Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [18]
“I need to buy a black gal,” Forrest said.
“You what?” Mary Ann had stood up sharply, tall as she could draw herself.
“Wait a minute,” Forrest said. “Not for me.”
She stared at him, both eyebrows high. I must want her to know, he thought. What I’m doen, and why.
Mary Ann took her fists off her hips. She opened her hands and looked at her palms, then back at him.
“All right,” she said. “I’m listening.”
HE WENT ALONE on a fast saddle horse, because he didn’t know just where he was going or how long it might take to get there. All he had to look for the girl with was her first name and an anecdote. Turned out she had been sold twice, first to a broker and then to a place called Coldwater Plantation, a couple of miles north of Hernando. He knew the owner, a little bit, but that didn’t help much—he still had to pay extra since the girl was expecting, and since he couldn’t hide the fact that he wanted her special and wouldn’t nobody else do.
He didn’t name his reasons while they were dickering over the price—the other man would have thought he was crazy if he had. Hell, maybe he was crazy. If he went around doing this kind of thing for every wild nigger, he would be out of business in no time. He had to borrow a wagon to carry her home, since she was too far along to ride, and that cost him some extra too. He had to drive the wagon himself, with his saddle horse coming along behind on a lead rope, for that wasn’t a horse you could ask to draw a wagon.
His man ran from the horse to the troublesome Ben. A man you couldn’t ask to set in a cage or drag a chain … He shook his head, like a horsefly was after him, to chase that thought away.
The girl sat on the box next to him, bowed-up and silent, staring down at the ruts in the road below the wagon tree. She was short and heavyset, hair so tight on top of her head she nigh about couldn’t close her mouth.
“Nancy,” he said. He could feel the effort it took her not to even glance his way. By damn they make a lovely couple, he thought, hoping Ben might prove a good enough carpenter to make this whole expedition worthwhile. He didn’t even bother to worry if the idea might not turn out, because Aunt Sarah was usually right about things like that and if she wasn’t this time, well …
“Benjamin,” Forrest said. “Ben. That’s why—”
The girl seemed to fist up even tighter; now she was biting her lower lip.
“What’s the matter with you?” he burst out. “Why would I name him to you except—”
“For meanness,” Nancy said.
“Simmer down, would ye?” said Forrest. “I ain’t that kind of mean.”
When he did get her back to Ben, he thought, she’d find him with that half-healed wound where Forrest had busted the pot upside his head, but he hadn’t done that for any kind of meanness, but just only because he had to, that’s all. He hadn’t thought about it before he did it, and there was no use thinking about it now. Maybe he should have stuck to trading in mules. There’d never be the same money in it, but it was rare to end up feeling like a mule owned you as much as you owned the goddamn mule.
A man and his wife came along in a buggy and Forrest raised his hat to them. He couldn’t call their names right off but they were people Mary Ann’s mother knew from Horn Lake. They weren’t too far from Memphis now and he would be mighty glad to get off of this wagon and get shet of this surly gal.
“Yore man ain’t no use at all without you with him,” he announced. “That’s why I’m carryen you back to him, and that’s all they is to it. Ain’t no meanness come into it, not that I can see. World’s hard sometimes. I didn’t make it.”
He shut up and looked at the road ahead, looked at the mule’s tail switching greenbottle flies. Nancy still didn’t say anything, but he could feel the knot of her temper coming undone. In a little while she raised up her head and began