Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 10

When she'd gone, Harry picked up another loose board and retrieved another sack. This one contained a powder-flask, bullets, and a small box of waxed linen patches. He wrapped up the apples and handed the sack to January, except for two left on the table-presumably for Bello and Cynthia-one that he stuck in his own pocket, and another he threw to January.

"Best apples in the parish," he said, as they slipped outside and went around to the pigsty in back of the house. "M'am Camille, she had the trees brought in special, like everything else in that garden of hers. Here." He stepped over the fence and reached under the roof of the pig-house, bringing out a Kentucky long-rifle with its lock wrapped carefully in greased cloth. "Sweet as candy. Pigs love 'em."

"That what we're huntin' tonight?" asked January, fascinated. "Pig?"

"Nuthin' in the world like a good pig," replied Harry cheerfully. "And Tim Rankin's are the best."

While sugar plantations lined the river from its mouth to Baton Rouge, January was aware that most of the whites of the river parishes were, in fact, not of the planter cla.s.s. Along New River, and Bayou Conway, in the Achtafayala country and on the nameless little bayous of the cipriere, lived a scattered population of small farmers, Scots-Irish or Welsh or descended of the old Acadians of Canada, crackers who raised a haphazard selection of cotton, corn, and yams and lived largely on the increase of their herds of cattle and swine. Most kept a few slaves-Aniweta, one of Harry's girlfriends, was broad-wife to a man whose master lived over on New River-but on the whole they had as little to do as possible with tillage or agriculture. They were, January had found, a curious combination of autodidactism and ignorance, squalor and pride, and he mistrusted them wholeheartedly.

"From what I hear," said January, "Tim Rankin's dogs are the best, too, and he won't take kindly to one of his hogs takin' a little walk out in the country."

"Ben . . . No wonder Michie Hannibal's daddy-in-law put you nursemaidin' him. You worry more than any man I ever met. You worry so much it's a wonder you don't chop your hand off cuttin'

cane."

And Harry led the way off, through the cipriere. In January's childhood, when Louisiana had been Spanish land, the cipriere had stretched unbroken, mile after mile of marsh and pond and oak ridge, as far as you could walk in a day. Indian tribes, Natchez and Chickasaw and Houmas, had wandered it. Runaway slaves had established whole villages in it and had lived in peace for years, and so in places it remained. But after an hour on the winding trail, with the moon's thin dappling filtered by moss and cypress branches, January smelled the stinks of settlement, the sweetish revolting stench of hogs and the murkier pong of outhouses n.o.body had bothered to clean in decades, and among the oaks the milky light showed a straggly field of cotton, the stumps left in where the land had been cleared.

Beyond that squatted the usual squalid cracker dwelling of boards and bousillage, sagging on its piers and possessed of not a single gla.s.s window, though by its size it was clearly the home of the master, not a slave.

There were no barns. Crackers tended to let their stock live as untrammeled a life as they did themselves, though a kind of shed offered minimal shelter to a couple of mules. Near that, as he and Harry circled through the silent woods, January glimpsed a rough zigzag of split rails, and heard the mumbling grunts of swine.

"Once we get goin'," said Harry, producing a caneknife and chopping down a sapling which he stripped and topped with the deftness of long practice, "we gotta go fast. I'll take care of the dogs."

"You just do that." What the h.e.l.l, January wondered, had he gotten himself into? But it was all a way of buying his way into the community, a way of listening. . . .

If he didn't get himself killed for the benefit of some benighted barter of Harry's.

Had he been picked because he was a new boy and dumb enough to go along with one of Harry's schemes? Or simply because he was big enough to lug a dead hog at a run through the woods?

Harry had slipped away into the ghostly silence of the woods. A few moments later January heard the dogs, first barking, then barking and cras.h.i.+ng through the trees on the far side of the house.

