Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  In the hollow of the dead tree the usual candle burned. But there were far more candles than usual, waxed down all amongst the roots of the tree. Some special service must be owed to the Old Ones today. From the branches dangled small cloth packets, bound up with snatches of red and black string. On the trunk of the tree people had pinned up keys and small rusty padlocks, bills of the worthless Confederate money, burnt cartridge paper, locks of hair, ribbons and love letters from home.

  Henri stood up. He was terribly hungry. He felt a hole through his midsection like the hole through his head, but so much bigger that a buzzard could have flown through without grazing a wing tip.

  Mist roiled around the bald crown of the hill. The bone flutes and gourd rattles of the Old Ones had joined in the fiddle tune. They had handfuls of teeth in their shakers today. Through a gap in the mist strode R. H. Auman and Jacob Cruse, both killed at Chickamauga on the same day as Henri. They tipped their hats to him as they walked by. Jeffrey Forrest beckoned them to join the dance.

  Henri himself did not feel like dancing, though the music tickled and jumped in his head. He looked down at himself, at his bare sunken ribs. He was still poorer than the day Forrest first found him by the roadside in Kentucky. No shoes and no shirt, just a red wanga bundle round his neck on a string. His butternut trousers were rags to the knee. His weapons were nowhere. He was done with the war.

  Out of the mist climbed Felix Hicks, a quartermaster slain not long after Brice’s Crossroads—he’d asked to ride with Forrest’s escort to attack A. J. Smith, just for the adventure of it. Auman handed Hicks a gourd. He drank, and passed it on to Henri. The gourd held cool water with a faint taste of field mint. Where was there mint now, in all this country? The horses had eaten or trampled it all.

  He handed the gourd to Tommy Brown, just coming up the hill with Bill Green, both of them killed near Lynchburg in 1864. They’d surrendered already, but when a Union officer ordered them shot on the spot, Green snatched his pistol and killed him with it. In the next few seconds they were both gunned down. Henri walked around the crown of the hill, not quite dancing, though his step grew buoyantly light and his hips just barely began to flow with the music. The Old Ones had tipped up hollow logs and were drumming. Henri raised another gourd of water that had come into his hands, saluting the four directions with a splash. From the east, more of the dead kept arriving: Jim Shoffner, Bobby Reeves, Bill Robinson, Jacob Holt, Alf Boone, Pone Green, who was killed at Tuscaloosa. C. C. McLemore. Sammy Scales and P. S. Dean.

  Here came John J. Neal, shot down as he rode with a dispatch from Forrest to Hood. The message said what?—Don’t come. Death is waiting. More than six thousand men to be felled in one day.

  Now, from this now, Henri peered into the mist, knowing that beyond it he might see the Army of Tennessee hurling itself to total destruction against Schofield’s fortified line south of Franklin. Blood running in the trenches ten inches deep. Forrest almost biting his own lips off in his frustration that Hood would not order him to flank Schofield out of his hastily dug works, preferring to charge, head-on, to his ruin.

  Here came Will Strickland, killed near Pulaski on Christmas Day, 1864, while he helped Forrest cover Hood’s wretched retreat from the carnage of Franklin and Nashville—the last shredded remnants of that army slipping across the rivers to the west. Forrest had been fond of Strickland, who’d come without leave from an infantry regiment to join the escort—liked him so well that he sent seven men back to the Twenty-seventh Tennessee to replace him. Green recruits they might have been but still there were seven of them.

  There were Union boys coming in now too. Henri did not know their names, though he recognized many of their faces. They had not only met at sword’s point. Sometimes they’d find each other in some smokehouse or cornfield, hollow and famished, together in that as they scavenged for food. By the war’s end, one in every ten able-bodied men in the Union states would have been, had already been killed in some battle. In the Confederacy, it would be one in four.

  Jerry could not possibly feed so many! But Henri had a chunk of warm pone in his fist, and when he looked at the skillet there was some left there. Not a lot, but there was some.

  What a faithful service Jerry had made. No matter what had already happened he always managed to feed them something. And the dead were always, endlessly hungry. Henri was grateful. He wanted to weep, but the dead have no tears.

  Some of the new arrivals seemed to look at him strangely. Henri scratched his head. There were burrs in his hair. With his bare chest, bare feet, tattered trousers held up with frayed rope, he must look like a contraband, a runaway slave.

  His cornbread was finished. Last gravelly crumbs in the back of his craw. He would always be hungry but he wanted to rest. He went back to the limestone shelf and stretched out. Around him the fiddling and drumbeat grew distant.

  He covered his face with his forearm to block out the pale light of the sky. But his arm was transparent; he could see right through it. He could see straight through his own eyelids too. The hilltop was empty. Nobody was there. He himself was not there. There was no one but Jerry, serving the dead.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  May 1865

  JERRY LOOPED a piece of soft old rope around King Philip’s big head for a hackamore. After the war there were not enough ready-made halters to go around. He stroked the velvet of King Philip’s nostrils and clucked to him as he tied him to an iron ring in the hall of the barn, then went to clean his stall.

