Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (17 page)

Footsteps creaked by on the gallery: Agamemnon taking coffee to Esteban's room next door. Across the piazza, little Jean-Luc screamed hysterically, “That's mine! That's MINE!” and the even-littler Fantine shrieked as if she were being murdered.

“The Daubrays own forty arpents of riverfront immediately south of here,” Hannibal went on, “which after the Creole custom was equally the property of Alysse's children, to wit Gauthier, Enid, Corinne, Louis the Worthy, and Hippolyte. Gauthier as eldest son married early and profitably, and his son was Raymond, only a few years younger than his uncle Hippolyte. In true Creole fashion la famille lived together beneath one roof for a number of years, which is one of the best arguments I've ever heard for primogeniture.”

“Napoleon has a great deal to answer for,” January remarked.

“Perhaps too many of his friends asked him to provide for younger sons. Be that as it may, Gauthier's wife and Mama Alysse did not get on-apparently Gauthier's wife didn't get on with anyone-and by common consent shortly after the slave revolt here in '98, Gauthier and his bride obtained permission from the rest of the family to build another house about three-quarters of a mile upstream of the main Daubray residence, and slightly more than that distance downstream of here. They called this refuge Refuge, and evidently such was the animosity between Gauthier and the rest of the clan that Gauthier, instead of leasing family slaves to cook and clean, bought them out of his wife's money. In time they bought cane-hands from the same source of funds, and even built their own mill rather than use the family one.”

“I'm not surprised.” January leaned one massive shoulder against the doorjamb, looking out through the jalousies into the piazza between its enclosing wings. The new-risen sun sparked on the French doors of the dining room, and made a bright splash on Madame Fourchet's silvery dimity as she emerged to stand leaning with her elbows on the gallery rail, looking out toward the kitchen and the fields, telling over her rosary beads. “Given the Creole system of keeping land and family together and everyone living and working under one roof, I'm a little surprised there aren't more murders in such households.”

Madame Helene came out of the dining room talking, and cornered her new mother-in-law against the railing: “Of course, as mistress of the house now it's up to you to discipline the servants however you see fit, but I've always found that . . .”

“It's worth looking into,” remarked Hannibal. “In the case of the Daubrays, homicide was apparently considered on both sides. Gauthier got family permission to work about fifteen arpents as a semi-independent fief, always with the understanding that he'd come to Daubray on Christmases and Easters and pledge fealty to Mama. Son Raymond spent a lot of time in New Orleans gambling and drinking and getting into duels, and at the age of nineteen showed up at Refuge one morning with a completely unsuitable wife-according to Madame Helene she was Irish and made hats-and an infant, the girl Marie-Noel. Gauthier died a year or so later-of outrage, presumably-and Raymond spent about seven years running his fifteen arpents' worth of Refuge into the ground with unsound business practices, foolish decisions about planting, and too few slaves. I don't know anything about cane, but Robert assures me that the fields weren't replanted at all in that time, the cane just growing again and again from the same roots, which I gather isn't something that answers.”

“It isn't.” On the gallery, the conversation between young Madame Fourchet and Madame Helene had developed into a lively quarrel, with all the talking evidently on Madame Helene's side. In her gown of swagged bronze-gold silk and blond lace lappets, she resembled nothing so much as a gorgeously plumed pheasant pecking a half-grown partridge chick. “The cane comes up thinner and thinner each year and won't stand. It falls and grows sideways and is almost impossible to harvest, and is so thin it's barely worth grinding when you do. But digging it out and replanting takes a tremendous amount of labor. You need slaves.”

Robert came out of the dining room. His wife seized him and thrust him at Marie-Noel in the hopes that he'd back up her contentions, whatever they were. January caught the words “. . . worthless maid must have cut off a piece of it . . . I distinctly ordered fourteen yards and there's barely twelve in the package! Now what am I going to do with twelve yards of pink silk?” Robert's eyes sought Marie-Noel's, and the girl quickly turned her face away.

