Devil's Dream (29 page)

“Do you really believe all that horseshit?” Henri said.

“I don’t know,” Kelley said. “I think probably I believed it before I ever thought much about it, but the more I think about it the less sense it makes.”

The owl poked up its tail feathers and crapped out a small dry pellet of mouse hair and bone. The pellet made no sound when it struck the dirt beneath the tree.

“And you?” Kelley said. “You think we’re all niggers under the skin, didn’t you just say so?”

“We’re all blood and bone under the skin,” Henry said. “And a little gristle. You’ve seen as much of that these last few years as anyone.”

“That notion has been growing in me, though,” Kelley said, in no way derailed from the track of his previous thought. “I’m beginning to doubt that a soul has a color, in God’s eye.”

September 1863

U
NDER THE SHADE
of a great magnolia, Henri stretched on his back in Jerry’s wagon bed, his head pillowed on fresh sweet straw. He’d just had a tremendous dinner served to him and Jerry and Matthew in Bellevue’s kitchen: fried ham and turnip greens and black-eyed peas and biscuits with cold butter and peach preserves. So now he dozed, full and heavy, opening one eye now and again to watch the pale undersides of the waxy green leaves above him shivering whenever a breeze passed through them. It was twilight and the doves were calling, their liquid voices burbling as they left the ground for the eaves of the mansion or the branches of the four magnolias that framed the white-columned portico.

Matthew sprawled facedown beside him, snoring in the straw. Beside him was a snarl of half-mended harness, a spool of pack thread and an awl. Jerry sat on the wagon box, brushing dried mud from Forrest’s riding boots.

“I don’t believe he’s had theseyear boots off in six months,” Jerry said. “Not by the way they smells …”

At the sound of tramping in the street, Henri pulled himself up by a wagon rail. A cartridge popped and Matthew shot up like a rocket, clawing a revolver from his belt before his sleep-glazed eyes were well open. Henri pushed the barrel down and away from him.

“It can’t be anything,” he said. “There’s not a Yankee in a hundred miles of here.”

But he climbed out of the wagon and peered down the slope from the house to the street. The view was obscured by a high boxwood hedge. Behind him the front door of the house swung open and Doctor Cowan came trotting down the steps, buttoning his coat.
Henri and Matthew straggled after him, to the gate of the spear-point iron fence that enclosed Bellevue’s front lawn.

“I heard it but I didn’t believe it,” Cowan said. “Boys, it’s the Nancy Harts.”

Down the street came marching some forty women, all ages and sizes but most appearing to be in their twenties, most wearing their everyday dresses and hats but a couple of them got up in hoop skirts. They were armed with a motley of old shotguns and muskets from the previous century, barrels lashed to the stocks with rusting wire. Their leader, a young woman with a flushed face and hair beginning to come loose from the pins under her hat, wore a Revolutionary War sword belted to her slender hips. The scabbard’s point dragged a furrow in the dirt behind her.

“Did you ever …” Cowan said, and Henri admitted that he never did.

“T
HE
H
ELL
?” Forrest stood in his shirttail, bare toes curling on the board floor, gazing across the portico roof at the end of the queer parade. A threesome of spotted dogs trotted at the heels of the last pair of women in the passing column. He glanced over his shoulder, then looked back toward the street. Mary Ann sat up in the bed, closing her gown at her throat with one hand.

“It’s the Nancy Hart Home Guard,” she said. “Nancy Morgan and Mary Cade Heard got it up between them.”

Forrest shot her a queer look. “How many battles has they fit?”

“Well …” Mary Ann slipped her feet to the hearth rug beside the half-tester bed and crossed to the window to join him. She glanced a bit wistfully at the ashes in the black marble fireplace. Her bare feet felt chilly once they’d walked off the rug. It was not quite cold enough for a fire, but she’d ordered one for last night notwithstanding, and she had it in mind to order another. Senator Hill had taken his wife to their place in Athens, leaving the Forrests the run of Bellevue and command of its servants—in honor of Forrest’s first leave in eighteen months. Mary Ann had not stopped anywhere quite so fine as this in a very long time and she wanted to try all the mansion’s amenities before the whole situation melted away.

