Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [73]
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
May 1865
UNDER A THIN SPRING RAIN, Major Anderson rode out with Forrest from the town of Meridian, Mississippi. They had nowhere in particular to go and nothing special to do when they got there. Sometime that day paroles were supposed to be signed for them and all their men who had a few days before consented to surrender, but neither Anderson nor Forrest could exert any influence on that event. Their object was to take the air and exercise their horses, though since the failure of their enterprise to fight off Wilson’s fourteen thousand cavalry with less than half that number, the horses were so played out they could hardly lift their hooves from the mud, while the men, as Forrest would put it, not excluding himself, were wore right down to a nubbin.
They trotted doggedly out into the countryside, halting briefly at the edge of a blighted farm, its fence rails carried off for bonfires, livestock scattered or scavenged by soldiers of either or both sides, a cotton field coming up in hogweed. Forrest clicked his tongue and rode on. Presently the road ran into the woods. Forrest’s head was lowered under a slouch hat, rainwater running from the front and back of the brim. Now and then he massaged his upper arm with the other hand: the half-healed saber cut from the fighting around Selma the month before. Forrest had killed the Yankee horseman who’d cut him but it took him longer than usual to get it done.
Sheets of silvery rain poured over him. His long duster, once bone-white, had evolved into a colorless patchwork that seemed to be held together by nothing more than grime and dried blood. When Anderson urged his horse alongside he could see Forrest’s lips working, under the hat brim and inside his beard. He would be composing something, probably. Though indisposed to the use of the pen, as Kelley put it from time to time, Forrest was choosy of the words he wanted in a document and Anderson often had the task of setting them down on paper.
They’d reached a crossroads and Forrest reined up. Anderson waited what seemed a long slow time; he’d never seen Forrest undecided about where he wanted to go.
“Which way, General?”
Forrest hacked out a rough simulacrum of a laugh. “If one goes to Hell and t’other to Mexico, hit don’t make me no difference,” he said.
Inside his clammy, rain-soaked garments, Anderson’s spine got even chillier than before. There were notions abroad of Confederate soldiers haring off to join the Mexican Revolution, but Forrest had seemed to pay them no mind. When invited to carry on the fight west of the Mississippi he turned it down cold. Nothing but murder he called that scheme, and any man who entertained it a fit subject for a lunatic asylum.
Forrest was still talking, perhaps to himself. “Never yet had to study what to do I just done it.” No, he was talking to Anderson after all, flashing him a quick bitter grin. “Anytime I run acrost one of them fellers as fit by note, I whupped him fore he got his tune pitched right. Swallered him whole whilst he set thar a-studyen. But now … by damn hit’s been too many in that style been worken on our side.”
Forrest looked along one fork of the road, then the other. “Cain’t afford to think about it,” he muttered. “I’m most give out, but I hate to give up. In my life I ain’t never give up, not on a thing that mattered. By damn I jest hate the thought of it.”
“Then don’t give up on