Free Devil's Dream by Madison Smartt Bell Page A

plantation, at dawn a few days before the holiday. In fact he knew they scratched there almost every morning, and there were nigh on two dozen of them too. He’d roused Willie at first light, and they crept up on the turkeys under cover of a fringe of trees that curtained the field. Kneeling by a stump at the pasture’s edge, he’d helped the boy steady the long rifle and take aim on the eye-bead in the wattled head of a big gobbler. When he squeezed the trigger the turkey dropped. Willie couldn’t help himself from jumping up with a shout, but still, Forrest bagged four more birds before the flock had scattered into the woods.
    He brought the turkeys back to Memphis in his leather saddlebags, and hung them by their feet a day or two in the crisp fall weather. In the yard, sitting on the edge of the cistern, Aunt Sarah plucked the birds one by one while Catharine’s toddlers chased the feathers and caught them all into two bags: down for pillows, wing feathers for pens. Catharine mixed cornbread with onion broth to make stuffing, while Aunt Sarah took charge of roasting the birds—and it was she who brought the first turkey on its platter to the table, never mind the weight, while Catharine had charge of a dish of sweet potatoes following behind. Both black women stood back from the table, in case anything more should be wanted straight away, as the oohs and ahs went up—they had a big crowd, this time. Forrest’s mother was there and his twin sister, Fanny, and three of hisolder brothers too, though Jesse and Jeffrey had dodged the occasion and gone deer-hunting across the river in Arkansas. On Mary Ann’s side: the Reverend Cowan her uncle, her mother of course, and her first cousin, J. B. Cowan, who with his surgeon’s skill was carving the birds—a task at which Forrest tended to feel clumsy.
    Reverend Cowan asked the blessing and after the chorus of
amen
, bowls of greens and rice and taters and relish began to go round, along with a platter of sliced white bread. At a whisper from Aunt Sarah, Catharine padded into the kitchen and returned with a cream-colored gravy boat. She held it, standing to the left and a little behind Forrest’s chair, waiting for the plates to be served. She had worked herself warm in the kitchen, and he was aware of the heat radiating from her skin, and the hot sheen on her face and her open throat and her glossy forearms, though he did not turn his head to look.
    “Mister Forrest, white meat or dark?” From the opposite end of the table, Doctor Cowan saluted him with the carving knife.
    “I like the dark,” Forrest said, with a lip-licking smile. Surreptitiously he ran his thumb inside his waistband to assure there was room for the meal coming his way.
    “Yes,”
Mrs. Montgomery said, with an untoward sharpness. “We
know
that you do.” With that she turned her pursed lips and pointedly raised chin toward Mary Ann.
    The gravy boat sloshed a bit as Catharine set it down on the table, turned her back, and started for the kitchen. Mary Ann’s large eyes were picked out with blue flame. He could read the thought that flared in her gaze:
How dearly I’d love to whip that slut till her hips stop switching
.
    His sister said something to Doctor Cowan, who batted the conversational shuttlecock toward William Forrest—soon enough the talk had resumed; there was a reasonable semblance of a festive conversation, though Mrs. Montgomery kept her silence, pecking at her plate like a croupy hen, and Mary Ann, though she spoke pleasantly enough if addressed, did not even pretend to touch her food.
    Forrest made himself clean his plate, forced himself to down a small second helping even, though the meat was like chewing fibers of a pine board now, and the surfeit lay like a stone below the topmostbutton of his trousers. Presently the children were excused and ran out laughing. A quarter-hour on, the ladies retired to the parlor. Forrest followed Doctor Cowan to the porch. As they went out,