Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [114]
Not all Hood’s existing cavalry was overjoyed by the new commander. One knight grumbled bitterly to his diary, “… a man having no pretension to gentility—a negro trader, a gambler—… Forrest may be & no doubt is, the best Cav. officer in the West, but I object to a tyrannical, hotheaded vulgarian’s commanding me.”
As the blue-tinged smoke of Forrest’s oration dissipated, Ben’s shoulders sank, and he turned back to his team. He scooped a weak mixture of shriveled corn and lint from a pocket and gave each mule the smallest taste. Henri watched him. Benjamin had showed nothing at all during the altercation over the mules, but now it seemed a shadow lay across his face.
He looked at Henri over a blue cross on a mule’s back. “You known they wa’nt gone hang me there.”
Henri shook his head. “Bedford Forrest wouldn’t let that happen.”
“Bedford Forrest don’t rule the entire world and all what’s in it,” Ben said.
Henri blew a puff of air. “What’s eating you?”
“Got trouble in mind cause I cain’t see what’s comen. I know sump’n is but I cain’t see it. You know what you know ’cause you got the sight.”
Henri shook his head again. He wanted to say it wasn’t like that but he couldn’t think how to say what it was like.
His mind was still worrying over this problem when he found himself walking with Ben and Matthew toward the center of Hood’s great camp. Toward the center there was speech-making from the senior officers, with boasts of grand victories soon to come, but on the fringes the tattered soldiers amused themselves as best they might. Those with instruments picked and sang. Someone had set up a shell game on a barrel and men stood around betting for the sheer fun of it with pebbles or with wads of the worthless Confederate scrip—buttons were too valuable to gamble with now.
Henri paused to watch the dry pea disappearing, reappearing, almost always popping back into view where you didn’t expect. It’s like that, he thought, a little like that. Ben was looking at him, narrowly. Matthew had pushed ahead through the crowd, for General Hood was calling Forrest to the rostrum now.
Henri opened his mouth, closed it. He went through the loopholes in the crowd that Matthew’s passage had left half-open. Ben came behind him. Closer to the platform the men thickened in clusters, like butter beginning to clump in a churn, but here in a pocket was a card game going, on the splintered top of an empty caisson. Henri stopped and watched the cards moving under the bitten nails of the dealer’s hands. It’s a little like that too, he thought of saying, or less like cards dealt with deliberation than the whole pack scattered in a fall, each with some event wriggling on its surface but with no thread to string them all together. He could choose to pick up any card spilled from the pack. He saw that Ben was watching him again and it crossed his mind that Ben himself must have some feel for what people were thinking, or at least for what Henri was thinking, once in a while anyway.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s hear what the old man’s got to say.”
Well, soldiers—Forrest cleared his throat. I come here to jine ye. I’m gone to show ye the way into Tennessee. My conscripts are goen and I know Hood’s veterans can go. I come down here with three hunnert and fifty men. I got thirty-five hunnert conscripts now. Since May I fought in ever county in West Tennessee. …
“You ever see anything ain’t gone happen?” Ben said. “Ain’t never gone happen?”
“No,” Henri said. “I don’t think so.”
I fought in the streets of Memphis, Forrest was saying, and the women run out in their nightclothes to see us, and they will do it again in Nashville