Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  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.

  When the hen-bird’s wing doth rest

  Quiet on her mossy nest;

  Then the hurry and alarm

  When the bee-hive casts its swarm;

  Acorns ripe down-pattering,

  While the autumn breezes sing…

  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.

  Oh Sweet Fancy! Let her loose.

  Everything is spoiled by use:

  Where’s the cheek that doth not fade

  Too much gaz’d at? Where’s the maid

  Whose lip mature is ever new?

  Where’s the eye, however blue,

  Doth not weary? Where’s the face

  One would meet in every place?

  Where’s the voice, however soft,

  One would hear so very oft?

  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.

  At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth

  Like to bubbles when rain pelteth.

  “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.

  Let, then, sweet Fancy find

  Thee a mistress to thy mind:

  Dulcet-eyed as Ceres’ daughter,

  Ere the God of Torment taught her

  How to frown and how to chide;

  With a waist and with a side

  White as Hebe’s when her zone

  Slipt its golden clasp and down

  Fell her kirtle at her feet—

  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 thr
ow 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.

  Now they were leaving the ragged southern border of the town, where moonlight splintered through the skeletons of new-framed houses, on streets as yet unnamed. The road they walked tended in the direction of Hernando. He had a mental glimpse of Mary Ann’s eyes, flicking at him for a moment over the top of the poetry book where’s the eye however blue … But he could not turn back from the other woman who still walked a pace or two ahead of him, glancing back now over her shoulder, her dark visage calm and serious, perhaps a hint of a smile tucked into her collarbone where he couldn’t really see.

  The moon a day or so past full, an oblong rather than a circle. A rag of cloud slipped across the lower half of it, hurrying back toward Memphis. She was leading him on, each dip of her step pulling his foot forward as if they were linked by some invisible magnetic shackle. Or it was the force of his intention propelling her forward; how to know? He tried again to think of returning, but could not imagine any sort of future. As near as five minutes from now was a black hole. Deep gravity seemed to be pulling him down, although in fact the road was ascending, climbing to the gateposts of Elmwood Cemetery, which were coming up pale before them in the moonlight.

  As they entered he wondered how she knew her way; was it possible she’d come here freely? Certainly she seemed sure of her direction. He overtook her now and walked beside her, on her right, near enough he could have reached for her hand. In the way of such things they’d come to call her Catharine Forrest, he thought, and her children would be called Forrest too, if he didn’t sell her or sell them. In time of need or simply for profit he might sell a saddle horse, even a fine one he’d known huge and bold and rippling between his legs …

  “Ain’t you afeart?” he asked her. For a moment he seemed to be asking it of himself. But Bedford Forrest had not been afraid of anything since when he was twelve he got first word that his father was dead. He couldn’t remember many times before that either.

  “Feart of what?” Her voice low, a hint of laughter in it maybe.

  “Haints.” By damn, by Satan’s horny cloven hooves, he might as well be twelve again and trying to spark some scrawny girl in a gunny sack for a dress.

  Catharine’s laugh came low and husky. “This buryen ground too young fo’ haints.” He saw the white of her teeth as she smiled in the dark. “Not no scary ones, no way.”

  It was true—Elmwood had been dedicated just two years before and thus far was most commonly used as a park. Of a Sunday he’d driven the rambles himself, with Mary Ann and the children and sometimes a grandmother. He’d not known of niggers coming here much, though Catharine seemed to know her way.

  The air was heavy with crape myrtle aroma, and all the dogwoods were in bloom; white quatrefoil leaves trembling up to the moon. The giddy myrtle scent caught in the back of his gullet. He followed her under a spray of dogwood and stopped beside a waist-high marble slab.

  She turned to face him. His fingertips trailed the surface of the stone, dipped into indentations of the letters there. “You’re not afraid,” he said.

  “Of haints?”

  “Of me.”

