Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 13

They were powdered up in a twist of paper and January wasn't certain what they were-fragments of honeysuckle at least, and a smell of licorice. But he mixed them with a little water, and held the gourd for Kiki to drink.

She retched, gagged, fingers digging into his biceps like iron vises. She had kneaded pounds of bread every day for years, and her grip was like a blacksmith's. Then she lay back, gasping, in the crook of his arm, and began to weep.

Gently, January lifted her, carried her to the moss bales. He tucked her skirt up out of the way and laid more of the rags from her basket under her bottom to absorb the last of the blood. The mess of bloodied rags, moss, and aborted flesh he gathered together and carried outside, locating a charcoal-burner's bucket and upending it over the sorry little heap to keep the foxes out of it until he could come back and bury or burn it. By lantern light, the fetus had looked to be about three months along. A dangerous time to abort.

When he came back Kiki had pulled her skirt down over her legs. She lay breathing shallowly, eyes closed, tears running from them down her plump cheeks. January took off his coa.r.s.e jacket and tucked it around her, then used his clasp-knife to cut the cords on one of the moss bales, piling the wiry gray ma.s.ses around her like a rude blanket. Kiki groaned, and whispered, "Gilles."

"Was it Gilles's child?"

She opened her eyes, not surprised at the question. He gave her the gourd he'd filled from the barrel; she drank thirstily. Not the cleanest, he thought, but she'd lost blood and it was exactly what she'd have drunk back in the quarters.

After a time she nodded, and wept again without a sound.

January turned away, and sorted through the basket on the table. There was slippery elm there, and willow bark. It wasn't part of a surgeon's training, but he'd learned from Olympe and, long ago, from old Mambo Jeanne. He hunted through the little hut til he found a tin cup, which he filled with the last of the water in the gourd and set over the lantern's candle, so that the bark could steep. As he worked he felt Kiki's gaze on his back, and saw she had turned her head a little to watch him work.

She whispered, "He'd have sold it. Michie Fourchet would have sold it."

January couldn't argue.

"Gilles was so good. And it made him so happy, when I told him I was carrying." She shook her head. " 'She gonna be a beautiful gal,' he said. She gonna look just like you.' "She closed her eyes, and laid her forearm over them, not sobbing, but with the tears still flowing down.

Still January said nothing. He knew-they all knew-what generally happened to beautiful gals who were not free. The water hissed and bubbled in the cup. He wrapped a corner of his outer shirttail around his hand and brought the cup to her, helped her sit up to drink. "We'd better be getting back," he told her. "You're chilled, and you've lost blood. I'll get you to your cabin and then come back here and bury the child. Should anyone find it, with you sick tomorrow, they'll guess." It meant a day in the fields with little more than an hour's sleep, but he had no thought of not helping her. For a slave woman to induce abortion in herself or anyone else was punishable by whipping, an act of robbery from her master.

Kiki sighed, and struggled to sit up. "I won't be sick tomorrow," she said. There was infinite weariness, an endless chain of days on which she had been strong; in her tired voice. "n.o.body will know." "They'll know if you faint dead on the kitchen floor. Can you put these on yourself?" January handed her the long rags she'd folded as clouts to absorb the bleeding and, though he'd performed the most intimate care of her less than an hour ago when she was semiconscious, now turned his back on her, and let her tend to herself. "Tell 'em you broke a jar and cut your foot, and need to stay off it for a day, and let Minta do the cooking."

"I do that and the whole family'll die of poisoning, not just Michie Fourchet."

January laughed, and turned back in time to see her rising shakily to her feet. "No, you don't."

Again, he picked her up, not easily, for she could not have weighed less than two hundred pounds, but without trouble. He had worked with the dying and the dead, both as a surgeon in Paris, and before and after those years during the fever summers in New Orleans. He had learned the knack of lifting bodies. "Which is the best way back to your cabin?"

The candle in the lantern was flickering out, so he left it on the table with the basket. The gibbous moon stood high, shedding sufficient silvery light through the bare trees to find their way back to the fields. January hoped he'd be able to return as easily to the hut when he'd left Kiki at her quarters.

