Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (26 page)

Was it his mother who'd said of the Avocet slaves that they'd spend half their work-time getting to and from the wooded swamp? And Avocet lay north of here.

Rose waited by the pirogue, in her right hand the red bandanna that meant All is well, come into camp. If it was on the ground, or in her left hand, it meant All is not what it seems. They had a system of whistled signals based on the first few bars of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” for how many ambushers had taken the camp.

“I think this is as far as we'd better try bringing the boat.” January took off his straw hat to wipe the sweat from his face. “There's a pretty fair trail out to the cheniers, probably from St. Roche Plantation. Shall we go back to that shack we saw about a mile ago? It looked deserted. Then when the moon rises we can go have a look at St. Roche itself.”

The shack did indeed prove deserted, containing only dusty muskrat-traps and crabbing-nets, several families of rats, and some shovels. January concealed their rifles along the rafters, hung the food sacks in the corners, and tucked the blankets on which they slept, and the little tent of mosquito-bar, into an old box of pulley-blocks behind the broken door. He felt weary enough to drop after the day's journey. But the moon would rise soon, just past full, and he needed a look at the wood-sheds of St. Roche. He smeared more of Olympe's citrus oil on his face, neck, and arms, then passed the gourd to Rose.

“This is where your mother would come in useful,” she remarked, tugging the brim of her hat down more snugly over her forehead and readjusting the pins that held it to her tight-coiled hair.

“You mean to poison mosquitoes with her malice?” he asked, and Rose laughed.

“I'm sure she could tell us which planters treat their slaves poorly enough to make buying guns from Franklin Mulm sound like a good idea. It would save us checking.”

“You wrong my mother,” returned January in a shocked voice. “If we sat her down and asked her, I think we'd find every single planter between here and Jesuit's Bend to be stingy, cruel, capricious, and a practitioner of unspeakable vices.”

They ate bread and cheese and oranges from Cut-Nose's orchard, and drank the ginger-water from the gourds they'd brought, and waited for the moon to rise. January hooked a couple of the empty gourds to his belt, to fill up at the plantation well, if possible. Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, they had moved all day surrounded by water, with not a drop of it potable. Only closer to the river would there be wells, and water that was not brackish. Like the Ancient Mariner, too, they had moved through stillness Alone, alone, all, all alone-seeing no other soul. The land was too open here, and the river too closely patrolled, for there to be much traffic of slave-smuggling from Captain Chamoflet and his boys: their usual routes lay north and west in the direction of town. Still, it was in January's mind that Mulm would be lying in wait west of the river when the revolt began, to pick off runaways. It was perfectly possible that Mulm had made a deal of some kind with the smugglers.

Or did the American think himself too powerful to need to divide his profits with Chamoflet? He'll catch cold at that, January thought. Both the British and the American armies had learned, at different times, that if the trappers and fishermen of the marshes were against you, you were in trouble indeed.

When the moon turned the indigo world to silver, he and Rose left the shack and followed the line of the old bayou. It had clearly been passable farther up a number of years earlier, to judge by the wharves that jutted out now into sluggish pools of mud and quicksand. The path along it passed through the thin belt of cypress and palmetto to the fields of St. Roche Plantation, where cane stood already shoulder-high. From the back of the fields January smelled the smoke of the quarters, the pungence of privies and livestock. He and Rose easily followed the cart-paths to the edge of the home-place, the familiar pattern of cow-barns and pig-houses, stables and kitchen garden, plantation shops and, set among its trees facing the river, the Big House itself.

The sight of it, in the ghostly drench of the moonlight, filled January with uneasiness. Nature was ravenous in this countryside; every planter along the river waged constant war against its overnight incursions of seedlings, fern, and elephant-ear. While the ground around the quarters, and the “shell-blow grounds” where the slaves raised their own food, was relatively clear, seedling pines and swamp laurel grew in thickets right up to the back of the house. And where, on every other plantation January had ever seen, a barbered lawn stretched to the river, this one grew rank with weeds.

The overseer's cottage was dark, its shutters and doors and windows hanging slackly open, like an idiot's gaping mouth. In the quarters, the gay rattle of drums and banjos sounded, and voices called and answered in song. But the Big House was dark. A single candle marked one window at the back on the upstream side.

