Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Forrest faced front, where the Yankees surprised him with a second volley hard on the first. By damn they must have got holt of some of the brand-new Spencer repeaters—he needed to get some of them for his own folks. Six-guns among his own party were beginning to pop here and there, though the range was still a shade long for them. Forrest, like the better disciplined members of his troop, continued to hold his fire.

  His horse leapt over some stones of the wall, more clumsily than it should have done, missing a stride as it came down, then partially recovering. There was in fact a little creek beyond the wall, narrow enough some of the horses jumped it too, but Forrest’s mount plunged straight in—it wasn’t more than fetlock deep. The bottom was paved with smooth flat stones; when he looked down he thought he even saw a crawdad. There was blood mixed in the spray the hooves splashed up, and in a flash of disbelieving outrage Forrest saw a slim column of blood spurt from the throat of his cantering horse.

  He leaned forward and closed the hole with his right index finger. As he did so he seemed to feel another bullet skim down the whole length of his spine. That much was lucky. Be damned if he’d stop to change horses now.

  He was near enough to see the faces of the Yankees. The frost of alarm passing over them as they began to grasp that the horse, though certainly shot dead, was not going to stop carrying Forrest with his arms and his rage into their midst. In fact the unnamed horse was moving smoothly now. Through the wound that united them, Forrest could feel the heartbeat of the animal flowing into his own.

  Had he lost one of his pistols, when he stooped to stop the blood-gush? No he must have dropped it into a coat pocket, where he could feel it now bouncing against his hip … another sore spot there, where Gould had shot him back in June. His right hand was busy but he could still reach the other pistol with his left. He drew the double-edged sword instead and whipped it once around his wrist. The flexible Damascus blade sang as it sliced through the rushing air.

  The Yankees could have, should have, got off a few more shots at him, but by now they must have cottoned onto the idea that no number of bullets would be enough to stop this charge. The Yankees turned and whipped their horses away toward Missionary Ridge.

  Keep up the skeer—Forrest didn’t know if it was him yelling it or Anderson or Strange or any of the many others to whom he’d taught the phrase and concept; maybe he was just hearing it inside his own head. He spurred up the slope. The Yankees were scattering into the thickets. He locked onto one of them, the nearest, who sensed the pursuit, looked back once to see it coming, his mouth a little red ring of fear. The Yankee rider whipped his horse faster, twisting and turning through the briars of the thicket like a rabbit on the run.

  Locust thorns clawed at Forrest’s coat sleeves. He saw the Yankee break his crop on his horse’s backside, then fling the useless handle away. The blue coat billowed, catching air like a sail. Forrest squeezed an ounce more speed from his horse, raised his sword and howled as he struck. The enemy squealed as the coat parted and the sword’s tip drew a red groove in the flesh to the right of his spine, all the way down from neck bone to coccyx. A shallow wound, hardly worth holleren over so. Forrest thought of the claw marks on his mother’s back, and different niggers he’d had to whup—it was damn awkward to swing a sword out of this crouch and yet he dursn’t straighten up for then his finger would come out of the horse’s neck and then the horse would bleed out and die.

  Swop his damn head off Goddammit right now, Forrest told himself, spurring up to close again. The tail of the Yankee’s horse lashed across his face and he spat out a thread of coarse hair as he cut again with the sword, the blade chopping into the other man’s shoulder this time, instead of the throat as he’d intended—hard enough to knock the Yankee out of the saddle, though Forrest didn’t much think he had killed him.

  He rode past, thinking irritably that he’d still have to claim an enemy life for this dead horse he was still flogging forward. They broke out onto the open road, and here the Yankees had picked up speed, the dust of their departure just settling around the next bend. One of the new Spencers lay by the roadside, trigger guard snagged by a twig of a sapling, and Forrest wanted to stop to retrieve it, but there was the same problem about the hole in his horse’s throat and anyway somebody coming behind would get it—the Yankees were throwing down so much as they ran it would take all day to get everything picked up.

