Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (36 page)

“Something Cornwallis said to me about you speaking some other language with Michie Hannibal . . . Did Michie Hannibal by any chance teach you how to read?”

He drew a folded sheet from the pocket of his rainfleckered black jacket, and January saw written on it

BAPTISTE GRASSE     

TRIOMPHE PLANTATION-ASCENSION PARISH.

Hope glowed in the older man's eyes. “It's from my wife,” he said softly. “Harry gave me this just now. She must have wrote me, same as I wrote her.”

“False River Jones is here?”

Baptiste shrugged. “He must be.”

Kiki started to speak, then turned and walked quickly away to the hearth, where she sat mending the fire. It occurred to January suddenly that the cook might know of the trader's whereabouts. She had, after all, her own wares to vend.

It was not lost on him, either, that salts of mercury was a town poison, something not obtainable by merely boiling up leaves or bark. It could be bought quickly, and quickly passed from hand to hand.

As January unfolded the sheet he saw again the woman's bright-colored dress, and the way she'd run through the crowd on the levee with her skirts gathered up in her hands.

“Beloved,” he read. The spiky French handwriting was clear and the spelling good. Since it was forbidden by law to teach slaves to read or write, it was clear that Baptiste's wife had sought someone to write for her, as her husband had petitioned Hannibal.

I pray God daily you are well and in a good place, and the people around you are kind. Monsieur Pierre is gone to France now with poor Madame, and I am with Monsieur Norbert on the Rue des Bons Enfants. He and his wife are good people. They wanted me to marry their coachman Emil but because I am married already they say I don't have to. Leon and Aurette are still with me and send their Papa all their love. I pray I will soon see you again. All my love, Odette."

“He's lucky.” Kiki came back over to the table after Baptiste left with the letter folded close in the pocket next to his heart. Her hand flinched as she gathered up the used cup and saucer, set them aside.

“That his wife was sold to people who didn't take her children from her?” asked January. “Or make her marry one of their own slaves just to have everything convenient?”

“He's lucky to hear from them at all. So many don't.
So many just . . . wonder.”

“Do you know where he might be?” asked January. “The trader?”

Kiki hesitated, dark eyes shadowed in the firelight. Then she shook her head. “I have no use for him,” she said.

Another howl of pain split the night, the desperate cry of a man pushed to the limit of what flesh will bear. January startled. But only Kiki's eyes moved, sliding sideways, gauging the sound as she would have gauged, by the brisk bubbling of water in the kettle, how long to leave eggs on the boil.

And as she turned away, January thought he saw her smile.

Shortly before dawn on Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of November, Simon Fourchet died. His young widow sent Jacko the groom with a note to Baton Rouge, with orders to locate Robert Fourchet; she dispatched another message to the Waller farm in New River where Sheriff Duffy was supposed to be staying with various members of his posse, giving an account of the new catastrophe.

In the predawn darkness, after the screaming at long last ceased, January climbed the little bluff above the new landing and took down the yellow bandanna from the branch of Michie Demosthenes the Oak.

He did not replace it.

It was time, he thought, to ask for help.

January thought long and hard about going to Esteban Fourchet and saying, “I'm a free man. My name is Benjamin January and your father brought me here to find the hoodoo who murdered Reuben and Gilles.”

After he left the kitchen, and before he trekked through the thinning rain to the bluff above the landing to remove the bandanna, he crossed the yard to the garçonniere and checked the underside of the bureau drawer where he'd concealed one copy of his freedom papers, and the underside of the armoire where he'd hidden another.

Both were gone.

He wasn't sure whether Harry could read or not, but almost certainly the official seals on both-beautifully faked by a friend of Hannibal's, who'd forged copies of the original documents themselves-would be worth stealing. The copy he'd rolled up in an empty bottle-of Finch's Paregoric Restorative Draught and buried in a corner of Madame Camille's garden shed was still there.

But he thought about Esteban's dark unimaginative eyes, blinking into his when he'd told him his father was being poisoned; about the way the man's mouth had thinned and flattened, not in anger that someone would kill his father but in annoyance that a field hand would take up his time with nonsense. From the dark of the gallery outside the garçonniere he watched that tall, stiff-limbed figure help his young stepmother through the darkened dining room to her own room on the other side of the house, Agamemnon bearing candles behind them. Marie-Noel was still and silent, arms wrapped around herself, blond head bowed.

