Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [17]
Downstairs, John Forrest slept sitting up with one arm hooked over the post of his chair. A little oil lamp had burned itself out on the table at his right hand. Moon from a fanlight washed over him, pale as milk.
A good night for a coon hunt, surely, to listen to dogs running under the moon. But that was a country occupation, and here they were in town. A drinking man would take such a restlessness somewhere to be drenched in drink. Forrest might have gone to gamble, except that Mary Ann had named it to him as a weakness, and he would brook no weakness in himself. The thought that he was bound to play again one day oppressed him.
He let himself into the slave stockade through the house door. Stone doorstep cool beneath the curve of his bare feet. The iron pump cast a long spectral shadow across the yard.
Sensing the same wakefulness in one of the stalls, he padded toward the set of iron bars, cast all of a piece and bolted into a square hole of the door. The moon was behind him, and his shadow must have fallen into the interior. Benjamin charged the door from the inside, with such dire purpose that Forrest had to steel himself not to skip back. The whole door jumped in its hinges when the big man struck it with his palms.
For a second, they were nose-to-nose, with those few stripes of iron between them. Then Benjamin blew a gust of air through his nostrils, turned and went back to his stool. He lowered over something on his knees, ignoring Forrest. By damn, but this one was hardheaded! A whisper of wood came away from a chunk of cedar he held braced in one of his hands. In the other, a sliver of blade caught a gleam of the moon. What was he shaping? Something round—a bedpost knob, or a darning egg.
Forrest turned away from the door. Aunt Sarah stood by the iron pump now, her matchstick figure upright and still. Forrest crossed the yard toward her and sat down on the edge of the cistern.
A tin cup hung from a horn of the faucet. Aunt Sarah pumped it full of water, took one sip and passed the cup to Forrest, who drank about half and returned it to her. Aunt Sarah took another swallow and dashed what remained into the yard. She hung the cup back in its place. Forrest sensed her light weight settling on the step above him. The shadow of her kerchiefed head fell over his bare shoulders.
“You aim to tell me what he’s doen with a knife?” he said.
“It settles him some to whittle,” Aunt Sarah said.
Forrest snorted, much as Ben had done. “Don’t seem to settle him enough,” he said. “Somebody’s apt to find that twixt their ribs, afore we’re through.”
Silence obtained. In a tree somewhere beyond the palings, a mockingbird whistled the first notes of a popular air, then gave it up.
“I shore could use a carpenter, don’t ye know,” Forrest said. “But I do believe he’s too peevish to work.”
Moonlight pooled around them in the yard. A little gray mouse stepped over the sill of Aunt Sarah’s cabin and looked at them for a moment and then went back inside.
“He ain’t naturally mean like that,” Aunt Sarah said.
Forrest waited. The water stain on the dirt of the yard was fading as it dried.
“Don’t know what turned his heart bad, do you?”
Forrest’s chuckle was inaudible, even to himself. “No, Auntie, I don’t know,” he said. “But I reckon I must be fixen to find out.”
THE SACK OF COINS from his last gambling spree was hid beneath a fireplace tile. It wasn’t that they didn’t use the bank, but this gold was special, something apart, and Mary Ann had planted it there like a charm.
“I need a piece of money,” Forrest told her, looking toward the fireplace from where he sat at the table with his bacon, biscuit and coffee. If you pressed on the right top corner of the tile it would rock up on the other side and you could slip a knife blade into the crack and lift the whole