Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [115]
Ben took hold of Henri’s forearm and looked into his eyes. Henri could feel Ben’s human warmth coming toward him through the palms of his hands, and he realized that he didn’t have that vitality in him anymore, and that Ben could probably feel that too.
I have fought a battle ever twenty-five days …
“I don’t see you dead,” Henri said to Ben. “I don’t see that. But you don’t want to make this run to Nashville.”
“All right.” Ben let go his arm. “I believe you tellen me the right thing to do. I’ll just cut out and go back to Coahoma.”
“Best leave your mules.”
“Leave the mules and the wagon too.” Ben smiled. “Walk till I git thar.” He hesitated. “Hope to see you.”
You won’t, Henri thought. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “You’re headed in the right direction. There’s a river of blood to get across before anybody in this crowd makes it to Nashville.”
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 …
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
April 1854
THIS APRIL 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.
Then let winged Fancy wander
Through the thoughts still spread beyond her
Open wide the mind’s cage door.
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar
O Sweet Fancy! Let her loose:
Summer’s joys are spoilt by use
And the enjoying of the Spring
Fades as does its blossoming;
Autumn’s red-lipp’d fruitage too,
Blushing through the mist and dew,
Cloys with tasting; What do then?
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 …
Fancy high-commission’d—send her!
She has vassals to attend her:
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth has lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray:
All the heaped Autumn’s wealth,
With a still mysterious stealth:
She will mix these pleasures up
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shalt quaff it—
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.
Thou shalt, at one glance behold,
The daisy and the marigold;
White-plum’d lilies, and the first
Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst
Shaded hyacinth, always
Sapphire queen of the mid-May
And every leaf and every flower
Pearled with the self-same shower.
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.
When the hen-bird’s wing doth rest
Quiet on her mossy nest;
Then the hurry