cooking coldwater cornbread, a single hoecake that occupied the whole circumference of the pan. He hunkered, tail-bone hanging over his heels, flicking the hoecake now and then with a clean chip so that it would not stick.
The cornbread had a nubby surface and a faint bluish cast, like the limestone shelf where Henri had reposed. He knew it would be not quite as hard as limestone when at last he bit into his piece, and it would be just fleetingly sweet from the white corn it was made of—Jerry had not got his hands on sugar, honey, or molasses for weeks. Henri’s mouth began to water, and he swallowed a time or two.
The boy was still fiddling. Faster than before. This was a tune meant to pick up speed as it advanced. A challenge to see how fast you could work the bow without dropping a note. Young William Lipscomb had the fiddle now. Had it always been he who played “Devil’s Dream”? Lipscomb was killed or was to be killed at the age of eighteen, in the course of a skirmish on a rainy night when Forrest, profiting from the dark and the wet, sprang a surprise attack with a few of his escort on a much larger Federal cavalry unit under Cabron. November 1864: Forrest had been on his way to join John Bell Hood as he marched the Army of Tennessee from Atlanta toward Nashville, leaving Sherman unhampered to lay waste to Georgia. Lately Forrest had equipped his escort with the new Spencer repeating rifles and that and the fact that his men were well camouflaged in their wet rubber slickers made up for the disadvantage in numbers. The escort routed Cabron’s men as they struggled to raise their tents in the rain, took fifty-odd prisoners and still more small arms. Riding away with a smaller group yet, Forrest was accosted by a company of Federals who tried to take him prisoner—one had touched a gun barrel to Forrest’s breastbone, but Major Strange clipped his arm so the shot went wild. In that whirl of confusion in the rain and dark, young Lipscomb caught the bullet that killed him a day or so later. William Wood was also killed in that brief engagement at Fouché Springs. He sat now on a stump looking up at young Lipscomb, tapping a toe and rattling pebbles in the cup of his hand to mark time.
In the hollow of the dead tree the usual candle burned. But there were far more candles than usual, waxed down all amongst the roots of the tree. Some special service must be owed to the Old Ones today. From the branches dangled small cloth packets, bound up with snatches of red and black string. On the trunk of the tree people had pinned up keys and small rusty padlocks, bills of the worthless Confederate money, burnt cartridge paper, locks of hair, ribbons and love letters from home.
Henri stood up. He was terribly hungry. He felt a hole through his midsection like the hole through his head, but so much bigger that a buzzard could have flown through without grazing a wing tip.
Mist roiled around the bald crown of the hill. The bone flutes and gourd rattles of the Old Ones had joined in the fiddle tune. They had handfuls of teeth in their shakers today. Through a gap in the mist strode R. H. Auman and Jacob Cruse, both killed at Chickamauga on the same day as Henri. They tipped their hats to him as they walked by. Jeffrey Forrest beckoned them to join the dance.
Henri himself did not feel like dancing, though the music tickled and jumped in his head. He looked down at himself, at his bare sunken ribs. He was still poorer than the day Forrest first found him by the roadside in Kentucky. No shoes and no shirt, just a red wanga bundle round his neck on a string. His butternut trousers were rags to the knee. His weapons were nowhere. He was done with the war.
Out of the mist climbed Felix Hicks, a quartermaster slain not long after Brice’s Crossroads—he’d asked to ride with Forrest’s escort to attack A. J. Smith, just for the adventure of it. Auman handed Hicks a gourd. He drank, and passed it on to Henri. The gourd held cool water with a faint taste of field mint. Where was there mint now, in all this country? The horses had eaten or trampled it all.