It worried him, until they emerged from the woods, and saw the yellow fountain of upwelling fire from the direction of the quarters; heard the shouting, and smelled the smoke.

?TWELVE.

The fire had started in the woodsheds. By the time January reached Kiki's small room attached to the rear of the kitchen, wind had carried burning fragments to the roofs of the cabins. "Dammit, get into line!" He heard Fourchet's snarled bellow, and the crack of whips. "Get the G.o.ddam buckets-!"

"Dear G.o.d." Kiki's eyes were wide with shock. When he set her down to open the door she clung to the doorpost, staring back at the flames in horror.

"What do you have for burns?" January scooped her up again, carried her into the little chamber and over to the bed she had shared first with Reuben, then with Gilles. Though none of the field hands had spoken of it, the presence of the healing herbs in the basket told him she did at least some doctoring. "I'll need bandages, beeswax . . ."

"There's wax in the kitchen." She started up from the bed and he pressed her back by her shoulder, met her eyes. "Oh, for G.o.d's sake, Ben, I've cooked dinner for twenty people five hours after I birthed a child."

"Well, somebody else got the fire going tonight. You have sa.s.safras? More willow bark?" He'd already gone to the hearth, thrust a stick of kindling into the banked embers, and breathed on it gently, adding more kindling as the yellow flame licked up. The brighter light showed him her medicine box beside the bed. "May I?"

She nodded, and he flipped back the lid, sniffed the tiny bundles wrapped in worn clean sheeting.

"Make yourself a tea of these and take it," he ordered, setting willow bark and briory on the bed beside her. "Then lie down and stay down. I'll be back as soon as I can."

Bandages and herbs in his pockets, he set out for the quarters at a run.

Ajax's house, first in the line and nearest the mill, was a torch-even as January arrived the driver flung himself out of the flames, naked and gasping, with his two-year-old daughter Milly clasped to his chest. Rodney's little son lay screaming on a blanket near the cane, his mother Ancilla crouched above him, frantically pouring water over him from a gourd. The child's shrieks made a keening, hideous background to the greedy din of the fire.

Rodney's cabin was ablaze and Dan and Minerva's just beyond. It was just past midnight and most of the inhabitants of the quarters had sunk into the first depths of heavy sleep-Giselle and Emerald were running along the dirt street, pounding on doors, thrusting into dark cabins to drag their friends out of paralyzing slumber and shove them to safety. Someone had gotten to the plantation bell. It was clanging furiously, the iron racket penetrating the dreams of the unfree as no other sound could.

"Get the buckets and make a line for the river!" Fourchet was yelling. "Get the trash away from the walls!"

January slung his coat into a safe corner near the mule barn, caught up a rake, and joined the gang of women frantically clawing the piles of loose trash--cane-tops and leaves and fragments of dropped wood--away from the walls of the first woodshed, the one nearest the mill, which had not yet caught. The second and third, stocked and ready with enough wood to complete the sugar- boiling, lay downwind. If the wind didn't shift, the first shed and the mill would be safe. He saw Thierry, in shirt and boots and no trousers, thrusting and shoving men toward the burning sheds.

"Pull the walls out! Save the wood!" Looked beside him and saw Madame Marie-Noel, dressed with a shawl around her shoulders, wielding a rake beside the nightgowned housemaid Ariadne.

Saw Esteban and Robert, both in their nightshirts, running from the direction of the house. Men were already forming up a line past the smithy and the mill, across the open square and Thierry's house, through the oaks and over the levee to the river. Nearly two hundred yards, buckets being pa.s.sed from hand to hand, while Herc, stumbling and naked, shouted a second gang into order to clear the trash from the walls of the mill. Frenzied mules brayed and kicked in their barn, the horses in the stable, maddened by the scent of the smoke. Another woman shrieked "Claire! Claire!" Juno, January identified her: He'd seen the baby Claire only that morning, one of the swaddled infants along the edge of the field. . . .