Owner in Mandeville, January thought, trying to brush away the cold sensation that crept on the back of his neck.
Or Pass Christian, or one of those other pleasant little towns along the Gulf Coast. Looks like he spends most of his time there. Well, Id be drumming and singing, too.

And, maybe, plotting revolt.

Knowing what he knew of the quarters on hot summer nights, he waited until the sounds of singing died away before touching Rose's hand to move on. From the fields, couples emerged, shadows who kissed, and giggled, and slipped into their stifling cabins, shut up against the inevitable mosquitoes. In spite of the citrus oil, January and Rose were bitten everywhere. It was only a few hours until dawn.

But some nights, reflected January, you have to dance. You have to make love in the hot musky pungence of the cane. Or if you're a child, you have to run madly with your playmates in and out through the cane-rows, forgetting everything your mama ever told you about snakes. You have to do it or you'll die, inside where it counts. The darkness settled closer around the home-place and the cicadas throbbed like the beat of the sea on the Gulf beaches. Beneath those drumming waves sounded the peeping and booming and warbling of a half-hundred separate kinds of frogs, all singing like Aristophanes' chorus, guarding the road to the land of the dead. His father had given them names, January recalled-Monsieur Gik and Monsieur Big Dark, and little Mamzelle Didi of the tiny silvery voice. Who had made those names up? And beneath those names, he heard the darker names of the secret gods who lurked in that African midnight, watching over those who slept.

Handfast, he and Rose moved along the edge of the cane until they were nearly opposite the sugar-house. Here, at least, the ground had been kept clear. The tall chimney brooded in the moonlight and the smell of burnt sugar and cane-sap lingered, even during the five-sixths of the year when it stood quiet and empty. It was an old-fashioned kind, with the roundhouse where the mules would walk standing separate, so that the green, sticky juice had to be collected in buckets and carried across to the receivingtrough in the sugar-house itself. Behind all this, the four wood-sheds stood, open-sided and steep-roofed, containing blackness thick as velvet. Coming close, January saw that one was filled with wood, a second nearly so.

The quarters were dark now and silent. Silence; too, shrouded the overseer's deserted house. That single candle on the upstream side of the Big House had gone dark shortly after the drums in the quarters had ceased. Odd, for planters to keep such late hours in the country when they had to rise and ride their acres before it grew light.

Did someone know or guess-or fear-something about the drums? Most planters forbade them, on pain of whipping.

From his pocket January took striker and flint, and raveled a wisp of tow around the two smaller fingers of his hand. The sound of steel hitting flint was like a hammer in the night, the sparks appearing to him as sky-wide lightning. He touched his candle's wick to the burning tow, pinched the kindling out. The smoke seemed, for a moment, to fill the night with its smell.

Without a word, Rose stationed herself by the corner of the shed closest to the Big House, where she could watch the open ground. Warily, trying to keep the light concealed as he studied the dirt around the front of the filled woodshed, January searched for marks of coming and going. Nothing unusual. Not, he reflected, that he knew exactly what he was looking for, and the dim light of a single candle wasn't exactly optimum for the task. Hefting the snakestick he'd carried since leaving town, he slipped into the second shed. Napoleon could have marched half his army up to the shed under cover of the cicadas January nearly jumped out of his skin at the sudden eruption of a cat.

A moment later he heard Rose's two-note warning whistle-Run for it. . . .

The cat, he thought. And then, Maybe not...

He blew out the candle and slipped out the side of the shed almost into the arms of a man with a gun.

“This here a shotgun,” said a warning voice in gombo French, “and I can't hardly miss. Serapis. . .” Lantern-light.
The hiss of a metal slide. A tall silhouette, the top-hat and the way he held his shoulders identifying this second man, Serapis, as the driver from the trail. He still wore only a loincloth, no better than those of the other slaves, unusual in a driver. Most of them liked the distinction of wearing a jacket and boots, let alone trousers. He carried a shotgun like that of his companion. Both lowered their weapons when the lantern-glow showed them they weren't dealing with one of Captain Chamoflet's smugglers.

