Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “We got to jump’m afore day,” Forrest said when he heard the news. “Else they’ll do us like they done us at Donelson.” He thought for a moment. “Like we done ourselves.”

  He left the camp alone and was gone for hours. The moon had traveled half the sky when Henri propped up on an elbow to hear Forrest muttering mostly to himself.

  “Cain’t find nobody to listen to me.” Air puffed out of him as he settled on his back. “This battle’s our’n to piss away, and we done pissed it.”

  · · ·

  TWO RAIN-SOGGY DAYS LATER, General William Tecumseh Sherman and his infantry command set out in pursuit of Rebel soldiers retreating down the road from Shiloh toward Corinth—abandoning all of the ground they’d won in the first phase of the battle. The Federals were four miles out of their camp when they came upon a long wide hollow strewn with timber. The trees had been felled in this long swale the year before but never hauled off to the sawmill. Bark flaking from them, covered with a fresh growth of spring vine, the logs lay every which way, crisscrossed just as they’d first fallen.

  On the ridge beyond appeared a couple of Rebel horsemen. Sherman raised his glass to his eye. The riders didn’t altogether look like white men, and that puzzled him for a moment, but they were Rebels sure enough. He had no way of telling how many cavalry lay on the far side of that ridge, but it hardly mattered. The swale of fallen timbers would make a charge impossible; his foot soldiers would certainly have the advantage there.

  “Yankees,” Matthew called, trotting his horse down toward Forrest. “Lots of them.”

  “How many?” Forrest reined his gray around, pulled down the brim.

  “Fifteen hundred and maybe more,” Henri said. “I don’t know. They’re still coming out of the trees.”

  Forrest coughed. “That’s five to one on us. I wonder where in Hell they keep coming from.” He had a hundred fifty of his own men on hand and two hundred other horsemen Breckenridge had assigned to him for the rearguard actions of the day. He began dismounting these men now and ordering to the cover of trees or boulders along the top of the ridge.

  “Yankees can’t ride for … beans,” Matthew piped up. He was still astride his horse and exposed on the open backbone of the hill.

  “Git down from thar, and mind out for sharpshooters,” Forrest snapped. Then he stopped to look down the hill. “No, wait a minute.”

  The blue skirmishers below were losing all semblance of a line as they began picking their way across the mossy logs. And the Yankee horses balked at every timber, though they were only going at a walk.

  “They cain’t ride worth a good goddamn, kin they?” Forrest whispered, grinning at Matthew and Henri. And then in a shout: “Mount up, boys—let’s go find’m.”

  THAT BLASTED CATERWAULING—Sherman couldn’t get used to it; much of it as he’d already heard, it still raised the hair on the back of his neck. Or maybe it was the impossible disaster spread before him: two or three hundred Rebel horse flying down the ridge into the swale where his men blundered among the logs, flinging up great gobbets of mud from their hooves and leaping among the fallen timbers as nimbly as giant cats. His skirmish line had already been slashed to pieces; and now his regular infantry was on a stumbling run to the rear, with the Rebel riders hard after them. One of the Rebels, tall in the saddle, pistol in one hand and blade in the other, came riding far out ahead of the rest, guiding his speckled gray horse with his knees as the animal jumped one log after another, gaining speed as he reached open ground and bore down on the infantry battle line Sherman had hastily regrouped two hundred yards behind his skirmishers.

  As the speckled gray’s pumping shoulders smacked into the troops, a segment of the blue line collapsed and began to boil. Forrest had knocked down four or five Yankees with rounds from his Navy six before it clicked empty. The saber in his left hand whirled around and around like the blade of a windmill, till it snagged on a Yankee collarbone and sprang free with a jolt that numbed his fingers for a second. He drew a foot-long knife from his waistband—better for close quarters anyway. His horse made a tight turn on bunched hindquarters and now Forrest saw that his men had not followed him … perhaps because they had better sense. He was alone amid a thousand of the enemy, still cutting relentlessly with his left hand and using his empty pistol as a club.

