Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (37 page)

“You do that.”

They were cutting close to the cipriere that morning, and January had less than half a mile to walk before he reached the trees. He'd been on Mon Triomphe long enough now that he was familiar, by hearsay and instruction as well as actual practice, with the network of pathways, clearings, root-lines, and hummocks in those wet and marshy wildernesses that lay behind the river plantations; he'd heard often enough of the trail that wound north past Lescelles land to Prideaux. Ram Joe's abroad-wife Nan lived on Prideaux, and Harry was romancing at least two of the house-servants there, plus a girl named Josette on Lescelles. It was a welltrodden way.

He thought about the dry mark between the rainwet cane-rows. About the long screaming pain of death from mercury poisoning. About the wad of boiled oleander leaves and stems in the kitchen at Refuge.

About the blow-pipe, and the roundhouse below the grinders; about the veve marks on the bedroom walls of the big house, and those in the kitchen at Refuge, and on the graves of two murdered men.

Thought about the evil that some men do, to all the lives that they touch.

He'd dreamed about the end of roulaison, in the few hours' sleep he'd had toward morning. About the harvesting of the last lone cane-stalk. On the last day of harvest one single stalk was left standing, while everyone went back to the quarters, washed up, and dressed in their best. The women took their hair down from its tignons and out of its strings and braids, combed it, and braided it up. The grooms would put ribbons on the mules, and the men got out all those things les blankittes didn't like to see them wear, the fancy waistcoats they'd buy from the traders, the bright-colored shirts. They'd all go out in procession with every cart on the place, singing-his father singing, January remembered, walking at the head of the line. It was his father, in the dream, who cut the last stalk, and rode back to the mill with it upraised like the spear of a vanquished enemy in his hand.

The men would take their turns still at the boiling and the grinding and the hauling of wood, but in the quarters that night they would dance. On some places-not Bellefleur, of course-the masters would set out food, sometimes join in the dancing, to everyone's joshing delight. Tomorrow would be easier. Tomorrow there would be less pain.

In his dream January followed the carts back, and saw that it wasn't a cane-stalk his father bore, but a sheet of cream-yellow paper, like Robert's letter to Esteban from the wood-yard. And he thought, That's Mohammed's list. The list of who was where when the mill caught fire.

So he struggled and fought his way through the singing crowd, all the way to the front of the procession, and into the burning mill. He saw by the firelight all the faces he'd known as a child, every one: his mother beautiful and young, with baby Olympe carried on her hip. Mambo Jeanne and clever Django and Uncle Zacky and all the others, and he cried out to his father, “Give it to me! Give it to me! It will save them all!”

And his father, turning, smiling, held out the paper. But when he unrolled it January saw, instead of words, only the triple-cross emblem of the Marasa, the Sacred Twins.

“I don't understand,” he'd wept to his father in the dream. “I don't understand.”

And his father had smiled.

They were burning over the fields at Lescelles. It was a small plantation, immediately upriver of Mon Triomphe, and the previous night while Fourchet lay dying they had harvested the final stalk and carried it in triumph through the drizzling rain. Fourchet had died, and they had sung and danced for one more defeat of the cane that was their true foe, not knowing of their white neighbor's death at all.

Now the men were burning over the fields. It was a difficult, smoky business. Men walked with buckets from the water cart around each field, to keep the burns small, so they wouldn't run wild, and smoke hung heavy in the air. From the edge of the woods January could see the women and the children skirmishing along the open unburned sides of the fields with clubs, to kill the rabbits and raccoons when they came darting out. Egrets circled above the flames, diving casually through the flames in quest of big lubber grasshoppers, and emerging soot-smutched to stalk about the stubble of the next field like grimy beggars in stolen clothes.

There was something Dantean about the scene, something of Bosch, the way a woman would brain a poor rabbit that was only trying to escape the fire. Or maybe, thought January, it was only a dreamlike horror, shapes seen through smoke.

He remembered wielding a club like that as a child himself.

False River Jones was a tall man, square-faced and potbellied. His lank gray hair hung past his shoulders, braided at the temples and tied with blue-dyed string. January found him by the smell of bacon frying, and coffee bubbling in a pot. He realized he'd been unconsciously expecting a small man, and a younger one. He'd expected a Kaintuck, too, so the mellow loveliness of the Welshman's singsong tones was a pleasant surprise.

