Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [31]
“Run away from where,” Henri said. “I was born free. The same as yourself. Well, not exactly. I’m not from this country.”
“I can tell that much from the way you talk,” Little said. “But why would a free nigger want to run South?”
“You don’t know where I was coming from, do you,” Henri said. “The world is round, if you haven’t heard that. And it’s bigger than you seem to think.”
Little opened his hands palm up on his knees. The fingers were long and slender, though calloused. “I’m just asking is all,” he said.
Henri got up and walked widdershins around the bare top of the knoll. The blackberry patch had vanished in fog. Through an aureole of the mist, a long way off and a long way down, he saw Forrest riding, riding, one hand holding a six-gun high and the other reached forward to stop the wound in the throat of his horse. When he passed behind the hollow tree he looked down again and saw the weary remnants of the Army of Tennessee marching over winter-hardened ground toward the trench south of Franklin where six thousand of them were to die. The air was full of the reedy music of Old Ones.
Henri walked back into the circle of men. “I came to raise a revolution,” he said. “Kill the white men and set the black men free.”
Little’s mouth had opened, round and dark. “A nigger rebellion.”
“A revolution, I said.”
“And kill the white people?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Then why in the hell are you fighting with us?”
“Who knows?” Henri said. “But I get to kill white people almost every day.”
Little looked over at Forrest where he breathed softly on his bed of green limbs. “What about him?”
“I don’t know about him,” Henri said. “He’s hard to kill.”
“And me?” Little was on his feet suddenly, as if something had stung him. “You think I’m easy?”
Easier than you want to be, Henri thought, but he didn’t say it. He felt sad for Little, who would soon be dead, and regretted having upset him. An Old One was blowing a flute in his ear, drilled out of one of Little’s own rib bones, and Little couldn’t even hear it.
Jerry was scraping his skillet with a bundle of twigs. “Y’all white folks done et,” he said. “Now you mise well go on about yo bidness.”
Little opened his mouth again. Nath Boone flicked his straw away and stood up. “Come on, Monty,” he said. “Don’t devil these people. There’s trouble enough.”
“All right, then,” Little said. He looked at Jerry. “We thank y’all for sharing your food.”
The two white men walked away from the hilltop. Two paces off the brow of the knoll the mist had swallowed them completely. Henri stood still, feeling his hands swing from his wrists like a pair of cannon balls hanging from chain. Matthew, sitting back on his heels again, was staring at him openly. Ginral Jerry was looking anywhere else. Forrest’s breath was just barely audible, a faint hiss like a bellows sustaining a coal.
CHAPTER TEN
May 1861
AT SUNRISE Forrest stepped down from the squared-off log that served as a back step for his house in Coahoma County and strode out toward the cotton fields. It was already warm and he wore no jacket, just linsey breeches and a pullover shirt with the lace hanging loose at the throat. He beat a straw hat against his thigh as he walked.
When he came out of the grove of oaks that shaded his house he was walking down a double row of cabins in the quarters. There were twelve of them, sound buildings all, the gaps between the logs chinked tight and the plank doors and shutters properly whitewashed. Benjamin had built them, one by one as they were needed, drafting help as he required it from among the middle-sized boys in the quarters. There was one of those boys might make a pretty fair carpenter himself before he was through. Benjamin had steadied up right well since Nancy had been returned to him, and they’d got three more children besides the one she’d been carrying when Forrest went to buy her back from Coldwater.
Women worked in their dooryards, cleaning skillets or cracking corn for the next meal. A shirttail baby with her