  “Kill that man,” Sherman screamed, standing up in his stirrups so abruptly the horse shied under him and he almost fell. Others nearer Forrest were also shouting kill him kill the Rebel and then a trooper pressed the muzzle of his carbine against Forrest’s side and squeezed. The muffled concussion was blunt as a fist banging into him, but Forrest felt his right leg go numb. That infuriated him more than ever, for what if they’d really done him some serious harm? He dropped the empty pistol into his pocket and used his free hand to snatch the scruff of the man who had fired and drag him up behind his saddle, while the left hand slashed at the fingers of a hand that had grasped at his knee.

  “Will no one kill that madman?” Sherman howled. Forrest had now broken into the clear, and Sherman saw that his men were holding their fire in fear of hitting one of their own, whom Forrest had hauled up behind him to use as a shield. When once out of range he threw the little man down, shook his fist at him, spurred up and rode on.

  Sherman hurled his hat on the ground. “How did you let him get away?”

  One of his troopers raised a hand to explain, waggling stumps of two of his fingers. “That was no mortal man,” he said. “That’s the Devil.”

  “SIR, ARE YOU HURT?” Kelley called as Forrest cleared the ridge. The gray horse streamed blood from so many wounds it was hard to tell where Forrest himself was bleeding.

  “I’ll live,” Forrest said, through his clenched teeth. “Effen I don’t die.”

  Cowan came toward him. “Will you get down and let me see to your wound?” he said. “That leg’s not right.”

  “I know it ain’t right,” Forrest snarled. “Let me oncet git to Corinth and then ye can pick at it all ye want.”

  “Will you not ride in a wagon at least?” Cowan said.

  “Damn straight I will not,” Forrest said. “That’d hurt a lot more than it already does.”

  Cowan broke from him and came toward Matthew and Henri.

  “How bad is it,” Matthew blurted.

  Cowan glanced back at the bloody man on the bleeding horse. “By the look of that leg he’s been hit in the spine.” He paused. “I wish you two would ride ahead and send for Mrs. Forrest to come to Corinth.”

  “As bad as that?” Henri said.

  “Mary Ann’s the only one can talk sense into him,” Cowan said. “And if not, she’ll want to bury him, of course.”

  ARRIVED AT LAST in the Corinth square, Forrest made to turn his horse back the way he had come.

  “What are you doing,” Kelley asked.

  “I believe that damn Yankee has done me in,” Forrest said. “I need to go back yonder and kill him.”

  Kelley snorted. “You’ve done all the killing you’re going to for one day.”

  But Forrest was no longer paying attention to him, because his horse was melting underneath him, slowly collapsing to the right. Forrest reached down with his right hand and pulled his right foot clear of the stirrup and rolled away from the dead animal as it hit the ground. Lying on his back, he reached out a hand to touch the horse’s blood-stiffened mane. Then he used both arms to turn himself over. The others watched him as if in a trance. All knew he would strike any man who moved to help him. Forrest pushed himself to his knees. Then somehow he was not only standing but limping toward the door of the hotel across the square.

  “How in the Sam Hill is he doing that?” Kelley wondered. “That leg wasn’t working a minute ago.”

  Cowan looked at him. “I don’t have the least dreaming notion,” he said. “But I reckon I better go try and find out.”

  MANY OF FORREST’S ESCORT spent the remains of the day and the evening lingering on the square between the
courthouse and the white hotel. The whole town hummed with General Johnston’s death and the fear that the Yankee hosts would next strike there. Few had heard enough of Forrest to feel much alarm about his injuries. Presently Benjamin came with two mules, noosed rope around the gray’s hind legs, and hauled the dead horse out of the square, leaving a drag trail smeared with blood in the dust.

  Mary Ann Forrest arrived on the night train and hastened into the hotel, greeting the men on the steps with a thin smile, not slowing her quick step. Dr. Cowan had not been seen for hours. Now and then Willie came out the side door of the hotel, all the jolliness drained out of him, furtively taking a few drags at a cigar stump before he hurried back inside. Henri watched Matthew watching Willie’s brief appearances, without so much of his usual hostility this time.

