Fever Season (26 page)

Halfway through Pauline’s careful but unpracticed recital of a Haydn contredanse the door opened. He saw the thin back of the girl at the piano grow rigid. The sticklike hands fumbled on the keys. Louise Marie, in the midst of a complaint about her ankles, fell silent and seemed to shrink into the hard golden upholstery of the divan.

A gleam of silk, dark peacock blue veiled with the shadows of the lightless hall, flickered in the doorway. A pale face crowned by a glory of dark hair.

“Pauline,” chided that lovely contralto in a tone like level steel, “after all Monsieur Janvier’s work, that is as well as you can do? From the beginning again, please.”

They’d be finishing the loading of the brandy onto the boat at the wharf, but something in the tone of her voice stilled January’s protest in his throat. It was the voice of a
woman who has never been contradicted, a woman who will tolerate no less than the perfect.

Pauline played as if a gun were pressed to her back.

“Pauline,” said her mother, still unseen within the rectangle of gloom, “from the beginning again, please. You know that no one appreciates mistakes in a piece of music, any more than they appreciate food spots on a silk dress.”

“Yes, Mama.” Sweat stood out in a crystalline wash on Pauline’s forehead; January thought he had never seen such rage, such hatred, in a girl’s downcast eyes. The spindly fingers trembled as they lurched through the first three bars.

“From the beginning again, please.”

The voice was a whalebone lash.

“From the beginning again, please.”

“From the beginning again, please.”

Pauline was crying without a sound. Her body was a wooden doll’s in her overlacy pink gown; and her hands fumbled, groped, struck note after note awry. In the doorway, her mother’s face remained in shadow, the strong, white, black-laced hands moveless where they rested among the folds of her dress: “From the beginning again, please.”

It was nothing January would have put anyone through, even in private, much less before a music-master and a colored man to boot. For a white girl the humiliation would have been excruciating. In her chair Louise Marie made neither sound nor movement, her hands locked around the lemonade she had sent for, as if she believed that by keeping very still she could avoid some terrible fate. Somewhere outside January thought he heard a steamboat whistle. But he would no more have spoken than he would have spoken to a madman with a knife.

At last Pauline broke down completely. She sat at the
keyboard, fighting the dry, racking sobs with all that was in her and shuddering like a beaten racehorse. From the doorway that exquisite golden contralto said, “I see we’re only wasting Monsieur Janvier’s time, Pauline. You may go to your room.”

Pauline flinched and caught her breath as if struck, then fought herself to stillness again. She rose like an automaton, not even daring to wipe the tears from her face and the snot trickling from her nose, and made her way to the door. Petticoats rustled as her mother stepped aside to let her pass, a thin harsh sound like flakes of steel. A good Creole daughter, Pauline curtsied to her mother, then vanished into the bake-oven shadows of the hall.

Louise Marie’s eyes flickered, showing white all around the rim—
Does she think after thirty minutes of that, her mother’s going to put her through it, too?

“You may go to your room as well, Louise Marie.”

“Yes, Mother.” The words came out like paper scraping as it is crushed. She rose quickly and without the ostentatious demonstrations of pain and bravery—the bitten lower lip, the tiny gasps, the hand on the hip—so characteristic of her every move. She still limped, and badly, but not nearly to the usual extent; she had almost reached the door when her mother said in that same whip-cut voice:

“Is this a sty or a garbage bin, Louise Marie, that you leave your dirty crockery all over the house?”

The young woman turned quickly back and collected her lemonade glass.

“I’m very sorry, Monsieur Janvier,” said Madame Lalaurie, as Louise Marie’s halting rustle of petticoats retreated down the hall. No anger inflected her voice, and no contrition. Only pleasant calm, as if reducing her children to tears of terror and exhaustion were a daily commonplace.
It occurred to him suddenly to wonder what being “sent to one’s room” entailed. “I assure you, both girls will be able to demonstrate the proper proficiency at Tuesday’s lesson. Of course, Bastien will compensate you for the extra time today.”

She melted into the gloom of the hallway with barely a whisper of silk. At no time during the previous forty minutes had January seen her face.

“M’sieu Janvier?”

He turned to find Bastien at his elbow, urbanely gesturing him out.

