Jenkins's rifle musket bucked against his shoulder. Smoke and flames belched from the muzzle. He took off his hat and fanned the air in front of him, trying to clear it enough to see not just through his own piece's smoke but that from the rest of the rifle muskets as well. The Union charge, such as it was, shattered like crockery on a big rock. Only eight or ten men in blue were down, but even the ones who didn't take a minnie felt the Angel of Death brush them with his dark wings.
“Charge!” the lieutenant shouted. A revolver in one hand and his ceremonial saber in the other, he set his own example.
Against determined foes, it would have been madness. It would have been suicide. But the Federals had no fight left in them. Some turned and pelted back in the direction from which they'd come. Others threw down their guns and tried to surrender.
Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn't. Jack Jenkins saw some of his comrades send Federals back toward the rear-often with a kick in the rear as they went. Others shot men in blue uniforms at point-blank range or bayoneted them even as they got down on their knees and begged for mercy.
“Don't shoot! Sweet Jesus, please don't shoot!” a Federal sergeant called to Jenkins. He held out empty hands. “See? I ain't got no gun.”
He also didn't have an accent like Jenkins's. He was no Tennessean, no homemade Yankee. He really did come from up North; he seemed to pronounce every letter in every word. And that likely meant… “You one of those fellows who tell nigger soldiers what to do?” Jenkins barked.
“Yes, that's right,” the sergeant answered. “But-”
He got no further. Jenkins pulled the trigger. The minnie caught the Yankee right in the middle of the chest. The man stared in astonished reproach for a moment, as if to say, What did you have to go and do that for? He opened his mouth, as if to ask the question. His knees buckled instead. He flopped and thrashed on the ground like a sunfish just pulled from a stream.
“Hold still, God damn you,” Jenkins said, and used his bayonet. He stabbed several times, till the U.S. sergeant finally stopped moving. “You turn niggers into soldiers, you deserve worse'n I just gave you.
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a bullet cracked past his head. For all he knew, a colored soldier fired it. He reloaded his own piece in feverish haste. He felt naked if he couldn't shoot back at the enemy. Some Yankee cavalrymen and even foot soldiers were getting repeating rifles that gave a company almost a regiment's worth of firepower. He thanked heaven nobody in Fort Pillow seemed to have guns like that. The lead they put in the air would have made storming the place gruesomely, maybe impossibly, expensive.
As he stowed his ramrod in its tube under the rifle musket's barrel, he wondered why the Confederacy couldn't make repeating rifles for its troopers. U.S. soldiers weren't any braver than their C.S. counterparts; with his own fierce pride, Jenkins refused to believe they were as brave. But the Federals would never lose the war because they ran short on things. Guns, ammunition, uniforms, railroads to take men where they needed to go, gunboats… The men in blue seemed to pull such things out of their back pockets, along with more food than they knew what to do with.
As for the Confederates… How many of Bedford Forrest's men were wearing captured clothing? Quite a few had blue trousers. A standing order required shirts to be dyed butternut right away, to keep the troopers from shooting at one another by mistake. A lot of Confederates carried captured weapons, too. The South simply couldn't make or bring in enough to meet its need.
Before the war, Southerners sneered at Yankees as nothing more than merchants and factory hands. The charge was true enough. But the South hadn't realized it brought strengths as well as weaknesses. Men fought wars, but they fought them with things. No matter how brave you were, you'd lose if you didn't have food in your belly, if you didn't have bullets in your rifle musket, if you didn't have gunboats to control the rivers. The Federals didn't have to worry about anything like that. The Confederates did, more and more as the fight dragged on.
But not right here, not right now. Forrest's motto was Get there first with the most men. He had the most men here, right where he needed them, and the Federals were melting away like snow in the hot sun.
A Negro running in front of Jenkins gave a despairing screech, threw his hands in the air, and wailed, “Do Jesus, don't kill me! I ain't done nothin' to nobody!”
“You one of those niggers yellin' you wouldn't give us quarter?” Jenkins growled.
“Oh, no, suh, not me! I ain't one o' them bad niggers!” The black man shook his head so hard, his cap flew off and fell to the ground beside him. He didn't seem to notice; all his fearful attention was on Jenkins. “I don’t want to fight no mo.
“I bet you don't, boy,” Jenkins said. “You a runaway?”
The Negro hesitated. If he said no, the way he talked would betray him-he sounded like someone from the deep South, from South Carolina or Georgia or Alabama or Mississippi. But if he said yes, he was liable to seal his own fate. Jenkins could watch the gears meshing and turning behind his eyes. In the end, all he said was, “Don't kill me, suh. I surrender.”
“You had your chance. All of you bastards had your chance. You should've took it when you could.” Jenkins squeezed the trigger.
Even he winced at what the Mini? ball did. It tore off the bottom half of the black man's face, leaving him gobbling and bleating because he could no longer make sounds resembling human speech. Blood poured down his front. But he would not fall. He would not die. He slumped to his knees and imploringly stretched out his hands to Jenkins. His eyes were enormous in his shattered face.
“Christ!” That was the Confederate lieutenant. He shot the colored soldier in the side of his head with his revolver. The Negro didn't try to stop him-the poor bastard's last gobble before he toppled over might have been meant Thank you. The lieutenant shook his head. “I wouldn't let a dog live with a wound like that, Corporal.”
“I'm sorry, sir,” Jenkins answered; it was horrific enough to sober him, which said a great deal. “I was gonna finish the son of a bitch. I had to reload, that's all.” He was doing it as he spoke. He forgot-or maybe he chose not to remember-that he'd bayoneted the white Tennessean after his bullet didn't finish the man right away.
“Well…let it go,” the lieutenant said. “Stinking bluebellies didn't give up when they had the chance. Now they're going to pay for it.”
“Oh, hell, yes.” There Jack Jenkins agreed with the officer one hundred percent. He stowed his ramrod and went back to the fight.
The smoke from the New Era's stacks was only a receding stain against the northern skyline. Nathan Bedford Forrest smiled a slow smile, the smile of a big cat that has fed well. The Federals inside Fort Pillow had surely counted on the gunboat's firepower to save their bacon for them. There had to be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth among them now, for they'd leaned on a reed that broke and pierced their hand.
Gunboats were wonderful-where the Mississippi was wide, and where they could shell soldiers who couldn't answer back with rifle muskets. If a gunboat came close enough to fire canister, though, good shots could put enough minnies through the gunports to remind them that the fight had two sides. Sailors didn't like being forced to remember that.
Now the New Era was gone, and Fort Pillow was gone, and nothing remained but the aftermath Forrest foresaw as soon as the U.S. commander refused to lower his flag. War means fighting, and fighting means killing, he thought with somber satisfaction. Quite a few generals on both sides shied away from that simple, brutal truth. He didn't. He never had. You did what you needed to do.
And now his men were… doing what they needed to do. He was abstractly sorry they were, but knew better than to try to stop them. Nothing so corroded an officer's authority as giving orders no one heeded. If he tried to stop the soldiers from paying back the Federals, they wouldn't listen to him. And so he hung back from the fighting, where usually he led the charge.