Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [65]
“Ye mean to tell me I won’t die today,” Forrest had said.
“I do mean that. You won’t.”
When Forrest finally broke the gaze, Henri breathed deep, then noticed the general was holding his pistol out toward him by the barrel. Henri took it, looked at it briefly, then thrust it back into one of the holsters Forrest had found for him that first day, while they were smuggling guns out of Louisville.
Forrest turned away and left the yard. It was then that someone noticed that Lieutenant Gould was still just barely breathing.
“You seen that.” As others began to scatter from the scene, Benjamin had slipped up to Henri and stopped with his big handsome head cocked to one side, looking at Henri crossways. “You seen the Old Man wa’nt gone die this time.”
“He’s not hurt bad as he thinks, that’s all,” Henri said, and looked down at the ground—it was true what he said but Ben was still lofting the question toward him with the crooked angle of his look, for both of them knew Henri hadn’t told the part of the truth that Benjamin wanted to hear.
FORREST LIMPED into the house where he’d taken a room, with a couple of doctors cautiously trailing him. Once they’d had the chance to examine him properly, they let him know his wound was not so dangerous as it first seemed. The bullet had not cut into his vitals but lodged instead in the flesh of his hip, whence it could be safely extracted. Then Forrest rose up and drove the doctors off. “Let it alone then, why don’t ye?” he shouted. “Hit’s nothen but a damn little pistol ball!” But the rage had left him altogether now, and his humor turned darkly inward.
Lieutenant Gould, whose wound did fester in the summer heat, was two or three days about his dying. The doctors kept him mostly quiet with morphine. Sometimes in the night he screamed. John Morton kept him company when he could, for they were friends from boyhood. Leave out the war and they were hardly more than boys now.
“Goddammit!” Forrest erupted, when Morton came to him. “Don’t I know what a sorry situation hit is? If he’d shown that much spunk on Sand Mountain we’d not never had no quarrel in the first place.”
Morton, whose pale round face was bluish with the small veins underneath the skin, spoke to him again in a low tone. Forrest took off his hat and looked into the crown as if maybe there was a crystal ball up in there.
“All right, John, all right,” he said. “I’ll go along with ye if that’s what ye want.”
When Forrest was most uncomfortably seated at the bedside, Lieutenant Gould groped for his hand and held it, and then in his weak dying voice he made a little speech he plainly had stored up in his mind ahead of time, saying he was sorry for what he had done, that the affair was begun in a reckless moment but if it had to end with one of them dead he was happy it should be him and not Forrest to die—it was better for the country that way.
Then Forrest looked Gould in the eye, and said in a voice that didn’t quite crack, “I jest wish the whole thing never come about, son—don’t ye know they ain’t no way on earth I could be glad about doen in one of my own?” Gould didn’t say anything more after that, but kept his weak clasp on Forrest’s left hand, while Forrest covered his eyes with his right. The other men in the room looked at each other strangely. Forrest never spoke about wishes. He only said what wasn’t, or what was.
After a time, young Gould drifted off, and Forrest got up and went out of the sickroom like Morton and the others there were invisible to him. In the night he woke crying, though he didn’t know that he was. The saltiness running through his beard into the corners of his mouth only puzzled him. He had dreamed of three women on a brow of a bald hill in the nighttime. His mother, Mariam, leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. Her front was covered with a crumpled cloth but her rawboned arms and her shoulders were bare, her strong square hands turned palm-up to him. Mary Ann had settled