Dead and Buried (27 page)

He moved through the cotton fields, keeping the river on his right; steered cautiously through the tufts of woods on the drier ground where the ferry-landing stood. Then he checked the compass by moonlight and turned inland, where the Texas Road branched off toward Mansura and Marksville in the place called the Prairie des Avoyelles – thin woods and round open spaces of phlox and butterfly weed. Stillness held the sleeping land, broken only by the throb of cicadas, the whine of mosquitoes, and the constant
peep-peep-peep
of frogs where the land lay low. Sometimes he would see a raccoon making its stealthy way through the cotton rows, or his brother-in-flight Compair Lapin. Once he heard the screech of a hunting owl.

When he was a child, he recalled, his mother was always telling him and Olympe to stay indoors with fall of darkness, lest they encounter mulberry witches and the Platt-Eye Devil. But there was magic in the humid darkness that no threat could overcome, and they’d wait until their parents were asleep – January seven, Olympe five and swearing if he and his friends didn’t take her along she’d scream to wake
all
their parents so that no one could go. Then they’d creep out, scorning evil ghosts and patterollers alike, to run through the cane rows in the striped light of the moon . . .

It was a miracle none of them had ever got snake-bit, but January had no recollection of any of his friends of those far-off days coming to harm. The danger was not in the woods and the night but in the Big House, with its laws and the actions of the whites. When his mother had been sold to St-Denis Janvier, and he’d freed her and they’d gone to live in that small pink cottage on Rue Burgundy, January had sorely missed the noises of the countryside at night. Many nights, in his eighth year and his ninth, he had sat on the gallery outside his little room, watching the street in the hope that somehow his father would find his way there, would take him up in his arms as he’d used to – those nights he’d come to know the deep-night sounds of New Orleans. The squeak of far cartwheels; the low, constant noise of the levees, which went on till any hour of the night; the wailing song of the scissors-grinder as he made his rounds.

It was good to hear the breathing whisper of owl wings, the voices of the nightbirds. To see Compair Lapin’s jaunty white shirt-front as the wily little trickster slipped past him in the dark to steal Bouki Hyena’s dinner and tup Bouki Hyena’s wife.

Once he heard hooves on the road, far off in the stillness, and moved in along the cotton rows, stepping wary for fear of snakes. When the riders, whoever they were, had passed, he moved on, knowing the moon would soon be down. In the end he had to cut brush and branches in the woods at the far end of the fields and sleep in the shelter of one of the old Indian mounds that dotted that part of the country. His water bottle was empty, and he turned over in his mind schemes for getting it refilled – only a fool would drink groundwater in this stagnant, low-lying country – for about three seconds, before he crashed into profound and exhausted sleep.

The plantation bell woke him, ringing far off in the darkness. He heard the eerie wailing hollers of the field hands as they came out to the harvest in the first whispers of light. Thirst clawed him, but his first thought was to wonder if Louis Verron had gotten ahead of him in the night.

He moved on through the woods, paralleling the road with the cotton fields lying between. Farther on, he moved out, crouching between the rows, until he got near enough to the gang to call out softly to the water-boy and refill his bottle. ‘You runned away?’ the child asked, and January shook his head.

‘I’m only goin’ to see my mama, ’cross the river. Where’s this place, son?’

‘Injun Pipe Plantation.’ The boy glanced back in the direction that the Big House lay, on the other side of the distant road. He was inches shorter than the cotton stalks all around them – January guessed his age at seven or eight. Older, he’d have been toting a sack himself. ‘Marse Cribb’s our marse,’ he added, a little uneasily. ‘I won’t tell him I seen you.’

There was a stirring, away among the rows; the first outliers of the picking gang. The riding boss, with his horse and his gun, wouldn’t be far behind. January whispered, ‘Thank you, brother,’ and, still crouching, slipped away among the rows. Later that day he heard men’s voices and climbed an oak tree, heart hammering with impatience, lest they reach Natchitoches Parish ahead of him and spread word to watch out for a black runaway, six-foot three-inches tall with a wounded face:
had his way with a little German girl was staying with us, fifteen years old, she was
 . . . Or whatever the story was going to be. It seemed like hours before the men, whoever they were – he never saw them, but he heard their dogs bark long after their voices had ceased – went on their way, yet by the sun it couldn’t have been half an hour.

Where the bridle trace swung north to the village of Mansura he found a spring, shrunk almost to nothing with late season but moving briskly enough, in this drier woodland, to be free of scum and duckweed. He washed his face in it, after he refilled his bottle, and soaked his shirt and the filthy bandages around his ribs. The pain had settled into a dull constant, but he had given up even the occasional curse at Hannibal for not making this trip safer for him.

Louis Verron was out to do whatever he had to, to bury the reason Isobel had fled from Paris. Traveling as a white man’s valet wouldn’t have saved him. It would only have gotten Hannibal killed as well. Verron would have been waiting for the
Parnassus
when it docked at the ferry landing.

Better that Hannibal remain in New Orleans, to act on whatever it was
he
knew that he wasn’t telling January, or anyone else, about the Stuart family. And to find ‘Lord Montague Blessinghurst’.

January leaned his back against a dogwood, watched across the little clearing where he sat as a dozen lean, half-wild pigs came snuffling out of the trees, digging among the leaf mast for acorns and roots.
Rest
, he told himself, though his spirit fretted and twisted to get up, to go on . . .
I’m good for another few miles
 . . .

You’re not. You breathe a little, or you’ll start making mistakes
.

