Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (19 page)

Reuben's new wife Trinette?
he wondered. Who had not left so much as a broken teacup at his grave? Jeanette, who'd been Mambo Jeanne's daughter? But surely she'd have poisoned Thierry first of all. Zuzu, who'd been sold away when the children in her care died? Her husband Lisbon?

Or was all this the work of the Daubray uncles, concealed from the wagging tongues in their own overcrowded family house?

But no white, he thought, would have invoked the guédé's blessing on their act. Would they?

Coming back to the kitchen he looked around again, and saw, beside the door, a dozen tiny holes in the wood of the jamb. When he held the candle close they looked fresh, as if someone had stabbed the wood with an awl. Some were enlarged, as nail holes are enlarged when a nail is pried or twisted out; one contained a broken-off point of what looked like wood.

There had been a couple of long splinters, he recalled, on the kitchen floor among the leaf fragments. He unwrapped the rag from his pocket to make sure. A little more search near the door showed him a three-inch splinter of cane-stalk, sharpened to a point with a knife.

This too he wrapped up in his rag.

He'd hoped to find something salvageable in the kitchen, something he could trade to Harry for information or goodwill, but there was nothing. Whoever had come here to make poisons had brought his or her own pot, knife, and cutting board; chalk and lampblack. The small door at the back opened only into a cabinet, a shedlike back room stocked with wood for the kitchen hearth so the cook wouldn't have to fetch it from the main sheds by the mill. There wasn't even a kindling hatchet left.

By the wavering candle-glow the veves seemed to watch him as he came back into the main kitchen. The wriggling snake-trails reached out after him when he turned his back. Field rats had taken residence here: They skittered along the shelves, waiting him out with scant patience, like parry hosts whose guests have lingered overlong.

Half numb with fatigue, January made his way through the thickets of cane that, with a kind of spite, the Daubray cousins had planted where Gauthier's lawns had once stretched to the river. He reached the levee, and from that shallow ridge looked at the moon, round and bright as an alabaster dish just above the trees of the western bank. The Refuge landing was a black tongue among black cypresses, jackstaff still pointing bravely at the sky, and beside it a crumbling boathouse crouched, a velvet shadow-beast lapping at the luminous water's verge.

In the dense chill of predawn January walked along the levee, thinking about Reuben and Trinette, and Lisbon's wife Zuzu. Of Fourchet himself; and young Marie-Noel Daubray. But his tired mind kept straying to Rose Vitrac, asleep in that shabby room on Rue de la Victoire near the wharves, looking young and vulnerable with her spectacles set on a pile of books at her bedside and her soft brown hair spread in waves about her on the pillow in the dark. And from those thoughts, his mind reached out to his father, and the green-black fields of cane that had once grown an hour's walk or less from the center of New Orleans, back when New Orleans had had actual ramparts where the Rue des Ramparts now ran.

He climbed the bluff above the Triomphe landing, untied the red bandanna there, and replaced it with a yellow. Thought for a passing moment about Abishag Shaw, and shook his head at the gangling backwoodsman's familiarity with the myth of Theseus.

A steamboat passed in the darkness behind him, amid a shower of uprising sparks, like American fireworks on the Fourth of July. Among the oak trees the big house slumbered dark and still, the kitchen shuttered fast, the overseer's house a coal-lump of malice against the beating glare of the mill. As January watched, a light flared in its window: Jeanette making coffee for the white man whose concubine she was. Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the grain.

Sorrow and rage filled him. Bitter helplessness, and fear that edged daily toward the uncaring violence of outlawry and revolt. How dare they? he thought. How dare they do this, to her, to Quashie, to me? To everyone here?

The rage and rebellion that had scorched him since he'd helped punish Quashie boiled to a blistering head in him, poisoned by the knowledge that revolt was useless. As Nat Turner and all who'd followed him had found. Rebellion would only make matters worse. You couldn't fight them.

But like the skirl of bright unbidden music, he remembered half a dozen white men running madly about with their dogs in the bitter-cold woods, blaspheming and blowing on their fingers while they looked for his trail, like Bouki the Hyena when Compair Lapin ran off with his supper or his shoes or his wife.

You can't defeat the army, he thought. But if you lie quiet in cover you might save yourself and win a skirmish or two.

He was singing softly to himself as he came down the levee, as the first bell of morning sounded.

