Dead and Buried (29 page)

Don’t let Verron come back now
.

He had no idea how long it had taken him to slice through the ropes, how long it would take the hunters to locate Verron. January turned back to the greedy little rings of fire at top and bottom of each thick slat, as if staring at them would increase the rate of burn.

By the discussion of his captors with the storekeeper, this part of the country was the home territory of the Verrons – probably not only the white French side of the family that had intermarried over four generations with the Spanish both here and from Mexico, but also of the
sang mêlée
children of Verron placées.
Where the great gentlemen of the town send the members of the family whom they don’t want to have anything to do with, white or colored
, his mother had said. Like sons who murder their brothers over women, or women whom one wishes one never married . . .

Or the ‘vulture eggs’: the children ‘from the shady side of the street’.
Sang mêlée
sons were often given plantations out here, far from the legitimate families in town. Daughters – if their fathers shied from leaving them to become placées themselves – were frequently married to someone else’s colored planter sons. January had always found it strange that men whose mothers or grandmothers had been slaves would think nothing of buying men and women in the markets of Baronne Street, shipping them up here, and keeping plantation discipline with the whip and the threat of sale – an opinion which always elicited from his mother a disbelieving stare. ‘Good Lord, Benjamin, you can turn a sixty percent profit on a good field-hand! More, if you keep him and rent him out to build levees or work a cotton press.’

This from a woman who had known the whip and the market herself.

Would Compair Lapin, that ultimate survivor, be proud of HER?

She’s free, respected, and a property owner. He probably would
.

Would that wood never burn through? Dago and Landry could have walked to New Orleans and back in the time since he’d been locked in the shed . . .

At last the wood seemed eaten through – he could only assume that, with the amount of supper-cooking going on at this hour in the village, his jailer had scented nothing abnormal, especially with the breeze off the river – and he gripped each bar by the middle in turn, wrenched the mid-sections free. The window was narrow, and it was a hard scramble to writhe through – he felt like his cracked ribs were going to eviscerate his lungs and heart when he fell through on the outside – and he moved off swiftly through the darkness to the stable. The storekeeper’s horse was stout and elderly and in no mood to leave her nice warm barn: January had to tie a short length of cannon fuse by a string to her rear hock, and light the fizzing, sputtering, stinking thing, in order to get her to run madly away through the trees. As well as the cannon fuse, he’d found in his jail some candles and a small firkin of raisins, a couple of handfuls of which made him feel considerably better.

With any luck at all, when Louis Verron and his cousins arrived, they’d set off looking for a horse across the fields.

January suspected that none of them would even think of checking the church.

TWENTY-TWO

A
nd there it was.

‘12 March, 1800. To Cadmus Rablé and his wife Noisette,
gens du couleur libres
, of Plantation Bayou Lente, a girl, Celestine.’

A brief check of previous parish registers turned up at least three other Rablé children – and the information that Noisette Dubesc of New Orleans, born in San Domingue in 1775, had married her husband after being first sold to him in 1794 by Louis-Florizel Verron, and then freed.

Three days later – 15 March, 1800 – was recorded the baptism of Celestine Verron, daughter of Eliane and Louis-Florizel Verron, of the Plantation Beaux Herbes in this Parish.

A faded map of the parish, tacked on the wall of the little vestry of St John’s chapel, showed January that Bayou Lente lay about eight miles from Beaux Herbes plantation. An easy enough journey to carry a newborn baby girl.

With great care, January tore the page from the register and replaced the rather moldy leather-bound volume where he had found it in the shelf near the map. Soundless as a great cat, he pinched out his candle and let himself out as he had come in, through the French doors looking on to the alleyway beside the church, hoping no one would remark that the catch on the shutters had been forced with a hoof pick, abstracted from the storekeeper’s stables.

A newborn baby girl.

To a woman who had lost three infants; a woman whose husband had taken her only child from her. A woman abandoned on a backwater plantation with nobody but the slaves – maybe not even a white overseer . . . A woman desperate for the comfort of a child.

‘You’ll never tell me she didn’t play him false,’ his mother had sniffed.

January wondered if Louis-Florizel Verron, haughty and self-righteous with his fragile son, ever knew
how
false his wife had played him.

It was a secret that any white man – let alone the scion of an old French Creole family who had sisters of his own to marry off into other old French Creole families – would kill to keep hidden. It had probably never occurred to Louis Verron that proof of what his Great-Aunt Eliane had done lay in the vestry of St John’s church, and not simply in the dimming recollections of those who had been in the remote Red River country years before Napoleon had sold the territory to the Americans for money to finance his English wars.

As he closed up the vestry shutters, January heard a commotion of men shouting, of horses stamping and jingling their bridles, at the other end of the short village street: Louis Verron and his cousins. He guessed he would be perfectly safe if he simply retreated into the church to wait, but he didn’t want to take the chance on being wrong. He crossed the church-side alley to the nearest house, dislodged a section of lattice, and crawled beneath the front porch, holding the lattice in place behind him as he listened to the tumult around the general store. A few minutes later men galloped past horseback, torch flame streaming. The assumption that January had taken the storekeeper’s horse kept them from turning out dogs, and also from looking around Cloutierville itself. In truth, he was more worried about snakes under the porch than about the men riding out to hunt him.

Don’t fall asleep
 . . .

He knew any man who had not been as tired as he now was would have debated whether anyone whose ribs, and crudely-bandaged fingers, and back, and face hurt as much as they did
could
fall asleep, but he knew he was inches from it.

It would take him two hours at least to reach Bayou Lente on foot. He’d have to follow the river, so as not to get lost without the compass. And Rose would never speak to him again if he didn’t get it back.