Keeping hold of the stripped pole with one hand and the sack of apples with the other, he darted from the cover of the trees, pulled open the crude gate of the hog pen, and tossed the first few apples out a couple of yards away. He poked and prodded the pigs in the pen until they were on their feet, snuffling and grunting as he fed one of them an apple. Then he retreated toward the woods again, breath coming fast, dropping apples which the pigs, with the gourmandise of their kind, trotted out to devour.

The crash of a gun in the undergrowth nearly made January jump out of his skin. A hog squealed and dropped, kicking, in the tangle of laurel and hackberry, and Harry called out in a triumphant whisper, "Got him!" Distantly, the dogs still barked.

"You could have got me!" January had been about four feet from the quarry, and having fought the British under Andrew Jackson he knew all about the accuracy of the average rifle.

"I didn't, though." Harry bent down with his caneknife and slashed the hog's throat. "Not a bad shot for moonlight." January recognized the cane-knife as one of those he and Mohammed had repaired the previous day, and wondered how that one had been extracted from the "fixed" pile without Thierry's knowledge.

"Let's get this boy out of here. They'll be along any minute."

He was tying up the pig's feet as he spoke and sliding the pole between them. January groaned inwardly, guessing what kind of evasion procedures would follow. He was right. They set off along the path, the pig borne between them on the pole with its blood dripping copiously; crossed a small bayou and continued through the woods with the ground getting lower and mars.h.i.+er around their feet. In summer the night would have been alive with frogs and crickets, the air a humming torture of mosquitoes. Winter had stilled the land, and January breathed a prayer of thanks for small favors. Distantly he heard the baying of dogs in the woods-more than before, he thought.

"I swear I never met a man who worries as much as you!" Harry shook his head. "It'll just be Rankin and his brothers and the Neys. Old Jules Ney and his boys live just on the other side of Lost Bayou. They're the ones you have to watch out for, not Rankin. Watch it here." They had stepped into water again, one of the wide sodden sloughs that dotted the cipriere. The water was freezing: January could only be grateful that snakes and gators would be asleep at this season.

"Are these Neys any relation to that charming gentleman who owns the Belle Dame?"

"That's them." They waded among the sedges and cypress knees. Then, at the point where a dirt road pa.s.sed the slough beneath a low-limbed oak, they turned on their tracks and worked their way back, emerging from the marsh at the same place they'd gone in and following the blood- trail back to the bayou, with the baying of the dogs growing louder all the time. "We'll leave our friend here in the back of Disappearing Willie's cave. It'll be safe there and it's cold enough in that cave to freeze water, nearly. The Neys are a bad bunch. If you get caught by them out without a pa.s.s, you tell them you belong to Michie Fourchet and not to a guest of his. They'll pa.s.s you along to Captain Jacinthe on the Dame if you're not careful, and you'll end up for sale in someplace you don't want to be."

"Here is where I don't want to be," said January through his teeth.

"That's just what you think now."

The watercourse grew narrower and more winding and the darkness more dense as the cypresses crowded in close and the moon sank. It was, January guessed, only a few hours until first light, with the prospects of a full day in the cane-fields to come. This had better be worth it.

In time they reached the oak-hummock in the midst of the waters that housed Disappearing Willie's shack. Disappearing Willie, the friendly little Ibo who had long ago lost his position of a.s.sistant gardener to M'am Camille, had, in addition to the brand on his face, more whip scars on his back than any man on Mon Triomphe. He wasn't surly or quarrelsome or disobedient or a thief. Simply, he could not be broken of the habit of running away. He'd never be gone long-two days or three days or four days. Willie had any number of hideouts in the cipriere, and seemed to consider a whipping the reasonable price to pay for a few days' liberty in the woods.

"He's crazy if he thinks Fourchet isn't going to kill him one day," January remarked, as he helped Harry suspend the hog in the damp-floored hollow cut in the bank beneath the shack. Harry was right-it was icily cold there, and at this season there was little danger the meat would spoil before the entrepreneur could dispose of it. "I've seen how crazy it makes Fourchet if anyone-a slave or one of his sons or whoever-goes against him. One day Willie's going to come back from hiding out and Fourchet's going to beat him to death."