“You just passin' through?” asked Serapis-meaning, Are you a runaway? The driver might have been twenty-five, but he looked older. Between overwork and never quite enough to eat, never quite enough sleep or rest, men generally didn't grow old in the quarters. His condition was good, and he carried himself proudly. Whoever owned these slaves, January found himself thinking, must have skill in the handling of men.

“My brother and me, we lookin' for a place to sleep, 'case it rains later,” answered January. “That's all. We be gone by mornin'.”

“Best you be gone now.” Serapis had a deep voice, mellow and soft. January guessed him to be pure African, like the younger man beside him. He wore a juju-bag tied around his chest and neck with string, a dark splodge like a cicatrice between his arm and his ribs. Close-up, January could detect the frailest whiff of the whiskey that the bag was soaked in periodically, to “feed” the spirit-a ball of intricately knotted string, most likely-within.

“I swear to you, we ain't out to steal anything,” January said. “Just that out on the marsh, we seen folks about we'd rather not run onto in the dark.”

“Best you be gone now,” the driver repeated. “There's a shed out on the marsh, under an oak by the old bayou. Roof don't leak too bad. But we don't have strangers comin' around St. Roche. That's your warnin'.” He touched the lock of his shotgun, “You won't get another.”

January held up his hands, palm-out, placating, “I didn't mean to offend....”

“You didn't.”

“Thank you for word about the shed. We'll sure sleep there, and like I said, we'll be gone by daybreak.”

“See you are, then,” said the driver. “Igi and me, we'll see you and your brother to the head of the bayou, make sure you don't get yourselves lost. The slave-stealers, they mostly keeps away, or works to the north. You be all right. Whistle for your brother, and make sure he knows not to come back here.”

“Alejo,” called January softly, the name they agreed on. “It's all right. We goin' to a shed on the bayou to sleep, not comin' back here.”

And he saw a flickering wisp in the dark that was Rose, and a gleam of the sinking moonlight on her spectacles. He guessed she'd heard every word.

Only when they were alone in the shed-with dawn only an hour away and every bird on the marsh giving tongue like Judgment Morning-did he ask, “What the hell did you make of that?”

“At a guess,” she murmured-barely more than a murmur against his shoulder in the dark-“he thinks we might be working for M'sieu Chamoflet. This close to the Barataria they must get slave-stealers now and then.”

“Or he's heard something,” suggested January. “We were looking for guns, and there they are.”

“Only a fool would buy shotguns for a revolt if he could buy rifles instead,” pointed out Rose. “Shotguns are what a master would let a trusted slave handle, for hunting-or guarding. Or what men would take to hunt if their master was away. And as you recall, rifles is what Artois found in that box.”

“Maybe,” said January. But something about that deserted house, those weed-choked grounds-about the tribal marks cut into the faces of both young men-lay on his heart, like the stain of bad dreaming. When Rose lay down to take an hour's sleep, January slipped outside the shack and into the indigo world of water and moonlight. It might have been his imagination, but as he listened to the frogs (M'sieu Gik over there, and Mamzelle Didi and all her pretty sisters answering like a chorus of miniature silver hammers from the other side of the bayou), he thought there was one direction-back toward St. Roche-where no frogs sounded at all. Nor did the birds, twittering like an operahouse orchestra tuning up, touch those few dark cheniers.

His rifle across his knees, he settled down to watch in that direction. He saw nothing move there-not humans, but neither birds nor foxes nor rabbits, either, when all around him the marsh flickered and whispered with wakening life.

When they went on in the morning, January found himself glancing repeatedly over his shoulder for the first mile or so, until the sensation of being watched was left behind.

They followed the narrow zone of cypress and palmettos between the marsh and the cane-fields, a band of country that had been extensively logged already to feed the ravenous fires of the winter harvest, picking their way among the flat, reedy islands, the summer-shrunk pools and muddy tussocks. It was slow going-back-aching, too, for the grasses were seldom higher than four feet. But they could hear the strike of axes in the trees, and the singing of the men. Gnats and mosquitoes swarmed despite all Olympe's medicaments, until Rose was driven nearly frantic. White cattle-egrets regarded them with amiable yellow eyes, and water-moccasins, dark-striped gray like tabby cats, glided sinuously through the pea-green duckweed in the pools.