  He could hear some of his own men clattering around the bend and took a quick glance over his shoulder, remembering the last time he’d done so that he’d seen Henry dead in the saddle. That might have been one of my sons kilt, he thought, but no, there was Willie coming on now, with no holes in him to be seen, and Matthew riding one place away now, with one of the younger troopers, Witherspoon maybe, between them. He remembered how Henry used to put himself between Willie and Matthew sometimes. That was a good man he had lost this morning. He had lost, would lose a passel of good men, afore all was said and done.

  Matthew, now he thought Matthew might make a good man too if he lived to get good grown—and Forrest had to mash down that idea right quick because they wouldn’t let Matthew be what a son of his ought to be, with his qualities. No matter how the war turned out, they wouldn’t let him. But who was they?

  Cain’t afford to think about it. He was striking the crest of the ridge right now, pulling his horse up under a patch of tall pines, atop which some Federal forward observers were turning their field glasses this way and that. Some looked out over the road to the west where Forrest’s men were coming, while others peered down the eastern slope along the path their own comrades were pounding toward Chattanooga, abandoning the observers there like so many treed raccoons.

  Here in a minute, he’d climb up there himself and have a looksee.

  Meanwhile, he still needed to kill a Yankee to pay for his lost horse. He sheathed his sword and drew a pistol with his free left hand. But hell it was damn near next to impossible to draw a bead up a damn tree when he had to crouch down across his horse’s neck all the time.

  By damn, Forrest said to himself, I might jest spend this entire war tryen to hold the whole world together with one finger.

  Matthew and Willie and more and more of the others were reining up now, forming a loose circle around where Forrest had halted. A riderless horse broke through the ring, blood on the saddle, mane clotted with blood. Forrest recalled how Henri liked to ride stretched out along his horse’s neck, like he thought he was a wild Indian or I don’t know what. Like he thought that style would spare him a bullet.

  He stuck his pistol in the holster and squinted up at the treetops again.

  “Might as well come on down,” he called. “Y’all prisoners now. Ye won’t be harmed.”

  He sat up straight and dismounted quickly. The blood spurt from his horse’s throat was not half the strength it had been at the start. Forrest’s right hand was black with drying blood. His left just speckled from his swordplay a couple of minutes before. He used the left hand to stroke the unnamed horse’s forehead. As the horse’s legs melted out from under it, Forrest cradled the whole head in his right arm, still stroking rhythmically with his other hand.

  His mother had taught him to hate waste—sometimes with reason, sometimes with a strap. Softly as he could he laid the dead horse’s head down on the stony surface of the roadway.

  “That there’s a horse done give everything he’s got.”

  His mounted men faced him, haggard, exhilarated.

  “And ye know that’s all I ask of the lot of ye—”

  One hand pressed to the small of his back, he straightened up and looked across at his people.

  “—all ye got. And ye give it too. But boys,” he said, and lowered his head to look again at the dead horse, wasted. “Hit’s sometimes I wonder, what in the Hell are we doen this for?”

  A Chronology of the Life of

  Nathan Bedford Forrest

  JULY 13, 1821

  Bedford Forrest and his twin
sister, Fanny, are born in Bedford County, Tennessee, on Caney Spring Creek, fifty miles southeast of Nashville—the eldest children of William and Mariam Beck Forrest.

  1833

  After losing land in Tennessee, the Forrests move to Tippah County (now Benton), Mississippi, where they lease a farm.

  1837

  William Forrest dies; Mariam Beck Forrest becomes head of the Forrest household.

  1841

  Bedford Forrest joins a Mississippi military unit to go to fight for Sam Houston’s cause in Texas. He sees no military action there, and spends a period splitting rails to earn money to get home.

  1842

  With his mother soon to remarry, Forrest leaves home. He has been doing well in trading livestock and his Uncle Jonathan offers him a partnership in Hernando.

