Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [128]
“Well, now,” Major Strange said as he stroked his long beard. “He might have been better disposed to you if you hadn’t offered to tie his quartermaster’s legs around his neck.”
“Might have been don’t make no matter.” Forrest was talking to Major Strange, though Henri had his horse and himself positioned right between them. “We’ll need ever last mule we got fore this is over and done with and Hood will too, to get his wreckage hauled away. Hit’s his whole damn army getten itself blown to smithereens down there.”
“Ain’t it the truth,” Major Strange said sorrowfully. “Just as well we’re not down there with them.”
“Ye think so?” Forrest looked sharply at Major Strange, looking right through Henri. “Well … ye might say that. Hell ye might say Hood has saved my life by sending me way around to Hell and gone and this far out of the action. Only single question I got—Why he’d have wanted to?”
The winter wind blew in their faces.
To the west, the grumble of gunfire rose and fell. The shallow trench so hurriedly dug by Schofield’s men before the Carter house was now beginning to fill with blood. Henri knew this though he couldn’t see it from where he sat.
“He might have known he’d need you more another day,” he said. But they were running out of days.
Forrest shot an irritable look straight through Henri to Major Strange. “What’s that ye say?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Major Strange replied.
He can’t see me, Henri thought. A bolt of cold shot down his spine. And he always sees everybody, for better or worse; he sees every man and knows him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
HIS HEAD ROCKED sharply back, painlessly but very hard. He lifted his hands to both sides of his head, but was afraid to touch it. He merely framed it airily with his fingertips. A hollow ran through his head from front to back with a brown wren flying backward through it, a discreet and modest little bird.
Forrest was riding out ahead of him still, ahead of them all, standing up straight in the saddle, slashing and screaming defiance and rage. It appeared to Henri now that the slit in the world’s fabric which Forrest galloped effortlessly through was now this very same echoing hollow passage through his own head.
His limbs were weakening, the grip of his knees on the plunging horse began to loosen, to give way. He snatched at the wild-flying reins and missed, then clutched at the saddlebow. Beginning to fall, he kicked free of one stirrup, but the other was caught. In terror, he knew he was sure to be dragged. Then something else surrendered, a stirrup leather broke; in one flighty instant Henri was airborne.
Then darkness, or rather a pearly mist, and still no pain.
As he came to, he smelled cooking first. Fatback sweating grease on hot iron. His eyes didn’t seem to work right yet, or else he just somehow couldn’t open them. He felt about with the flats of his hands and seemed to be lying on one of those limestone shelves he favored whenever he could find them. All over the hills of Tennessee they were usually easy enough to discover.
Apart from a distant high-pitched ringing, both his ears seemed to work all right. He could hear the first hectic notes of “Devil’s Dream” on a fiddle nearby. Who was it used to fiddle that tune so?
Henri sat up, tucking his legs up under him, and looked about the edges of his pallet of stone, for scorpions or centipedes or stinging woolly worms or snakes. He could see now, well enough. Satisfied there were no venomous creepy-crawlies in his range, he stretched his legs and lowered his bare feet into the dirt beyond the stone. The dust between his toes was cool, but not unpleasantly so. If he had not lost his boots in the fall then someone must have removed them while he was laid out here.
Ginral Jerry tended a small hot, almost smokeless fire, over which he was cooking coldwater cornbread, a single hoecake that occupied the whole circumference of the pan. He hunkered, tail-bone hanging over his heels, flicking the hoecake now and then with a clean chip so that it would not stick.
The cornbread had a nubby