Devil's Dream (36 page)

Both of them turned their eyes to Forrest, who was saying, with an air of glee,
I have seen the Mississippi run blood fer two hunnert yards, and I’m gone to see it again …

April 1854

T
HIS
A
PRIL EVENING
, close and sweet—in the course of the afternoon it had rained, hard and suddenly, driving the women into their houses, the men into barns and outbuildings, or under trees for shelter if they were caught in the wagons well out on the roads. When the rain had ended it grew much cooler, cool but somehow electrically close. Forrest sat at the end of a horsehair sofa, listening to the low clear voice of Mary Ann spooling poetry out of a book she held in a yellow orb of light from a whale oil lamp.

The thick blue scent of lilac fumed in the half-open windows. In the short time since Forrest had settled in the Adams Street compound, the women had planted tight rows of lilac and broad trellises of fast-climbing wisteria, with the idea of screening 85 Adams, where the family lived, from 87 Adams, where the slave pens were, and
both by sight and by the dense luxurious scent of erect or inverted cones of blue flowers …

Bedford’s brother John appeared entranced, his head rolled back on the high cushion of his armchair, eyes lidded and lips faintly parted, as if the limpid stream of words had eased his pain, or as if the heavy scent of the blue flowers muted it. Doubtless the laudanum also played its part.

Mrs. Montgomery shifted on the opposite end of the horsehair sofa. Biting a thread, she held her embroidery hoop at arm’s length and studied it critically. An outline of a bluebird there, a couple of its wings filled in with thread, perched in a cluster of flowers and lurid bright red fruit.

Them berries look pizen, Forrest thought, turning his head
toward the chair where Mary Ann went on reading, the open book obscuring her face, like a fan. The verses ran over him like water, without his picking much sense from them, though he found the rhythms of her voice to be soothing, as though indeed he floated in quiet water.

Somehow Mary Ann’s tone seemed to have become just faintly harsher. With a clatter of pitchers and cups Catharine had come into the room. She wore under her apron a dark gown, of a blue so deep it was almost black, picked out by bright points that might have been either red fruits or red coals. Forrest had issued her this fabric himself, from a store of rolls he’d recently bought to clothe his slaves.

Catharine stood tall, erect as a lion-hunter, the long neck holding her head up high, the weight of the many fine braids of her hair spreading and flowing over her shoulders. Only a slight rattle of the crockery betrayed a trace of nervousness. After a moment’s hesitation she moved to serve Mrs. Montgomery first, bending her legs to bring the tray and its contents within this mistress’s reach. Mrs. Montgomery served herself delicately from the steaming china pot, added two lumps of sugar, emitted a brittle smile.

Catharine passed the tray then toward Mary Ann Forrest, who waved her off with the back of the book, and went on, a little louder, with her reading.

Catharine lowered herself before Forrest now.

“Suh,” she murmured, molasses slow. “What will you take, Mist’ Fo’est?” Her brown eye caught his for an instant before slipping easily away. Forrest took his coffee black. She’d sewn her bodice firm and tight. A swatch of white muslin tucked in the V still permitted a view of the dark cleft between her breasts. Her nipples pushed red berries up through the cloth.

“That’ll do me,” Forrest said, sitting back on the sofa, careful not to spill his cup, and Catharine caught him again with a sidelong smile as she rose, with a graceful turn away from him, but looking over her shoulder to say to him, “Suh, is that all you want?” As she moved off to serve the men sitting outside on the gallery, it occurred to Forrest that she might be slightly better tolerated by the white women of this household if she could only swing her hips a little less winsomely.

Catharine did not remain long on the gallery. The two Cowan men, Mary Ann’s uncle and cousin, had gone outdoors to smoke cigars, perhaps for a discreet taste of whiskey. They did not care for coffee now.

Mary Ann broke off, a little sharply, and without finishing the last few lines of the poem. Again Catharine had appeared in the frame of the doorway. “Missus,” she said. “Will they be anything else?”

Mary Ann glanced up without looking at the new housemaid directly. “We’ll want no more of you tonight—you can go on to the quarters. But leave the tray with us.”

Catharine seemed to smile obscurely as she stooped to settle the tray on a low table. The movement involved an undulation of her long back and brought her derriere in tight relief beneath the fabric.

Mrs. Montgomery had apparently pricked herself with a needle. She sucked a droplet of blood from a fingertip. “Exotic costume for a house servant,” she remarked, once Catharine had barely swayed out of the room. “A saucy wench if I make no mistake. I wonder you don’t find her stout enough for the field.”

Though the remark seemed generally addressed, Forrest rather took it to himself. I wonder if she’s stout enough to stand up to your witchery, he thought, but had the good sense not to say it.

Mrs. Montgomery looked at her daughter then, somewhat askance. Mary Ann did no more than to lower her eyes over the verses she had not quite finished reading. Then she closed the book, with a startling slap.

“I believe I’ll go up to my room,” she said.

