The New World (25 page)

Natty felt the same, to judge by her own quick “goodnight”—then she shuffled a few yards away across the deck and patted the space beside her, to show I must follow. I did as she asked, and lay down with the satchel between us, where I thought it would be safe. I kept my eyes open as the silence settled around us again, but all I saw was the fog swirling above me like marbling on the pages of a book, and all I heard was the river muttering to itself as the
Angel
toiled forward into the darkness.

After his bold story and the bolder moralizing that followed, I thought Joshua might chase me into my dreams and accuse me there as well. But it was Black Cloud who did that—I should have known. Black Cloud once more crouching forward in the prow of his boat with his eyes bursting and talons grasping. When I woke next morning I had frightened myself so much I lay with my heart pounding, telling myself “I am still alive! I am still alive!”—and opening my eyes wide. Breathing the scent of the ponies tethered a little way off. Hearing the splash of the river against our hull. Feeling the soft glide of our progress.

I was myself again, looking round to find the fog had blown away and our boat was moving much faster than I thought, with the current stronger and our oarsmen making up lost time. Where was Natty? Here, beside me. And where were Joshua and Anne Marie? Gone away—because they had woken before us, and seen our journey was almost done, and moved to the prow of the
Angel
so they could watch their new lives rise up to greet them at the first opportunity.

I felt in no hurry; I liked the relief of my awakening too much, and the warmth of the early sun, and I did not want it to end. Why was this, when I had waited so long to reach my destination, and traveled so far? As I climbed to my feet and watched the river tying and untying its threads behind us, I thought I must be nervous of feeling disappointed the moment I stepped ashore. There was a simpler reason as well. Black Cloud would never forget us. He would find us in New Orleans. And if not in New Orleans, then on board whatever ship took us home. And if not there, then at home itself. And if not at home, then at the ends of the earth, because we were his prey forever.

What was my defense against him? Watchfulness, that was all. Like the poor Christian soul who believes the Devil lies in wait at every turn, and knows this Devil is his own creation and cannot be banished. The same watchfulness that helped me survive the wilderness, and now kept me safe on the
Angel
as I gazed at the river-flow, and the debris of straw-wisps and leaves, and the last rags of mist, and the sun-sparkles, and the trees massed on either side of me: the silent battalions I had seen ever since we first came aboard, sometimes shivering into life when a flock of white birds rose from the black shadows, but otherwise blank and endless.

Black Cloud was nowhere in this and everywhere—in the water, in the blue sky, in the trees, in the vapor. If I cupped my hands to my ears and listened as carefully as possible, I heard the river pattering against the prow of his boat and remembered how quickly he was gaining on us. If I narrowed my eyes and concentrated on the trees masking the bend we had just traveled round, or the one before that, I saw his silhouette glimmering through the leaves. If I closed my eyes entirely, he rose to his full height before me, his fire-shadow at his side. Black Cloud with his decorations swarming over his arms and bull-chest. The Painted Man with his narrow shoulders like a boy.

“What are you doing?” Natty wanted to know, when she eventually came to join me. I told her I was on watch, making sure we were still safe. Once she would have reproached me for saying this, in the days when she thought the Rider could rescue her from every difficulty. Now we were alone she was gentler again, and accepted that we must look out for one another.

“He will come, you know,” Natty said, laying both her hands on the stern-rail so the spray and sunlight mingled on her skin.

“Natty, not again…” I began, but she carried on regardless.

“We could drop it in the river.” Her eyes moved from my face to the satchel around my neck, as if she might be about to lunge and tear it away from me, settling the matter there and then.

“But we decided. He'd never believe us—he'd think we'd hidden it somewhere.”

“We could hand it to him.”

“He still wouldn't be satisfied. He'd still want to kill us.”

Natty frowned into the sunlight, gathering herself to say something she knew I would not like to hear. “You only talk about him. You never say why you want it yourself.”

I let her charge sink into me, keeping my eyes fixed where the huge muddy river met the purplish blue of the skyline.

“We're like our fathers,” I said eventually, as if I was half-asleep.

Natty nodded slowly. “Our fathers,” she repeated. Her voice hung in the traveling air, and I could not decide whether she had finished her sentence.

