Devil's Dream (6 page)

Forrest sat at a table with his back to the door, his head sunk between shoulders so stiff they seemed to tremble, lank hair running sweat into his collar. It was close in the dark room, but not so hot as all that. At his left hand was a heap of silver dollars, and a neater stack of gold eagles high enough the sight of it made her breath come short. Under his right hand was a pistol.

She moved counterclockwise around the table till she had come within his field of vision, but he did not seem to see her. The red holes of his eyes tilted toward the spot on the table where the dice rattled between a pair of nail-bitten hands that scooped and shook and rolled them again, all to a low monotonous chant—she did not even want to make out the words of it. She had seen him so before, though seldom—when he was in his most terrible rage. Or not quite so. As a child she had once seen a fire eating away the core of a house till all its timbers were red coal and ash in the shape of a house with none of its substance, and maybe what she was seeing now was more like that.

“Mister Forrest,” she said. “It’s time to come home.”

The dice spun on the table, were smothered by a greasy cuff, raised and rolled another time. She called again and still he did not hear her.

“John,” she said. “Pick up the money.”

The other gamblers’ faces were hidden, shaded away under the
brims of slouch hats, plug hats—only Forrest was bareheaded, his hair flaming out like the mane of a lion. John nodded to Jerry, who began scooping the coins off the table edge into a bag so long and narrow it probably had once been a sock. At that Forrest coiled and clutched up his pistol, but John dropped one of his sticks to cover the gun hand.

“Goddammit, Bedford. You’ll not shoot your own blood over a dirty pair of dice.”

Mary Ann completed her circuit of the table and set her hand on Forrest’s other shoulder, a calming touch she meant it to be, but now he turned his red rage on her, flinching and twitching this way and that like a blind man stung by invisible bees. The man across the table had palmed the dice and scraped back his chair, beginning—“Lookahere, lady, you got no right”—but another man snatched at his sleeve to quiet him. Forrest might well remember an insult to his wife when he came to himself and if he did he would make them pay.

“Come away, Mister Forrest,” she said. “Your children want you.”

Still he did not seem to see her, though he’d stopped writhing in his seat.

“Fanny wants you,” she said slowly.

Something collapsed in Forrest’s face as he turned in the direction of her voice. “Whar is she? Whar’s little Fan?”

“Come along with me,” Mary Ann said. “I’ll take you to her.”

John managed to get the pistol away from Forrest as he rose, knocking over the chair he’d been sitting in; he tucked it into his own belt. Forrest’s hat had fallen under the table; Mary Ann crouched down to retrieve it. The pack of onlookers parted before them. Outside, the dawn was turning blue.

“Go on home,” Mary Ann said to John and Jerry once they were clear. “I’ll walk him cool.”

Jerry raised the sock of money mutely.

“Just set that on my chest of drawers, if you would,” she said. “I’ll see to it when I come back in.”

She guided Forrest north along the riverside. A yellow dog came down past them, trotting over the planks, tail tucked and head riding low. Forrest was still white and shaking, though he smelled no worse than hot and sweaty; they’d left the reek of tobacco and
whiskey behind them in the gambling den. With a shudder he turned toward her.

“Whar’s Fan? You said—”

“Hush. Fan’s all right. She’s with her grandmother.”

Forrest’s eyes came partway into focus; she thought a glimmer of last night’s quarrel might have returned to him.

“What day is it,” he asked.

“My Lord!” said Mary Ann. “It’s only Tuesday. But it can’t be that you don’t know. Keep on with this and you’ll ruin us all.”

“I was winning.” He held her shoulders and leaned fiercely toward her. “I was winning, I know I was.”

“That money has gone home ahead of you,” she told him. “I mean to set it by. For Fanny’s wedding and to give our Will a start when the time comes. Don’t you see, there’s no amount of money worth you losing yourself like you do! Every man has a weakness, and this thing is yours. You must know you can’t master it and just keep away.”

He let go her shoulders and lowered his eyes. “Let me have a minute.”

She watched him scramble down the bank to the water’s edge, where he crouched on his heels and gathered water in his hands to throw back all over his face and his head, not caring how he wet his clothes. For a minute or more he stayed hunkered down, his head turned toward the south point of Mud Island. Kingfishers skimmed the surface of the brown, slow-moving water. Of a sudden the sun cleared the buildings of the town with a great scattering of light, and the cloud bank west of the river was edged with copper and gold.

