Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [58]
Often when he left a dream like that it took more than a moment for him to understand where he had landed in the living world. This morning they were riding hard, but he didn’t feel the verve of pursuit. They must not be chasing then. He began to feel sure that they were running. Here was a town of some description. Cowan, Tennessee, in fact—clawed out of not much in the Cumberland foothills about ten years before, called into being by a railroad coming through. Forrest’s wife’s family had been on this ground for fifty years or so, when there were farms and not much town. Before that it was Indians.
The riders splashed across a fork of Boiling Creek, and soon after clattered over the railroad track. A ways out of Cowan, a tunnel had been blasted through the mountain to let the railroad through, and the last few days there had been talking of blowing it up, so as to stop the Yankees using it to chase Bragg south to Chattanooga. But then the Confederates needed that passway just as much. “Hit’s more than a notion to tear that thang down,” Forrest said, “and builden it back won’t be no easier.”
They rode by the log courthouse, not stopping to parley. A clerk in his shirtsleeves popped out the door and stood staring after them, arms akimbo—then turned and raised one hand to shade his eyes as he looked back along the way they had come. Then he darted inside and banged the door. Others in the hamlet were barring shut their houses, reasoning that Yankees must be hard on the heels of such a precipitate Confederate flight.
The last few days they’d been fighting running battles with the forward-most detachments of Rosecrans’s Federal cavalry. Fighting and running. Forrest liked running into the thick of the enemy—not away. But Bragg and his whole army had been outmaneuvered and flushed from the East Tennessee Valley; Bragg’s command was scuttling south across the Tennessee River to find shelter in the mountains back of Chattanooga. At the evening halt, Forrest would draw Bragg’s name in the dirt with the toe of his boot and spit on the word before he slept. “What a sorry ass they done give me to cover.” He said that like it was a prayer.
They all slept light, and not for long, so oftentimes Henri couldn’t find a rock to suit him and would only stretch in the wormy dirt for a black inky blotting of an hour or two. One-quarter roused by the thumping of boots and saddles, he might ride for a mile or more before he understood just where in the waking world he was. The fringed palm leaf bore him away toward a thing that hadn’t happened yet, when they would be fighting a hard battle near the banks of the Tombigbee River, in hot pursuit of Sooy Smith. Just over the bridge, Forrest crossed paths with one of his own privates who’d flung away his gun and gear and was running full-tilt and fear-stricken away from the fight as fast as his frantic legs would carry him. Forrest pounced from his horse and caught the fugitive by the scruff of his neck and threw him down, then broke a green blackberry cane to thrash him with, not caring for the thorns tearing his own palm. When he was satisfied with the switching he yanked the soldier to his feet and shoved him toward the battle again: “Git on, and goddamn ye! Ye’d as well get kilt over thar as here and a lot more comfortable too, I’ll warrant.” And by then the soldier seemed happy enough to rush back into the fray barehanded.
Another day that was yet to come, Forrest would be reclining on his coat, which he’d spread as a ground cloth, propped up on his elbows and turned on one hip (for his backside was all broken out in boils). He would go thin as a rake that summer, bones thrusting out through the skin of his face, eyes flickering yellow-green like