Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 22

But they didn't. January had bolted across the treedotted strip of land between the big house and the cane beyond Thierry's cottage, when they at last emerged around the corner, riding h.e.l.l-for- leather on the horses that they'd run to, caught, and mounted. It was a good hundred and fifty feet and January leaned into it, legs driving with all his strength, hoofbeats hammering behind him, and a small corner of his heart zinging with the knowledge that there was no way they could catch him before he reached the cane, and he was right.

He plunged into the cane, slithering through the harsh dark green wall of it, praying he wouldn't tread on a snake. They'd expect him to head for the river. That bought him time, for he veered leftward immediately, inward toward the swamp. Once in the cipriere, he thought, they'd have to separate-and then like High John the Conqueror in the tale, he'd be able to take on both the lion and the bear.

He heard the riders behind him, still trying to drive their horses through the cane-rows. They were crackers, not planters, and had never had the occasion to learn that each row of mature cane was, in effect, a wall. He slithered through two or three, like a flea burrowing in a bale of cotton, then hit one of the narrow paths between ditches and ran, their curses fading behind him.

They'd waste time at that, he thought, before turning inland.

His heart was racing, after a week of slavery wild with freedom and with terror.

Two weeks on Mon Triomphe had given him back his old sense of bearings about distances, too.

When he worked his way back through the rows toward what he thought would be about the end of the line of cabins, he found he wasn't far off; just opposite Nancy and Boaz's house, two or three only from the end of the row. At this time of the afternoon, the quarters were empty; everyone in the field, except for the sick and the tiniest children under Pennydip's charge. It was an easy matter to spring over the fence in the last garden in the row, to dart to the well-stocked pig-house, slip his hand under the rafters, and find Harry's rifle.

He threw himself under the house, groped in the long weeds there for the boards that covered holes. He was looking for powder and ball, and found none, although he did find a bullet mold and seven or eight small bags of lead sc.r.a.ps such as he'd collected from Arnaud on Daubray.

Also three gourds of liquor, a bag of salt, a woman's blue silk dress, and two cane-knives. He took one gourd of liquor and the salt, in case he needed something to trade, but didn't dare stay to hunt more thoroughly. He was thinking very fast, like a hunted animal-aware that they would indeed hunt him like an animal. What he meant to do had to be done swiftly, in the hunt's first rush, before men came in from all over the parish. Already he could hear the voices of the pursuers, far distant and still near the river. But with rumor and fear of rebellion capping three years of accounts of Nat Turner's depredations, it wouldn't be long, he thought, before more men joined them. He paused only long enough to help himself to the ash-pone and yams Cynthia had laid out under a pot, then slipped back into the cane, and started to run along the rows-Harry's liquor gourd bouncing and knocking against the small of his back. Once the men turned their horses toward the cipriere, they could travel faster than he.

Once they got Tim Rankin's dogs, he reflected, he had better be able to lick all four feet and jump . . . and thereafter keep his feet off the telltale earth.

A rider bound for Tim Rankin's would take the cart path that turned into the little trail he and Harry had used, that ran along the edge of the slough.

The initial search would be downstream, in the direction of Refuge. If he swung upstream-if he obtained a horse long enough at least to lose the dogs-there was a good chance he could work his way to the river in the next parish. Thereafter he could hide out on Catbird Island and wait for Shaw.

If Shaw was coming. January had been angry at Kiki for saying Hannibal might desert him, but now-on the run for his life-he wasn't so sure.

They would hang Mohammed, he thought, as he reached the shelter of the woods with barely three hours of daylight left and the riders close enough that he could hear their voices, sharp in the distance like bells. Jeanette, too, of course, and Parson and Pennydip. Probably old Banjo as well. Anyone who'd been on Mon Triomphe thirty-six years ago, when Gowon and his friends had burned the house, murdered the overseer and his family and Fourchet's young wife and infant daughter. Duffy was looking no farther than that, seeing nothing but the specter of slave rebellion, without examining the pattern closely to see whether it fit or only appeared to fit.