"I think he knows that," said Harry. The cave was guarded by a couple of boards propped over its low opening to keep foxes and gators out. He took a couple of tallow candles from his pocket and lit them-he had lucifer matches, not flint-his breath glittery smoke in the light. January's wet clothes clung to his body and he s.h.i.+vered as he worked. "I sure wouldn't do it. But I think Willie figures, So what? Where else is he going?" Harry finished tying the hog's feet to the rough beam driven from wall to wall, and regarded January in the candle-gleam. Without his habitual engaging smile his face seemed older-he was barely twenty-and tired. "What else is he going to do with his life, 'cept enjoy a couple days here and there, and put up with what it costs him? Isn't that what everybody does?"

Was it? Stepping out of the wet dampness of the cellar, January looked across the cobalt glimmer of the bayou, of black lumpy cypress knees and gray moss like chalk smears on the velvet gloom.

He thought of the men who'd knocked him down in the street, slit his clothing with their big Green River knives and tore up his music, who would have happily beaten him or killed him. . . .

The white oafs in the taverns, whom he had to call "sir."

It was the price he paid to sit at the dinner table with Olympe's children and listen to his brother- in-law tell them stories about High John the Conqueror by mellow candlelight. What he paid to have coffee with Rose in the arcades of the market by the levee, or to walk across the Place d'Armes in the multicolored delight of autumn mornings when everyone was out with their market baskets in the freshness of the air.

He'd lived in Louisiana for twenty-four years, before leaving for Paris. When he thought-when he knew--that remaining in Paris in the wake of Ayasha's death would destroy him with grief, he'd known also what it would cost him, to come back to the only family he had.

What had his mother paid, he wondered, for the freedom she'd bought for herself and her children? Had she loved the tall black man with the country marks on his face? Was that why she never spoke his name?

Or had she had any choice?

Velvet silence. Bitter cold. The far-off smell of smoke from every mill along the river and the green musky scent of the water, only inches from the entrance of the cave.

And then, suddenly, much nearer now, the baying of the dogs.

"s.h.i.+t," said Harry, not much discomposed. "We better split up. I'll see you back at the quarters."

"Wait a-!"

But Harry was gone.

And the clamor was far too close, now, for him to dare shout, I don't know the way back, dammit! Somebody yelled, "There he is!"

?NINE.

January bolted straight into the water, plunged and floundered for the opposite bank. The bobbing lanterns were some distance off, where the trees thinned into a muddle of cypress knees, muck, and reeds, and his pursuers wasted time seeking dry ground before they realized there wasn't any; this gave January time to reach the woods. He cursed himself for having followed Harry blindly, without asking the way, and cursed Harry even more. In the lowering moonlight every oak, every hickory, every swamp-maple and thicket of hackberry looked just alike, and as unfamiliar as the landscape of China or the surface of the moon.

Even following the bayou didn't help, for there was no way of telling which way a bayou "ran."

They didn't "run" at all, most of the time, or sometimes seemed to flow in one direction, sometimes in another, depending on the river's rise. In any case it was too dark to tell. The voices called to one another in French, beyond the barking of the dogs: It was the Neys and not the Irish Rankins. "They'll sell you where you don't want to be," Harry had warned.

But running through the moonlit woods, memories came back to January, of childhood stories told by old Uncle Zacky about Compair Lapin and how he'd outwit Bouki the Hyena and Michie Lion by running along fence-rails, or doubling on his trail, or wading through water . . . All he'd have to do was lick his four paws and jump up in the air. . . . He could still see the agile old man's delighted, ridiculous imitation of the act.

And he smiled, understanding that Uncle Zacky hadn't been telling them about a rabbit at all.

