Devil's Dream (9 page)

“I like the dark,” Forrest said, with a lip-licking smile. Surreptitiously he ran his thumb inside his waistband to assure there was room for the meal coming his way.

“Yes,”
Mrs. Montgomery said, with an untoward sharpness. “We
know
that you do.” With that she turned her pursed lips and pointedly raised chin toward Mary Ann.

The gravy boat sloshed a bit as Catharine set it down on the table, turned her back, and started for the kitchen. Mary Ann’s large eyes were picked out with blue flame. He could read the thought that flared in her gaze:
How dearly I’d love to whip that slut till her hips stop switching
.

His sister said something to Doctor Cowan, who batted the conversational shuttlecock toward William Forrest—soon enough the talk had resumed; there was a reasonable semblance of a festive conversation, though Mrs. Montgomery kept her silence, pecking at her plate like a croupy hen, and Mary Ann, though she spoke pleasantly enough if addressed, did not even pretend to touch her food.

Forrest made himself clean his plate, forced himself to down a small second helping even, though the meat was like chewing fibers of a pine board now, and the surfeit lay like a stone below the topmost
button of his trousers. Presently the children were excused and ran out laughing. A quarter-hour on, the ladies retired to the parlor. Forrest followed Doctor Cowan to the porch. As they went out, a red-bone hound came yawning and stretching from under the table and loped around the house to the back door of the kitchen where the chances of scraps might be more favorable.

Reverend Cowan went for a post-prandial stroll with two of Forrest’s able-bodied brothers. John Forrest laid his cane against the wall and slumped, with lidded eyes, into one of the several freshly caned rockers. Doctor Cowan bit the tip of a cigar and spat the remnant over the porch rail. He lit up and sat down, gently rocking. Forrest settled into the chair next to him. The aroma of the cigar seemed not so unpleasant, and for once in his life he almost wished he had acquired the habit of tobacco.

Of all the relatives in Mary Ann’s train, Forrest liked J. B. Cowan best. The doctor was certainly aware of the obus that his aunt had detonated in the dining room, but he did nothing except blow lazy smoke rings and talk on soothingly dull subjects such as the price of cotton and tobacco and the shifting of land values in North Mississippi and West Tennessee.

From the kitchen came a smash of splintering crockery, and the younger woman’s voice shrilled. Aunt Sarah’s lower tones came in behind the first frustrated shriek, soon had covered it and smoothed it all away. By now it had grown dark outdoors. Forrest heard a splash as someone tossed a basin of water out the back kitchen door, and a dog yelped for getting a wet tail.

“It’s a mite chilly.” Doctor Cowan got up and stilled his rocker with a hand on its top post. “I believe I’ll go in.”

“Good night, Cousin,” Forrest murmured.

In the corner of the porch, John Forrest was not quite snoring, lost in a laudanum haze. The cold Forrest felt in his own bones had little to do with the weather. Though he did not see his twin sister now as often as he used to, he knew she would come a few minutes before she laid her strong square hand on his right shoulder, and he knew what she was going to say.

“Brother,” Fanny Forrest said. “You have got yourself in a right ugly fix.”

He reached across his chest and caught her right hand in his left. “Don’t I know it,” he muttered.

“Nothen to do but meet it head-on.” Fanny said. “Yore wife will be expecten you to make it right.”

“Some things are jest wrong all over.” Forrest looked up; her eyes were deep-set and dark as his own.

“Is that a fact?” she said. “I expect you know more about that than I do.” She gave his hand a parting squeeze and let it go.

“I’
M NOT ASLEEP
,” Mary Ann’s voice said, as soon as he had crossed the threshold.

Forrest maneuvered the bedroom door shut behind him. Of course he’d known it futile to hope she would be. The whole dark room seemed to hold its breath. He listened to the slow pump of his heart. Though his wife was a lady, it was not unknown for her to fly out at him if provoked. She’d shout until her hair came loose and red patches flared beneath her cheekbones. But not tonight. The house was packed full as a straw tick, with even adults sleeping three to a bed, children rumpled together like puppies in a sack. No more than he, Mary Ann didn’t want all her kin and his to know their trouble. The cutting would be quietly done. Almost in silence.

