Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Mary Ann caught his eye for a moment. “I don’t know that I take your meaning.”

  “I think that ye do.”

  She dropped her eyes. Inside the room behind her, the burr of the Reverend’s reading stopped for a moment and then resumed.

  “I’ll tell ye a story,” Forrest said. “I mean it ain’t no story, hit’s the truth.” He hadn’t planned this part, but it came out more easily. “When I was a boy we lived out to Tippah. It was wilderness then, and no neighbor nigh. My mother rode ten miles, one day, for a basket of chicks to start us a flock. It was coming on dark when she got near to home, and a painter came onto her trail.” He paused. “I don’t know if ye’ve heard a painter scream.”

  “It chills the blood,” she said. “Go on. I’m listening.”

  “The painter is a witchy critter,” Forrest said. “Hit smells the blood inside the feathers. Hit hears a heartbeat from a long ways off. My Aunt Fannie begged my mother to throw that basket down behind her so the painter might stop. She wouldn’t do it. Right when she rode in the yard the painter sprung up onto her back. Hit torn off her dress and left stripes on her back like she had been whupped.”

  “That’s a terrible story.”

  “I don’t know that it is. My mother was right satisfied with what she done. She brought them chicks safe inside the house.”

  Through the open window behind Mary Ann, silence came streaming out like smoke.

  “Miss Montgomery,” Forrest said. “What would you do? Hang on to them chicks or throw’m down?”

  “I can’t answer that. How could I?” She looked at him and held the look. Her eyes were a deep liquid green. “I couldn’t know, unless I was there. I couldn’t know till I’d already done it.”

  “You have beautiful eyes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I mean they’re honest. That’s what I said.”

  “Your eyes are black.” Mary Ann shivered. “They go right through me.”

  “I could answer that question.”

  “I’m sure that you could.” She stood up and the cat dropped out of her lap and poured itself over the rim of the porch like water.

  “You know your mind better than I know mine,” she said. “I hope you’ll come again tomorrow.”

  FORREST SLEPT POORLY and woke before dawn. He split wood for an hour, then bathed, and cut himself shaving, and staunched the cut with a spiderweb. It was still far too early to set out for Horn Lake, so he went to Hernando and, after some casting about here and there, succeeded to obtain a marriage license. At eleven o’clock he hitched his horse to the brass ring the cast iron nigger offered him in front of the Montgomery house.

  Today no other callers had preceded him. As a matter of fact the porch was empty. He stood before the front door, hesitating to knock, but before too long the door swung inward. Mrs. Montgomery greeted him, courteously, deferentially even, but without real warmth. There was a little pinch in the skin between her eyebrows, as if maybe she really did have a headache. As she showed him into the parlor, Forrest thought he saw the silhouette of Reverend Cowan, coming in the back door at the end of the hall.

  “Good morning, Mister Forrest,” Mary Ann said, offering him the white dove of her hand. “You seem to be an early riser.”

  Forrest didn’t know what to make of that. There was not an hour left in the morning. “I was up fore day,” he finally told her, squeezing his hat brim, turning his head this way and that and blinking like an owl. They shut up the parlor to keep out the heat: the windows were open just an inch from the sash and the room was curtained to such a darkness that he could barely make out the shapes of the furniture at first. Mary Ann, who wore a light cotton dress and kept her face pale with her parasol, stood out of the gloom like a revenant.

  He set down his hat on a fragile-looking little table his eyes had adjusted just enough to discern, and touched the fold of the marriage license inside his coat pocket. The feel of it reassured him less than he’d hoped. The front door squeaked, then the porch floorboards, and he heard a rustling as Mrs. Montgomery and her brother settled themselves out there, between the windows.

  “Come and sit down,” Mary Ann was saying. Forrest squinted at one chair and another—none struck him as stout enough to bear a grown man’s weight. But she was patting a cushion on the little horsehair love seat, where she had taken the other place. There was a reed of huskiness in her airy voice which he wasn’t sure had been there yesterday.

  “Did ye not tell me ye meant to answer my question?” he said, remaining where he was.

  She raised her chin to him. “Which question was that?”

