Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 21

In his dream January followed the carts back, and saw that it wasn't a cane-stalk his father bore, but a sheet of cream-yellow paper, like Robert's letter to Esteban from the wood-yard. And he thought, That's Mohammed's list. The list of who was where when the mill caught fire.

So he struggled and fought his way through the singing crowd, all the way to the front of the procession, and into the burning mill. He saw by the firelight all the faces he'd known as a child, every one: his mother beautiful and young, with baby Olympe carried on her hip. Mambo Jeanne and clever Django and Uncle Zacky and all the others, and he cried out to his father, "Give it to me! Give it to me! It will save them all!"

And his father, turning, smiling, held out the paper. But when he unrolled it January saw, instead of words, only the triple-cross emblem of the Marasa, the Sacred Twins.

"I don't understand," he'd wept to his father in the dream. "I don't understand."

And his father had smiled.

They were burning over the fields at Lescelles. It was a small plantation, immediately upriver of Mon Triomphe, and the previous night while Fourchet lay dying they had harvested the final stalk and carried it in triumph through the drizzling rain. Fourchet had died, and they had sung and danced for one more defeat of the cane that was their true foe, not knowing of their white neighbor's death at all.

Now the men were burning over the fields. It was a difficult, smoky business. Men walked with buckets from the water cart around each field, to keep the burns small, so they wouldn't run wild, and smoke hung heavy in the air. From the edge of the woods January could see the women and the children skirmishing along the open unburned sides of the fields with clubs, to kill the rabbits and racc.o.o.ns when they came darting out. Egrets circled above the flames, diving casually through the flames in quest of big lubber gra.s.shoppers, and emerging soot-s.m.u.tched to stalk about the stubble of the next field like grimy beggars in stolen clothes.

There was something Dantean about the scene, something of Bosch, the way a woman would brain a poor rabbit that was only trying to escape the fire. Or maybe, thought January, it was only a dreamlike horror, shapes seen through smoke.

He remembered wielding a club like that as a child himself.

False River Jones was a tall man, square-faced and potbellied. His lank gray hair hung past his shoulders, braided at the temples and tied with blue-dyed string. January found him by the smell of bacon frying, and coffee bubbling in a pot. He realized he'd been unconsciously expecting a small man, and a younger one. He'd expected a Kaintuck, too, so the mellow loveliness of the Welshman's singsong tones was a pleasant surprise.

"Dear, no, Ben that's a guest at Triomphe?" Jones held out his hand. "And a shabby shabby thing it was of your poor master to leave you that way, and in such hands, and him not returning!"

Jones shook his head. On the prow of the little lugsailed pirogue tied to a cypress knee, a black dog no bigger than a good-sized guinea hen dozed, chin on paws. The boat itself was like a miniature shop, jammed with boxes, packets, rolls of fabric, horns of powder, and firkins of nails.

Rush baskets of eggs dangled from bow and stern, and a couple of pumpkins were lashed to the little shelter amidships where, evidently, Jones slept.

"You'd best watch yourself around that old villain Ney, should Master Fourchet grow any sicker.

He's a man that wouldn't stick at taking off an unclaimed Negro some night. His brother's a dealer up the river in the territories, and that son of his has been known to run them up the river to him on his boat. An unpleasant family, the Neys, the lot of them."

The Welshman poured out some of his coffee into a pale green bone-china cup, which he held out to January, gesturing him to a seat on a deadfall by the fire. Beside the coa.r.s.e woolen trousers he wore, and his greasy buckskin coat, his exquisitely fitted vest of purple silk stood out with the ridiculous grace of a lily on a trash pile: like a child's fancy-dress garment, too beloved to put off.

"Poor Andy Ffolkes lost one of his men, out looking after Ffolkes's pigs in the woods. Maybe the poor fellow ran for it, but maybe too Ney and those sons of his had something to do with it. So you watch yourself, my boy."

January set the cup, untasted, on the log at his side, until he'd seen Jones drink his. "M'sieu Fourchet is dead," he said quietly, his eyes on Jones's hand, and he saw the fingers jerk with surprise.

