He went on, and no one but he knew the price he paid. John Bell Hood had lost an arm at Gettysburg and a leg at Chickamauga, and was a slave to laudanum to hold the pain at bay. Forrest, a stranger to whiskey and tobacco, had no more to do with opium in any form. If he hurt, he hurt – and he went on.
On days when he hurt badly, he was apt to be meaner than usual.
If he met the Federals on those days, he took it out on them. He'd lost track of how many U.S. soldiers he'd killed himself; something on the order of a couple of dozen. He didn't think any other general officer on either side could come close to matching his score. If no Yankees were close by when the pain got bad, his own men had to walk soft.
Forrest patted his horse's neck as he rode west. McCulloch's troopers had left the road a chewed – up ribbon of mud. Like any good cavalryman, Forrest took care of his mount before he took care of himself… when he wasn't in combat. When he was… He wasn't sure whether he'd had more horses shot out from under him than he'd killed damnyankees. It was close, one way or the other.
Bullets that hit the horses were mostly meant for him. He didn't intend to let himself get killed till he whipped the invaders from the north out of the Confederate States. Too bad for the animals, but the country needed him more than it needed them.
“Invaders,” he said, and then something more sulfurous still. The garrison in Fort Pillow wasn't even made up of invaders. Yankees at least fought for their own side. You could respect that, even if you thought they'd chosen a bad cause. But the men of the Thirteen Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.)…
What could you call them but traitors? They sold out their own land to join the enemy. Some of them had fought for him in earlier campaigns. Maybe they thought they could lord it over their friends and neighbors and kin if they switched sides. Maybe they just thought they'd get easier duty and better rations if they wore blue instead of butternut.
Whatever they thought, he aimed to show them just how big a mistake they were making.
As for the rest of the soldiers in Fort Pillow… Forrest muttered again, loud enough to make Captain Anderson send him a curious glance. Angrily, Nathan Bedford Forrest shook his head. Negroes had no business being soldiers, and the damnyankees had no business trying to turn them into soldiers.
Negroes were property, like horses and mules and cattle. If any man believed that to the bottom of his soul, Bedford Forrest did. How not, when he'd got rich trading in them? If you put horses and mules and cattle into blue uniforms and gave them rifles, could they fight? Of course not – the idea was ridiculous. Nigger soldiers were just as ridiculous to Forrest.
He hated the Yankees who armed Negroes and tried to train them to fight, not the blacks themselves. He wouldn't have been surprised if some of the bucks in Fort Pillow had been through his slave pens in Memphis one time or another. He had no trouble with blacks – as long as they worked in the fields or in the kitchen or somewhere like that. Deep down in his belly, he was convinced Northerners didn't know anything about Negroes, or they wouldn't try to put weapons in their hands. How could they know, when they didn't live side by side with them the way Southern whites did?
His own slaves had gone to war with him, as teamsters and jacks of- all- trades. He'd promised to free them when the fighting was over, which no doubt went a long way toward keeping them quiet. In three years of warfare, only a handful had seized any of the countless chances to run off. He took that to mean they were satisfied with their lot.
If it also meant they were scared to death of him, well, that wasn't so bad. And why shouldn't they be? Most of the Federal soldiers who ran up against his dragoons (oh, the Confederates called them cavalry, but they mostly fought on foot; they used horses to get where they were going in a hurry) were scared to death of them, and of him, too.
He got into Brownsville about two in the afternoon. Brigadier General Chalmers greeted him with a half – sour, “Might have known you couldn't stay away.”
“Might have known it myself,” Forrest allowed. The first word came out mought; he was a rich and famous backwoodsman, but a backwoodsman all the same. He said fit when he meant fought, too, and had several other turns of phrase that marked him for what he was. He lost no sleep over it. To his way of thinking, a man could be a gentleman without sounding as if he had a mouth full of butter. He got straight to business: “You find a guide to take us through the swamps and such?”
“Sure did,” Chalmers answered. “Shaw!” he shouted.
When Forrest found out Major Bradford had held W. J. Shaw in
Fort Pillow, he sharply questioned the man. The last thing he wanted was a homemade Yankee deliberately turned loose to lead his men astray and bog them down. He didn't need long to decide Shaw was nothing of the sort. What the guide felt toward Bill Bradford was… what any good Tennessean should feel for the traitors who wore blue, as far as Forrest was concerned.
“Good enough, Mr. Shaw,” he said, setting his left hand – the one he counted of higher worth, for he was left – handed – on the guide's shoulder. “Let's go catch us some Federals.”
“I'll get you there, General.” Shaw's eyes glowed with pride. So did Nathan Bedford Forrest's – with hunger.
Jack Jenkins yawned as his horse pushed on through the darkness. He'd been in the saddle for twenty – four hours, more or less. He didn't think he'd ever been so weary. He hoped the horse didn't founder. It had carried him for a whole day, and they still had hours to go before they reached Fort Pillow.
Somebody in front of him said, “Reckon we'll surprise the damnyankees when we hit 'em?”
“Jesus Christ, we better,” Jenkins said. “Nobody'd reckon we could
come so far so fast. Wouldn't believe it myself if I wasn't doin' it.”
“Hope that Shaw fella knows where he's goin',” the other trooper said. Jenkins had no idea who he was. He couldn't see the man at all, and made out his horse only as a vague blur. Splashes and drips and hoofbeats did a good job of disguising the other man's voice – and, no doubt, Jenkins's, too.
Not knowing who he was didn't mean disagreeing with him, not when he spoke such plain good sense. “If he doesn't, we're up the creek,” Jenkins said. In this part of western Tennessee, that might be literally true.
The Hatchie River bottoms, people called the country between Brownsville and Fort Pillow. Mississippi had some swamps and sloughs and marshes that seemed to go on forever. This country struck Jack Jenkins as being as bad as any farther south, and all the worse at black, black midnight.
“One thing,” said the talkative trooper up ahead of Jenkins. “Don't reckon we got to worry about any niggers gettin' ahead of us and warnin' the garrison.”
“I should hope not,” Jenkins agreed. “Nobody could go faster'n we are. Hell, I don't see how we're goin' as quick as we are.” As if to underscore that, a wet branch smacked him in the face.
As he spluttered, the other soldier said, “Not likely, no, but you never can tell what some crazy coon might try an' do. But I don't figure any nigger'd go around after dark in these parts. He'd be sure a hant'd get him.”
Another branch tried to yank the hat off Jenkins's head. Only a quick, desperate grab saved it. He jammed it town tighter; with luck, the next branch wouldn't be so lucky. “Weather like this, country like this, god damn if I don't halfway believe in hants myself,” he said.
Plenty of whites raised by Negro mammies and wet nurses soaked