Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [61]
Downstairs in the parlor the mantel clock tolled three times. Mariam’s head stirred, crushing her cheek against the plaster wall, but still she slept, a bean pod dangling from her fingers. Fan had shifted in the bed and was reaching for him with both her arms, her dark eyes wide. Her mouth open too though she made no sound. He picked her up and held her against his collarbone. Her face burned against his throat. She didn’t have the heft she’d had three days ago or four. She didn’t weigh any more than a rabbit, he thought.
As he carried her down the stairs the owl’s weird sibilant voice faded. Doctor Cowan and his brother were still sleeping in their chairs. He stood in the night air holding and stroking her back until it seemed she was cooling a little. Then he went inside and settled in a rocking chair before the cold fireplace. When Fan was well she would ride astride of his long shinbone, holding his hands and shrieking with joy with the wild gallop he would give her. Tonight he could only rock her so gently. The faint warmth of her breath on his neck as he slept.
When he came to, daylight had leaked into the room, and his mother stood behind the rocker. Fan’s little arm felt hard as a wire across his shoulder.
“Let me have her,” Mariam said. “You need to let me have her now.”
“I don’t want to let her go,” he said. “I won’t.”
Mariam shook her head and set her teeth in her lower lip and then released it. “You have to let her go,” she said. “Because, we have got to wash her now, and lay her out on the cooling board.”
“The cooling board?” Forrest twisted in his chair, feeling how Fan’s body moved against him rigid as a plank.
“We air goen to have to bury her, Bedford. Ye cain’t hold on to her thisaway.”
“Where’s Mary Ann?” Forrest said.
“She’ll wake to sorrow,” his mother told him. “Best let her sleep.”
“Fan.” Forrest rocked a little. “Fan.”
“Bedford.” Mariam put her hand on the back of his neck and squeezed. He felt the strength in her hand from all the cows she had milked in her life and was milking still. “Don’t you break down.”
He couldn’t recall how he’d come to surrender the body, but presently he was standing on the porch, empty-handed with his chest and belly cold all the way to the spine. John and Doctor Cowan held their faces sunk in their hands, afraid to look at him, Forrest supposed. The sun was rising in the same place it would have if his dear daughter Fan had not died in the night. He walked down the porch steps and looked up. The screech owl slept now with its eyes squinched shut—a useless cupful of feathers. He no longer wanted to harm it, really. He only wished that enemies would fall upon him now, like the river rats from the night before, surging with the intent to kill, so that he could slash their throats and spill their entrails onto the ground, or tear the limbs from them bare-handed. Yet he knew even this would not relieve his feelings much or for long.
A day later he stood in the burying ground with a shovel hat jammed on his head, choking in a high tight collar, listening to the damned preacher mumbling ashestoashesdusttodust, his own thoughts whirling around the same pin Goddammit if there was any goddamn God why would he make a little girl that never did nobody no harm to die of the bloody flux? Answer me that goddamn your eyes. But his mother’s eyes were firm upon him and he would not say these things aloud. Son Will