"Dead! Dear G.o.d." The trader set his cup down quickly and crossed himself. "The poor soul. I knew he'd been taken with his heart, of course, and they got that sanguinary fraud Laurette from Baton Rouge for him. The man thinks of nothing but bleeding! Bleeding and puking, and a blister to draw the blood to the chest so he can bleed again! A disgrace, when modern medicine offers genuine cures like calomel and quinine and the scientific use of magnetism! A disgrace."

Jones shook his head again, and January asked, "Laurette doesn't believe in calomel, then?"

"A Goth," sighed the Welshman regretfully: "A true medieval barbarian." He sipped his coffee again. "Laurette bled him to death, I suppose."

"He was poisoned," January told him. "With salts of mercury, I think-which can be extracted from calomel, by somebody who knows what he's doing." This last statement was purely for the benefit of the trader's obvious prejudices, since calomel was, in fact, nothing more than salts of mercury, administered in whatever dosage the doctor might think appropriate. January had encountered physicians who didn't think the cure sufficiently "heroic" unless the patient's gums bled. If Jones subscribed to this view of healing, he wouldn't take kindly to the suggestion that someone had died of a genuine cure that modern medicine had to offer. "Good G.o.d!" Jones scrubbed one surprisingly refined hand over his stubbled chin. "You don't mean it?"

"Did you sell any such thing to anyone along the river?" asked January. "Or know of anyone who bought such a thing? They've caught a girl on Triomphe, the overseer's concubine. . . ."

"Poor Jeanette, yes." His eyes filled with concern and he got to his feet. "And they think she did it? That's foolishness! She and Quashie went east to New River; they hadn't even heard of Thierry's death. . . ." He stepped over the gunwale, bent to extract a small packing box from where it was stowed under a huge coil of rope and a bag of gun locks. "Which was how they were able to catch her so easily. She went to get eggs from the Gallocher farm. . . ."

"Can you prove that? Testify to it?"

"Dear, well, I'll have to word it carefully, so as not to sound like I abetted the poor things. Worse than the Spanish Inquisition, people are hereabouts when it comes to runaways." The trader opened the packing box, pulled out one bottle after another, holding them up to the sunlight to check the level of their contents. "I'll speak to Duffy tomorrow. He has a warrant out for me, of course, but we have our agreements. Oh, dear, yes."

Had the two bottles of opium that disappeared from Hannibal's luggage ended up here? Several of them looked like it, but Jones probably bought medicaments extracted from the stores of every plantation between here and Natchez.

"No, I don't even have salts of mercury here," the trader said at last, closing the box again. His face was drawn with genuine distress. "It's been quite some time since I had occasion to obtain any. And as for selling it, the planters generally have their factors in town buy whatever they need and send it along by steamboat. The Negroes have no use for the marvels of modern science, if you'll excuse my saying so, my friend. I can tell by your speech that you're an educated man-and as such it's doubly a disgrace that your fool of a master let them use you as a cane-hand, of all things! But surely you know that the average field-worker would rather be dosed with honey and slippery elm by the local mambo, than avail himself of Aesculapius's more standard blessings.

"And speaking of the local mambo," he added, replacing the box, patting the dog, and climbing back over the gunwale, "how is the lovely Madame Kiki? I have missed seeing her, this trip."

"She's well," said January, with a slight feeling of shock, of seeing a fragment of colored stone drop into its place in a mosaic. Speaking of the local mambo. . . .

"Is she?" Sadness crossed the expressive dark eyes. "I was so sorry to be the bearer of such news to her. Such a terrible blow to any woman. Please tell her, again, that if there's anything I can do.

"What news?"

Jones looked surprised. "About her husband and children," he said.

"Children? Husb-Do you mean Reuben, or Gilles?"

The trader shook his head. "Hector," he said. "A dear man with a laugh like Zeus on Olympus. A most amazing fellow-could bring down anything with a blowpipe or an arrow or those little throwing-sticks such as they use in Africa. Looked like he'd mince you up for his breakfast, yet he was as gentle and civilized a man as you could find on three continents. I thought if you were her friend she must have spoken to you of him."

