Harry Turtledove - Fort Pillow

Another branch tried to yank the hat off Jenkins's head. Only a quick, desperate grab saved it. He jammed it town tighter; with luck, the next branch wouldn't be so lucky. “Weather like this, country like this, god damn if I don't halfway believe in hants myself,” he said.

Plenty of whites raised by Negro mammies and wet nurses soaked

up slaves' superstitions almost as readily as pickaninnies did. The only people who'd raised Jack Jenkins and his brothers and sisters were his father and mother and his mother's bachelor brother. They were hardscrabble farmers too poor to do anything but dream of owning slaves of their own.

That didn't mean Jenkins didn't know about hants. He heard about them from his white friends, and from the colored boys who fished in the creeks side by side with him. With kids, the lines of separation between whites and blacks weren't so sharp as they were once people grew up. If a Negro boy was more likely to wear ragged clothes and go without shoes than his white counterpart, the white might be inclined to jealousy, not to thinking he was only a slave and not worth wasting much money on.

So maybe things did haunt these woods and swamps. Jenkins couldn't swear they didn't. But he knew Bedford Forrest rode somewhere toward the rear of this column. Jenkins didn't and wouldn't believe any hant ever hatched could shift old Bedford.

Drain Lake River. Spring Lake. Big Slough. The names came out of the night as if hants wheezed them forth. Somebody said the rivers and creeks were full of bigmouthed black bass. Jack Jenkins's mouth filled with spit when he heard that. No time for fishing now, though. No time for anything but riding. Soft, marshy ground close by the countless streams. Woods wherever the land climbed a little higher.

Down by the Hatchie and the smaller streams that flowed into it, cypresses stood tall. Some of them actually grew in the water, their knees sticking up to help support them. Cypresses made Jenkins shiver. In the language of flowers, they stood for mourning and death. Maybe that was as foolish as letting fear of hants keep you inside after dark — but maybe it wasn't, too.

On higher ground, oaks and beeches supplanted the cypresses. Vines hung down from them; Jenkins got more than one wet slap in the chops. Brush and ferns crowded close to the trails. Sometimes it was hard to make out what was trail and what was undergrowth.

Without W.J. Shaw, the Confederate troopers might well have lost themselves in the swamps. Even with him, there were times during that seemingly endless night when Jenkins thought they were lost. In darkness absolute, with no moon or stars overhead, how could you tell where west lay? Shaw seemed able to, or at least was confident he could.

Had such a lean, muscular column — fifteen hundred mounted men — ever penetrated this country by night before? By the way the animals reacted, Jack Jenkins would have bet against it. Wild hogs tIed deep into the woods, grunting and squealing. The thought of roast pork made Jenkins's stomach growl. He'd eaten a couple of bites of Brunswick stew and a weevily hardtack biscuit when they rode through Brownsville, but that was quite a while ago now.

Bobcats yowled when they ran away. Raccoons made eerie noises that sounded almost as if they ought to be speech. And once an owl glided by all ghostly not more than two feet in front of Jenkins's startled face. Its wings were silent as a bug inside cotton batting. Had he blinked while it flew past, he never would have known it was there.

What else lived in these woods? Deer and bear, without a doubt. The deer were bound to be long gone, their sharp ears alerting them to danger and their swift legs carrying them away from it. Turkeys probably stayed asleep in spite of the horsemen's racket. Damn fool birds! Jenkins thought. If they weren't asleep, they'd be standing under drips with their beaks agape, and some of them would go on drinking till they drowned.

Up above, passenger pigeons would be roosting in the trees. A lot of them would already have flown farther north to breed, but some remained in this part of the world. Jenkins had seen the red — eyed birds flying in the rain before dark. Rain didn't faze them a bit, though sleet might knock them from the sky and fog confused them and made them land wherever they could.

Passenger — pigeon pie made mighty good eating, too. Thanks to the birds, nobody who could afford a shotgun was likely to starve. There were so many of them. It was almost as if God put them there as an unending bounty for the whites who spread across His land.

“Stay close to the man in front of you!” an officer shouted. “Don't go wandering off the trail!”

“Yes, Mother,” a trooper called. Other riders snickered. Confederate soldiers took their superiors no more seriously than they had to.

Confederate officers knew that as well as their men did. They hated it. This one swore. If the officers had their way, they would turn the Confederate Army into an outfit as full of spit and polish as the U.S. Army… wished it were. From what Jack Jenkins had heard, ordinary Federal soldiers gave their superiors a hard time, too. One of their officers was supposed to be known to his troops as Old Bowels.

But the men in gray were looser than the men in blue. People on both sides said so. The damnyankees tried to lord it over everybody, their own soldiers included. Outfits like Forrest's, on the other hand, were even looser than the loose Confederate average. Officers won respect — when they did win respect — because of the men they were, not because they wore bars or stars on their collars.

“No wonder the Yankees want nigger soldiers!” Jenkins exclaimed, all but blinded by the flash of his own insight. H he weren't so tired, it might not have struck him such a blow. As things were, it seemed a truth of Biblical proportions.

“What do you mean?” asked somebody not far away.

“What's a nigger good for? Doin' what he's told, and that's the long and short of it.” So said the cavalry corporal, with the assurance of the Pope speaking ex cathedra. That he'd had little to do with Negroes bothered him not a bit. He went on, “The Federals, they want everybody to do what they say all the damn time. So niggers with guns are perfect for them.”

“Could be,” said the other voice in the night. “Just one thing wrong with it, though.”

“What's that?” Jenkins demanded, angry that his brilliant perception should be challenged in any way. He was almost too weary to stay in the saddle, but not to ride his hobby-horse.

“You can give a coon a rifle. Hell, you can give a coon a cannon and call the nigger son of a bitch an artilleryman,” the other soldier said. “But even if you do, you can't make the black bastard fight.”

Jenkins considered that. A yawn almost swallowed his consideration. He welcomed the next wet vine or branch or whatever it was that hit him in the nose; it woke him up a little. “Well, hell,” he said, thus revived. “You know that, an' I know that. But what do the damnyankees know, anyways?” He was convinced he'd proved his point. And the other trooper didn't argue any more, so maybe he had.

On they rode, on and on and on. They paused for a few minutes every so often, to let the horses rest a little, drink from streams and puddles, and eat the handfuls of oats their riders doled out to them. The way Jenkins's mount hung its head told him how weary it had to be: as weary as he was, or maybe more, because he didn't have so much on his back.

He patted the horse's neck. “Don't worry about it,” he said. “Don't you worry about a thing. We got to be gettin' close to the damn fort.. don't we?” He wished he hadn't added the last couple of words. They only reminded him he had no idea how far off Fort Pillow was.