Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [125]
Through the vapors to the east he saw, down a long brushy slope of the hill, young Matthew sitting on the tailgate of an empty wagon, swinging his long legs just an inch or so short of the ground, his head lowered despondently, rolling a revolver from one hand to the other. Henri nodded to himself and started down the steep slope toward the boy, picking his way through buck bushes and briars. He was halfway down when a fine big rabbit popped up practically at his feet and went bouncing away around the curve of the hill. By the time Henri thought to produce his own pistol the rabbit had lost itself in the ground cover.
He hung the pistol back on his belt and hopped out to the level ground where the wagon was stalled in its ruts. It was Benjamin’s wagon, Henri noticed. Ben had carved the back of the box seat with two wildcat heads snarling and spitting to right and to left. Benjamin himself slept in the wagon bed, cushioned by a heap of tattered flour sacks.
Matthew glanced up briefly, looked back at his knees. He was rolling the empty cylinder in and out of the frame of his revolver. It made a sharp metallic click whenever it snapped back in.
“What are you back here brooding for?” Henri said. Back along the road the wagon had come from he could hear an intermittent boom of cannon; smoke rose on the horizon to mingle with dust in the setting sun.
Matthew shrugged. “No cartridges.”
“You’ll find plenty forward, I’d expect.”
This time Matthew held Henri’s eyes. “You?”
Henri turned to gaze upward at the Old Ones’ bald hill, but it was gone; he seemed instead to have descended a much wider slope, a neglected pasture going to brush and blackberry bramble and the orange-blond sage grass. At the top of the pasture was a partly collapsing rock wall fence and above that the crown of the hill was covered with a tight bristling top knot of trees. By this landscape Henri could tell they were in Tennessee, and by the king snake colors of the leaves he knew it must be fall. “He don’t need me for nothing,” Matthew said. The cylinder rolled out of the pistol in his palm, clicked back.
“They don’t really need me either,” Henri said. It was November, he recalled, and Forrest was at Johnsonville, destroying the Federal supply depots there where the railroad met the Tennessee River. The startled Yankees had been spooked into burning their own boats before they scattered, while a thoughtful barrage of Forrest’s artillery set fire to the warehouses east of the river. Thus the smoke … Forrest himself was passing the time by taking jocular charge of one of Morton’s guns, one of the few instruments of war he had no real idea how to manipulate, calling out nonsensical comments and commands: a rickety-shay! Elevate the breech of that gun lower! A last merry dance on the brink of ruin. Those burning stores were meant for Sherman, but Sherman had already taken Atlanta. General Hood was already marching the Army of Tennessee north from that defeat toward its ultimate doom in the shallow ditch south of Franklin. There was nothing now, except pillage, between Sherman and the Atlantic Ocean.
“He caught Willie horseracing again,” Matthew said. “Punished him hard. Made him tote fence rails with the rest of the boys, until he was ready to drop.”
“And so?”
“He didn’t do a thing to me.”
“And you’re complaining about that.”
“He didn’t even see me,” Matthew said. “Like I just wasn’t there. I would have won the damn race too, if he hadn’t stopped it.”
Henri looked up the slope again, wondering how many more rabbits might be hid in the wiry scraggle of buck bushes. His stomach folded in on itself. A gust brought a swirl of rust-colored leaves from the hilltop to settle among the patches of sage grass in the pasture.
“Don’t tell me he didn’t see you,” he told Matthew. “He might not show anything about it but there’s not much he doesn’t see.” “Here’s one thing I can’t stand about Willie,” Matthew said.
“Just one?” Henri forced a smile.
“Just—every day of the week,