Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (28 page)

“A couple of them that Thierry whipped.” She spoke quietly; spoke too as if he'd never made the pretense of being an ignorant field hand, and she had never scorned him. “Would you have a look at them? They're bad off.”

January nodded. He'd planned to look in at the hospital. “You got prince's pine in that satchel of yours? Ground holly?
Sassafras?”

“I don't have ground holly but I know where it grows.”

“Get me some, if you would, please. Make a strong tea out of the roots, the color of coffee if you can get it that dark.” He followed her to her door and took the packets of herbs she handed him.

“I used willow bark on them already. Ti-Fred and Vanille are running a fever, it's them I worried about most. That Vanille, she's too thin. She has too much white blood in her to be tough.”

She'd been raised too gently, rather, thought January, as he climbed the steps of the rough-built cabin that served as a slave hospital. This was probably the first real beating of her life.

Most of those Thierry had lashed throughout the day had already returned to their cabins. January never ceased to marvel at the physical toughness, the matter-of-fact stoicism, of those who'd been born his brothers and sisters in bondage. Of those who'd been burned in last night's fire only Marquis remained, moaning softly in the wet sheets propped around him. Throughout the day the children in the hogmeat gang had come out to the fields with the latest bulletins: He beat Quashie fifty strokes an' Quashie never made a sound, but Jeanette, she sat behind the kitchen an' cried an' cried. Agamemnon, he fainted dead away after five strokes. Mohammed, he prayed when Thierry beat him, yelled out loud to his Allah-God to help him.

Two of the women, Flora and Chuma, had simply pulled their blouses up over their bleeding backs and gone out to the field to finish their workday. January had seen them loading the cane cart on his way in to speak to Hannibal.

Ti-Fred, as the first man beaten that morning, had gotten the overseer's first anger and first strength. He lay on his belly like a dead man, barely breathing, face and hands clammy with shock. In the next cot Boaz, a man of about January's age, lay far gone in the pneumonia that his body was too exhausted by a lifetime's overwork to resist. Quashie, on another bunk, was motionless as the image of a dead god. Two beatings in five days, thought January, checking Boaz's pulse, then Quashie's, with a sickening sense of despair. For Quashie it was truly, now, flee or die.

He examined Marquis's raw, blistered skin for sign of infection, and added another chunk of wood to the fire in the cabin's little hearth. The last one. Thierry must have raided even the hospital's small store to feed the mill furnaces.

Madame Helene's maid Vanille was weeping, feverish exhausted tears, the kind of broken sobbing that feeds on itself. A small pot sat on the grate above the hearth flames-there was no pothook-and January poured water into a gourd and washed his hands again. In a second gourd he made up a sassafras wash, and set the little kettle of willow-bark tea closer to the flames to warm again.

“Michie Robert?” whispered Vanille, when January carefully removed the poultice from the young woman's back.

“Ssshh, shush. You'll be all right.”

Vanille pressed her face into the corn-shuck mattress and began to cry again as he trickled the warm water over her flesh. He counted the stripes-ten lashes. Nothing, to a field hand. “He didn't speak a word,” she whispered. “He let me be beaten and he didn't speak a word.”

January thought of the valet Agamemnon, turning anguished eyes toward Esteban.
“Did you think he would?” he asked gently, and she shuddered.

“He should have looked after me,” murmured the girl. The smell of sassafras was a strong clean sharpness, summery against the smells of sweat and blood. “He should have spoke. He did before, when M'am Helene would get mad. He said, `Don't you take it out on her, 'cause you hate M'am Fourchet.' Why didn't he speak now?”

“Is she jealous about the love letters?” January patted lightly with a clean cloth, spoke in his softest voice, in his best French, masters' French, house-servant French. Under the gentle warmth of the rinse the gashed skin grinned in red slits. She would always carry these marks; they would lower her price if she were sold, maybe prevent her from being bought for a house-servant at all. “The love letters Michie Robert writes?”

“It was that woman in Paris. First her, and now M'am Fourchet. She thought he was all hers, when his papa made him marry her. But there was that woman . . .”

“A mistress?”