"No," said January, as pattern-pieces shook themselves gently into place. "She told no one. What happened?"

"They both belonged to a Mr. Thomas Bezaire, in town. Five years ago he died, and his nephews sold them, Kiki to Mr. Fourchet and Hector and the children to a man named Bartholomew Lomax who had a lumber-mill downriver near Chalmette. Unfortunately conditions at Lomax's weren't good, and in any case I never thought the boys should have been put to the work-cutting cypress off a flatboat, working waistdeep in water for days on end. There was an epidemic of scarlet fever there last month."

He was silent, big hands toying self-consciously with one of the four watch-chains that measured out his belly in a pendant abundance of fobs. His brown eyes were turned inward, as if he saw that brave and courtly hunter, those lively boys.

Then he said, "I used to bring her news of them whenever trade took me down there. She was most terribly affected. I know her master was an unsympathetic man, but in the end he was prevailed on to separate her from that brute Reuben. . . ."

I have made amends where I could, Fourchet had said. But there are some amends that cannot be made.

He pictured what Fourchet's response would have been, had Kiki said, I will not marry the man you've chosen for me, because I have a husband elsewhere instead.

Oh, Kiki, he thought, seeing her eyes in the candlelight of the moss-gatherers' hut. Her face as she poured water from kettle to pot, impa.s.sive against everything the world had to throw at her.

He'd only sell it. . . .

"What about Hippolyte Daubray?" he asked, though now he knew what the answer would be.

"I've heard that on the night of the fire in the Triomphe sugar-mill, he was out pursuing you up and down the river-was this true?"

Jones chuckled richly, almost hugging himself at the memory. "Oh, deary me, yes! My goodness, that was the most fun I've had in years. Les freres Daubray have always considered me a pernicious influence on the help-all of them do, of course-so when their coachman mentioned to me, the last time I stopped here, that Hippolyte had arranged a little ambuscade for me, I abstracted one of the old pirogues from the boathouse at the Refuge landing. . . . What a fisherman Mr. Raymond was, to be sure! I did it up with straw and trash to look much like my own vessel, then lit a lantern on the prow and waited just downstream of the landing until I heard Daubray approaching.

"He probably thought he was being so stealthy! Pitiful, really. I started muttering things like 'Why, what'll you give me for this here damask tablecloth, Michie Jones?' " The abrupt shift to field-hand gombo was startling, coming from that white, gray-bristled face.

"And all the while I kept moving the boat downstream, and Daubray followed me along the batture, tripping over cypress knees and getting his trousers wet while the fog got thicker and thicker. He must have pursued me for five miles before I slipped off the end of the boat and left him chasing it downstream for goodness knows how far, while I took a horse I'd arranged to have waiting for me and rode back to my own boat and my own customers."

He chuckled again. "I'm told Daubray forbade any of the house-servants to so much as mention the matter in his hearing. He promised a flogging to the man who made up a song about it, if he could catch him."

Later, January walked back through the cipriere, his mind turning as the buzzards turned in the air high over the burning fields. Circling again and again to Kiki. Others were as much to blame for her pain as Fourchet, but Fourchet was the one closest to her hand. And now Fourchet was dead, and Reuben was dead. . . . And Gilles, who had been good to her, was also dead.

She knew where the oil was stored, he thought. And Rose-who had a surprising streak of matter- of-fact bloodthirstiness in her-had told him enough times about how to make delayed action explosives for him to know that it could be done fairly simply, by one who knew how. The cook had never spoken to him, or to anyone apparently, of her life before she'd come to Mon Triomphe-"Stuck up," Vanille and the other women called Kiki. Meaning that she kept herself to herself.

The local mambo. No one to whom January had talked-not even the other mambos-knew she was that.

Was she clever enough to use the same curse-mark over and over when she'd marked the house, to make it look like the work of one copying by rote, not practiced in the art? She was, but his mind snagged on so intricate a fakery. Why pretend the marks had been made by one ignorant of all the various signs of cursing, if she'd kept her own proficiency hidden? Or was that why she'd drawn the blessing sign, the heaven sign, on Reuben's grave at that late a date? To let him, January, guess that she was, in fact, learned in the old ways?

