face was bluish with the small veins underneath the skin, spoke to him again in a low tone. Forrest took off his hat and looked into the crown as if maybe there was a crystal ball up in there.
“All right, John, all right,” he said. “I’ll go along with ye if that’s what ye want.”
When Forrest was most uncomfortably seated at the bedside, Lieutenant Gould groped for his hand and held it, and then in his weak dying voice he made a little speech he plainly had stored up in his mind ahead of time, saying he was sorry for what he had done, that the affair was begun in a reckless moment but if it had to end with one of them dead he was happy it should be him and not Forrest to die—it was better for the country that way.
Then Forrest looked Gould in the eye, and said in a voice that didn’t quite crack, “I jest wish the whole thing never come about, son—don’t ye know they ain’t no way on earth I could be glad about doen in one of my own?” Gould didn’t say anything more after that, but kept his weak clasp on Forrest’s left hand, while Forrest covered his eyes with his right. The other men in the room looked at each other strangely. Forrest never spoke about wishes. He only said what wasn’t, or what was.
After a time, young Gould drifted off, and Forrest got up and went out of the sickroom like Morton and the others there were invisible to him. In the night he woke crying, though he didn’t know that he was. The saltiness running through his beard into the corners of his mouth only puzzled him. He had dreamed of three women on a brow of a bald hill in the nighttime. His mother, Mariam, leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. Her front was covered with a crumpled cloth but her rawboned arms and her shoulders were bare, her strong square hands turned palm-up to him. Mary Ann had settled behind her, with such a tender and sorrowful expression on her face; she was laving the scars that the panther had left, while behind her, where Mary Ann did not have to see her, Catharine stood holding the basin ready. Her face was lost in shadow, but he could see she wore a deep blue cloth tied over her head, with white specks on it shining bright as the stars beyond the hill.
It was him or me, Momma, Forrest said. It was him or me.
Oh now Bedford, don’t take on. Her eyes deep and dark in the hollows of her head. I know it was. I know.
And he knew that she knew just how half-true that was. Awake now, he understood that Gould had died while he was dreaming. He could feel the skin of his cheeks crinkling as the salt dried to the skin, and the itch of the healing wound in his hip. The real trouble was he sometimes thought he would not, could not ever die.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
January 1865
THEY RESTED against each other in the darkness of a borrowed clapboard house, winter wind sawing at the frame of their attic room. An iron grate in the floor released a little heat from the woodstove simmering in the room below.
“Does it still hurt?” Mary Ann said. For a moment she couldn’t even remember which one of his many old wounds she had referred to.
Forrest shifted against her, spread his large warm hand across the small of her back. “Right now nothen hurts,” he said.
She fingered a lock of his hair in the dark. Right now she didn’t feel the cold at all, but she had felt a stab of it when meeting him after months of absence she saw how white his hair had grown.
“I’ll never have you all the time,” she said, or maybe only thought. “But when I’ve got you I’ve got all of you there is.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
February 1864
ON HIS HASTY RETURN from rounding up five thousand recruits in West Tennessee, Forrest was quick to send Henri and Matthew out on a scout: Federal General Sooy Smith was leading a couple of thousand cavalry south from Collierville, Tennessee. Bedford kept Willie Forrest back by him, but sent two other men of his escort—Nath Boone, who now had the rank of lieutenant, and a man named Billy Strickland, who would not be killed till the fight around Pulaski at the end of the