Another branch tried to yank the hat off Jenkins's head. Only a quick, desperate grab saved it. He jammed it town tighter; with luck, the next branch wouldn't be so lucky. “Weather like this, country like this, god damn if I don't halfway believe in hants myself,” he said.
Plenty of whites raised by Negro mammies and wet nurses soaked
up slaves' superstitions almost as readily as pickaninnies did. The only people who'd raised Jack Jenkins and his brothers and sisters were his father and mother and his mother's bachelor brother. They were hardscrabble farmers too poor to do anything but dream of owning slaves of their own.
That didn't mean Jenkins didn't know about hants. He heard about them from his white friends, and from the colored boys who fished in the creeks side by side with him. With kids, the lines of separation between whites and blacks weren't so sharp as they were once people grew up. If a Negro boy was more likely to wear ragged clothes and go without shoes than his white counterpart, the white might be inclined to jealousy, not to thinking he was only a slave and not worth wasting much money on.
So maybe things did haunt these woods and swamps. Jenkins couldn't swear they didn't. But he knew Bedford Forrest rode somewhere toward the rear of this column. Jenkins didn't and wouldn't believe any hant ever hatched could shift old Bedford.
Drain Lake River. Spring Lake. Big Slough. The names came out of the night as if hants wheezed them forth. Somebody said the rivers and creeks were full of bigmouthed black bass. Jack Jenkins's mouth filled with spit when he heard that. No time for fishing now, though. No time for anything but riding. Soft, marshy ground close by the countless streams. Woods wherever the land climbed a little higher.
Down by the Hatchie and the smaller streams that flowed into it, cypresses stood tall. Some of them actually grew in the water, their knees sticking up to help support them. Cypresses made Jenkins shiver. In the language of flowers, they stood for mourning and death. Maybe that was as foolish as letting fear of hants keep you inside after dark — but maybe it wasn't, too.
On higher ground, oaks and beeches supplanted the cypresses. Vines hung down from them; Jenkins got more than one wet slap in the chops. Brush and ferns crowded close to the trails. Sometimes it was hard to make out what was trail and what was undergrowth.
Without W.J. Shaw, the Confederate troopers might well have lost themselves in the swamps. Even with him, there were times during that seemingly endless night when Jenkins thought they were lost. In darkness absolute, with no moon or stars overhead, how could you tell where west lay? Shaw seemed able to, or at least was confident he could.
Had such a lean, muscular column — fifteen hundred mounted men — ever penetrated this country by night before? By the way the animals reacted, Jack Jenkins would have bet against it. Wild hogs tIed deep into the woods, grunting and squealing. The thought of roast pork made Jenkins's stomach growl. He'd eaten a couple of bites of Brunswick stew and a weevily hardtack biscuit when they rode through Brownsville, but that was quite a while ago now.
Bobcats yowled when they ran away. Raccoons made eerie noises that sounded almost as if they ought to be speech. And once an owl glided by all ghostly not more than two feet in front of Jenkins's startled face. Its wings were silent as a bug inside cotton batting. Had he blinked while it flew past, he never would have known it was there.
What else lived in these woods? Deer and bear, without a doubt. The deer were bound to be long gone, their sharp ears alerting them to danger and their swift legs carrying them away from it. Turkeys probably stayed asleep in spite of the horsemen's racket. Damn fool birds! Jenkins thought. If they weren't asleep, they'd be standing under drips with their beaks agape, and some of them would go on drinking till they drowned.
Up above, passenger pigeons would be roosting in the trees. A lot of them would already have flown farther north to breed, but some remained in this part of the world. Jenkins had seen the red — eyed birds flying in the rain before dark. Rain didn't faze them a bit, though sleet might knock them from the sky and fog confused them and made them land wherever they could.
Passenger — pigeon pie made mighty good eating, too. Thanks to the birds, nobody who could afford a shotgun was likely to starve. There were so many of them. It was almost as if God put them there as an unending bounty for the whites who spread across His land.