  In the small hours Forrest sent for Kelley to come and bring a pen and paper. Some speculated on the courthouse steps that Kelley had been called to administer last rites or to take down Forrest’s testament or both. But Kelley, if he came out again, came by a different door. The first man out of the hotel at dawn was Ginral Jerry, shambling and shuffling, head bowed down (but then he normally walked so, Henri thought), eyes red and a little rheumy (but didn’t he always look so?).

  How is he? Will he make it? The men clustered round.

  “He still kicken,” Jerry said. “Ole Miss wif him now.” He slipped through the others and walked toward the wagons where mules stood sleeping still in harness in a side street off the square.

  The next man to appear was Cowan, raising a smashed minié ball high in a pair of forceps. The surgeon had washed his hands, Henri saw, but there was a crust of dried blood beneath his nails. The lump of crushed lead passed from hand to hand. “Is he going to live?” somebody said.

  “I think so,” Cowan said. “Ask me, he’s too mean to die.”

  Cowan went into the hotel to sleep. On the outskirts of Corinth, the roosters were crowing. The first real sunlight was staining the hotel facade when Kelley came up to the courthouse and dropped a bundle of newspapers on the lower step. He raised a hand to quiet the men spluttering questions at him, picked up a paper and folded it open.

  “Hear this,” he began.

  200 Recruits Wanted!

  I will receive 200 able-bodied men if they will present themselves at my headquarters by the first of June with good horse and gun. I wish none but those who desire to be actively engaged. My headquarters for the present is at Corinth, Miss. Come on, boys, if you want a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees.

  N. B. Forrest

  Colonel, Commanding

  Forrest’s Regiment

  When he had finished Kelley smiled faintly and handed the paper to Nath Boone, who stood tracing the words with a fingertip, lips moving slightly. When he got to the end he dropped the paper against his thigh. “Ain’t it the truth?” he said to all. “Hit’s nobody can tell us what fun is.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  August 1857

  MARY ANN HAD LAIN DOWN through the worst of the late-summer afternoon heat, but could not sleep. Where men perspired, ladies must merely glow, and yet she felt herself to be sweating like a horse through the thin sheets between which she restlessly reclined. It was near four in the afternoon when she began to hear the household coming back to life on the floors below. She sat up and arranged her clothing and went down. On her way to the porch she collected a basket of pecans lately sent to the Forrest family as a compliment from friends in Georgia, and a pie pan to hull the nuts into.

  Forrest’s sister Fanny was paying them a visit and had already settled herself on the porch with a bucket full of green beans to break. There too Mary Ann found Doctor Cowan, who sat on a rocker rolling an unlit cigar between his slender fingers.

  “Too hot to smoke,” he said ruefully, glancing up as Mary Ann came out to join them.

  “Ain’t it the truth,” she answered, aware of her just brushed hair already going lank against her forehead. “I can scarce draw a breath.”

  She settled herself to crack and pick nuts, rocking gently as she worked—all three of them rocked, for the small motion stirred up the ghost of a breeze. Around the borders of the front yard a half-dozen magnolia saplings sagged, their limbs seeming almost too weak to support the glossy dark green leaves. A planting of grass in the yard had died out and the surface was going back to dirt. Too late for a watering to renew it.

  Nut meats ticked against the tin. In the slave pens next door a commotion broke out. The sharply raised voice of John Forrest, a thump, a grunt, slap of a strap against something. A moment after these sounds had subsided, the high wooden gate of the pen creaked open and Catharine came out, unperturbed and moving languidly, carrying a twig broom. She came into the Forrests’ front yard by the waist-high picket gate and began to sweep dead leaves and dust across the surface of sere yellow grass.

  Mary Ann folded her hands over the nuts. “There are times,” she remarked, “when I do wish my dear husband might take up some other line of work.”

  Bite your tongue, she thought at once, forbearing to steal a glance at Fanny. It was the heat that made her feel quarrelsome, she thought.

  “I don’t know …” Doctor Cowan raised a bushy eyebrow toward her. “Well, some of the family have thought so too, I reckon—You know your mother did.”

