Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “You asked me once about those chicks.” Her voice was husky in the dark.

  Chicks? What chicks? Forrest’s mind scrambled. He stood with the door an inch from his back, and he still had his boots on. It came to him that she must be harking back to one of the first conversations they’d ever had, long before the least shadow of trouble fell between them. His heart raised up a little at that.

  “I’ve decided,” Mary Ann said. “I’ll hang on to my chicks come hell or high water. Be damned to the panther or the Devil himself.”

  “And you a good Christian woman to talk that way.” Forrest had the faintest hope the quarrel could be turned to banter.

  “You better not think I’ll stop at talk.” A match sizzled, flared up, and Forrest’s eyes contracted. On the far side of the bed from him, Mary Ann was lighting a lamp.

  He sat down in the chair beside the door and began working off his left boot with the wooden bootjack. “What do you want me to do?” he said.

  Her look was a blue bolt between his eyes. “Tell me the truth about those high-yaller brats she’s whelped in the yard.”

  Forrest swallowed. “Her chirren and our’n are brothers and sisters. Well, you ast me.” He peeled off his stocking and draped it over the top of the empty left boot. “I mean the least’n. Not Thomas. The one she come here with.”

  “Well, that is surely a comfort. Thomas is not one of your bastards. And what about the one she’s toting in her belly?”

  Forrest felt his face beginning to color. The bootjack hung slack in his right hand. “I won’t lie to ye about that one neither.”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t lie.” She lowered her voice to a slashing whisper. “You deceive, but you don’t lie. You go down there to the pens at night and shoot your seed into her black belly like a boar-hog rutting on a sow. And you think I don’t know about it! So my own mother has to throw it in my face at the family table?”

  “That was her doen,” Forrest said. “Not mine.”

  “It was your doing made it possible,” Mary Ann snapped. “And well you know it too.”

  Forrest peered down at his one bare foot, which seemed very ugly to him.

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  Mary Ann stood on the far side of the cannon ball four-poster from him, fingers trailing in the tangled sheet. Bearing two children had thickened her only a little. He could see the outline of her breasts against the thin cotton of her gown. “There’s some things I expected you wouldn’t do,” she told him.

  “Well,” he said miserably. “I cain’t go back and fix that now.”

  “No,” she said. “You can’t. But you can get that—get her out of my house, and her spawn with her.”

  Forrest raised his head. “You want me to sell her down the river?”

  Mary Ann’s eyes bored into him, then lowered. “No. I suppose I don’t want that.”

  She looked him more calmly now, across the field of crumpled linen. Forrest didn’t much believe in God but what if God had a face like hers? Ashamed for him. Sorry for him. Not about to move toward him.

  “Do you think it is wrong to use someone and sell her away afterwards?” Mary Ann said.

  “Think twice if you want to throw that up to me,” Forrest stood up, feeling his one bare foot cold on the floor, unbalanced from the booted one. He put one hand on the cannon ball at the top of the bedpost nearest him. Benjamin had carved it—had built them a whole new bedstead. “You use people yoreself and then have me sell them. Yore precious Momma too. All right, I don’t mean nothen against yore Momma, but they ain’t no truth in the way folks think about that round here. Find me some other fine lady who looks down her nose at the man sold her the maid that laces her corset and brushes her hair. Washes the pee stains outen her drawers. Who you think picked cotton for them sheets you sleep in, that gown you got on? And Yankees ain’t no better, no matter what they think. They’re in it right up to the neck with the rest of us. It ain’t only they brought most of the niggers over here in the first place. Why, they got white chirren worken in them mills up there, no better’n slaves and mebbe worse when they ain’t got no master charged to feed’m. And some no bigger nor stouter than—”

  Forrest broke off. Mary Ann bit her lip and looked away, toward the heavy blinds suffocating the room. The shade of Fan, dead for three years, drifted in through a crack and passed out through the wall. Caught now like a fly in amber, she could neither grow nor change. Bedford had covered his face with his hands.