  1845

  March 10: Forrest’s Uncle Jonathan is attacked and killed on the street in Hernando by members of the Matlock family. Defending his uncle, Bedford Forrest dispatches two or more Matlocks, using a knife tossed to him by a bystander after his own pistol is emptied. Subsequent to this affair, Forrest is appointed constable in Hernando.

  September 25: Forrest marries Mary Ann Montgomery, whom he has met about a month before, thanks to having assisted her and her mother when their carriage was stuck in a ford.

  1846

  William Forrest is born to Bedford and Mary Ann Forrest.

  1847

  Frances A. Forrest is born to Bedford and Mary Ann Forrest.

  1848

  John Forrest, next in age after Bedford, returns as a cripple from the Mexican War.

  1852

  Bedford and Mary Ann Forrest move to Memphis, Tennessee, where Forrest expands his business as a slave-trader.

  1853

  From Hill & Forrest, a firm in which he is a partner, Forrest purchases “a Negro woman named Catharine aged seventeen and her Child named Thomas aged four months.”

  Forrest buys adjacent lots on Adams Street in Memphis: 85 Adams for his personal residence and 87 Adams for his slave pen.

  1854

  June 26: Forrest’s daughter, Frances, dies of dysentery.

  1856

  Forrest buys some 700 acres in Shelby County.

  1857

  James McMillan is shot in a dispute with another slave-trader, Isaac Bolton, and dies of his wounds in Forrest’s home.

  June 26: In the wake of a gambling-related murder, Forrest is elected to a vigilance committee to run gamblers out of Memphis (despite a serious gambling habit of his own).

  1858

  Forrest is elected alderman in Memphis. He buys 1,900 acres of cotton land in Coahoma County, Mississippi, and 1,346 acres across the river in Phillips County, Arkansas. He adds eighty-five feet of frontage to his Adams Street property between 2nd and 3rd Streets and moves from 85 Adams to another house on the south side of Adams between 3rd and 4th Streets.

  1861

  January 14: South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi vote to secede from the United States, followed by Texas and Louisiana.

  April 3: Confederates win victory over Union forces at Manassas, Virginia, in the first battle of Bull Run.

  May: Forrest buys a forty-two-acre farm seven miles north of Memphis for his mother and stepfather, James H. Luxton.

  June 8: Tennessee secedes from the United States.

  June 14: Forrest, his youngest brother, Jeffrey, and his son, William, enlist as privates in the Confederate Army at Randolph, Tennessee.

  At some point during these early days of the war, Forrest offers freedom at the war’s end to those of his slaves who are willing to serve as teamsters in his command. Forty-five men accept this offer.

  July 23: Swiftly promoted to lieutenant colonel, Forrest runs a newspaper ad for “Mounted Rangers.” He travels to Kentucky to recruit and buy arms for his company.

  October: Forrest and his Rangers are ordered to Fort Donelson, in Tennessee.

  December 28: In his first Civil War engagement, at Sacramento, Kentucky, Forrest kills two men with a saber.

  1862

  February 13: Union commander Ulysses S. Grant attacks Fort Donelson. Bedford Forrest fights a five-hour engagement with Union troops on the Fort Henry road.

  February 14: As fighting continues around Fort Donelson, the Confederates finally drive the Union troops from the field. Forrest gets fifteen bullet holes in his coat and has two horses shot from under him—one with seven bullet wounds and the second blown up by an artillery shell.

  February 15: Refusing to surrender with the other Confederate commanders, Forrest evacuates the men of his command in the direction of Nashville, Tennessee.

  February 23: Having broken up mobs of looters with a fire hose and provisioned his men from Nashville stores, Forrest leaves Nashville for Murfreesboro, just in advance of the surrender of Nashville to the oncoming Union Army commanded by General Don Carlos Buell.

  March 10: Reinforced by a new company raised by his younger brother Jesse, Forrest is elected colonel of a force now at battalion strength. Ordered to Corinth, Mississippi, Forrest scouts and determines that Grant, moving south from Fort Donelson, is intending a junction with General Buell, moving west from Nashville.