  There wasn’t such of a whole lot to do because this task was done every day; still Jerry grunted every time he bent to fork up a clump of wet straw and manure. During the war he had often got wet and slept cold and now he had a touch of that arthuritis in both his knees and his right hip. The place on his hip worked around to the back sometimes.

  He racked the pitchfork in the barrow and shook out a little lime powder on the damp spots in the stall. Once they had dried, he would scatter fresh straw. But now he got a stiff brush and a metal comb and went to work on King Philip’s mane and tail and coat. Being so near the big hot-blooded horse would warm and ease the arthuritis pains that came and went with the morning dew, and it also seemed to soothe and loosen his mind. He had give up his commission same as General Forrest had, so people didn’t call him Ginral Jerry no more, but mostly just plain Jerry, though some did call him Mister Forrest, since he didn’t have any other last name but Forrest and that was a name that carried respect. He was free too, now that the war was over, and although the state of freedom had not much changed the way he lived, he liked to think about it and did so several times a day.

  “Whoa, you,” he said, when King Philip shifted a leg or shivered, his low voice scrambled in his mouth. In the course of the war most of his natural teeth had fell out and General Forrest had got him a fresh set of wooden ones, like what George Washington used to have. The wooden teeth were not very comfortable, but Jerry liked to wear them anyway, except when he needed to eat or talk.

  When King Philip stirred, Jerry slipped a hand out of the brush’s strap to stroke the horse with his bare palm. Nestling against the warm hide of the horse, he muttered at the level of his breath I’se free now, and let that whisper shimmer, and then thought My chirren free. My grandchirren be free. He combed some burrs and loose hair out of King Philip’s mane and thought My greatgrandchirren gone be free, and stopped with that. There was something about the freedom of his great-grandchildren that always seemed to trouble him a little; he didn’t know why. Maybe it was because he didn’t have any great-grandchildren yet, that he knew of. He didn’t know what this trouble could be, though it was true that now some people appeared to be worse off free than they had been slave … but Forrest’s people did all right, except they were poor, but then everybody down South was poor, white or black, since the war. Only Jerry thought Forrest would be rich again soon. He seemed to already be working on that.

  In the other stalls horses had begun to nicker and stamp. �
��Hesh, y’all,” Jerry said, slipping his hand back into the strap of the brush. “Be still.” He looked about—the boy who should have been dropping a handful of grain in their feed boxes had wandered off somewhere. That was one of his grandsons, Sophus. Through the open barn doors, Jerry caught sight of him up near the fence, shading his eyes from the rising sun to look at something that must be coming down the road.

  He made to call Sophus back to the barn, but he couldn’t get his voice to carry very far past the wooden teeth, and it was awkward to take them out because he had the brush and comb strapped to his hands. As he considered this problem, he felt King Philip bunch up against him. There was a flash of blue on the road.

  King Philip backed up, surged forward, made to rear. With a ripple of his long muscular neck he broke free of the hackamore.

  “Whoa, you hoss,” Jerry said, shaking off the brush to reach for a hold of forelock or mane. King Philip shook free and charged for daylight.

  “Shit far,” Jerry said. He had learned this expression from his master.

  The barn doorway was secured with a two-by-six plank slid between the doorposts at waist height, but Sophus, going out, had left it barely caught on one side. The plank bent away like a twig as King Philip went through it, then sprang back to catch Jerry in the midsection, knocking him flat and knocking the wind clean out of him. In the split second he lay on the dusty clay floor, he caught sight of an old ax handle waiting there to be set with a new head, and he snatched it as he got up and ran. Scattering fence rails like splinters, King Philip had burst onto the road to attack the little party of Federal curiosity-seekers who’d come out in hope of a glimpse of that devil, Forrest.

  They were getting more devilment than they’d counted on now. Like a certain number of other old soldiers, King Philip had not really accepted the notion that the war was now over. Blue cloth and brass buttons sent him clean out of his mind. Forrest didn’t ride him off the place anymore, since all North Mississippi was crawling with uniformed Yankees, and Forrest even did business with some of them. This bunch, though, was nothing but a bunch of featherheadedlollygagginggoddamngolliwoggawkers as Forrest would certainly have let them know, if he had been near.

  King Philip had laid his ears back and bared his teeth and had his neck stretched so long and straight he looked more like a hydra than a horse. Sophus was yelling for Jerry from the raw bottom of his throat, and Jerry wanted to call back stay way from dat hoss but he couldn’t have got so much past his mouthful of wood if he’d had breath to holler, and he had none to spare. King Philip had knocked down one of the strange horses already and as the rider rolled clear he reared to attack another one with his front hooves. A third Yankee horse wheeled to kick, nearly throwing his rider in the process. A fourth horseman swung his mount away to make room to draw a pistol.

  Jerry jumped over a couple of fence rails and knocked down the gun arm with the ax handle. The pistol fired wild when it struck in the ditch; the report drove King Philip still crazier. Jerry smacked a couple of the Federal horses with the ax handle to drive them back, then turned to put his body between King Philip and the enemy.

