exactly what I told him. I did everything but draw a diagram on his coat-tail of exactly what he was to do, no more and no less, from the time he left me until he saw me again: which was to make contact and then fall back. I gave him just exactly the right number of men so that he couldn’t do anything else but that. I told him exactly how fast to fall back and how much racket to make doing it and even how to make the racket. But what do you think he did?”
“I can tell you,” Granny said. “He sat on his horse at five o’clock yesterday morning, with my whole yard full of men behind him, yelling goodbye at my window.”
“He divided his men and sent half of them into the bushes to make a noise and took the other half who were the nearest to complete fools and led a sabre charge on that outpost. He didn’t fire a shot. He drove it clean back with sabres onto Smith’s main body and scared Smith so that he threw out all his cavalry and pulled out behind it and now I don’t know whether I’m about to catch him or he’s about to catch me. My provost finally caught the boy last night. He had come back and got the other thirty men of his company and was twenty miles ahead again, trying to find something to lead another charge against. ‘Do you want to be killed?’ I said. ‘Not especially,’ he said. ‘That is, I don’t especially care one way or the other.’ ‘Then neither do I,’ I said. ‘But you risked a whole company of my men.’ ‘Ain’t that what they enlisted for?’ he said. ‘They enlisted into a military establishment the purpose of which is to expend each man only at a profit. Or maybe you don’t consider me a shrewd enough trader in human meat?’ ‘I can’t say,’ he said. ‘Since day before yesterday I ain’t thought very much about how you or anybody else runs this war.’ ‘And just what were you doing day before yesterday that changed your ideas and habits?’ I said. ‘Fighting some of it,’ he said. ‘Dispersing the enemy.’ ‘Where?’ I said. ‘At a lady’s house a few miles from Jefferson,’ he said. ‘One of the niggers called her Granny like the white boy did. The others called her Miss Rosie.’” This time Granny didn’t say anything. She just waited.
“Go on,” she said.
“I’m still trying to win battles, even if since day before yesterday you ain’t,’ I said. I’ll send you down to Johnston at Jackson,’ I said. ‘He’ll put you inside Vicksburg, where you can lead private charges day and night too if you want.’ ‘Like hell you will,’ he said. And I said excuse me ‘Like hell I won’t.’” And Granny didn’t say anything. It was like day before yesterday with Ab Snopes: not like she hadn’t heard but as if right now it didn’t matter, that this was no time either to bother with such.
“And did you?” she said.
“I can’t. He knows it. You can’t punish a man for routing an enemy four times his weight. What would I say back there in Tennessee, where we both live, let alone that uncle of his, the one they licked for Governor six years ago, on Bragg’s personal staff now, with his face over Bragg’s shoulder every time Bragg opens a dispatch or picks up a pen. And I’m still trying to win battles. But I can’t. Because of a girl, one single lone young female girl that ain’t got anything under the sun against him except that, since it was his misfortune to save her from a passel of raiding enemy in a situation that everybody but her is trying to forget, she can’t seem to bear to hear his last name. Yet because of that, every battle I plan from now on will be at the mercy of a twenty-two-year-old shavetail excuse me again who might decide to lead a private charge any time he can holler at least two men in gray coats into moving in the same direction.” He stopped.
He looked at Granny. “Well?” he said.
“So now you’ve got to it,” Granny said. “Well what, Mr. Forrest?”
“Why, just have done with this foolishness. I told you I’ve got that boy, in close arrest, with a guard with a bayonet. But there won’t be any trouble there. I figured even yesterday morning that he had already lost his mind. But I reckon he’s recovered enough of it since the Provost took him last night to comprehend that I still consider myself his commander even if he don’t. So all necessary now is for you to put your foot down. Put it down hard. Now. You’re her grandma. She lives in your home. And it looks like she is going to live in it a good while yet before she gets back to Memphis to that uncle or whoever it is that calls himself her guardian. So just put your foot down. Make her. Mr. Millard would have already done that if he had been here. And I know when. It would have been two days ago by now.”