Well, you can't tell about n.i.g.g.e.rs. Settling himself in the long gra.s.s of the slough, January could almost hear the man saying it. Reason enough not to search for motive, or logic, or any coherent chain of likelihood. A white man had been murdered by his slaves. Every man of them who held slaves-or hoped to hold slaves in the future when he was richer-would be uneasy, too frightened by the recent events in Virginia to consider that January hadn't even been on the place when the trouble had started.

And by flight he had branded himself guilty. Reasonable or not, there was little likelihood he'd survive capture.

You can't tell about n.i.g.g.e.rs.

Well, he thought, leveling his gun on the path that led toward Tim, Rankin's house, you can sure tell about this one.

He would have, he knew, only the one shot.

And the shot, if it failed, would give away his hiding place to the rider whose hoofbeats he could feel through the vibration of the ground.

Virgin Mary, help me get out of this. He was back in New Orleans, the mob of white men around him roaring with laughter as they razored his clothes off him with their knives. Help me get that horse.

There was an oak tree the rider would have to swing around, a low branch he'd have to duck, not twenty feet from where January lay. Smoke from the burning fields of Lescelles stung January's eyes and he blinked the tears away. His mind focused, narrowed, his whole being relaxed and waiting, concentrating on the single shot he'd have. He propped his arms on the elbows, leveled the barrel. Virgin Mary . . .

. . . help me kill this man?

As if someone had pulled the bung from a keg he felt the fire of concentration, the focus of his mind, leave him in a rush.

Virgin Mary, help me kill this man, who is your son as I am your son. The hoofbeats were audible now.

He's a white man. He'll shoot me running, shoot to kill.

I need the horse. They'll have the dogs on me, hang me. This is my one chance. He tried for a split second to tell himself that he didn't really intend to kill the rider, but of course he did-he'd already figured out where to hide the body, in the long gra.s.s of the slough.

Anonymous rifle, anonymous bullet. Shaw's not coming, and even if he guesses he'll understand.

No one will know for sure.

Except you. Will you speak of it to your son.

He wanted to yell at her, Shut UP! I don't have time for this! But you didn't talk that way to G.o.d's mother.

And she was right.

Trembling, he closed his eyes. Heard the hoofbeats check and slow as the man pa.s.sed under and around that perfectly extended tree limb. Heard them pick up speed.

They're going to get the dogs. The afternoon air hung silent, even the singing in the fields hushed.

b.u.mper and Nero must have come out with the news that Ben had run away and they were sayin'

at the house as how it was him that poisoned Michie Fourchet. . . .

Here in the cipriere the smell of cooking sugar was less, the smoke of the burning fields at Lescelles stronger, like sand in his lungs and eyes. Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, he prayed helplessly, show me the way. If I'm not going to turn outlaw-if I'm not going to become the man who steals other men's food and liquor and salt just because I might need them to trade, who'd kill a man from ambush just to steal his horse please show me what I need to do.

The smoke and the scent of ashes grew stronger, a hot reek that stung and burned and drowned out all other scents.

January heard the dogs behind him as he strode north through the cipriere. He stuck to water where he could, wading knee-deep and thigh-deep and waist-deep in green stagnant ponds, the few turtles not sleeping in their burrows turning to regard him somnolently from the branches where they sat. Sometimes he could cut across the drier ground by making stepping-stones of cypress knees, or wading through hackberry brambles. Sometimes he was able to climb a tree and work his way through the branches monkey-wise.

But all this slowed him down. What he needed now was speed.

Sun slanted through the thinning western trees, sun blurred with s.m.u.tty yellow veils of smoke.

January dropped from the trees and raced over the dry ground, the pack howling behind him.

Through the trees he saw the air wavering as heat beat on his face, saw the quarter mile of ash- covered, smoking stubble-rows where the fire had already pa.s.sed. The smoke nearly hid the men working far out to the sides with the water buckets, dim shapes, like demons in a nightmare.