  “You see,” she said slowly. “There’s something you can’t bear.”

  He slowly nodded his masked head, and his fingers tightened against his face.

  “I can’t bear this other thing,” she told him. “I won’t bear it.”

  Forrest lowered his hands to his waist. He had not wept. His eyes were a little red, but dry, and there were white vertical stripes where his fingers had pressed, from his eye sockets to the first springing of his beard.

  “You want for me to set her free?”

  “Would you throw away that much money? Unless it was over a gaming table?”

  “It ain’t that simple.” Forrest began to walk around the foot of the bed toward his wife. “I set people free a time or two. Look at them now. They still ain’t free.”

  “Don’t touch me,” Mary Ann told him.

  “Look at me then.” Forrest held her eyes. “You don’t have to be a slave to think like one. You have to set yore own-self free.”

  She turned from him and blew out the lamp. Forrest retreated, limping on one bare foot and one booted one, in the direction of the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she said out of the sudden dark. “You made this bed. Now lie in it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  December 1861

  THAT FIRST CAMP CHRISTMAS in Kentucky, Forrest was in a genial mood, for his wife had come up from Memphis to join him for the holiday, and he and their boy were all quartered together in a big warm tent with a partition and an iron stove and a plank floor. Better yet, there were floored and heated tents for all the men in his command. December 23 they’d shot some wild geese and come back to camp with a couple of dozen to hang and tenderize for a Christmas feast. There was a keg of brandy too, though Forrest didn’t touch a drop of it. He was flushed and expansive anyway, maybe from horseracing just before dinner, when he’d won some money on son Willie’s ride.

  A pair of fiddlers had been found, and they rosined their bows for the country dances. Forrest handed his wife a little jealously around the square—a few ladies had turned up from the Hopkinsville area but not enough to make even couples. The bugler Gaus played fanfares to mark the figures, though more than a little off-key from the strings. When the fiddles struck up “Devil’s Dream,” the breathless dancers took their seats, leaving Forrest dancing a hornpipe alone to the quickening tune, capering and clicking his heels and somehow finding wind all the time to pronounce a long brag of how he and his Rangers would whup the Yankees and drive them home; counting off their heroic virtues one by one. When the tune had ended, Forrest fell into his chair (there was still a loaded plate before him), but he wasn’t quite done yet with the roster—

  “Old Ornery here,” Forrest stabbed the air between him and Henri with his fork, “ye’d not think hit to see him now, but when I first come acrost him he was a-walken barefoot … and now ye couldn’t dream of a finer-looken sojer.” Henri only smiled and thumbed the nap of his butternut lapel and flexed his toes inside the fat leather of his new high-topped boots and toasted his captain with an inch of brandy in his enameled tin cup. The eyes of the company flicked across him briefly, then returned to Forrest, lately promoted to colonel and happily holding forth—he’d bought most of them uniforms out of his own pocket, the same as he’d paid for the five hundred revolvers, Colt Navy sixes all shiny and new and one of them snug now in Henri’s waistband, the grip of it denting into his belly as it swelled out with hot goose. He and couple of the others who’d m
et him that day with Forrest on the Brandenburg road had toted the pistols under their dusters (Forrest issued Henri a good linen duster straight away) from the warehouse to a Lexington livery stable where they were packed in old potato sacks, a few taters on top of each load for show … By the time they left Louisville, there was word that a couple of companies of Union Home Guard meant to waylay them on the road south. But by then Forrest had strengthened his hand with ninety-some recruits under the name of Boone’s Rangers. He passed every man a pair of pistols and rode to the town of Nolin with a huge Confederate flag flying back over his column. At the Nolin station enough of the people turned out to watch that Forrest’s number looked three times what it really was to passengers whipping through on a southbound train—who carried word of a large, fierce and well-equipped Rebel army to every whistle-stop on the way to Nashville. Forrest carried his guns and men back to Tennessee without seeing a ghost of the Union Home Guard …

