Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [99]
“I mean to have this sword, anyway,” Forrest said. “Christmas is a-comen.” His teeth flashed in his beard as he turned toward Morton. “What air ye gapen at thar, son? Ye already done had yore Santy-Claus.”
Morton smiled broadly at that thought. A couple of days back, they’d captured a Federal artillery unit at Lexington, made a hundred and fifty prisoners, and claimed a pair of cannon for Morton’s use (for Forrest would assign none of Freeman’s guns to him).
“Colonel Fry offered you a fine old sword,” Morton said. Jacob Fry, a man well up in years, had practically had tears in his eyes when he unbuckled his sword belt to surrender Trenton and its garrison to Forrest. The weapon had been in his family for forty years, he said—he’d carried it in the Black Hawk War on the Illinois frontier in 1832. Then Forrest handed the sword back to him, with the hope he’d not use it on his own people in the future, and what was he thinking, Henri wondered now—did he suppose that Yankees and Rebels were still the same people?
“He won’t be cutten nobody with that fer a spell,” Forrest remarked. “And I do believe I like this’n better.” He settled his grip on the hilt and swung the blade up. “It’s light.” Damascus steel sang in the close, powder-smelling air of the depot. “And it’s limber.”
He ran his thumb along the edge and pressed his lips together, thin and tight. The blade had been edged on one side only, as usual for a cavalry sword, and sharpened for no more than six inches back from the point. “We’ll see to that shortly,” Forrest said, though mostly under his breath.
He walked out holding the blade upright, the scabbard thrust through his wide leather belt, stepping high on the balls of his feet like a big cat. The men followed him out of the depot, into the frosty air of that December evening.
Forrest’s camp spread out across the pastures from the edge of the village of Trenton. Campfires burned to the lip of the horizon, as if some enormous host had broken a march there. A dull roll of kettledrumming filled the air. Here Forrest had mustered most of the prisoners he’d taken since crossing into West Tennessee—at Trenton and a few other places.
Benjamin stood up in the back of his wagon, pounding out a dogged beat on a kettledrum as if he were driving railroad spikes. Despite the cold, he had sweated through the yoke of his osnaburg shirt. When Henri climbed into the wagon, Ben stopped thumping, almost gratefully it seemed, and stepped back. Elsewhere the deep rolling beat continued, all across Forrest’s thinly spread camps.
Ben offered the sticks with their big round cottony tips to Henri, who shook his head, laying his bare hands on the drum skin, feeling for breath and a spirit inside. Presently he began a petro rhythm, quick, sharp and dry, using palm and fingertips together, cupping the downbeat, catching the deep center note with a roll of his wrist that used the thumb as a striker—Benjamin had drawn the thorn from that thumb, at Shiloh in the spring. He leaned on the rail of the wagon now, watching Henri, beginning to shift his hips a little to the more complicated rhythm, and the white boys passing were hearing it too, looking up curiously into the wagon, some of them maybe a little uneasy. Henri stopped. With a quick smile at Ben he jumped down from the wagon.
A sort of military exercise was under way—the only semiformal drill in which Forrest had ever taken an interest. Leaving their horses hobbled out of sight, about a thousand dismounted men marched by the prisoners in as close an order as they could manage, one detachment after another: left right left, forward march. They passed through the town, out of view of the prisoners, found their horses and left them to graze in some other field, returning to the drill again from this new angle, so it seemed to the prisoners, who would all be paroled the next day (as Forrest had not men enough to hold them), would return