Through the battlefield scud he glimpsed Hannibal in night-gear and Agamemnon trouserless in a ruffled linen shirt, running past with hooks and axes to join the women in the quarters. In the milling ma.s.s, the blinding smoke, they doused Random and Charity's house, Rachel and Chevalier's, with the contents of every rain barrel they could find, desperately trying to keep the fire from spreading along the line. Water flashed in the red glare as January ran to join the gang pulling at the rickety wooden walls of the third shed, the one nearest the quarters, dragging the burning wood out and dousing it.

Fourchet yelled something, plunged in with a small gang of men to drag at the woodshed walls.

His hat was gone but he was fully dressed-when had the man last slept?-and his gray hair framed a face twisted with fury and desperation. January was beside him, shrinking back from the hammering heat of the flames, when someone yelled, "It's coming down!"

Looking up, January saw the wall of burning logs above them crumple. It seemed to take forever, as time does in a dream, the light growing brighter and brighter as the flames poured down onto their heads. Thinking about it later he realized how easy it would have been to dodge out himself and leave Fourchet standing. The old man had certainly earned that kind of death.

But whether because he'd spent his adult life tending burns and trauma, or because the Virgin Mary had, in fact, put in his heart the forgiveness he had grudgingly asked for-or simply because he could not let another man die three strides from him if he could help it-he hooked one ma.s.sive arm around the planter's chest and shoulders as he plunged back, dragging him bodily from under the collapsing logs.

"Father!" Robert was shouting, clutching at Fourchet from the other side as they stood panting in the maelstrom of men. "Father!"

Fourchet started to speak, then doubled over, choking, face flushed dark in the firelight.

"Get him out of the heat." January scooped the old man effortlessly up in his arms-after Kiki he was nothing-and carried him back toward the barns. "Sit him up. Let him breathe. Keep him still." Confusion swirled around them, the fire's roar blending with the sinister, breathing rattle of the wind in the canes. The scattered wood and slumped walls of the third shed were little more than a shapeless bonfire now, pouring rivers of flame at the hard bright watching stars. In the quarters Ajax's house collapsed, then Rodney's, like shacks built of cards to which some malicious child had applied a match.

The child Bo's screaming was silenced. January heard a woman crying, howling her grief. For the first few moments he thought Fourchet too would die, and cursed that he had no medicines, no preparations of any kind. He could only grip the broad flat shoulders in his hands, and feel the old man's desperate spasms as he fought for breath.

"His heart?" Robert knelt beside him, pressed a silver brandy flask into his hand.

January nodded. Esteban yelled, "Save the wood! Save the wood!" and Herc staggered past carrying a young man from the second gang-Marquis was his name-who'd been burned in the collapse of the third shed.

"Get him a blanket," said January. "Anything, keep him warm-" "Get that devil's p.i.s.s away from me!" Fourchet spat out the mouthful January had given him and sat up, eyes crazed in the flaring light. "You're trying to ruin me! Thrust me back into h.e.l.l . . ."

"Get him hartshorn," said January. "Baptiste, run back to the house and get hartshorn and a blanket, fast!" The butler, his coat awry and his white shirt s.m.u.tched everywhere with soot, bolted for the house like a dog coursing hares.

"Here." Someone pressed a medicine bottle into January's hand; he looked up and saw Kiki, who shouldn't have been on her feet.

"Water." The ammoniac reek of the hartshorn was far too strong to drink. Everyone looked around, but the rain barrels and cisterns and jars of drinking water had mostly been dumped on the barn walls, and the mill. January settled for holding the bottle under Fourchet's nose. The planter coughed violently, but opened his eyes, and his breathing seemed to be more steady. He tried at once to sit up and January forced him back against the barn wall. "It's being taken care of, sir."

"The wood . . ."

"It's being taken care of. Can you breathe?"

Someone put a blanket into his hand and he wrapped his former master in it: a slave's quilt, strange gaudy colors, unfamiliar shapes. Other voices behind him, lost children calling for their mamas, women crying their children's names. Juno calling "Claire! Claire!" over and over like a machine.