The papers, and the seal, weren't good enough to stand up to the scrutiny of one who'd assume them to be forgeries. And January could easily imagine Esteban saying to Marie-Noel or to Cornwallis or to Hippolyte Daubray, who was almost certain to show up with offers to help with the harvest or purchase the plantation-“And one of the hands, that valet or whatever he is that Father's friend Sefton left here, is now claiming he's a free man! Claiming Father brought him here on purpose to spy! Did you ever hear the like?”

January was alone, in the midst of enemy territory, as if he had strayed behind British lines at Chalmette. Worse, he thought, because all the British would have done was impound him, believing no more readily than their American cousins did that a black man could be a soldier.

Whoever had poisoned Fourchet-be it Trinette or Marie-Noel or her uncle, be it Cornwallis or the mysterious False River Jones-was in too good a position to silence him, particularly if someone took it into their heads to lock him up.

He was a rabbit in an open field, he thought, coming down the bluff through the thinning rain. Around him in the darkness he could almost hear the howling of wolves.

Because of the rain, and the black darkness of overcast sky, he took a small horn lantern from the shed in Camille's garden, to light his way to the bluff. And because he was carrying the lantern, knowing Esteban and probably Cornwallis at least would still be stirring in the house, he made his way to and from the bluff the long way around, through the cane-rows downstream from the house and up the batture, with the levee between the bobbing light and the windows.

The rain, never hard, ceased as he came down the bluff. The smells of the night rose thick about him as he crossed the low point in the levee above the old landing, closed the lantern's slide, and moved cautiously, silently, through the dark among the oak trees until he reached the cane. There was a cart-path a dozen rows in, that he could follow without a struggle. The sweet heavy greenness of the cane, and the cold clayey odor of wet earth; the harsh stink of smoke, where across the river someone had already begun to burn over the fields.
The woodsmoke pouring from the doors of the mill, the gritty musk of boiling sugar.

The house was silent now.

Wet jeweled the cane, black walls rising up on both sides of him. Bright angry rubies flashed among the sprawled mess of undergrowth, rats darting, annoyed at the interruption of their suppers. Water beaded on the weeds between the rows, and the reflection of his lantern-light sparkled in the brimming ditches. A raccoon waddled across the row and vanished into the dark, leaving a dark, scuffed trail.

Farther on lay another scuffed line of tracks. Human.

January froze.

The rain had barely ended-these must have been made since then. The weeds were too thick to hold any kind of edge or print, but the alternating brush of human feet was unmistakable. January followed cautiously to the little dry patch of weeds where the rain hadn't reached. The stalks were pressed down. He saw the place where a heel had driven the herbage into the mud.

Someone had sat here. For hours, it looked like. Just sitting in the rain.

January felt the hairs lift on his nape. The spot was, he knew almost before he pushed through the cane to check, directly opposite the house.

Whoever it was had listened, since before the rain began, to Simon Fourchet's death-screams. And when he was dead, had gotten up and gone.

When Esteban counted out the cane-knives in the bleak predawn darkness, he announced to the hands that Michie Fourchet was dead. “You're all to pray-uh-for him,” he said, holding his whip in those stiff fumbly hands, gloomy down-turned eyes surveying the faces in the mingled rubicund glare of torches and the mill doors. “Pray for his soul.”

Behind him, January heard someone say softly, “Oh, yes, I'll do that sure.” It was as if Esteban, so long under his father's heel, hadn't the slightest idea of how to behave or think in the face of either his death agonies, or his total and permanent absence from his life. For the rest of his life, a part of him would still be looking over his shoulder.

And maybe all of them would. January's eyes sought the faces of the house-servants and the yard hands, gathered along the edge of the meeting-ground. Baptiste looked strained; the three maids clung together behind him, genuinely distressed. Agamemnon, holding up a girandole behind the family, had a tense stillness to him, the broken quality he'd borne since his beating almost a week ago.