“Good night,” Forrest said, looking at his wife’s heels as they turned. He’d heard her use the phrase “my room” quite seldom, but often enough to know it meant he’d not be warmly received in the bed the two of them normally shared.

He gave her a five-minute lead up the stairs. The floorboards creaked as she moved about. Then stillness. He stood up, stopping himself from yawning or cracking his back, two perfectly natural actions his mother-in-law regarded as unseemly and uncouth.

“Good night, Mother Montgomery,” he said.

A loose thread caught in her teeth again, she grimaced at him across the embroidery hoop, signifying her inability to reply. Forrest glanced up the stairs, then stepped out onto the porch. The scent of lilac lay heavy on the moist air, with a wisp of cigar smoke threaded
into it. From a hidden perch in a new-leafed maple came the liquid trill of a mockingbird.

“Gentlemen,” Forrest said. The two Cowans murmured some answer to this. A draw on his cigar brought a brief orange glow across the face of the young surgeon.

Forrest stepped down into the street, and raised his eyes for a moment to the bedroom window, dark, and for a moment he pictured the volume of poetry carefully placed on a doily by the extinguished lamp, then Mary Ann lying on her side in their bed, her shoulder jutting up through gown and coverlet like the tip of an iceberg.

And I didn’t even do anything, he thought. I didn’t do anything yet.

The men on the porch would suppose he was going to gamble, he thought, and was irked by thinking it. Ordinarily he acted with no consciousness of another’s opinion, not even his own. Tonight he felt his kinsmen on the porch were watching him, considering him, and so were the dark windows upstairs in the house. When he unlocked the gate in the fence enclosing 87 Adams, it seemed to him dozens of eyes turned his way from the pens, though in fact scarcely anyone was about, only Aunt Sarah and a pair of girl-children drying crockery by the pump head in the light of a pine torch.

The chain clanked against the gatepost when he let it drop, and he covered it with one hand to still it. The fence was built so high and tight more to screen the pens from the neighbors than to discourage escape; escape was a discouraging prospect anyway and there were plenty worse places in Memphis than here. Catharine stood in the doorway of the cabin he’d assigned her, gazing calmly across the yard at him, her round-eyed child riding on her hip. She’d put off her apron when she left the big house, and in the blend of torchlight and moonlight the dress sewn from the cloth he’d given her looked painted on.
You can’t have her lessen you force her
. The words dropped onto him out of nowhere, as if they’d tumbled out of the poetry book. Once in a brawl someone had managed to strike him between the eyes with a pistol butt, and he had lost consciousness in a flash of white light, though apparently he’d continued
to fight until he came to himself somewhat later, many hands dragging him back by his elbows, voices warning him he’d thrashed his assailant half-dead. He could picture himself turning away from the locked gate and going off to Mason’s or another gambling house where he could throw his money down and feel the surge of excitement rising. A wave to carry him away. But he did such things without thinking about them; the thought had no appeal. He might simply return to the big house, then, where his son and his daughter had long been asleep.

But Catharine had handed her child to Aunt Sarah and was moving silkily toward the gate, still watching him evenly—her face was turned a little to the side but her eyes were straight on his. A nigger wench might be whipped for the boldness of that gaze. He felt the child’s eyes on him too, but then Aunt Sarah clucked and crooked her finger and teased the child’s attention to herself.

“It’s all right,” he said to her, as Catharine stepped out between the gateposts, as if Aunt Sarah might challenge her departure with the master, as if he had to explain to her what he did. The old woman’s eyes were lost in the pockets of wrinkle and shadow below the tight band of her head cloth. She swiveled away as he shut the gate, the child’s weight pulling her. His hands felt thick and awkward, manipulating chain and lock. His keys fell into his pocket like lead weights.

“What air we doen?” he seemed to have asked her.

“You the mastah,” Catharine said.

“I ain’t the master of this,” he said.

She made some sound, not quite a word, then turned from him and walked into the shadows. Inertia broke and he went after her. She seemed in fact to be leading the way. Or she was walking a pace or two ahead of him to afford him that view she knew he enjoyed, the——I haven’t done anything yet, he thought. Only imagined crowding her into a corner of the dark smoky cabin, exchange of hot breath, flesh straining against the cloth, collapsing to a shuck tick on the floor. Instead he was walking through this cool, flower-scented night, not quite close enough to touch her. A closed carriage passed them; he didn’t bother to notice whose. There were lights at some of the windows they passed and surely people sat invisibly
in the shadows of their porches too, observing Forrest walking with his slave girl, and let them think what they damn well pleased. They were walking toward the southern edge of town.

Words skittered around the inside of his head like ants, like he’d kicked over an anthill in there.
Fancy
was a word that kept lighting up. From the poem. Forrest had never taken pleasure from reading himself and knew nothing of poetry at all except in some way he seemed to know that Mrs. Montgomery preferred other even duller poets than the one Mary Ann had chosen to read. He hadn’t known his mind had captured so many of those words.
Oh sweet fancy let her loose everything is spoilt by use
.