Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [127]
“If we’re fighting for slavery,” Henri said, once he had a partial grip on himself, “we’re not going to win.”
Matthew clamped one hand on the grip of his pistol and one on the barrel, squeezed as if he meant to bend it. Then his hands loosened and he laid the pistol on the worn boards of the wagon bed beside his thigh.
“I’ll never be more than a nigger to him,” he said.
“Listen to you,” Henri said. “All twisted up about a word. You think he never was called a bad name in his life? A word never meant that much to Bedford Forrest. It’s what’s inside your skin that counts. Bone and gristle. Blood and heart.”
The yellow light of anger faded from Matthew’s eyes, replaced by a weariness that was also familiar. Henri felt a little sad that he couldn’t stay with him all the way. But Matthew would survive the war.
“Mathieu,” he said. “Listen to me. You’re trying to pry something out of him that you’ve already got. You got as strong a dose of him as Willie does. And he knows it just as well as you do. Take that. Live your life with that.”
“But am I his son or am his slave? And I can’t figure out if I love him or hate him.”
“That’s right,” Henri said. “You’re right about that. Suppose maybe you’re allowed to do both.”
Matthew’s gaze narrowed. “You talk like a hoodoo man, sometimes,” he said. “What are you, anyway?”
Zanj, Henri thought, the spirit that walks with you. “Just an idea,” he said instead, “of what you might become.”
· · ·
HE WAS ALREADY GONE when Benjamin sat up, blinking slowly, his eyes coming clear. He dropped off the back of the wagon, took a few steps below the roadway, and pissed on the fading autumn grass. Buttoning his trousers again, he walked back toward Matthew and the wagon.
“We best get on,” he said, as he climbed aboard.
Matthew nodded and joined him on the decorated box. Ben clucked to the drowsing mule and the wheels began to turn.
“You oughtent to spend so much time talken to dead folks,” Benjamin told him. “They’s a whole lot of life ahead of you yet.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
November 1864
FORREST, with his escort about him, sat his horse to the east of the Lewisburg Pike, from a point where he could see Federal sharpshooters on a knoll just across the Harpeth River, picking off men from the van of the Confederate column marching doggedly, upon Hood’s order, head on toward Schofield’s entrenched works in Franklin.
“Jackson,” Forrest hollered, twisting his hat in his hands, “take yore boys across that stream and run them Yankees off that hill.” He continued abusing his hat as Jackson and his men obeyed the order. Henri, followed by Major Strange, rode their horses close into Forrest’s left side. “That’s how it ought to gone all over,” Forrest was muttering. “Hood had the sense to listen to me, I’d flushed Schofield out of all his works the same way and we might of whupped’m solid here … instead—” Forrest jammed his hat on his head, pulled the brim down to shade his eyes. His fingers had turned blue with the sharp winter cold. “He’s set on killen ever last man he’s got, chargen’m head-on into them trenches.”
The bloodbath was already coming, Henri thought, most certainly it had already begun, away to the left of their position, with heavy constant firing along the Columbia Pike, where Hood had insisted his infantry charge the Federal trenches and abatis across a couple of hundred yards of open, frozen field. Forrest took off his hat again, rolled it tight, then idly reshaped it on the pommel of his saddle. “We had’m in the bag at Spring Hill,” he said. “Sent for him once, sent for him twicet. No sir, General is not to be DISTURBED goddamn his eyes. Too full of whiskey and opium to raise up his sorry ass outen the bed.”
“Sent for you yesterday,” Henri said. An expression he’d learned among slaves of the South. “Now here you come today.” Such a heart sadness in this handful of words. Forrest did not appear to hear the sound of them, much less capture their sense.
“And today he damn well won’t hear what