Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (33 page)

“You wouldn't say that if you'd ever seen anyone who had.” January sopped and wiped at Thierry's buttocks and the backs of his thighs. “There. See? That's blood that sinks down under the skin to the lowest point on the body, right after death.”

“You mean he died sitting up?”

“Looks like it. And someone laid him down later. The way his head's bent forward would confirm that; the neck and the jaw are the first to harden up. Damn it.” Having pulled the trousers, shirt, and coat back into position, January laid the body down again and tried to lift the hands from where Ajax had laid them, folded, over the corpse's groin. “The ankles are going to be like wood. We'd need a razor to get the boots off and I'm not sure they'd tell us much. Look at this.” He pushed up the coat sleeve, and the sleeve of the shirt beneath it, as far as he could, and twisted and pulled at the fingers, kneeling to peer underneath for a look at the palms. “Can you see the palms?”

“Mostly.”
Kiki knelt, and squinched herself around. “They look all right to me.”

“Exactly,” said January. “No cuts. None on the coat sleeves or shirtsleeves either, or anywhere else on the clothing as far as I can tell.” Gingerly he probed and separated at the crawling horror of the opened belly, shaking from his fingers the roaches that crawled out. “This looks like it was done with a cane-knife. The intestines are cut through just about to the backbone, far too deep for even a river-rat's fighting-knife. And it looks like a single cut, driven in underhand and pulling up.”

“I'll just take your word for that.” Kiki went back into the front room and returned with the water bucket, a little pot of Pennydip's soft soap, and another shirt. “But it doesn't take a man from the main gang to be able to do that, you know. Those knives are sharp. A woman could do it, if she was mad enough, or scared enough. You'd be surprised at what a really mad woman can do.”

“My guess is,” said January, sitting back, “that maybe a woman could do it easier than a man from the main gang. Can you see Thierry letting a man he'd whipped get that close to him, even if he didn't see the knife in the dark and the rain?”

“Hmm.”
Kiki thought about that. Then she said, “You say that to Sheriff Duffy and he's going to think, Jeanette. And probably nobody else.” Her eyes met his and she added, “And that might be for the best.”

“For everyone but Jeanette,” January said. He washed his hands again, then rose and stepped quickly into the back room, to the chest where Thierry would have kept his pistols. None were there now.

That meant nothing, really, he thought, as he went back into the bedroom and wadded the two shirts together. Kiki followed him to the front door with the bloodied and filthy water, which after a cautious glance in both directions they poured out so that it ran under the house. Harry had been in the house, however briefly. He could easily have taken them while everyone else was occupied with the body. Very likely several spare knives and whetstones were missing, and probably Thierry's Sunday stickpin, too.

The shirts January stashed in the long weeds under the steps. The shadows were definitely on the eastward side of the oaks as he and Kiki walked, with inconspicuous swiftness, across to the wall of cane, and stepped inside as through a curtain.

“It was pouring rain last night,” said January, as they waded along the rows toward the back of the mill, whence Kiki could cut unseen back around to the kitchen. “Why would Thierry have gone to Catbird Island in a storm like that, when he already knew the people he pursued knew that their boat had been destroyed?”

“To meet someone else?”

January nodded. “It was too much to hope there'd have been a note in his pocket, but that little bay at the south of the island where he was found is only about a hundred feet from False River Jones's campsite. And it seems Jones is back in the area.”

“Ben, Michie Jones wouldn't hurt a fly!” Kiki caught his sleeve, looked up into his face with real distress in her eyes. “All right, he'll buy anything that people bring him without asking where it comes from, but he's a good man! Time and again, he's put himself in trouble to bring folks letters and things, news of their families and friends.”

“Maybe it explains what Thierry was looking for on the island.” January glanced at the shadows of the cane. “Damn it, Ajax is going to welt me for sure. Kiki, listen. I sent Hannibal to town to find out about Esteban's friend Michie Molineau. He should have been back yesterday, today at the latest. When he comes back, would you ask him to send for me from the fields, at once?”

He paused, seeing the odd light in her eyes, and she said, “You sent Michie Hannibal to town?”

January opened his mouth and then realized how foolish it would sound to say, That is, I meant of course that Michie Hannibal went to town and bade me stay here. . . .