For the first time January looked around him and saw Kiki, and Robert, and Cornwallis, and Harry. Trust Harry to find a way of looking like he was doing something without putting himself in any position of risk. To Cornwallis, January said, "Who's the nearest doctor?" Then he remembered to glance at Robert, as if seeking white advice.

"Dr. Laurette, in Baton Rouge." January guessed there were American doctors in Donaldsonville across the river, but guessed too that Fourchet would no more submit himself to an American doctor than he'd trust an American steamboat master-and no wonder. Robert continued, "I understand that the most modern medical thinking these days is that a patient should be given brandy immediately, to stimulate the system, followed by mild electrical ma.s.sage of the hands and feet. There's a doctor in New Orleans-"

"You're not going to give me brandy and that's final," snarled Fourchet, silencing his son. "Or stinking opium, like your mother. Marie-Noel . . . Marie-Noel . . ." He sank back against the wall again as Baptiste came dashing back from the house with blankets and-thank G.o.d for the man's good sense-a gla.s.s of bromide diluted in water. January applied this to Fourchet's lips.

"Michie Georges-Michie Hannibal's father-in-law, sir" January dipped a nervous little bow to Robert and reminded himself to say li instead of il--"he gets took like this. I'm sorry if I done give myself big dewlaps over it, sir, and spoke as I didn't ought to, but the doctor back in town, he tell me what-all to do and he say, 'Don't you take no back-chat from n.o.body or your master a dead fish.' "

"No, it's quite all right." Still looking put out at having his advice refused, Robert screwed shut his brandy flask and pocketed it. He'd pulled on trousers under his nightshirt and was barefoot, his hair rumpled and his face now blackened with smoke and soot. Madame Fourchet came up, flaxen hair hanging in confusion down her back and her arm wrapped around her swollen belly as if in pain; January got quickly to his feet and offered her his arm, and she shook her head and waved both him and Robert away.

"I'm well," she said. "Thank you." In the firelight, she looked alarmingly white about the mouth.

"What about the children in the quarters? Was anyone badly hurt?" She'd lost her shawl in the confusion and January saw that she wore no corset under her dress, not even the shaped stays of maternity. Only a thin shift, and the dress itself had been merely caught together at the waist and nape with its b.u.t.tons, the laces pulled any old how, as if she'd dragged them tight herself.

"I want to see, I want to see!" Jean-Luc came dashing from the direction of the house in his nightshirt, pursued by Madame Helene's maid Vanille. Now that things were a little quieter, January could hear Fantine screaming like a steam whistle from the gallery outside the nursery.

"Is Grandpere going to die? Did all the slaves get roasted? I want to see!"

The blaze was dying down as the wood was scattered and doused. The reek of burned cane was thick among the gritty stink of smoke. In the confusion the baga.s.se shed nearby had taken fire, too, and being too far away to further ignite anything was blazing unchecked and unregarded.

Women and children drifted through the mirk from the direction of the levee, buckets in hand, like the d.a.m.ned stumbling out of h.e.l.l. From among them Rodney ran to his wife, stood like a man stunned above the silent body of their son. Ajax and Hope clung together, Hope weeping as she held their many children close. Thierry cursed and struck a man.

Ajax took a deep breath, and called out, "Let's take a count," as January and Harry between them lifted Fourchet to carry him back to the house. "Make sure there's no one missin'. Soon as it gets light let's get cuttin' saplings, make a shed for what's left of the wood so it won't get wet next time it rains. . . ."

It occurred to January that he'd just saved the life of one of the few men whom he had actually ever dreamed about killing.

When he'd seen Fourchet safely put to bed, with Robert and Madame and Cornwallis in attendance, January returned to the plantation hospital. Kiki-duly limping on a bandaged foot-was there already, mixing poultices and applying dressings to burns.

Rodney's Bo and Juno's Claire were dead. The young man Marquis had some bad burns but was already talking sensibly and trying to make a joke or two with his friends through the pain; Emerald had broken her wrist getting Chevalier's daughter Princesse out through the cabin window after the door caught fire behind her. Dumaka, sick with pneumonia in his cabin, had been overcome with smoke and dragged out by his wife Fayola.

