Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 16

"The work keeps me from thinkin'."

Esteban lifted a hand as if he would have touched his driver's shoulder, then thought again, and turned away.

The men on the night gang generally had three or four hours' sleep before they were due back in the fields again. After slipping up to the levee to change the green bandanna for a purple, January had intended to take an extra hour before setting out for Daubray with his pa.s.s and his story about a letter that needed to go to New River, but instead was wakened at full daylight by Harry and Disappearing Willie bringing Quashie back in. "Thierry made him go out with the main gang cuttin' this mornin'," explained Will, gently laying the young man down on his cot. Quashie was unconscious, ashen and waxy-looking; his hands, when January pinched his fingernail, were icy cold.

Harry silently disappeared, and returned a moment later with a gourd containing a little whiskey.

January sniffed it but concluded that its quality was such that it couldn't possibly have come from the big house, and held it to Quashie's lips. "Thank you," he said later, when Will had gone out to find Jeanette. Harry waved away the thanks.

"I hear tell you're headed for New River with a letter," said Harry, following January down the cabin steps and around to the back, where the bachelors' communal washing facilities-a trough- faced their weed-grown patch of yams, corn, and peas.

"I wouldn't be washin' up extra fine to impress Ajax." January dug his fingers into the little firkin of soft soap he'd brought out with him, and scrubbed the water over his face, hair, and naked chest.

"You goin' by way of Daubray?"

"I might be."

"Arnaud, that cooks for Michie Louis, might give you something in the way of lunch, if so be you was to stop at the kitchen there and hand him this." From under his shirt, he pulled a rough bundle wrapped in rags. He must have gotten it from his cabin at the same time he got the whiskey.

"Be a pleasure," said January.

From his pocket, Harry produced a small sack of salt-the scrunch of it, and the smell, unmistakable-and said, "And if so be you'd just give this to old Mambo Hera, from Trinette, I'd be obliged." The moment he was out of sight of the house January opened the bundle. It contained about two yards of the pink silk Madame Helene had been so enraged about a few days before. He shook his head.

The bag contained only salt. It was high quality and clean, presumably from the big house salt- box.

Just what I need, thought January, shoving both parcels under his arm again. To get stopped by the patrollers with this on me. . . .

Since he was supposed to be going to New River, January took the field roads through the cut cane stubble, waving to the women loading the cane carts as he pa.s.sed. But as soon as he was out of sight of the big house he veered south. Rats scurried unseen through the weed and maiden cane; buzzards wheeled lazily, watchful black dots against the hazy blue. The day was warmer and clouds stretched horizon to horizon now, with more to the south. Alone, January let the peace of the country fill him again, and wondered what Rose was doing, back in town, or Olympe, or his enterprising nephews and nieces. Flexed his aching hands and wondered how long it would take his fingers to regain their lightness on the keyboard, and whether his mother would let him take away the piano St.-Denis Janvier had bought for him, when he took his share of Fourchet's money and got his own rooms elsewhere at last.

Wondered if he would one day be able to induce Rose to share them with him.

He had not lived alone in twelve years, he realized, save for those two nightmare weeks in Paris following his wife's death.

Arnaud, the Daubray cook, a trim little man with a dapper salt-and-pepper beard, received Harry's bundle with alacrity. "What people waste!" he cried disapprovingly. "My Katie can get herself a whole bodice out of these bits!" Ayasha had been a seamstress, so January could tell that though Harry had snipped and cut the sh.e.l.l-pink fabric to give the impression that it was sc.r.a.p, it was not, in fact, waste-and what woman in her right mind would discard that much fabric that could so easily be made up into something else?

But Harry had been wise, for the cook promptly launched into a sincere diatribe about theft, while counting out small bits of lead from jar-seals and broken pipe-fittings-evidently his agreed- upon payment for the silk. "Now, it's one thing to trade with real leavings, like that silk or coffee beans that's been used, or tea leaves," he said, clicking his tongue. "But those field hands will steal anything-anything."

January, who'd been careful to dress in the wool trousers, blue calico shirt, and corduroy jacket of his earlier incarnation as a respectable house-servant, nodded gravely. "I can understand them stealing food, if their master's a harsh one," he said, mirroring exactly the cook's more educated- though certainly not Parisian-French. "But stealing things to sell them to a river-trader like this M'sieu Jones I hear so much of..."