“In due time, and to no one's unbearable surprise, Raymond got himself killed in a duel,” Hannibal went on. “The unsuitable Irishwoman having already been gathered to her ancestors, little Marie-Noel returned to Daubray to be raised as a poor relation-mending her cousins' ball dresses and running their errands for them and cleaning out the kitchen grates a la Cinderella for all I know. At this time the beautiful Camille was still alive, though I think she'd gone to live permanently in New Orleans by then, and in any case Marie-Noel was only six. Robert was eighteen, and went with his mother. He did not return to Mon Triomphe with any regularity until the time of his marriage seven years ago to Helene Prideaux, whose father had some sort of business dealings with the good Michie Simon, though they subsequently ceased to speak to one another.”

“So Marie-Noel Daubray would have known Robert Fourchet only as a handsome young neighbor who regarded her as a child.” January thought of Robert saying Tu, of the way their gazes had crossed, and Marie-Noel's had fled.

“Well, she was a child. And still is, by any standards but Creole. In London she wouldn't even be out.” Hannibal picked up his violin again, sketching the outlines of an old galliard, like an artist noodling the shape of an eyebrow or the refraction of a rose through a water glass while his mind was on other things. Is it not strange, Shakespeare had said, that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?

“But time's wheel turns. At some point it apparently occurred to our delightful host that a) legal claim might be made on the fifteen arpents' worth of Refuge through the person of its sole heiress, and b) that said sole heiress might be tired of cleaning kitchen grates and mending flounces for the daughters of Louis the Worthy.”

“And he rode over and they put their heads together.”

“As Cinderella would probably tell you, even a prince who only recognizes your footwear is preferable to a lifetime cleaning out grates.”

On the gallery Madame Helene gesticulated angrily, the argument evidently not going her way. Robert stood back, shaking his head in silence. If Madame Fourchet resembled a half-grown partridge chick being pecked by the opulent pheasant, then, Robert was a trim little grass-parrot, fastidious and overwhelmed.

At Daubray, thought January, the girl must have had her fill of tantrums and abuse. But even Cinderella had not been married to a furious and violent man four times her age. Madame Helene burst into noisy tears and stormed away toward the sewing parlor that faced the ruined garden.

“Of course I haven't heard the arguments for the other side, but apparently Gauthier did get a legal sequestration of the Refuge lands in writing from Alysse. Who is of course now claiming that she never signed any such document. Grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est.”

How had it answered, January wondered, to wed in April, and in November to be confronted with a daughter-in-law more than ten years one's senior who had had no notice that her place as head of the household had been usurped?

Robert turned, and caught Marie-Noel's arm as she would have left. He said something to her, apparently urgent, by the bend of his body, the gesture of his free hand. She shook her head, withdrew to the length of his arm and hers, but he would not release her fingers. In the garçonniere's other room-Esteban's room-a man's voice said passionately, “He doesn't run my life!”

Marie-Noel met her stepson's eyes, and after a long moment he let her go. She turned and hurried along the gallery and down the steps to the piazza, and hence across to the kitchen. From the sewing parlor Helene's voice cried, “You uppity slut!” and there was a woman's cry of pain.

Robert watched Marie-Noel until she disappeared into the kitchen. Then, visibly bracing himself, he walked down the gallery to see what his wife might be up to now.

When the work ended for the day, instead of seeking his mattress, January paused at the bachelors' cabin only long enough to wash, then continued along the quarters street in the clear blue wash of the winter moonlight to Harry's cabin at the far end. A couple of yellow candles burned, filling the place with the stink of tallow, and as January paused in the doorway Harry was saying to Ti-Jeanne the washerwoman, “Good. These are good.” He held up to the candlelight one of the objects from the sack on the little table, a golden-brown russet apple. Going to a corner of the cabin he removed a loose board from the floor and, kneeling, felt around the space between the floor and the ground below, eventually leaning down to the full extent of his arm.

He drew up a small sack of coarse hemp-January guessed he'd had it buried under a brick beneath the house for protection. Indeed, though many planters would argue that the cabins were raised on piers, and floored with plank instead of earth, for reasons of health and cleanliness, in fact they were so built to curb the slaves' propensity for burying stolen goods under their floors.

Harry brought out a twist of paper containing salt, which he put into Ti-Jeanne's hand. “Now, if you should happen to find a couple of wore-out pillowcases that they're going to throw away anyhow, I think I could probably talk Ned into parting with one of his cat's kittens, when she gets old enough to mouse good.”

There was no one named Ned on Mon Triomphe.

