Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  July 1863

  WHEN POSSIBLE Henri liked to find a rock to sleep on, though of course he often couldn’t do it. But there were plenty of limestone shelves all over North Georgia and North Alabama and West Tennessee. If it was dry he didn’t mind the hardness of it, and he believed a stone pallet gave him a little advantage over whatever might come crawling while he slept. One dawn he’d opened his eyes on the sight of Nath Boone cautiously pouring a copperhead out of his boot. Another time it was a shout that roused him and there was Willie Forrest, gabbling and shuddering as he flung a foot-long writhing red millipede from his clothes.

  If Henri slept well, the slab of stone would turn beneath him, rising and falling like a plank on billows of the ocean, or even sail away into the wind, so that he dreamed the drifting flight of a fringed palm leaf, long enough and plenty for him to stretch out his whole body on the air. There were no such leaves where he slept now, but he knew them well in the country he came from. They had leaves like that in Louisiana too.

  Often when he left a dream like that it took more than a moment for him to understand where he had landed in the living world. This morning they were riding hard, but he didn’t feel the verve of pursuit. They must not be chasing then. He began to feel sure that they were running. Here was a town of some description. Cowan, Tennessee, in fact—clawed out of not much in the Cumberland foothills about ten years before, called into being by a railroad coming through. Forrest’s wife’s family had been on this ground for fifty years or so, when there were farms and not much town. Before that it was Indians.

  The riders splashed across a fork of Boiling Creek, and soon after clattered over the railroad track. A ways out of Cowan, a tunnel had been blasted through the mountain to let the railroad through, and the last few days there had been talking of blowing it up, so as to stop the Yankees using it to chase Bragg south to Chattanooga. But then the Confederates needed that passway just as much. “Hit’s more than a notion to tear that thang down,” Forrest said, “and builden it back won’t be no easier.”

  They rode by the log courthouse, not stopping to parley. A clerk in his shirtsleeves popped out the door and stood staring after them, arms akimbo—then turned and raised one hand to shade his eyes as he looked back along the way they had come. Then he darted inside and banged the door. Others in the hamlet were barring shut their houses, reasoning that Yankees must be hard on the heels of such a precipitate Confederate flight.

  The last few days they’d been fighting running battles with the forward-most detachments of Rosecrans’s Federal cavalry. Fighting and running. Forrest liked running into the thick of the enemy—not away. But Bragg and his whole army had been outmaneuvered and flushed from the East Tennessee Valley; Bragg’s command was scuttling south across the Tennessee River to find shelter in the mountains back of Chattanooga. At the evening halt, Forrest would draw Bragg’s name in the dirt with the toe of his boot and spit on the word before he slept. “What a sorry ass they done give me to cover.” He said that like it was a prayer.

  They all slept light, and not for long, so oftentimes Henri couldn’t find a rock to suit him and would only stretch in the wormy dirt for a black inky blotting of an hour or two. One-quarter roused by the thumping of boots and saddles, he might ride for a mile or more before he understood just where in the waking world he was. The fringed palm leaf bore him away toward a thing that hadn’t happened yet, when they would be fighting a hard battle near the banks of the Tombigbee River, in hot pursuit of Sooy Smith. Just over the bridge, Forrest crossed paths with one of his own privates who’d flung away his gun and gear and was running full-tilt and fear-stricken away from the fight as fast as his frantic legs would carry him. Forrest pounced from his horse and caught the fugitive by the scruff of his neck and threw him down, then broke a green blackberry cane to thrash him with, not caring for the thorns tearing his own palm. When he was satisfied with the switching he yanked the soldier to his feet and shoved him toward the battle again: “Git on, and goddamn ye! Ye’d as well get kilt over thar as here and a lot more comfortable too, I’ll warrant.” And by then the soldier seemed happy enough to rush back into the fray barehanded.

  Another day that was yet to come, Forrest would be reclining on his coat, which he’d spread as a ground cloth, propped up on his elbows and turned on one hip (for his backside was all broken out in boils). He would go thin as a rake that summer, bones thrusting out through the skin of his face, eyes flickering yellow-green like ghost-lights in a swamp.

