Devil's Dream (31 page)

T
HAT’S
D
AMASCUS STEEL
,” John Morton said helpfully, as Forrest flexed the blade of the sword he’d just picked up from the Federal stores at Trenton. “It’s imported, General.”

“Is that a fact?” Forrest stroked his calloused palm beneath the blade, studying the intricate whorls of the many-times-folded metal.

Morton beamed back at him, his face as round and friendly as a biscuit. He’d been gamboling around Forrest, glad as a puppy, since Forrest had changed his mind and accepted him, theoretically, as a gunner, which hadn’t gone so smoothly at first. Forrest already had a perfectly good captain of artillery in S. L. Freeman, and he didn’t care to have that arrangement interfered with.
I’d like to know why in HELL Bragg sent that tallow-faced boy to take charge
, Henri had heard Forrest snarl when Morton first reported. Whereupon Morton rode a hundred-mile round-trip to get his orders confirmed by General Wheeler, and did it in just under twenty-four hours. Forrest stopped backbiting after that, for it was the kind of thing he might have done himself. Just nineteen years old, Morton was tougher than he looked, resilient, jovial, hard to dislike.

Forrest raised his head and glanced around the depot. “Hit’s a shame,” he remarked. “We’ll have to burn up half this stuff.”

“What for?” Morton asked him, suddenly crestfallen.

“Don’t have men enough to haul it out of here,” Forrest said shortly. “If hit ain’t one thang hit’s another.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” Nath Boone said, exchanging a look with John Freeman, the artillery captain whose barrage had helped induce the Federal surrender earlier that same day. Forrest’s men had been going hell for leather all over West Tennessee, since they’d
crossed the Tennessee River at Clifton a week or so before, with two thousand men but a terrible shortage of caps for their firearms. Since then Forrest had been scavenging one day at a time, finding caps enough to fight a handful of small fierce engagements, dividing his forces again and again to make them seem to be everywhere in the region at once, ripping up railroad and bridges wherever they went. At night they burned five times as many fires as they needed and Forrest had the wagoneers beat kettledrums deep into the night, to make them seem more numerous than they were. Now here they were embarrassed by these riches.

“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 to Federal lines in Kentucky to report the Confederates had been reinforced from all directions, all through the night—there was an army at full strength. Already,
thanks to such stratagems, rumor had inflated Forrest’s numbers from two thousand to five—by tomorrow the guesswork would balloon to twenty thousand. As he passed his circling soldiers now, Forrest stopped to exchange salutes with the officers as smartly as he knew how, then lowered his gloved right hand and passed on, the Damascus sword still riding upright in his left. Most of their wagons were clustered around a livery stable here, and there was a little forge attached to it, idle now, its fire gone cold. Earlier that afternoon Forrest had impressed the blacksmith to trim hooves and shoe the horses that needed it, but the man had gone home to his supper, long since. Ginral Jerry was lingering there; he’d spent the afternoon holding horses for the smith, and soon Ben came to join him.

Forrest passed the forge, the anvil and the bellows, bending his eye on a grindstone, big as a wagon wheel and a hundred times as heavy, riding in a stout wooden carriage under the stable eaves. The pale stone seemed to glow a little in the dusk.

Jerry moved toward the crank handle, automatically, and the great stone round broke its inertia and began to revolve. Its surface was wide as both of Forrest’s palms together, and Forrest didn’t have small hands.

“I thought you told us a cavalryman was better off with a six-gun,” Henri said.

“What if I did?” Forrest set the blade against the spinning stone; a thread of grating sound rose from the contact. “A man’s better off with all he kin get.”

Morton moved up for a closer look. Whatever Forrest turned a hand to fascinated him. Matthew came up too, rustling at Henri’s elbow in the dim. Willie must have gone off somewhere to race the new-shod horses, with other young sports excited by the little victories of the day.

