Devil's Dream (5 page)

“Put’m up, then, Jerry,” Forrest said, and the black man moved forward, motioning the slaves toward the cabins with the short stick he held in his right hand. A speckled banty hen flew up to a post of the stockade and perched there, bobbing her head between her shoulders, rustling her wings. As the line of slaves passed the pump, the slave Benjamin broke away and kicked a chamber pot from the row of them that Aunt Sarah had set on the brick rim of the cistern to dry. The chamber pot flew into the red iron of the pump and shattered. In the next instant Forrest had picked up another and smashed it over Benjamin’s head. Stunned, the slave rocked on his heels like a tree in the wind. Forrest wheeled on Jerry.

“What air ye looken at? Put’m up now like I done tolt ye.”

He turned to face Benjamin, a fine stout buck, near his own height. Like the others he had stripped to the waist to parade before the customer. His bare chest pumped; the sinking sun glanced off a point of the nine-foot stockade and caught the sheen of sweat where
his breath moved. A trickle of blood ran down from a cut above his left ear.

“Well now, Ben.” Forrest lifted the shard of crockery that hung from its looped grip in his left hand and glanced at it with an air of surprise. Then he squinted back into the eyes of the tall slave. “Ye done cost me might near a dollar on them two pots.” He watched as Benjamin’s eyes came clear.

“Whup me then.” The slave looked past him, to the post that stood a few paces from the house door—a whitewashed six-by-six beam about chest high, with a rope end trailing from a hole drilled near the top.

“Ye been whupped plenty,” Forrest said, and stepped to the side; he raised his right forefinger toward the old welts the lash had carved across Benjamin’s back, but stopped short of touching them. By the back door, John shifted his cane to his left hand and swung back his coat with his right, freeing the grip of the pistol in his waistband—yet Benjamin was worth close on a thousand dollars, far too valuable to shoot.

“I don’t see as whuppen has done ye no good,” Forrest said. “Jest make ye more ornery is what I suspect. I ain’t got a mind to whup ye no more. Jest aimed to call ye back to yore senses.”

Benjamin’s heavy shoulders let down. “Yassuh,” he said. “I hear what you say.”

“Let that be the end of it.” Forrest turned and tossed the potsherd into a corner of the fence. “Aunt Sarah? Would you please come and wash this boy’s head?”

John shifted his weight with a wince, letting his coat flap cover the pistol. As the old woman hurried toward the cistern, Forrest pumped water into his own cupped hands and dashed it into his face. With his fingers he raked back his hair and smoothed down his beard. The flutter of a curtain in the window of the brick house caught his eye and he frowned briefly at the movement. Aunt Sarah had taken Benjamin by the hand and was clucking as she led him to the pump. Forrest lowered his head and went inside.

The children swarmed him as he entered the parlor, pulling at the square tails of his jacket.

“Kin we go and watch the sun go down on the river?” Willie
cried. “Kin we?” His sister, Fanny, crowded up behind him, dark eyes round and excited. Mrs. Montgomery turned away from the window where she had been working and pulled a handful of pins from her mouth.

“That’s ‘can,’ not ‘kin.’ ‘May we.’ Say ‘May we,’ William.”

Willie looked from his grandmother back to Forrest. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. He jumped up and down a couple of times, bare heels slamming on the board floor.

“Git on, then,” Forrest told him, running a hand across his hair. He lifted Fanny to his hip and turned backward, spinning her; the child arched her back over his elbow, shrieking with pleasure, her dark hair flying. Forrest set her down, and steadied her. “Keep a close eye on yore sister,” he told William. “See ye both git home afore dark.”

The children ran out. Mary Ann, flushed from her work, got down from a stool by the left rear window, tucking up a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She followed the children as far as the parlor door, and called out to the servant girl to bring coffee. Mrs. Montgomery lifted a swatch of flowered calico from the right rear window and let it drop back into place.

“What do you think of our curtains, Mister Forrest?” she said.

Forrest’s mind still ticked with her schoolmarm corrections.
Kin. Can. May we?
He flexed his fingers. “They shet out the light,” he said briefly.

“It is the fence around your slave pens that shuts out the light,” she said sharply. “My object is rather to shut out the view.”

And yet nonetheless she drew back the curtain. The slave Benjamin sat on the edge of the cistern, chin propped on his folded hands, while the old black woman dabbed a wet rag at the cut and swelling across his temple. Mrs. Montgomery sniffed and let the calico fall.