He'd been telling them about this. How to avoid dogs. How to get to safety, and leave the whites behind scratching their heads. And as he doubled on his own trail, and JUMPED up in the air to grab the branch of an oak-as he scrambled along the limbs of the tree to the limbs of the next, watching below for water to land in January felt in his heart the exhilaration of knowing he was going to get away.

Of knowing he'd outwitted les blankittes.

Striding through the woods in the last of the moonlight, hearing the voices, the furious barking fading behind him, he wanted to sing. Nonsense words, alien words, slave-song African words he remembered his father singing: "Jinga bunga bungala bunga, Jinga bunga baby . . ."

His old piano master, the ramrod-spined Herr Kovald, who'd worked so hard to make him master of the beauty of Mozart and Bach and the floating wonderfulness of Pachelbel, would die of offended indignation.

"Jinga bunga bungala bunga, Jinga bunga baby."

There were songs for singing when you set forth on Quests for Enlightenment to the Temple of the Queen of the Night, January thought, and there were songs for singing when you'd just outrun a bunch of white Men with dogs who'd sell you down the river if they caught you.

He followed the sinking moon til he carne into the cane-rows, then worked his way along the ranks of silent rustling spears toward the river. The cane was thin, snarled and matted underfoot, cane ratooned so many times it was practically indistinguishable from wild gra.s.s, and this told him where he was: in the back fields of what had been the Refuge lands, fields the Daubrays hadn't yet brought back into productivity even after all these years. After a narrow belt of this he came into replanted acres, and worked his way riverward, til he came out of the cane nearly on top of what had been the big house, Gauthier Daubray's Refuge.

Cane was planted almost up to its walls. The oaks that had stood between it and the river had been felled. The house itself was a "house of twenty," as the Senegalese builders would have called it, meaning twenty cypress timbers had been hewn to support its floors on the brick piers that raised it above the ground. The dense shadows that cloaked its silent gallery hid every detail of its swampward side, but January saw that the tiny garconniere was shuttered fast, the pigeon coop boarded up. The cistern still stood beside the kitchen, however, and January ran a little water from its rusted tap, catching the icy flow in his hands. This wasn't particularly satisfactory, and he closed the tap and went to the kitchen to see what had been left by way of gourds or cups.

The kitchen door was closed but unshuttered. January took from his pocket the candle stub he, like Harry, habitually carried, and the little tin box of lucifers. By the new-sparked light he made out vacant shelves, bins emptied of their contents, dough troughs and an old rice cart. . . .

And the mark of the guede, written in red chalk and lampblack upon the wall.

The sight of it shocked him so that he nearly dropped the candle. A triangle topped with a cross, and stylized serpents. The skull and coffin of Baron Cemetery. Trailing lines scrawled over the floor, creeping like serpents toward the hearth. January fished automatically in his pocket and touched the blue beads of his rosary, whispered the first few words of the Ave, as a child would have ducked for shelter into the folds of the Queen of Heaven's blue robe.

Then, candle held high, he walked to the hearth, and examined the ashes there.

There were a lot of them. The fire had been kept going a long time. Its ashes were white and sunkenlooking, but clearly not anything like ten years old. A few weeks, he thought, no more.

The dark of the moon.

The moon's dark is the time when ill will lies strongest on the land.

The table had been used, too, though it had afterward been cleared and cleaned. He knelt to search underneath and found an a.s.sortment of fragmented leaves and stems, which told him this had been done at night, in bad lighting. He wrapped these in the cleanest rag he could find and tucked them in the pocket of his s.h.i.+rt. In the midden outside, behind the kitchen, he found buried a pot, a knife, a cutting board, and a thick wad of mushed and boiled leaves.

Oleander. He picked the leaves up gingerly, bandanna wrapped around his fingers. She-or he-had made the poison here.

