Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 26

January was very tempted to avail himself of the offer, for he ached all over and the la.s.situde of shock pressed on him, physically and mentally. If Shaw had survived-and January prayed that he had, and not simply because Shaw could vouch for his ident.i.ty-the policeman could keep Duffy and his posses at bay. If he hadn't, if he'd been badly hurt, January was still a fugitive. In any case it would take weeks for the garbled tales of slave revolt, house-burning, poisoning, and kidnapping to sort themselves out, if they ever did.

It was best, he thought, that he exit the whole situation through the first door that opened, and not ask questions that would cause delay.

Though frantically busy with his own harvest and boiling, Monsieur Conrad lent January money to take a boat south that afternoon, as, he said, he had lent money to Kiki. The river's rise brought several boats a day past La Cheniere. The butler recalled that Kiki had taken the Achtafayala.

January was willing to bet she wouldn't be aboard it when it docked in New Orleans.

When the Boonslick pa.s.sed Lescelles plantation there was a flag out on the landing, and Hannibal, Esteban, les deux Mesdames Fourchet, and the children boarded. January concealed himself in the stern section of the deck where the poorer free colored and the slaves were relegated, and it was there that, much later, Hannibal sought him out.

"All I can say is, for a man raised by an opium addict, Michie Robert has only the dimmest possible idea of how much Patna Naptime the really hardened system can absorb with impunity,"

said the fiddler, perching like a rather worse-for-wear gra.s.shopper on the top of a hogshead of nails. "They dosed me with enough so that I didn't really feel up to much derring-do--not that I'm much in the derring-do line to begin with--but I had plenty of leisure to chip off the business edge of every gun-flint in their boxes there, and dump most of my ration of water into the powder. As I observed before, Solus pro virili parte ago: I can only do the best I can."

"And what you did saved all our lives," said January. "I don't think Shaw and Quashie would ever have gotten on board if the crew had been fully armed. How did you happen to end up as a guest at Refuge anyway?"

"Silly b.a.s.t.a.r.d came out onto the gallery as the Heroine went past. There aren't even any trees in front of the house nowadays, just cane. I don't suppose it would have mattered if it wasn't me on board, or if I hadn't seen him board the Belle Dame that morning bound in exactly the opposite direction. That green coat of his stood out a mile. We stopped at Daubray to pick up a letter, and I disembarked and walked up the river road. I hid my luggage in the cane-they must have found it after Jules Ney caught me behind the kitchen that evening." The fiddler unfastened the clasps of his violin case for the fifth or sixth time, peeking inside as if to rea.s.sure himself that the instrument was safe and undamaged; touching the varnished wood as a lover would have touched his lady's cheek. He looked desperately thin but surprisingly well, despite singed hair and an angry burn on his forehead, earned when he'd dragged young Fantine Fourchet out of the inferno of smoke and flame that had been Mon Triomphe.

January could see the charred ruin of the house as they pa.s.sed it, veiled in the smoke-clogged white mists that still blurred the river. Through the trees his eye picked out the pale tumbledown planks of the slaves' graveyard, the broken crockery and bottles around the graves slowly sinking into the earth.

Mon Triomphe.

Simon Fourchet's pyre, consumed like a barbarian prince with all he owned.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

"Papa Ney was all for scuppering me on the spot, but Robert argued that as I'd written to my fict.i.tious cousins on New River-thank G.o.d!-if my body wasn't found among the victims of this slave revolt there'd be a search. After romancing his father's wife for weeks-unsuccessfully, as it turned out-Robert brought her to her father's old house with a note swearing he'd kill himself for love of her if she didn't see him. . . ."

"And Marie-Noel fell for it?"

Hannibal gestured forgivingly. "She's only sixteen. In any case he forced her to drink paregoric that night, and she was still logy from it the next morning, not that any woman's going to endanger the life of her unborn child when a man has a pistol to her side. After Robert forced her and Esteban to tell the slaves they were being sold, and to cooperate, Ney and his father drugged everyone in the house-as you guessed-then put it to the torch. They didn't tie anyone, because we were all supposed to have been driven into the house before it was fired by rebelling slaves. G.o.d only knows what possessed me to rescue the children. I quite agree with Robert that murdering the pair of them-and their mother-was not only necessary to his scheme but intensely gratifying as well."

