Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [67]
Boone considered, pulling up his horse’s head from a patch of half-frozen weed in the ditch. “Hit’s Forrest’s nigger after all,” he said. “I expect he’s been whupped for it.”
“Been whupped plenty,” Ben put in.
“Don’t seem to have cured ye,” Strickland said.
“Well now,” said Nath Boone. “I’ve noticed he looks the Old Man in the eye that same way too.”
“White gemmun,” Ben said suddenly. “Here’s why I come. You know he caught that buncha white boys trying to sneak off back to Jackson where they was just rounded up last week. You know he made ’m stand by those graves till sunup with the men with the rifles to shoot ’m dead right by there too.”
Henri considered. He remembered the same scene queasily himself. The new recruits all had come from West Tennessee, where in the fourth year of the war he was finding men a little less willing to follow the Confederate battle flag than they had been on his previous canvassing trip a year before. A man, a boy, might sooner follow Forrest than most, as Forrest was reputed to win all his fights. They’d taken more than three thousand new men south from Jackson, but scarcely a third of these had a firearm—the lot of them were as green as fresh rawhide and just as happy to run as fight. Henri could picture one such, Briley. How did he come to remember that name? Scarce out of his teens, the boy stood spindly, propped on the shovel at the head of the grave Forrest had ordered all the deserters he’d caught to dig for themselves, eyes rolling white and his lantern jaw trembling.
“Well,” said Boone, “he didn’t shoot’m finally, did he? Hit’s just tryen to skeer’m out of runnen away.”
Strickland looked at Ben just as hard as he was looking at him. “It don’t seem to have cured you.”
“I ain’t runnen nowhar,” Ben said quickly. “I axed for a change of duty is all. Them boys standen in they graves don’t sit right by me. I’ll take my chance I get shot by the Yankees effen I can ride with you. Best way I can figure to get that other bidness outa my craw.”
“Well,” said Boone, “that’s your plan, you cain’t go running around empty-handed.”
Benjamin smiled, wrinkling the pale bolt of scar that struck down from his temple onto his cheekbone. A swatch of his tattered blanket wrapped forward from the roll behind his saddle. When he flipped it off (softly so as not to spook the white mule) they could all see one Navy six in his belt and another in his hand—the latter had been trained on Strickland’s rib cage throughout the conversation.
After a rather long pause, Boone let out a chuckling sigh. “Put that thing up till we find us some Yankees,” he said. “And make yourself welcome to join this party.”
THROUGH THE CHILL of that night they rode with the rags of their blankets wrapped around their shoulders. Dark of the moon, so they could barely see each other’s horses, except for Ben’s white mule, which stood out plainly. The blacks who began to fill the road around them were invisible, some headed east and others west. Some muttered low that the Yankees were coming and others cried deliriously that they were free at last! But none of them seemed to know where they were going. Henri felt his sense of himself as a separate being melting into the milling throng of them all; he was sinking into this dark stream, diffusing into its crosscurrents. He might have slept some in the saddle; if so he was awakened by the crump of cannon in the distance ahead.
The eastern horizon was red with burning. Still a couple of hours to dawn. Boone called a halt and after a quick whispered conference they left the road and picked their way along the bank of the Tallahatchie till they reached the town of New Albany at first light. There’d been no burning here nor was there any real sign of disorder, though the ways through town were deeply rutted by wagon and gun carriage wheels and trampled by many boots and hooves. Dung from the draft animals lay barely cool. The buildings were all shuttered and barred and no one struck a light within nor ventured out to ask their business.