“We can't help it,” she went on. “Except we haven't done as much as they did.”

“As much damage?”

Natty spread her hands on the rails and turned them over, showing the pale skin on her palms, and the darker creases. “I don't know,” she said, then pushed back from the rail and stepped up close to me. Her mouth was ajar, which let me see the wet tip of her tongue; I am sure if we had stayed this close for a second longer, for only a second, she would have kissed me.

As it was we hesitated, and then it was too late: a shout suddenly rose from the deck behind us. We turned to look, and our fellow passengers were throwing their hats in the air and congratulating one another; they had seen the beginnings of a town float into view among the trees on our starboard side.

A moment before, I had wanted to stay in my dream. Now everything was changed. Natty grabbed me by the hand and together we ducked round the side of the captain's wheelhouse, then toward the prow of the
Angel
. We wanted to see the future as much as everyone else; we wanted our journey over and done with.

But as the crowd brought us to a standstill they told us this was not New Orleans, it was Baton Rouge. Baton Rouge which I am sure is a fine old city today, with all manner of churches and theaters and paved streets, but then was still very uncivilized. As I watched the meager shacks drifting past, and the boats loading and unloading, and the sailors glance up from their work to wave at us, and admire us for traveling so far to see them, I thought the advice I had previously given myself about feeling disappointed was sound after all.

Then the last buildings drifted away and the trees returned again. But as we watched these last shreds of the great forest disappear, and the silvery marshes beyond them, I knew that enough had changed for us to see everything with new eyes. Who were we to blame others for being rough and ready? Our feet were black with dirt; our clothes were made of skin and twine; our hair straggled around our faces; our minds were filled with memories that did not belong here. We were savages. We had neglected the habits of our tribe.

That is why we felt more and more adrift, the nearer we came to our destination. We were grieving for everything we were leaving behind. The scrubland had almost starved us. The dry valleys had parched us. We had been nearly blinded by wind and sunlight and dust. We had almost been broken by swamps and bogs and fog and dew. But we had also found these things wondrous, and shared the sorrow of the people who lived among them. In my last view of the wilderness, it did not surprise me at all that my eyes were filled with tears.

After that: cleared ground with farms and plantations. Big smooth lakes opening in between, bordered with fragments of the old woods. White cotton fields and rice fields, and slaves working there. Saplings and ornamental bushes in rows. Pleasure boats beginning to shimmy around us, inspecting us, as well as working boats minding their own business: barges and luggers, smacks and schooners all about to collide with one another but all finding a safe passage, like bees in a swarm.

I did not look closely at any of this. In fact I could hardly look at anything, never mind that I had just told myself to stay watchful. Instead, I returned to our old place at the stern of the
Angel
and sank back into my river-dream for the last time. I saw myself jumping ashore, or else onto one of the other boats that passed us—onto one that was laboring upriver the way we had just come down. I raced back through the mangrove swamps and the cane-brake, through the Thicket and thorn-village, through the endless miles of flat and empty land. I imagined myself vanishing into the immense and level western part of the country, where I was accepted among the people and knew their ways and spoke their language. I believed I would live there according to the laws of simplicity, with my mind open to the sun all day and at night filling with starlight.

Was Natty a part of this vision? I was on the point of imagining that, when my dreams were scattered.

“Look!” she was calling. “Come here!”—and I went back to join her, where she was pointing toward the shore.

Set back from the river, sometimes only ten feet off and sometimes a hundred or more, was an embankment rising about twelve foot high. An astonishing construction, which gave the clearest possible impression that from here onward mankind had settled the ground. The country was under control.

Such was the destination we had longed for; such was our entry into New Orleans.

At Baton Rouge I had seen enough doors and windows to remember what a town looked like. But here were so many more of the same, and so mightily extended into towers and turrets, chimneys and steeples, quays and wharves, warehouses and lodging-houses, they seemed to deserve another name entirely. The sky darkened and narrowed. The sweet smell of vegetation turned into smoke. The silence became noise, and slow time quickened into hurry and bustle.

The change was extraordinary. In London I easily forget that streets used to be swamps, and tall buildings were once empty air. Here the newness of things was paramount—the newness, and the ingenuity.

