Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [13]
“Git on, then,” Forrest told him, running a hand across his hair. He lifted Fanny to his hip and turned backward, spinning her; the child arched her back over his elbow, shrieking with pleasure, her dark hair flying. Forrest set her down, and steadied her. “Keep a close eye on yore sister,” he told William. “See ye both git home afore dark.”
The children ran out. Mary Ann, flushed from her work, got down from a stool by the left rear window, tucking up a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She followed the children as far as the parlor door, and called out to the servant girl to bring coffee. Mrs. Montgomery lifted a swatch of flowered calico from the right rear window and let it drop back into place.
“What do you think of our curtains, Mister Forrest?” she said.
Forrest’s mind still ticked with her schoolmarm corrections. Kin. Can. May we? He flexed his fingers. “They shet out the light,” he said briefly.
“It is the fence around your slave pens that shuts out the light,” she said sharply. “My object is rather to shut out the view.”
And yet nonetheless she drew back the curtain. The slave Benjamin sat on the edge of the cistern, chin propped on his folded hands, while the old black woman dabbed a wet rag at the cut and swelling across his temple. Mrs. Montgomery sniffed and let the calico fall.
“I had hoped, when you removed to Memphis, you would not keep my daughter above another Negro barracoon.”
Forrest’s fingernails bit into his palms. “Ma’am, you can hope in one hand and—”
“Bedford!” Mary Ann cut him off.
“Well, and she oughtent to put my blood up thataway!” Forrest stalked out, swinging the door hard behind him, but he turned and caught it on the butt of his palm before it struck the jamb. The force of his glare lingered with Mary Ann for a moment after his footsteps had receded toward the street.
“Now he’ll go and get drunk,” her mother said.
“You know very well he’ll do no such thing,” Mary Ann said. “You know better.”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Montgomery. “I tried whiskey oncet to know what it was. I ain’t tetched it since, and I won’t never agin.”
Mary Ann turned white along her cheekbones. “Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Mama.”
“I suppose it doesn’t.” Again, Mrs. Montgomery drew back the new curtain. Beside the lever arm of the pump, Aunt Sarah was poulticing Benjamin’s cut, leaning in close to peer with her watery old eyes from under the crisp blue line of her head cloth. She leaned one hand on Benjamin’s shoulder, for support, or possibly to comfort him. The red line of the sunset light drew away from them across the packed dirt of the yard.
Mrs. Montgomery moved away from the window and lowered herself onto the edge of a slick horsehair love seat. “I’m sorry I provoked him,” she said, looking down at the hooked rug between her feet.
“Let it pass, shall we?” said Mary Ann.
“But slave-trading, really!” her mother blurted. “He might have done well enough with the horses and mules.”
“The whole country runs on slavery, Mother. Even the cloth from the Yankee mills. Slaves picked the cotton for the curtain we hang to shut out the sight of them.”
“Well!” said Mrs. Montgomery, working her fingers in her lap. “I’m sure you got those opinions from him.”
“It’s right that I should,” Mary Ann told her. “He is my husband.”
Mrs. Montgomery sighed and shifted slightly on the edge of the seat cushion. The girl came in with the coffee tray and set it down, just a little shakily, on the table before the love seat. Her dress was rather too snug at the hips and bosom for Mrs. Montgomery’s taste, and a warm scent seemed to pour out of her dark velvet skin, overpowering the coffee. The girl straightened, paused for a second, then moved toward the door, hips switching and her long hands swimming around them lazily like fish.
“Catharine.”
At Mary Ann’s voice the girl stopped, resting one hand on the door frame. There was something almost impertinent in the way she looked at her mistress, Mrs. Montgomery thought, or perhaps it was only that everything irked her because she was quarreling so pointlessly with