“They knocked down a hornets’ nest with a stray ball once,” she
told him. “That engagement was counted a defeat, I believe. And then they killed a neighbor’s cow, which one might consider a Pyrrhic victory I suppose. But all that was in the early days, when they were still learning how to shoot.”

Forrest looked at her sidelong, suppressing a snort. Though she was not quite touching him he could feel the blowsy warmth of her, fresh from the bedding.

“Mrs. Morgan called this morning, as a matter of fact,” Mary Ann said. “With Mrs. Heard. They’d be honored if you would review their troops.”

“Review them? Review them? Ain’t they no West Pint mollycoddle slinken around as kin review a gang of women soldiers? In all my life I don’t know if I ever heard such a goddamn knee-knocken pack of—”

“Stop!” Mary Ann bumped him with her hip; if the gesture was playful, her voice had hardened. “You oughtn’t to mock them, Mister Forrest. There’s not been an able-bodied man in LaGrange since eighteen sixty-one. Nancy Morgan’s husband went off to war before they’d been married more than six months, and her scarce twenty-one years old. And there’s Mary Heard running two plantations all on her lonesome and a hundred slaves between them. This militia business keeps their spirits up, if nothing else. And who knows if it won’t come in handy before all’s said and done?”

“You want me to review’m, Miz Forrest?” He drew her to him, feeling the round heat of breast and belly come willingly against his side through the thin cloth. “All right then—Ladies, stand to arms!”

“What I want you to do is come back to bed.” She ran her slim fingers up under his shirttail. “It’s been too long and I can’t get—.”

“It’s been fifteen minutes,” Forrest muttered, though happy enough to follow where she led. It was an excellent featherbed too—made of the finest, softest down—though already in need of a thorough good beating and airing.

N
EXT MORNING
F
ORREST
, his boots and uniform well brushed, stood more or less at attention in the square of LaGrange, with Mary Ann beside him in a Sunday dress just slightly shiny at the elbows, watching the Nancy Hart Home Guard drill. Though he had small
patience with such exercises even when performed by professional fighting men, he kept a straight face throughout the proceedings. When First Sergeant Adelie Bull demonstrated how she could shoot the pips out of a playing card at thirty paces, Forrest broke into a genuine smile.

“Lieutenant Morgan, Lieutenant Heard—” he said as those ladies presented their arms, “Now by the long scaly tail of the D—” Mary Ann elbowed him.

“By the beard and the belly of G—”

This time a sharp look was sufficient.

“By all that’s
holy
if I may say so, I’d sooner be commanded by the pair of you than that shilly-shallying milksop
Braxton Bragg.”

Though the two young women looked as much pleased as perplexed, Mary Ann piloted him quickly away, through a circle of onlookers around the square. Matthew was there with a couple of his usual companions and it struck Forrest, not for the first time, how his wife could practically walk through the boy without seeming to see hide nor hair of him.

“You’ve scandalized those poor young ladies,” Mary Ann said, once she’d hauled him into the Bellevue parlor. “Or frightened them, even—I worry you have.”

“I swan they took it as a compliment,” Forrest said. “As for them to be frightened, why we all ought to be.”

Mary Ann walked to the rosewood piano, struck a cluster of notes, and revolved back toward him on the embroidered stool. “What do you mean?”

Forrest had said more than he meant to but he saw there was no retreat. Charge then.

“All right,” he said. “If what we got now is women for soldiers, I reckon I might as well take counsel with you.”

“I reckon you may have had worse counsel,” she came back at him. “I’ve heard of that letter you sent to General Bragg. Captain Anderson says it near scorched his fingers to set down those words.”

“You’ve got no quarrel with Anderson,” Forrest said.

“I don’t.” Mary Ann swung from side to side on the stool, threw back her head of pale hair. “What scares me is you, when you won’t rein yourself in.”

