Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Jerry,” Henri said cautiously.

  “King snake,” Jerry told him. “Ain’t pizen. Ain’t no harm in’m at all …”

  The hilltop was contained in a pocket of mist, a pearly gray dimness like a cataract. Henry got up and walked the rim of the hill to the cardinal points. West: through the parting of the mist, he could see the distant figures of Forrest and his escort fighting a rearguard action to cover the retreat of Hood’s decimated army, from the bloody disasters at Franklin and Nashville. South, Forrest sat his horse beside Charles Anderson, facing down a darkly wooded trail like a tunnel, debating whether to fly to Texas or Mexico and continue the doomed struggle there. These were not scenes Henri desired to enter.

  Through the vapors to the east he saw, down a long brushy slope of the hill, young Matthew sitting on the tailgate of an empty wagon, swinging his long legs just an inch or so short of the ground, his head lowered despondently, rolling a revolver from one hand to the other. Henri nodded to himself and started down the steep slope toward the boy, picking his way through buck bushes and briars. He was halfway down when a fine big rabbit popped up practically at his feet and went bouncing away around the curve of the hill. By the time Henri thought to produce his own pistol the rabbit had lost itself in the ground cover.

  He hung the pistol back on his belt and hopped out to the level ground where the wagon was stalled in its ruts. It was Benjamin’s wagon, Henri noticed. Ben had carved the back of the box seat with two wildcat heads snarling and spitting to right and to left. Benjamin himself slept in the wagon bed, cushioned by a heap of tattered flour sacks.

  Matthew glanced up briefly, looked back at his knees. He was rolling the empty cylinder in and out of the frame of his revolver. It made a sharp metallic click whenever it snapped back in.

  “What are you back here brooding for?” Henri said. Back along the road the wagon had come from he could hear an intermittent boom of cannon; smoke rose on the horizon to mingle with dust in the setting sun.

  Matthew shrugged. “No cartridges.”

  “You’ll find plenty forward, I’d expect.”

  This time Matthew held Henri’s eyes. “You?”

  Henri turned to gaze upward at the Old Ones’ bald hill, but it was gone; he seemed instead to have descended a much wider slope, a neglected pasture going to brush and blackberry bramble and the orange-blond sage grass. At the top of the pasture was a partly collapsing rock wall fence and above that the crown of the hill was covered with a tight bristling top knot of trees. By this landscape Henri could tell they were in Tennessee, and by the king snake colors of the leaves he knew it must be fall. “He don’t need me for nothing,” Matthew said. The cylinder rolled out of the pistol in his palm, clicked back.

  “They don’t really need me either,” Henri said. It was November, he recalled, and Forrest was at Johnsonville, destroying the Federal supply depots there where the railroad met the Tennessee River. The startled Yankees had been spooked into burning their own boats before they scattered, while a thoughtful barrage of Forrest’s artillery set fire to the warehouses east of the river. Thus the smoke … Forrest himself was passing the time by taking jocular charge of one of Morton’s guns, one of the few instruments of war he had no real idea how to manipulate, calling out nonsensical comments and commands: a rickety-shay! Elevate the breech of that gun lower! A last merry dance on the brink of ruin. Those burning stores were meant for Sherman, but Sherman had already taken Atlanta. General Hood was already marching the Army of Tennessee north from that defeat toward its ultimate doom in the shallow ditch south of Franklin. There was nothing now, except pillage, between Sherman and the Atlantic Ocean.

  “He caught Willie horseracing again,” Matthew said. “Punished him hard. Made him tote fence rails with the rest of the boys, until he was ready to drop.”

  “And so?”

  “He didn’t do a thing to me.”

  “And you’re complaining about that.”

  “He didn’t even see me,” Matthew said. “Like I just wasn’t there. I would have won the damn race too, if he hadn’t stopped it.”

  Henri looked up the slope again, wondering how many more rabbits might be hid in the wiry scraggle of buck bushes. His stomach folded in on itself. A gust brought a swirl of rust-colored leaves from the hilltop to settle among the patches of sage grass in the pasture.

  “Don’t tell me he didn’t see you,” he told Matthew. “He might not show anything about it but there’s not much he doesn’t see.” “Here’s one thing I can’t stand about Willie,” Matthew said.

  “Just one?” Henri forced a smile.