It was this more than anything else that abolished my visions of a different life. As Natty continued to point out this church or that shopfront, this stevedore unloading or that sailor standing to watch him with arms akimbo, our captain rattled our bell and announced our arrival to the whole community. While the echoes reverberated I wanted to rinse them out of my head or ignore them, yet at the same time an older part of myself, the earliest and least destructible part, reminded me this was the world I knew best. This was what had made me, whether I liked it or not. Sluggishly at first, and then more hungrily, I began to devour the sights that appeared along the shore.

The men and women whose voices drifted toward us in a stream that mingled English with French, French with Spanish, Spanish with Portuguese. The houses where a hundred different styles played a continuous game of Trump, so Gothic arches leaped toward pagoda roofs, and fanciful metal balconies looked down on plain wooden doorways. The ships—the ships more and more, as we came toward the center of the town—which had sailed here from the four corners of the world and now had their hulls so closely packed at the wharves, and their rigging so intricately criss-crossed, they made a gigantic net to catch the sun.

“We'll get home from here,” Natty said, her eyes gleaming.

“I'm sure we can,” I told her.

She thought there was a note of doubt in my voice. “Surely you're not still thinking we might be caught?” she said.

I noticed she still did not mention Black Cloud by name.

“Nooo,” I said, stretching the word to make myself seem relaxed, but not creating that effect. Natty screwed up her face and pointed off the stern.

“There,” she said. “What can you see?”

The river ran more nearly straight this close to the town, and had also widened with every mile we came nearer the coast; I was faced with an immense stretch of water.

“Nothing,” I told her, which was obviously not true. I saw rowing boats hovering in the sunlight like water boatmen; smaller craft ferrying passengers; tall trading ships and passenger ships—their sails furled or unfurled, their decks empty or congested, their crews anxious to leave or happy to return.

“Well,” I corrected myself. “Not nothing.”

“Exactly,” Natty said. “Not nothing. But not Black Cloud following us.”

She had said his name at last, because the very idea of him now seemed remote, and the thought that he might hurt us impossible. Impossible even when I forced myself to search more carefully through the confusion, crawling from prow to stern of every boat on the river, from crow's-nest to cabin door, and still found no trace of him.

It was enough, for the time being at least. Without replying to Natty again I looked forward and watched the captain bring us alongside a wharf which had our name,
Angel
, written on its timbers in billowing red letters. This was his place, where he was always allowed to return. Now it was our place, where we would begin the next stage of our existence. I squared my shoulders and made myself ready to step ashore.

Because I have learned more about New Orleans in later years than I could possibly have known at the time, I will allow myself to interrupt my story at this point and give a brief history lesson.

The city stands on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, which is vastly wide at this point as I have already said, and also very deep, and therefore suitable as both port and harbor. Forty years before we arrived, the population was a few thousand and no more—men and women who had lived under French protection, and flourished because they had surrounded themselves with a line of fortification, and also built the embankment we had seen (which they called a levee) to keep the river at bay in case of floods. And, I might add, in case of storms, which I knew to my cost were frequent and violent in those parts.

As their prosperity increased, so of course did the interest of others in owning it, and rights of possession passed to America in 1803 at the same time as Louisiana and Texas. When Natty and I arrived, we therefore found ourselves in a place that had only recently learned how to call itself whole, while remaining legion.

This paradox was reflected in the design of the place, since New Orleans had grown up around a large square that lay close to our wharf (and contained on its fringes a cathedral, a town hall, and other important buildings) but soon gave way to a most bewildering labyrinth of alleys, snickets, dead ends and short cuts. In this respect, the grand old town can best be described as a theatrical stage (“Entertainment” would be a more suggestive word), on which order and confusion were always at loggerheads, not least because the mix of nations on which it was founded seemed continually to attract more friends and family, traders and travelers, gawpers and tricksters, lawyers and priests, honorable men and dishonorable ones, admirable women and deceivious ones, slaves and profiteers, all bringing with them a torrent of stuff as mighty as the Mississippi itself: sugar and skins and hides and lead and flour and wheat and corn and tobacco and rice and cotton and cotton and cotton.