But why purchase salts of mercury rather than make up oleander poison again? Either one, introduced into the medicine bottles, would a.s.sure the man's death, and the purchase-from a trader or another slave-would put Kiki into that seller's hands.

Unnecessarily.

Why break the cane-knives? Why burn the mule barn?

Foolish acts, absurd.

He shook his head. There was something wrong with his chain of reasoning. It looked good up to a point Kiki certainly hadn't cared what happened to the field hands, at least before the fire-and then vanished when you drew close, like those illusions drawn by Flemish painters centuries ago.

The sun was halfway down the sky when he heard the singing of the main gang across the fields.

He watched and waited until Jules Ney rode away, back toward the mill, then slipped from the cane into the line of women, gathering up the cut rows and dumping them in the carts. The woman beside him whispered, "You in trouble," but didn't call attention to him, for which January was grateful. He knew any overseer in the country would be within his rights to whip him-it remained to be seen what Ajax would do.

In moments the driver came walking along the row, whip in hand.

This, January knew, was a bad sign. If Ajax was going to ignore his disappearance for most of the afternoon, he'd stay at the other side of the row and then work him back in among the men, as he'd done before. Why, Ben been back for the longest time, Michie Ney, I thought you seen him.

"You in a world of trouble, Ben."

January stepped from the line of women. "I understand that, sir. I'm sorry."

Ajax shook his head, tilted back his high-crowned beaver hat. "I don't know what the f.u.c.k you did, but Michie Esteban sent for you to come to the house nigh on to a half hour ago. I told him one of the babies had crawled off into the cane. . . ." He nodded toward the swaddled infants, sleeping restlessly or chewing their fists or bits of their wrappings, in the shade of a patch of maiden cane on the field bank. "That you'd gone looking for it. You better head on back there now. Herc'll go with you," he added, and signed to the driver, who'd paused to talk to Trinette.

"Make sure you don't get lost."

There was wariness in Ajax's eyes, and no wonder, thought January. He knew men who took pride in being outlaws or rogues, but he had never been one of them, even as a child. The imputation of shirking, of lying and cowardice, stung him almost as bad as the cut of the whip would have.

But he only nodded, and started back toward the house at a rapid walk. A half hour, he thought, or more. . . . He thought he would have heard a steamboat's whistle, even in the cipriere, but couldn't be sure. It was impossible that it would be Shaw this soon. It had to be Hannibal. But when they reached the house Cornwallis met them at the bottom of the back steps, and said, "Wait for Michie Esteban in the office."

"Yes, sir." January followed him up the steps and along the gallery as Herc headed back for the fields. A white man in the scruffy corduroy of a cracker was leading old Pennydip across the yard to the jail. The poor old woman was arguing, baffled, but when she tried to pull her arm free the man yanked her nearly off her feet. Two more whites-one of whom January recognized as the tall skinny youth in cheap jean trousers who'd been part of the posse that had captured Jeanette-came around the corner of the stables leading Mohammed. The blacksmith's hands were chained.

"What's happening?" January asked Cornwallis. "Don't tell me those fools think Mohammed had anything to do with-"

"Go on in," said Cornwallis. "Sheriff Duffy is taking in those that were on the place all those years ago, when the slaves rose up."

"That's crazy." January's heart pounded suddenly hard. "After all these years? Pennydip wouldn't have the strength to climb to the rafters of the mill to stuff kindling up there. Do they think she crawled in Thierry's window after the cane-knives? Or carried them to the forge? Mohammed-"

"You just wait in here," said the valet impatiently, and opened Fourchet's office door. "Mr.

Esteban will be along as soon as he's done with Sheriff Duffy. And don't touch anything."

"No, sir." He supposed he should be thankful Duffy didn't show signs of hanging every bondsman on the place.

Cornwallis didn't motion him to a chair, and he had better sense than to even think about taking one. When the valet departed in quest of Esteban-whose m.u.f.fled voice could be heard in the parlor, with another man's January stepped over to the desk and had a quick look through the papers arranged with such scrupulous neatness on its top.

