Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [12]
“I’ll wager he’ll be back tomorrow,” he said to his brother John, who leaned on his cane by the back door of the brick house that closed off the fourth side of the stockade. John only nodded and smiled at his feet.
“Put’m up, then, Jerry,” Forrest said, and the black man moved forward, motioning the slaves toward the cabins with the short stick he held in his right hand. A speckled banty hen flew up to a post of the stockade and perched there, bobbing her head between her shoulders, rustling her wings. As the line of slaves passed the pump, the slave Benjamin broke away and kicked a chamber pot from the row of them that Aunt Sarah had set on the brick rim of the cistern to dry. The chamber pot flew into the red iron of the pump and shattered. In the next instant Forrest had picked up another and smashed it over Benjamin’s head. Stunned, the slave rocked on his heels like a tree in the wind. Forrest wheeled on Jerry.
“What air ye looken at? Put’m up now like I done tolt ye.”
He turned to face Benjamin, a fine stout buck, near his own height. Like the others he had stripped to the waist to parade before the customer. His bare chest pumped; the sinking sun glanced off a point of the nine-foot stockade and caught the sheen of sweat where his breath moved. A trickle of blood ran down from a cut above his left ear.
“Well now, Ben.” Forrest lifted the shard of crockery that hung from its looped grip in his left hand and glanced at it with an air of surprise. Then he squinted back into the eyes of the tall slave. “Ye done cost me might near a dollar on them two pots.” He watched as Benjamin’s eyes came clear.
“Whup me then.” The slave looked past him, to the post that stood a few paces from the house door—a whitewashed six-by-six beam about chest high, with a rope end trailing from a hole drilled near the top.
“Ye been whupped plenty,” Forrest said, and stepped to the side; he raised his right forefinger toward the old welts the lash had carved across Benjamin’s back, but stopped short of touching them. By the back door, John shifted his cane to his left hand and swung back his coat with his right, freeing the grip of the pistol in his waistband—yet Benjamin was worth close on a thousand dollars, far too valuable to shoot.
“I don’t see as whuppen has done ye no good,” Forrest said. “Jest make ye more ornery is what I suspect. I ain’t got a mind to whup ye no more. Jest aimed to call ye back to yore senses.”
Benjamin’s heavy shoulders let down. “Yassuh,” he said. “I hear what you say.”
“Let that be the end of it.” Forrest turned and tossed the potsherd into a corner of the fence. “Aunt Sarah? Would you please come and wash this boy’s head?”
John shifted his weight with a wince, letting his coat flap cover the pistol. As the old woman hurried toward the cistern, Forrest pumped water into his own cupped hands and dashed it into his face. With his fingers he raked back his hair and smoothed down his beard. The flutter of a curtain in the window of the brick house caught his eye and he frowned briefly at the movement. Aunt Sarah had taken Benjamin by the hand and was clucking as she led him to the pump. Forrest lowered his head and went inside.
The children swarmed him as he entered the parlor, pulling at the square tails of his jacket.
“Kin we go and watch the sun go down on the river?” Willie cried. “Kin we?” His sister, Fanny, crowded up behind him, dark eyes round and excited. Mrs. Montgomery turned away from the window where she had been working and pulled a handful of pins from her mouth.
“That’s ‘can,’ not ‘kin.’ ‘May we.’ Say ‘May we,’ William.”
Willie looked from his grandmother back to Forrest. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. He jumped up and down a couple of times, bare heels slamming on the board