Smoke veiled the hot ruined carpet of earth and ash.

There was a ditch filled with last night's rainwater just beyond the edge of the trees, like a little moat delineating white man's land from the territory of runaways. January lay down in this and rolled, soaking his clothes; got up and shoved his stolen food and stolen salt into his shirt again, his little bundle of pa.s.ses. He remembered Rose's experiments with alcohol, and regretfully left the liquor by the ditch after taking one big hard swig of it.

Then he picked up the gun again and ran.

His cheap brogans smote the hot ash and cinders of the field, kicked live embers, like High John the Conqueror striding through h.e.l.l. The buzzards ascended like cinders themselves on the columns of heat, gra.s.shoppers bounced and buzzed around him, and the smoke wrapped him in scorching veils, rendering him unseen. Virgin Mary, guard me, he thought, with the pounding rhythm of his flight. Hide me in your cloak and keep me safe. The wall of fire loomed ahead of him, heat growing, hammering. As you covered over Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, so cover me....

He could hear the dogs barking among the trees as he plunged into the flame.

Heat and smoke and suffocation all around him and then he was through, with the leaping wall of gold and crimson flame behind him now, following him, and panicked rats and squirrels skittering madly around his feet. He ran along the row through smoke thick as muslin curtains, watching the fire that raced and crept over the litter of leaves, weeds, trash, and maiden cane. The long lines of fire extended before him on either side. Through the smoke he could make out shapes moving in the gloom, women and children waiting with clubs for the small game to flee before him, men with water buckets, ready to douse down the fire if it looked to be growing too big to control. Through the licking flames on his left January could see them, a hundred feet or so ahead. On the right the fields had been burned that morning. Last night's rain set up a smolder and smoke. Night was drawing in.

Before he got close enough that anyone could say for certain what they saw through the smoke, January veered right, springing over the spear-points of the cut cane-rows, dodging through the oncoming stringers of the fire. On the sides of the field, the line of fire was a reef of heat and flame, scorching his skin and making the water steam in his clothing as he dodged through its channels and plunged into the smoky world of ash and burned earth beyond.

There he dropped immediately to the ground, stretching out in one of the ditches that had bordered the cane-rows, so close to the burning field that sparks fell on him. He could hear the hounds baying, frustrated, in the distance, nearly a mile behind him now at the borders of the cipri6re. Ash and burning buried his scent. Now and then a leaf of flame would gyre lazily above the retreating inferno, spin and loop as it was consumed and drift, still burning, to the ground.

"Sovra tutto / sabbion, dun cader lento," whispered January, the words of Dante coming back to him. "Pidvian di fuoco dilutate falde/ come di neve in Alpi senza vento. "

Flakes of fire falling like snow in the Alps when no wind blows.

Like the d.a.m.ned beneath that endless snowfall of fire he lay on the burned earth, waiting for the darkness to thicken. Dante had written those words concerning the h.e.l.l of the Violent. Those who kill without thinking. Who feel that their fear or their rage ent.i.tles them, and do not ask the names of those they kill.

The baying of the dogs faded. The voices of the women and children disappeared as their frightened game took shelter, like January, under night's protecting veil. Only the voices of the men remained, those few who stayed out in the night with the water cart, making sure the fires didn't get out of hand.

But he'd accomplished one thing, he thought, the red-hot goad of panic subsiding in his gut. Two, if you counted saving his own neck from the noose.

He'd laid a trail that definitely led north. Any escaping slave in his senses would keep on heading in that direction, instead of doubling back. The waning moon wouldn't rise til late, and in any case the sky was still densely overcast, with the promise of fog by morning.

Despite the darkness he had little problem in following the cane-rows riverward. The Lescelles hands were burning the baga.s.se from the mill in great heaps all along the levee, as was the custom at the end of roulaison. The yellow glare of the flame led him on, through thickening mists that held and condensed the smoke, until he seemed to be pa.s.sing through another of Dante's landscapes, night sulfurous with distant fires.