“A whore,” whispered Vanille. “If she's a mistress, he'd have given her someplace nice. After he went out three, four, five times, M'am Helene followed him in a cab, she and I together. We followed him to this dirty house in a dirty part of town, and saw them through a window. Saw her on her bed, and Michie Robert sitting by her, holding her in his arms. M'am Helene was so angry she cried. When he gave her diamond earrings-same as he gave his sister when he left her at that school-M'am Helene said, Did you give a pair to your old whore, too? 'Cause she was old.
Old and ugly, in that torn-up lace wrapper. And he hit her.”

She laid her forehead against January's arm, tears hot against his flesh. She had been bought in town, January remembered hearing someone say, and like Kiki, was “proud.” She had no one on the place to turn to.

“When he went out again she beat me. And she beat me the other day, when she saw him talking to Madame. Now he's not here to stop her, what'll happen to me?”

What indeed? January felt sickened. In this soured and unhappy household it was indeed the slaves who reaped the whirlwind of their masters' sowing: men and women who had nothing to do with the reproaches and rage passed from generation to generation, who would happily have been anywhere else, leading lives of their own.

And there was worse to come, if he didn't find the killer.

Under his soothing touch Vanille was sinking into drowsiness. He had best, he knew, put the astringent solution of ground-holly root on her wounds before she slept. Gently he covered her back with Kiki's poultice again, to keep the flies off, and crossed again to the kitchen. As he approached it he saw Jeanette by its door, glancing around her at the other doors that let into the yard-the laundry and the candle-room. A moment later Kiki herself appeared in the doorway. She handed the girl a large basket with a towel tucked around it, and what looked like a rolled-up quilt.

Jeanette slipped around the corner and was gone. “I'm sorry.” Kiki went to the hearth, moving slowly and painfully still, and with a crane-hook brought forward a small pot that had been boiling over the flames. “I was about to bring you this out to the hospital when Baptiste came over and told me Dr. Laurette's come from Baton Rouge on the boat that Michie Hannibal took to town. He's that fond of meringues, Dr. Laurette, and Madame thought it'd be nice if we had some.”

Her round face was gray with weariness, and, January thought, there remained at the back of her dark eyes some of the haunted look they'd worn in the firelight last night. He recalled Jeanette's scornful words, She wouldn't spit on the back of a field hand to wash it, and thought about the poultices laid not only on Vanille's back, but on Quashie's and Ti-Fred's in the hospital from which he'd just come.

She had spoken of children. Was it that loss which had touched her, finally? Or simply the understanding that what was happening could break into violence at any moment, and destroy them all? Her hands twitched-not quite a tremor-as she poured the tisane into a gourd.

“Michie Fourchet going to be all right?” he asked.

“Dr. Laurette thinks so.” Kiki handed him the gourd. “He bled him good. Laurette's a great bleeder; I think he wants to be a soldier in his heart. Most of the time I look at these blankitte doctors that bleed everyone no matter what's wrong with them and I think they're crazy, but for Michie Fourchet, it makes him weak and keeps him quiet, and right now quiet is what he needs. Dr. Laurette gave him some bromide, all mixed with sassafras and sugar to kill the taste of it-it's better than hartshorn, they say.”

As Kiki talked she broke eggs into a white Germanware bowl, neatly separating the whites from the yolks, and scraped a little sugar from the loaf on the table. “How do you use it?” She nodded at the gourd. “Ground holly? I never heard of that.”

“It's an astringent, mostly,” said January. He sloshed the liquid-it was dark, the color of strong tea. “It keeps wounds clean better than brandy or rum. My sister learned of it from an old Natchez woman. My sister's a voodoo. Olympia Snakebones. Watch it,” he added, as Kiki's hand twitched again and the pinch of cream of tartar she was carrying to the meringue bowl scattered fluffily over the table.

“I'm all right.” Kiki braced herself on the corner of the table, rosebud mouth caught together tight. “It just . . . takes me sometimes.”

“You shouldn't be up.”

“I'll be all right. You go out and take care of Vanille. I'll get Minta to do the washing up tonight and lie down as soon as supper's done.”

Yesterday's clear hard cold seemed to be breaking as January walked back to the hospital through the chill, slanting light. Rain coming. Clouds piled in the southern sky. He'll only sell it. And, I cooked dinner for twenty people . . . after giving birth to a child. . . .

What had become of that child?