“Dear, no, Ben that's a guest at Triomphe?” Jones held out his hand. “And a shabby shabby thing it was of your poor master to leave you that way, and in such hands, and him not returning!”

Jones shook his head. On the prow of the little lugsailed pirogue tied to a cypress knee, a black dog no bigger than a good-sized guinea hen dozed, chin on paws. The boat itself was like a miniature shop, jammed with boxes, packets, rolls of fabric, horns of powder, and firkins of nails. Rush baskets of eggs dangled from bow and stern, and a couple of pumpkins were lashed to the little shelter amidships where, evidently, Jones slept.

“You'd best watch yourself around that old villain Ney, should Master Fourchet grow any sicker. He's a man that wouldn't stick at taking off an unclaimed Negro some night. His brother's a dealer up the river in the territories, and that son of his has been known to run them up the river to him on his boat. An unpleasant family, the Neys, the lot of them.”

The Welshman poured out some of his coffee into a pale green bone-china cup, which he held out to January, gesturing him to a seat on a deadfall by the fire. Beside the coarse woolen trousers he wore, and his greasy buckskin coat, his exquisitely fitted vest of purple silk stood out with the ridiculous grace of a lily on a trash pile: like a child's fancy-dress garment, too beloved to put off. “Poor Andy Ffolkes lost one of his men, out looking after Ffolkes's pigs in the woods. Maybe the poor fellow ran for it, but maybe too Ney and those sons of his had something to do with it. So you watch yourself, my boy.”

January set the cup, untasted, on the log at his side, until he'd seen Jones drink his. “M'sieu Fourchet is dead,” he said quietly, his eyes on Jones's hand, and he saw the fingers jerk with surprise.

“Dead!
Dear God.” The trader set his cup down quickly and crossed himself. “The poor soul. I knew he'd been taken with his heart, of course, and they got that sanguinary fraud Laurette from Baton Rouge for him. The man thinks of nothing but bleeding! Bleeding and puking, and a blister to draw the blood to the chest so he can bleed again! A disgrace, when modern medicine offers genuine cures like calomel and quinine and the scientific use of magnetism! A disgrace.”

Jones shook his head again, and January asked, “Laurette doesn't believe in calomel, then?”

“A Goth,” sighed the Welshman regretfully: “A true medieval barbarian.” He sipped his coffee again. “Laurette bled him to death, I suppose.”

“He was poisoned,” January told him. “With salts of mercury, I think-which can be extracted from calomel, by somebody who knows what he's doing.” This last statement was purely for the benefit of the trader's obvious prejudices, since calomel was, in fact, nothing more than salts of mercury, administered in whatever dosage the doctor might think appropriate. January had encountered physicians who didn't think the cure sufficiently “heroic” unless the patient's gums bled. If Jones subscribed to this view of healing, he wouldn't take kindly to the suggestion that someone had died of a genuine cure that modern medicine had to offer.

“Good God!” Jones scrubbed one surprisingly refined hand over his stubbled chin. “You don't mean it?”

“Did you sell any such thing to anyone along the river?” asked January. “Or know of anyone who bought such a thing? They've caught a girl on Triomphe, the overseer's concubine. . . .”

“Poor Jeanette, yes.”
His eyes filled with concern and he got to his feet. “And they think she did it? That's foolishness! She and Quashie went east to New River; they hadn't even heard of Thierry's death. . . .” He stepped over the gunwale, bent to extract a small packing box from where it was stowed under a huge coil of rope and a bag of gun locks. “Which was how they were able to catch her so easily. She went to get eggs from the Gallocher farm. . . .”

“Can you prove that? Testify to it?”

“Dear, well, I'll have to word it carefully, so as not to sound like I abetted the poor things. Worse than the Spanish Inquisition, people are hereabouts when it comes to runaways.” The trader opened the packing box, pulled out one bottle after another, holding them up to the sunlight to check the level of their contents. “I'll speak to Duffy tomorrow. He has a warrant out for me, of course, but we have our agreements. Oh, dear, yes.”

Had the two bottles of opium that disappeared from Hannibal's luggage ended up here? Several of them looked like it, but Jones probably bought medicaments extracted from the stores of every plantation between here and Natchez.