  By December 28 the goose had worn off enough that Henri’s pistols rode more comfortably in his belt. Forrest had parted from Mary Ann at Hopkinsville, and he and his men were riding up the road to Sacramento, following a report of five hundred Federal cavalry in those parts. The people in the little town of Rumsey came out in a state of high excitement to see them pass, children and dogs racing at the heels of the horses for a quarter-mile, and a young woman came riding out on a horse almost as fine as Forrest’s own. All the men took off their hats as she overtook them (she was an able rider too) and as she passed Henri a blue ribbon slipped loose from her strawberry hair. Private Terry, riding a length behind Forrest, caught it with a shout. But the girl had eyes for the commander only. She rode beside him, loose hair shimmering in reddish streaks on the wind. Forrest bowed to her from the saddle, and for a moment their two horses seemed to waltz.

  Then Captain Bill Forrest came pelting back along the road with word that the Federal rear guard was just around the bend ahead, and someone, maybe Captain Starnes, called out, “Will somebody send that wild filly home before she gets herself killed out here?” But the girl was gone; she’d jumped her sleek gelding over a rail fence and was cantering away across a field of corn stubble. Terry, staring after her, flourished her blue-ribbon favor in his fist, but the girl did not look back, and Forrest had forgotten her altogether, was hissing orders for Starnes and Kelley to leave the road on either side to flank the Federals, now forming to advance. Forrest himself drew out his saber with his right hand and stood up in the stirrups as he yelled for a charge on the Federal center.

  Henri rode in his wake, closing his left hand over the reins, drawing a Navy Colt with his right. His horse was good but not the best in the vanguard. Private Terry and Captain Merriweather were well out in front of him, neck and neck with Forrest practically, when Henri saw the back of Merriweather’s head come off just in time to duck and to miss it splashing into his own face. Merriweather crashed down dead in the road and his horse shied off into a thicket of blackberry bramble. Henri, still leaning low, got off a shot between his horse’s ears, aiming as best he could at a clutch of brass buttons and a patch of blue, not seeing the effect. Forrest’s saber had somehow traveled from his right hand to his left and was running through the Federal Captain Bacon as Forrest shot another man off to his right with a six-shooter. Bacon had barely time to fall dead from his horse before Forrest barreled into the Federal Captain Davis, a second too late to stop him killing Private Terry with his saber (Terry had ridden between the two at a moment when Forrest’s head was turned the other way), too close and too quick to bring his blade to bear; Forrest struck Davis with all his weight and the weight of his horse, flinging the Federal Captain hard to the ground and riding through him till his mount tripped over another fallen Federal horse and fell, sending Forrest flying twenty feet forward over its head. Henri swept by, carried by his own momentum, firing his revolver into another melee surrounding Starnes; Forrest had already rolled to his feet, or had landed on his feet like a cat, and Starnes hurled his empty revolver at the back of a fleeing Federal—they were all on the run now.

  Henri pulled up his horse and turned. Forrest stood in the roadway, saber sheathed somehow, training his pistol on Captain Davis, who clutched his broken shoulder with one hand as the other weakly signaled his submission. Forrest’s face had turned the color of hot iron and the two little scars above his right eyebrow glowed like two red chinks in a stove, but his eyes burned liquid yellow. “A wild Indian!” Kelley yelled, bursting from a thicket left of the road. “No, a panther. My God, do we even know this man?”

  “Name of the Lord, Chaplain,” Starnes said cheerfully, dismounting to recover the pistol he had thrown. But Henri was thinking of something else he had seen. Forrest, still aiming his pistol firmly with one hand, had crouched by the still warm corpse of Private Terry and touched the boy briefly with the other, on the wrist just below the fist still gripping the blue scrap of ribbon, and when he did so his face was pale and tranquil as a dreamer’s. Henri didn’t know when it had time to happen but he knew that it had.

  “I’m no chaplain,” Kelley was saying. “A chaplain is a useless thing in war. I’ll fight when the fight’s on and preach when it ain’t.” He watched Forrest carefully as his burning eyes cooled and he lowered his pistol, finally accepting Davis’s surrender.