Beaux Herbes – where Eliane Dubesc Verron had lived, sometimes with, and more often without, her aloof and guilt-riddled husband – lay in the opposite direction. That was the direction in which Verron and his men had ridden.

‘Not even capable of bearing a living child,’ his mother had said of Eliane. The boy nothing but a bundle of bones . . . A textbook of illnesses . . . The other three children had died at once . . .

Had she hungered for a girl, a child who would be her own to love? A healthy, beautiful child, such as her former maidservant bore with such ease?

What did she offer Noisette, the girl who had come from Sainte Domingue with her, the girl she must have grown up with, before the revolution drove Eliane’s father – who was probably Noisette’s father as well – to New Orleans? Possibly money.
But what woman of color could pass up the chance to know that her daughter would become the daughter of a well-connected white family, with all that such a birth meant opening up before her?

Celestine
.

You’ll never tell me she didn’t play him false
.

January made himself wait, telling over in his mind the first book of Pope’s
Iliad
, until – when ‘Jove on his couch reclined his awful head’ – the last of the village’s lights disappeared from upper windows, and the town lay silent beneath the white, full moon.

The plantation bell at what January earnestly hoped was in fact Bayou Lente woke him with a start. For a moment of panic, terror, nightmare, he was still back in the store shed at Cloutierville, and Louis Verron and Toco and the storekeeper and the ‘boys’ were coming to hang him, after first beating him to death. His body was so stiff with exhaustion, bruises, and the scrapes and gouges left by the broken stumps of the window bars, that for a time he could only lie in the far corner of the mule barn where he’d crawled an hour before moonset.

When the door opened he debated for a moment about speaking to the mule boss, then pushed himself deeper into the hay. There’d be an overseer outside.

Nobody who’d grown up on a plantation dealt with overseers any more than they had to.

Lantern light made gold mirrors of the mules’ eyes as the mule boss and his boy buckled their harnesses in place, led them out. Through the open door, January could hear the work gangs getting breakfast, and his whole body transformed into a single, silent shriek of hunger. Cotton harvest would have both gangs in the field today, and everybody else from the home place that could be spared. Bearded and caked with blood and river mud, his shirt torn to rags to bandage his fingers, January knew he’d make the worst possible impression, but he knew also that there might be very little time to speak to Cadmus Rablé and, if he was lucky, Isobel Deschamps. He’d circled the home place through the cotton fields, the fallow corn, twice last night, watching, listening for any sign that Louis Verron and his men were waiting for him here after all.

It got light. A couple of cats who’d been chasing lizards in the straw evidently heard the sounds of white folks’ breakfast being carried across from the kitchen to the house, because they slipped out through cracks in the walls, and a few minutes later the two youngest mule boys came in to muck the stalls.

Feeling a little like Odysseus introducing himself to Nausicaa, January rose from the hay, and asked, ‘This here Bayou Lente?’

The smaller boy flinched toward the door, but the slightly larger one grabbed him by the shirt. ‘Yeah.’

‘I need to speak to Michie Rablé.’ January made a futile effort to knock some of the hay off what was left of his sleeves. ‘And to Mademoiselle Isobel, if she’s here.’

The boy nodded again. ‘She here, yeah.’

Thank you, blessed Mary Ever-Virgin
.

‘Would you tell her, please, that M’sieu Janvier is here from New Orleans, with a message for her from Pierrette. Tell her, her mama sold Pierrette, two days after she left town.’

Both boys stared at him, shocked. The slightly larger boy protested, ‘She wouldn’t!’

‘She did,’ said January. ‘And I need to speak with Mademoiselle Isobel, just as soon as it’s convenient for her.’

‘Tell her, Den,’ ordered the larger boy, and gave the smaller a shove toward the door. And, to January, ‘What the hell happen to you?’

January had not even finished washing his face in the mule trough when Cadmus Rablé crossed from the big house.

He was a big man of sixty or so, square-built, with the combination of African features and near-European coloring common in that part of the country. In his close-cropped gray hair lingered traces of the honey hue of Isobel’s, but his eyes were the blue of the Gulf on a summer day. January wondered whether Celestine – and Isobel – had gotten their gray-green eyes from Noisette.

Rablé looked him up and down. ‘You’re never a piano teacher.’

January sighed. ‘I clean up some ’fore I give lessons, M’sieu.’

Clean or dirty, the planter had used the polite address ‘vous’.

January knew
libres
– his mother among them – who judged that the darker a person was, the closer they were to the despised slaves, and indeed he saw this way of looking at the world pass like the reflection of some earlier training across Cadmus Rablé’s blue eyes. Then he saw, too, the man’s expression shift: looking past the color, to manner and voice and the likelihood of his story. ‘Come in the house.’

January looked down at his filthy clothing, his bare feet smeared with mule dung and bayou mud. ‘You got to be joking, sir.’

‘On the gallery, then. Den,’ Rablé called to the smaller mule boy, ‘you run tell Zellie to heat up a bath in the laundry – you hungry, sir?’

‘Only reason I didn’t eat those two boys was ’cause I was too tired to catch ’em.’

‘Where’d you hear this about Pierrette?’ asked Rablé, as they climbed the steps to the rear gallery of the house. Like most Creole houses it faced the river, sturdily built of timber and bousillage, like January’s own in New Orleans but smaller. The rear gallery was arranged as a summer dining room, overlooking the kitchen buildings and the quarters beyond. A servant came out of the pantry with coffee and favored January’s tattered clothing and bare feet with a glance of resentful contempt as he poured –
what’s the likes of HIM doin’ havin’ coffee with Michie Rablé?
– and another crossed from the kitchen with callas and sausage.