  The big horse hesitated. The fallen Federal ran up and caught Jerry by the shoulder from behind. Reflexively Jerry batted him away with the iron comb he didn’t realize was still attached to his left hand. King Philip charged and the Yankee rolled under the belly of another horse to get away. Jerry dropped the ax handle to snatch at King Philip’s mane and came away with a handful of coarse hair.

  Forrest, who’d been assisting a blacksmith at the forge, came burning up all soot-streaked, black beard jutting and eyes shooting sparks. As he passed Sophus he grabbed a rope the boy must have had the good sense to fetch from the barn. In a moment he had caught King Philip and brought the horse under some kind of control.

  Jerry put his teeth in his bib pocket and took the rope’s end. He ran the curry comb lightly over King Philip’s spine. The big horse shuddered and subsided.

  “Whoa, you,” Jerry set. “You jess settle down. War done over. You let these Yankee gemmun alone.”

  For a moment they all watched each other, breathing. One blue-coat fondled his forearm where the ax handle had bruised it. Another nursed a red row of scratches from the iron teeth of the comb.

  Lieutenant Hosea took off his hat.

  “General Forrest?” he said.

  Forrest folded his arms across his chest.

  “Dear Lord,” Hosea said. “Your niggers fight for you. Your horses fight for you. No wonder you were so hard to whip.”

  Forrest looked back at him, yellow gleam in his eye, and said, “I ain’t been whupped till yet.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  December 1853

  A SUNNY MORNING, following a night of rain not quite cold enough to freeze. It was warmer now, though a chill breeze came off and on from the river. Forrest was walking back from the docks on the Memphis riverfront when something thumped into his leg. A little black boy, no more than two years old if that, rebounded from the collision and was gathering himself to run again when Forrest caught him up.

  “Well, hello.”

  The boy was dressed in just a rag of osnaburg, with holes cut in it to make a smock. The cloth was grimy but the child was clean. His hair was cut close against his scalp and his arms and legs were glossy, well fleshed.

  “Now who do you belong to?” Forrest said. He ran his thumb over a ringworm circle on the boy’s shoulder where it emerged from the smock. The worm was dead and the mark of it looked to be half-healed; there was a faint odor of a coal oil poultice when he lifted his thumb away.

  “Somebody been taken care of you, anyhow,” Forrest said. He’d noticed too that the neck and arm holes in the smock had been neatly hemmed; never mind the cloth itself was worn to near-transparency.

  The boy twisted in his arms and kicked at him with both bare feet.

  “Quit that,” Forrest said. “Fore ye break yore toe.”

  The boy squirmed and looked with white eyes toward the river, where a boat horn blew a long low hoot. “Now where did ye drop from?”

  Wordless, the boy gaped at him, revealing a flash of sound-looking teeth, then puckered his lips tight shut.

  “Cat got yore tongue, hah?” Forrest said. “Well I reckon ye didn’t just fall from the moon.”

  He looked in the direction the boy was refusing to look, and saw R. J. Willis come huffing around the corner, all in a lather, a rope leash in one hand and a short braided riding crop in the other. Forrest swung the boy to his left hip and set his right leg forward. Willis stopped for a second when he saw them, then came on at a slower pace.

  “You don’t mean to use all that on a little ole shirttail boy,” Forrest said. He was wearing a pistol on his right hip and he touched it briefly through the coat flap beneath which it was hidden.

  “Goddamn runaway needs to be tied.” Willis halted about three paces away. “Needs to be taught a good lesson too.”

  “I got him, don’t I?” Forrest said. “He ain’t goen nowhar.”

  “That there’s my propitty, Forrest,” Willis said. “Hand him over.”

  Forrest looked about himself. Women with their shopping baskets were tucking pale faces away in their bonnets as they discreetly left the street, and the shopkeepers stood well away from their windows. In one of the shops a plank shutter banged closed, though it was well short of the dinner hour. Disputes between slave-traders could turn very salty. Forrest himself had been a witness in the case where Bolton shot poor McMillan, claiming McMillan had sold him a free nigger. He still felt troubled when he thought of that business, for McMillan had been uneasy about going to see Bolton in the first place, and Forrest had advised him to go, and not seen till later he ought to have gone with him. He had traveled with McMillan once in a while, running coffles upriver from New Orleans in the early summer, when the heat made unhealthy to keep too many slaves in the barracoons down there, and he’d been struck by the fact that McMillan never carried a pis
tol and never seemed to need one to govern the people he was transporting.

  Bolton must also have known McMillan generally went unarmed, for he shot him in cold blood and threw down a knife afterward to make a claim he’d been attacked. McMillan had lived long enough to tell this story; they carried him back to Forrest’s house to finish his dying. In the back of his mind Forrest had thought Bolton too much a coward to do what he did—a poor risk to misjudge a man that way. Though Forrest and others testified to the murder, Bolton went free. As for the free nigger, it turned that he really was free and could prove it to boot, so he had been turned loose a good while before, and whoever had paid for him lost his money. There was no use thinking about any of it really.