Good Man Friday (2 page)

Pedro. Bourrège's fighting slave.

‘Are we to have a bout or not, M'sieu?' Smugness tinged Bourrège's voice. ‘My boy cannot stand about like this in the cold, waiting for you to forfeit.'

‘I ain't gonna goddam forfeit!' Norcum's weather-reddened little face grew dark, and the two or three Americans who had followed the French planters all took up the cry in a way that told January that they, too, had money on Gun. When January opened his mouth to speak, Norcum grabbed him by the arm, shoved him against the saloon's wall.

‘Don't you say one goddam word, boy.' Brown spittle flicked January's shirt front. ‘You get my boy on his feet and into that stage—'

‘
He can't fight
.' January's voice was hard now. ‘He is badly injured. Another fight will kill him.'

Norcum waved the words aside. ‘Shit, Gun's won fights with a goddam broken leg!'

A man named Fry came over to them, a land-speculator who, like Norcum, was one of the few businessmen in the city still able to afford such things as parties, music lessons for his sister, and a subscription to the much-reduced opera. Without so much as a glance at January, he whispered to Norcum, ‘You ain't gonna scratch, are you, Eph?'

‘I am not gonna goddam scratch!' Eph Norcum thrust January away from him, strode back to where his slave lay. January saw him drag Gun up sitting.

‘Now you listen to me,' said Norcum quietly. ‘I don't care how bad your belly hurts. You can lay down when you won that fight.'

‘Sir, I can't—'

‘You gonna. I got ten thousand dollars ridin' on your black ass, and every man I know got the same. You know where's the only place I can get that money back if you don't get in there and win? By sellin' that wife of yours – and both your girls – to the dealers.'

January drew breath to protest, and the servant who'd fetched him grabbed his arm, tried to pull him away.
You're in New Orleans
, January reminded himself with an effort.
Not Paris …

Paris where he'd spent sixteen years of his life, Paris where he'd trained at the Hôtel Dieu, Paris where a surgeon could protest blackmail and murder without being beaten by outraged white men for his temerity …

In Gun's eyes January saw the knowledge that this was exactly what Norcum would do.

His voice low, Norcum went on, ‘You kick that Pedro's French-nigger ass or you're gonna be the sorriest nigger in this state. And your wife's gonna be the sorriest one in Missouri.'

Gun closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Yes, sir.' He didn't weep, the ability to do so having been beaten out of him years ago. Only put out his hand – massive as an ox's hoof – and the two young field-hands who'd stayed near ran up and helped him to his feet. He barely staggered when his master, and Harry Fry, and half a dozen other Americans crowded around him, slapped him on his back and yelled things like, ‘That's the spirit, Gun!' and, ‘
Now
we gonna show them sissy-ass French …'

January knew he'd better go. Yet he sank down on to the bench where Gun had lain and sat there while the other three slaves ran around the corner to watch the fight. He heard someone shout the names of the contestants: Norcum's Gun and Bourrège's Pedro. ‘No interferin' with the combatants … no man to step over the lines into the stage … a round is called when a combatant's knee touches the ground … thirty seconds between rounds …'

Nothing, January reflected, about no biting, no eye-gouging, no recourse to what were politely termed ‘foul blows'. This wasn't a white man's fight.

He remembered telling his fellow musicians in Paris about these fights, as he'd told them of the other ‘customs of the country' into which he'd been born: of the quasi-genteel arrangements of free colored plaçage and of ‘Blue Ribbon' balls, and of the manner in which well-bred young white girls were taught to ignore the fact that their husbands were tupping the female slaves. Of the means by which ‘portly' slave girls were ‘put with' the most ‘portly' of their master's slave men, whether the girls wanted to breed by those men or not. He could afford then to display such curiosities, like the decorative mutilations of savages, for he'd had no intention of ever returning to Louisiana.

Nor would he have done so, he thought, if he'd had anywhere else to go, when the epidemic of Asian cholera had taken his first wife a good deal farther away than Missouri …

In the yard, voices rose to shrieks. Jed Burton's valet came racing around the corner of the saloon. ‘Best you clear outta here, Mr January,' he panted. ‘Mr Norcum, he mad fit to kill.'

