Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [101]
“War means fighting. And fighting means killing.” Forrest turned to Ben. “Step up, son, and turn the grindstone.”
And the stone’s movement drew the other men to it, like a magnet would. Henri expected Orville to slink away, but he remained with the rest of them. The rolling of the kettledrums continued. They seemed to have gathered a shared overtone, a note held deep in a common throat. Henri felt the petro rhythm pulsing in his palms.
“War to the knife,” Forrest said, in the same chanting pattern, his hands wreathed in sparks where he held blade to stone. “Knife to the hilt. They say the world itself turns like a grindstone. Over and over. Don’t never stop.” He looked up, while the metal still sang against the stone, including Morton, Orville, Matthew in his gaze. “Ye may whet yoreself agin it. Or let it grind ye down.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
October 1864
HENRI AND MATTHEW RODE abreast through woods a few miles west of Paris Landing, on a trail of a drove of half-wild hogs. A hundred yards back, Ben’s wagon lumbered along after them, making a more difficult way through the trees. Forrest had sent them all out requisitioning but it was harder than it used to be around here. Farmers were hiding all they had, from hams and dry corn to their half-grown children, and letting their livestock ramble the woods.
Hogs were crafty, mo’ smarter than man, Jerry would say. Did say. Besides which it was hard to draw a bead on a hog with a pistol from the back of a horse cantering over rough ground. But Matthew had wounded a big spotted sow in the hindquarters, and her back leg was dragging a blood spoor over the carpet of oak leaves and acorns on which the hogs fed. At last Henri circled his horse ahead of her, hopped down and planted a bullet between her eyes.
“Bleed her, boy—don’t just stand there!” Jerry shouted from the slow-moving wagon. Matthew stood, sword drawn, unsure of what do with it. Jerry skipped down from the wagon and ran toward them, unfolding a clasp knife from his bib pocket. He dropped to his knees beside the sow and in the same motion had slit her throat.
“Now he’p me hang her,” he said, producing a length of cord from another pocket. In a moment the sow swung head down from a branch of a white oak. Matthew and Henri both skipped back as Jerry opened the sow’s belly with a quick downward pull of the knife blade, and the sharp-smelling huddle of guts spilled out on the blood-soaked leaves. Jerry wiped the knife and looked at Matthew.
“Don’t reckon you knows how to clean chitlens?” He snorted. “Done spent too much time hangen round the house.”
He turned toward the wagon and called to Ben, who had got down to address his pair of mules. “What you doen? We got us a hog.”
“Seen if a mule can eat acorns,” Ben said.
“Can they?” Henri called.
“They can but they won’t.”
A gunshot exploded and Henri crouched and looked for his horse, who had shied away—he crawled two yards forward and caught the trailing reins.
“Hog thieves! Hog thieves!”
At the edge of the trees a starveling boy was reloading an ancient firearm with an octagon barrel twice as long as he was tall. A girl in a ragged skirt assisted him, standing on a stump to ram in the charge.
“Hold up,” Ben called from the wagon. “We got money to pay.” He waved a fistful of brown Confederate scrip he’d grabbed from a bushel basket of the stuff in the back of the wagon.
“Just as soon have that many dead leaves,” the boy called, struggling to steady the long wavering barrel, till the girl stooped and put her shoulder under it. “Ain’t worth no different.”
The rifle cracked. By hazard the bullet cut the cord and the sow flopped down onto the steaming heap of her innards. A second later the air was