And from the upper deck, Jean-Luc's voice called shrilly, "You give that here! That's mine! It's MINE!" followed by strident and uncomforted tears. Madame Helene remained in the women's cabin, prostrate with shock at what she had undergone.

She recovered sufficiently to go down to the ship wharves the following day, however, in company with January, Hannibal, a slightly singed and bruised Lieutenant Shaw, Madame Fourchet, and a trio of stout, blue-clothed City Guards, and intercept her husband as Robert was boarding the steam packet Anne Louise. January went with Shaw and his minions along the crowded levee, while Hannibal and the women waited in the market arcade, at the same little table by the coffee-stand where January had so often sat with Rose. It was unlikely, Shaw said, that Robert Fourchet would recognize a tall, well-dressed gentleman of color as one of his father's field hands.

But January would certainly recognize him.

The sailing-ship wharves lay downstream of the French town, the levee jammed at this time of the year with the world's commerce. Hogsheads of sugar, pipes of wine, bales of cotton; voices clamoring in every language G.o.d distributed at Babel: wh.o.r.es and Yankee sailors and Greek oyster-fishers and market women selling bandannas. Clothed in his high beaver hat and new black nip-waisted coat, January strolled toward the Anne Louise and scanned the faces, looking not only for Robert, but for Kiki.

January was still not entirely certain what he felt about Kiki. She had murdered an innocent man, and had calculatedly and coldly murdered a guilty one, not to free herself from him, but out of pure revenge. If you cut us, do we not bleed? Shylock had asked of men who, later in the play, had put their boots on his neck and made him eat filth. Having only sipped the cup Kiki had drunk of all her life, January understood exactly why she had done what she had done.

But he understood too that pain and fear are no pardon for murder. On the whole he was glad that Kiki had drugged him-in his exhaustion it had not taken much-and made her escape. He was fortunate, he supposed, that she hadn't killed him as he slept. She was quite capable of it. If he saw her on the wharf he knew he must-and would-raise a hue and cry.

But he did not. He did, however, see Robert Fourchet, decorously clothed in mourning black, hastening along the levee toward the Anne Louise, with a new valet carrying his valise in his wake. January raised his tall beaver hat and wiped his forehead, which was the signal, and Shaw and his myrmidons closed in.

He was close enough to hear Shaw say, "Mr Fourchet?"

There was a momentary hesitation; January thought he saw the young man's eyes dart among the crowd, pick out the blue-clad forms of the City Guard moving in on him. "I'm Robert Fourchet, yes."

"If'n you'd care to come along here to the market for a minute, there's a couple ladies would like to have a word with you."

"Thank you." Marie-Noel Fourchet rose from her seat after Robert had been led away, and walked across to where January stood, un.o.btrusive in the curious silent way he'd practiced since early adolescence, against the brick pillars of the market. She'd put back her veils of mourning crepe to speak the few words that identified her stepson as the man who'd held her at gunpoint, forced her to drink opium, left her and her family unconscious in a burning house. In their sooty frame her triangular, homely face looked even paler and more lashless. She held out a black- gloved hand.

"M'sieu Sefton tells me you were working for my husband." She nodded back toward the table under the arcade, where Hannibal was charming Madame Helene out of the hysterics that she'd considered an appropriate accompaniment to her husband's arrest. "That you tried hard to save him."

At the table, the dark, florid woman-in crepe and jet beads and veils to her knees despite the fact that she was mourning only a father-in-law-clutched Hannibal's hand and sobbed, "We have been left dest.i.tute! Dest.i.tute!"

"Will you be all right, Madame?" asked January. Whatever the courts decided to do with January's evidence from the slaves and Madame Fourchet's account of an attempted murder, Robert's valise had contained two of Thierry's pistols, which could have come into his hands no other way. The rest, January surmised, could safely be left to Shaw.

"I think so. Robert had most of the fifty thousand dollars those men paid him for the slaves. . . ."

Marie-Noel raised her glance to January's face. "Were all of them killed?" Tears glimmered in her pale eyes.

