Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [119]
“Haints.” By damn, by Satan’s horny cloven hooves, he might as well be twelve again and trying to spark some scrawny girl in a gunny sack for a dress.
Catharine’s laugh came low and husky. “This buryen ground too young fo’ haints.” He saw the white of her teeth as she smiled in the dark. “Not no scary ones, no way.”
It was true—Elmwood had been dedicated just two years before and thus far was most commonly used as a park. Of a Sunday he’d driven the rambles himself, with Mary Ann and the children and sometimes a grandmother. He’d not known of niggers coming here much, though Catharine seemed to know her way.
The air was heavy with crape myrtle aroma, and all the dogwoods were in bloom; white quatrefoil leaves trembling up to the moon. The giddy myrtle scent caught in the back of his gullet. He followed her under a spray of dogwood and stopped beside a waist-high marble slab.
She turned to face him. His fingertips trailed the surface of the stone, dipped into indentations of the letters there. “You’re not afraid,” he said.
“Of haints?”
“Of me.”
Again the warm syrup of her laughter. “You think I don’t know what a man is?” She shook back her hair and stood with her back arched, hands cocked at her waist. “I seen how you looks at me. I knows what you wants.”
“But what do you want?” It could not be himself who said these words—asking a black slave wench what she wanted.
She loosed some hidden clasp and all at once the dress fell from her, pooling at her feet. When she stepped out of it, toward him, the warm loamy scent of her seemed to wash over him already.
“What I can git,” she told him.
And with a smile, though her almond eyes were not entirely smiling. She looked to him sleek as a seal in the fractured moonlight that fell through the dogwood. Her breasts rose toward him as she breathed. He had not touched her yet, not ever, not even when he’d seen her the first time, chained to a ring on a post of that stall. In a flash before he reached for her he wondered why he would choose this. To be no longer master of anyone, and least of all himself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
April 1863
MELEE. A ricochet whine brought Henri to a heightened state of consciousness, focused as if on the rust-red pain of a wasp sting. The horses bunched, Forrest’s charger jostling Henri’s mount. A string of curses why that slipslidenfleabittenwormriddeneggsuckenliv-erblownhorsestealengraverobben son of Satan I’ll tie his skinny legs around his neck in a sweet bow knot afore I’m done … It seemed the shooting came from all sides now, three hundred and sixty degrees of a circle closing in. The point of Forrest’s double-ground sword stuck up, revolved, as if to cut little crescents from the clouds in the blue sky overhead.
Henri looked at Forrest’s magnificent bay war horse and couldn’t think of the animal’s name, couldn’t seem to remember if this was the fifth or the fifteenth horse Forrest would have shot from under him—and was that an event that had already happened, or was it still to come?
From the rear or what had been their rear a cannon coughed up thunder and grapeshot. Henri was shocked to a slightly clearer sense of the occasion and its time and place. It was spring, green grass and the pillowy fresh air told him that much, the fields so lush their horses risked foundering if they overgrazed. Last night Ginral Jerry had come into camp with half a dozen young rabbits slung over his shoulder, so dazed with spring fever, Jerry had claimed, he had only to snatch them up by their ears.
The pitch of the ringing in Henri’s ears shifted, and near him he saw a corporal clap a hand around his upper arm. Blood leaked through the cracks between his fingers as the gray cloth stained. To the corporal’s woebegone expression Forrest bit off a few words. “Hold yer horse in, son, ye ain’t bad hurt till yet.”
Smoke to the west—the Yankees had been burning barns and fields. A courier came galloping in amongst them: “Stanley’s run over Armstrong’s rear! Captured a mess of guns, and Captain Freeman!