Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [87]
“Did I hear you was fixing real biscuit?” Little said. Jerry, scraping coals over the lid of his iron skillet, answered with no more than a grunt. Rumor was that he had salvaged a sack of white flour from the supplies Smith’s Yankees had been toting.
Little and Nath Boone and the Reverend Kelley sat in a row on the gray fallen log, like birds on a rail waiting the right moment to swoop down on a field of ripening corn. Only Jeffrey, as he circled the bare crown of the knoll, seemed to hear the piping of the Old Ones. Presently he shook a leg and commenced to dance. Not all of the Old Ones appeared so old, and soon a couple of the most lively women had joined the Rebel cavalier. Henri saw them in grass skirts and strings of cowries and not much else, but Jeffrey may have perceived his partner in some other guise: a ball gown, say, which his sweetheart might have worn for him in Memphis before he went to war and died.
Ghost fiddlers (when had they been slain?), sawed out the opening notes of “Devil’s Dream.” Little was staring into the dance, not altogether as if he could see it but more like he was somewhat aware of something from which he desired to be distracted.
“Hey Ornery!” he called, too loud and too rough, so that Henri refused to answer or turn his head that way. He was looking into the cold mists that roiled around the brow of the knoll and there he seemed to see some shapes from Thompson Station.
“Monty,” Nath Boone said. “You know he don’t answer to that from you.”
“Henry, then,” Little kept on. “You never did finish telling that story. Where you come from, and niggers rising up to kill white folks and all.”
Jerry leaned forward to try the heat of his improvised Dutch oven with his palm. Nodding, he sat back over his heels again, then began to slap a lump of grayish dough flat onto a scrap of board.
“All right,” Henri said. “Which did you want me to tell you first?”
Little shot him a suspicious look. “Ain’t but one right way to tell a story.”
“Fine,” Henri said. “I’ll tell it backward then.”
I’d been to Louisville already the day you crossed me on the road, he said. I knew the guns were there and meant to have them for my people. I was looking to meet Frank Merriam there, and Osborne Anderson, and Owen Brown. They never showed up. I don’t know where they are to this day. I couldn’t take those pistols on my own. We didn’t have money to buy them you know. I stayed around that town too long, hoping the others were going to come. After four days I crossed Israel Green in the street. What he was doing there I don’t know. He didn’t make out that he knew me then, but I know he must have for that very night they broke in the door where I was sleeping and the best I could do was jump out the window. I had my shirt and my britches and a knife I kept in the bed with me. No time to get my boots or my gun. They had more men waiting for me down in the street but I climbed up and went over the rooftop and then I ran for the river and floated down.
“Owen Brown!” Kelley said, eyes widening.
You know that name. The son of old Osawatomie Brown, out of Bloody Kansas. I was with them there at Harpers Ferry. I got away with Owen, and Osborne and Merriam, a few others too. There was supposed to be a thousand slaves rise up to take the guns that we had captured. But it looks like all that came was two.
“Why …” Little’s eyes widened. “That’s the same goddamned murdering abolitionist John Brown the Yankees sings about whilst they march. You ought to been hanged right along with him.”
“If you say so,” Henri said. “But then I’d have missed being here with you.”
“Be quiet, Monty,” Nath Boone said. “Let the man tell his story.”
But Henri was watching Jerry cut cat-head biscuits with the rim of his dented tin cup. He lifted the lid of his Dutch oven and slicked the iron with a fingerful of lard. The hot smell of molten hog fat made