“You asked me once about those chicks.” Her voice was husky in the dark.

Chicks? What chicks? Forrest’s mind scrambled. He stood with the door an inch from his back, and he still had his boots on. It came to him that she must be harking back to one of the first conversations they’d ever had, long before the least shadow of trouble fell between them. His heart raised up a little at that.

“I’ve decided,” Mary Ann said. “I’ll hang on to my chicks come hell or high water. Be damned to the panther or the Devil himself.”

“And you a good Christian woman to talk that way.” Forrest had the faintest hope the quarrel could be turned to banter.

“You better not think I’ll stop at talk.” A match sizzled, flared up, and Forrest’s eyes contracted. On the far side of the bed from him, Mary Ann was lighting a lamp.

He sat down in the chair beside the door and began working off
his left boot with the wooden bootjack. “What do you want me to do?” he said.

Her look was a blue bolt between his eyes. “Tell me the truth about those high-yaller brats she’s whelped in the yard.”

Forrest swallowed. “Her chirren and our’n are brothers and sisters. Well, you ast me.” He peeled off his stocking and draped it over the top of the empty left boot. “I mean the least’n. Not Thomas. The one she come here with.”

“Well, that is surely a comfort.
Thomas
is not one of your
bastards
. And what about the one she’s toting in her belly?”

Forrest felt his face beginning to color. The bootjack hung slack in his right hand. “I won’t lie to ye about that one neither.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t lie.” She lowered her voice to a slashing whisper. “You deceive, but you don’t lie. You go down there to the pens at night and shoot your seed into her black belly like a boar-hog rutting on a sow. And you think I don’t know about it! So my own mother has to throw it in my face at the family table?”

“That was her doen,” Forrest said. “Not mine.”

“It was your doing made it possible,” Mary Ann snapped. “And well you know it too.”

Forrest peered down at his one bare foot, which seemed very ugly to him.

“What do you expect me to do?”

Mary Ann stood on the far side of the cannon ball four-poster from him, fingers trailing in the tangled sheet. Bearing two children had thickened her only a little. He could see the outline of her breasts against the thin cotton of her gown. “There’s some things I expected you
wouldn’t
do,” she told him.

“Well,” he said miserably. “I cain’t go back and fix that now.”

“No,” she said. “You can’t. But you can get that—get her out of my house, and her spawn with her.”

Forrest raised his head. “You want me to sell her down the river?”

Mary Ann’s eyes bored into him, then lowered. “No. I suppose I don’t want that.”

She looked him more calmly now, across the field of crumpled linen. Forrest didn’t much believe in God but what if God had a face like hers? Ashamed for him. Sorry for him. Not about to move toward him.

“Do you think it is wrong to use someone and sell her away afterwards?” Mary Ann said.

“Think twice if you want to throw that up to me,” Forrest stood up, feeling his one bare foot cold on the floor, unbalanced from the booted one. He put one hand on the cannon ball at the top of the bedpost nearest him. Benjamin had carved it—had built them a whole new bedstead. “You use people yoreself and then have me sell them. Yore precious Momma too. All right, I don’t mean nothen against yore Momma, but they ain’t no truth in the way folks think about that round here. Find me some other fine lady who looks down her nose at the man sold her the maid that laces her corset and brushes her hair. Washes the pee stains outen her drawers. Who you think picked cotton for them sheets you sleep in, that gown you got on? And Yankees ain’t no better, no matter what they think. They’re in it right up to the neck with the rest of us. It ain’t only they brought most of the niggers over here in the first place. Why, they got white chirren worken in them mills up there, no better’n slaves and mebbe worse when they ain’t got no master charged to feed’m. And some no bigger nor stouter than—”

Forrest broke off. Mary Ann bit her lip and looked away, toward the heavy blinds suffocating the room. The shade of Fan, dead for three years, drifted in through a crack and passed out through the wall. Caught now like a fly in amber, she could neither grow nor change. Bedford had covered his face with his hands.

