“Not me mine, by God,” Forrest growled. “At Fort Pillow, we killed five hundred niggers for a loss of twenty of our own; the Mississippi ran red for two hundred yards with their blood. That ought to show Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners—in other words, that they deserve to be just what and where they are.”
“They fought well enough at Bealeton, and elsewhere against the Army of Northern Virginia in our advance on Washington City,” Lee said: “no worse than their equally inexperienced white counterparts, at any rate. And in your campaigns in the lands formerly under Federal occupation, have you found them such easy prey as you did at Fort Pillow?”
He purposely did not mention the stories that said most of the Negroes at Fort Pillow had been slain after they surrendered. Forrest bristled even so. “Even a rat will fight, if you push him into a corner,” he said contemptuously.
“But if you don’t, he will not,” Lee replied. “The Negroes could quietly have returned to their bonds, at no danger to themselves. That they chose what most of them must have known to be a futile fight—all the more so, as your men were armed with repeaters—must, I believe, provoke the contemplation of any thoughtful man.”
“Their grandfathers fit when they were in Africa; too, I expect,” Forrest said with a shrug: “fit and lost, or they’d not have been caught and shipped over here. The ones I fit after the armistice? They were better than those worthless, hapless niggers at Fort Pillow, that I grant you. But that they fit ‘well enough’? I deny it, sir, or I’d not have licked them over and over again.”
“There our opinions differ,” Lee said. Forrest inclined his head to show he agreed with that much, if with nothing else Lee had said. Lee persisted, “I do not feel the views of the rest of the world may be ignored with safety for our state, nor do I think we can take the Negro’s lack of manliness as much for granted as before. Sooner than see the Confederacy eternally plagued with revolt and insurrection, should we not begin a program of—”
“Just one damned minute, sir,” Forrest broke in. Lee blinked; he was not used to being interrupted, let alone so rudely. Forrest sprang up from his chair and thrust his face, now quite red, up against Lee’s. “General Lee, you’re high-born, you’re high-minded, you might as well be a saint carved out of marble, and everybody says you ‘II be President as soon as Jeff Davis steps down. But if you are talking in any way, shape, or size about making people free Diggers, sir, I will fight you with every ounce of strength in my body. And I won’t be alone, sir, I promise you that. I won’t be alone.”
Lee rose, too. He wondered if Forrest would lay hands on him. The cavalry officer was some years his junior, but Lee promised him a nasty surprise if he struck first. He also wondered if Forrest would challenge him. He did not consider Forrest a gentleman, but the Tennesseean no doubt thought of himself as one…and was no doubt very quick with a pistol. But he had offered Forrest no personal insult: if anything, the reverse was true.
The two men glared at each other at closer than arm’s length for some little while. Lee battled down his own rage, said tightly, “General Forrest, I no longer find you an agreeable guest here, nor will you be welcome at my home again.”
Forrest snapped his fingers—left-handed; he had also eaten that way.” See how much I’d care to come back. I’d just as soon eat at Thaddeus Stevens’s house. The men of America Will Break may have saved the South from his tender mercies, but I see we can grow our own crop of Judases.” He spun on his heel and stomped away, his boots crashing on the wood floor, then slammed the door so violently that the flame in every lamp and candle in the dining room jumped. Lee listened to his furious footsteps receding down the walk. He slammed the iron gate that gave onto the street with a loud metallic clang.
Several women exclaimed upstairs. Lee walked to the bottom of the stairway and called, “It’s perfectly all right, my dears. General Forrest chose to leave a bit sooner than he thought he might, that’s all.”
But it wasn’t all right, and he knew it. Till now, his only enemies had been men his professional duty called him to oppose: Mexicans, western Indians, John Brown, soldiers and officers of the United States. Now he had a personal foe, and a dangerous one. He blew a long breath out through his mustache. He could feel the difference. He did not care for it.
Nate Caudell wiped sweat from his forehead, paused to rest a moment in the shade of a willow tree. His chuckle was half amused, half chagrined. Henry Pleasants’s new farm was only five miles or so up the road from Nashville toward Castalia, and here he’d started breathing hard before it came into sight. In the army, a five-mile march wouldn’t have been worth complaining about. “I’m getting lazy and soft,” he said out loud.
He pushed on. Before long, he came to a split-rail fence. As soon as he turned into the lane that led to the farmhouse, a white man who was hoeing a vegetable garden enclosed by another fence turned and let out a loud halloo to announce his arrival. The fellow’s voice had an Irish lilt to it; when he turned back toward Caudell, his pale, freckled face looked vaguely familiar.
“Good day,” Caudell said, lifting his hat. “Have I seen you somewhere before?”
“Faith, sir, I don’t think so. John Moring I am, and I’ve spent most of me time till now down by Raleigh—saving a spell in the army, that is.”
“That’s where—” Caudell began, and then stopped. Moring hadn’t been in his company, and had disappeared from the Forty Seventh North Carolina not long after Gettysburg. But that was almost three years ago now, and no one these days was making any effort to track down deserters. Caudell shrugged. “Never mind. Is Mr. Pleasants at home?”
“You’re Nate Caudell, are ye not? Aye, he’s here: sir. Where else would he be?”
Caudell lifted his hat again, walked on down the lane. He passed a stable with a cattle pen beside it, jumped over a tiny stream, then went by a corncrib and a woodpile. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of the pigpen by the corncrib, but beyond it stood the farmhouse, in the middle of a large, irregular yard where chickens and turkeys scratched.
Henry Pleasants came out onto the house’s covered porch just as Caudell got to the end of the yard. He waved to his friend and hurried over to greet him. Barnyard fowl scattered, clucking and gobbling indignantly. “Hello, Nate,” he said, pumping Caudell’s hand. He waved out to the fields that stretched back from the house. “Crop should be ail right, God willing, though we’ve had less rain than I’d hoped for.”
“Good.” Caudell looked at the fields, too, and back at the cow barn and pigpen, then at the farmhouse itself, a two-story whitewashed clapboard building with a timbered roof and a tall brick chimney—no planter’s mansion this, but no hovel, either. “It all looks very fine, Henry. I’m happy for you.”
“I still need a man with a good head for figures, Nate, to keep me from having to do my own bookkeeping,” Pleasants said. “You know I’d pay you better than your schoolteaching does.”
He’d made that offer the last time Caudell came to the farm, too. As he had then, Caudell shook his head. “I like teaching school, Henry. It’s not a line of work you get into for the money. And besides, I’d sooner be your friend than your hired man.”
“The one wouldn’t leave out the other, Nate. You know that.
“All right, but no thank you all the same.” Caudell knew nothing of the sort. As a teacher, he worked for wages but was largely free in what he did and how he did it. That suited his independent nature far better than sitting at a ledger with Henry Pleasants looking over his shoulder ever could.