His eyes were clear when he came back toward her, combing his hair back with his fingers. Downriver, a white steamboat was chuffing toward the piers. A cloud of small birds gathered behind the paddle wheel.

“Pretty,” she said, pointing over his shoulder. He turned and they watched the boat together till it was securely docked. She handed him his hat and he put it on his head and when he had fixed the angle of it, he slipped an arm around her waist. She let him walk with her that way.

“And what is your weakness, Missus Forrest?”

“You,” she said, feeling a warmth in her face as they moved shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. “I don’t mind to allow it, my weakness is you.”

F
OR TWO WEEKS RUNNING
, Forrest woke in the night with a weight on his mind … something he couldn’t get a sound hold on. The full moon lowered through the window; he could not return to sleep. Shadows of wisteria vine danced over the rag quilt, shifting with the slight rise and fall of Mary Ann’s sleeping bosom. Forrest slipped silently out of the bed. In the hallway he stood for a moment, holding his trousers in one hand and listening for the light breath of his daughter.

Downstairs, John Forrest slept sitting up with one arm hooked over the post of his chair. A little oil lamp had burned itself out on the table at his right hand. Moon from a fanlight washed over him, pale as milk.

A good night for a coon hunt, surely, to listen to dogs running under the moon. But that was a country occupation, and here they were in town. A drinking man would take such a restlessness somewhere to be drenched in drink. Forrest might have gone to gamble, except that Mary Ann had named it to him as a weakness, and he would brook no weakness in himself. The thought that he was bound to play again one day oppressed him.

He let himself into the slave stockade through the house door. Stone doorstep cool beneath the curve of his bare feet. The iron pump cast a long spectral shadow across the yard.

Sensing the same wakefulness in one of the stalls, he padded toward the set of iron bars, cast all of a piece and bolted into a square hole of the door. The moon was behind him, and his shadow must have fallen into the interior. Benjamin charged the door from the inside, with such dire purpose that Forrest had to steel himself not to skip back. The whole door jumped in its hinges when the big man struck it with his palms.

For a second, they were nose-to-nose, with those few stripes of iron between them. Then Benjamin blew a gust of air through his nostrils, turned and went back to his stool. He lowered over something on his knees, ignoring Forrest. By damn, but this one was
hardheaded! A whisper of wood came away from a chunk of cedar he held braced in one of his hands. In the other, a sliver of blade caught a gleam of the moon. What was he shaping? Something round—a bedpost knob, or a darning egg.

Forrest turned away from the door. Aunt Sarah stood by the iron pump now, her matchstick figure upright and still. Forrest crossed the yard toward her and sat down on the edge of the cistern.

A tin cup hung from a horn of the faucet. Aunt Sarah pumped it full of water, took one sip and passed the cup to Forrest, who drank about half and returned it to her. Aunt Sarah took another swallow and dashed what remained into the yard. She hung the cup back in its place. Forrest sensed her light weight settling on the step above him. The shadow of her kerchiefed head fell over his bare shoulders.

“You aim to tell me what he’s doen with a knife?” he said.

“It settles him some to whittle,” Aunt Sarah said.

Forrest snorted, much as Ben had done. “Don’t seem to settle him enough,” he said. “Somebody’s apt to find that twixt their ribs, afore we’re through.”

Silence obtained. In a tree somewhere beyond the palings, a mockingbird whistled the first notes of a popular air, then gave it up.

“I shore could use a carpenter, don’t ye know,” Forrest said. “But I do believe he’s too peevish to work.”

Moonlight pooled around them in the yard. A little gray mouse stepped over the sill of Aunt Sarah’s cabin and looked at them for a moment and then went back inside.

“He ain’t naturally mean like that,” Aunt Sarah said.

Forrest waited. The water stain on the dirt of the yard was fading as it dried.

“Don’t know what turned his heart bad, do you?”

Forrest’s chuckle was inaudible, even to himself. “No, Auntie, I don’t know,” he said. “But I reckon I must be fixen to find out.”

