Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 19

'Papa, I'm afraid I'm dying, Papa, I'm going to die. . . ."

The men took up the refrain-softly, very softly, as they cut the heavy soil with their shovels, for even so memorializing one man's rebellion would be, January knew, a whipping offense. But Gowon was owed it, he thought, for the daughter he had lost. For all the children that all of them had lost, Bo and Claire and that infant of Gilles and Kiki who would never be born. For Ajax, untying his own daughter from the whippingframe, to which he'd surrendered her rather than risk bringing the consequences of revolt down on all those under his care. For January's own father, who had watched his son and his daughter taken away.

"They carry them down to the river, They throw them in the stream.

They carry them down to the river, The river.

They throw them in the stream.

Papa, I'm afraid I'm dying . . ."

The thought clicked suddenly in January's tired mind. Thierry lying on the snags and deadfalls within feet of the river.

Someone gutted him and then cut his throat, and left him sitting up. . . .

Why didn't they just pitch him into the river?

He was left there on purpose. January had a.s.sumed that someone had later come and laid him down, but why was he left there at all?

He was LEFT THERE. Left THERE: Moved from somewhere else, to draw attention to Catbird Island and away from the site of the actual killing.

Moved by someone who had access to a boat.

"Near enough to six feet," decided Nathan. "I ain't gonna waste more sweat on him." The men walked back to Thierry's cottage and from there, while the others were loading the hastily made coffin onto a wood cart, January went to the back of the big house and told Baptiste they were ready to lay Michie Thierry down.

The butler went inside. Lamps burned in the dining room, and January could hear Fourchet's voice, hoa.r.s.e and incoherent, from his bedroom. Still furious over something, by the sound of it.

Then dim forms moved in the shadows under the gallery, and light from the windows caught Madame Fourchet's straight pale hair, and the sheen of Madame Helene's persimmon-colored silk. "Well, if you find it amusing to go out in the cold like that in your condition by all means do so, but it has never been the custom here, I a.s.sure you." The night was not more icy than Helene's voice. "He was a coa.r.s.e rude man and I'm sure he got what was coming to him for not controlling himself better around the negresses."

"He must have a Christian burial." Ariadne was helping Madame on with her heavy cloak.

"Oh, honestly, my dear, I don't think the man had been in a church since he was baptized! I'm sure he wouldn't care."

"All the more reason to give him one."

Madame Helene let out a little t.i.tter, but when she got no response she burst out querulously, "If you must go, I wish you will tell me what I am to do if Monsieur Fourchet gets restless? He's going to need you. . . ." There was fear in her voice. It wasn't that she didn't think. Thierry needed a Christian burial, January realized. She simply didn't want to be left alone with her father-in-law.

The gentle wind lifted Madame Fourchet's cloak as she descended the steps and made the six lights of Lundy's candelabra jerk and dance. The women unloading the cane carts at the roaring orange h.e.l.l-mouth of the mill, the men dragging wood and stoking the fires, crowded to the mill doors. January heard Old Ney's hoa.r.s.e shouting and the crack of a whip within.

Madame read the service for the dead in her small, flat voice, and dropped a branch of Christmas roses-the only flowers available at that season in her predecessor's garden-into the grave. Then Lundy walked her back to the house, and the men worked by torchlight in the cold to fill in the hole. As they walked back past the slaves' graveyard, January looked out into the darkness under the trees there where the graves of Gilles and Reuben lay, remembering the fading names on the other graves, the rebels whose names would vanish once Mohammed died. . . .

And a dark scribble on one of the new headboards caught his eye.

"Let me take that," he said, reaching for Mohammed's torch. "I'll follow you along soon."

"Better not." Nathan glanced around him worriedly. "It's not a good thing, to be walkin' in the graveyard on a moonless night. Not ever, come to that. There's witches that wait in the darkness."

"We'll wait for you," said Gosport.

"I'll be quick." Torch in hand, January waded through the weeds to the twin graves. The china Kiki had placed around the new-turned earth glinted in the yellow light, like a black cat's teeth when it mews, tiny and vicious, and the bodies decomposing in the shallow earth filled the air with a musty nastiness. The names, REUBEN and GILLES, were already fading from the wooden headboards.

The new mark on Reuben's board seemed doubly clear.

It was a veve, surrounded by the crosses and stars of protection and care. The mark of Papa Legba, the guardian of all crossroads, guide of the dead. A blessing-sign, to leave on a grave.

Papa Legba, open the gate, the women would sing in Congo Square, on the hot summer evenings when the slaves' produce market would be set up there, and men would gamble under the sycamore trees, and watch torchlight flicker over the faces of the dancers. Papa Legba, open the gate.

