a faint odor of coffee. Ginral Jerry would be overjoyed with such a find.
“How’ve you been,” Henri said. The three of them were stretched out now across the bean sacks, keeping their heads below the wagon rails, for there were more than a few bullets singing over them.
“All right, I guess.” Sam Green smoothed a palm over the breech of his Spencer. His palms were gray with callus that looked like limestone furrowed by water. “Just tryen to live.” Henri found himself trying to think about all the most extreme efforts he had made to live himself, all at the same time. He looked around for something to stop his thoughts. Matthew had turned from the other two men, his body molded over slabs of bacon. He was watching the fight through a crack between two warping boards.
“Hi bout y’all?” Sam Green said.
How about us, Henri thought. It occurred to him that in the end one might betray everything. So that in the end there was no other constant than betrayal. He raised his head to look out of the wagon and very quickly brought it back down.
“They’re fighting like there’s no tomorrow.”
“’Cause for us they ain’t. Kill or be killed. Not no mercy nowhere. That’s what they believes.”
Us or them, Henri thought, then asked him, “Do these Yankees treat you right?”
“Don’t know bout that.” Sam Green flattened further on his back. His eyes, tobacco-brown in the whites, looked up at the swiftly darkening sky. “They says we ain’t slaves no mo but they don’t treat us like we men. Don’t leave us drink outen they dipper. Don’t leave us drink outen they wells. We come across the country taken what we finds any ways we can take it.”
“And then they give you a bad name for it.”
“Tha’s jess about exactly what they do.” Sam Green chuckled softly. In the fairly near distance, a wounded horse screamed. Green turned sideways to squint through the wagon rails. “Colonel Bouton, now, he ain’t so much that way. He act like he count on us, most times. Go on and look at him over there now.”
Henri raised his head again. There indeed was Edward Bouton commanding with a sure authority, grim but graceful under a flood of fire. Black troops moved willingly to his order, opening their line to let the fleeing Federals through, then closing again to resist pursuit. They disputed every yard of their retreat.
A man with a Fort Pillow badge rushed up to the wagon looking for cartridges and screamed his frustration when he found only beans. With a butcher’s knife drawn he ran back to the fight. Horse-holders were struggling to hold mules panicking from the racket of battle. Bouton and his black soldiers were fighting ferociously on the right of their line.
“It’s hangen for him if y’all catches him, see?” Sam Green remarked. “Ain’t no tomorrow for him neither.” His head turned suddenly, as if to some specific sound Henri couldn’t pick out from the general barrage. Then he jumped out of the front of the wagon and unstaked the two mules hitched to the tongue. Something on Bouton’s left had broken and a whole white Federal infantry unit was coming back at a panicked run. Sam Green clucked to his mules, tapped them with a length of cane. The wagon turned, jostling with others as they moved toward the bridge, some drivers lashing each other’s mules as they tried to advance. Sam Green, horribly exposed on the wagon box, murmured to his animals more calmly.
It was almost too dark to see anything now. Red flashes from the muzzles of the guns. Some black soldiers now had joined the flight, sailing past like bats in the gloaming, some ripping off Fort Pillow badges as they ran. Others fought on desperately. Sam Green patiently maneuvered the wagon onto the first boards of the bridge. Then the tiny movement he’d been so carefully conserving altogether stopped. Ahead of them the bridge was blocked by a wagon jammed crossways.
Sam Green craned his neck to peer ahead of him, then behind. Henri followed the direction of his backward glance. In the darkness by the tree line a muzzle flashed red and he saw the ball lift from the barrel and arc toward them like a meteorite, growing till it blotted out the sky. A kind of astral music accompanied it, ringing, shimmering: the music of the spheres. The bullet moved with a terrible dark lethargy toward them, but Henri could not seem