In all, ten men and two women had suffered various degrees of blisters, burns, and scorches.

After making sure all were cared for and sending Kiki to bed, January collected a shovel from the storeroom beneath the house, and walked out through the cane-rows to the moss-gatherers' hut, where he buried all evidence that a woman had aborted her child there. Then he climbed the levee and changed the blue bandanna to green. By that time it was dawn.

"When we catch the n.i.g.g.e.r that did this," Thierry was saying, as he and Esteban surveyed the wet heaps of cordwood, the charred ruin of the sheds, "I'm personally going to skin him-or her-and make a tobacco pouch out of the pelt."

An acre of cane, ground and boiled, consumed nearly twenty cords of wood. Throughout the year, once the cane was in the ground and the corn planted, cutting wood in the cipriere was a constant, getting ready for the next roulaison.

Approximately four hundred of the plantation's six hundred acres of cane still stood uncut, and at a guess-surveying the long wet row of scorched logs, half-charred salvage, debris collected from the ruinsJanuary estimated there were about a thousand cords of usable wood. Or would be, once they dried out.

In the quarters, the slaves sifted through the smoking remains of the six burned cabins in quest of cook pots, cups, shoes, blankets. The younger children had already been parceled out among the women, bundled in borrowed blankets wherever beds could be found. Juno and Ancilla slept, broken with weeping. The wind had died down. The morning was cold. n.o.body was keeping track of anybody. January climbed the back steps, and scratched gently on the door of the garconniere.

"Inire, amicus meus! As the lady said in the play, All strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise!"

"Are you all right?"

"Tolerable." Hannibal had washed the soot and filth from his face and hands but his nightshirt was still black with them, and he looked beaten with exhaustion. He was propped on the bed- pillows with a tray across his thin knees, sipping cocoa and contemplating a French porcelain plate of untouched rolls. "G.o.d bless Baptiste. He brought these-he tells me the beautiful Kiki was injured in fighting the fire. Did you take note of who was dressed and who wasn't?"

"As if our friend wouldn't be clever enough to strip before the alarm sounded?" January listened for wheezing or gasping in the fiddler's speech, but other than the rough huskiness characteristic of consumptives he sounded well. In himself he could feel the rage like a low-grade fever, a small steady pulse that nevertheless let him speak quietly and evenly. "What time did it start, do you know?"

"About midnight. And I'm pleased to announce definite proof that neither Esteban nor the beautiful Agamemnon is the hoodoo, as they were together-discreetly quiet, I'm grateful to say-in Esteban's room next door at the time the fire started, and for at least an hour and a half before."

"Good," said January. "I didn't look forward to explaining it to Fourchet if his son turned out to be the culprit. To say nothing of the fact that I'm almost certain our culprit is a slave, or was one at one time. It saves you the trouble of getting details of the will out of Fourchet's lawyer, too."

"Well, I'd still be curious about that. Where there's a will, there's a relative, and it doesn't do to discount that fact. Robert was in here after supper explaining political economy and the shortcomings of the factory system to me-knowing how desperately I crave enlightenment on the subject of workers' housing in Paris-and went to bed at about ten. I heard Esteban turn in shortly after that, I a.s.sume when the night men took over at the mill. About five minutes later Agamemnon scratched on Esteban's door, presumably to help him off with his socks, and remained until people started shrieking 'Fire!' "

"Cornwallis was dressed," remembered January, casting his mind back to the confused images of blackness and flame. "Baptiste was dressed. . . ."

"Baptiste has barely had time to change his linen and wash his face," said Hannibal. "Fourchet doesn't hold with half-dressed servitors trotting out to the mill to give him his coffee halfway between midnight and morn. And Cornwallis has been sleeping fully clothed, in a chair in his master's room these past several nights, and catnapping during the day-an excellent way to remain unaccountable for your exact whereabouts at any given time. If all the field hands were supposed to be in their cabins except those actually working in the mill, you might be able to inquire among them. . . ."