Reuben's new wife Trinette? he wondered. Who had not left so much as a broken teacup at his grave? Jeanette, who'd been Mambo Jeanne's daughter? But surely she'd have poisoned Thierry first of all. Zuzu, who'd been sold away when the children in her care died? Her husband Lisbon?

Or was all this the work of the Daubray uncles, concealed from the wagging tongues in their own overcrowded family house?

But no white, he thought, would have invoked the guede's blessing on their act. Would they?

Coming back to the kitchen he looked around again, and saw, beside the door, a dozen tiny holes in the wood of the jamb. When he held the candle close they looked fresh, as if someone had stabbed the wood with an awl. Some were enlarged, as nail holes are enlarged when a nail is pried or twisted out; one contained a broken-off point of what looked like wood.

There had been a couple of long splinters, he recalled, on the kitchen floor among the leaf fragments. He unwrapped the rag from his pocket to make sure. A little more search near the door showed him a three-inch splinter of cane-stalk, sharpened to a point with a knife.

This too he wrapped up in his rag.

He'd hoped to find something salvageable in the kitchen, something he could trade to Harry for information or goodwill, but there was nothing. Whoever had come here to make poisons had brought his or her own pot, knife, and cutting board; chalk and lampblack. The small door at the back opened only into a cabinet, a shedlike back room stocked with wood for the kitchen hearth so the cook wouldn't have to fetch it from the main sheds by the mill. There wasn't even a kindling hatchet left. By the wavering candle-glow the veves seemed to watch him as he came back into the main kitchen. The wriggling snake-trails reached out after him when he turned his back. Field rats had taken residence here: They skittered along the shelves, waiting him out with scant patience, like parry hosts whose guests have lingered overlong.

Half numb with fatigue, January made his way through the thickets of cane that, with a kind of spite, the Daubray cousins had planted where Gauthier's lawns had once stretched to the river. He reached the levee, and from that shallow ridge looked at the moon, round and bright as an alabaster dish just above the trees of the western bank. The Refuge landing was a black tongue among black cypresses, jackstaff still pointing bravely at the sky, and beside it a crumbling boathouse crouched, a velvet shadow-beast lapping at the luminous water's verge.

In the dense chill of predawn January walked along the levee, thinking about Reuben and Trinette, and Lisbon's wife Zuzu. Of Fourchet himself; and young Marie-Noel Daubray. But his tired mind kept straying to Rose Vitrac, asleep in that shabby room on Rue de la Victoire near the wharves, looking young and vulnerable with her spectacles set on a pile of books at her bedside and her soft brown hair spread in waves about her on the pillow in the dark. And from those thoughts, his mind reached out to his father, and the green-black fields of cane that had once grown an hour's walk or less from the center of New Orleans, back when New Orleans had had actual ramparts where the Rue des Ramparts now ran.

He climbed the bluff above the Triomphe landing, untied the red bandanna there, and replaced it with a yellow. Thought for a pa.s.sing moment about Abis.h.a.g Shaw, and shook his head at the gangling backwoodsman's familiarity with the myth of Theseus.

A steamboat pa.s.sed in the darkness behind him, amid a shower of uprising sparks, like American fireworks on the Fourth of July. Among the oak trees the big house slumbered dark and still, the kitchen shuttered fast, the overseer's house a coal-lump of malice against the beating glare of the mill. As January watched, a light flared in its window: Jeanette making coffee for the white man whose concubine she was. Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the grain.

Sorrow and rage filled him. Bitter helplessness, and fear that edged daily toward the uncaring violence of outlawry and revolt. How dare they? he thought. How dare they do this, to her, to Quas.h.i.+e, to me? To everyone here?

The rage and rebellion that had scorched him since he'd helped punish Quas.h.i.+e boiled to a blistering head in him, poisoned by the knowledge that revolt was useless. As Nat Turner and all who'd followed him had found. Rebellion would only make matters worse. You couldn't fight them.