When January emerged from the hospital again the shadows were long across the yard, and under the dark of the gallery candlelight showed in a window or two, like sleepy-lidded eyes. Had Marie-Noel Fourchet burned the letters Robert denied he'd written her? Or did she take them out of some compartment in her desk sometimes and read over words of tenderness that her husband never spoke?

Did she believe them? A middle-aged whore in a dirty part of Paris.
An odd choice, for a man as fastidious as Robert Fourchet.

On the whole, he thought, it was likelier that she'd burned them. Marie-Noel didn't look like a foolish woman. And she'd be a fool to think Madame Helene wouldn't search til she'd found them, in order to throw them in Simon Fourchet's face.

But sixteen is an age that treasures scraps of comfort. He worked through the night in the mill, hauling wood, stoking fires, thrusting cane into the grating iron teeth of the rollers and later piling cut stalks along the downstream outer wall of the mill, so that it could be carried in easily once the mill was running full-out again. Thierry went up to the house just after supper and returned in a savage mood, wielding his whip as if he suspected every man and woman present of destroying the wood stores in order to threaten his position as overseer. It was a relief when the overseer went off duty a few hours before midnight. Esteban stayed later. He worked without shouts or curses, frequently consulting the silent, ashen-faced Rodney about the appearance of the boiling sap, and when it should be skimmed, or struck, or moved from kettle to kettle.

“Will you be all right?” January overheard him ask Rodney at one point during the evening, and the bereaved father nodded.

“The work keeps me from thinkin'.”

Esteban lifted a hand as if he would have touched his driver's shoulder, then thought again, and turned away.

The men on the night gang generally had three or four hours' sleep before they were due back in the fields again. After slipping up to the levee to change the green bandanna for a purple, January had intended to take an extra hour before setting out for Daubray with his pass and his story about a letter that needed to go to New River, but instead was wakened at full daylight by Harry and Disappearing Willie bringing Quashie back in. “Thierry made him go out with the main gang cuttin' this mornin',” explained Will, gently laying the young man down on his cot. Quashie was unconscious, ashen and waxy-looking; his hands, when January pinched his fingernail, were icy cold.

Harry silently disappeared, and returned a moment later with a gourd containing a little whiskey. January sniffed it but concluded that its quality was such that it couldn't possibly have come from the big house, and held it to Quashie's lips. “Thank you,” he said later, when Will had gone out to find Jeanette. Harry waved away the thanks.

“I hear tell you're headed for New River with a letter,” said Harry, following January down the cabin steps and around to the back, where the bachelors' communal washing facilities-a trough-faced their weed-grown patch of yams, corn, and peas.

“I wouldn't be washin' up extra fine to impress Ajax.” January dug his fingers into the little firkin of soft soap he'd brought out with him, and scrubbed the water over his face, hair, and naked chest.

“You goin' by way of Daubray?”

“I might be.”

“Arnaud, that cooks for Michie Louis, might give you something in the way of lunch, if so be you was to stop at the kitchen there and hand him this.” From under his shirt, he pulled a rough bundle wrapped in rags. He must have gotten it from his cabin at the same time he got the whiskey.

“Be a pleasure,” said January.

From his pocket, Harry produced a small sack of salt-the scrunch of it, and the smell, unmistakable-and said, “And if so be you'd just give this to old Mambo Hera, from Trinette, I'd be obliged.”

The moment he was out of sight of the house January opened the bundle. It contained about two yards of the pink silk Madame Helene had been so enraged about a few days before. He shook his head.

The bag contained only salt. It was high quality and clean, presumably from the big house salt-box.

Just what I need, thought January, shoving both parcels under his arm again. To get stopped by the patrollers with this on me. . . .

Since he was supposed to be going to New River, January took the field roads through the cut cane stubble, waving to the women loading the cane carts as he passed. But as soon as he was out of sight of the big house he veered south. Rats scurried unseen through the weed and maiden cane; buzzards wheeled lazily, watchful black dots against the hazy blue. The day was warmer and clouds stretched horizon to horizon now, with more to the south. Alone, January let the peace of the country fill him again, and wondered what Rose was doing, back in town, or Olympe, or his enterprising nephews and nieces. Flexed his aching hands and wondered how long it would take his fingers to regain their lightness on the keyboard, and whether his mother would let him take away the piano St.-Denis Janvier had bought for him, when he took his share of Fourchet's money and got his own rooms elsewhere at last.