Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 20

January nodded. He'd seen the room now and then over the past ten days. Small and spa.r.s.ely furnished, the walls washed a pale cheerful yellow, with its big bed and cypress-wood armoire it could double as a sickroom or lodging for a female guest. Even there, as in the mistress's bedroom next door, Camille Ba.s.sancourt had left her mark. The bed was an elaborate confection of pear-wood and ebony, imported from France by the woman who had never gotten over losing her place in Paris society. The armoire, inlaid with slips of pearl and bra.s.s, could have contained the garments of a regiment.

Kiki brought the tea to the table. She moved more briskly now, as if the lingering la.s.situde and cramps that had followed her abortion were departing. When a desperate, moaning shriek ripped the night, more animal than human as Fourchet's strength waned, she did not even check her stride.

January recalled the way Fourchet had said, Your mother tells me . . . and the casual glance he'd given to the woman he'd bedded with as little thought as most men would m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e. To the woman he'd sold as he'd have sold a riding-mare, to a friend who liked her action. It was of only pa.s.sing concern that he'd included her two children in the transaction. In spite of the law mandating the sale of children under the age of ten along with their mothers-"if at all possible"-it was a far from universal practice.

I wanted this, he thought, wondering at himself. The night he'd seen Fourchet whip the young Mohammed nearly to death, he remembered he'd crept trembling into the corner of the bed he shared with Olympe and his parents. Remembered thinking, I hope he dies screaming.

He closed his eyes. I hope he dies screaming. He remembered his father holding him, powerful hands comforting him with their strength, and a soft deep voice saying, "G.o.d answers prayer.

You want to be careful what you ask for."

"Where were you going to go?" he asked after a time, as silence crept over the kitchen. He glanced up, and saw Kiki had been listening. "With Quashie and Jeanette," he answered the question in her glance. "You never did say."

"Quashie wanted to follow the river north," said Kiki softly. "Past Vicksburg and Natchez and St.

Louis, and on into the territories, and live in the woods, he said. G.o.d knows how he planned to do it. He'd never done nothing but cut cane in his life and didn't so much as know how to make a fish-trap, though I will say for him he was a good shot. Jeanette said no, it'd be better to go to New Orleans, where they could make a living. There's plenty of people in New Orleans who'll draw up freedom papers that'll pa.s.s if the police don't look at 'em too closely.

"Me . . ." She smiled a little. "I think I'd go west to the Texas lands, or south to Mexico. I'm a good cook, you know. I was trained up in town. I'd get a little money and open an eating-house, and have my own room with no one to share it."

Her voice broke off and her round little mouth clipped together hard, as if at a memory. Tears swam in her eyes and she turned her head away fast and cursed as if she'd got a cinder in her eye.

"You loved him," said January gently, and Kiki looked back at him. "Gilles."

After a split second's hesitation she nodded. Then she made herself flash a quick grin. "That's not to say I wouldn't fall in love right away with some handsome Mexican with silver spurs on his boots and silver b.u.t.tons on his jacket. . . ."

January laughed, Kiki's eyes smiling with him. Then the smile faded, and she asked, "What'll they do to her? Jeanette? Hang her?"

He nodded, sick again with his own impotence. He was sure that one of Thierry's keys, tucked in his blanket in the bachelors' cabin, was to the jail, but it would do him little good. Another of Jules Ney's sons or nephews had been left to guard the jail, keeping an eye on it from the shelter of the mill door. The workers walked wide around him.

"I thought of going out through the cipriere, and finding the cores of those Ashford apples that I know would be out there, proof that's the road they took and were nowhere near Catbird Island or wherever it was that Thierry really died. But no one would listen, and no one would care. I'll have to wait til Hannibal gets back. . . ."

His eyes met Kiki's.

"And he will be back," said January quietly. "Or send someone."

The cook sniffed. "If he thinks of it."

From the darkness came another cry, forming up into incoherent words, curses and ravings.