Granny waited until he got done. She stood with her arms crossed, holding each elbow in the other. “Is that all I’m to do?” she said.
“Yes,” General Forrest said. “If she don’t want to listen to you right at first, maybe as his commander…”
Granny didn’t even say “Hah.” She didn’t even send me.
She didn’t even stop in the hall and call. She went upstairs herself and we stood there and I thought maybe she was going to bring the dulcimer too and I thought how if I was General Forrest I would go back and get Cousin Philip and make him sit in the library until about supper-time while Cousin Melisandre played the dulcimer and sang. Then he could take Cousin Philip on back and then he could finish the war without worrying.
She didn’t have the dulcimer. She just had Cousin Melisandre. They came in and Granny stood to one side again with her arms crossed, holding her elbows. “Here she is,” she said. “Say it. This is Mr. Bedford Forrest,” she told Cousin Melisandre. “Say it,” she told General Forrest.
He didn’t have time. When Cousin Melisandre first came, she tried to read aloud to Ringo and me. It wasn’t much. That is, what she insisted on reading to us wasn’t so bad, even if it was mostly about ladies looking out windows and playing on something (maybe they were dulcimers too) while somebody else was off somewhere fighting. It was the way she read it. When Granny said this is Mister Forrest, Cousin Melisandre’s face looked exactly like her voice would sound when she read to us. She took two steps into the library and curtsied, spreading her hoops back, and stood up. “General Forrest,” she said. “I am acquainted with an associate of his. Will the General please give him the sincerest wishes for triumph in war and success in love, from one who will never see him again?” Then she curtsied again and spread her hoops backward and stood up and took two steps backward and turned and went out.
After a while Granny said, “Well, Mr. Forrest?”
General Forrest began to cough. He lifted his coat-tail with one hand and reached the other into his hip pocket like he was going to pull at least a musket out of it and got his handkerchief and coughed into it a while. It wasn’t very clean. It looked about like the one Cousin Philip was trying to wipe his coat off with in the summer house day before yesterday.
Then he put the handkerchief back. He didn’t say “Hah” either. “Can I reach the Holly Branch road without having to go through Jefferson?” he said.
Then Granny moved. “Open the desk,” she said. “Lay out a sheet of note-paper.” I did. And I remember how I stood at one side of the desk and General Forrest at the other, and watched Granny’s hand move the pen steady and not very slow and not very long across the paper because it never did take her very long to say anything, no matter what it was, whether she was talking it or writing it. Though I didn’t see it then, but only later, when it hung framed under glass above Cousin Melisandre’s and Cousin Philip’s mantel: the fine steady slant of Granny’s hand and General Forrest’s sprawling signatures below it that looked itself a good deal like a charge of massed cavalry: Lieutenant P. S. Backhouse, Company D, Tennessee Cavalry, was this day raised to the honorary rank of Brevet Major General killed while engaging the enemy. Vice whom Philip St-Just Backus is hereby appointed Lieutenant, Company D, Tennessee Cavalry.
N. B. Forrest Genl
I didn’t see it then. General Forrest picked it up. “Now I’ve got to have a battle,” he said. “Another sheet, son.” I laid that one out on the desk.
“A battle?” Granny said.
“To give Johnston,” he said. “Confound it, Miss Rosie, can’t you understand either that I’m just a fallible mortal man trying to run a military command according to certain fixed and inviolable rules, no matter how foolish the business looks to superior outside folks?”
“All right,” Granny said. “You had one. I was looking at it.”
“So I did,” General Forrest said. “Hah,” he said. “The battle of Sartoris.”
“No,” Granny said. “Not at my house.”
“They did all the shooting down at the creek,” I said.
“What creek?” he said.
So I told him. It ran through the pasture. Its name was Hurricane Creek but not even the white people
