Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [76]
Catharine turned toward the front window again. “You looks at him once you knows where he come from.”
“That’s about the size of it.” Forrest sat back. “Well, he done cost me all I could give and then some. He don’t seem to want much to do with me and I don’t know what to do with him. You can jest picture how Ole Miss would cotton to him at home.”
“So you aims to drop him on me.”
“I got him schooled to a saddle-maker on Beale Street. Fore you know it he’ll be bringen home good money.”
Catharine rocked back in her seat and laughed harshly. The baby stirred and she stroked his head with her palm. Black curls were already coming in on the milk-chocolate scalp.
“I’ll see your young’ns learn a trade also,” Forrest said. “When it oncet comes time.”
Catharine gazed back at him evenly. “Will they be free?”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Forrest said. “What I’d like to know is will I ever be.”
She laughed again but there seemed to be no bitterness in it this time. The baby was sleeping now and she drew him carefully away from the breast. The nipple stood up dark and thick and polished with spit, and she didn’t cover it even after she had laid the baby in the box in the corner. She looked at Forrest with her hands on her hips and the one breast pointing at him, her handsome head held high.
“A fancy gal you say. Nawlins.”
“They warnt a thing I could do to stop that at the time.” Forrest narrowed his vision into her ginger eyes. “I stopped it happenen to you.”
“I knows it,” Catharine said. “I was right there when you laid down yo money and bought me for yo self.”
When she opened the door to the second room there was a flood of light from the windows in the west wall. Through the doorway he could see in the bright pool of sunlight a bed with a quilt made of worn-out work pants with the legs slit and sewn together in Vs. Catharine shrugged her whole upper body and when she turned toward him again she was bare to her navel. Yet what seemed to capture his eye the most was the way the tendon of her neck was centered so perfectly in the cup of her collarbone. It struck him like an arrow to his core.
“Come on, you big ugly mean ole buckra,” she said. “Le’s see how you claims what you owns.”
SOMEONE had cranked the bed ropes good and tight and for the next two hours they needed to be. Forrest was roused from a thick oily sleep by young voices laughing and a splattering sound from the street. He sat up to peer out the window. Outside, Matthew and Thomas tittered and pointed as the black horse Satan hosed down the street with a great foamy piss.
Catharine caught his shoulder and pulled him back. “Lay down,” she said. “I don’t want’m to see us.”
Forrest stretched out on his back, not entirely at ease. He could hear his watch ticking in some pocket of his discarded clothes. A warm hand on his belly. She burrowed against him.
“I wish you belonged to me all the time,” she said.
“I know it.” Forrest looked into the shadows of the ceiling. “Ain’t nobody gets all they wish for.”
IN THE GLOAMING he rode north across town toward the home where his white family lived, with an idea forming just below the surface of his mind. Mary Ann was out in the side garden, snipping off buttercups with a small pair of scissors. She straightened and stood willowy as a sapling, holding the yellow flowers in both her hands and looking intently after him as he and the black horse passed. He could feel the look lingering on him after he had gone by, and for a wonder it didn’t feel bad. A lot of poison had drained from the space between them since Catharine’s departure from the household.
Jerry met him at the stable and took the reins of the black horse as Forrest got down. In the last blue light of the evening, a bat flickered across the stable yard as Jerry led Satan into his stall. Forrest went into the house, where he found Mary Ann arranging her flowers in a little clear vase full of water. From that she turned to light the lamp on the sideboard. For the time being there was