"You're in it with him! You're in it together!" And later, "No G.o.ddam opium, you b.i.t.c.h! You want to see me as bad as you!"

"G.o.d send that he dies soon," Baptiste whispered, coming in a few minutes later. He crossed himself with a hand that trembled. "G.o.d forgive me for saying it, but for both their sakes, for all their sakes . . ."

"He's a tough old man." January poured the butler a cup of bitter, second-brewed tea. He should, he knew, return to the quarters to sleep, for Jules Ney in his calculating fashion was worse than Thierry, uncaring even for a position that wouldn't be his after the roulaison was done. It was nothing to Ney if slaves died to make his two-hundred-dollar bonus.

But he knew he wouldn't sleep.

"I was hoping I'd find you here, Michie Ben." Baptiste sat down on the bench beside him. Having come north with him on the Belle Dame--and presumably seen that he wasn't, in fact, a field hand, but the minder of the f.e.c.kless scion of a well-off planter family-he had never treated January with the dismissive contempt of the other house-servants. Even Cornwallis, who'd also been on the Belle Dame, acted as if January were an animal, liable to break something or besmirch the beeswaxed floors at any moment, an att.i.tude that January found in many ways worse than the fiscal-or patronizing-calculations of the whites.

"Something Cornwallis said to me about you speaking some other language with Michie Hannibal . . . Did Michie Hannibal by any chance teach you how to read?"

He drew a folded sheet from the pocket of his rainfleckered black jacket, and January saw written on it BAPTISTE GRa.s.sE.

TRIOMPHE PLANTATION-ASCENSION PARISH.

Hope glowed in the older man's eyes. "It's from my wife," he said softly. "Harry gave me this just now. She must have wrote me, same as I wrote her."

"False River Jones is here?"

Baptiste shrugged. "He must be."

Kiki started to speak, then turned and walked quickly away to the hearth, where she sat mending the fire. It occurred to January suddenly that the cook might know of the trader's whereabouts.

She had, after all, her own wares to vend.

It was not lost on him, either, that salts of mercury was a town poison, something not obtainable by merely boiling up leaves or bark. It could be bought quickly, and quickly pa.s.sed from hand to hand.

As January unfolded the sheet he saw again the woman's bright-colored dress, and the way she'd run through the crowd on the levee with her skirts gathered up in her hands.

"Beloved," he read. The spiky French handwriting was clear and the spelling good. Since it was forbidden by law to teach slaves to read or write, it was clear that Baptiste's wife had sought someone to write for her, as her husband had pet.i.tioned Hannibal.

I pray G.o.d daily you are well and in a good place, and the people around you are kind. Monsieur Pierre is gone to France now with poor Madame, and I am with Monsieur Norbert on the Rue des Bons Enfants. He and his wife are good people. They wanted me to marry their coachman Emil but because I am married already they say I don't have to. Leon and Aurette are still with me and send their Papa all their love. I pray I will soon see you again. All my love, Odette."

"He's lucky." Kiki came back over to the table after Baptiste left with the letter folded close in the pocket next to his heart. Her hand flinched as she gathered up the used cup and saucer, set them aside.

"That his wife was sold to people who didn't take her children from her?" asked January. "Or make her marry one of their own slaves just to have everything convenient?"

"He's lucky to hear from them at all. So many don't. So many just . . . wonder."

"Do you know where he might be?" asked January. "The trader?"

Kiki hesitated, dark eyes shadowed in the firelight. Then she shook her head. "I have no use for him," she said.

Another howl of pain split the night, the desperate cry of a man pushed to the limit of what flesh will bear. January startled. But only Kiki's eyes moved, sliding sideways, gauging the sound as she would have gauged, by the brisk bubbling of water in the kettle, how long to leave eggs on the boil.

And as she turned away, January thought he saw her smile.

Shortly before dawn on Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of November, Simon Fourchet died. His young widow sent Jacko the groom with a note to Baton Rouge, with orders to locate Robert Fourchet; she dispatched another message to the Waller farm in New River where Sheriff Duffy was supposed to be staying with various members of his posse, giving an account of the new catastrophe.