Only sometimes they'd sing instead, Open the gate, Saint Peter, open the gate--gonna pa.s.s through, Saint Peter, gonna pa.s.s through.

January stared at the symbols for some time, trying to fit times and patterns together in his mind with the memory of a woman's face in the lantern-light of a moss-gatherer's blood-smelling hut.

He was very thoughtful as he walked back toward the house.

?SEVENTEEN.

"Can you get me in to see Michie Fourchet?" Baptiste, though clearly a little startled to find January in the kitchen yard at noon when he should have been eating lunch with the main gang in the field, at least didn't look down his nose at his filthy clothes. "I'll do what I can," the butler said, though he sounded doubtful. "But you know Michie Fourchet isn't well."

"Believe me, I wouldn't disturb him unless I felt it urgent," said January. "But if he's thinking he's safe, and the place is safe, because Quashie and Jeanette have fled, he's mistaken. They didn't kill Thierry, and I don't think they were behind the hoodoo. Please tell him that."

Baptiste frowned. In the ten days he'd been on Mon Triomphe, January had seen the little man recover his confidence and settle in as head of the servants, aided largely by the fact that n.o.body in the household liked his main compet.i.tor for the role, Cornwallis. As Baptiste studied him now, January could see he was thinking, not simply of the meaning of the words, but of what they implied in terms of the household---and the plantation-at large. "What do you know about the hoodoo, Ben?" he asked. "You aren't even from here."

"I know what I've heard," answered January. "And I know what I saw, out on Catbird Island and down by the levee on Sat.u.r.day, when that first lot of wood arrived. And I think if Michie Fourchet thinks he's safe now he's in more danger than ever. And so is every person on this place."

Baptiste bit his lip, and his dark eyes shifted in the direction of the mill. January understood what he was thinking. It was up to the butler to act as gatekeeper of who entered or did not enter the house. Should Esteban return from the mill while January was in his father's room, or Madame Helene happen to encounter him on the gallery, it would be up to Baptiste to explain the presence of a dirty and stinking field hand in the white folks' sacred purlieus.

He gave January another quick look-over, then appeared to decide there wasn't much that could be done. "All right. I'll take you in through Michie Fourchet's office. But you got to be quick."

"I'll be quick."

They climbed the steps to the back gallery, with Baptiste keeping a watchful eye out toward the mill. He stopped, put his head through the dining room French doors to make sure Lundy was setting the table properly ("Turn those knives over so the blades point in toward the plate, would you? Thanks."), then escorted January through Fourchet's small office, and into the bedroom with its drawn curtains and pale blue-washed walls. There too was a portrait of the first Madame Fourchet, stiff and odd against a background of banana plants and flowers, leading January to deduce that Juana Villardega had been either born in New Orleans or brought there as a young girl-she looked about sixteen. On the other side of the chimney-breast hung a much-better- executed pastel of the current Madame, its size and the twin houses of Refuge and Mon Triomphe in the background testifying that it had been paid for by her husband, not her relatives.

These January noticed only in pa.s.sing, for his attention was riveted instantly by the man in the bed, and the smell of vomit and voided blood that choked the close air of the room.

"Michie Fourchet!" He stepped closer, shocked. Fourchet raised his head like a cornered dog. In the dimness his eyes had a slick silvery gleam. "What do you want?"

January glanced back at Baptiste, standing in the doorway. The table next to the bed was thick with bottles and gla.s.ses, a water pitcher and spoons, two or three towels neatly folded. The man has a heart condition, thought January. What are they giving him? That doctor from Baton Rouge isn't puking a man with a strained heart, surely? But the only bottles on the bedside table among the chewed cigar stubs were bromide-at least three empties-hartshorn, and the pitcher of water, the ammoniac smell cutting the sinuses like a silvery knife.

"I'd like to ask your permission to search the boundaries of the plantation for signs of Thierry's murderer. If you look at where the body was found, sir, and the fact that-"

"Thierry wouldn't murder anyone." January blinked.

Fourchet rolled his head a little on the pillow. He looked as if someone had siphoned flesh from some areas of his face and pumped water into others, and his hands wavered across the coverlet.

"Anyway that was years ago. A man can do what he likes with his own slaves." The words came out in short bursts, as a baby will dribble food. He tilted his head.

"b.i.t.c.h lied to me," he added. "Too sodden with opium to even turn them over. Thought she was too good for the place. Paris was all she ever thought about."

"Michie Fourchet?" January stepped forward, and Fourchet pulled back his lips in a snarl.