Through the darkness came voices, singing, incongruously gay. Hands clapping time, and January's own heart involuntarily lifted. For these people, the worst was over. The backbreaking part of the job was done. Michie Sugarcane had been carried to the mill, defeated, as his father had carried that last captive enemy in the dream. They'd made it through again. They'd survived another year.

"Jump, frog, your tail gonna burn, Jump, frog, your tail gonna burn, Jump, frog, your tail gonna burn, Be brave, it'll grow again. . . ."

Men and women called out, laughing, their breath gold clouds in the raw night. A woman danced between two blazes on the levee, waving her red tignon like a flag, and the mists glowed around with the fires. Everyone would get more sleep. Someone at least from every family would be able to get the overgrown garden-patches cleared, get the yams dug, spend a little more time cooking so there'd be the comfort of eating good food on your own doorstep again. There'd be time January remembered, standing in the darkness beyond the range of that hot woolly light-for his mother to sing him and Olympe songs again, before they fell asleep. Time to wash clothes and air bedding, and keep the cabin clean. He heard the voices of children, darting and running around the fires and in and out of the darkness, and an ache came back to his heart for them, remembering his own joy at such times.

Joy more precious than gold, he thought, because there was so little of it, and it was so hard won.

Careful to stay beyond the range of the fire, cloaked in the darkness and the mist, he climbed the levee's shallow breast, to, where the river's curve deposited a huge tangle of snags, grown up with brush during low water. The fog lay thick, and with luck would hide him, though the firelight from above let him pick his way among them, the voices on the levee a comfort. Keeping just outside the range of the fires' smudgy light, he settled himself among the snags.

He'd have to wash out his clothing, he thought-it was black as any Miltonian devil with soot and burned dirt. That meant a fire, probably on the far side of Catbird Island and sheltered from sight of the river, to keep him warm through the night while it dried. With any luck Shaw would arrive tomorrow, possibly with Hannibal in tow. . . .

If Hannibal was capable of travel.

January's jaw tightened. In some ways, he admitted, Simon Fourchet had had a point about trusting those who used opium. Still . . .

He dug from his trouser pocket the wallet containing the pa.s.ses Hannibal had written. As he took them out he toyed with ideas of how to slip onto the levee come morning and mix up soot and tree-gum into something resembling ink. It would take a clever line of talk, however, to convince a posse he wasn't the man they were looking for, if he happened to be cornered. There weren't a lot of six-foot, three-inch coal-black Negroes wandering free about the countryside. From the island he could keep an eye on the landing, always provided Duffy and his stalwarts didn't decide that the island was a good place to look for a fugitive.

In that case . . .

A flash of virulent green among the packet of papers caught his attention. January frowned, the color half familiar, and flipped back among the tight-folded sheets. He'd thought the packet was a little thick.

Between the two undated pa.s.ses a crumpled sheet was wedged, whose handwriting didn't match the fiddler's graceful Italianate script.

French handwriting. The sort of script, in fact, that had been beaten into him at the St. Louis Academy for Young Gentlemen on Rue St.-Philippe, and nothing like Hannibal's very English hand.

January held the paper up, so that the light from the bonfire showed up the writing more clearly. It was only Robert's first note to his father, explaining that he'd had to pay two dollars and forty cents a cord for wood from the woodlot of M'sieu Gottfreid in Baton Rouge. January remembered the stiff cream-colored stationery; remembered Esteban dropping it as Jeanette came stumbling over the levee, screaming her hatred at the man who'd raped her. Broken fragments of the seal still clung to the paper, not wax, but a cheap gum-and-flour wafer the color of an unripe lime.

. . . such a shopgirl method . . .

Precisely like the second letter, which January had seen on Esteban's desk that afternoon.

The fastidious Robert might conceivably use seals that color if they were all that were available at a place of temporary lodging, but would he carry them in his luggage?