“No, I don't even have salts of mercury here,” the trader said at last, closing the box again. His face was drawn with genuine distress. "It's been quite some time since I had occasion to obtain any. And as for selling it, the planters generally have their factors in town buy whatever they need and send it along by steamboat. The Negroes have no use for the marvels of modern science, if you'll excuse my saying so, my friend. I can tell by your speech that you're an educated man-and as such it's doubly a disgrace that your fool of a master let them use you as a cane-hand, of all things! But surely you know that the average field-worker would rather be dosed with honey and slippery elm by the local mambo, than avail himself of Aesculapius's more standard blessings.

“And speaking of the local mambo,” he added, replacing the box, patting the dog, and climbing back over the gunwale, “how is the lovely Madame Kiki? I have missed seeing her, this trip.”

“She's well,” said January, with a slight feeling of shock, of seeing a fragment of colored stone drop into its place in a mosaic. Speaking of the local mambo. . . .

“Is she?” Sadness crossed the expressive dark eyes. “I was so sorry to be the bearer of such news to her. Such a terrible blow to any woman. Please tell her, again, that if there's anything I can do. . . .”

“What news?”

Jones looked surprised. “About her husband and children,” he said.

“Children?
Husb-Do you mean Reuben, or Gilles?”

The trader shook his head. “Hector,” he said. “A dear man with a laugh like Zeus on Olympus. A most amazing fellow-could bring down anything with a blowpipe or an arrow or those little throwing-sticks such as they use in Africa. Looked like he'd mince you up for his breakfast, yet he was as gentle and civilized a man as you could find on three continents. I thought if you were her friend she must have spoken to you of him.”

“No,” said January, as pattern-pieces shook themselves gently into place. “She told no one. What happened?”

“They both belonged to a Mr. Thomas Bezaire, in town. Five years ago he died, and his nephews sold them, Kiki to Mr. Fourchet and Hector and the children to a man named Bartholomew Lomax who had a lumber-mill downriver near Chalmette. Unfortunately conditions at Lomax's weren't good, and in any case I never thought the boys should have been put to the work-cutting cypress off a flatboat, working waistdeep in water for days on end. There was an epidemic of scarlet fever there last month.”

He was silent, big hands toying self-consciously with one of the four watch-chains that measured out his belly in a pendant abundance of fobs. His brown eyes were turned inward, as if he saw that brave and courtly hunter, those lively boys.

Then he said, “I used to bring her news of them whenever trade took me down there. She was most terribly affected. I know her master was an unsympathetic man, but in the end he was prevailed on to separate her from that brute Reuben. . . .”

I have made amends where I could, Fourchet had said. But there are some amends that cannot be made.

He pictured what Fourchet's response would have been, had Kiki said, I will not marry the man you've chosen for me, because I have a husband elsewhere instead.

Oh, Kiki, he thought, seeing her eyes in the candlelight of the moss-gatherers' hut. Her face as she poured water from kettle to pot, impassive against everything the world had to throw at her.

He'd only sell it. . . .

“What about Hippolyte Daubray?” he asked, though now he knew what the answer would be. “I've heard that on the night of the fire in the Triomphe sugar-mill, he was out pursuing you up and down the river-was this true?”

Jones chuckled richly, almost hugging himself at the memory. "Oh, deary me, yes! My goodness, that was the most fun I've had in years. Les freres Daubray have always considered me a pernicious influence on the help-all of them do, of course-so when their coachman mentioned to me, the last time I stopped here, that Hippolyte had arranged a little ambuscade for me, I abstracted one of the old pirogues from the boathouse at the Refuge landing. . . . What a fisherman Mr. Raymond was, to be sure! I did it up with straw and trash to look much like my own vessel, then lit a lantern on the prow and waited just downstream of the landing until I heard Daubray approaching.

“He probably thought he was being so stealthy! Pitiful, really. I started muttering things like `Why, what'll you give me for this here damask tablecloth, Michie Jones?' ” The abrupt shift to field-hand gombo was startling, coming from that white, gray-bristled face.

“And all the while I kept moving the boat downstream, and Daubray followed me along the batture, tripping over cypress knees and getting his trousers wet while the fog got thicker and thicker. He must have pursued me for five miles before I slipped off the end of the boat and left him chasing it downstream for goodness knows how far, while I took a horse I'd arranged to have waiting for me and rode back to my own boat and my own customers.”