‘Is Gun dead?' In his heart he already knew.

The servant nodded. ‘That Pedro fetched him a blow in the belly, an' seem like he throw up all the blood in his body. I think he's dead 'fore he hit the ground.'

January closed his eyes for a moment and saw again the fighter's face when he'd stood up and disappeared straight-backed into the crowd.

He hoped someone would tell Gun's wife – and his daughters – what this man had done for their sakes, or tried to do.

‘Thank you.' He picked up his satchel, filled with the simple piano-pieces that he taught the children of those few – all of them whites, these days – who had the money to pay for it. In it he generally carried a few paper twists of basilicum powder and willow bark, laudanum, and a scalpel or two, tools of the surgeon's trade that neither whites nor free colored would hire someone as black as himself to practice. Even the darker-complected among the
sang melée
found it inconceivable that one who looked so much like a hulking coal-black field-hand would have either education or skill.

Even in France – that land of
liberté, égalité
, and government informers – it had been the same.

He'd learned a long time ago that music paid better.

Unless, of course – he reflected as he ducked between the Turkey Buzzard's outhouse and woodpile and into the swampy semi-wilderness of tree stumps and squatters' shacks that lay beyond – you happened to get on the bad side of one of the few white planters still rich enough to be holding entertainments in this impoverished carnival season of 1838.

Then you'd better start looking around for some other way to feed your family and heat your house through the chilly months to come.

J
anuary was not terribly surprised to receive a cold letter from Eph Norcum's business manager the following day, informing him that his services at Mr Norcum's Valentine's Day ball, Washington's Birthday ball, and the bridal musicale in honor of his sister were no longer required. He hoped the planter's ire wouldn't extend to telling his friends, ‘I don't want to see that murderin' nigger incompetent so-called doctor on any future occasion …' – meaning on the orchestra dais of
their
Carnival celebrations – but in the course of the next several days it became clear that it did.

‘Either that, or they all had money wagered on Gun as well.' He dropped to the worn planks of the gallery floor the equally frosty dismissal from Harry Fry's new wife.

It was the most recent of nearly a dozen, starting with Norcum's – nearly a week ago, now – and including not only those who had hired him for Carnival entertainment, but also the fathers of most of his few piano-students as well. From the assurance of a moderate income through the carnival season, and the hopes of picking up a few more students to eke his family through the starving summer, January found himself facing having his small savings exhausted by Easter, with no prospects for anything beyond.

‘The wretched man
would
have his thumb in every business in town that still has its doors open,' remarked Rose dispassionately. She set aside the slate on which she'd been double-checking her husband's budgetary calculations and put on her spectacles again.

In palmier days – before President Jackson had taken it upon himself to dismantle the central bank of the United States and precipitate last year's financial collapse – Rose and January had run a small boarding-school in their big Spanish house on Rue Esplanade. Their students had been mostly the daughters of plaçées, those semi-official mistresses of white planters, brokers, bankers and landowners whose mixed-race children had for well over a century made up a caste of free colored in the town. These girls, of whom Rose herself was one, were traditionally schooled to be what their mothers had been, trained in deportment, music, a little sketching, and given sufficient familiarity with literature to be pleasing companions to the men who'd negotiate contracts with their mothers to give them houses and annuities. In contrast to most other girls' schools in the city, Rose had offered all the things she herself had hungered for as a child: mathematics, science, history, languages modern and arcane. The sort of learning that no girl – white or colored – was supposed to understand or want.

It was, as January's widowed mother had not been slow to point out, a foolish waste of time and capital and a good way to end up bankrupt. (‘And don't expect ME to provide for you when you do …')

The times had proven her correct in this. Even parents willing to provide such an unlikely education for their daughters in good times were now forced to make hard choices. Invariably, they saved what funds they had, to educate the sons who would, with luck, bring in money to the family as a whole. The girls would have to wait, as girls always did.