  “Just—every day of the week, every hour of the goddamn day, Willie knows who he is, or he thinks he does—no, he doesn’t even bother to think about it. That idea never once crosses his mind—”

  “And you don’t know?”

  “How would I know? Am I soldier or a saddle-maker? White man or a nigger? A body can’t be both, can they? Not both of those things jumbled up together?”

  Henri cocked an eyebrow at him. “You might want to try just being a man, and never mind the rest of it.”

  Matthew ducked his head. “It’s different for you.”

  Well, that was true, Henri thought. Or maybe it was just half-true.

  “I hadn’t seen such a lot of Willie lately,” he remarked.

  “He’s keeping him back.” Matthew raised his pistol sharply, sighted it down the empty road, then lowered it again to his lap. “So he’ll be safe.”

  Henri considered. It could be true. Forrest might indeed have grown more solicitous of his only son, since his brother Jeffrey had been killed in the pursuit of A. J. Smith.

  “That’s his Momma wants him safe,” Henri said. “Forrest has got fighting blood. He wants his blood to fight.”

  “If I’m his blood,” Matthew said, “he never has claimed me.”

  “He has,” Henri said. “A time or two. I’ve heard him.”

  “If I’m his blood,” Matthew said, “then why would he stick me in an old nigger shack at the bottom of Memphis? Where he slips around at night to fuck that nigger wench who plays like she’s my momma though she ain’t. Fucks the wench like she was a dog.”

  “Wait a minute.” Henri raised a hand to dam the flow of ugly words. Benjamin was motionless on his pallet of sacks; only his eyes darted, beneath closed lids, tracking whatever he saw in his dreams … Henri considered the Memphis raid, when Forrest had fallen behind them on Beale Street. In his inward eye he saw the woman with those little boys, recalled the liquid grace of her movement. Son. Dark honey in her voice. Why don’t you hold the ginnal’s hoss? The thing that hadn’t made sense then did now. He could see the woman and Forrest inclining toward each other like a pair of silhouettes cut from black paper.

  “Does he do her like she was a dog?” He waited.

  “No. I don’t guess so.” Matthew looked at the ground between his dangling feet. “It’s like he can’t get enough of her.” He raised his head to the smoke-stained horizon. “Like she can’t get enough of him.”

  Henri followed his eyes to the smoke. The dots in the air across the river must be buzzards.

  “They act like they love each other.” Matthew spat.

  “Well,” Henri said. “I suppose that’s not much use to you.”

  “It’s not much use to nobody,” Matthew said. “You know he’ll never claim the sons he got with her.”

  Henri looked away up the hill. There was no argument with that, he knew.

  “He claimed you once,” he said. “I heard him do it.”

  Matthew looked at him.

  “The day Sam Green got killed.”

  “Oh, that,” Matthew said. “Well, he’ll call anybody Son. He’s probably called you that before.”

  Henri reached around in his memory. It might be true; he wasn’t sure.

  “You ever hear him say a thing he didn’t mean?”

  Matthew stared at the dirt between his feet. His right hand clenched
the handle of his empty weapon. “But he never thinks,” Matthew said. “He never thinks about how it might be like for me.”

  “You might be right as far as that goes,” Henri admitted. “If he got all tied up thinking thoughts like that he wouldn’t be able to do like he does.”

  “Oh yes,” Matthew said. “Do and ride on and never look back.”

  “Listen,” Henri said. “He won’t claim you like he does Willie. You’re not headed for a bunk in the big house when all this is done. I know that as well as you. That won’t happen in your time, not anywhere in this country. But you’re not headed back to slavery time either.”

  Matthew looked up at him sharply. “How do you know what’s going to happen.”

  Everything has already happened, Henri thought, but he knew it wouldn’t help to say that.

  “If we’re not headed back to slavery,” Matthew said, “then what are we fighting for?”

  “Oh,” Henri said. “You think I don’t ask myself that every day?” He had begun to laugh and couldn’t stem the tide of it any more than if he had been vomiting. Ben stirred on the sacks but did not quite wake. Matthew did not join in.

  “If we’re fighting for slavery,” Henri said, once he had a partial grip on himself, “we’re not going to win.”

  Matthew clamped one hand on the grip of his pistol and one on the barrel, squeezed as if he meant to bend it. Then his hands loosened and he laid the pistol on the worn boards of the wagon bed beside his thigh.