  April 6: Supported by Forrest, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston attacks Grant at Shiloh, Tennessee, before Grant can be reinforced by Buell. The Confederates win the day—Willie Forrest is briefly lost in the action, then found herding prisoners. That night Forrest, scouting with a party disguised in captured Union coats, finds Buell crossing the Tennessee at Pittsburgh Landing to reinforce Grant. Though he realizes that Confederates must attack before daylight or be overwhelmed, he can’t find a general to authorize the attack. Johnston has been killed and replaced by General P. G. T. Beauregard.

  April 7: The Confederates are forced to retreat from Shiloh toward Corinth.

  April 8: Forrest breaks pursuit by the cavalry command of William Tecumseh Sherman with a charge at the Fallen Timbers. Overshooting his 350 troopers he fights his way out—though shot in the back—using “a rather small Federal trooper” as a shield. Forrest rides to Corinth, where his horse dies of its wounds. Furloughed for sixty days to Memphis to recover from his own gunshot wound, he returns to duty after three weeks, advertising for 200 men who want to “have a heap of fun and kill some Yankees.”

  June 11: Forrest is detached from his regiment by Beauregard and sent to Chattanooga, Tennessee (with his personal escort of some two dozen men), with the idea he will organize disparate cavalry units in the area to interrupt Buell’s movement toward Chattanooga.

  July 13: On his birthday, Forrest, with a consolidated force of 1,500 men attacks Union troops at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, at 4:30 a.m., defeats them and frustrates their attempt to burn down a jail full of Confederate prisoners. Through ruses Forrest induces the surrender of other bodies of Union troops posted outside the town. He destroys the railroad at Murfreesboro and retreats to McMinnville with some 1,200 prisoners. Eight days following he is promoted to brigadier general.

  July 18: With 700 troopers, Forrest raids within sight of Nashville. Two weeks later he strikes the railroad at Manchester, Tennessee. In this period Union General William Nelson complains that Forrest’s men are mounted on racehorses, thus fruitless to pursue with infantry.

  August 22: General Braxton Bragg, urged by Forrest to attack Nashville, instead orders Forrest to the Sequatchie Valley.

  September 3: Forrest joins Bragg on a maneuver into Kentucky, distracting Buell with diversions at Sparta, Lebanon and Murfreesboro.

  September 17: Supporting Leonidas Polk, Forrest helps force a surrender of 4,000 Federals at Munfordville, Kentucky.

  September 23: Forrest (injured by a horse that rolled on him) is ordered to turn over his regiment to Joseph Wheeler and return to Middle Tennessee to raise new troops and raid.

  Forrest establishes a base in Murfreesboro but then (as Bragg retreats from Kentucky, Robert E. Lee from Maryland, and Earl Van Dorn and
Sterling Price are defeated at Corinth) retreats to Tullahoma.

  November: Bragg places Forrest under Wheeler’s command.

  December 3: Forrest writes to Wheeler complaining about John Morton, young son of a Nashville physician, being foisted on him as an artillery commander. Extremely keen to serve under Forrest, Morton makes a 104-mile round-trip from Columbia to Lavergne and back to get updated orders from Wheeler.

  December 10: Bragg orders Forrest to West Tennessee.

  December 13: Forrest crosses the Tennessee River at Clifton.

  December 18: Forrest routs Union troops from Lexington, Tennessee, capturing two cannon for John Morton’s use. Through ruses such as beating kettledrums, lighting extra campfires and marching his men in circles, Forrest persuades Union commanders in West Tennessee to inflate their estimate of his strength from an actual 2,000 to 5,000. During the next few days he destroys the railroad north of Jackson and captures a Union garrison at Trenton. From Trenton stores he obtains a sword of Damascus steel and, contrary to military regulations of the time, sharpens both sides of it.