Forrest carried the blade with a slicing motion at a close angle against the turning stone, his grip so firm the metal never bounced or clattered, and the drone of the grinding was steady and smooth. Orville, the young Virginian who’d joined them several months before, kept clearing his throat for some reason. “Hold up,” Forrest said to Jerry, who released the crank and let the stone drift to a halt. Forrest pushed back his sleeve and ran the top of his forearm across the freshened edge. A couple of wiry black hairs came away and
floated off into the gloaming. “Another thang,” Forrest grinned as he raised the blade. “This here don’t never run out of ammunition.” He turned to Jerry. “Let Ben step up. This part is goen to take a mite longer.” A shower of sparks flew up this time when Forrest brought the steel to the turning stone, for he was grinding the blunt top of the blade. Henri exchanged a silent, white-eyed glance with Matthew.

Nath Boone raised a hand to his chin. “He’s laid himself out a job of work.”

Henri nodded and smiled faintly. He could see now that Forrest meant to file down an eighth-inch of metal on the top side of the blade, to make a second edge where none had been intended by the smith who forged it. He’d end up with a double-edged, razor-sharp sword, and likely it would not be used for shaving.

“General Forrest,” Orville piped up.

Rapt in his task, Forrest didn’t seem to hear him at first. He seldom paid much attention to Orville, who had been in his first year at West Point when the war began. Young and impetuous as John Morton, he was not half so likable. But he was strong in the saddle, and when he joined their company after Shiloh he’d been riding one racehorse and leading another.

“General?” Orville insisted now. “You’re not supposed to sharpen a sword that way.” He cleared his throat for the thirtieth time. “It’s contrary to the rules of war.”

Forrest heard him now, and turned so briskly that every man took one step back, including Ben. The crank kept on revolving with the momentum of the stone.

“The rules of war?” Forrest said.

Henri braced himself for a torrent of cursing.

“War ain’t got no goddamn rules.” But Forrest’s voice hadn’t climbed. He said it quietly. Sadly, almost. He let the Damascus blade spin down through his thumb and forefinger till the pommel rested on the ground. He pricked the ball of his finger on the point and showed the fine bead of blood to the men surrounding him. Then he licked it away with the tip of his tongue.

“War means fighting. And fighting means killing.” Forrest turned to Ben. “Step up, son, and turn the grindstone.”

And the stone’s movement drew the other men to it, like a magnet
would. Henri expected Orville to slink away, but he remained with the rest of them. The rolling of the kettledrums continued. They seemed to have gathered a shared overtone, a note held deep in a common throat. Henri felt the petro rhythm pulsing in his palms.

“War to the knife,” Forrest said, in the same chanting pattern, his hands wreathed in sparks where he held blade to stone. “Knife to the hilt. They say the world itself turns like a grindstone. Over and over. Don’t never stop.” He looked up, while the metal still sang against the stone, including Morton, Orville, Matthew in his gaze. “Ye may whet yoreself agin it. Or let it grind ye down.”

October 1864

H
ENRI AND
M
ATTHEW RODE
abreast through woods a few miles west of Paris Landing, on a trail of a drove of half-wild hogs. A hundred yards back, Ben’s wagon lumbered along after them, making a more difficult way through the trees. Forrest had sent them all out requisitioning but it was harder than it used to be around here. Farmers were hiding all they had, from hams and dry corn to their half-grown children, and letting their livestock ramble the woods.

Hogs were crafty, mo’ smarter than man, Jerry would say. Did say. Besides which it was hard to draw a bead on a hog with a pistol from the back of a horse cantering over rough ground. But Matthew had wounded a big spotted sow in the hindquarters, and her back leg was dragging a blood spoor over the carpet of oak leaves and acorns on which the hogs fed. At last Henri circled his horse ahead of her, hopped down and planted a bullet between her eyes.

“Bleed her, boy—don’t just stand there!” Jerry shouted from the slow-moving wagon. Matthew stood, sword drawn, unsure of what do with it. Jerry skipped down from the wagon and ran toward them, unfolding a clasp knife from his bib pocket. He dropped to his knees beside the sow and in the same motion had slit her throat.

“Now he’p me hang her,” he said, producing a length of cord from another pocket. In a moment the sow swung head down from a branch of a white oak. Matthew and Henri both skipped back as Jerry opened the sow’s belly with a quick downward pull of the knife blade, and the sharp-smelling huddle of guts spilled out on the blood-soaked leaves. Jerry wiped the knife and looked at Matthew.

“Don’t reckon you knows how to clean chitlens?” He snorted. “Done spent too much time hangen round the house.”