Cornwallis looked sleek and smug. Kiki, like a bronze idol, but there was a flare to her nostrils and an unholy flicker of bitter joy in her eyes.

“He was-uh-a good master,” Esteban went on, as if he knew it was a lie but couldn't imagine what else to say. “Bought you and-uh-cared for you and gave you enough to eat. Madame Fourchet has-uh-taught you all to pray, and I expect you to do it.”

Around him, January sensed the tension ease. The worst, at least, hadn't happened. Esteban had told them to pray for Fourchet's soul, not informed them that they were all being held responsible for his death. Yet.

As the drivers led the men out to the fields, Old Jules touched Esteban on the arm, murmuring something to him and gesturing at the jail. Esteban drew back, shaking his head. Ney shrugged and said more loudly, “It's nothing to me. He was your father.”

Esteban winced, and looked away. Ney's pale eyes jeered. “Niggers killed your mama, too, didn't they?” January wondered for the first time exactly where the boy had been, when his mother and baby sister were hacked to death.

At last Esteban muttered, “Have you-uh-done it-uh-before?”

Old Jules Ney nodded briskly. “You want me and my nephew to see to it?”

Esteban shuffled his whip from hand to hand and said nothing. Taking that for assent Ney signed to the stringy youth who'd spent the night in the shelter of the mill door, watching the jail. When January looked over his shoulder he saw Old Jules and his nephew walking to the jail. The younger man held a torch, a rope, and an iron poker.

“They asked Jeanette where was Quashie,” Bumper reported later, his thin young face gray with shock. Nero, beside him, was shivering, as if he'd had to stop on his way out to the fields to vomit. “They tied her up by the wrists to the bars in the jail window. First Old Ney slapped her, back and forth on the face, and then he burned some wood and heated up the end of a poker and burned her face and her feet and her boobies. She spit at him.”

He swallowed hard, and looked at his father, as if asking whether all white men were that way; whether this was something he'd have to cope with all his life. Yes, said the driver's eyes, tired dark eyes that had seen everything. Yes, it is, my son.

The men, and the women who'd left the cane carts to gather around the boy, glanced at one another, helpless and shaken. It was mid-morning, and if Jules Ney had been in the field then he'd have cut them all, for leaving the cane-rows to listen to Bumper's news. Esteban was visible, riding between the field and the mill. He'd already observed that Ney was pushing the cutters too fast-the stubble stood a good foot tall, instead of being chopped close to the ground-but instead of speaking to the overseer about it had simply told Ajax to do the best he could. Already the women were behind, from the cut stalks being laid down fast and sloppy any old way, and the carts were filled with cane-trash and weeds.

January stepped back to where Harry stood, arms folded, looking as if he hadn't spent the night tupping one of the housemaids over at Daubray. “Harry, where's False River Jones camped? I need to see him,” he added, when Harry widened his eyes in innocence and began to protest that he had no more idea of the trader's whereabouts than the littlest bird in the trees. “You know as well as I do that Jeanette didn't have the first thing to do with poisoning Michie Fourchet. Jones may know something that would save her life.”

Harry's wide, friendly mouth curled in wondering bemusement. “And you're going to tell old Duffy, and old Michie Ney, how they got the wrong hoodoo? I'll buy a ticket to that.”

“Well,” said January deprecatingly, “I'll see if I can get Michie Hannibal to do that part, kind of subtlelike. He's due back today. But we got to do something,” he added, as Harry raised his head and scanned the stubble fields. There was movement in the direction of the mill, along the line of the cart path, Ney in his blue-and-red blanket coat returning at a gallop, lashing his horse with the quirt. “Once Duffy gets here, who knows who else they'll light on?”

Ajax had begun to chouse the women back to the carts. They moved stiffly, weary beyond bearing. “There's a little bayou between Prideaux and Wildrose plantations,” Harry said softly. “Bottomland where there was a crevasse in the levee couple years ago. Runs clear back into the cipriere. He'll be about a mile into the woods. Ney'll whip you,” he added in a conversational tone, “when you get back.”

January sighed, and said, “Fuck Ney.”

“I'll tell him that.” Harry grinned, and lifted his hand farewell.