Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [106]
“Boy, that don’t make no sense,” Forrest replied. “They’ll need to skin me afore they burnt me, else they’ll not git much of a skin.”
No one laughed. Henri, reluctantly, turned his head toward the questioner: the same stripling who’d escaped the firing squad just the day before. His pinched dirty frightened face, like a rat with the plague among them.
“And then they’ll need to catch me before they kin carry out any part of that plan,” Forrest said.
“They say they gone kill everbody.” The lad’s voice began to shake. “Say they gone kill us all and take no prisoners.”
“They can say what they want to,” Forrest said, and made to turn his back.
“But do they mean it?”
Forrest rounded on him then. “How the hell should I know if a body means what he says or not? If I was to say it I’d damn sure mean it. That’s all I know. The rest we’ll find out when we git thar. And I mean to git thar quick.”
“All right,” the boy said, stepping back. “All right.”
They rode south from Booneville on a track west of the rail bed. Beyond the thickets further west Henri could hear the faint trickling of a stream. It was already very hot, as Forrest had predicted. Now and then a woodpecker tapped at a hollow tree; the staccato drumbeat carried a long way through still air.
“What about us,” Matthew said.
Henri looked over his shoulder.
“I mean what do you think they’d do to us.”
“They?”
“The black troops with the Yankees. That wear those badges—Remember Fort Pillow.”
Henri slowed his horse so that he and Matthew fell a few lengths behind Witherspoon and the other white men of their company. “I doubt many of this bunch were ever at Fort Pillow,” he said. “They couldn’t have been. You know that.” He paused for a moment, recalling the river at sunset, running with blood; at the edges of the great blood slick, threads of blood unraveled in the water, tendrils trying to reach or root in something.
“What is it that they say they remember?” Henri asked. “What really happened or what somebody told them did?”
For a moment Matthew said nothing. He glanced back once at Benjamin, who had left the wagons to Jerry and the other teamsters and was riding in the rear with the arms of a cavalryman in his belt and on his saddlebow. What really had happened at Fort Pillow, Henri was wondering now. Was there still any autonomous fact of that action, or only the story he’d told himself?
“I don’t want to fight my own people,” Matthew said.
“Matthew,” Henri said. “Mathieu. You’ve come to the wrong war.”
Directly, Ben clucked his tongue.
“You talk like you know who your own people are,” Henri said, stopping himself from a backward glance at Ben. It struck him that maybe he was being more quarrelsome than comforting, as the crackle of rifle fire began to rip through the blackjack thicket ahead of them. Some of the Federals appeared to be armed with the new Spencer repeating carbines, but these were wont to jam in the heat of a fight, while the Navy sixes seldom misfired. And Forrest appeared to be correct that the brushy terrain did everything to conceal how few the Rebels were, at this point, in comparison to the enemy.
Henri could not make out the crossroads or the bridge through the thickets. Indeed there was more than one pair of roads that crossed in these few acres east of Tishomingo Creek. As best he could recall from riding a similar route in darkness the night before, the bridge would be maybe half a mile distant. He circled north, with Matthew and Ben, in the direction of the Baldwin Road. They had got separated from Witherspoon, last seen clubbing a Federal trooper with a jammed repeater he’d snatched from another of the enemy.
The booming of two Federal batteries fell away behind them to the south. They were angling, Henri thought, toward the Federal left flank, though it was almost impossible to locate the lines in this heavily wooded ground. Of three hundred fifty men of the Seventh Tennessee, only seventy-five were still on their feet by this time. They fought dismounted now, struggling with Federals firing from cover of a brush fence at the