The first of the line of bonfires was about thirty feet from where January crouched among the deadfalls. Most of the singers were gathered around the second and the third, watching the woman with the red tignon dance. Carefully, January crept closer, prodding among the wet dark hollows for sleeping gators or snakes. In time he came directly beneath the blaze on the levee, the light of it brilliant above him as day.

The ink on the letter was black and even. He remembered thinking, in Esteban's office, how unusual that was, for the ink in a public lodging to be so expensive and so free of grit.

He's traveling north, thought January, turning the stiff sheet back and forth to the light. Going from woodlot to woodlot, from plantation to plantation, during the roulaison, in quest of wood, at this time of the year the commodity most in demand. He's staying in whatever inns and lodging- houses he can find. Presumably he's carrying his own notepaper. Maybe even his own wafers.

But he wouldn't carry his own ink, unless he wanted black splotches all over his nice white Parisian ruffled shirts.

And if he wouldn't be caught dead with colored wafers on his letters, and is using them only in the emergency of not having anything else, how conceivable is it that two separate establishments would have the same colored wafers? Or ink of the same color and consistency in its standishes?

At the same moment that he saw in his mind Marie-Noel Fourchet crushing a letter to her breast-a letter written also on cream-colored notepaper, sealed with a green wafer-he thought, He wrote all three of those letters in advance. Wrote them all in the same place, at the same time, and sent them north with someone else to buy the wood.

You're in this together, Simon Fourchet had said, dying.

You're in this together.

And January thought, without further conscious train of one idea to the next, Refuge.

It had been in his mind already, to find a plank or a snag or a floating trunk, and so paddle and drift south with the current to the boathouse at Refuge. False River Jones had spoken of M'sieu Raymond's pirogues stored there, and if for some reason Shaw did not make an appearance in the morning, a boat would be a useful thing to have.

Always supposing, thought January, as he poled along close to the sh.o.r.e of the outward side of Catbird Island, there's a vessel there without a hole in the bottom.

And if there was, January very much wanted to have a look at the planking of its seat and floor.

The house Gauthier Daubray had built to separate his spouse from the rest of the family was dark.

The boathouse lay a little distance from the weedy remains of the plantation landing, and January slipped off his drifting log and swam to it. Once inside, he removed his shirt-shivering in the cold-and covered the single window before striking a lucifer to locate the boat, then another to have a look at the planking.

As he had suspected, there were dark smudges and stains in two places on its bottom, about eighteen inches apart and much blurred and blotted with water. Precisely the distance, thought January, from a man's throat to his belly. Slashed open with a caneknife because Thierry, out hunting for Quashie and Jeanette, encountered someone who shouldn't have been anywhere in the vicinity last Sat.u.r.day night.

The old landing, thought January. Easy to tie the pirogue up there, and walk to the house where Simon Fourchet's medicine bottles sat unguarded in the birthing-room. And of course Thierry had gone to that landing thinking to intercept the fleeing lovers. Robert Fourchet had slashed him, stuffed the handkerchief in his mouth to stop his cries, cut his throat, and left him sitting up on the batture while he went to the house; his neck and jaw had begun to stiffen by the time he returned.

The body had been taken up to Catbird Island for precisely the same reason January had run north, to lose himself in the fire of the burning fields.

To get everyone looking the other way. Upstream, not down.

You're in this together. . . .

The only question now was, With whom?

He groped his way through the pitch dark to the window and slipped his clammy shirt back on.

The boathouse door was locked: He had to lower himself into the water again, and wade and swim around to the nasty mess of cypress knees and clinging weed that fringed the batture.

Something moved in the water and he backed off to circle around and wade in at another point, and this was what saved him.

For in that moment he heard the quick scrunch of hooves on the oyster-sh.e.l.l road that ran along the top of the levee. Immediately opposite the landing and the boathouse the wheels slowed, and a woman's voice said, "To the left. There between the trees."