  Again the warm syrup of her laughter. “You think I don’t know what a man is?” She shook back her hair and stood with her back arched, hands cocked at her waist. “I seen how you looks at me. I knows what you wants.”

  “But what do you want?” It could not be himself who said these words—asking a black slave wench what she wanted.

  She loosed some hidden clasp and all at once the dress fell from her, pooling at her feet. When she stepped out of it, toward him, the warm loamy scent of her seemed to wash over him already.

  “What I can git,” she told him.

  And with a smile, though her almond eyes were not entirely smiling. She looked to him sleek as a seal in the fractured moonlight that fell through the dogwood. Her breasts rose toward him as she breathed. He had not touched her yet, not ever, not even when he’d seen her the first time, chained to a ring on a post of that stall. In a flash before he reached for her he wondered why he would choose this. To be no longer master of anyone, and least of all himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  April 1863

  MELEE. A ricochet whine brought Henri to a heightened state of consciousness, focused as if on the rust-red pain of a wasp sting. The horses bunched, Forrest’s charger jostling Henri’s mount. A string of curses why that slipslidenfleabittenwormriddeneggsuckenliv-erblownhorsestealengraverobben son of Satan I’ll tie his skinny legs around his neck in a sweet bow knot afore I’m done … It seemed the shooting came from all sides now, three hundred and sixty degrees of a circle closing in. The point of Forrest’s double-ground sword stuck up, revolved, as if to cut little crescents from the clouds in the blue sky overhead.

  Henri looked at Forrest’s magnificent bay war horse and couldn’t think of the animal’s name, couldn’t seem to remember if this was the fifth or the fifteenth horse Forrest would have shot from under him—and was that an event that had already happened, or was it still to come?

  From the rear or what had been their rear a cannon coughed up thunder and grapeshot. Henri was shocked to a slightly clearer sense of the occasion and its time and place. It was spring, green grass and the pillowy fresh air told him that much, the fields so lush their horses risked foundering if they overgrazed. Last night Ginral Jerry had come into camp with half a dozen young rabbits slung over his shoulder, so dazed with spring fever, Jerry had claimed, he had only to snatch them up by t
heir ears.

  The pitch of the ringing in Henri’s ears shifted, and near him he saw a corporal clap a hand around his upper arm. Blood leaked through the cracks between his fingers as the gray cloth stained. To the corporal’s woebegone expression Forrest bit off a few words. “Hold yer horse in, son, ye ain’t bad hurt till yet.”

  Smoke to the west—the Yankees had been burning barns and fields. A courier came galloping in amongst them: “Stanley’s run over Armstrong’s rear! Captured a mess of guns, and Captain Freeman!”

  “Is he in Armstrong’s rear goddamn him!” But for once Henri had a suspicion that Forrest’s battle joy might be just slightly feigned. “By the bloody burning horns of the Devil that’s jest whar I been tryen to git him all day! Come on, boys, we’ll be in his rear terrectly—”

  The event assembled itself in Henri’s mind. Today they were in Middle Tennessee, south of Franklin on the Lewisburg Pike, riding out from Spring Hill for a reconnaissance coordinated with Van Dorn. In this region the road was embraced by bends of the Harpeth River, one of which the Federal General Stanley had unexpectedly crossed, overrunning Freeman’s hastily formed battery before he could get off a shot, then moving into Armstrong’s rear. The Confederates would have been set for a rout if Forrest had not rallied his escort to charge back on the attackers—by the first shock of contact most of the riders had persuaded themselves that Stanley really had fallen into a trap set by Forrest, and their wildcat shrieking turned triumphant:

  Yyyyyyaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!

  They’d overrun Freeman’s cannons now, though not the Federals who were rushing back toward the river crossing with their prisoners. Forrest, his bearded face in a genuine battle blaze, leaned toward Henri from his saddle and said, “Ornery, did I git around to tellen ye the time this puts me in mind of—” while on the other side of him Matthew turned his horse in closer, risking a collision to capture the anecdotal pearl—