Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [62]
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
June 1863
FORREST WAS PEELING a little green apple with a penknife when Lieutenant Gould came into the quartermaster’s office, carefully moving the smaller of the two blades in a spiral around the knotty fruit, so the apple skin came off all in one curly piece. The nitpicking discussion of supplies and transport had paused as the several other men in the room watched the procedure, waiting to see if Forrest would get the peel off whole. Then Gould swarmed in, with a swirl of the tails of his long white duster, and pressed up against the edge of the table, vibrating.
“General,” he said. “The matter of my transfer.”
Forrest took a bite of the peeled apple and found it, unsurprisingly, sour. He set it down on the blotter before him.
“All right, Mister Gould,” he said. “Let’s step out into the hallway where we can speak apart.” He pulled the blade through his thumb and forefinger to clean off the apple juice, and snapped the knife shut as he stood up.
“I won’t be a minute, boys,” he said, and followed Gould out of the room, twirling the folded knife in his right hand.
They paced the corridor of the Masonic Hall, for Gould could not be still. It was a long hallway, and dim; at the east end a little sunshine leaked through a fanlight above the door. In the dusty eaves a handful of little bats hung upside down, asleep. Forrest kept spinning the closed knife in his fingers, kicking it with his thumb to make it turn, looking anywhere but at Gould, and wishing he had never consented to their meeting.
Not long before, Gould had given up a pair of cannon to the Federals who charged him at Sand Mountain, during the long pursuit of Streight. I caint keep nobody on that’ll let that kind of a thing happen, Forrest said in his mind, as if explaining it to a third party, John Morton perhaps, That’s all they is to it and they ain’t gone be no argument about it.
Gould’s importuning kept breaking into his thoughts. “General, do you not see that this order amounts to an imputation of cowardice?”
“Hush a minute and listen to me,” Forrest said, and looked down into the lieutenant’s flushed face for the first time. “When you give up them cannon, son, the damyankees turned them right around—they hurt us with’m and hurt us bad and you know that the same as me. They kilt a whole mess of my boys with them guns afore we got’m back. I cain’t have no more of that, d’ye foller? Hit ain’t nothing to me if ye’re a coward or if’n—”
“No man can accuse me of being a coward and both of us live.” Gould’s face had broken up into pink and white blotches and Forrest was just thinking the words peaches and cream when he saw, too late, a pistol-shaped object rising from under the lieutenant’s duster—maybe the hammer snagged on the fabric or maybe Gould had intended to fire through the cloth. Forrest caught the hot barrel and twisted it down and away from him. He knew he was hit though he hadn’t yet felt pain; the first sensation was the sticky warmth of blood running down the side of his leg. He had opened the penknife with his teeth at the same time as the twisting movement that took Gould’s pistol out of the compass of his body brought the two men toe-to-toe and without stopping he drove the longer blade of the knife between Gould’s ribs and ripped it sideways. The hallway filled with the sharp bitter smell of a punctured gut. Gould sighed and dropped his pistol. He staggered toward the western door, passing the men who’d flung out of the quartermaster’s office at the sound of the shot and now stood with their mouths hanging silently open. The bats, startled by the report, fluttered in and out among the rafters.
Forrest went out the opposite door, unconsciously wiping the knife blade on his pants leg, then dropping the folded knife into his pocket. He was in Columbia, Tennessee, he remembered