T
HE SACK OF COINS
from his last gambling spree was hid beneath a fireplace tile. It wasn’t that they didn’t use the bank, but this gold was special, something apart, and Mary Ann had planted it there like a charm.

“I need a piece of money,” Forrest told her, looking toward the fireplace from where he sat at the table with his bacon, biscuit and coffee. If you pressed on the right top corner of the tile it would rock up on the other side and you could slip a knife blade into the crack and lift the whole thing out. Mary Ann might think he didn’t know that but he did. He couldn’t have said why he needed the money to come out of that hidey-hole, when he could have got it somewhere else and not said anything about it. She asked him only with her glance.

“I need to buy a black gal,” Forrest said.

“You what?” Mary Ann had stood up sharply, tall as she could draw herself.

“Wait a minute,” Forrest said. “Not for me.”

She stared at him, both eyebrows high. I must want her to know, he thought. What I’m doen, and why.

Mary Ann took her fists off her hips. She opened her hands and looked at her palms, then back at him.

“All right,” she said. “I’m listening.”

H
E WENT ALONE
on a fast saddle horse, because he didn’t know just where he was going or how long it might take to get there. All he had to look for the girl with was her first name and an anecdote. Turned out she had been sold twice, first to a broker and then to a place called Coldwater Plantation, a couple of miles north of Hernando. He knew the owner, a little bit, but that didn’t help much—he still had to pay extra since the girl was expecting, and since he couldn’t hide the fact that he wanted her special and wouldn’t nobody else do.

He didn’t name his reasons while they were dickering over the price—the other man would have thought he was crazy if he had. Hell, maybe he
was
crazy. If he went around doing this kind of thing for every wild nigger, he would be out of business in no time. He had to borrow a wagon to carry her home, since she was too far along to ride, and that cost him some extra too. He had to drive the wagon himself, with his saddle horse coming along behind on a lead rope, for that wasn’t a horse you could ask to draw a wagon.

His man ran from the horse to the troublesome Ben. A man you
couldn’t ask to set in a cage or drag a chain … He shook his head, like a horsefly was after him, to chase that thought away.

The girl sat on the box next to him, bowed-up and silent, staring down at the ruts in the road below the wagon tree. She was short and heavyset, hair so tight on top of her head she nigh about couldn’t close her mouth.

“Nancy,” he said. He could feel the effort it took her not to even glance his way. By damn they make a lovely couple, he thought, hoping Ben might prove a good enough carpenter to make this whole expedition worthwhile. He didn’t even bother to worry if the idea might not turn out, because Aunt Sarah was usually right about things like that and if she wasn’t this time, well …

“Benjamin,” Forrest said. “Ben. That’s why—”

The girl seemed to fist up even tighter; now she was biting her lower lip.

“What’s the matter with you?” he burst out. “Why would I name him to you except—”

“For meanness,” Nancy said.

“Simmer down, would ye?” said Forrest. “I ain’t that kind of mean.”

When he did get her back to Ben, he thought, she’d find him with that half-healed wound where Forrest had busted the pot upside his head, but he hadn’t done that for any kind of meanness, but just only because he had to, that’s all. He hadn’t thought about it before he did it, and there was no use thinking about it now. Maybe he should have stuck to trading in mules. There’d never be the same money in it, but it was rare to end up feeling like a mule owned you as much as you owned the goddamn mule.

A man and his wife came along in a buggy and Forrest raised his hat to them. He couldn’t call their names right off but they were people Mary Ann’s mother knew from Horn Lake. They weren’t too far from Memphis now and he would be mighty glad to get off of this wagon and get shet of this surly gal.

“Yore man ain’t no use at all without you with him,” he announced. “That’s why I’m carryen you back to him, and that’s all they is to it. Ain’t no meanness come into it, not that I can see. World’s hard sometimes. I didn’t make it.”

He shut up and looked at the road ahead, looked at the mule’s
tail switching greenbottle flies. Nancy still didn’t say anything, but he could feel the knot of her temper coming undone. In a little while she raised up her head and began to look at the scenery.

T
HEY ROLLED BACK
onto Adams Street in the cool of the day. Jerry drew upon both gates of the stockade so the wagon could come in. He looked at the wagon curiously as it went past.