“I had hoped, when you removed to Memphis, you would not keep my daughter above another Negro barracoon.”

Forrest’s fingernails bit into his palms. “Ma’am, you can hope in one hand and—”

“Bedford!” Mary Ann cut him off.

“Well, and she oughtent to put my blood up thataway!” Forrest stalked out, swinging the door hard behind him, but he turned and
caught it on the butt of his palm before it struck the jamb. The force of his glare lingered with Mary Ann for a moment after his footsteps had receded toward the street.

“Now he’ll go and get drunk,” her mother said.

“You know very well he’ll do no such thing,” Mary Ann said. “You know better.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Montgomery.
“I tried whiskey oncet to know what it was. I ain’t tetched it since, and I won’t never agin.”

Mary Ann turned white along her cheekbones. “Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Mama.”

“I suppose it doesn’t.” Again, Mrs. Montgomery drew back the new curtain. Beside the lever arm of the pump, Aunt Sarah was poulticing Benjamin’s cut, leaning in close to peer with her watery old eyes from under the crisp blue line of her head cloth. She leaned one hand on Benjamin’s shoulder, for support, or possibly to comfort him. The red line of the sunset light drew away from them across the packed dirt of the yard.

Mrs. Montgomery moved away from the window and lowered herself onto the edge of a slick horsehair love seat. “I’m sorry I provoked him,” she said, looking down at the hooked rug between her feet.

“Let it pass, shall we?” said Mary Ann.

“But slave-trading, really!” her mother blurted. “He might have done well enough with the horses and mules.”

“The whole country runs on slavery, Mother. Even the cloth from the Yankee mills. Slaves picked the cotton for the curtain we hang to shut out the sight of them.”

“Well!” said Mrs. Montgomery, working her fingers in her lap. “I’m sure you got those opinions from him.”

“It’s right that I should,” Mary Ann told her. “He is my husband.”

Mrs. Montgomery sighed and shifted slightly on the edge of the seat cushion. The girl came in with the coffee tray and set it down, just a little shakily, on the table before the love seat. Her dress was rather too snug at the hips and bosom for Mrs. Montgomery’s taste, and a warm scent seemed to pour out of her dark velvet skin, overpowering the coffee. The girl straightened, paused for a second, then moved toward the door, hips switching and her long hands swimming around them lazily like fish.

“Catharine.”

At Mary Ann’s voice the girl stopped, resting one hand on the door frame. There was something almost impertinent in the way she looked at her mistress, Mrs. Montgomery thought, or perhaps it was only that everything irked her because she was quarreling so pointlessly with Mary Ann.

“Do tell Master John we’ll have supper at seven.”

“Yessum,” the girl said, and took her sinuous way out.

“There’s a sassy wench,” Mrs. Montgomery did not forbear to say. “I can’t say I much like the eye on her.”

“You don’t find much to your liking this evening.”

“Oh child,” Mrs. Montgomery said, melting suddenly. “You do put me to shame.” She clutched her daughter’s hand and pulled her down to sit beside her. “Of course it’s right that you should know your duty to your husband. And he
is
a good man—even I know it.”

Mary Ann kissed her cheek, then disengaged to pour the coffee. With a sudden clatter the children ran in.

“You’re back soon,” their grandmother said.

“Pa sent us,” Willie told them.

“You saw your Pa on the riverside?” said Mary Ann. “Did he go into Mason’s?”

“We didn’t see,” said Willie. Fanny pressed against her grandmother’s knee and gazed up at her wistfully. Mrs. Montgomery plucked a lump of sugar from the bowl and popped it into the little girl’s mouth.

“Mama!” Mary Ann reproved her.

Mrs. Montgomery bridled and looked away. “And Mister Forrest?”

Mary Ann shook her head, just slightly. “I don’t think we’ll wait supper.”

M
ARY
A
NN SLEPT COLD
, knees curled to her breast. When she woke the first time the bed was still hollow. At her second waking there was a small fierce warmth attached to her back like a limpet—Fanny had wormed her way into the bed and wrapped her arms around her mother from behind. Mary Ann worked herself free and shifted the sleeping child onto her lap and stroked her smoothly
back to sleep, then carried her to her mother’s room and put her into the bed. Mrs. Montgomery stirred, though without entirely waking, and gathered the child to her. Cautiously, Mary Ann backed out.