  “I’m a patient man,” said Forrest. “I try to be patient. Ye oughtn’t to trifle with me, though.”

  “I don’t mean to trifle,” she said. “You asked me two questions that I recall, but there was just one you asked outright.”

  She beckoned him again, he didn’t come.

  “I’ll be your wife, if that’s what you want.”

  “That was the question,” Forrest said. “Yes.”

  From the porch came a murmur and a slither of muslin, as if perhaps Mrs. Montgomery had fainted. Forrest turned his head just a hair toward the sound, but it seemed as if the Reverend were ministering, and Mary Ann didn’t seem much concerned.

  “Come to me now,” she said, and when he had done so, she took his head in both her cool hands and looked at him closely, then stretched up to kiss him quickly on the cheekbone, lingering just long enough that he felt the startling rasp of her tongue’s tip along the fine edge of the cut his razor had left there that morning. When she drew back he wanted to follow but she stopped him with a light palm on his chest.

  “Tell me,” she said. “What happened to the panther?”

  Forrest smiled broadly in the dim. “I’ll give ye his hide for a wedding present if ye want. I’m sorry to say a good deal of the har has fell out.”

  “I thought so,” she said, and drew him to her. The outside curve of her breast fit naturally into the palm of one hand, as the other slid over the round of her hip to the small of her back. The kiss seemed to open her whole being to him.

  “Oh,” she gasped, coming out of it at last, one hand pressed to her high-buttoned throat. “Oh my God. Well I never.”

  Forrest was struck by a horrible thought. “Have ye let one of them rascals tetch ye?” he blurted.

  “Hush, Bedford,” she said, folding herself into his side, and covering his mouth with her fingers. “Nobody ever touched me like that.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IT CAME ABOUT after some battle or other—Shiloh, Fort Pillow, Franklin (or no, it wouldn’t have been Franklin)—that Henri found Willie and Matthew fighting. Or they found him, brawling out of the undergrowth to swarm each other on the bare packed ground before the hollow tree. It was just dawn, the white mist rising, and all around the graybacks lay, some few snoring, most just barely breathing, exhausted from the work of war. None would rouse to intervene. Those two were fighting to hurt each other, knuckles and elbow, sharp knees and mean kicks aimed to the groin. Both were banged up and a little bloody, from each other’s efforts as much as from yesterday’s fighting; Henri knew that neither had been gravely wounded the day before.

  “Eh!” he said, and rolled up from his scrap of blanket. “Stop that.”

  The two ignored him, panting, circling each other, looking for a way to close. Willie was bigger of the two, long and rawboned, though gaunt from scant rations, but Matthew was older, cannier, and probably more dangerous. He slipped and struck and coiled and sprang, like a bobcat or a snake. On happy days he could do a back flip standing, and all the men would laugh and cheer, and Matthew smiled bright with all his white teeth, but this morning his jaw was hard set and even his eyes had turned yellow with rage.

  Henri took a step and stood between them. Willie let down, just a little, when he did that. But Matthew whipped from behind Henri, throwing a quick one-two that caught Willie hard on the breastbone
and the eye socket, the second punch twisting to cut around the eye. The first blow had clipped Henri in the back of his ribs as it went through. He stepped aside. Willie gave his head a hard shake and dropped it and ran at Matthew with his head low and his hands high.

  “Bon, si c’est comme ça,” Henri said, raising his shirt tail to touch the bump that had risen on his rib cage, “Allez-y.”

  A handful of other soldiers of the camp were getting up to the watch the fun. One bet on Willie, another on Matthew, all merely for sport as no one had a crying dime to pay real stakes. Henri was inclined for Matthew, but Willie had a plan. He charged in hard and lumbering like a bull, took a punch on the fleshy part of his nose and didn’t let it slow him. He threw his whole weight on the other like a sack of corn, and brought the both of them to the ground. Wrassling, stomp and gouge in the dirt, gave Willie’s greater weight and longer limbs the advantage. He seemed to pin Matthew, just for a moment, and certainly slammed the back of his head against the hardpack.

