Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [9]
“That’s a terrible story.”
“I don’t know that it is. My mother was right satisfied with what she done. She brought them chicks safe inside the house.”
Through the open window behind Mary Ann, silence came streaming out like smoke.
“Miss Montgomery,” Forrest said. “What would you do? Hang on to them chicks or throw’m down?”
“I can’t answer that. How could I?” She looked at him and held the look. Her eyes were a deep liquid green. “I couldn’t know, unless I was there. I couldn’t know till I’d already done it.”
“You have beautiful eyes.”
“What did you say?”
“I mean they’re honest. That’s what I said.”
“Your eyes are black.” Mary Ann shivered. “They go right through me.”
“I could answer that question.”
“I’m sure that you could.” She stood up and the cat dropped out of her lap and poured itself over the rim of the porch like water.
“You know your mind better than I know mine,” she said. “I hope you’ll come again tomorrow.”
FORREST SLEPT POORLY and woke before dawn. He split wood for an hour, then bathed, and cut himself shaving, and staunched the cut with a spiderweb. It was still far too early to set out for Horn Lake, so he went to Hernando and, after some casting about here and there, succeeded to obtain a marriage license. At eleven o’clock he hitched his horse to the brass ring the cast iron nigger offered him in front of the Montgomery house.
Today no other callers had preceded him. As a matter of fact the porch was empty. He stood before the front door, hesitating to knock, but before too long the door swung inward. Mrs. Montgomery greeted him, courteously, deferentially even, but without real warmth. There was a little pinch in the skin between her eyebrows, as if maybe she really did have a headache. As she showed him into the parlor, Forrest thought he saw the silhouette of Reverend Cowan, coming in the back door at the end of the hall.
“Good morning, Mister Forrest,” Mary Ann said, offering him the white dove of her hand. “You seem to be an early riser.”
Forrest didn’t know what to make of that. There was not an hour left in the morning. “I was up fore day,” he finally told her, squeezing his hat brim, turning his head this way and that and blinking like an owl. They shut up the parlor to keep out the heat: the windows were open just an inch from the sash and the room was curtained to such a darkness that he could barely make out the shapes of the furniture at first. Mary Ann, who wore a light cotton dress and kept her face pale with her parasol, stood out of the gloom like a revenant.
He set down his hat on a fragile-looking little table his eyes had adjusted just enough to discern, and touched the fold of the marriage license inside his coat pocket. The feel of it reassured him less than he’d hoped. The front door squeaked, then the porch floorboards, and he heard a rustling as Mrs. Montgomery and her brother settled themselves out there, between the windows.
“Come and sit down,” Mary Ann was saying. Forrest squinted at one chair and another—none struck him as stout enough to bear a grown man’s weight. But she was patting a cushion on the little horsehair love seat, where she had taken the other place. There was a reed of huskiness in her airy voice which he wasn’t sure had been there yesterday.
“Did ye not tell me ye meant to answer my question?” he said, remaining where he was.
She raised her chin to him. “Which question was that?”
“I’m a patient man,” said Forrest. “I try to be patient. Ye oughtn’t to trifle with me, though.”
“I don’t mean to trifle,” she said. “You asked me two questions that I recall, but there was just one you asked outright.”
She beckoned him again, he didn’t come.
“I’ll be your wife,