Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [44]
“But now sometimes I wonder about it too.”
A couple of sparrows had landed in the shade of the magnolias now lengthening toward the porch across the yard. Mary Ann watched the little brown birds pecking in the dirt.
“Well,” Fanny said. “I know he loves you. More’n anything he’s got. More’n me or Mamma, or anybody really.”
She rocked, considering; her beans were done. “Except Fan, I reckon. How he loved little Fan … Too much, maybe.”
“Can a person love too much?”
Fanny didn’t respond to that. Mary Ann was watching Catharine, who had tucked up her broom and left the yard, and was moving at her molasses-smooth pace back toward the board gate into the slave pen.
“Suppose he loves her?” Mary Ann blurted.
“Well,” Fanny said. “Suppose he doesn’t.”
“Then he lies with her without loving her,” Mary Ann said. “And which way would I rather?”
“Sister,” said Fanny. “If it’s a thing you cain’t know, you might be better off not to think about it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
August 1864
THE RAIN HAD SLACKED a little when Henri came back into Oxford with a wagonload of corn foraged from the farmland east of the town. With Ginral Jerry and a handful of others from Forrest’s escort he’d spent the better part of the day playing hide and go seek with Federals of A. J. Smith’s command who were also scouring the country for supplies, and with better success since they were four times as numerous.
“Rosen-ears!” Lieutenant Dinkins called out brightly, slipping up to the wagon to peel back a green shuck.
“Git yo’ dirty paws offa that corn,” Ginral Jerry told him. Dinkins hunched his shoulders and pretended to slink away. Forrest looked toward them from where he stood with Chalmers on the lowest of the courthouse steps, his boots slathered to the top with tar-black Mississippi mud.
“That ain’t no rosen-ears,” he said. “That’s hoss-corn.”
“General,” Chalmers called his attention back. “What do you mean for me to do while you are gone?”
“Play like we ain’t gone nowhere.” Forrest’s dark eyes turned toward Henri. “Well, Ornery? Air ye ready to go?”
Go where, Henri thought. He said nothing. He had been riding around the country all day.
Forrest’s whole face brightened. He grinned through his beard, then let out a wild cackle that brought every ragged soldier lounging under the eaves around the square to his feet, whether booted or bare.
“Come on, boys,” Forrest whooped. “We’re a-goen to Memphis!”
· · ·
THE RAIN PICKED UP as night fell and the column moved west on the road toward Panola, two by two. Henri rode beside the wagon, watching water stream off the brim of his hat, trying not to listen to the growling of his stomach.
“Cornbread,” Lieutenant Dinkins said suddenly. “By Godfrey, I smell cornbread.”
“Leave your dreaming,” Henri said.
“No, Hank, but I swear I do. Hot pone at two o’clock and not three hundred yards forward.”
“Hesh up,” Ginral Jerry said from the wagon. “You maken me think I smells it too.”
But around the next bend of the road they came upon a couple of dozen women of the country standing under a brush arbor by a long trestle table, handing up pieces of cornbread to every man as they passed. Henri got a chunk the size of his fist. It had a drip of molasses on it to boot. The burst of saliva at the back of his mouth was painful when he took the first bite.
“Glory be,” Dinkins said, with real reverence, before he stopped his mouth with cornbread. Henri forced himself to eat slowly. He liked riding near Dinkins, who was a cheerful soul. Scarce twenty years old, he still managed to live the war as a frolic. He never seemed to know that his feet were blistered to his iron stirrups, bleeding through the socks that were all he had to cover them. The rain poured down. Henri rode on, content with the bread still warm in his belly.
“When we once get to Memphis,” Dinkins