Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (33 page)

He turned away and covered his face. “The first thing I thuh-thought was that I shouldn't have left her. If I'd stayed w-with her she w-wouldn't have been alone. She w-wouldn't have been k-k-killed. It was only later when I got home that Puh-Puh-Puh- . . . that Papa looked at me that way.”

His arms wrapped around him, hugging himself with wretchedness, and January struggled to put his own anger at them aside—anger at the boy who would let an innocent man take his punishment, a man who would let an innocent take the punishment of a boy whom he truly believed to be guilty.

Behind his flank he flexed his gouged and bleeding hand.

Stay silent. Stay silent and learn.

But maybe, he thought, part of his own anger was only envy. He didn't like to think so, but he suspected that if it had been Minou who'd been jailed, their mother would have been at the Cabildo that night raising seven kinds of Cain until her child was freed. Even if she thought Minou had killed a man.

“I never thuh-thuh-thought it was p-possible to love someone like that,” the boy went on, his voice a hoarse whisper now, speaking almost to himself. He might have taken the silence for sympathy, or he might have gone beyond awareness of January's existence, only needing to confess to someone who was not his father, someone of whom he wasn't afraid.

“I never thuh-thought I c-could love someone that . . . that wild. She was n-nothing like I'd ever thought about, or d-dreamed about, but I c-couldn't get her out of my mind. It was like one of those c-crazy, dirty d-dreams one gets. I n-never thought I'd violate another man's wuh-woman, or go through all those st-stupid little subterfuges, meeting her at night after he'd left, s-sending her secret letters, everything they do in n-novels. I didn't know what to do. And now at n-night all I c-c-can think about is her voice, and the times she'd be like a child who needed me. It was m-my fault,” he added softly. He was shivering now, hands clutched together, pressed to his lips. “M-my fault she was alone when . . . when he came into the room.”

“And you have no idea who he might have been?” asked January in the voice of his own confessor.

The boy raised his head, stared at him blankly, as if such a thought had never crossed his mind. As if Angelique's death had been like one of Byron's poems, some catastrophe engineered by malevolent gods to harm the bereaved, not attached to other matters in the victim's life.

As if, January realized, in Galen Peralta's mind, An-gelique had no other life than as the center of his consciousness.

“Do you know who might have hated her?” he asked. “Who might have wished her dead?”

Of course you don't,
he thought, as the boy simply gazed with those tear-filled blue eyes. You never spoke to her about a single one of her other concerns, did you?

“I ... n-no,” he stammered. “Who w-would have w-wanted to harm her?”

The blind naivete—the complete ignorance—of the remark made him want to hoot with laughter, but that, he knew, would be his death.

“An ex-lover?” January suggested gently. “A rival? Someone she had wronged? If she had a crazy temper, she'd have taken it out on someone other than you.”

The boy shook his head and looked away, face darkening in the gloom as he realized, perhaps for the first time, that he had not known very well the woman he had professed to so madly love.

“Was there someone you saw on the stairway?” asked January. “Someone you passed in the courtyard on the way out?”

"I d-don't ... I d-don't remember anything. Look, my p-papa says we should let this all blow . . over. . . .

“But then the man who did this will get away.” January made his voice low, both grave and sympathetic, as if he were speaking to one of his students or to some poor soul at the night clinic. “Listen, Michie Peralta.” He carefully used the idiom of the slaves, like a dog lowering itself down before another dog so as not to get killed. “I'm grateful to your father for sending me away rather than doing some worse thing, because I know it's in his power to do so.” The arrogant bastard. “But one day I want to clear my own name, and to do that I have to find who really did it. If you can tell me everything you remember about that night, I can write to my family from France or Mexico or wherever I end up, and they can talk to the police, investigate this thing. Clear your name as well, not just with the police but with your father.”

The boy licked his lips with a pale, hesitant tongue, but his watery eyes brightened a little. “I ... I un-derst-stand. But I d-don't ... I really d-don't remember.”

Just as his love for Angelique had been a matter of concern to him alone, thought January, so in his mind he saw only himself at their parting and not anyone around him.

“How did you leave the building?” asked January in a coaxing voice, trying to ignore the agonizing pain in his hand. “Down the service stairs?”

