Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [104]
“What page is that on?” Henri said.
“Jesus said. Hit’s on ever page.”
“Wait a minute,” Henri said, overcome with a strange effervescence of mirth. “This girl’s an abolitionist, Benjamin. A blackhearted abolitionist, I tell you.”
The girl wriggled all over and ducked her head. Henri thought maybe she almost blushed. He saw she had taken his words as a high compliment, possibly even a flirtatious one. The road now ran between two fields, one blanketed with a host of starlings like a dark snowfall.
“I’ll give ye black-hearted.” The girl picked up her head and jutted her jaw, like a horse that had got the bit in its teeth. “What y’all done over to Fort Pillow.”
“And that was what?”
“Kilt all them harmless niggers as was beggen for mercy.”
“Miss,” Matthew said. “It wasn’t quite like that. They were trying to kill us too.”
Harmless, Henri thought, well, not all the time. It was hard to construct a memory of the slaughter under the bluff because it had all been too confusing. It seemed to him though that some of the Yankee soldiers would surrender one minute, then pick up a gun and start firing the next …
“That ain’t how hit was named to me.” The girl looked at Henri. “Ain’t you a free nigger?”
Her eyes were almost colorless, like water. He found it oddly difficult to sustain her gaze. “I’ll answer to free,” he said.
“How bout y’all?” She had turned to the two men on the box. Henri noticed she hadn’t asked Matthew and Matthew had turned from the discussion to gaze off over the wagon’s tailgate at the receding field full of starlings.
Benjamin passed the reins to Ginral Jerry, who remained silent, facing forward, studying the bristly tails of the mules.
“Don’t ye want to be free?” the girl asked Ben. He studied her for a moment more, hitched around on the box to face her, one heavy arm hanging down into the wagon bed.
“Here’s a thing I been learned,” he finally said. “I was out here all by myself I might be free but I wouldn’t live long.”
“What about your brother?” Henri said, thinking this was how it was now, in this part of the country, where a tumbled-down one-room cabin housed two different kinds of partisan, and no one could tell whose Rangers were whose.
“Hell far.” The younger girl startled them with the froggy deep note of her voice. “He thinks the same as y’all do I reckon.” She snorted and turned to look backward at the starlings. “Rebel to the bone.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
June 1864
WITHIN A GLADE outside the town they buried two deserters in the rain. A third, a boy in his teens, had at the last moment been spared. Forrest, turning his head to one side to spit into the hoof-churned mud, rasped, Let the young’n live, and looked as if he might say more, but didn’t.
Afterward the boy helped them dig one grave for two. Henri didn’t know if he were friend or kin to the two grown men who’d just been shot or if the three of them had ended up in the bottom of the same sack through simple mischance alone. The boy’s face was wet as he worked, but maybe only from the downpour. Sticky mud clung to shovel blades and would not be shaken loose. When the grave had at last been filled, Benjamin led the boy away toward the shelter of the wagons. Ben’s face looked lined and weary from the digging. He said nothing, but guided the boy with a large hand set between his shoulder blades.
That night Henri lay wakeful under the forked canvas of the shebang, knowing from Matthew’s stiffness beside him that Matthew wasn’t sleeping either. Moisture beaded on the underside of the sodden cloth, soon enough began to drip. Henri pushed his mind away from the two dead men and the young survivor. He would not learn their names or know their faces. Forrest had been in a savage mood for quite some time. The dismal weather might account for some of it. Braxton Bragg, still nominally his commander in spite of all, kept him annoyed with criticism of his recruiting methods, which were indeed sometimes a bit severe, as the grim events of that day confirmed. Since Fort Pillow, the