He shut it, and looked down into the woman's eyes. They mocked him, bemused, and she shook her head. “Maybe if Ajax welts you it'll teach you to act like a proper nigger and not some uppity town-bred Ee-theeopian who's too proud for his own good. And that's all to the best,” she added softly, “for everyone. I'll pass your orders along, sir.”

“Thank you,” said January, “Mamzelle Kiki.”

And he loped off fast through the cane, turning over in his mind what he had learned from Thierry's body, and what it could mean. The examination of the corpse would cost him his lunch, but on the whole, he thought, food wasn't something he was interested in, just at the moment.

Through the afternoon, and into the evening, January strained his ears for the far-off wails of the boats on the river, trying to mold the sound into the longer, warping notes of a vessel coming in to the landing. Hecursed the singing of the men when it obscured the sound. Yet he knew if a boat came in Bumper and Nero would be out at once with the news.

None came. It's the wrong time of year for the fever, thought January. Either consumption, or opium, had tangled Hannibal in its snare.

Damn it, he thought. Damn it, damn it, damn it. I'll have to speak to Fourchet tomorrow.

He wondered what he would say.

Hunger soon enough returned to sponge away his revulsion at the postmortem he'd performed and, more than hunger, exhaustion: He felt like a steamboat trying to paddle upriver without logs in its firebox. Ajax glanced at him once or twice, when the dizziness of sheer fatigue made him stagger, but said nothing. January was aware he was falling farther and farther behind the others-and slowing Gosport down as well-but feared to work faster. Don't let me lose a finger, he prayed, aware that the priest who'd taught him his catechism at the age of eight would have pointed out that this was the probable Divine penalty for cutting cane on the Sabbath. And then, as the whetstone slipped from his sweaty, shaky grip, he added, Or a hand.

Who had Thierry expected to see on Catbird Island? And who had he met instead?

And who had come along later and laid him down, saying no word to anyone of his death? January had seen Trinette among the women in the mill but couldn't recall exactly when. Harry had been absent but then Harry usually was. Lisbon and Yellow Austin . . . ?

The following day brought another flatboat, with two thousand more cords of wood. “Three dollars and fifty cents a cord!” Esteban raged, when he got the note from his brother concerning the payment. “My God, he'll bankrupt us!”

“Boy never did have any sense,” remarked Old Jules Ney, who had come that morning to take Thierry's place as overseer.

“And I would have bet money he'd have seen Michie Fourchet in Hell before he'd take the job,” Mohammed remarked, helping January-as all men on the plantation had been drafted to help, save only the house-servants and those actually working in the mill-unload the wood onto every cane cart and wagon and haul it to the makeshift shelters. “Fourchet made it very clear that the son of a Jacobin sans-culotte who'd been deported from France for poaching was no fit associate for his own son, no matter how similar their interest in machines. When Robert would come here during the summers, young Michie Jacinthe used to study with him at the house. I don't think old Michie Jules ever forgave Fourchet for putting an end to it.”

“Michie Esteban asked him,” provided Gosport, wiping sweat from his face. “Who else would he ask? Every other man in the parish that don't have cane of his own is out riding patrol after Quashie and Jeanette. And anyhow,” he added, glancing along the line at the stringy, gray-haired patriarch, an eerie elderly doppelganger of the scarlet-coated master of the Belle Dame, “they're mostly Americans.” Behind Old Ney's head, against the damp gray roil of the sky, the red bandanna fluttered from the bare oak tree on the bluff like a streak of blood. “Michie Esteban offered two hundred dollars, for a month's work to finish the roulaison. I should think Michie Ney would forget his pride for that much.”

“Forget his pride?” Harry sniffed, and shifted the weight of the wood over his shoulder. “You watch his eyes. He's countin' every man and seein' how the land lies, to sneak a man out of here to sell in the Territories. You mark my words, before roulaison's done somebody's gonna turn up missin'.”

