Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [86]
“General.” Henri pulled himself straight. “You are not the man to let this go on.”
They reached the fort in half the time it had taken Henri to get to Forrest’s post, Henri lagging a little behind, since his jenny couldn’t have kept pace with Forrest’s horse even if she’d wanted to. Forrest cantered to the flagpole and cut down the flag with his saber, then jumped from the saddle to the ground.
“Hold your fire, boys,” he said. “I never ordered no goddamn massacree! You’ll see me settle with any man as says I did—”
What was left of the garrison was going over the bluff like a waterfall to the riverbank below, but the Confederates were still killing stragglers in the enclosure of the fort, strewn now with bodies crossways over each other wherever they’d fallen. Henri got a glimpse of Lieutenant Walker tumbling down among the remnants of his command. Forrest had jumped down from his horse and was going between the Confederates and the Federals, knocking down gun barrels with his saber, his Navy six cocked in his left hand.
From a heap of the dead a black man stood up shakily, catching Henri’s elbow for support. One of Nolan’s partisans drew a bead on him with his pistol.
“Stop where you are,” Forrest told him.
Nolan’s man turned to look at him blankly, then renewed his aim on the man who clung to Henri’s elbow. He cocked his pistol with his thumb. Most of the blacks who lay dead all around had been shot at about this point-blank range. But the explosion came from Forrest’s pistol this time. Nolan’s man fell over sideways, his pistol discharging its round into a heap of corpses.
“There’s an end to it,” Forrest said. With that, the firing stopped in the fort, though at the foot of the bluff it was livelier than ever.
“Lawd,” said the man at Henri’s side. “Lawd.”
Henri could feel his trembling, if it wasn’t maybe his own trembling. “What’s your name?” he said.
“Green,” the man said. “Sam Green. I needs to set down.”
Under the splintered catwalk was an ammunition crate where Green could sit without drenching the seat of his trousers in the blood that pooled everywhere in the fort’s enclosure. Henri led him there and left him. The blood smell, mixed with fumes of spilled whiskey, was chokingly strong. He went down the bluff, skidding when his boot heels tore out clay from under the thin stubble of weed. He finished the descent sliding on his tailbone.
The New Era had steamed away out of range—the Federal gunboat had fired some rounds at the very beginning of the engagement but the sharpshooters with Anderson knew how to strike down the artillerymen by firing into the gun ports, and soon enough she’d been driven back. Anderson and Barteau had converged on the riverbank and caught the fleeing Federals in a crossfire. They were still firing too, mostly into the water now. Henri stood up and picked his way over corpses to the water’s edge. He saw Lieutenant Hunter fling himself into the stream, among a pack of his panicked black soldiers, but the lowering sun glared off the water so that he couldn’t see what happened to the lieutenant after that.
Some of the Federals were trying to pull themselves up onto a barge that drifted near the bank, but sharpshooters picked most of them off before they could gain cover. The stream was dotted with the dark heads of swimmers picked out hard black against the red reflection on the water, and every few seconds one exploded when a sharpshooter popped a ball into it. Then the body would roll up and float downriver in the sluggish stream. That slaughterhouse smell was thicker than ever in the back of Henri’s throat. He raised a hand to shade his eyes and saw that it wasn’t only the sun that reddened the river. Thick and viscous as molasses, the Mississippi was running blood as far he could see.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
IN LIFE Jeffrey Forrest was a gay lighthearted young fellow, and Bedford Forrest loved him better than all save his own son Willie