In the predawn darkness, after the screaming at long last ceased, January climbed the little bluff above the new landing and took down the yellow bandanna from the branch of Michie Demosthenes the Oak.

He did not replace it.

It was time, he thought, to ask for help.

?EIGHTEEN.

January thought long and hard about going to Esteban Fourchet and saying, "I'm a free man. My name is Benjamin January and your father brought me here to find the hoodoo who murdered Reuben and Gilles."

After he left the kitchen, and before he trekked through the thinning rain to the bluff above the landing to remove the bandanna, he crossed the yard to the garconniere and checked the underside of the bureau drawer where he'd concealed one copy of his freedom papers, and the underside of the armoire where he'd hidden another.

Both were gone.

He wasn't sure whether Harry could read or not, but almost certainly the official seals on both- beautifully faked by a friend of Hannibal's, who'd forged copies of the original doc.u.ments themselves-would be worth stealing. The copy he'd rolled up in an empty bottle-of Finch's Paregoric Restorative Draught and buried in a corner of Madame Camille's garden shed was still there.

But he thought about Esteban's dark unimaginative eyes, blinking into his when he'd told him his father was being poisoned; about the way the man's mouth had thinned and flattened, not in anger that someone would kill his father but in annoyance that a field hand would take up his time with nonsense. From the dark of the gallery outside the garconniere he watched that tall, stiff-limbed figure help his young stepmother through the darkened dining room to her own room on the other side of the house, Agamemnon bearing candles behind them. Marie-Noel was still and silent, arms wrapped around herself, blond head bowed.

The papers, and the seal, weren't good enough to stand up to the scrutiny of one who'd a.s.sume them to be forgeries. And January could easily imagine Esteban saying to Marie-Noel or to Cornwallis or to Hippolyte Daubray, who was almost certain to show up with offers to help with the harvest or purchase the plantation-"And one of the hands, that valet or whatever he is that Father's friend Sefton left here, is now claiming he's a free man! Claiming Father brought him here on purpose to spy! Did you ever hear the like?"

January was alone, in the midst of enemy territory, as if he had strayed behind British lines at Chalmette. Worse, he thought, because all the British would have done was impound him, believing no more readily than their American cousins did that a black man could be a soldier.

Whoever had poisoned Fourchet-be it Trinette or Marie-Noel or her uncle, be it Cornwallis or the mysterious False River Jones-was in too good a position to silence him, particularly if someone took it into their heads to lock him up.

He was a rabbit in an open field, he thought, coming down the bluff through the thinning rain.

Around him in the darkness he could almost hear the howling of wolves.

Because of the rain, and the black darkness of overcast sky, he took a small horn lantern from the shed in Camille's garden, to light his way to the bluff. And because he was carrying the lantern, knowing Esteban and probably Cornwallis at least would still be stirring in the house, he made his way to and from the bluff the long way around, through the cane-rows downstream from the house and up the batture, with the levee between the bobbing light and the windows.

The rain, never hard, ceased as he came down the bluff. The smells of the night rose thick about him as he crossed the low point in the levee above the old landing, closed the lantern's slide, and moved cautiously, silently, through the dark among the oak trees until he reached the cane. There was a cart-path a dozen rows in, that he could follow without a struggle. The sweet heavy greenness of the cane, and the cold clayey odor of wet earth; the harsh stink of smoke, where across the river someone had already begun to burn over the fields. The woodsmoke pouring from the doors of the mill, the gritty musk of boiling sugar.

The house was silent now.

Wet jeweled the cane, black walls rising up on both sides of him. Bright angry rubies flashed among the sprawled mess of undergrowth, rats darting, annoyed at the interruption of their suppers. Water beaded on the weeds between the rows, and the reflection of his lantern-light sparkled in the br.i.m.m.i.n.g ditches. A racc.o.o.n waddled across the row and vanished into the dark, leaving a dark, scuffed trail.