“You see,” she said slowly. “There’s something you can’t bear.”

He slowly nodded his masked head, and his fingers tightened against his face.

“I can’t bear this other thing,” she told him. “I won’t bear it.”

Forrest lowered his hands to his waist. He had not wept. His eyes were a little red, but dry, and there were white vertical stripes where his fingers had pressed, from his eye sockets to the first springing of his beard.

“You want for me to set her free?”

“Would you throw away that much money? Unless it was over a gaming table?”

“It ain’t that simple.” Forrest began to walk around the foot of the bed toward his wife. “I set people free a time or two. Look at them now. They still ain’t free.”

“Don’t touch me,” Mary Ann told him.

“Look at me then.” Forrest held her eyes. “You don’t have to be a slave to think like one. You have to set yore own-self free.”

She turned from him and blew out the lamp. Forrest retreated, limping on one bare foot and one booted one, in the direction of the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she said out of the sudden dark. “You made this bed. Now lie in it.”

December 1861

T
HAT FIRST CAMP
C
HRISTMAS
in Kentucky, Forrest was in a genial mood, for his wife had come up from Memphis to join him for the holiday, and he and their boy were all quartered together in a big warm tent with a partition and an iron stove and a plank floor. Better yet, there were floored and heated tents for all the men in his command. December 23 they’d shot some wild geese and come back to camp with a couple of dozen to hang and tenderize for a Christmas feast. There was a keg of brandy too, though Forrest didn’t touch a drop of it. He was flushed and expansive anyway, maybe from horseracing just before dinner, when he’d won some money on son Willie’s ride.

A pair of fiddlers had been found, and they rosined their bows for the country dances. Forrest handed his wife a little jealously around the square—a few ladies had turned up from the Hopkinsville area but not enough to make even couples. The bugler Gaus played fanfares to mark the figures, though more than a little off-key from the strings. When the fiddles struck up “Devil’s Dream,” the breathless dancers took their seats, leaving Forrest dancing a hornpipe alone to the quickening tune, capering and clicking his heels and somehow finding wind all the time to pronounce a long brag of how he and his Rangers would whup the Yankees and drive them home; counting off their heroic virtues one by one. When the tune had ended, Forrest fell into his chair (there was still a loaded plate before him), but he wasn’t quite done yet with the roster—

“Old Ornery here,” Forrest stabbed the air between him and Henri with his fork, “ye’d not think hit to see him now, but when I first come acrost him he was a-walken barefoot … and now ye
couldn’t dream of a finer-looken sojer.” Henri only smiled and thumbed the nap of his butternut lapel and flexed his toes inside the fat leather of his new high-topped boots and toasted his captain with an inch of brandy in his enameled tin cup. The eyes of the company flicked across him briefly, then returned to Forrest, lately promoted to colonel and happily holding forth—he’d bought most of them uniforms out of his own pocket, the same as he’d paid for the five hundred revolvers, Colt Navy sixes all shiny and new and one of them snug now in Henri’s waistband, the grip of it denting into his belly as it swelled out with hot goose. He and couple of the others who’d met him that day with Forrest on the Brandenburg road had toted the pistols under their dusters (Forrest issued Henri a good linen duster straight away) from the warehouse to a Lexington livery stable where they were packed in old potato sacks, a few taters on top of each load for show … By the time they left Louisville, there was word that a couple of companies of Union Home Guard meant to waylay them on the road south. But by then Forrest had strengthened his hand with ninety-some recruits under the name of Boone’s Rangers. He passed every man a pair of pistols and rode to the town of Nolin with a huge Confederate flag flying back over his column. At the Nolin station enough of the people turned out to watch that Forrest’s number looked three times what it really was to passengers whipping through on a southbound train—who carried word of a large, fierce and well-equipped Rebel army to every whistle-stop on the way to Nashville. Forrest carried his guns and men back to Tennessee without seeing a ghost of the Union Home Guard …