  At dusk he stood up, shrugged into his coat, and in the company of Sam Donelson rode over to scout the Yankees at Verona. Under cover of darkness they rode all through the camp, counting wagons and guns at their leisure and with such a boldness no one thought to challenge them. They’d adopted no disguise but the poor light hid their Rebel gray. The two of them were on their way out when finally a dozen Federal pickets called them to halt. Forrest raised his voice to shout HOW DARE YOU ARREST YOUR COMMANDING OFFICER! and in the split second of the pickets’ hesitation he and Donelson laid on the spurs and rode over them, wrapped tight to their horses’ necks like a pair of wild Indians and Forrest’s tailbone sticking up high in the wind as the minié balls showered down all around them. When they were once out of range and had caught their breath, Lieutenant Donelson remarked that the scrape had been a mite close for comfort. Forrest shot him a yellow grin through the dark and said, “If a bullet had jest of bust one of these godforsaken devilish boils, I might have got me a little relief.”

  Today as they cantered through the last outskirts of Cowan they passed a tall rawboned woman standing in her dooryard, pounding shelled corn in a dugout mortar with a pestle half again as long as she was tall. As he drew level with the cabin Forrest’s head swiveled around to regard her. She raked a hank of hair from her face and flung out him. “Whynt ye stand and fight like a man, stead of runnen away like a rascally dog? I wisht Ole Forrest was here, I do. Ole Forrest’d make ye fight!” They’d gone another half a mile before Anderson cleared dust from his throat to speak. “The cat has got Ole Forrest’s tongue, I reckon.”

  Forrest raised his eyes to the wooded ridge of their horizon and smiled in the tatters of his beard. “Ole Forrest don’t want to git whupped with that fence post she’s handlen,” he said, and they rode on.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  June 1854

  IT WAS SOMETIME after midnight when Forrest came out of the gambling house, but maybe, he hoped, not very long after. There was not light enough to see his watch, but at least he did still have his watch. He walked over to the riverfront for the stirring of air on the water. Someone hissed at him from the shadow of a low shed.

  Hi you! Step over here a minute.

  Forrest stopped, searching toward the voice. He stepped into the shadow of a building behind him, to hide his silhouette. One of the men across the way stepped clear of the shed and beckoned. Forrest paid gold coins through the fingers of his right hand in his pocket while with his left he touched the grip of a pistol in his waistband and then settled his grasp on the haft of his long knife—just as deadly and a whole lot quieter. He could see two of them now, just their heads and shoulders visible against the glow of slow-moving river behind them. A pale patch at the throat of one, a cravat maybe. These riverboat agents dressed like dandies oftentimes. They came and went like driftwood on the stream. There might have been a third man in the shadow of the shed. Come on, he thought, raising a heel to the sill behind him, setting himself for the first shock, Come ahead if ye mean to come. He felt keen, alert, the master of himself. He’d quit for once when he was ahead, and it would need more than a swarm of these river rats to rob him of his winnings. But the rats decided to stay where they were, whispering and scrabbling in the dark.

  Forrest turned the corner and walked back into town. At the next corner he stopped and looked back once, then released his hold on his knife and went on, turning gold pieces over in his pocket. When he came in vi
ew of his house and saw the lamp still burning in the sickroom, his bubble of elation burst. He would have liked to go in the back gate and sit by himself a while maybe, on the edge of the cistern among the nigger pens. Aunt Sarah might come out and bring him water then. But the white folks had already seen him, looking down from his front porch.

  The eerie twittering of a screech owl in a tree branch over the porch roof unnerved him rather, though it was only an owl. Resolutely he climbed the steps. His brother John’s eyes were shiny with laudanum. Doctor Cowan’s looked exhausted but clear.

  “No better,” Forrest said.

  Cowan only shook his head at first. “She’s awful weak,” he said at last. “I’m sorry.”

  Forrest went into the house, set his hat on the rack and straightened his jacket. He touched his weapons and his gold, but felt no reassurance from them. He went up the stairs to the second floor, empty hands swinging.

  “Don’t touch her.” Mary Ann’s voice was cold as winter stone. “I won’t have your black hands on her.”