Farther on lay another scuffed line of tracks. Human.

January froze.

The rain had barely ended-these must have been made since then. The weeds were too thick to hold any kind of edge or print, but the alternating brush of human feet was unmistakable. January followed cautiously to the little dry patch of weeds where the rain hadn't reached. The stalks were pressed down. He saw the place where a heel had driven the herbage into the mud.

Someone had sat here. For hours, it looked like. Just sitting in the rain.

January felt the hairs lift on his nape. The spot was, he knew almost before he pushed through the cane to check, directly opposite the house.

Whoever it was had listened, since before the rain began, to Simon Fourchet's death-screams.

And when he was dead, had gotten up and gone.

When Esteban counted out the cane-knives in the bleak predawn darkness, he announced to the hands that Michie Fourchet was dead. "You're all to pray-uh-for him," he said, holding his whip in those stiff fumbly hands, gloomy down-turned eyes surveying the faces in the mingled rubicund glare of torches and the mill doors. "Pray for his soul."

Behind him, January heard someone say softly, "Oh, yes, I'll do that sure." It was as if Esteban, so long under his father's heel, hadn't the slightest idea of how to behave or think in the face of either his death agonies, or his total and permanent absence from his life. For the rest of his life, a part of him would still be looking over his shoulder.

And maybe all of them would. January's eyes sought the faces of the house-servants and the yard hands, gathered along the edge of the meeting-ground. Baptiste looked strained; the three maids clung together behind him, genuinely distressed. Agamemnon, holding up a girandole behind the family, had a tense stillness to him, the broken quality he'd borne since his beating almost a week ago.

Cornwallis looked sleek and smug. Kiki, like a bronze idol, but there was a flare to her nostrils and an unholy flicker of bitter joy in her eyes.

"He was-uh-a good master," Esteban went on, as if he knew it was a lie but couldn't imagine what else to say. "Bought you and-uh-cared for you and gave you enough to eat. Madame Fourchet has-uh-taught you all to pray, and I expect you to do it."

Around him, January sensed the tension ease. The worst, at least, hadn't happened. Esteban had told them to pray for Fourchet's soul, not informed them that they were all being held responsible for his death. Yet.

As the drivers led the men out to the fields, Old Jules touched Esteban on the arm, murmuring something to him and gesturing at the jail. Esteban drew back, shaking his head. Ney shrugged and said more loudly, "It's nothing to me. He was your father."

Esteban winced, and looked away. Ney's pale eyes jeered. "n.i.g.g.e.rs killed your mama, too, didn't they?" January wondered for the first time exactly where the boy had been, when his mother and baby sister were hacked to death.

At last Esteban muttered, "Have you-uh-done it-uh-before?" Old Jules Ney nodded briskly. "You want me and my nephew to see to it?"

Esteban shuffled his whip from hand to hand and said nothing. Taking that for a.s.sent Ney signed to the stringy youth who'd spent the night in the shelter of the mill door, watching the jail. When January looked over his shoulder he saw Old Jules and his nephew walking to the jail. The younger man held a torch, a rope, and an iron poker.

"They asked Jeanette where was Quashie," b.u.mper reported later, his thin young face gray with shock. Nero, beside him, was shivering, as if he'd had to stop on his way out to the fields to vomit. "They tied her up by the wrists to the bars in the jail window. First Old Ney slapped her, back and forth on the face, and then he burned some wood and heated up the end of a poker and burned her face and her feet and her b.o.o.bies. She spit at him."

He swallowed hard, and looked at his father, as if asking whether all white men were that way; whether this was something he'd have to cope with all his life. Yes, said the driver's eyes, tired dark eyes that had seen everything. Yes, it is, my son.