‘Mama says Norcum's still rich because he's a slave-smuggler.' Gabriel, January's fifteen-year-old nephew, emerged on to the gallery through one of the long French windows on the heels of Rose's remark. ‘He brings them in from Africa through Cuba to Texas, Mama says, for half what Virginia slaves cost—'

Mama
was January's sister Olympe. Two years younger than himself, like nearly everyone in New Orleans Olympe was struggling to provide for the children in her household too young to work. When circumstance had made it impossible to hire even a little help in keeping up the big old house, January had taken in Olympe's two older children – Zizi-Marie, seventeen, and Gabriel. Gabriel could make two handfuls of beans and rice into a banquet gods would stand in line for, and Zizi-Marie helped Rose with the housework when she wasn't at her father's shop learning the upholsterer's trade. Olympe's husband – Paul Corbier, a highly skilled upholsterer – hadn't had a commission in over a year, and the family was living on Olympe's earnings as a voodooienne and herb-doctor.

‘Well, then we can all have the satisfaction of knowing he'll go straight to Hell when he dies.' January turned Rose's slate around right-ways-up toward him and considered the neat columns of figures: taxes, food, fuel. Repairs on shoes, new sheet-music so that January could stay
au courant
on his work, provided he could get any. Small articles like new gloves and cravats, for who would hire an entertainer who looked shabby? Modest provisions for the church and the ‘burial society' – a social and benevolent organization – to which he belonged.

In three weeks it would be Lent.

He looked at the figures on the slate and felt like a farmer who sees locusts descend upon his corn.

‘He can't tell the French not to hire you, can he?' Gabriel scooped up Baby John from where Rose had left the infant – now three months old – on a blanket in the mild winter sunlight.

‘He can't,' agreed January. ‘But he hired me – and the other Americans hired me – back before Christmas, so the Destrehans and the Marignys and the Roffignacs all hired Damien Jouet or Marc Paillard to play for them.' He named the other two best-known piano-players in New Orleans. Like himself, they were the sons of free colored mothers, whose white protectors – in their cases, the boys' fathers – had paid to have them taught.

Like himself, he knew that both men were living on the edge of disaster. In better times, every musician in town subsisted on private lessons. These days, French Creole and American newcomer families alike were all having their sons and daughters instructed by whatever Aunt Unmarriageable happened to be either living in their households or at least eating at their tables three or four times a week.

‘Well, beat that with a chain,' grumbled Gabriel. ‘Maybe I could quit Maître Clouard and look for work—'

‘You'll do nothing of the kind.' Five days a week, Gabriel assisted the principal chef at the Hotel Iberville, learning the art and science of French cookery. This exchange of service brought in no money, but January's instincts told him it would eventually provide the youth with a handsome living.

‘I think –' January bent sideways in his sturdy willow chair to pick up Mrs Fry's discarded note – ‘I need to speak to Lieutenant Shaw.'

Rose glanced from the slate, eyebrows lifting. Silent.

‘City Guards won't hire a black man,' Gabriel protested.

‘I should hope not,' Rose remarked. ‘Considering the number of runaway slaves we've hidden under this house in the past year.'

January shook his head. ‘But I've worked with Shaw finding missing people, or solving puzzles …'

‘Like last year,' agreed Gabriel enthusiastically, ‘when you helped him get the man who killed his brother—'

‘You were away for six months.' Rose gathered Baby John from Gabriel's arms and didn't look at January. Between them the words hung unspoken:
You almost didn't come back
.

‘He may know someone who needs a job done. A job they can't ask the Guards to do.' January extended a finger to his son, marveling again at the infant's tiny perfection, as if he'd never seen a baby before. Baby John – no one would ever think of calling that miniature professor of philosophy
Johnny
– was already taking after Rose's slender build, his coloring halfway between January's nearly-pure African ‘beau noire lustre' and Rose's quadroon café-crème. The brown eyes that looked back into January's were wise, and solemn, and a thousand years old.
If I have to be gone another six months
, reflected January,
or get myself shot at or half-drowned in the river or poisoned or blown up in a steamboat or all the other fool things I've been mixed up in to get money for this house, these people whom I love … Men have done worse
.