Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “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.”

  MARY ANN 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.”

  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.”

  FOR 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 trous
ers 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.