Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [11]
“You give?” he said. “Say calf rope!” His voice was muffled by his bloody nose. Matthew stuck a stiffened finger into his throat and weaseled free, landing a swift kick in Willie’s midsection as Willie struggled up, then catching him with an open hand across the cheek when Willie came upright. Matthew danced back, out of range. A demon was in him, Henri saw—it unnerved him more than a little. Some of the graybacks had begun to clap, on a pounding rhythm, to move the fighters harder.
Henri whipped in and caught Matthew on the forearm. “Mathieu,” he hissed, distracting him with the queer pronunciation. “Come back.”
Matthew’s arm throbbed against his palm like a strummed brace wire. His hand and the arm it grasped were much the same shade: coffee with a swirl of cream. As quick as that Matthew broke the grip and twisted away and turned his yellow-burning eyes on Henri.
“Why are you fighting me?” he said bitterly. “Why me?”
If I had a hundred men like you, Henri thought. Or twenty-five or even ten. In New Orleans or Charleston or Louisville … Harpers Ferry. Though Matthew was a boy yet. He’d soon be twenty, Henri guessed, and if Matthew had really been a slave the boy in him would have long since been extinguished.
Matthew turned his burning eyes on Willie again. In an instant they were rolling on the ground once more. The back of Matthew’s shirt tore loose in Willie’s clutch.
“Goddamn yore eyes git up from thar.” General Forrest had come out of nowhere, himself in a towering battle rage. Henri moved out of the line of his approach. No man wanted to meet that head-on.
“Don’t ye know hit’s still yet Yankees to fight? They ain’t no shortage of’m neither. And you pair of fools a-wasten yore strength on each other. Git up out of that and look at me.”
Willie stood, his hands dropping to his hips, and looked at the region of Forrest’s belt buckle, snuffling and swallowing the blood that kept drizzling from his left nostril over his upper lip. Matthew rotated his eyes onto Forrest like muzzles of a pair of cannon.
“My own blood son a-wasten hisself in sech foolishness,” Forrest snapped. “And you, Matthew, my boy. Hadn’t ye got no better sense than that? Look at yoreself the both of ye. Look each other in the eye.”
Both boys obeyed him then. The yellow fire faded from Matthew’s stare. Henri saw that both pairs of eyes were the same—black, hard and shiny like obsidian.
Willie was first to drop the gaze. He broke away and stalked off into the brush around the clearing. Matthew turned to Forrest then, his open hands held up.
“If I’m yours,” he said, “why won’t you own me?”
Forrest’s own rage had drained out of him now. He looked around the clearing. The men of his escort, white and black, were doing their best to seem as if they’d never had the least interest in this fight or even known it was happening. Some cleaned their guns, or searched for dry socks, or rummaged in their kits for rations. Ginral Jerry struck flint and steel over a frayed heap of deadfall sticks, then crouched down to blow on the spark. The sun had come up somewhere now, sending green-gold dappling through the brush. When Forrest spoke, his words seemed to come out of the same sad bitterness as Matthew’s.
“I own the lot of ye,” he said. “Cain’t ye see that?”
He looked all around to be sure no one would answer. Now even Matthew’s head hung low. Then Forrest turned and strode away, in the direction of the horses.
Ginral Jerry was molding cakes with cornmeal and cold water. They didn’t even have any salt left now. But when the first hoecake hit the hot iron, the sizzle and smell clenched up Henri’s stomach, and he felt that ache at the back of his jaws.
He looked away from his hunger, anywhere. Matthew, head lowered, wandered out of his view. On a low springing branch of a pin oak sapling, two goldfinches shone bright in a sunbeam. In the hollow of the tree, the stub of a white candle obscurely burned.
CHAPTER FIVE
April 1854
THE CHICKENS WERE JUST going to roost when the man named Herndon