Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [134]
Willis’s pens weren’t much different from his own, except not so clean, which was a difference you could smell. The boy stayed quiet on Forrest’s hip, only his head searching and turning. They both watched Willis pull a wooden pin out of a hasp on one of the stalls. He turned and nodded to Forrest, almost expressionless as he pulled the door wide.
Inside, a black girl crouched on a shock of straw, holding her head in both her hands. As the door came open, she jumped up with a rattle.
The boy wriggled free of Forrest and ran to her, clutching her leg through her calico skirt. He let out a little sound like a cat would make. Or maybe it was her.
Both their heads turned together to regard him. Her neck was long and she carried her head high. Dust motes, stirred up by her sudden movement, swirled in the air between them, sparking gold when they caught the shafts of sunlight planing in through the cracks in the broad boards of the stall. Or maybe it was those bright spots that sometimes filled his field of vision if he straightened up too quickly, from bending down low. He did feel a little dizzy as a matter of fact, though he couldn’t think of a reason why. The brown honey of her eyes and a look that went clean through him.
“What’s his name?” Forrest heard himself asking.
“Thomas.” The voice seemed to come out of nowhere and when it stopped on those two syllables he couldn’t remember the sound of it at all. Had she even opened her mouth to speak? Now he saw her catch her lower lip in her top teeth, then release it.
He turned toward Willis. “What’s her name?”
“Catharine.” Willis was peering at a paper he must have found in his pocket or somewhere. “Two a’s.”
“Is that right?” Forrest said. “I’d not’ve took ye for such a keen speller.” He wasn’t much for spelling himself, if it came to that.
Willis shrugged. “I can read how it’s wrote.” He glanced back at the paper. “Seventeen years old, born’n’raised in Terror Bone Parish—”
Forrest raised up a finger to stop him, and stepped out of the stall into the bright chilly sunshine of the yard. He needed a minute to get his feet back under him—he knew that much, though he couldn’t quite figure what had knocked them out. He felt offbalance, somehow missing the slight weight of her son on his hip. It put him in mind of how he’d sometimes tote his daughter that same way. Though Fan, at five years old, was bigger … A picture flashed on him of Mary Ann in her mother’s buggy, stuck fast in the ford. The sweet opportunity he’d seen and tasted there. He pushed that image from him, staring at the pointed planks of Willis’s gate till his mind was blank, and then he stole another glance at Catharine. The long oval of her face tilted slightly upward, like a dark flower straining for the sun. Fiercely tight braids of her hair hung from beneath the point of her kerchief down between her shoulder blades. He could have her, he thought, with a lurching thrill. He had the money. Business was good.
He might offer a thousand dollars. Throw in a hundred more for the boy. Thomas, she’d said. His mind reached to recapture the sound of her voice. He turned back and spoke through the doorway, searching to find her again in the dim.
“Did you work in the house, where you come from?”
“Yassuh, I did.” Her eyes didn’t drop when she answered him. Trouble there, maybe. For sure. She held his gaze until, to calculate, he had to look away himself. They did have need of a housemaid at home. He pushed away the thought of Mary Ann’s reaction when he presented her with one she hadn’t chosen.
Duffy spat tobacco juice over the doorsill. “She worked in the bed where she come from,” he said.
His guffaw cut off when Forrest turned his head half-toward him, not so far as to have to really look at Duffy but just enough to mark where he was.
“I want to hear from you I’ll ast,” Forrest said.
He looked at