“Stay close to the man in front of you!” an officer shouted. “Don't go wandering off the trail!”
“Yes, Mother,” a trooper called. Other riders snickered. Confederate soldiers took their superiors no more seriously than they had to.
Confederate officers knew that as well as their men did. They hated it. This one swore. If the officers had their way, they would turn the Confederate Army into an outfit as full of spit and polish as the U.S. Army… wished it were. From what Jack Jenkins had heard, ordinary Federal soldiers gave their superiors a hard time, too. One of their officers was supposed to be known to his troops as Old Bowels.
But the men in gray were looser than the men in blue. People on both sides said so. The damnyankees tried to lord it over everybody, their own soldiers included. Outfits like Forrest's, on the other hand, were even looser than the loose Confederate average. Officers won respect — when they did win respect — because of the men they were, not because they wore bars or stars on their collars.
“No wonder the Yankees want nigger soldiers!” Jenkins exclaimed, all but blinded by the flash of his own insight. H he weren't so tired, it might not have struck him such a blow. As things were, it seemed a truth of Biblical proportions.
“What do you mean?” asked somebody not far away.
“What's a nigger good for? Doin' what he's told, and that's the long and short of it.” So said the cavalry corporal, with the assurance of the Pope speaking ex cathedra. That he'd had little to do with Negroes bothered him not a bit. He went on, “The Federals, they want everybody to do what they say all the damn time. So niggers with guns are perfect for them.”
“Could be,” said the other voice in the night. “Just one thing wrong with it, though.”
“What's that?” Jenkins demanded, angry that his brilliant perception should be challenged in any way. He was almost too weary to stay in the saddle, but not to ride his hobby-horse.
“You can give a coon a rifle. Hell, you can give a coon a cannon and call the nigger son of a bitch an artilleryman,” the other soldier said. “But even if you do, you can't make the black bastard fight.”
Jenkins considered that. A yawn almost swallowed his consideration. He welcomed the next wet vine or branch or whatever it was that hit him in the nose; it woke him up a little. “Well, hell,” he said, thus revived. “You know that, an' I know that. But what do the damnyankees know, anyways?” He was convinced he'd proved his point. And the other trooper didn't argue any more, so maybe he had.
On they rode, on and on and on. They paused for a few minutes every so often, to let the horses rest a little, drink from streams and puddles, and eat the handfuls of oats their riders doled out to them. The way Jenkins's mount hung its head told him how weary it had to be: as weary as he was, or maybe more, because he didn't have so much on his back.
He patted the horse's neck. “Don't worry about it,” he said. “Don't you worry about a thing. We got to be gettin' close to the damn fort.. don't we?” He wished he hadn't added the last couple of words. They only reminded him he had no idea how far off Fort Pillow was.
With luck, the horse wouldn't know he was bluffing.
It sighed like a tired old man when he swung up into the saddle
again. So did he. He felt like a tired old man, though he was only twenty — five. Bedford Forrest drove everybody like hell, himself included. Jenkins had never gone on a ride to compare with this one. He hoped to God he never did again.
On some roads, he might have dozed in the saddle, confident the horse would keep heading the right way even if he didn't pay attention. He nodded off a couple of times, but jerked back to consciousne
ss whenever he did. Too easy to go astray here, to get lost in the swamps. He didn't want to give the officers any excuse to come down on his head.
Every so often, he heard voices stiff with authority screaming at troopers who blundered. No, he didn't want that happening to him. But whenever he yawned, he had to fight to stay awake. And he yawned more and more often now.
Little by little, the rain eased and then stopped. Jenkins needed a while to realize it had. All the leaves and branches were still soaking wet, and drips pattered down on his hat. Some of them slid down the back of his neck, too. He couldn't figure out how they did that. The brim of the hat was supposed to keep it from happening. No matter what it was supposed to do, the back of his neck got wet.
Little by little, also, the shape of the horse in front of him grew more distinct. Little by little, he began to make out the man atop the horse. Up above the clouds that still hid the stars even if they no longer wept, dawn was on the way. It wasn't here yet, but it was coming.
