Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [8]
“I’ll ast ye to jedge fair if I deserve that name,” Forrest said. “I never once started a fight in my life.”
“You don’t have to tell me you’ve finished a few,” Cowan said. “And men’s lives into the bargain.”
“If you mean that business over to Hernando last spring—Reverend, them Matlocks didn’t leave me no choice. They was out to murder my Uncle John and I wouldn’t stand by and not try and stop it. They was four against one and I had not but two balls to my pistol. They’d of kilt me too if a neighbor hadn’t of thrown me a knife.”
“I see,” said the Reverend. “I’m sorry for your uncle’s death. Untimely.” He offered his hand and Forrest took it.
“I thought I heard you were left-handed,” Cowan said.
“I can manage a knife with my left hand. Ginerlly I shake with my right. I’m able with either.”
“I don’t doubt you are,” said the Reverend. He let go Forrest’s hand and pressed his fingertips to his eyelids. “Well. I don’t see how I can stand in the way of your conversing with my niece, so long as she’s willing.” He turned. “Mary Ann, you have a caller, if you care to receive him.”
“Mister Forrest is welcome.” Mary Ann stood up and the cat slipped down to the floor. Reverend Cowan shaded his eyes with his palm.
“I believe I’ll go indoors a spell,” he said. “Behave yourselves, young people.”
Forrest heard his boot heels booming on the boards of the porch as he walked toward her. She fluttered her fingers in his palm, then pointed to the joggling board—a fifteen-foot plank pegged between two square posts that bowed it up like a spring.
“I believe I’ll jest set on this chair,” Forrest said. “I don’t much trust a seat that moves, unless it would be on back of a horse.”
Mary Ann laughed and bounced herself once on the board, as if to show him how it worked. He watched the movement ripple through her body and thought of the merry scene he’d interrupted: the three of them laughing on the wiggling plank. The movement made them all rub up against each other. He had prepared what he meant to say, but no idle pleasantries to precede it.
The window behind Mary Ann was open, and through it he heard Mrs. Montgomery’s thin voice declare that she had a headache. A chair creaked as the preacher settled into it, and presently he commenced to read from some book of moral philosophy, in a low dull voice like the drone of a fly.
The cat floated up onto Mary Ann’s lap—a big ginger cat with rings on its tail.
“You’ve driven off my gentlemen friends,” she said, “and left me with nothing but poor Pussy.”
“I don’t much feel sorry for that cat whar he’s at,” Forrest said, surprised at the ease with which he said it. Mary Ann smiled, but absently.
“You know,” she said, looking somewhere past him, “till yesterday I couldn’t tell which one I liked better. William plays and sings so sweetly. But it’s Teddy who knows how to make me laugh.”
“How about today?”
When she tossed her head her yellow hair shook out. “Today? I don’t know that I like either one of them, so much.”
“Miss Montgomery,” Forrest said, leaning forward in the ladderback chair where he sat. “If ye was to go with either of them, they’ll leave ye mired in some slough like whar ye was at yestiddy. Come go along with me and yore wagon will roll down the center of the high road with all my strength behind it.”
Mary Ann caught his eye for a moment. “I don’t know that I take your meaning.”
“I think that ye do.”
She dropped her eyes. Inside the room behind her, the burr of the Reverend’s reading stopped for a moment and then resumed.
“I’ll tell ye a story,” Forrest said. “I mean it ain’t no story, hit’s the truth.” He hadn’t planned this part, but it came out more easily. “When I was a boy we lived out to Tippah. It was wilderness then, and no neighbor nigh. My mother rode ten miles, one day, for a basket of chicks to start us a flock. It was coming on dark when she got near to home, and a painter came onto her trail.” He paused. “I don’t know if ye’ve heard a painter scream.”
“It chills the blood,” she said. “Go on. I’m listening.”
“The painter