Chickamauga, Henri thought to say, but it occurred to him that Chickamauga hadn’t happened yet, and another tumbling shell was blotting out the sun. He skittered backward from under its shrieking shadow, and fell over the fallen log himself, discommoding not only Sergeant Major Strange but also Ginral Jerry, who had taken shelter with them there. Below, the fort’s single 128-pounder coughed and roared, and the gunboats answered. A horse let out a screaming whinny, then fell silent.
Henri risked a peep above the log. The last chunk of shrapnel had sheared away the tent pole on which Kelley had been leaning (for the camp stool where he sat had no back to it). The minister stood up, arms akimbo, Bible pinned beneath an elbow, peering irritably at the mess of collapsed canvas. Weak sunlight glinted from his spectacles. A birdlike twittering emerged from between his lips.
“What the hell is that chatter?” Strange inquired.
“He cussen in Chinese, thas all,” Jerry explained. He had rolled onto his back and lay relaxed with one knee up and his hands laced behind his head; a straw or a splinter moved in the corner of his mouth as he talked.
“Chinese?” Strange propped up on an elbow, looking at Jerry, but Jerry was gazing further off, at a quartet of rag-winged buzzards turning in the cold wind above the fort.
“Chinese,” Strange said again. His tone shifted from outraged disbelief to a sort of resignation. Jerry rolled one eye toward him.
“He been a preacher ovah theah. In China,” Jerry said. Again Henri raised his head above the log. With a sigh, Kelley settled himself on the canvas triangle of his stool and bent his attention back onto the Bible. Henri snuggled into the cold gray wood. Another hail of shrapnel pelted down and Jerry rolled tighter against the log, which Henri himself embraced still more closely.
Then something changed in the pattern of the cannonade down by the riverside, as if a voice had left the choir, a bullfrog been gigged out of the pond. An exploding shell bloomed over Fort Donelson, and in its orange aureole the broad bearded face of Kelley appeared, hovering over the fallen log.
“Come on, boys, let’s get out of this mess,” he said, glancing over his shoulder as he slipped the Bible into his coat pocket. “There’s too much commotion to read anymore. And the colonel went down there an hour ago—I want to see what’s going on.”
Jerry only smiled and stayed where he was, curling closer to the log. Henri and Strange got up and followed Kelley. They found their horses in a grove of pin oaks in back of their camp. With Kelley leading they threaded their way through a peppering of hastily dug rifle pits to the right of the trenches which Buckner’s men occupied, waiting for a landward assault from the Federals. The outer works of the fort were three miles long and the Confederates on the ground were too few to man them as they were meant to be manned. Henri rode with his shoulders hunched against the swelling noise of the cannon, following Kelley down a gulley that fed into Hickman Creek, which gave them and their horses some cover from the shells. At the mouth where the creek flowed into the Cumberland, Forrest stood beside his trembling horse, soothing it by stroking the withers as he stared at the four Federal ironclads closing in on the inner redoubt on top of the bluff to his right. Fort Donelson’s 128-pounder had gone silent—only four smaller cannon remained.
“Hello, Parson,” he said, turning the whites of his eyes on them. “Ye’d best git to prayen now that ye’re here—ain’t nothen but Godamighty can save that fort.”
THEY DIDN’T STAY LONG to pray or to watch, but the fort did survive, by the hardest, despite the loss of its one long gun. At closer range the smaller pieces cut up the ironclads handily and set them adrift away downriver. But Grant’s reinforcements were still closing in overland.
That night it snowed, and at first light, diffused by a hovering fog from the river, the Confederates led by General Pillow attacked the Federals below the little town of Dover, downriver from the fort, hoping to open a line of retreat along the road to Nashville. Henri rode between Kelley and Strange, shaking from the cold he could not get used to, following Forrest as the cavalry rode in advance of Pillow’s left. They made their first charge through a fog so thick