  “You give?” he said. “Say calf rope!” His voice was muffled by his bloody nose. Matthew stuck a stiffened finger into his throat and weaseled free, landing a swift kick in Willie’s midsection as Willie struggled up, then catching him with an open hand across the cheek when Willie came upright. Matthew danced back, out of range. A demon was in him, Henri saw—it unnerved him more than a little. Some of the graybacks had begun to clap, on a pounding rhythm, to move the fighters harder.

  Henri whipped in and caught Matthew on the forearm. “Mathieu,” he hissed, distracting him with the queer pronunciation. “Come back.”

  Matthew’s arm throbbed against his palm like a strummed brace wire. His hand and the arm it grasped were much the same shade: coffee with a swirl of cream. As quick as that Matthew broke the grip and twisted away and turned his yellow-burning eyes on Henri.

  “Why are you fighting me?” he said bitterly. “Why me?”

  If I had a hundred men like you, Henri thought. Or twenty-five or even ten. In New Orleans or Charleston or Louisville … Harpers Ferry. Though Matthew was a boy yet. He’d soon be twenty, Henri guessed, and if Matthew had really been a slave the boy in him would have long since been extinguished.

  Matthew turned his burning eyes on Willie again. In an instant they were rolling on the ground once more. The back of Matthew’s shirt tore loose in Willie’s clutch.

  “Goddamn yore eyes git up from thar.” General Forrest had come out of nowhere, himself in a towering battle rage. Henri moved out of the line of his approach. No man wanted to meet that head-on.

  “Don’t ye know hit’s still yet Yankees to fight? They ain’t no shortage of’m neither. And you pair of fools a-wasten yore strength on each other. Git up out of that and look at me.”

  Willie stood, his hands dropping to his hips, and looked at the region of Forrest’s belt buckle, snuffling and swallowing the blood that kept drizzling from his left nostril over his upper lip. Matthew rotated his eyes onto Forrest like muzzles of a pair of cannon.

  “My own blood son a-wasten hisself in sech foolishness,” Forrest snapped. “And you, Matthew, my boy. Hadn’t ye got no better sense than that? Look at yoreself the both of ye. Look each other in the eye.”

  Both boys obeyed him then. The yellow fire faded from Matthew’s stare. Henri saw that both pairs of eyes were the same—black, hard and shiny like obsidian.

  Willie was first to drop the gaze. He broke away and stalked off into the brush around the clearing. Matthew turned to Forrest then, his open hands held up.

  “If I’m yours,” he said, “why won’t you own me?”

  Forrest’s own rage had drained out of him now. He looked around the clearing. The men of his escort, white and black, were doing their best to seem as if they’d never had the least interest in this fight or even known it was happening. Some cleaned their guns, or searched for dry socks, or rummaged in their kits for rations. Ginral Jerry struck flint and steel over a frayed heap of deadfall sticks, then crouched down to blow on the spark. The sun had come up somewhere now, sending green-gold dappling through the brush. When Forrest spoke, his words seemed to come out of the same sad bitterness as Matthew’s.

  “I own the lot of ye,” he said. “Cain’t ye see that?”

  He looked all around to be sure no one would answer. Now even Matthew’s head hung low. Then Forrest turned and strode away, in the direction of the horses.

  Ginral Jerry was molding cakes with cornmeal and cold water. They didn’t even have any salt left now. But when the first hoecake hit the hot iron, the sizzle and smell clenched up Henri’s stomach, and he felt that ache at the back of his jaws.

  He looked away from his hunger, anywhere. Matthew, head lowered, wandered out of his view. On a low springing branch of a pin oak sapling, two goldfinches shone bright in a sunbeam. In the hollow of the tree, the stub of a white candle obscurely burned.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  April 1854

  THE CHICKENS WERE JUST going to roost when the man named Herndon left the Adams Street stockade, unsatisfied with the half-dozen slaves Forrest had paraded for him around the brick walk in the center of the cabins. Forrest showed him politely to the gate in the high board fence, and chained the gate to its post when Herndon had gone out, rattling the iron to prove it sure.

  “I’ll wager he’ll be back tomorrow,” he said to his brother John, who leaned on his cane by the back door of the brick house that closed off the fourth side of the stockade. John only nodded and smiled at his feet.

  “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 th
e 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.