"Good Lord, False River Jones!" Arnaud raised his hands in an appeal to heaven. "There are times when I believe the man is employed by the Devil himself, to tempt field hands to theft and flight."

"Flight?" January thought of the pirogue waiting under the snags at Catbird Island.

The cook wrapped up all his little sc.r.a.ps of lead-a chunk nearly the size of a woman's fist-and handed it to January. "Half the runaways on this river," he declared, with the air of one driving home a point, "start out with Jones bringing somebody word of their woman or their child or their mother up in Baton Rouge or down in the city. Now, you sell a young buck, or a likely girl, and they get over it, mostly. Field hands do." With his clean clothes and shaved chin, as January had expected, Arnaud had a.s.sumed him to be a house-servant, in league with him against the coa.r.s.er spirits of the cane-patch. So he nodded a self-evident agreement and donned an expression of admiration for the man's philosophic wisdom.

"They do," continued Arnaud, "until they're down at the levee in the middle of the night trading off a tablecloth or a china cup or half my store of tea for a gourd of liquor! And such liquor-my lord! And all it takes is Jones asking, 'You wouldn't be Plautus from Four Corner plantation, would you? I have a letter from your girl there,' and the next day the boy's moping and thinking about how everything was wonderful back on Four Corner, and n.o.body made him work there, and they fed him chicken and biscuits there, and off he goes. And I ask you, what good does it do?"

"Not any," said January, in the voice of one aggrieved by the misbehavior of inferiors. "Not any at all."

"I mean, they have to know they're going to be caught and brought back. They have to know that that part of their life is over. They're never going back there. They're never going to see those people again. Why not just accept that fact and go on?"

January remembered the tears of one night in childhood, when a boy he'd been best friends with- Tano, his name had been-was sold away. He'd wept and wept, sick with the thought that he'd never see that friend again. That for all intents and purposes, Tano was dead. Gone. Sold down the river.

"Why not?" he agreed. "You'd think the decent people around here would do something about Jones, wouldn't you?"

"They've tried." Arnaud shook his head, and with a few quick strokes sliced bread for them both, and cheese and apples. "Near to three weeks ago, Michie Hippolyte heard Jones was back, working his way down the river, and set out to trap him. I could have told him it was no use.

Anyone could. It's my belief the field hands heard of it, though Michie Hippolyte kept quiet about his plans, and only took Michie Roger-that's our overseer-and Michie Evard his cousin with him.

But the field hands, they eavesdrop and listen and spy. Would you believe it, just the other day..."

January listened patiently for another hour, contributing his mites of agreement and gossip, until he ascertained that Hippolyte Daubray, his overseer, and his cousin, had in fact been seen to depart for their hunt on the night of the Triomphe sugar-mill fire. By dint of careful questioning he learned also that the middle-aged dandy had been "out hunting" when he was supposed to have been supervising the harvest on the afternoon and evening of the seventh, when the mule barn had burned, but the rest of the timing was not so certain. Having seen him, January couldn't imagine that stout sybarite dressing himself in a field hand's rough garb and hat to sneak up and spook the mule team in the roundhouse in the middle of the morning, but, he was aware, appearances could be deceptive indeed.

"An unpleasant situation all around, M'sieu," Arnaud sighed. "That girl, that Marie-Noel . . ."

Across the yard a knot of young ladies of the Daubray household were visible on the back gallery, bright chattering creatures like tropical birds. They were sewing-fancy st.i.tchery, it looked like from here-and one of them sent a maid hurrying across the yard to the kitchen for lemonade.

Once he heard their laughter.

"I understand her jealousy." The cook counted out lemons with a grimace of regret. "Particularly of M'sieu Louis's daughters. They are so beautiful, and Mamzelle Marie-Noel is-well-not. Michie Louis, he did everything he could to prevent the match. He even sent her away to New Orleans to keep her from marrying that awful man, for it was clear as day all he wanted was claim to Michie Raymond's house and lands. But she schemed to get M'sieu Fourchet wound around her thumb, saying no and then saying yes, and he went nearly crazy trying to find out whether that wife of his was dead or not. A bad hat she was, gettin' drunk and actin' up and leavin' him and her children to go back to France as she did. And a good thing, too, that she did turn out to have died, for I would not have put it beyond him to have murdered the poor woman. A drunkard and a brute," Arnaud added, in a tone rich with satisfaction, "and one day that girl'll find out her mistake, if she hasn't already."

