Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [32]
At the end of the quarters lane, Forrest paused where Ben had raised a wooden gateway. There wasn’t any fence or gate to go with it so it was just for show—one of Ben’s own notions. The posts were set wide enough to pass a wagon with no trouble and the crossbar would be nigh on eight feet high. Forrest squinted up, raising the straw hat to one side of his face to shade his eyes from the climbing sun. Since he’d last come this way a week or so back, Ben had carved the joins of post and lintel so that two hands clasped each other at each corner. He would have needed a ladder to do that.
Morning glory vines were climbing each post from the ground. If they had been planted there a-purpose, Forrest couldn’t say. The vines looked fragile and they had a long way to go before they’d reach the joined hands on the high crossbar. Ben’s own cabin was considerably ornamented with such whittling, and so were quite a few of the others—he probably earned himself a little something in doing such work on the side. The big house here, still being finished, might have had such decoration, except that Mary Ann thought it uncivilized—said that it gave her the willies, in fact.
The men had gone out ahead of him, but not by much. He could hear the cadence of a song from the cotton fields hidden behind the next low rise, accented to the point where hoes chunked into the dirt in unison, pausing there and beginning again.
The banty hen had been chased clean out of the quarters, and now broke one way, toward the creek, while Ben and Nancy’s little girl ran the other, picking up speed as she dashed into the open shed by the creek bank, built in the shade of two big water maples, where Ben sat planing white poplar boards for cabinets in the big house. He stood up quickly and caught her to his bare chest. The girl squirmed, looked back at Forrest and then away, pulled at the pendant Ben wore on a string around his neck: a half-hickory nut he’d whittled just a little bit, to improve its natural resemblance to a barn owl.
“Be still, now,” Ben told her. “What got into you?” He looked at Forrest with the hint of a half-smile. “She act like she think you the booger-man.”
“Hattie,” Forrest said. The name had come to him when she turned her little round face his way. She stared at him a moment, then wildly shook her head.
Benjamin set her on the ground and gave her a tap on the bottom. “Get on back to yo momma then,” he said. “Effen you don’t want to act like folks.”
Hattie dodged around Forrest’s left leg and bolted back toward the quarters. He glanced after her for a second, watched the pale dusty soles of her feet flying up. When he turned back, Ben was just straightening. The zigzag scar came out of the close-cropped hair above his temple and down by his ear like a lightning bolt.
“Reckon she don’t see too many big ole bushy black beards round here,” Ben said. “Cep’n when you comes to see us.”
A couple of the middle-sized boys had stopped pulling their crosscut saw when Forrest arrived at the shed, but now, when he glanced at them, they went back to it. The one with the best feel for the work was coming twelve probably; he had a pair of big soft ears, shaped like handles of a jug. Forrest ran his over the board Benjamin had been planing. Smooth grain and more than two hands wide.
“Doen a fine job with this lumber,” he said.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Might need to put this job off a while though,” Forrest said. “Why don’t you walk over to the field with me a minute.”
Ben’s eye’s flicked over him, quick a snake’s tongue, then went out to the horizon.
“No, I ain’t senden ye to chop no cotton,” Forrest said. “Not even studyen that. Hit’s a piece of news and the men need to hear it, that’s all.”
He turned and stepped out from under the shed roof. Ben pulled on a shirt and followed him along the curving, rutted path toward the first cotton