Galen nodded. “I d-didn't . . . Everybody was in the upstairs lobby. But I heard . . . voices ... in the office when I came out the b-bottom, so I w-went through the lobby and out into the c-court that way.”

His father's voice,
thought January. In Froissart's office, talking to Granger and Bouille.

“Did you see anyone in the lobby? Anyone you know? Or would know again?”

“I d-don't ... I d-don't know.” Galen shrugged helplessly and looked around, casting about for a reason to leave. “They were all w-wearing masks.”

“What kind of masks? Anything really pretty? Really vulgar? Really ugly?” If the killer had ascended the service stair sometime during the progressive waltz, he—or just possibly she—would have almost certainly passed this distraught boy in the lobby or the courtyard.

“There was that vulgar p-purple p-pirate,” said Galen promptly, his brow unfurrowing with relief at being able to recall something or someone. “M-Mayerling was d-down there, I ... I hurried p-past because I didn't want him to see me. I didn't—I c-couldn't—do with speaking to anyone. There was a w-woman dressed like an Indian in b-b-buckskin. . . .”

He frowned again, struggling with the mental effort as much as with his stutter. A very perfect young Creole gentleman, thought January dourly: competent with a sword or a horse and slowly being inculcated to the endless, careful work of running a sugar plantation, but utterly without imagination. Or perhaps with just enough imagination to sense that he was being pressed and molded against his will, the will he was not allowed to have, into something he was not. Enough fire in him to rebel against his father's demands by seeking out a creature of fire like Angelique Crozat.

“There was a k-kind of Turk in an orange t-turban,” he went on after a moment. “He was in the c-courtyard. I remember thinking his t-turban looked like a p-pumpkin under the lanterns in the trees. And as I c-came down the steps I s-saw Angelique's little f-f-friend, C-Clemence. She was st-standing in the courtyard, looking for s-someone. But I c-couldn't stand to talk.”

His face contracted again with sudden pain, and he turned away. “Duh-duh-don't . . . Don't let my father know I s-said all this,” he whispered. “I have to g-go. I have to be out at the w-woodlot now. I just wuh-wuh-wanted you to know I d-didn't ... I d-didn't kill her. Do you believe me?”

“I believe you,” said January. You cowardly link wretch. And, hearing the anger in his own voice, the threat of sarcasm fighting to rise to the surface, he added humbly, “Thank your father for me. And thank you.”

“It's all I can d-do,” said the boy softly. “I hope ... I hope your friends c-can find who really d-did it. I hope what I've t-told you is some help. Because I c-can't even c-confess this, you know? I cuh-cuh-can't ... I cuh-can't c-confess that I left her alone.”

You 're condemning me to exile from everyone I know,
thought January, as the door closed behind Galen, the labored squeak of the bolt echoed again. From the only home I have. And you expect me to pity you because you can't confess?

Have your own nightmares, boy. I'll shed a tear for you on my way back to New Orleans on foot.

He turned back, gritting his teeth hard as the steel arms of Christ's cross pressed, then grated, in the raw meat of his palm, and began to gouge at the clay once more.

"Boss-man say, Gonna sell that big black boy, Boss-man say, Gonna sell that big black boy.

Tell the Big Boss he run off in the night,

But take him out, take him on up to Natchez

town
..."

January swung around, heart pounding hard at the sound of the thin, wailing song beneath the jailhouse window. A woman singing, he thought, standing in the near-complete early darkness of the evening, her voice almost hidden by the singing of the hands as they came past on the pathway to the cabins.

Singing to him. There was no other reason for her to be there, close enough to the jail for him to touch, had he not been chained.

"Mama, take this food, hide it in the black oak tree, Mama, take this food, hide it in the black oak tree,

Where the bayou bends, My food, my boots, they wait for me . . ."

Something dark flashed between the bars of the windows; a moment later he heard the soft strike of metal on the packed dirt of the floor.

Uhrquahr,
thought January, in a sudden flash of cold rage. So Uhrquahr had his own plans to benefit from the windfall his employer had too much honor to pick up.

The anger helped him. Exhausted, the agony in his hand sapping the rest of his strength, without that fury he wasn't sure he'd have been able to tear free the loosened chain from the wall.

