Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [130]
Here came John J. Neal, shot down as he rode with a dispatch from Forrest to Hood. The message said what?—Don’t come. Death is waiting. More than six thousand men to be felled in one day.
Now, from this now, Henri peered into the mist, knowing that beyond it he might see the Army of Tennessee hurling itself to total destruction against Schofield’s fortified line south of Franklin. Blood running in the trenches ten inches deep. Forrest almost biting his own lips off in his frustration that Hood would not order him to flank Schofield out of his hastily dug works, preferring to charge, head-on, to his ruin.
Here came Will Strickland, killed near Pulaski on Christmas Day, 1864, while he helped Forrest cover Hood’s wretched retreat from the carnage of Franklin and Nashville—the last shredded remnants of that army slipping across the rivers to the west. Forrest had been fond of Strickland, who’d come without leave from an infantry regiment to join the escort—liked him so well that he sent seven men back to the Twenty-seventh Tennessee to replace him. Green recruits they might have been but still there were seven of them.
There were Union boys coming in now too. Henri did not know their names, though he recognized many of their faces. They had not only met at sword’s point. Sometimes they’d find each other in some smokehouse or cornfield, hollow and famished, together in that as they scavenged for food. By the war’s end, one in every ten able-bodied men in the Union states would have been, had already been killed in some battle. In the Confederacy, it would be one in four.
Jerry could not possibly feed so many! But Henri had a chunk of warm pone in his fist, and when he looked at the skillet there was some left there. Not a lot, but there was some.
What a faithful service Jerry had made. No matter what had already happened he always managed to feed them something. And the dead were always, endlessly hungry. Henri was grateful. He wanted to weep, but the dead have no tears.
Some of the new arrivals seemed to look at him strangely. Henri scratched his head. There were burrs in his hair. With his bare chest, bare feet, tattered trousers held up with frayed rope, he must look like a contraband, a runaway slave.
His cornbread was finished. Last gravelly crumbs in the back of his craw. He would always be hungry but he wanted to rest. He went back to the limestone shelf and stretched out. Around him the fiddling and drumbeat grew distant.
He covered his face with his forearm to block out the pale light of the sky. But his arm was transparent; he could see right through it. He could see straight through his own eyelids too. The hilltop was empty. Nobody was there. He himself was not there. There was no one but Jerry, serving the dead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
May 1865
JERRY LOOPED a piece of soft old rope around King Philip’s big head for a hackamore. After the war there were not enough ready-made halters to go around. He stroked the velvet of King Philip’s nostrils and clucked to him as he tied him to an iron ring in the hall of the barn, then went to clean his stall.
There wasn’t such of a whole lot to do because this task was done every day; still Jerry grunted every time he bent to fork up a clump of wet straw and manure. During the war he had often got wet and slept cold and now he had a touch of that arthuritis in both his knees and his right hip. The place on his hip worked around to the back sometimes.
He racked the pitchfork in the barrow