  CHAPTER NINE

  GINRAL JERRY HUNKERED over a greenwood fire, turning hot grease in his iron skillet, tilting the crackling fat to the rim so the aroma drifted toward Forrest where he lay on a pallet of green boughs, resting from the wound he’d taken that last day of Shiloh. It was rather strange that he lay on his back since it was there the bullet had struck him, low and dangerously near to the spine. On the packed ground beside was a bare saber and on the other side a Navy six. His hands were folded over his breastbone and his cheeks sunken, skin waxy and pale, though Henri knew he was not dead. His nostrils flared slightly at the odor of the sack sausage Jerry was slicing into the sizzling grease, but his eyes stayed shut, shifting in dream beneath the lids.

  Ginral Jerry worked cornmeal mush in a tin cup. Matthew sat on his heels beside him, balancing a bowl of pastel-colored birds’ eggs he had been climbing trees to forage. Henri heard rustling in the brush, over the brow of the hill behind the hollow tree, and he got up to investigate, covering the six-shooter in his belt with the palm of his hand. Montgomery Little and Nath Boone were climbing toward him, one holding back a snag of blackberry bramble for the other to pass. Henri was a little surprised to see them there since Little didn’t die till Thompson Station in 1863 and Boone, in fact, survived the war.

  “My my,” Boone said, “Don’t that just smell good.” And Little: “Y’all mighty handy at foraging.”

  Ginral Jerry showed them the whites of his eyes and said nothing, setting small white hoecakes into the grease. Henri looked the other way. Boone was all right but he was a little wary of Little, who’d been the one to point out to Forrest that Henry wasn’t exactly a white man, back when their paths first crossed that morning on the Brandenburg road. His Y’all meant you people meant you niggers maybe.

  “How’s the Old Man?” Boone’s shadow fell across Forrest’s pallet.

  “He resten,” Ginral Jerry said. “He ain’t got no appetite.”

  “A shame,” said Little. “When for once there’s something to feed him.”

  Ginral Jerry’s eyes showed a little white. He pushed hoecake and sausage to the walls of the skillet. Matthew leaned forward and broke the tiny birds’ eggs one by one into the hot black ring of bare metal. They bubbled up quickly and were done almost at once.

  Ginral Jerry served a portion onto a clean shake of wood and ran it under Forrest’s nose. When the commander didn’t stir, he set it down on Forrest’s chest, above his folded fingertips. Then he passed food around to the others.

  “One?” said Little, looking at his miniature fried egg.

  “One,” Ginral Jerry replied.

  “They ain’t very big.”

 
“They ain’t very many of’m neither,” Jerry told him.

  Little subsided. “Lord we ask you to bless this food. And to preserve our lives for your service.” He glanced toward the Roman, who whispered in Latin, eyes half-shut, clicking beads around the circle with his thumb.

  They ate.

  Forrest’s portion rose up and down on his chest with his slow breath. Little watched the regular movement. Henri felt that the white man was not sated and that his hungry attention would soon shift to him.

  He opened the cylinder on his pistol and shook the cartridges out in his hand. Idly he spun the cylinder with his thumb, peering as if he meant to clean it. At the end of one tube of oiled metal he saw a vignette of Forrest, raising the head of his dead brother who’d just been shot, and in another he assiduously turned a grindstone against the edge of a long blade. Here was Henri himself, diving out an upstairs window of a Louisville tavern, and there he was again, running barefoot and breathless after a young doe.

  “Well, Hank,” Little said. “I’ve oftentimes wondered.”

  Henri sighed. He reloaded his pistol, snapped it shut, and tossed the chip of wood from which he’d eaten onto the fire.

  “What exactly were you up to that day we found you on the road?”

  Nath Boone, squinting a little, picked at his teeth with a wisp of straw.

  “You had the look of … a runaway. Maybe?” Little said. “But you seem like an educated man.”

  “Run away from where,” Henri said. “I was born free. The same as yourself. Well, not exactly. I’m not from this country.”