"Still," said January thoughtfully, "if one wished to get a letter to someone on the river . . . Where would one find this Michie Jones?"

"Oh, he's due back any time." The cook scowled his disapproval, and sent the maid off with her wickerwork tray of lemonade, cakes, and marrons glaces. "He generally camps on the far side of Catbird Island, or sometimes up Bayou Prideaux, that little bayou between the Prideaux lands and Lescelles."

Before departing, January asked to be taken to Mambo Hera's cabin, and with visible distaste Arnaud pointed out a tiny annex on the back of one of the barns, just opposite the long shabby rows of the pighouses. "She asked for that place," he apologized. "M'sieu Louis, and M'sieu Hippolyte, offered her a room above the kitchen where it was warm, but she wouldn't have anything but a place among her animals. It makes it most awkward to look after her. . . ."

"Thanks," said January. "I'll find my way."

As he crossed through the stable yards he could see her already, a little bundle of faded gaudy rags in the shadow of the annex's tiny gallery. Close by the kitchen he saw another old woman plucking chickens and telling stories to the littlest children, the toddlers too old to be carried to the fields with their mothers but too young to do any kind of work, but no one, apparently, had any idea of burdening Mambo Hera with such a task. She sat alone on her bench, staring out with eerie contentment in her cataract-blind eyes, as if she lived on air alone and the sounds and scent it brought her. And January shivered as she turned her face toward him-as she twisted her wry little neck to look up, for she was bent nearly double with arthritis. And he understood what Jeanette had meant, when she said this woman had Power.

Even had he not been told who she was, he thought, he would have known. She was a priestess.

Not as Marie Laveau was in town, heiress of traditions adapted and mingled in this new world.

Not like Laveau's disciple Olympe, who had studied with the old mambos and learned the ancient medicines and the ancient ways.

Mambo Hera was the ancient way.

She said, "Who this alejo come walk up my path?" and her voice was thin and high and mumbling over toothless gums. Her nostrils flared, scenting him; he saw thought pucker the wrinkled flesh on that little skull that seemed barely bigger than his own great fist. "Stranger come walking from Triomphe, where they're cooking the sugar. . . . Stranger come from town?

Come on the boat?"

January realized he must have the smells of the steamboat's soot, of the town market's spices, imbued still in his clothing, along with the light sweat of a few hours' walk. He replied, "I've come down from Triomphe, yes, Mambo. A woman there asked me to give you this." And he took the little bag of salt from his pocket, and held it out to her. The old woman extended a hand so balled and broken with arthritis that the palm was gouged with healed wounds from her own nails, but she pinched the bag between finger and thumb, and secreted it in her clothing. Her hair was thin, a myriad of white braids framing old country marks on her temples; under the creased and wrinkled lids the opal deadlights seemed indeed to see.

"Trinette?" she asked, and January said, "Yes."

"That Reuben died?"

"He died." She nodded, satisfied. "How did he die? I made a ball of black wax and pins for her, and the ashes of a thrush's wing; told her bury it under the threshold of his house, where he'd walk. I burned a black wax candle for her in the dark of the moon, stuck all through with pins, and the last pin fell out when the moon was full. Was that when he died?"

"Yes," said January. "That was when he died."

As he worked his way back through the cane-fields of Refuge, examining the ground along as much as he could of the border between the two properties, January glimpsed Gauthier Daubray's empty house from afar. Seen by daylight, it had originally been a gay pink, faded now but still somehow reminiscent of a single camellia among the monotony of the cane-fields.

January had a good deal of sympathy for Marie-Noel Fourchet: for the young girl's desire to escape Daubray at almost any cost, and for her present difficulties. Yet he had been reminded, in the past week, that there are worse fates than to live with your wealthy relatives under a roof that doesn't leak, and to eat the bread of captivity accompanied by liberal helpings of the chicken of captivity, the ham of captivity, the gravy of captivity, and the marrons glaces of captivity while suffering no worse fate than to mend your beautiful cousins' dresses and watch them catch husbands while you had none for yourself.

Since the confrontation between the Daubray brothers and Simon Fourchet, no cane had been harvested in the Refuge lands. It would have been easy to make one's way through it to the fields of Mon Triomphe, and so almost to the walls of the mill itself. However, January found no evidence that anyone wearing a white man's boots had done so.