  “I know she does still,” Mary Ann said, aware of a wry twist in her lips.

  Cowan crossed his eyes on the tip of his cigar, then tucked it away in his breast pocket. “I won’t deny I felt the same in the beginning,” he said. “Everybody despises a slave-trader. It’s like he was a man defiled. But then there’s nobody in this country that don’t depend on slavery—”

  “Now that’s a leaf right out of his book,” Mary Ann said.

  Cowan rocked, reflecting. “Well, but leave the slaves a minute. Consider this. You may buy yourself a fine horse. Trained up and schooled to the last inch, till all you practically have to do is think where you want her to go, and there she goes, before you even need to touch her with your hand or heel.”

  Mary Ann considered her own mare Nelly, whom Bedford Forrest had given her—the quick sensitive grace of all her movements. Animal knowledge. Half-consciously she watched the slave girl move through the yard, her back straight, head slightly inclined, expending the precise bare minimum of effort required to keep the dry broom whisking. Oh, and she was glowing, certainly; her sweat-darkened calico twinned with her hot flesh like sealskin.

  “Who knows and cares for that mare the best?” Cowan said. “The one who uses her and rides her? Or the one who broke her and trained her to your service?”

  How the Devil should I know? Mary Ann stopped herself from saying. Instead, feeling a cross knot tighten in the center of her forehead, she set aside the tin pan, stood up and dumped an apronful of broken nut shells onto a patch of yard Catharine had just swept.

  “Hmmm. Perhaps it’s a little too warm, this afternoon, for philosophy.” Cowan smacked his palms on the knees of his trousers, then pushed himself out of his chair. “Ladies. I believe I may attempt a stroll.”

  The picket gate didn’t catch, but drifted open slowly once Cowan had gone out. A lean tawny dog paused to look in, eyes dull with the heat and tongue lolling over black gums.

  “Git, you.” Catharine stepped over to shake her broom at it, and snapped the gate firmly shut as the dog trotted off. Then she returned to sweeping up the nutshells, with the same faintly indolent grace as before, expressionless. There was nothing about her comportment that Mary Ann could have fairly called sullen. The futility of her spite lumped in her throat. Though she might have given the girl some new command, she simply watched as Catharine swept her liquid way toward the magnolias at the far end of the yard.

  “Don’t you know he loves you?”

  “I know it,” Mary Ann said, before she thought to ransack her memory for where in the previous conversation this question might spring from—they’d been talking about horses, hadn’t they … or had
Fanny Forrest just read something straight out of her mind. She was Forrest’s twin, and looked much like him if you took away the beard, tall and rawboned and with the same strong features thrusting from her face—good-natured but somewhat abrupt in her manner, “plain-spoke” as she’d have put it herself.

  “But now sometimes I wonder about it too.”

  A couple of sparrows had landed in the shade of the magnolias now lengthening toward the porch across the yard. Mary Ann watched the little brown birds pecking in the dirt.

  “Well,” Fanny said. “I know he loves you. More’n anything he’s got. More’n me or Mamma, or anybody really.”

  She rocked, considering; her beans were done. “Except Fan, I reckon. How he loved little Fan … Too much, maybe.”

  “Can a person love too much?”

  Fanny didn’t respond to that. Mary Ann was watching Catharine, who had tucked up her broom and left the yard, and was moving at her molasses-smooth pace back toward the board gate into the slave pen.

  “Suppose he loves her?” Mary Ann blurted.

  “Well,” Fanny said. “Suppose he doesn’t.”

  “Then he lies with her without loving her,” Mary Ann said. “And which way would I rather?”

  “Sister,” said Fanny. “If it’s a thing you cain’t know, you might be better off not to think about it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  August 1864

  THE RAIN HAD SLACKED a little when Henri came back into Oxford with a wagonload of corn foraged from the farmland east of the town. With Ginral Jerry and a handful of others from Forrest’s escort he’d spent the better part of the day playing hide and go seek with Federals of A. J. Smith’s command who were also scouring the country for supplies, and with better success since they were four times as numerous.