"I think so, Madame. Some of them got into the water before the boat blew up, but not many, I don't think. And the boat was out in mid-river by then, and rolling with the current. I myself barely got to sh.o.r.e."

She bit her lips and crossed herself. "Those poor people," she whispered in real distress, that had nothing in it of sorrow over the loss of an investment of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

"Those poor people." A gawky, familiar figure edged its way toward them through the gaudy press of market women and keelboat thugs, stevedores and flaneurs, and January recognized Esteban, followed closely by a tubby, pleasant-faced little gentleman wearing an overly elaborate lilac-striped cravat.

The pair paused by Hannibal and Madame Helene, and Hannibal gestured toward where January and Madame Fourchet stood. January heard Esteban say, ". . . settlement out of court . . . sixty thousand dollars plus help to get the rest of the harvest in . . ."

Evidently, January thought, in spite of losing all their slaves, Marie-Noel-and the child she carried-were not going to starve.

"Hannibal tells me my husband agreed to pay you for your time and your pain." Madame Fourchet opened the beaded reticule at her belt, and drew out a stiff piece of pale brown paper-a draft on the Louisiana State Bank for five hundred dollars. "I'm sorry it cannot be more, for we owe you more than we can say, Esteban, and my . . . daughter-in-law . . ."-her voice stuck on the words-"and myself. But we've lost most of the crop, and it will take everything we have to keep the plantation itself. I hope you understand."

January took the paper from her black-gloved hand. "I understand, Madame." They'd probably sell the town house, he guessed. And use the proceeds, and the settlement, to buy more slaves.

And after everything that he had pa.s.sed through, to save the people who'd plunged into the river, the people among whom he'd lived, nothing had changed.

Vast weariness crushed him and he wanted to tear the bank-draft up and walk away, rather than have anything further to do with the Fourchet family. Even that five hundred dollars, he understood, had come from human sweat and human blood. His mother's and his friends' and his own.

But he put it in his pocket.

"You must not think too harshly of my husband," said Madame Fourchet, in her soft, gruff voice.

"He was a man who lived with a great deal of pain in his heart. He did the best he could."

January recalled the dark face creased with rage, that yelled at him in nightmares. The sickening slap of a broom handle on his flesh and the sound of his own ribs breaking.

Screams in rainy darkness. The stink of cigar smoke. I have tried to make amends where I can.

This woman, he thought, looking down at her, had sat beside his bed all through that night, while his son sat out in the rain for the pleasure of hearing him die. "Did you love him, Madame?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, I did," and there was no mistaking the warmth in her eyes, as she drew her veils down.

She turned and walked back to her family, leaving January alone.

"So they all live happily ever after," said January a few nights later, as he walked Rose home from supper at Dominique's house. His sister's white protector was still on the family plantation, seeing to the last of the harvest, and Minou was taking advantage of the chance to entertain friends of color who would not, of course, be admitted to her house when a wealthy white gentleman was either there or expected to arrive. "Esteban with his dear friend M'sieu Molineaux, Madame with her child, Madame Helene as a poor relation among the Prideaux clan. . . . She's apparently suing her mother-in-law for upkeep, on the grounds that they had enough money to give me five hundred dollars."

Rose laughed at that, a joyous whoop at the absurdity of humankind, and January shook his head.

He had found rooms of his own that day, in what had been the garconniere of a neat cottage on Rue Ursulines: slightly more than he could afford, but the woman who owned the house, a former placee like his mother, would allow him to use her parlor for piano lessons three days a week.

"What did your mother say?" "Nothing. She thinks I'm a fool for leaving, and points out-quite rightly-that I'll be paying twice as much for the same accommodations and no meals thrown in. I suspect she's going to rent out my old room to someone else for three times what I was paying her. She doesn't understand that what I'm paying for is freedom."

"Of course she doesn't," said Rose. They pa.s.sed the lights of the Cafe du Venise, and for a moment the music of Hannibal's fiddle flowed through the illuminated doorway to infuse the mist around them. "Because of course you're no more free of her than you were before."

"I may not be free," he said, "but at least I have choice. And that's something."

She smiled. "With your mother, that's a great deal."

