Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [83]
“Confederate Congress ain’t here so they don’t git no say,” Forrest told him. “Ye’ll be treated fair if ye strike yore flag. Don’t and ye’re like as the next man to get kilt in the fight.”
“Major Booth asks for more time,” Young told him.
“He damn well caint have it,” Forrest snapped. “Pussyfoot around and I won’t be responsible. I need me an answer and I need it right quick.”
The two Federal officers nodded and rode back to the fort. Why were they dealing in a dead man’s name, Henri wondered. But maybe he knew … Bradford was a West Tennessean himself but he’d made a bad reputation since he came to Fort Pillow. His orders were to live off the land and he’d followed them to the point of pillage. Old scores of his own to settle, perhaps. And there were insults to women on Bradford’s watch, the kind that can only be washed out in blood. Major Booth had arrived at the fort so recently he’d not had the time to make himself hated.
“They hopen to get some he’p out of them gunboats,” Forrest muttered, reaching under his coat to finger a bruise where his ribs had slammed a stone in his fall. “Well, we ain’t got all goddamn day to set around and let that happen.”
Captain Young appeared on the parapet among the black soldiers there. He pointed and said something to one of the more excitable troopers, who capered and kicked out a leg. “Wooo, thas Ole Bedford sho’ nuff. We knows him! Yes we do.” And then the man jumped behind the wall to shelter himself from Forrest’s baleful stare. But Forrest didn’t look altogether displeased. He’d come out here to be recognized, Henri realized, or at least that would be part of his reason. A little while back Colonel Duckworth had bluffed a garrison in Union City to give itself up with surrender-or-die threats written over Forrest’s name—when Forrest himself was on his way to Paducah. Fort Pillow’s commanders would be more likely to take those warnings seriously if they knew Forrest really was here in person, and there were apt to be others besides Captain Young who had run up against him somewhere before.
Lieutenant Hunter returned to them, alone this time, his features more drawn than they had been before. He passed Forrest a scrap of paper with the name of Major Booth forged to it, then turned to Goodman and said something to him in a low voice.
“Your note does not produce the desired effect,” Forrest spelled out slowly. He looked up at the envoy. “I don’t know whoever in there is setten down this horseshit but tell him if the next one ain’t wrote in plain English I’ll come in there and poke it down his throat with a ramrod.”
“I’ll do what I can to satisfy you,” Hunter said. He nodded to Forrest and returned toward the fort.
“That man smelt of whiskey, I swan,” Forrest said. He crumpled the note and threw it down. “Even this goddamn paper stinks of whiskey.”
Henri looked again at the walls of the parapet, where some of the capering, catcalling blacks did appear to be a little tipsy. Maybe Bradford would be drinking too, to keep his courage up. Through one of those queer windows in his mind he could see men standing with tin cups and gourds around a keg.
“We will have this place come hell or high water,” Forrest said. “If everbody up there has done drunk hisself senseless it’s jest gone be too bad.”
He rode west along the bluff, peered out at the river, rode back. Rarely had Henri seen him so fidgety. This fort was about as stout as the one at Paducah. There they had sacked the town with no trouble, commandeered a few hundred horses, captured all manner of supplies and destroyed whatever they couldn’t carry. They’d had the pleasure of burning a steamboat, and the dock where it was moored. The fort, however, they failed to take. “If I have to storm your works, expect no quarter,” Forrest had written when he demanded surrender. The Federal commander called the bluff and when Forrest’s men charged they were thrown back, and their leader, A. P. Thompson, killed. Forrest gave up and went away, with his men feeling rightly