The men, and the women who'd left the cane carts to gather around the boy, glanced at one another, helpless and shaken. It was mid-morning, and if Jules Ney had been in the field then he'd have cut them all, for leaving the cane-rows to listen to b.u.mper's news. Esteban was visible, riding between the field and the mill. He'd already observed that Ney was pushing the cutters too fast-the stubble stood a good foot tall, instead of being chopped close to the ground-but instead of speaking to the overseer about it had simply told Ajax to do the best he could. Already the women were behind, from the cut stalks being laid down fast and sloppy any old way, and the carts were filled with cane-trash and weeds.

January stepped back to where Harry stood, arms folded, looking as if he hadn't spent the night tupping one of the housemaids over at Daubray. "Harry, where's False River Jones camped? I need to see him," he added, when Harry widened his eyes in innocence and began to protest that he had no more idea of the trader's whereabouts than the littlest bird in the trees. "You know as well as I do that Jeanette didn't have the first thing to do with poisoning Michie Fourchet. Jones may know something that would save her life."

Harry's wide, friendly mouth curled in wondering bemus.e.m.e.nt. "And you're going to tell old Duffy, and old Michie Ney, how they got the wrong hoodoo? I'll buy a ticket to that."

"Well," said January deprecatingly, "I'll see if I can get Michie Hannibal to do that part, kind of subtlelike. He's due back today. But we got to do something," he added, as Harry raised his head and scanned the stubble fields. There was movement in the direction of the mill, along the line of the cart path, Ney in his blue-and-red blanket coat returning at a gallop, lashing his horse with the quirt. "Once Duffy gets here, who knows who else they'll light on?"

Ajax had begun to chouse the women back to the carts. They moved stiffly, weary beyond bearing. "There's a little bayou between Prideaux and Wildrose plantations," Harry said softly.

"Bottomland where there was a creva.s.se in the levee couple years ago. Runs clear back into the cipriere. He'll be about a mile into the woods. Ney'll whip you," he added in a conversational tone, "when you get back."

January sighed, and said, "f.u.c.k Ney."

"I'll tell him that." Harry grinned, and lifted his hand farewell.

"You do that."

They were cutting close to the cipriere that morning, and January had less than half a mile to walk before he reached the trees. He'd been on Mon Triomphe long enough now that he was familiar, by hearsay and instruction as well as actual practice, with the network of pathways, clearings, root-lines, and hummocks in those wet and marshy wildernesses that lay behind the river plantations; he'd heard often enough of the trail that wound north past Lescelles land to Prideaux. Ram Joe's abroad-wife Nan lived on Prideaux, and Harry was romancing at least two of the house-servants there, plus a girl named Josette on Lescelles. It was a welltrodden way.

He thought about the dry mark between the rainwet cane-rows. About the long screaming pain of death from mercury poisoning. About the wad of boiled oleander leaves and stems in the kitchen at Refuge.

About the blow-pipe, and the roundhouse below the grinders; about the veve marks on the bedroom walls of the big house, and those in the kitchen at Refuge, and on the graves of two murdered men.

Thought about the evil that some men do, to all the lives that they touch.

He'd dreamed about the end of roulaison, in the few hours' sleep he'd had toward morning. About the harvesting of the last lone cane-stalk. On the last day of harvest one single stalk was left standing, while everyone went back to the quarters, washed up, and dressed in their best. The women took their hair down from its tignons and out of its strings and braids, combed it, and braided it up. The grooms would put ribbons on the mules, and the men got out all those things les blankittes didn't like to see them wear, the fancy waistcoats they'd buy from the traders, the bright-colored shirts. They'd all go out in procession with every cart on the place, singing-his father singing, January remembered, walking at the head of the line. It was his father, in the dream, who cut the last stalk, and rode back to the mill with it upraised like the spear of a vanquished enemy in his hand.

The men would take their turns still at the boiling and the grinding and the hauling of wood, but in the quarters that night they would dance. On some places-not Bellefleur, of course-the masters would set out food, sometimes join in the dancing, to everyone's joshing delight. Tomorrow would be easier. Tomorrow there would be less pain.