On the docks there were still two wagonloads of brandy to unload. Passengers loitered grumpily along the railing of the upper decks; on the lower, uneven gaggles of slaves and poor and keelboat Kaintucks jockeyed for places in the shade.

At the steamboat offices January sent in his card and asked for the lading lists for Wednesday, September 18: the
Missourian
and the
Vermillion
had docked in the morning, if the clerk recalled aright, the
New Brunswick
had been in by afternoon for certain, the
Walter Scott
and the
Silver Moon
sometime between four and eight o’clock, he thought. But, he said, he might be wrong.

During the lesson, January had left his grip in the charge of a woman at a silk shop a few houses down Rue Royale from the Lalauries, and now he changed clothes in a sheltered corner of the
Philadelphia’
s deck. Once out of the formal disguise of black coat and linen shirt, he wandered over to the engine room, watching a mixed crew of black and Irish stevedores carrying barrels and packages aboard and stowing them on deck.

“You made it,” remarked the engineer, coming out beside him in time.

“And I feel like a prize fool for hurrying.” January
grinned, and the stout, heavily muscled little man grinned back up at him.

“Oh, I seen ’em do this a thousand times.” He spoke rough English, like an American; January guessed him a freedman from one of the American enterprises in the town. “Rushing around like somebody took and lit they tails on fire, and then we end up waitin’ all the same.” He wiped his hands on a rag.

“Think we’ll make Twelve-Mile Point by dark?”

“Oh, sure. Once the old
Philly
get goin’, she goes, and Mr. Graham, he can work her up the banks close enough you can pick daisies off the levee. We’ll make Red Church by dark, easy, never mind Twelve-Mile Point.”

January personally didn’t think so—Red Church landing was a good twenty-five miles upriver—but nodded and looked impressed. He lowered his voice, and leaned down a little to the engineer. “Look, sir, this’s my first time out of New Orleans. I got all my papers just fine, and notarized at the Cabildo, but I been hearing rumors and talk. How safe is it, going up to Twelve-Mile Point? I’m going to see my sister, that still works for Mr. Bailey up there, and I’m … well, I’m a little worried. About river pirates and slave stealers and such.”

All humor vanished from the engineer’s eyes. “Where you staying, brother?”

January hefted his grip. “I thought I’d sleep out in the woods.”

“You should be safe. But watch your back, you know? You don’t have to sleep in the woods, neither. The big house up at Spanish Bayou, ’bout two miles down from the Point, is empty now, they’re sellin’ it up. You can probably sleep on the gallery or in one of the cabins. There’ll be water in the well and everything. Just be a little
careful who you talk to, and don’t get yourself anywhere where you can’t run. How you gettin’ home?”

“I thought if nobody’s around the plantation I’d put out a flag on the landing when the
Lancaster
comes by tomorrow.”

“Just what I was going to tell you. Bailey’s a good man—county magistrate in St. Charles Parish, as you probably know. Go to him if you can, if you get in any kind of trouble. His place is about three miles above the point. Skylark Hill, he calls it, but most people still call it the Old Marmillon Place.”

“I know I sound like a timid old maid,” said January deprecatingly. “I hear most people can travel pretty safe—I hear even Marie Laveau went upriver for a bit, last month.”

The engineer chuckled. “That she did. Took a cabin on the
Lancaster
, bold as paint, is what Guidry on the
Lancaster
told me, and put a gris-gris on his engine room into the bargain, for them lettin’ her off at the old Black Oak landing like she asked, and tellin’ off the
Jefferson
to pick her up there again on their way down. I’d sure like to see some slave stealer try to mess with
that
lady.” He threw back his head and laughed richly, relishing the picture of the slave stealers’ discomfiture. “Now that I truly would.”

It was five thirty, and close to sunset, when the
Philadelphia
finally backed out of the wharf. From among a group of black freedmen and free colored laborers on the bottom deck, January nervously watched the banks slide by, wondering how from the height of the texas deck Mr. Graham could possibly navigate among the slanting shadows, the hot, hard glare of brazen sun on the water and then the fast-falling twilight that changed every snag, every bar, every line of ripples from moment to moment as he watched.