A half-written letter to Fourchet's agent in New Orleans, requesting that he make arrangements with the bishop for a funeral on the twenty-ninth. Announcements of it were to be posted around the French town accordingly; also the agent was to see to the purchase of the appropriate number of gloves, scarves, and candles to give to the mourners.

Robert's note that had incurred such wrath: Three dollars and fifty cents per cord for wood, indeed!

A list of slaves' names, mostly women and second-gang men, with prices jotted after them: Nathan, $900. Jacko, $1000 (?). Cynthia, $750 (children?). Figures in another column, adding and subtracting the sums paid out for cordwood. Esteban, January realized, was planning which slaves to sell to make up the difference.

A letter from an attorney named Dreischoen: With regard to the evidence to be presented to the Supreme Court on the fifth of December next, regarding Madame Daubray's intention of gifting the Refuge lands outright to her son Gauthier . . .

The door from parlor to dining room opened and January stepped back quickly, lest he should be seen taking an interest in the affairs of his betters. But it wasn't Esteban. It was young Madame Fourchet, pausing beside the dining table to break the bright green wafers on a folded sheet of cream-colored paper. She stood for a moment in the shadows of the darkening room, reading what was written.

Then she crushed the paper against her chest, her face turned aside, her mouth catching tight to keep her lips from shaking. She stood so, looking out through the French doors into the sunlight of the piazza between the house's wings. Her whole body shivered, and her breath came swift, like one who struggles not to weep.

With a kind of deliberate calm she smoothed the crushed paper out on the edge of the table, refolded it, and pa.s.sed out onto the gallery as Esteban and Sheriff Dutfy entered the room. January felt his nape p.r.i.c.kle at the sight of the sheriff. In the moment it took for the two men to cross the corner of the dining room to the office door, January stepped back, opened the French door onto the gallery, and moved one of the room's plain cypress-wood chairs about a foot, so that it could be seized and flung if, for instance, he had to make a bolt out the door. . . .

"This him?" Duffy's sharp little black eyes sized him up two seconds after January had returned to his respectful stance in the corner beside the desk. "Big b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

Esteban nodded. "Ben, what was it you-uh-told me yesterday, about my-uh-my-about Michie Fourchet being poisoned?"

"Sir, I was all wrong about that, as you told me." January bobbed his head, wishing for the thousandth time he wasn't nearly six and a half feet tall and dangerous-looking. He stooped his shoulders and tried to appear oaflike and cowed. "I remembered as how Michie Hannibal's cousin died of drinkin' mercury, and how he puffed up like that, and went off his head, and how his gums bled. And when I seen Michie Fourchet bleedin' from the gums, and him off his head, and I remembered how the folks 'round the quarters was sayin' somebody tried to poison him, and poisoned poor Michie Gilles instead, I just got scared, I guess."

He glanced from Esteban to Duffy, who'd relaxed-the cringing must have worked-and taken his hand from the pistol at his belt.

"But you're right, when I thought about it, that calomel does make the gums bleed, too. . . ."

"I thought you said it was the brother of your master's father-in-law," said Esteban, "who drank mercury."

January thought, f.u.c.k. "It was, sir," he said, racking his brains to remember whether he'd given this mythological individual a name. "Michie Jacques and Michie Georges both was Michie Hannibal's cousins on his mother's side-"

"Lock him up with the others," said Duffy. "We'll get to the bottom of this."

?NINETEEN.

The sheriff was reaching for his pistol as he said the words, but he very clearly didn't expect much resistance. January slung the chair at him and was out the door onto the gallery without seeing whether it struck its target or not. Three long strides took him to the gallery rail and he swung over it, dropping to the ground as Esteban yelled, "Get him! Stop him!" to no one in particular, and Duffy bellowed, "Doyle! Waller! Catch that n.i.g.g.e.r!"

Because he spoke decent French and was reasonably clean, if s.h.a.ggy, Duffy had been allowed in the house. But thanks to Esteban's prejudices against Americans, the sheriff's posse had been left on the front steps, chewing and spitting and playing mumblety-peg. If they'd simply run around the corner of the house the minute Buffy yelled, they'd have caught him.