But like the skirl of bright unbidden music, he remembered half a dozen white men running madly about with their dogs in the bitter-cold woods, blaspheming and blowing on their fingers while they looked for his trail, like Bouki the Hyena when Compair Lapin ran off with his supper or his shoes or his wife.

You can't defeat the army, he thought. But if you lie quiet in cover you might save yourself and win a skirmish or two.

He was singing softly to himself as he came down the levee, as the first bell of morning sounded.

At noon, January lay down on the strip of waste ground at the end of the cane-rows and fell asleep as if he'd been struck over the head, not caring that it meant missing his dinner. Harry, he noticed--in the two seconds of consciousness between rec.u.mbence and blackness--didn't. In fact, Harry disappeared the moment Ajax yelled "Rice cart!" and didn't reemerge from the cane, sleek and pleased with himself, until seconds before the men were choused into the rows again. Time enough to rendezvous either with one of his many girlfriends or, more likely, with someone from the house or from one of the nearby houses.

He's got to be a machine.

They were cutting quite a ways downriver of the house, and back towards the cipriere. January had to fight to keep his mind from drifting, a dangerous thing when you were swinging half a yard of edged metal full force, the dust of the fields gummed with cane-juice to his hands and face and hair. Lack of sleep slowed his mind, and that was deadly. Hunger, too, now that he had no choice but to be awake. The singing helped, the rhythm of it focusing the mind without distracting it. Now and then some shouted phrase, some wailing fall of the music, would lift and turn his heart. Then down the line one of the women called out, "Look alive!" and he heard the crash and rustle of a horse, riding through the scattered stubble and trash.

Thierry, he thought, his stomach clenching, but it wasn't.

"What on earth is the meaning of this?"

Two men, mounted on bay hacks that January recognized as expensive. The younger rider was about January's own age, large and fair and portly, and clothed in a coat of costly malt-colored wool. His neckcloth was striped a vivid gold, and a tad too fancy for riding one's acres in. The older, perhaps eight years senior, had the same square chin and the same fair hair, though what was thick and mostly still flaxen, lying on the shoulders of his companion's inappropriate coat, was thin and graying on the older man's head; the man himself was narrower, smaller, and more compact. The difference between a hank of jerky, thought January, and a fat-marbled roast with sauce Bearnaise.

"Tell your men to stop," ordered the older man, drawing rein beside Ajax. "You're on Daubray land."

Ajax doffed his beaver hat at once, respectfully avoiding the mounted man's eyes. "Michie Louis, sir, it'd give me great happiness to oblige you, but Michie Fourchet'd skin me alive if I did." The driver's scarred, ugly face wore an expression of wholly specious concern. "He told us off to cut these fields today, and I can't go against what he said. b.u.mper!" he called, and his son, with the inevitable Nero at his heels, dashed up, water gourd dripping from his hand. "You run back to the house and get Michie Fourchet fast, so he and Michie Daubray can work this out between them."

The two boys fled, and Louis Daubray looked annoyed because the driver had refused to be bullied. The younger man, whom January guessed to be Hippolyte, said, "I told you he'd try something like this." And smote the field dust from his sleeves. "Well, look at the bubbies on that one," he added, small gray eyes twinkling in their pouches of fat, and he gestured with his quirt at Ajax's daughter Eve, working her first season at the cane carts with her mother in the women's gang. "Wonder what old Simon would charge for the pleasure of breaking her in?"

"Tell your men to stop," ordered Louis pettishly again, and gestured around him. "Your master may claim that this is his land, but it is indubitably my cane."

"Sir, the fact is I don't remember whether we planted this cane or you planted this cane, so you may very well be right." Ajax bowed again as he spoke, hat in hands and voice carefully neutral.

"But I can't go against Michie Fourchet's orders-"

"You very well can, when his orders are in direct contravention of the law!"

"He gets any more mad," murmured Gosport, in the thick African patois that was barely French at all, "he'll pop right up off that horse and spin around in the air," and there was a silent ripple of laughter among the men.