Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [66]
It was him or me, Momma, Forrest said. It was him or me.
Oh now Bedford, don’t take on. Her eyes deep and dark in the hollows of her head. I know it was. I know.
And he knew that she knew just how half-true that was. Awake now, he understood that Gould had died while he was dreaming. He could feel the skin of his cheeks crinkling as the salt dried to the skin, and the itch of the healing wound in his hip. The real trouble was he sometimes thought he would not, could not ever die.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
January 1865
THEY RESTED against each other in the darkness of a borrowed clapboard house, winter wind sawing at the frame of their attic room. An iron grate in the floor released a little heat from the woodstove simmering in the room below.
“Does it still hurt?” Mary Ann said. For a moment she couldn’t even remember which one of his many old wounds she had referred to.
Forrest shifted against her, spread his large warm hand across the small of her back. “Right now nothen hurts,” he said.
She fingered a lock of his hair in the dark. Right now she didn’t feel the cold at all, but she had felt a stab of it when meeting him after months of absence she saw how white his hair had grown.
“I’ll never have you all the time,” she said, or maybe only thought. “But when I’ve got you I’ve got all of you there is.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
February 1864
ON HIS HASTY RETURN from rounding up five thousand recruits in West Tennessee, Forrest was quick to send Henri and Matthew out on a scout: Federal General Sooy Smith was leading a couple of thousand cavalry south from Collierville, Tennessee. Bedford kept Willie Forrest back by him, but sent two other men of his escort—Nath Boone, who now had the rank of lieutenant, and a man named Billy Strickland, who would not be killed till the fight around Pulaski at the end of the year.
They set out from Oxford late in the day, heading more or less due east. A good deal earlier, Jeffrey Forrest had been sent, in command of quite a serious force, with the idea of intercepting Smith’s advance somewhere south along the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, and the scouts’ orders were to find and join him if they could. Bedford Forrest, who knew that Sooy Smith was taking his orders from William Tecumseh Sherman, supposed that once Smith struck the railroad below Corinth he’d keep ripping it up all the way to Meridian and maybe further. Sherman was setting out from Vicksburg to cut his own slash across this Confederate breadbasket, so more than likely he meant to join Smith at Meridian or nearby.
Henri had not ridden so far with his party when they heard a jingle of harness behind. With a couple of hisses exchanged between them, they pulled their horses out of the road and into a clump of cedars to see what might be coming along the road. Benjamin was following, riding the strongest white mule of his wagon bareback, forcing the animal into a reluctant but rapid trot.
Nath Boone and Strickland swarmed into the road, their pistols raised skyward, turning their horses to block the mule’s way.
“Boy, state your business,” Strickland said.
Ben looked straight at him through the long ears of his mule.
“I come out to jine this scout with y’all.”
“Is that right,” said Strickland. “Let me see your pass.”
“It was Ginral Forrest give me leave,” Ben said. “He don’t spend time writen out no passes.”
Henri and Matthew were watching Boone, who’d been in a changeable humor since his brother Alfred had got killed up in Somerset about two months before. Boone’s bushy eyebrows were pushing together like maybe he had a headache coming on.
Strickland was looking at Boone too. “Does it worry you how this boy won’t lower his head when he speaks