"But I'm angry, Rose." Their steps turned along Front Street, toward Rue des Victoires where her rooms were. To their right the levee spread out in the cobalt luminance of the winter night, torches blazing like golden footlights, outlining some incomprehensible spectacle on a stage. The smells of the eating-houses swirled around them-oysters frying, onions, syrup-meeting the stinks of salt and fish and tar and engine smoke from the wharves like a tidal river, and from somewhere close by a woman sang, "One cup of coffee, just five cents/ Make you smile the livelong day. . . . "

"The way the people in the quarters were treated-the way I was treated-I can't forget it. I thought I'd left it behind when I was a child and I found I hadn't. I'd just buried it, deep. And now it's come up out of its grave like a dead man's haunt, and it speaks to me all the time."

He shook his head, as a hobbled animal does when tormented by summer flies. "I see Quashie tied and beaten for no better reason than that he loved Jeanette. I see Kiki given in marriage to a man she hated just because Fourchet wanted Reuben to do his job well. I know there are good masters and bad masters and that the poor in the big cities are treated just the same, and yet I walk down the streets now and I see white men-strangers-and I hate them, I feel rage at them, killing rage, and this isn't a good way to feel. I know, because I saw what it did to Simon Fourchet. And I don't know what to do."

He spoke desperately, words he had not voiced to anyone, and as he spoke them he felt anger all over again at Simon Fourchet for having changed him, put this in his heart. Anger and helplessness and burning shame.

"Have you spoken of this to your confessor?" Torchlight flashed across her spectacle lenses as she turned her head, made a golden halo of the white tignon she wore. He knew that Rose was not a religious woman-a logical Deist, whose G.o.d was mathematics-but in her voice he heard her understanding of his own faith.

"He told me to pray. To pick out one white face-and one black face-from all the strangers I see, each day, and to burn a candle, and say a prayer, for those two every day. But I'm still angry. I think I may be angry for a long time."

"Are you sorry you went?" she asked. "Sorry you lived among these people? Sorry you remembered?"

He said, "No."

"It's an injury," she said. "A wound. There will be a scar, and the scar will hurt-mine certainly do- but wounds do heal." Her long slim hand, cold within its glove, slipped into his.

Shortly after the New Year, January was pa.s.sing a blacksmith's yard on the Rue St.-Pierre, coming home late from rehearsals with an opera company visiting from Italy, which would open in the Carnival season. The mist lay thick in the wet streets, and his head was filled with arias and duets and the precise placement of half-notes, but out of the dark he heard a man's single voice lifted in wailing, gentle song: "They carry them down to the river, They throw them in the stream.

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

He stepped into the torchlit yard, and saw the smithy br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with the warmth of lamps. A small broad-shouldered man bent over an anvil, like a bee in the center of a rose of crimson light, drawing out an iron bar flat for some future project, the forge-light edging his cropped gray hair with gold. From the yard gate January added his voice to the song: 'Papa, I'm afraid I'm dying, Papa, I'm gonna die. . . . "

Mohammed looked up, and his teeth glinted in a smile. "Ben!" He laid his hammer aside, and his hand was rough and hard as the forged iron as it clasped January's. "I'm glad to see you well."

"And I you."

"It is still Ben, isn't it?" asked the smith. He'd grown a beard, which with the broken nose and the scars left by Duffy's beating altered the look of his face. "I go by the name of Moses these days.

Moses LePas. M'sieu Theroux, that's the owner here, speaks of taking me on as a partner."

"He couldn't get a better," said January. "Man, it's good to see you. Are any of the others in town, do you know? Are they well?"

"Just about everyone's well," the blacksmith said. "I heard from Herc only last week-he and Trinette are in New York. Ajax has his own gang of stevedores on the waterfront there, and b.u.mper and Nero are in school. They come home and teach Hope what they've learned, to read and to figure. Marquis-you remember how bad he was burned-he's got a little farm on Cane River, and a Chickasaw wife. Agamemnon's up there, too, working in a tavern; old M'am Pennydip cooks for him and keeps house. Quashie and Jeanette are expecting a child, over in Mobile."

"And Kiki?" asked January, and the look Mohammed gave him, sidelong, told him what the blacksmith guessed.