The afternoon brought Sheriff Duffy on the Bonnets o' Blue, accompanied by an equally hairy cracker deputy. They were met at the bottom of the big-house steps by an exhausted-looking Madame Fourchet, but not admitted to the house. (“Michie Fourchet, he took an' threw a water glass at Baptiste when he asked,” reported Bumper.) Whether the lawman considered the matter simple murder or the prelude to rebellion he didn't mention to anyone who later spoke to January, but Duffy didn't spend long in the overseer's cottage. Passing the little building on the way back from changing the signal late last night, January had heard the scratch and scuffle of rats and foxes from its walls. In any house in the quarters, friends and family would have been sitting up with the dead, the men telling stories, the women sobbing and wailing in grief. Their shrieks and tears were a gift to the departed spirit, a token of respect. But even more than that, the presence of friends-by the light of whatever tallow candle-ends and pine-knots could be donated to illuminate the dark hours-was a guarantee that morning wouldn't find the body missing nose or fingers or lips amid a welter of sticky little tracks.

Whatever else Duffy found, January didn't know. The fact that he'd brought a single deputy rather than a posse argued for a calmer outlook than was usual in the district, but then it was roulaison and difficult to muster a force. He and his deputy were offered ale and cornbread in the kitchen-much to Kiki's annoyance, since both partook of the nearly universal American addiction to tobacco-chewing-and departed soon thereafter into the cipriere.

Throughout the remainder of the day, Bumper and Nero brought scraps of news to the toiling men: Michie Duffy had told Michie Esteban there was six posses out lookin' for Quashie an' Jeanette; Michie Fourchet went just about crazy when Esteban told him how much Michie Robert paid for that wood. (January knew that, at least. The train of wood carts followed the carriage track around the side of the house close enough for him to hear the old man's hoarse cursing and the crash of thrown objects.) Little Michie Jean-Luc got into the cottage and stole the dead man's knife and had to have it taken from him. M'am Fourchet and M'am Hehne got into another squabble over whose fault it was that he got the key.

Just after luncheon, Hippolyte Daubray put in an appearance, resplendent in royal blue superfine, and offered one of his many cousins as overseer for the rest of the roulaison-but mostly, January suspected, to poke around for information. Everyone in the woodcarting detail was then treated to the sight of Madame's elegant cousin bolting down the steps like a hunted hare, with Fourchet clinging to the jamb of his bedroom door screaming, “You're all in this together! Pigs! Filth!” after his retreating heels.

From everything January could find out-he spoke to Kiki at noon, before the main gang went out into the fields again under Jules Ney's cold watchful eye-Duffy had been asking after those few old slaves remaining on the place who'd been involved in the uprising of '98. There weren't many of those, for the work was killing and Fourchet wasn't a man to keep a dependent who had outlived his or her usefulness. January hoped Fourchet had spoken to the sheriff about the pattern of the events being wrong for a planned revolt-the men agreed that Duffy was shrewd, and might understand. But after Daubray's visit, it would be useless to try to see Fourchet. January judged by the quiet at noon that Madame had dosed him with bromide again, slowing the heart action and tipping him over into sleep.

And still Hannibal did not return.

When it grew too dark for further work in the field, Jules Ney grudgingly detailed four slaves to bury Thierry. Word had been sent to Thierry's sister, his only relative, in New Orleans, informing her of her brother's death and offering to disinter and ship the remains if so required. At a guess, thought January-as he and Gosport, Nathan, and Mohammed dug the grave-Thierry was going to be on Mon Triomphe til judgment Day. He couldn't imagine even a sibling wanting the man badly enough to pay for having him dug up and brought to town.

Like the slaves' burying-ground a dozen yards away among the trees, the white graveyard lay close to the river, where the land was higher. Behind the big house you would hit groundwater only a few feet down. The wind made the oak trees curtsey and mutter, and brought the stink of smoke from across the river, where one of the smaller plantations-already finished with harvest-was burning over the fields. This was done to clear away the cane-trash, and fertilize the soil with ash. Whatever bagasse was not dried for kindling would be piled and burned on the levee later. From the top of the levee, January had glimpsed far-off pale ribbons of flame.

Weathered boards marked two other graves in that corner of the little family burying-ground, nearly hidden by weeds and as far from the graves of a former Fourchet sister-in-law, a cousin, and the sister-in-law's three children as space would permit.

“Them's Michie Munoz an' Michie Gansel,” supplied Mohammed, nodding toward them. “Michie Gansel was overseer when Warn. Juana and Miss Annie was killed. He died then, too, him and his wife and her baby, all buried in the same grave.”