She stood for a moment in the passage, listening to the sighs of the sleeping house, before returning to the room she shared with her absent husband. It was two hours yet before dawn, but she dressed for the day, and went down the stairs with her street shoes in her hands. John Forrest sat in a straight chair in the parlor, now leaning forward, now back. A teacup on the table near held sweet-smelling dregs of a laudanum brew. A bullet in his spine from the Mexican War had left him crippled and he could not get comfortable to sleep stretched out. Indeed he slept little in any posture. For most of any night he waked and watched.

When Mary Ann caught his eye, he shook his head. She perched on the edge of the love seat and began buttoning up her shoes.

“I’ll go along with you,” John said.

“I’d be glad if you did,” she said. “Maybe you can rouse Jerry too.”

John nodded, climbed his cane hand over hand to reach his feet and took a second walking stick from beside the door as he went out. By the time Mary Ann had wrapped a shawl over her shoulders and opened the front door, the two men were waiting for her below the stoop.

They went slowly, John laboring along with his two sticks poking up like the hind legs of a grasshopper. Jerry shuffled and stooped and sucked at the stem of an unlit cob pipe. Once Mary Ann tripped over a ridge of dried mud from a wagon rut and Jerry ran a hand under her elbow to steady her.

“Watch yo step, Mistis.”

“Thank you, Jerry.” With a turn of her waist she slipped free of his hand and stepped forward, slim and straight under the dome of brilliant stars that arched over the town to the Mississippi, where the crescent moon pricked into a cloud bank like a fishhook sinking into fluff mud.

They went north along the river, going carefully over the rickety plank walk above the mud, toward the lamplight and grumbling of Mason’s.

“I’ll go in and see,” John said.

“Thank you, Brother,” said Mary Ann. John passed her one of his sticks and ran his free hand over his waistband before he pulled open the door and went in. Mary Ann stood aside from the wedge of light that spilled out, and soon someone had shut the door, muting the burr of urgent voices and the rattle of the dice. Jerry studied the cloud bank rising on the west side of Mud Island.

“Mi’ rain dis mornen,” he suggested.

“It might do that,” said Mary Ann.

John limped out, his head tucked low. “Sister, he ain’t in there.”

“Did you look well?”

“I looked all over, but you know I’d seen him if he’d been there, first thing when I crossed the sill.”

Mary Ann nodded and turned away. There was God’s plenty of gamblers and gambling dens in Memphis, shifting up and down the riverside like the packs of rats that also infested the docks, defying all efforts to exterminate them or drive them permanently away. The three of them worked their way south on Front Street, with John stepping into a second, a third gambling room, while Mary Ann and Jerry waited in the shadows by the door. At the fourth, just around the corner from the Gayoso Hotel, he was slow to return.

“Sister, he’s there but I can’t budge him,” John said when he finally did come back out. “He’s on a winning streak, at least.”

“That’s no matter,” Mary Ann said. “He’ll play till he loses the lot of it. Whatever he’s won and whatever he’s got.”

John took his second stick from her and rocked back on the pair of them, looking across at the lightening sky above the river. “It’ll soon be day.”

“You know that won’t stop him,” Mary Ann said. “It won’t stop a one of them.” She waited, then looked sharply at John. “Did you tell him that I’m here?”

“In a manner of speaking,” John said. “He ain’t able to hear it, the state that he’s in.”

He paused. Mary Ann was looking intently at the stain of light under the door in front of her.

“Might send Jerry after him,” John said, and forced a short barking laugh. “Jerry’s got a way with a mule.”

Jerry hummed and chuckled, but didn’t move. Mary Ann only
clucked her tongue. “I won’t send him in there alone,” she said. “They’re apt to mistreat him.” Her pale hand darted for the handle of the door.

“Well,
you
can’t go in there—” John was saying, but he was too slow. Using both sticks, he struggled in after her, into the thick funk of liquor and smoke. Jerry stuck the pipe in his pocket, snatched his hat off his head and followed. Someone had risen to block Mary Ann’s path.

“Miss, you cain’t—”

“Don’t you dare put that hand on me.” Flaring her nostrils, she drew herself up.

The man fell away from her. “That’s Forrest’s wife.”

“Run the nigger out, at least!” someone called, with a curse, and another man said, “That’s Forrest’s nigger.”