He consulted the compass, and his notes, and thought about that good-looking boy in the Cabildo cell. If what he guessed was true – if Isobel Deschamps had been with Foxford that Thursday night, and had told him why it was she couldn’t wed him – then his silence, and his honor, must not be allowed to cause his death.

The only question was . . .

No
. January shook the thought away. There were a half-dozen questions, and the fact that he thought he knew what was going on didn’t mean that he was right. And he wouldn’t know for certain until he reached Cloutierville and got into the little chapel of St John there.

Only four people could tell him the whole of the truth.

One of them – Celestine Deschamps – obviously wouldn’t.

Viscount Foxford had made it clear that he would hang rather than speak.

With luck he would find Isobel at the end of his search – so certain had he been of where she had in truth gone, that he’d spent the hour or so they’d stopped in St Francisville talking to another of Parnassus Sam’s acquaintances rather than going a mile and a half outside of town to Rosetree. Even had he done so, even had she been there, he suspected that she would have proved as close-mouthed as Foxford was proving, unless he could say, ‘I have been to Cloutierville, and this is what I found there.’

And the fourth person . . .

January got wearily to his feet, knowing that if he lingered he’d fall asleep.

He suspected that the fourth person would tell him all the details that he now only guessed.

Mid-morning of the following day he came in sight of the river again, having cut off the wide loop it made around the Prairie des Avoyelles. There were fewer plantations here, and along the bayous and in the woods he glimpsed the old French style of cottages, huge slanting roofs covering deep galleries against the almost daily rainfall, ancient walls of mud and posts. At one of these dwellings he slipped in among the garden rows, as close as he dared, and helped himself to three yams and two eggs that he found in the hen coop, fleeing at the sudden incursion of a very small, but very noisy, yellow dog. Twice, late in the afternoon of that griddle-hot Friday, he saw parties of men riding along the river road.

He was too far off to see their faces, or their numbers, or how they were dressed, or anything about them except that they were there. And that they rode at a canter, like men with a purpose.

It could be anything, of course. There could be a slave escaped, or a brother who had shot his brother over a grasping woman. There could be a woman driven to desperate flight with her husband’s money crammed in her reticule.

In his heart he knew they were hunting him.

He slept Friday night in the woods, in a shelter of cut boughs against the sudden drumming rain. He slept well, having roasted his yams and sucked the eggs and set a makeshift funnel of leaves to run rainwater into his bottle, secure in the knowledge that no matter what Louis Verron was saying he’d done – who he was supposed to have robbed or raped or murdered in their beds – nobody was going to be out hunting a fugitive in weather like this. If his directions were correct, he knew he should be getting close to Alexandria.

Noon had passed – and he had crossed the ill-kept wagon-road that had to lead into Alexandria from points south – when he became aware that men were hunting him.

As he paused in the woods to take his bearings, at the back of the cotton fields of some plantation that ran down to the river, the song of the field hands came to him distantly:

‘
Hush, little baby, don’t you cry
,

I done, done what you told me to do
 . . .

Yo’ mother an’ father was born to die
,

I done, done what you told me to do
 . . .’

Then, in mid-song, the words changed, weaving themselves around a different tune:

‘
Wade in the water, wade in the water, children
,

Wade in the water
,

Angel’s gonna trouble the water
 . . .’

As swiftly as he could without drawing attention to himself, January retreated into the woods, till he came to the bayou he’d passed a half an hour before. ‘Wade in the water’ – no matter what verses of the Bible it had been taken from – meant only one thing, when sung by the field hands:
they’ve got the dogs out after you, brother. Whoever you are, whyever they’re after you, wade in the water, till they lose your scent
.

The bayou led back into marshy ground. It was late in the day. If he had to hide too long, January knew he ran serious risk of becoming lost in the woods when darkness fell.

Crotch-deep in the motionless black stream, fearing every second he’d feel the teeth of a three-foot gar in his leg, January waded, until he found a tree limb low enough to pull himself up on to, to climb to where he’d be hidden by the leaves. He was some distance from the bayou, hidden among the dense crown of a pecan tree, when he heard the dogs and men come cursing past along the watercourse, too far off to see.

Damn
.
Hannibal
, he thought, clinging to the rough round strength of the bough,
you owe me
 . . .

It was an old imprecation, casually spoken. It had only to cross through his mind to be dismissed: the thought that the fiddler would ever be capable of paying back anything he owed to anyone was ridiculous on the face of it. Yet he was trying, January understood. Trying to pay ancient debts – to Patrick Derryhick, to Lady Philippa Foxford – for kindnesses done in some other lifetime.

Pay me when we meet on the Other Side, old friend
 . . .

And if I don’t want to end up on the Other Side by this time tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to have to get myself out of these woods
.

TWENTY-ONE

H
e was twenty miles the other side of Alexandria, and thoroughly lost in the woods, when he was taken, by a couple of trappers he suspected had been trailing him for miles. The worst thing about being a black man in cotton country was that there was no such thing as a black man, slave or free, minding his own business. Every white man – and a good number of black ones as well – felt it was their business to ask who you were and what you were doing.

By the time he’d evaded the dog patrol on the road it was dark, and among the pine trees he had not dared to kindle fire even long enough to check his compass. He spent the night in exhausted sleep among the roots of a hollow tree, and through the following day he tried to work his way back to the woods that edged the cotton fields, beyond which would lie the river. Yet he had either come further south-west than he’d thought, or was on a stretch of the river where the woods came straight down to the water, or – most probably – the sketchy map he had of the territory was simply wrong. He listened for the sound of plantation bells but heard nothing, and he knew that wherever he was, he would be too far yet from Cloutierville to hear its Sabbath-bells ringing.