“How much longer?” somebody asked. The words weren't far from a groan. If the answer was anything like another half day, despair, if not mutiny, would soak through the ranks.
Alarmed at the thought, Jenkins looked around now that he could see a little farther. Men and horses all had their heads down. No one seemed any peppier than he felt. But no one seemed ready to give up or give out, either. That was good. He didn't want to have to try to turn the troopers around if they decided they'd had enough.
Of course, if they decided they'd had enough, they would have to let Major General Forrest know it. If you were brave enough to do that, weren't you brave enough to face the Federals, too?
“Rein in! Rein in!” The call from up ahead was soft but urgent. “We need the horse holders!” When mounted troops went forward to fight, some of their comrades had to stay behind to hang on to the horses. The usual proportion was about one in four. Forrest used far fewer. He always aimed to get as many of his men into the fight as he could.
“Big Pete, Burrhead, it's your turn,” Jenkins called to the men he led. Excitement tingled through him. If they were dismounting, they had to be ready to go into battle, which meant they'd got to Fort Pillow after all, and before the sun came up.
“Big Pete's horse went lame. He's way the hell back there somewhere,” a trooper said.
Jenkins swore. He told off another soldier to take Big Pete's place. The soldier swore, too — he wanted to get up there and fight. Few people who didn't want to get up there and fight joined Forrest's cavalry. “Somebody's got to do it, Clem,” Jenkins said. “I picked you.”
Not far ahead, rifle muskets began to bang.
III
Lieutenant Mack Leaming lay on his cot, happily halfway between slumber and wakefulness. Part of him knew reveille would sound soon. The rest was warm and comfortable under a thick wool blanket on an iron — framed bed with a tolerable, or even a little better than tolerable, mattress. A little earlier, he'd been dreaming of a redheaded woman he'd seen in Brownsville. The dream was more exciting than the brief glimpse he'd got of her. He knew he wouldn't get it back — you never did — but he kept trying.
The bugler's horn didn't wake him. The sounds of running feet and shouting men did. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he said, sitting up in bed and groping for his shoes — like most soldiers, he slept in the rest of his uniform.
His first thought was that some of the men had got into the sutlers' whiskey, of which there was more inside the perimeter of the fort than he would have liked. Dawn was a hell of a time for a drunken riot to start, but you never could tell. That was true of his own troopers. He thought it was bound to be even more true of the colored soldiers just up from Memphis.
Then he heard gunfire, and he flung himself into his shoes and dashed out of the barracks. If his men and the coons were going at each other, then all hell had broken loose. He would have to figure out in a hurry whether to try to put out the fire or to make damn sure the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry ended up on top.
But the gunshots weren't coming from inside the earthwork. As soon as he left the barracks, he realized that. The fire was coming from farther away. He looked around, gauging the growing light. It couldn't be later than half past five. A sergeant ran by, as fast as if the seat of his pants were on fire.
“What the hell's going on, Gunter?” Leaming shouted.
“Sir, there's Rebs outside the fort,” Sergeant Gunter answered.
“They're shooting at our pickets in the rifle pits.”
“Rebels?” Leaming shook his head. “There can't be. There aren't any Rebels closer than Jackson.”
As if to make a liar out of him, brisk fire came from the south and east. “We sure as hell ain't shooting at each other,” Gunter said.
Since Leaming had wondered if the men in the garrison were doing exactly that, he wasn't completely convinced. But the distant catamount screech of the Rebel yell persuaded him that Sergeant Gunter knew what he was talking about.
“What in the name of damnation is going on out there?” Major Bradford asked from behind Leaming. Bradford had taken his own sweet time getting out of bed.
“Sir, the Confederates are attacking the fort,” Leaming answered. “What? Have you gone clean round the bend?” Bradford yelped. “There's no Secesh soldiers within seventy miles of this place.”
“I thought the same thing, sir,” Leaming said. “But listen.”