  “I’ll never be more than a nigger to him,” he said.

  “Listen to you,” Henri said. “All twisted up about a word. You think he never was called a bad name in his life? A word never meant that much to Bedford Forrest. It’s what’s inside your skin that counts. Bone and gristle. Blood and heart.”

  The yellow light of anger faded from Matthew’s eyes, replaced by a weariness that was also familiar. Henri felt a little sad that he couldn’t stay with him all the way. But Matthew would survive the war.

  “Mathieu,” he said. “Listen to me. You’re trying to pry something out of him that you’ve already got. You got as strong a dose of him as Willie does. And he knows it just as well as you do. Take that. Live your life with that.”

  “But am I his son or am his slave? And I can’t figure out if I love him or hate him.”

  “That’s right,” Henri said. “You’re right about that. Suppose maybe you’re allowed to do both.”

  Matthew’s gaze narrowed. “You talk like a hoodoo man, sometimes,” he said. “What are you, anyway?”

  Zanj, Henri thought, the spirit that walks with you. “Just an idea,” he said instead, “of what you might become.”

  · · ·

  HE WAS ALREADY GONE when Benjamin sat up, blinking slowly, his eyes coming clear. He dropped off the back of the wagon, took a few steps below the roadway, and pissed on the fading autumn grass. Buttoning his trousers again, he walked back toward Matthew and the wagon.

  “We best get on,” he said, as he climbed aboard.

  Matthew nodded and joined him on the decorated box. Ben clucked to the drowsing mule and the wheels began to turn.

  “You oughtent to spend so much time talken to dead folks,” Benjamin told him. “They’s a whole lot of life ahead of you yet.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  November 1864

  FORREST, with his escort about him, sat his horse to the east of the Lewisburg Pike, from a point where he could see Federal sharpshooters on a knoll just across the Harpeth River, picking off men from the van of the Confederate column marching doggedly, upon Hood’s order, head on toward Schofield’s entrenched works in Franklin.

  “Jackson,” Forrest hollered, twisting his hat in his hands, “take yore boys across that stream and run them Yankees off that hill.” He continued abusing his hat as Jackson and his men obeyed the order. Henri, followed by Major Strange, rode their horses close into Forrest’s left side. “That’s how it ought to gone all over,” Forrest was muttering. “Hood had the sense to listen to me, I’d flushed Schofield out of all his works the same way and we might of whupped’m solid here … instead—” Forrest jammed his hat on his head, pulled the brim down to shade his eyes. His fingers had turned blue with the sharp winter cold. “He’s set on killen ever last man he’s got, chargen’m head-on into them trenches.”

  The bloodbath was already coming, Henri thought, most certainly it had already begun, away to the left of their position, with heavy constant firing along the Columbia Pike, where Hood had insisted his infantry charge the Federal trenches and abatis across a couple of hundred yards of open, frozen field. Forrest took off his hat again, rolled it tight, then idly reshaped it on the pommel of his saddle. “We had’m in the bag at Spring Hill,” he said. “Sent for him once, sent for him twicet. No sir, General is not to be DISTURBED goddamn his eyes. Too full of whiskey and opium to raise up his sorry ass outen the bed.”

  “Sent for you yesterday,” Henri said. An expression he’d learned among slaves of the South. “Now here you come today.” Such a heart sadness in this handful of words. Forrest did not appear to hear the sound of them, much less capture their sense.

  “And today he damn well won’t hear what’d fix it.”

  “Well, now,” Major Strange said as he stroked his long beard. “He might have been better disposed to you if you hadn’t offered to tie his quartermaster’s legs around his neck.”

  “Might have been don’t make no matter.” Forrest was talking to Major Strange, though Henri had his horse and himself positioned right between them. “We’ll need ever last mule we got fore this is over and done with and Hood will too, to get his wreckage hauled away. Hit’s his whole damn army getten itself blown to smithereens down there.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” Major Strange said sorrowfully. “Just as well we’re not down there with them.”

  “Ye think so?” Forrest looked sharply at Major Strange, looking right through Henri. “Well … ye might say that. Hell ye might say Hood has saved my life by sending me way around to Hell and gone and this far out of the action. Only single question I got—Why he’d have wanted to?”

  The winter wind blew in their faces.

  To the west, the grumble of gunfire rose and fell. The shallow trench so hurriedly dug by Schofield’s men before the Carter house was now beginning to fill with blood. Henri knew this though he couldn’t see it from where he sat.

