Devil's Dream by Madison Smartt Bell

Author:Madison Smartt Bell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Southern States - History - Civil War, Historical, Biographical, Biographical Fiction, General, Confederate States of America, Southern States, Historical Fiction, 1861-1865, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307378637
Publisher: PANTHEON
Published: 2009-11-03T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

April 1864

THEY HAD BEEN FIGHTING around Fort Pillow for hours by the time Forrest himself rode in, grim and weary from more than a day and a night in the saddle—he had ridden over seventy miles since the day before. Henri led him out a fresh horse. Chalmers had launched the first attack on the fort near dawn, and as soon as they swept the pickets from the outer works they had overrun the Federal horse pen and captured the stock. The Federals were just a little more than seven hundred, too few to man the outer works even with the fresh black troops that had just been sent from Memphis, and they had quickly fallen back to the second line of defense, a zigzag breastworks on the top of the hill, with its rear open to the junction of Coal Creek and the Mississippi River.

With a grunt, Forrest swung astride the captured horse. Captain Anderson joined him for a scout of the perimeter. Henri fully intended to stay where he was, but Forrest beckoned him to follow. Henri climbed onto a brown jenny mule that had caught his eye in the Federal stock pen. The outermost works of Fort Pillow encompassed several hilltops and the terrain was cut this way and that by ravines. Henri liked the jenny’s sure step over the rough ground and he felt too that she had some particular instinct for self-preservation.

It would have been a pleasant spring morning, bright but cool. Outside the stock pen the hillsides were speckled with tiny white star-shaped flowers and the yolky yellow of new dandelions. Moving in a semicircle southeast from the Mississippi, they passed Ginral Jerry, just out of range of the guns of the fort, going along at a crouch and gathering the bitter greens. Chalmers had posted sharpshooters on the hills inside the outermost works and they were steadily exchanging fire with the Federals in the inner defenses.

Forrest rode halfway up the hillside and turned to face the river again, gathering the reins with one hand and shading his eyes with the other, though the sun was mostly in his back. Behind the zigzag breastworks, atop a bluff at the river’s edge, there was a U-shaped inner fort, refurbished with fresh dug earth, with slits for six cannon belching lead in their direction. They were out of cannon range where they were, but a couple of Federal long rifles carried further. Forrest’s unfamiliar horse was restless with the whistle of the balls, kept squirming sideways and trying to sit down. Henri stroked his jenny’s trembling neck, along the lines of the blue-hair cross that grew across her shoulders.

“Goddammit this oughtent to take all goddamn day!” Forrest remarked. “They ain’t that many of the scalawags in there nohow. We need to move some more riflemen up to make them sonsabitches put they goddamn heads down.”

“Look there,” Anderson said, and pointed down the slope. “McCulloch wants you.”

Henri could not tell if it was McCulloch or not,

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