Major Bradford did. Even in the pale, uncertain light of first dawn, Leaming watched the color drain from his face. How? Bradford's lips silently shaped the word. “How could they get here without anybody knowing?” he managed aloud. “Maybe Forrest really did sell his soul to the Devil, the way the niggers say.”
“What are we going to do, sir?” Lieutenant Leaming asked.
“I don't know,” Bradford said, which struck his adjutant as a fundamentally honest response, but not what he wanted to hear from the regimental commander. Bradford gathered himself, or tried to: “I don't see how we can surrender, though. Lord only knows what Forrest's men would do to us, let alone to the niggers here.”
“Didn't Major Booth say we could hold this fort against anybody and anything for a couple of days?” Leaming asked, perhaps incautiously.
“He said it, yes. How old were you, Lieutenant, before you found out what people say isn't necessarily so?” Major Bradford loaded his words with all the scorn his courtroom training could pile onto them. Mack Leaming's cheeks and ears heated. He hoped the light was still too dim to let Bradford notice him flush. He was in luck — the regimental commander had stopped paying attention to him. Bradford was looking toward the tents that housed the newly arrived colored troops and their white superiors. “Where in tarnation is Major Booth, anyway?”
Booth chose that moment to pop out of his tent like a jack-in-the-box. The senior officer's tunic had several buttons undone. He wore no hat. His hair was all awry. But his eyes flashed fire even in the gray light before sunrise. “So the Rebs have shown up, have they?” he shouted, a fierce and unmistakable joy in his voice. “Well, good! “
“Good?” Major Bradford might have been looking around for a judge with whom he could lodge an objection.
“Good!” Major Booth shouted again. Mack Leaming inclined toward Bradford's opinion; no visit from Bedford Forrest was good news for anyone who followed the Stars and Stripes. But Booth went on, “We'll give the bastards a bloody nose and a black eye, and we'll send 'em back to Mama with their tail between their legs! Isn't that right, boys?”
The Negro soldiers spilling out of their tents screeched and capered and carried on. But the screeches were defiance hurled at the Confederates. Many of the capers the black men cut were lewd, but also showed they intended to fight. And the way the colored troops carried on brought smiles to the faces of the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry's troopers, many of whom had seemed as uncertain and afraid as Major Bradford and Mack Leaming himself.
“Are we going to fight those Secesh bastards?” Major Booth
bellowed.
“Yes, suh!” the colored artillerymen yelled back.
“Are we going to whip those Secesh bastards?” Booth bellowed, even louder than before.
“Yes, suh!” The Negroes got louder, too. Lieutenant Leaming hadn't imagined they could.
Eyes still blazing, Booth peered this way and that. “Bradford!” he shouted. “Where in God's name are you, Bradford?”
“I'm here, sir,” Major Bradford answered. He had to say it again before he could make Major Booth hear him. “What do you require of me?”
“We don't want to let Forrest's men drive our pickets back into the fort right away, do we?” Booth demanded.
Bradford hesitated. Mack Leaming didn't think the Federal garrison wanted to do any such thing. Some of the ground within the large perimeter Gideon Pillow first laid out was higher than the position at the juncture of Coal Creek and the Mississippi the garrison now held. If the Confederates got sharpshooters on that high ground, they could fire down on the U.S. soldiers inside the present small earthwork. That wouldn't be good at all.
“Do we?” Major Booth repeated, more sharply than before. He knew the right answer, whether Bill Bradford did or not.
“Uh, no, sir.” Major Bradford might not know the answer, but he could take a hint.
“All right, then, goddammit,” Booth said. “Get some skirmishers out to help the pickets.” He cocked his head to one side, listening to the gunfire out beyond the breastwork. “Don't send a boy to do a man's job, either, Major. The Confederates sound like they're here in numbers. “
“Very well, major,” Bradford said, and turned to Mack Leaming.
“Order Companies B and C out to the picket line.”
“Companies Band C. Yes, sir.” Leaming dashed away, shouting, “Company B forward to the picket line! Company C forward to the picket line! We have to hold off the Rebs at long range!”
Fort Pillow Page 4