"And I'd get lies," said January. "n.o.body in the quarters is going to mention it, if someone was absent. And if Harry's behavior, and Quashie's, and mine for that matter, are anything to go by, there's a world of clandestine coming and going. G.o.d knows what it's like when everyone isn't dead tired."

He pa.s.sed a blistered hand across his face. "Not that any of the field hands could provide a word of evidence if they wanted to about whether their cabin-mates were awake or asleep, present or absent, thirty seconds after they themselves lay down. I didn't see Quashie, I didn't see Trinette, but that means nothing-I didn't arrive on the scene until well after the fire had taken hold, and if I'd started the fire the first thing I'd do is take off my britches, rumple my shirt, and mix in with the crowd, doing my best to-" "My dearest cousine, I was horrified to hear," a man's rich voice broke in, m.u.f.fled by the garconniere walls but still audible from the direction of the dining room. January's eyebrows rocketed into his hairline and he got soundlessly to his feet, crossed to the French doors, and pushed them open in time to see, through the dining room door, a glimpse of the malt-brown coat Hippolyte Daubray had worn two days previously in the cane-fields of Refuge. "And now the good Cornwallis informs me that your husband is ill? How dreadful for you!"

The voice retreated deeper into the house. January slipped through the French door and drifted down the gallery, positioning himself at the corner of Esteban's room where he could look through the door of Fourchet's office, through the office, and through the open door into the old man's bedroom beyond. He couldn't see Fourchet himself, but had a good view of Daubray, looming in all his refulgent splendor with Marie-Noel standing, abashed and silent and with an expression of unexpressed pain on her face, at his side.

"My dear Simon, I am appalled!" Hippolyte leaned forward, presumably to clasp his erstwhile foe by the hand. "Pray forgive me, and give no further thought to our little contretemps of Tuesday. I wouldn't dream of pressing a duel on a man-"

"Since it was my challenge, I'll be the best judge of that," snapped Fourchet. "I daresay "

"Father," said Esteban's voice. "M'sieu-uh-Daubray-uh-hasn't come to discuss the duel."

"Of course not," cut in Daubray. "I came merely to offer whatever a.s.sistance it is in my power to extend. We are, after all, in a sense family."

"Then as family," said Fourchet, "you can help my men bring over the cut wood from the sheds at Refuge."

"At the least possible computation it is half ours," added Madame Fourchet, straightening up and regarding her cousin with those calm gray eyes.

"The h.e.l.l it is, woman, it's all ours!" bellowed Fourchet. "Every stick and sc.r.a.p of it! Of all the puling, mealymouthed-"

"My dear cousine!" Hippolyte threw up his buff-gloved hands in mimed dismay. "Had we but known! But of course, it was the first that we used for the sugaring. We had such a very large crop this year, you know, and the sheds at Refuge were closest to our mill. Not that there was much there, of course, only a few dozen cords-"

"There was a shed fifty feet long and twelve wide, chock full of it!" roared Fourchet. "I went over myself and saw it!"

"Then sell us an equal amount of what is in your own sheds," cut in Marie-Noel steadily. "If you admit to having taken what was mine, it is the least that you owe."

"Of course!" Daubray clasped his hands before his breast. "Of course. We can certainly spare you a thousand cords to get you started-until your men can get more cut-but since we're also going to have to pay our men to cut extra, the lowest possible price we could ask is five dollars a cord-"

"Five dollars!" Fourchet's blankets-all January could see of the man-jerked as if yanked by a string. Both Marie-Noel and Esteban leaped forward, hands held out to restrain him from leaping at his enemy's throat. "You scoundrel, I could pay my own Negroes fifty cents a cord!"

"Dear heavens, fifty cents! As little as that?" Hippolyte rounded his piggy pale eyes as Esteban hastily poured his father a gla.s.sful of bromide-and-water from the carafe beside the bed. "Well, you're known throughout the countryside as a man who gets the most work out of his hands.