At noon, January lay down on the strip of waste ground at the end of the cane-rows and fell asleep as if he'd been struck over the head, not caring that it meant missing his dinner. Harry, he noticed--in the two seconds of consciousness between recumbence and blackness--didn't. In fact, Harry disappeared the moment Ajax yelled “Rice cart!” and didn't reemerge from the cane, sleek and pleased with himself, until seconds before the men were choused into the rows again. Time enough to rendezvous either with one of his many girlfriends or, more likely, with someone from the house or from one of the nearby houses.

He's got to be a machine.

They were cutting quite a ways downriver of the house, and back towards the cipriere. January had to fight to keep his mind from drifting, a dangerous thing when you were swinging half a yard of edged metal full force, the dust of the fields gummed with cane-juice to his hands and face and hair. Lack of sleep slowed his mind, and that was deadly. Hunger, too, now that he had no choice but to be awake. The singing helped, the rhythm of it focusing the mind without distracting it. Now and then some shouted phrase, some wailing fall of the music, would lift and turn his heart. Then down the line one of the women called out, “Look alive!” and he heard the crash and rustle of a horse, riding through the scattered stubble and trash.

Thierry, he thought, his stomach clenching, but it wasn't.

“What on earth is the meaning of this?”

Two men, mounted on bay hacks that January recognized as expensive. The younger rider was about January's own age, large and fair and portly, and clothed in a coat of costly malt-colored wool. His neckcloth was striped a vivid gold, and a tad too fancy for riding one's acres in. The older, perhaps eight years senior, had the same square chin and the same fair hair, though what was thick and mostly still flaxen, lying on the shoulders of his companion's inappropriate coat, was thin and graying on the older man's head; the man himself was narrower, smaller, and more compact. The difference between a hank of jerky, thought January, and a fat-marbled roast with sauce Bearnaise.

“Tell your men to stop,” ordered the older man, drawing rein beside Ajax. “You're on Daubray land.”

Ajax doffed his beaver hat at once, respectfully avoiding the mounted man's eyes. “Michie Louis, sir, it'd give me great happiness to oblige you, but Michie Fourchet'd skin me alive if I did.” The driver's scarred, ugly face wore an expression of wholly specious concern. “He told us off to cut these fields today, and I can't go against what he said. Bumper!” he called, and his son, with the inevitable Nero at his heels, dashed up, water gourd dripping from his hand. “You run back to the house and get Michie Fourchet fast, so he and Michie Daubray can work this out between them.”

The two boys fled, and Louis Daubray looked annoyed because the driver had refused to be bullied. The younger man, whom January guessed to be Hippolyte, said, “I told you he'd try something like this.” And smote the field dust from his sleeves. “Well, look at the bubbies on that one,” he added, small gray eyes twinkling in their pouches of fat, and he gestured with his quirt at Ajax's daughter Eve, working her first season at the cane carts with her mother in the women's gang. “Wonder what old Simon would charge for the pleasure of breaking her in?”

“Tell your men to stop,” ordered Louis pettishly again, and gestured around him. “Your master may claim that this is his land, but it is indubitably my cane.”

“Sir, the fact is I don't remember whether we planted this cane or you planted this cane, so you may very well be right.” Ajax bowed again as he spoke, hat in hands and voice carefully neutral. “But I can't go against Michie Fourchet's orders-”

“You very well can, when his orders are in direct contravention of the law!”

“He gets any more mad,” murmured Gosport, in the thick African patois that was barely French at all, “he'll pop right up off that horse and spin around in the air,” and there was a silent ripple of laughter among the men.

“Little bitch put him up to it,” muttered Louis Daubray, shading his eyes and gazing in the direction of the house. “Under that piety she always was a schemer.”

“She'll find her claims-if she wins them-come a little more expensive than she thought,” remarked Hippolyte. “If she hasn't found so already. The first time he takes a knife to her dresses, or starts smashing things she treasures . . .” He shook with a sudden chuckle of reminiscent laughter. “Do you remember the night old Simon took a hammer to Camille's pianoforte? And her staggering along the levee all done up in that ridiculous yellow ball dress, waving her opium bottle and screaming to all the boats to take her back to France?”

