Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [118]
“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