The thought of Uhrquahr did it, though. He wrapped the chain twice around his arm and wrenched, half-blind with anger, and the staple popped free with a force that sent him staggering into the opposite wall. He stumbled, fell, gasping and in a pain he had never experienced in his life, aching in every muscle.

And knowing that he wasn't done yet, for he had to cut through the wooden bars.

He couldn't even stand up to cross the cell to the window. On hands and knees, in the pitch dark, he crawled, back muscles crying out with agony as he swept the invisible dirt before him with his left hand. His right was a useless root of pain. He literally had no idea how he'd manage to cut the bars.

He knew he'd have to manage. There was food and his boots waiting for him in the black oak where the bayou curved—a short distance from the path that led back to Ti Margaux's house, for he'd noticed the tree there. God knew how he'd get the spancel off his wrist or where he could get sufficient alcohol to keep his hand from mortifying—at a pinch, a willow-bark poultice would probably suffice, if he had time to make one. But once he ran, he'd better not get caught again.

His fingers touched metal, lumpy and heavy. It was the head of a mattock, razor-sharp on its edge and capable of chopping through the toughest roots.

Blessed Mary ever-Virgin,
he thought, reaching down to touch the rosary in his trouser pocket, with its battered and twisted steel cross, I owe you as many Masses as you want to name.

And I owe you too. Papa Legba
—the opener of doors.

A waxing moon had risen midway through the afternoon, and pale silver flickered on the waters through a gauze of mist when January finally reached the black oak where the bayou curved. Heart pounding with fear of snakes, wildcats, and nests of sleeping hornets, he groped in the crotch of the brooding dark shape, wreathed with fog and Spanish moss, and almost at once his fingers touched cloth. It was a slave's blanket, not his own, wrapped around a good store of ash pone and dried apples, a holed and ragged linsey-woolsey shirt, a corked gourd, which even from the outside smelled of raw cheap rum, and his boots.

Thanking God with every breath he drew, January pulled on the boots first. His feet were bleeding from a dozen scratches and so swollen he could barely get the boots on, but even at this early season, he knew there was danger from snakes. His own shirt he'd torn to make a bandage to keep the dirt out of his raw and throbbing hand, and to tie up the chain to his right arm. He shed the remains and replaced them with the linsey-woolsey garment, which if old and ragged was at least whole.

He tore another strip from the old shirt, squatting in a broad fletch of moonlight on the edge of the field, and gritted his teeth as he pulled the crusted, sticky wrapping from his hand. The new strip he soaked in rum and wrapped tight, put another on top of it, the pain of the alcohol going right up his arm and into his belly and groin as if he'd been stabbed.

The river,
he thought. They'll search the west bank first.

As the thought went through his head his heart sank. He was a strong man, and after Galen Peralta had left him, one of the children had brought him pone and pulse and greens on a cheap clay plate, probably what they all lived on in the quarters. But he'd been living soft. He could feel the exertions of yesterday in the muscles of his thighs and back and legs; his bones telling him in no uncertain terms that he was forty. Even with the logs and planks and uprooted trees that drifted down and caught in the snags of the river bars to float his weight, he wasn't sure he'd be able to swim the river at this point. The current was like a millrace below the city, powerful and treacherous.

But he didn't really have a choice. He knew that.

The stream was high, but by the weeds and mud on the banks the peak of the rise was past. There was no guarantee that another rise wouldn't come down while he was halfway across, and if that happened he could be carried halfway to the ocean and perhaps drowned. As he picked his way among the moonlit tangle of weed and scrub on the levee, one or perhaps two plantations up from Chien Mort, he understood why slaves became superstitious, praying to whatever saint or loa they thought might be listening and collecting cornmeal, salt, mouse bones and chicken feathers in the desperate hope that they might somehow avert catastrophes over which they had no control.

It was the alternative to a bleakness of despair he hadn't known since his childhood.

And in his childhood, he recalled—waist-deep in water, his boots hung around his neck as he struggled to clear a floating tree trunk from half-unseen obstructions, the chain weighing heavier and heavier on his right arm —he had been as avid a student of the rituals of luck and aversion as any on Bellefleur. If he'd thought it would do him any good in reaching the east bank in safety he wasn't sure he wouldn't have taken the time to snap his fingers, hop on one foot, and spit.