He hadn't Shaw's abilities as a tracker, but in default of other evidence it was increasingly clear to him that the hoodoo was someone on Mon Triomphe, whoever else might be paying or urging that someone to mischief. The one exception to this hypothesis might just be False River Jones.

And he would know more, or be able to guess more, after he'd seen the man himself.

It had been three days since January's last visit to Catbird Island, so he worked his way river- ward through Refuge's straggly fields til he came to the levee and the snag-tangled, tree-grown batture beyond. Far off he could hear men singing, maybe the gang from Mon Triomphe or maybe the Daubray gang, the rhythm punctuated by the chop of knives.

"Way-o, Madame Caba, Way-o, Madame Caba, Way-o, Madame Caba, Your tignon fell down, Your tignon fell down."

Blackbirds flitted and dove through the cane. A rabbit sat up and looked at him, soft gray-brown with its little white shirt-front, as if it were going to a ball in town. When the green wall before him lightened he waited, seeing the moving stacks of a downriver boat gliding by. From those slow-moving decks there was nothing to do but watch the banks, and someone would almost certainly point him out: "Hey, there goes some n.i.g.g.e.r just standin' wastin' time on the batture. . .

." From its tangled shelter he could see them, two Americans in tobacco-brown coats leaning on the rail, spitting into the churning water. A waiter hurrying along the deck with a tray of coffee things. He saw how the man stepped aside in contempt from one of the stevedores on the deck- because he wore rougher clothing, January wondered, or because he was Congo black, African black, and the waiter was fair of skin, quadroon or octoroon?

All going south, to New Orleans.

Why? January blinked sleepily at the sun-glitter where water rippled over a sunken bar. Who were these people, standing at the railings, looking at the banks? What were the patterns in their lives? When the boat had gone by (Oceana, said the red-and-blue letters on her wheelhouse) he made his way for a mile and a half along the batture, sheltered from view by cypresses and willow logs, thanking G.o.d that it was winter and there were few gators around. A cornsnake slipped across his path, sluggish with the cool season, and he remembered how Olympe would trace the veve for Damballah-Wedo in the earth of Congo Square, to summon the Serpent King. Sometimes she'd draw two snakes framing a pillar, sometimes instead of a pillar an elaborate column of crosses and stylized flowers-other nights only a few stars. Shaw had asked him once about this: Like a white man, Shaw thought these things always had to be done the same way to be "right." But the spirits changed, and their signs shifted, and it all depended on what mood Olympe was in and what she felt that spirit of water and wisdom required January felt he had grown up understanding this.

When he reached the old landing behind its silted-up bar, he examined it with particular care.

You couldn't get a big side-wheeler in behind the bar anymore, but there was ample room for a pirogue or a keelboat-probably even for a small stern-wheeler, if you had a pilot who knew the water. An ideal place to put in if you wanted to come up along the cane-rows and make mischief with the woodsheds.

But as far as January could tell, examining the damp earth around the mossy and dilapidated wharf, n.o.body had done that within the past four or five days.

He was close enough now to the house that he could hear the women singing as they unloaded the cane at the mill. He removed his coat and shirt, shivering a little in the cool afternoon, and rolled up his trousers to his knees, so that he wouldn't return mud-spattered and scratched from what was allegedly a peaceful trip out to New River with a letter. Watching and listening all around him and expecting every moment to hear Thierry call down from the levee, "What the h.e.l.l you doin' here, boy?" (And what the h.e.l.l would the overseer be doing on the levee at this time of the day?) January crawled and crouched and dodged from tree to tree, from snag to snag, up the half-mile or so of bank, past the new landing, through the older willows around the little headland where Michie Demosthenes the Oak stood gesticulating with his purple bandanna at the pa.s.sing boats (Everything fine here, Michie Shaw), and around to the foot of the Catbird chute.

Behind the shelter of the headland he stripped off his trousers and boots, and waded across to the island. There were tracks there. A white man's boots, coa.r.s.e and heavy and square-toed. He recognized them at once: Thierry's. He'd seen such tracks now for days in the fields and around the muck of the burned sheds. Fresh, coming and going. That day, the mud not even dried. No older than lunchtime.

He shuddered at the thought of how easily he could have run into the man.

He followed them around to the little bay at the end of the island, knowing with heartsick certainty what he was going to find.