  He could see Catharine, standing in the doorway, lamplight soft on the glossy curve of her cheek, her kerchief neat above her brows, eyes empty, mouth expressionless—she was always so when so rebuked.

  “Get out,” Mary Ann said.

  Catharine turned, walked past him, down the stairs. He watched her away, searching for any trace of insolence, a swing of her hip beneath the calico—there was nothing of the kind. Presently he heard the back door close and pictured her walking, straight and slim, past the cistern to the stall where her own healthy child slept calmly.

  With an effort he crossed the threshold, into the stink of blood and runny shit. They had just cleaned up little Fan again and were tucking her up in the big bed. His mother came past him, carrying a tin basin out. The stench abated when she had gone.

  Mary Ann’s eyes passed over him. She did not speak. But I won, Forrest thought to say, and wanted to justify himself still further. I won close on four hunnert dollars. And don’t a man have a right to some relief? I don’t drink whiskey nor use tobacco. I don’t take laudanum. I don’t pray.

  Mary Ann lowered her head, and sat stroking the girl’s hair and shoulder as she shifted and murmured in fretful sleep. No word was spoken until Mariam came back into the room with the basin washed and dried and empty.

  “Mother Forrest,” Mary Ann said then, pushing her weight up from the bedside chair. “I have just got to lie down for a spell.”

  “Yes, child,” Mariam Forrest said. “I know ye do.”

  “You’ll call me if—?”

  “Yes. I will.”

  Mary Ann went out without saying a word to her husband or looking at him. Slowly Forrest crossed the floor and lowered himself into the chair at the bedside. Mariam Forrest sat in a ladder-back chair against the wall.

  “That gal has got a right to be weary,” she said, with no particular inflection in her voice. Forrest looked across the bed toward her. She took up a basket from the floor and went on shelling butter beans, her eyes bent steady on her work. Forrest felt a little easier in his mind. Cain’t afford to think about it he told himself. He laid a hand on Fan’s forearm. The child had quieted and breathed easily in sleep.

  Butter beans pattered from basket to bowl. The quick nervous surge of his gambling adventure began to drain away from Forrest. His eyes were heavy. Poor Fan was breathing with her mouth open, a light rasp away back in her throat. The ticking of the beans slowed down and stopped and Forrest looked across at his mother, who was sleeping in well-disciplined silence, bolt upright in the straight chair except that her head had rolled to the right and rested against the wall. A vine of scar wrapped over her left shoulder. Her shoulders were almost as high and wide as his.

  He’d dressed her wounds, that time the panther tore her back. It shamed him but he’d let no one else undertake it. In fact she’d told him what to do herself, between clenching her teeth on a rag to control herself at the pain of the liniment. Since then he’d never seen her bare. He had seen slaves aplenty though, with the weal-grids of whip scar raised on their backs—lashed there by himself sometimes. When he must and when there was no other way before him. The screech owl from its post just beyond the open window poured quicksilver gibberish into his ear. He wanted to reach through and wring its feathered neck, but it was thought to be bad luck to kill an owl. He saw himself standing over Catharine, her calico ripped down to her waist, her back still long and smooth and whole though a braided rawhide dripped from his hand and Mary Ann’s resentment would make him leave it raw and bloody from a hundred cuts. With a shivering start he came awake. He would go and murder that owl, he thought. But it was due to happen, what he’d dreamed. He didn’t want to think on that, but he would have to study it. He could not keep on keeping Catharine so close. In a few years’ time, with a little luck and a lot more determination, he’d claw himself out of the slave trade altogether, and be a planter, like the gentry. Or be a planter anyway.

  Downstairs in the parlor the mantel clock tolled three times. Mariam’s head stirred, crushing her cheek against the plaster wall, but still she slept, a bean pod dangling from her fingers. Fan had shifted in the bed and was reaching for him with both her arms, her dark eyes wide. Her mouth open too though she made no sound. He picked her up and held her against his collarbone. Her face burned against his throat. She didn’t have the heft she’d had three days ago or four. She didn’t weigh any more than a rabbit, he thought.