The engineer hadn’t lied about the pilot’s skill. Once clear of what had been the Hurst plantation, now divided up into house lots, the river’s banks deteriorated. Hugging them close, out of the heavy strength of the main channel that swept the downstream-bound boats so quickly by, was a matter of avoiding fallen trees; submerged mud spits; hidden obstacles; and, January reflected uneasily, the corpses of other boats that had come to grief on similar debris.

How the pilots did it January didn’t know, but in a very short time he saw the lights of the Carrollton wharf twinkling primrose through just-gathering dusk. They stopped there and went through what seemed to him to be an endless, fiddling rigmarole of off-loading cargo, taking on passengers, holding the boat while the passengers went hunting for the youngest member of their family who had wandered away; no, wait, Mr. Slow-Toad and his worthless wife and family want to get off here after all.
Luggage? Good heavens, sir, we
did
have luggage! Let’s send the slowest waiter onboard to look for it while we all stand here and talk.…

Between Carrollton and Twelve-Mile Point lay about three miles of fickle shadows and dark water inhabited by every snag, bar, and submerged tree in Louisiana—
sea-serpents, too, belike
, thought January gloomily, watching the matte, dark cutouts of the trees glide by.

Alligators, anyway.

Sixteen years ago, when he’d left Louisiana for France, nothing but cane and
cipriere
lay between Girod Street and Baton Rouge. Even then, the plantation of Bellefleur where he had been born had been sold and subdivided. He knew the names of the streets between which it had lain, but was not able to pick out where they were, behind the
levee. In time Bellefleur and all who had dwelt there would be forgotten.

In his mind it still stood, and presumably in Olympe’s, and his mother’s: the whitewashed brick house, and the quarters; the cypress swamp through which his father was pursued, endlessly, by red-eyed hounds in dreams.

His elbows on the railing, January closed his eyes. The heavy churning of the water only a few feet below him, the throb of the engine, shuddered in his bones, but not enough to shake out those memories of innocence and love and pain.

You were born in the country, in thick hot rain and the smell of burnt sugar, the silence and the cicadas and the frogs. You waited on the gallery in the dark for your father to come, and he never did. Where do you go now?

Ayasha.

Rose.

She’d flinched from his touch.…
Don’t …

Did he think if he found Cora for her—rescued her friend from the men who’d taken her, cleared her name so that she could come back without being hanged for the murder of the man who’d raped her every day for the past who knew how many years—always supposing that she
was
innocent—that Rose would fall into his arms?

But he didn’t want her to fall into his arms.

We all need friends
, he thought. Although it was not wholly friendship in his mind when he saw again the cocoa brown tendrils of Rose’s hair lying soft over her cheeks, the thin angular shape of her shoulders in her blue-and-yellow dress.

Ayasha rose to his mind, the way her hot black eyes flamed when he admired another woman, the desert-witch smile.
Oh, a friend is what you want, is it, malik?

Yes
, he whispered.
Yes. I am lonely, and I want a friend
.

Under his feet he felt the engines change their note. From somewhere above a man yelled, “Back her! Back her! Bring her around!”

The twilight was still luminously clear, delicate as the heart of a blue topaz, like water through which all things seemed perfect, without shadow or light. He saw the cluster of cypress on the batture, the floating wooden platform of the landing at Twelve-Mile Point.

When he climbed the levee, his grip in his hand, the world was an identical patchwork, long thin strips of new-growing cane, rustling corn black in the twilight, trees like clouds sleeping on the ground where they guarded the houses of the whites.

The lacy ghost of the
Philadelphia
floated away into the gloom around Twelve-Mile Point, but he could see its lights twinkle for some time. Lights burned, too, in the houses among the trees, until from the top of the levee he saw a big white house in the circle of its gallery and its trees that showed no lights, and whose fields, when he walked down through them, were already rank with the quick-growing weeds of these tropical lands.

There was no smell of human habitation; not around the privies of the big house or around the cabins of the slaves. No cattle in the barns or horses in the stables. January wondered if the Reverend Dunk had convinced Madame Redfern to sell these, too, to him for half what they were worth. The woman seemed clever, sharp, and hard as a horseshoe nail. But January had seen her simper like a girl as the man of God kissed her hands.