bends of Chickamauga Creek till it dumped in the Tennessee River north of Chattanooga.

  Now there was another Indian name, and maybe Henry knew its meaning also. It was a curiosity having an eddicated nigger like that in the company … But Forrest’s mind was on other matters now. For days now they had been playing hide and go seek with the different Yankee divisions General Rosecrans had scattered, maybe even got lost from him and each other, in the wooded hills and coves between Chickamauga Creek and the high ridges east of Chattanooga. Lost and confused and ripe for a whuppen. But Braxton Bragg, that no-count mollycoddle, could not get his mind made up to go in and start the job and get it finished with. Forrest caught a wisp of beard in the corner of his mouth and began to grind his teeth on it—a sorry habit that seemed to come over him whenever he had to study on General Bragg. It must be in cases like this, he supposed, that a feller might like to chaw tobacco. Bragg had let himself be outflanked and maneuvered and shoved out of the forage-rich farmland of Middle Tennessee, as if it were his own shadow that had spooked him clear south to Chattanooga, and then he gave that up too when Rosecrans and his army appeared, yielding the town and its critical nexus of railroads without the ghost of a fight, arguing he would lure the Yankees out into the mountains and beat them there.

  And that, Forrest thought, was a plan that could work, had even already started to work, if only Bragg could make up his mind to use the opportunity. But there didn’t seem to be one spot on earth where this man was willing to make a fight. These last days he’d done nothing but whine and complain: It is said to be easy to defend a mountainous country, but mountains hide your foe from you, while they are full of gaps through which he can pounce on you at any time. A mountain is like the wall of a house, full of rat holes. The rat lies hidden in his hole ready to pop out. Who can tell what lies hidden behind that wall?

  Goddammit! Forrest said, aloud without meaning to, loud enough Highlander tossed his spirited head at the sound, and Willie, riding a half-length behind, looked over at him, perturbed. Forrest’s head was pounding with the fight bottled up inside of him. By damn I wisht Joe Johnston hadn’t got kilt, he thought. That wish had come to him many a time since Shiloh. He spread his hand over Highlander’s mane, feeling the heat and the strong pulse of blood through the big horse’s neck. A magnificent animal, a gift to him from the citizens of Rome, Georgia, when he’d saved them from Streight’s raid, the previous spring. The flow of Highlander’s energy under his hand helped him calm himself a little, but not much. His voice submerged into his mind. Cain’t he see he’s spose to be the goddamn cat? he thought.

  All day they skirmished through the hills and hollers west of the creek. True enough that it was hard to figure just where your enemy was in this country, but Forrest was getting an unpleasant suspicion that the Yankee units that had been scattered and isolated a few days before were now beginning to cluster and concentrate, like flecks of butter lumping in a churn. At day’s end he and his men broke contact and made a buttonhook to the south, to camp not far from Alexander’s Bridge, a ways upstream of their crossing earlier in the day. As the darkness grew, the pattering of small arms fire faded away in the distance like the end of a light rain.

  “Let’s have a few of y’all desert,” Forrest said with a wink, once their scant rations had been shared out and swallowed.

  “I’ll go.” Matthew was quick on his feet.

  “And me.” Willie was up on the other side of the cook fire’s ashes, narrowing his eyes on Matthew, then looking away.

  Forrest nodded to Matthew; to Willie he said, “You stay here.”

  The party of so-called deserters scattered down the slope and fanned into the woods toward where the Federal camps might be. Forrest spread his duster on the ground beneath a pin oak, and stretched out on his back. He would have closed his eyes a minute, except his strapping son stood over him, fists on his hips behind his holsters.

  “Why is it I don’t get to go?”

  “Why is it I don’t want you hung for a spy?”

  “Who says I would be?”

  “Who says you wouldn’t?” Forrest paused, turned onto his hip. Acorns dug into him through the cloth of his coat. “I might jest have a feelen.”

&nb
sp; “You always say feelings are for women and witches.”

  Forrest exhaled through his flared nostrils. It was true that he did often say such a thing.

  “You let Matthew go,” Willie complained.

  “They won’t worry a nigger. They’ll reckon he’s contraband and let him alone. They’ll not want to have to take care of him neither. He can git in and out of thar easier’n a rabbit.” Forrest chuckled. “A lot easier if ye think about it, ’cause won’t nobody want to throw him in a skillet.”

  Willie’s posture relaxed a little, his hands swinging loose. But he looked as if he might say something more.

  “Git on with ye, now,” Forrest said, raising up on an elbow. “There’ll be fight aplenty for ye tomorrow. And the day after that, if I don’t miss my guess.”

  When his son had gone off, Forrest peeled back his duster and brushed a handful of acorns from under it. Again he stretched out, looking up at the canopy of oak leaves. From the far side of the tree he could hear the whisk of Jerry’s comb on Highlander’s coat. His back hurt him some, from the wound he’d taken at Tunnel Hill a few days before. He made himself quit thinking about the pain until it passed. The patchwork of the shifting leaves let through some points of starlight. Now and then a dry leaf drifted down. Forrest did not know he had slept till he woke abruptly and rolled to his feet, with the knowledge that something was coming toward him.

  The stand of oak trees was at the head of a little rise, and to the west a couple of acres of cleared ground rolled down to meet a denser tree line at the bottom. There, a couple of human shadows detached themselves from the shadows of trees: ostensible deserters who’d already managed to slip away from the Yankee camps to the west. From the other direction, toward Alexander’s Bridge where Bragg’s headquarters was, a narrow ray of yellow light came rocking along—an aide carrying a dark lantern to light the way for General John Bell Hood.