The nearest Ned January had heard of lived on Lescelles, the small plantation immediately upriver-his cat Ika was a mouser noted throughout the parish.

Harry knelt again to replace the sack and the board. He shared the space with his brother Bello and Bello's wife Cynthia, they and their baby daughter sleeping now behind a hanging made of thick osnabrig sheets and presumably long inured to Harry's huckstering. Other than having more chickens than anyone else in the quarters, tucked up in the African fashion in baskets dangling from the rafter-ends outside to keep them safe from rats, more pigs in the sty behind the cabin, and a half-dozen strings of bright-hued beads hung on a peg near the hearth, there was little sign of Harry's activities in the dwelling.

“M'am Fourchet, she set a store by those pillowcases,” said the washerwoman worriedly, and Harry nodded with an understanding smile.

“Maybe a shirt, then?
Or a couple handkerchiefs? I hear Michie Robert has a lot of fine shirts. He won't miss one. That's my sweetheart.” He kissed the stoop-shouldered, gray-haired woman, and she giggled like a girl.

“You are bad.” Passing January in the doorway she grinned up at him. “You watch out for that Harry, Ben, because he's as bad as they come.” She sounded pleased.

When she'd gone, Harry picked up another loose board and retrieved another sack. This one contained a powder-flask, bullets, and a small box of waxed linen patches. He wrapped up the apples and handed the sack to January, except for two left on the table-presumably for Bello and Cynthia-one that he stuck in his own pocket, and another he threw to January.

“Best apples in the parish,” he said, as they slipped outside and went around to the pigsty in back of the house. “M'am Camille, she had the trees brought in special, like everything else in that garden of hers. Here.” He stepped over the fence and reached under the roof of the pig-house, bringing out a Kentucky long-rifle with its lock wrapped carefully in greased cloth. “Sweet as candy. Pigs love 'em.”

“That what we're huntin' tonight?” asked January, fascinated. “Pig?”

“Nuthin' in the world like a good pig,” replied Harry cheerfully. “And Tim Rankin's are the best.” While sugar plantations lined the river from its mouth to Baton Rouge, January was aware that most of the whites of the river parishes were, in fact, not of the planter class. Along New River, and Bayou Conway, in the Achtafayala country and on the nameless little bayous of the cipriere, lived a scattered population of small farmers, Scots-Irish or Welsh or descended of the old Acadians of Canada, crackers who raised a haphazard selection of cotton, corn, and yams and lived largely on the increase of their herds of cattle and swine. Most kept a few slaves-Aniweta, one of Harry's girlfriends, was broad-wife to a man whose master lived over on New River-but on the whole they had as little to do as possible with tillage or agriculture. They were, January had found, a curious combination of autodidactism and ignorance, squalor and pride, and he mistrusted them wholeheartedly.

“From what I hear,” said January, “Tim Rankin's dogs are the best, too, and he won't take kindly to one of his hogs takin' a little walk out in the country.”

“Ben . . . No wonder Michie Hannibal's daddy-in-law put you nursemaidin' him. You worry more than any man I ever met. You worry so much it's a wonder you don't chop your hand off cuttin' cane.”

And Harry led the way off, through the cipriere. In January's childhood, when Louisiana had been Spanish land, the cipriere had stretched unbroken, mile after mile of marsh and pond and oak ridge, as far as you could walk in a day. Indian tribes, Natchez and Chickasaw and Houmas, had wandered it. Runaway slaves had established whole villages in it and had lived in peace for years, and so in places it remained. But after an hour on the winding trail, with the moon's thin dappling filtered by moss and cypress branches, January smelled the stinks of settlement, the sweetish revolting stench of hogs and the murkier pong of outhouses nobody had bothered to clean in decades, and among the oaks the milky light showed a straggly field of cotton, the stumps left in where the land had been cleared.

Beyond that squatted the usual squalid cracker dwelling of boards and bousillage, sagging on its piers and possessed of not a single glass window, though by its size it was clearly the home of the master, not a slave.

There were no barns. Crackers tended to let their stock live as untrammeled a life as they did themselves, though a kind of shed offered minimal shelter to a couple of mules. Near that, as he and Harry circled through the silent woods, January glimpsed a rough zigzag of split rails, and heard the mumbling grunts of swine.