"Get out of my room. What the h.e.l.l you doing letting a field hand in my room, Gilles?"

Baptiste caught January's arm. "You'd better go." January pulled free, still staring at the face that was at once sunken and bloated, the puffy pale yellowish bulges beneath the eyes, the line of scarlet along the gums. "How long has he been like this?"

"Get him out of here!" Fourchet s.n.a.t.c.hed up an empty bottle from the table beside him and flung it, subsiding at once with a gasp of pain, hand pressed, not to his side, but to the small of his back. "Esteban! Esteban!"

Baptiste thrust January before him through the office, and the two of them nearly ran into Esteban in the door that led out onto the shade of the gallery.

"What the h.e.l.l is going on?" demanded the planter's son, as more crashes resounded from Fourchet's room. It sounded like the old man had swept the entire contents of the bedside table to the floor. "What the h.e.l.l is this man doing in here? Didn't I say my father wasn't to be disturbed?

Go in there," he added savagely to Baptiste, as the sounds of violent retching followed from the sickroom, and Madame Fourchet, her fair hair hanging disordered about her shoulders, darted along the gallery and into the dining room, and through to her husband's side.

Catching January's arm, Esteban shoved him out onto the gallery. The younger Fourchet's eyes were red rimmed from want of sleep and his face gray with dust and streaked with sweat. "What did you say to my father?"

"M'sieu Fourchet, I think your father's been poisoned."

Esteban's eyes flared with shock. Then his hand tightened on January's shirt and he slammed him into the house wall. "Who told you this? Where'd you hear this?"

"Hear it? For G.o.d's sake, look at him, man! Six days ago he strained his heart! Now he's off his head, he's bleeding from the gums, vomiting . . ."

"You uppity wh.o.r.e!" Fourchet screamed inside. "You think your son's too good to be part of the family? He's not a genius, he's just G.o.ddam lazy! Lazy and weak! All he wants to do is play with his worthless machines and his worthless friends. . . ."

"Is he voiding blood? Vomiting blood?" January demanded, as Esteban made a move to go through and into the room. "Has he pa.s.sed urine in the last day or so? Any at all?"

He realized Esteban was staring at him as if he were speaking Chinese. For a moment their eyes met, then January hastily lowered his, remembering that in this country it was taken as a sign of rebellion, of challenge, for a black man to meet a white man's eyes.

"I'm sorry, sir," he mumbled. "It's just one of Michie Georges' brothers was took just this way, from drinkin' salts of mercury. Now I hear as how someone tried to poison your daddy before, and did kill the old butler here, and when he started talkin' so crazy, and with blood comin' out his gums, I thought . . ." Pick up the hint, you stubborn oaf. Slap your forehead and cry, My G.o.d, could it possibly be . . .

But Esteban, not an imaginative man, only looked at him with sidelong suspicion, and said, "That's a common-uh-effect of calomel-medicine, you understand? I think you'd better just-uh- leave such things to the doctors. You had something you wanted to tell my-uh-my-my father?"

"Yes, sir," said January. All he could do was try. "How that Quashie, and Jeanette, they couldn't have done that murder the other night, since they knowed Thierry had wrecked their boat; they wouldn't have been on that island." But as the words came out of his mouth he could see Esteban barely heard him, and his own attention was jerked away, again and again, by the tumult in Fourchet's room.

"G.o.dd.a.m.ned b.i.t.c.h, you will live where I tell you! I'll not pay a lazy wh.o.r.e to have her own establishment . . . !"

At the sound of a blow and a cry, Esteban thrust January aside mid-sentence, and strode through the office to his father's room. January hesitated on the gallery, heart pounding, smelling blood very clearly now as Fourchet vomited again and thinking, Poison. Salts of mercury. His kidneys must be disintegrating within his body.

Dear G.o.d, what a h.e.l.lish way to die!

The jingle of bridle-bits came suddenly from the yard, the clatter of hooves. Men called out and laughed. Someone said, "Hey, sweetheart, not home yet!" and someone else, "Hey, the house!"

January ran over to the rail of the gallery on the mill side to look.

A posse of the patrollers had captured Jeanette. The rope that bound her wrists ran up to the saddlebow of a long youth in dirty jean and a low-crowned hat. The girl had fallen, for the front of her green dress was brown with dirt and mud, the b.u.t.tons torn away and her skirt spotted with blood from her grazed knees. Her head rolled on her shoulders with exhaustion, the curly cloud of reddish-black hair hanging over her face, and, as the men had said, when the horses came to a halt she collapsed among them, sitting in the wet earth of the yard before the mill.

