Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [27]
“No,” she said. “You don’t lie.” She lowered her voice to a slashing whisper. “You deceive, but you don’t lie. You go down there to the pens at night and shoot your seed into her black belly like a boar-hog rutting on a sow. And you think I don’t know about it! So my own mother has to throw it in my face at the family table?”
“That was her doen,” Forrest said. “Not mine.”
“It was your doing made it possible,” Mary Ann snapped. “And well you know it too.”
Forrest peered down at his one bare foot, which seemed very ugly to him.
“What do you expect me to do?”
Mary Ann stood on the far side of the cannon ball four-poster from him, fingers trailing in the tangled sheet. Bearing two children had thickened her only a little. He could see the outline of her breasts against the thin cotton of her gown. “There’s some things I expected you wouldn’t do,” she told him.
“Well,” he said miserably. “I cain’t go back and fix that now.”
“No,” she said. “You can’t. But you can get that—get her out of my house, and her spawn with her.”
Forrest raised his head. “You want me to sell her down the river?”
Mary Ann’s eyes bored into him, then lowered. “No. I suppose I don’t want that.”
She looked him more calmly now, across the field of crumpled linen. Forrest didn’t much believe in God but what if God had a face like hers? Ashamed for him. Sorry for him. Not about to move toward him.
“Do you think it is wrong to use someone and sell her away afterwards?” Mary Ann said.
“Think twice if you want to throw that up to me,” Forrest stood up, feeling his one bare foot cold on the floor, unbalanced from the booted one. He put one hand on the cannon ball at the top of the bedpost nearest him. Benjamin had carved it—had built them a whole new bedstead. “You use people yoreself and then have me sell them. Yore precious Momma too. All right, I don’t mean nothen against yore Momma, but they ain’t no truth in the way folks think about that round here. Find me some other fine lady who looks down her nose at the man sold her the maid that laces her corset and brushes her hair. Washes the pee stains outen her drawers. Who you think picked cotton for them sheets you sleep in, that gown you got on? And Yankees ain’t no better, no matter what they think. They’re in it right up to the neck with the rest of us. It ain’t only they brought most of the niggers over here in the first place. Why, they got white chirren worken in them mills up there, no better’n slaves and mebbe worse when they ain’t got no master charged to feed’m. And some no bigger nor stouter than—”
Forrest broke off. Mary Ann bit her lip and looked away, toward the heavy blinds suffocating the room. The shade of Fan, dead for three years, drifted in through a crack and passed out through the wall. Caught now like a fly in amber, she could neither grow nor change. Bedford had covered his face with his hands.
“You see,” she said slowly. “There’s something you can’t bear.”
He slowly nodded his masked head, and his fingers tightened against his face.
“I can’t bear this other thing,” she told him. “I won’t bear it.”
Forrest lowered his hands to his waist. He had not wept. His eyes were a little red, but dry, and there were white vertical stripes where his fingers had pressed, from his eye sockets to the first springing of his beard.
“You want for me to set her free?”
“Would you throw away that much money? Unless it was over a gaming table?”
“It ain’t that simple.” Forrest began to walk around the foot of the bed toward his wife. “I set people free a time or two. Look at them now. They still ain’t free.”
“Don’t touch me,” Mary Ann told him.
“Look at me then.” Forrest held her eyes. “You don’t have to be a slave to think like one. You have to set yore own-self free.”
She turned from him and blew out the lamp. Forrest retreated, limping on one bare foot and one booted one, in the direction of the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she said out of the sudden dark. “You made this bed.