Devil's Dream by Madison Smartt Bell Read Free Book Online Page A

it when I come back in.”
    She guided Forrest north along the riverside. A yellow dog came down past them, trotting over the planks, tail tucked and head riding low. Forrest was still white and shaking, though he smelled no worse than hot and sweaty; they’d left the reek of tobacco andwhiskey behind them in the gambling den. With a shudder he turned toward her.
    “Whar’s Fan? You said—”
    “Hush. Fan’s all right. She’s with her grandmother.”
    Forrest’s eyes came partway into focus; she thought a glimmer of last night’s quarrel might have returned to him.
    “What day is it,” he asked.
    “My Lord!” said Mary Ann. “It’s only Tuesday. But it can’t be that you don’t know. Keep on with this and you’ll ruin us all.”
    “I was winning.” He held her shoulders and leaned fiercely toward her. “I was winning, I know I was.”
    “That money has gone home ahead of you,” she told him. “I mean to set it by. For Fanny’s wedding and to give our Will a start when the time comes. Don’t you see, there’s no amount of money worth you losing yourself like you do! Every man has a weakness, and this thing is yours. You must know you can’t master it and just keep away.”
    He let go her shoulders and lowered his eyes. “Let me have a minute.”
    She watched him scramble down the bank to the water’s edge, where he crouched on his heels and gathered water in his hands to throw back all over his face and his head, not caring how he wet his clothes. For a minute or more he stayed hunkered down, his head turned toward the south point of Mud Island. Kingfishers skimmed the surface of the brown, slow-moving water. Of a sudden the sun cleared the buildings of the town with a great scattering of light, and the cloud bank west of the river was edged with copper and gold.
    His eyes were clear when he came back toward her, combing his hair back with his fingers. Downriver, a white steamboat was chuffing toward the piers. A cloud of small birds gathered behind the paddle wheel.
    “Pretty,” she said, pointing over his shoulder. He turned and they watched the boat together till it was securely docked. She handed him his hat and he put it on his head and when he had fixed the angle of it, he slipped an arm around her waist. She let him walk with her that way.
    “And what is your weakness, Missus Forrest?”
    “You,” she said, feeling a warmth in her face as they moved shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. “I don’t mind to allow it, my weakness is you.”
    F OR TWO WEEKS RUNNING , Forrest woke in the night with a weight on his mind … something he couldn’t get a sound hold on. The full moon lowered through the window; he could not return to sleep. Shadows of wisteria vine danced over the rag quilt, shifting with the slight rise and fall of Mary Ann’s sleeping bosom. Forrest slipped silently out of the bed. In the hallway he stood for a moment, holding his trousers in one hand and listening for the light breath of his daughter.
    Downstairs, John Forrest slept sitting up with one arm hooked over the post of his chair. A little oil lamp had burned itself out on the table at his right hand. Moon from a fanlight washed over him, pale as milk.
    A good night for a coon hunt, surely, to listen to dogs running under the moon. But that was a country occupation, and here they were in town. A drinking man would take such a restlessness somewhere to be drenched in drink. Forrest might have gone to gamble, except that Mary Ann had named it to him as a weakness, and he would brook no weakness in himself. The thought that he was bound to play again one day oppressed him.
    He let himself into the slave stockade through the house door. Stone doorstep cool beneath the curve of his bare feet. The iron pump cast a long spectral shadow across the yard.
    Sensing the same wakefulness in one of the stalls, he padded toward the set of iron bars, cast all of a piece and bolted into a square hole of the door. The moon was behind