Forrest paced, boot heels snapping on the floor. “Cain’t run on a
tight rein all the time. And I’ve held myself in mighty hard—since Shiloh, or the next thing to it.”

Mary Ann parted her lips as if she’d speak and decided not to. Forrest had his head down, tramping heavily around the room.

“I mean to give Bragg a piece of my mind,” he said. “He’s shouldered me out the road every chance he got—and I don’t even know if he does it for meanness or just because he’s a
goddamn fool
. Might near ever time I get up a command he makes me turn it over to somebody else. Men I raised myself, and armed and fed and mounted. By God I’d even swaller that if he made good use of’m but he damn well don’t.”

Forrest stopped and stared out the front window. In the faint reflection from the watery glass she could see him bite into his lip and release it. “Since we got ourselves run out of Vicksburg, I could do us some good on the Mississippi River,” he said. “Can I get an order from Bragg to go there? No I cannot.”

He raised his head slightly and peered through the glass before him. There seemed to be some kind of interest building in the street below. People were gathering outside the Bellevue gate, though they were not looking up at the mansion. Others were coming out from behind the house, drifting down the lawn to join them. Forrest clucked his tongue and resumed the oval of his pacing. A loose rowel on his left spur clattered as he walked.

“Everbody bet too much on General Lee in the first place,” he said. “Like they wasn’t any state in the Confederacy but Virginia. Well now Lee has got himself whupped in Pennsylvania and right now hit’s the most he can do to keep the Yankees out of Richmond. And d’ye know what that means?”

He had wheeled on her. Mary Ann raised her chin, but he didn’t leave her time to answer and she wasn’t sure what she’d say anyway.

“What means is that the Army of Tennessee is goen to count and it’s a-goen to count for life or death. It’s nigh bout the only thing standing in the way of the Yankees eaten our entrails clean across to the ocean. And what has
Bragg
done with that army? Well he let it get flanked out of Middle Tennessee without so much as offeren to fight. He had the Yankees in the palm of his hand at Chickamauga and he damn well let’m walk away.”

Forrest closed his own hand and banged his thigh with the fist. “Ain’t no such thing as a drawn battle,” he said. “Not no more. It’s win or lose and by God we look like losen if we don’t straighten out and do it damn quick. I know I can beat any pack of Yankees I meet afore air a one of them West Point sonsabitches can get his damn slide rule limbered up. I don’t only know it, I’ve proved it too—”

“I know you have,” Mary Ann said, rising from the piano stool. “I’m proud of you for it. We all are. But—”

His eyes shot through her and she paused.

“I don’t believe the Yankees can whup us,” Forrest said. “I won’t believe that. But we look mighty like whuppen our own selves.”

“Do you think putting yourself on the wrong side of General Bragg will help that?” Mary Ann said. “You’ve made me understand he’s not fit for his place. But what does it help to pursue a quarrel among ourselves?”

“It’ll help me do what I said I would,” Forrest said shortly. “I told the man I was comen to see him. Have you known me not to stand behind my word?”

“No,” said Mary Ann, exhaling, “and I don’t suppose I ever will.” Or that I’d have it any other way, she thought.

Forrest’s head snapped toward the window. “What’s all that hooraw?”

At the bottom of the lawn the street was now fairly lined with people who all shuffled their feet and looked expectantly to the west. A couple of ten-year-old boys were pulling a length of red yarn taut across the thoroughfare, right in front of the Bellevue gate.

“By God it’s a horse race.” He turned to her, his features flickering with an odd mix of irritation and pleasure, and caught her by the hand. “Come on—let’s go see.”

They were halfway down the lawn when the rhythm of hoofbeats quieted the rustle and hum of talk among the crowd. Willie, flogging King Philip for all he was worth, appeared neck and neck with young Witherspoon, who was probably riding a superior horse. Mary Ann’s breath caught; it was like watching her own heart flying away outside of her body. At the last instant King Philip edged a half length ahead and it was his straining chest that broke the strand of yarn.