From the gallery January saw Esteban hurry down the back steps and cross toward them, a tall thin figure stiff and awkward in his blue coat, his whip in his hand. He spoke to the men of the patrol, fumbled money from the pocket of his coat to pa.s.s among them. Then he bent, took Jeanette's chin in his hand, and forced her to look up at him. January knew what he would ask.

She shook her head, swaying, denying it, her whole body shaken with sobs. Esteban straightened, stood looking down at her for a moment. Then, as if making up his mind to do so, he caught her shoulder and shook her, and she cried in a voice shrill with pain and terror: "He didn't! He didn't!

I swear you we weren't anywhere near there!"

No, thought January. The pair would have gone straight inland, across the fields and into the cipriere, striking out toward New River and heading to New Orleans that way. Without a boat they'd be fools to stick to the river.

Esteban looked down at her from his height. He must have asked her something else, quietly, probably where Quashie was now, because Jeanette shook her head again, wrapping her arms around her half-exposed b.r.e.a.s.t.s and crumpling slowly to the ground. One of the men still on horseback tilted his hat and said something, pointing inland-that she'd been picked up over toward New River, January learned later-and Esteban's stiff shoulders lifted and settled a little without ever relaxing. Behind him in the house January heard Fourchet cry out, "Not opium!

Don't give me that stuff! Oh, dear Christ!"

And from the dining room a bell jangled, impatiently summoning servants, and a moment later Madame Helene's voice exclaimed, "Honestly, what is this house coming to? Jean-Luc Jean-Luc you will stay in your chair . . . ! Marthe . . ." In the cloudy cool of noon, the women sitting on the cane carts before the mill, eating their midday food and suckling their babies, watched silent-eyed as Esteban lurched forward and pulled Jeanette firmly to her feet. Two of the patrollers sprang from their horses and followed man and slave across the mucky ground to the little brick jailhouse, as if they expected Jeanette to turn on Esteban and gut him with her fingernails.

In the doorway Jeanette clung to the jamb for support, turning back to speak to Esteban. Pleading with him to believe her. Swearing that though the dead man had raped her repeatedly, had flogged the man she loved nearly to death, had harried her and insulted her and battered her, still she had not lifted her hand against him.

Her master pushed her awkwardly into the jailhouse, locked the door, pocketed the key. January could almost hear him saying it: I understand there are abuses but you just-uh-can't have slaves going around murdering their masters. . . .

In his curtained room, the dying man groaned, "Dear G.o.d, save me! Dear G.o.d, save me!" as the bloated tissues of his body swelled tight with water he could not void.

January descended the back steps of the house and was on his way to the fields again before Esteban returned.

Through the night Simon Fourchet screamed. The sound carried to the mill doors, where those who hauled cane up to the rollers, or dragged wood in from the shelters through the thin drizzling rain that started at sunset, paused to look at one another with fear in their eyes. n.o.body spoke much. Once, when January helped Chuma pick up some cane she'd dropped, the woman said, "Dear G.o.d have mercy on him. I'd wear any child of mine out, that gave pain like that to a dog."

But January saw she was afraid, too, wondering what would happen to them when Fourchet died.

Slavery, January understood now as he never had before, made you fear change almost more than anything else. Once he looked over in the direction of the jail, and thought he saw movement behind the bars of the single high-set window, as if someone had grabbed the bars and pulled herself up a little, to look out at the torchlight and the rain.

She will hang for his murder, he thought.

And almost certainly, Duffy was going to try to get out of her where Quashie was.

He leaned into the harness and gritted his teeth, to drag the sledgeload of expensive wood-at three dollars and fifty cents the cord-through the softening mud to the mill door.

Bad enough that Jeanette had to sit there in the tiny brick room listening to Fourchet die. What it was like for Madame Fourchet, sitting in the bedroom beside him, he couldn't imagine.

That would still be true, he thought, whether or not she'd given her husband the mercury herself.

"It's in the medicine," he said to Kiki, when, after the night shift men came on, he walked over to the kitchen. The light rain had eased, but the air was full of moisture; rain would start and stop like a seeping wound til daybreak. "It's the only thing he's getting that no one else in the house would touch. Our killer learned a lesson with your husband."

The cook glanced across at him in the muted glow of the hearth. Her black sleeves were rolled back and she tilted boiling water from the great kettle into the small clay pot that the servants used for their tea; flames reflected in her dark eyes like the sack of far-off towns.

January asked, "Where is the medicine kept?"

"In the birthing-room. Behind Madame's room." There was a long French door from that chamber onto the gallery that faced over Camille's garden.

"It isn't locked up or anything," Kiki went on. "It sits on the dresser in there. Anyone could come in or go out."