Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [124]
“Hell if a mule deserts you go after him,” Ben said. “Never mind a man.”
“Notice I ain’t come after you,” Forrest said.
Ben laughed almost inaudibly. “Figured you jest hadn’t come yet.”
“Don’t think I didn’t notice though,” Forrest said, as if he hadn’t heard. “Watching you leave was like seeing birds go before a storm. Low to the ground and fast as a bullet. Hit’s a sign.”
He laced his fingers behind his head, and looked up at the sag of canvas over his head. “We’ve looked right po’ly for quite a spell, since Atlanta went down, and I know what all Sherman’s doen down to Georgia—I might of stopped that bastard if they let me. But right now, I’d still say we got a chance to whup it. We’re bout to get the drop on Schofield, and if Hood can take back Nashville after that, why boys, hit’s gone be a whole new day.”
He looked at Ben inquiringly, out from under the deep shade of his brows.
Ben straightened again. “I come to ax your leave to go home, General Forrest.”
“All right.” Forrest leaned into his camp table, dug awkwardly at a clean sheet of paper with a pen crabbed painfully in his left hand. He took a long time to finish and sign.
“Benjamin,” he said. “I’ll give ye this here free paper. No, I won’t say that. I’ll say ye earned it.”
Ben reached for the document. “Thank you, sir.”
“Say hidy to Nancy and the chirren when ye git thar,” Forrest said.
“I’ll be sure and do that,” Benjamin said. Forrest still held the paper not quite in his reach.
“If ye’ll wait till morning I’ll have Major Anderson copy it out fair.” Forrest grinned. “Ye know I hadn’t got much of a hand fer writen.”
“That’s all right,” Benjamin said. “I’ll be more’n happy with what you wrote.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
THE ASHES of Ginral Jerry’s fire had gone cold. He hunkered on his heels, scouring the iron with a handful of sand, without looking at the work his hands were doing. Instead he peered across the dead embers into the hollow of the dead tree there on the hilltop, white-stubbled chin lifted, his watery brown eyes alert.
From the stump on which he sat, Henri followed the direction of Jerry’s gaze. The candle that sometimes burned in the hollow had gone out—it looked as if the wick had consumed itself all the way to the end, leaving lacy, wraithlike wings of white wax melted to the wood. Around the wax came a cold boneless movement, muscle pouring itself through a loop inside the hollow of the tree. Henri was startled enough that he froze, and his breath stopped for a moment when he realized it was a snake that wore those colored bands. In these parts he could recognize the copperhead, moccasin and rattler, also the green garter snake and the speckled chicken snake. The serpent in the tree was none of these, and Henri could not find its head, to know if it had the wedge shape of a viper. Then presently the snake’s head rose up from a crockery bowl that had been set at the bottom of the hollow place. The head was narrow and its color was duller than the rest, as if it had been dipped in … milk. How would Jerry have come by milk in this country?—which between the Rebels and the Yanks had been scraped as dry as that black skillet scoured with sand. The ribbon of black tongue flicked in, out of the scaled mouth slot. The colored body of the snake dripped off the convolutions of the inner wood, until the whole creature had disappeared into a lower crevice of the tree.
“Jerry,” Henri said cautiously.
“King snake,” Jerry told him. “Ain’t pizen. Ain’t no harm in’m at all …”
The hilltop was contained in a pocket of mist, a pearly gray dimness like a cataract. Henry got up and walked the rim of the hill to the cardinal points. West: through the parting of the mist, he could see the distant figures of Forrest and his escort fighting a rearguard action to cover the retreat of Hood’s decimated army, from the bloody disasters at Franklin and Nashville. South, Forrest sat his horse beside Charles Anderson, facing down a darkly wooded trail like a tunnel, debating whether to fly to Texas or Mexico