The overseer's tracks crossed and recrossed the margin of the concealing snags and brush, but January could see with a single glance at the ground that Thierry had found the boat. He saw where it had been dragged from its hiding place, saw the digs and gouges in the damp clay where the bottom had been stove in-probably, thought January, squatting to examine them in the slanting afternoon light, with an ax. There were long sharp gouges in the mud where the protruding shards had plowed, when the boat had been shoved back.

A little ways into the clumps of snags January found the dented and useless pot, the smashed cups and gourds. The candles were in fragments; the blanket, bread, and cheese lay scattered, sodden and stinking of p.i.s.s.

For some reason he remembered the gang of keelboat toughs slicing his coat off him with their skinning-knives, shredding his music into the gutter. That same viciousness. That same easy demolition of what had taken such time and such heartbreaking enort to procure.

The basket Kiki had given Jeanette had been torn from its tree branch. It had contained two loaves of bread, a quant.i.ty of salt meat and a small sack of cornmeal, another pot, three more apples from Madame Camille's garden, and three tin cups.

Three. January knelt by the damaged and mucky mess. The pillowcase that had wrapped the food was far too old to have come from the big house, but he recognized the neat yellow mending- st.i.tches along its edge.

He'll only sell her. . . .

He searched the rest of the island for signs of False River Jones and found none.

The afternoon was drawing to a close. Keelboats and flatboats showed like chips of debris on the quicksilver river, coming down the big current, the dark squat shapes of the great paddle- wheelers working their way up close to the sh.o.r.e. Too soon by several hours for him to expect people to believe he'd been to New River and back. He took his rosary from the pocket of his rolled-up jacket, set his back to a tree-bole in the midst of the island where none would easily see him either from the river or the levee, and gazed blinking into the warm blue-tinted distance. The clouds that had thickened all day formed a solid roof above, and the air was mild and heavy- feeling. Rain before morning, he thought. Maybe even before he could reasonably return to Mon Triomphe.

The thought didn't trouble him. He'd brought the black bandanna with him, that had to be tied onto the tree once it got dark.

It was the first time in many days that he'd been alone, with peace and with G.o.d.

"Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. . . ."

Then, because he had worked as a slave and lived as a slave for long enough to recall the priorities of servitude, he stretched out on the ground with his head on his rolled-up clothing, and fell immediately and profoundly asleep.

?FIFTEEN.

Throughout the following day, as he lopped cane-tops, or carried stalks to the carts, or hauled wood, or played the dozens with the other main-gang men while they rested at noon-"You so smelly the buzzards follow you around thinkin' you got a dead skunk in your pocket."

"Yeah, your brother so smelly he's a free man, 'cause he run away and the hounds kept vomitin'

and couldn't chase him."

January listened for the arrival of the steamboat that would bring Hannibal back from New Orleans.

The key to the deadly riddle, he was certain now, did not lie on Mon Triomphe itself. Short of catching the hoodoo red-handed, he could see no way farther forward, with the information he had or could reasonably expect to get. That the culprit was a fellow slave he was almost certain.

Yet the pattern of the crimes themselves felt wrong.

There was something else going on. Something at once too methodical and too random for rebellion.

When he'd returned last night in the rain, Kiki had made it her business to intercept him on the way back from the big house and let him know she'd found no oil-stained garment in the laundry.

This hadn't surprised him. If the hoodoo had been careful enough to conceal the cut-marks on the mill machinery with pitch, and retreat to the old kitchen at Refuge to boil up the poison from the oleanders, he or she wasn't about to casually stuff an incriminating shirt or skirt or bodice waist into Ti-Jeanne's willow baskets for all the world to see.

Some piece of information lay elsewhere, that would unlock the riddle: Esteban's lover perhaps, or Fourchet's will. January knew the pattern now, the rhythm of these lives. But the breaks and rifts he'd found all pointed to people who had demonstrably been elsewhere when the sheds, or the mill, or the mule barns burned.

There had been a shout last night for the dead children. Rain hammered the roof and dripped from the eaves, and the voices rose and fell against Old Banjo's singing where he crouched in the center of the circle on the floor in Harry's cabin. Standing among these people he was beginning to know and trust, January felt helpless, and angry-felt guilty, too, as if he were defrauding them somehow.

"Good-bye, my voice be heard no more, Good-bye, my voice be heard no more..."

Juno and Ancilla, weeping for children who would have been lost to them in any case. Kiki holding the bereaved women in her plump arms, tears on her face as she spoke words of comfort.

Baptiste handing around food.