"I've heard no word of her," he answered. "Mostly everyone else, though. Not many are here in town, of course, for fear of running into Michie Esteban, but there's some. They all ask after you, you know."

And what did they feel? January wondered. Did they feel that hideous, despairing sense that whatever they did, it would accomplish nothing? Did they feel hate every time they saw a white face, or wake in the night with memories that would be part of them forever?

But it would be forever, he thought. And it was a part of them, and a part of him as well, a blood- link that joined them. At that realization some of his anger shifted, and sorrow and understanding entered to ease a little of its pain. Joy warmed him at the,thought of all those friends, as if he'd received word of a family long lost.

"Tell them I'm well," he said, smiling then. "Tell them I'm fine." He filled the blacksmith in on what he'd heard of Esteban's activities, and those of Madame Fourchet. "Not bad," he said, "for one who had to start all over again."

"No." Mohammed grinned. "No, that's a woman who'll go far. It was a good thing that you did, you know," he went on. "I always meant to tell you at the time. So many men say to Allah, 'Show me your will and I'll do it,' and then when Allah says, 'Take this staff and go save that flock of sheep from wolves,' they say, 'Show me your other will.' We weren't your sheep. You didn't know us at all. I wanted to tell you how proud your father would have been of you."

January had been about to speak, to deprecate what he had done, but he found he could not. He stood with his breath indrawn, looking at the griot's face in the lamplight, unable to say a word. Mohammed went on, "You are Jumah's son, aren't you?"

Jumah.

Up until that moment January had never recalled his father's name. It had been buried under the pain of losing him, under the terrors of being taken away from the only home he had known; under the fear of his mother being taken from him as well. But now the name came back to him, not as a new thing, but as something always there. He said, "Yes. Yes, Jumah was my father."

And something cracked inside him, like ice breaking on a river in spring. He put his hand to his mouth but could do nothing else. Only stand in the lamp light of the smithy, sudden tears running down his face.

Old scars hurting. Dried wounds opening with lifegiving blood. Old memories singing from out of his dreams.

"No," said Mohammed gently. "Here, no, it's not a thing for tears, Ben. Your father was a good man, a righteous and upstanding one. He'd have done what you did."

And January shook his head, his shoulders shuddering as he fought to steady his breath. "Why didn't he come?" he asked, when he could speak. "All those years. Bellefleur was only a few miles from town, an hour's walk at most. Why didn't he come?"

"But he did," Mohammed said. "He came every week, whenever he could get a pa.s.s and many times when he couldn't. He'd walk into town and stand across the street, or around the corner, watching you come and go sometimes, or listening while you practiced on the piano. He said you played music like the spirits all praising G.o.d together, music like the sun coming up. He'd come back all glowing with it, and whether he spoke of it or not, we knew he'd been to see his son."

"He never spoke!" The words came out of January like broken potsherds working up through the earth of a grave. "He could have stopped me on the street, he could have come around the corner.

He didn't have to let my mother keep him away. I used to sit on the gallery behind the house, waiting for him at night. And he never came."

"Ah, Ben." The smith spoke, not to the musician standing before him, with his new black coat and his music satchel, but to the child on the gallery, the child who dreamed of the tall naked man with the country marks on his face. "Ben, he would not have done that to you. 'My son is a free man,' Jumah would say to us, those days when we'd ask him the same thing. 'Ben has to learn to stand like a free man, and to look other men in the eye. He has to learn to speak like a free man, so that no one will even have to ask him to prove he's free. They'll know it. And he can't learn that from a father who's a slave.' "

January was silent for a long time. Thinking about those nights, and the stillness and peace of the country. The silence of the sunlight, lying on the cabin floor.

"What happened to him?" he asked at last. For he knew then that the griot would know.

"In time Fourchet had him moved up to Triomphe."

"Because he'd run away all the time?"

Mohammed hesitated, then shook his head. A lie, but January understood. "I think he just wanted more hands there, or maybe it was after he sold Bellefleur. I don't remember."

As if, thought January, there wasn't a lost pot or a cast horseshoe that Mohammed didn't know about the people of the quarters in thirty-three years.