Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [113]
“You’ve given free papers to some,” Matthew said.
Forrest looked at him directly, a studying look, for the first time in their conversation. “That I have,” he said. “But them, they warnt none of my blood, don’t ye see?”
Matthew saw no use in saying that he didn’t see. He knew it was a compliment, maybe an honor from Forrest’s point of view, but he didn’t see what use it was to him.
“I reckon I ain’t give ye the satisfaction ye come fer,” Forrest said. “Tell you one thing I know—you won’t never be free of me. No more’n I could be free of you.”
Matthew watched him silently, like an animal watching from the dark hollow of a tree. Beyond the shelter, night was falling now, with the rain, and Forrest gazed into the dark.
“I’m tellen ye the truth as I know it,” he said.
“And you always know every bit of the truth.”
“Only God could know all of it,” Forrest said. “If there is a God.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I didn’t say that,” Forrest said. “I jest don’t want God to go messen in my business.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
November 1864
HENRI DIDN’T QUITE KNOW where he was when he woke on a pile of empty gunny sacks in the back of Ben’s wagon—somewhere in Alabama: Florence? Montgomery? He propped up on an elbow, opening his sleep-sticky eyes on the carved wildcats going at each other from either side of Ben’s wagon seat. There was a real-life scuffle happening too, between men, not animals, there at the front of the wagon. Somebody from General Hood’s quartermaster corps was trying to unhitch one of Ben’s mules, and when Ben kept batting his hands off the harness, the white soldier wheeled on him, raising a fist—
“You don’t quit foolen with me nigger I swear—”
Ben simply stepped back and pulled a Navy six from under his shirttail. The other man stopped short with his mouth hanging open. Slowly he backed away from the wagon, tripping once before he reached the shade of an overhang where Major Landis, whom Hood had sent to commandeer some of Forrest’s mules, was standing and watching the scene.
“He thrown down on me with a gun—that nigger yonder!” He bumped the major’s elbow and pointed.
Ben’s revolver was no longer in evidence by that time; he stood indifferently as if inspecting the harness of his double-teamed mules. Henri got out of the wagon, flicking shreds of burlap from the rags of his clothes, and stood beside him. Matthew was already there and so were John Morton and Witherspoon.
Before he hove into their sight, they could already hear Forrest in full cry—“By damn if he did I ordered him to do it—by damn that’s my nigger and I’ll answer for him and I won’t stand fer nobody messen with him—d’ye hear what I say?”
Witherspoon cupped a hand to Henri’s ear and said, “I expect they can hear him clear down to Atlanta.” Henri masked a smile.
“Go back to your quarters,” Forrest bellowed at Landis, “and don’t you come here again or send nobody about no mules neither one. Tell yore goddamn quartermaster if he bothers me anymore about any mules I’ll come down to his office and tie his long legs in a double bowknot around his neck and choke him to death with his own scrawny shins …”
Forrest’s beard stabbed the air as his lower jaw snapped open and shut. “I whupped the enemy and captured every mule wagon and ambulance in my command, I ain’t ast the government for wagons nor stock in the last two years—my teams air a-goen as they are or they ain’t goen at all.”
There were threads of white in the beard now, Henri noticed, and they hadn’t been there when Forrest first overtook him on the Brandenburg road in 1861.
THEY’D COME to Alabama still flush from laying waste to Sherman’s depots at Johnsonville, though that triumph didn’t make much difference now, since Sherman had taken Atlanta and could take whatever else he wanted from the fat of the Georgia land. Still, Forrest had enjoyed good luck recruiting since he’d come this way.
General Hood had recoiled from Sherman and was marching