Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [117]
“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.