  “He might have known he’d need you more another day,” he said. But they were running out of days.

  Forrest shot an irritable look straight through Henri to Major Strange. “What’s that ye say?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Major Strange replied.

  He can’t see me, Henri thought. A bolt of cold shot down his spine. And he always sees everybody, for better or worse; he sees every man and knows him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  HIS HEAD ROCKED sharply back, painlessly but very hard. He lifted his hands to both sides of his head, but was afraid to touch it. He merely framed it airily with his fingertips. A hollow ran through his head from front to back with a brown wren flying backward through it, a discreet and modest little bird.

  Forrest was riding out ahead of him still, ahead of them all, standing up straight in the saddle, slashing and screaming defiance and rage. It appeared to Henri now that the slit in the world’s fabric which Forrest galloped effortlessly through was now this very same echoing hollow passage through his own head.

  His limbs were weakening, the grip of his knees on the plunging horse began to loosen, to give way. He snatched at the wild-flying reins and missed, then clutched at the saddlebow. Beginning to fall, he kicked free of one stirrup, but the other was caught. In terror, he knew he was sure to be dragged. Then something else surrendered, a stirrup leather broke; in one flighty instant Henri was airborne.

  Then darkness, or rather a pearly mist, and still no pain.

  As he came to, he smelled cooking first. Fatback sweating grease on hot
iron. His eyes didn’t seem to work right yet, or else he just somehow couldn’t open them. He felt about with the flats of his hands and seemed to be lying on one of those limestone shelves he favored whenever he could find them. All over the hills of Tennessee they were usually easy enough to discover.

  Apart from a distant high-pitched ringing, both his ears seemed to work all right. He could hear the first hectic notes of “Devil’s Dream” on a fiddle nearby. Who was it used to fiddle that tune so?

  Henri sat up, tucking his legs up under him, and looked about the edges of his pallet of stone, for scorpions or centipedes or stinging woolly worms or snakes. He could see now, well enough. Satisfied there were no venomous creepy-crawlies in his range, he stretched his legs and lowered his bare feet into the dirt beyond the stone. The dust between his toes was cool, but not unpleasantly so. If he had not lost his boots in the fall then someone must have removed them while he was laid out here.

  Ginral Jerry tended a small hot, almost smokeless fire, over which he was cooking coldwater cornbread, a single hoecake that occupied the whole circumference of the pan. He hunkered, tail-bone hanging over his heels, flicking the hoecake now and then with a clean chip so that it would not stick.

  The cornbread had a nubby surface and a faint bluish cast, like the limestone shelf where Henri had reposed. He knew it would be not quite as hard as limestone when at last he bit into his piece, and it would be just fleetingly sweet from the white corn it was made of—Jerry had not got his hands on sugar, honey, or molasses for weeks. Henri’s mouth began to water, and he swallowed a time or two.

  The boy was still fiddling. Faster than before. This was a tune meant to pick up speed as it advanced. A challenge to see how fast you could work the bow without dropping a note. Young William Lipscomb had the fiddle now. Had it always been he who played “Devil’s Dream”? Lipscomb was killed or was to be killed at the age of eighteen, in the course of a skirmish on a rainy night when Forrest, profiting from the dark and the wet, sprang a surprise attack with a few of his escort on a much larger Federal cavalry unit under Cabron. November 1864: Forrest had been on his way to join John Bell Hood as he marched the Army of Tennessee from Atlanta toward Nashville, leaving Sherman unhampered to lay waste to Georgia. Lately Forrest had equipped his escort with the new Spencer repeating rifles and that and the fact that his men were well camouflaged in their wet rubber slickers made up for the disadvantage in numbers. The escort routed Cabron’s men as they struggled to raise their tents in the rain, took fifty-odd prisoners and still more small arms. Riding away with a smaller group yet, Forrest was accosted by a company of Federals who tried to take him prisoner—one had touched a gun barrel to Forrest’s breastbone, but Major Strange clipped his arm so the shot went wild. In that whirl of confusion in the rain and dark, young Lipscomb caught the bullet that killed him a day or so later. William Wood was also killed in that brief engagement at Fouché Springs. He sat now on a stump looking up at young Lipscomb, tapping a toe and rattling pebbles in the cup of his hand to mark time.