  As he carried her down the stairs the owl’s weird sibilant voice faded. Doctor Cowan and his brother were still sleeping in their chairs. He stood in the night air holding and stroking her back until it seemed she was cooling a little. Then he went inside and settled in a rocking chair before the cold fireplace. When Fan was well she would ride astride of his long shinbone, holding his hands and shrieking with joy with the wild gallop he would give her. Tonight he could only rock her so gently. The faint warmth of her breath on his neck as he slept.

  When he came to, daylight had leaked into the room, and his mother stood behind the rocker. Fan’s little arm felt hard as a wire across his shoulder.

  “Let me have her,” Mariam said. “You need to let me have her now.”

  “I don’t want to let her go,” he said. “I won’t.”

  Mariam shook her head and set her teeth in her lower lip and then released it. “You have to let her go,” she said. “Because, we have got to wash her now, and lay her out on the cooling board.”

  “The cooling board?” Forrest twisted in his chair, feeling how Fan’s body moved against him rigid as a plank.

  “We air goen to have to bury her, Bedford. Ye cain’t hold on to her thisaway.”

  “Where’s Mary Ann?” Forrest said.

  “She’ll wake to sorrow,” his mother told him. “Best let her sleep.”

  “Fan.” Forrest rocked a little. “Fan.”

  “Bedford.” Mariam put her hand on the back of his neck and squeezed. He felt the strength in her hand from all the cows she had milked in her life and was milking still. “Don’t you break down.”

  He couldn’t recall how he’d come to surrender the body, but presently he was standing on the porch, empty-handed with his chest and belly cold all the way to the spine. John and Doctor Cowan held their faces sunk in their hands, afraid to look at him, Forrest supposed. The sun was rising in the same place it would have if his dear daughter Fan had not died in the night. He walked down the porch steps and looked up. The screech owl slept now with its eyes squinched shut—a useless cupful of feathers. He no longer wanted to harm it, really. He only wished that enemies would fall upon him now, like the river rats from the night before, surging with the intent to kill, so that he could slash their throats and spill their entrails onto the ground, or tear the limbs from them bare-handed. Yet he knew even this would not relieve his feelings much or for long.

  A day later he stood in the burying ground with a shovel hat jammed on his head, choking in a high tight collar, lis
tening to the damned preacher mumbling ashestoashesdusttodust, his own thoughts whirling around the same pin Goddammit if there was any goddamn God why would he make a little girl that never did nobody no harm to die of the bloody flux? Answer me that goddamn your eyes. But his mother’s eyes were firm upon him and he would not say these things aloud. Son Will was there on his right hand, and Mary Ann, with just a thread of golden hair leaking out of the net of her black veil to catch the summer sun, had tucked all her grief up under his left arm, against the rib cage where his heart beat on.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  June 1863

  FORREST WAS PEELING a little green apple with a penknife when Lieutenant Gould came into the quartermaster’s office, carefully moving the smaller of the two blades in a spiral around the knotty fruit, so the apple skin came off all in one curly piece. The nitpicking discussion of supplies and transport had paused as the several other men in the room watched the procedure, waiting to see if Forrest would get the peel off whole. Then Gould swarmed in, with a swirl of the tails of his long white duster, and pressed up against the edge of the table, vibrating.

  “General,” he said. “The matter of my transfer.”

  Forrest took a bite of the peeled apple and found it, unsurprisingly, sour. He set it down on the blotter before him.

  “All right, Mister Gould,” he said. “Let’s step out into the hallway where we can speak apart.” He pulled the blade through his thumb and forefinger to clean off the apple juice, and snapped the knife shut as he stood up.

  “I won’t be a minute, boys,” he said, and followed Gould out of the room, twirling the folded knife in his right hand.

  They paced the corridor of the Masonic Hall, for Gould could not be still. It was a long hallway, and dim; at the east end a little sunshine leaked through a fanlight above the door. In the dusty eaves a handful of little bats hung upside down, asleep. Forrest kept spinning the closed knife in his fingers, kicking it with his thumb to make it turn, looking anywhere but at Gould, and wishing he had never consented to their meeting.