“That sour little puritan wouldn't care about her dresses, and if she ever fancied anything in her life other than the Bible I'd be surprised,” muttered Louis. “That's the only reason Simon hasn't driven her off yet. She treasures nothing: no novels to tear up, no pianoforte to take a sledge to, no glass birds and music boxes to stamp, no lace to rip . . What, sir, is the meaning of this?”

For Simon Fourchet had appeared at a hand-gallop across the stubble, hatless, gray hair jerking behind him in the breeze.

“The meaning of this, you mangy weasel, is that it's harvest . . .”

All work in the cane-rows had ceased by this time, men and women both gathered around the cane carts, listening as unobviously as they could. Finding himself next to Jeanette, January touched her shoulder gently, asked, “Is there someone on Daubray who'd know how to make gris-gris?”

“Mambo Hera,” the girl said promptly. “Even my mama was afraid of Mambo Hera.”

Like most of the women, she'd stripped off her coarse woolen jacket and hiked up her skirt almost to the thigh. Sweat gummed her calico shift to her breasts and ran down her cheeks from beneath the tignon that bound up her hair, making cedar-red tracks in the mousy dust. “Before she got so crippled she was them boys' mammy-Michie Louis and Michie Hippolyte. My mama said in her prime she had the Power, more than any other woman in this parish. I remember Mambo Hera when I was just little: She was a scary woman in those days.”

“But not now?”

“She's near ninety,” put in Disappearing Willie, who stood just behind them. “And this past summer she had a palsy-stroke, and doesn't get around much. She's near blind, too.”

“When she looks at you with those white eyes it still seems like she looks right through you, though.” Maybe, thought January. But somehow he couldn't imagine a dim-sighted and crippled nonagenarian accomplishing even the modest scramble up to the timbers of the mill, or slipping through Thierry's window to fetch a blanketful of knives to dump in the forge.

“I think all of 'em was scared to death of her,” Jeanette went on. “Warn Enid's daughters, and Michie Louis's, and all of 'em over to Daubray. All except Mamzelle Marie-Noel-M'am Fourchet, I should say.”

“It was the labor of my men who planted this cane here last season, and three years ago,” Louis Daubray was shouting, waving his quirt before Fourchet's face. “My men who cleared the trashy wasteland that was all that was left here of the ruin our cousin had made of family land . . .”

Gosport was right, thought January. If Daubray got any more riled he would fly off his horse like a badly made toy.

“Mama would take me over there, and I'd see the girls, M'am Enid's daughters Aimee and Rosine, that were always dressed so pretty, and Michie Louis's daughter Loie. They were fifteen, sixteen then, and Michie Robert and all the other boys would ride over to court them, all but Michie Esteban, of course. The girls, they'd give Mambo Hera sugar and candy and sometimes they'd steal things like tobacco or earrings, when their mamas would get them from off the steamboats, to bribe her to make them gris-gris to get this boy or that boy they wanted.”

“Don't think I'm not aware that you'd rejoice if my crop failed!” Fourchet stormed at the two Daubrays. “And don't think I don't know that it hasn't stopped at rejoicing! I know perfectly well you were on my land the night my mill burned . . . !”

“Don't be ridiculous!” Hippolyte, who'd been lounging in his saddle eyeing Eve and Jeanette and the petite sullen-faced Trinette, straightened with a jerk. “I was pursuing that pestilent thief of a goods-trader whom you permit to tie up and set up shop on your land!”

“And who saw you, eh? I've heard all about how you followed Jones halfway down the river, but who was with you?”

“Do you call my brother a liar, sir?”

“But Mamzelle Marie-Noel,” Jeanette went on softly, “she'd go by in her old made-over gown that she'd turned herself, just holding her Bible and her beads in her hands, and she wouldn't even so much as look at Mambo Hera. And Mambo Hera'd look after her and laugh.”

“. . . making free with the goods that are stolen from the rest of us! Why, I shouldn't be surprised if Jones gives you a cut of what he receives.”

“Liar!”
Fourchet lunged from his saddle, hands reaching for Hippolyte's throat. “Pig of a liar!” Hippolyte's horse, not surprisingly, threw up her head with a squeal of indignation and reared, blundering into Louis's mount, and by the time Ajax, January, Gosport, and Hope had grabbed bridles and steadied would-be combatants from clambering down to take up the challenge on the ground, the immediate danger of assault was past. “I will send my friends to call an you, you perjuring filth, and in the meantime get your fat bottom and your scrawny brother off my wife's land!”