Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 11

"Little b.i.t.c.h put him up to it," muttered Louis Daubray, shading his eyes and gazing in the direction of the house. "Under that piety she always was a schemer." "She'll find her claims-if she wins them-come a little more expensive than she thought," remarked Hippolyte. "If she hasn't found so already. The first time he takes a knife to her dresses, or starts smas.h.i.+ng things she treasures . . ." He shook with a sudden chuckle of reminiscent laughter. "Do you remember the night old Simon took a hammer to Camille's pianoforte? And her staggering along the levee all done up in that ridiculous yellow ball dress, waving her opium bottle and screaming to all the boats to take her back to France?"

"That sour little puritan wouldn't care about her dresses, and if she ever fancied anything in her life other than the Bible I'd be surprised," muttered Louis. "That's the only reason Simon hasn't driven her off yet. She treasures nothing: no novels to tear up, no pianoforte to take a sledge to, no gla.s.s birds and music boxes to stamp, no lace to rip . . What, sir, is the meaning of this?"

For Simon Fourchet had appeared at a hand-gallop across the stubble, hatless, gray hair jerking behind him in the breeze.

"The meaning of this, you mangy weasel, is that it's harvest . . ."

All work in the cane-rows had ceased by this time, men and women both gathered around the cane carts, listening as un.o.bviously as they could. Finding himself next to Jeanette, January touched her shoulder gently, asked, "Is there someone on Daubray who'd know how to make gris- gris?"

"Mambo Hera," the girl said promptly. "Even my mama was afraid of Mambo Hera."

Like most of the women, she'd stripped off her coa.r.s.e woolen jacket and hiked up her skirt almost to the thigh. Sweat gummed her calico s.h.i.+ft to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and ran down her cheeks from beneath the tignon that bound up her hair, making cedar-red tracks in the mousy dust. "Before she got so crippled she was them boys' mammy-Michie Louis and Michie Hippolyte. My mama said in her prime she had the Power, more than any other woman in this parish. I remember Mambo Hera when I was just little: She was a scary woman in those days."

"But not now?"

"She's near ninety," put in Disappearing Willie, who stood just behind them. "And this past summer she had a palsy-stroke, and doesn't get around much. She's near blind, too."

"When she looks at you with those white eyes it still seems like she looks right through you, though." Maybe, thought January. But somehow he couldn't imagine a dim-sighted and crippled nonagenarian accomplis.h.i.+ng even the modest scramble up to the timbers of the mill, or slipping through Thierry's window to fetch a blanketful of knives to dump in the forge.

"I think all of 'em was scared to death of her," Jeanette went on. "Warn Enid's daughters, and Michie Louis's, and all of 'em over to Daubray. All except Mamzelle Marie-Noel-M'am Fourchet, I should say."

"It was the labor of my men who planted this cane here last season, and three years ago," Louis Daubray was shouting, waving his quirt before Fourchet's face. "My men who cleared the trashy wasteland that was all that was left here of the ruin our cousin had made of family land . . ."

Gosport was right, thought January. If Daubray got any more riled he would fly off his horse like a badly made toy.

"Mama would take me over there, and I'd see the girls, M'am Enid's daughters Aimee and Rosine, that were always dressed so pretty, and Michie Louis's daughter Loie. They were fifteen, sixteen then, and Michie Robert and all the other boys would ride over to court them, all but Michie Esteban, of course. The girls, they'd give Mambo Hera sugar and candy and sometimes they'd steal things like tobacco or earrings, when their mamas would get them from off the steamboats, to bribe her to make them gris-gris to get this boy or that boy they wanted." "Don't think I'm not aware that you'd rejoice if my crop failed!" Fourchet stormed at the two Daubrays. "And don't think I don't know that it hasn't stopped at rejoicing! I know perfectly well you were on my land the night my mill burned . . . !"

"Don't be ridiculous!" Hippolyte, who'd been lounging in his saddle eyeing Eve and Jeanette and the pet.i.te sullen-faced Trinette, straightened with a jerk. "I was pursuing that pestilent thief of a goods-trader whom you permit to tie up and set up shop on your land!"

"And who saw you, eh? I've heard all about how you followed Jones halfway down the river, but who was with you?"

"Do you call my brother a liar, sir?"

"But Mamzelle Marie-Noel," Jeanette went on softly, "she'd go by in her old made-over gown that she'd turned herself, just holding her Bible and her beads in her hands, and she wouldn't even so much as look at Mambo Hera. And Mambo Hera'd look after her and laugh."

". . . making free with the goods that are stolen from the rest of us! Why, I shouldn't be surprised if Jones gives you a cut of what he receives."

"Liar!" Fourchet lunged from his saddle, hands reaching for Hippolyte's throat. "Pig of a liar!"

Hippolyte's horse, not surprisingly, threw up her head with a squeal of indignation and reared, blundering into Louis's mount, and by the time Ajax, January, Gosport, and Hope had grabbed bridles and steadied would-be combatants from clambering down to take up the challenge on the ground, the immediate danger of a.s.sault was past. "I will send my friends to call an you, you perjuring filth, and in the meantime get your fat bottom and your scrawny brother off my wife's land!"

"Should you find any friends the length of this river willing to call on me or to perform any office whatsoever on your behalf, I will own myself to be astonished beyond speaking, and this is our family's land, and no possession of any thieving b.a.s.t.a.r.d of our cousin's Hibernian drab!"

"I thought you was good at the dozens, Ben," remarked Gosport, coming up beside January, after Hippolyte, Louis, and Fourchet had been separated once again. "But I would purely love to hear those two go at it!"

"And you get back to work!" screamed Fourchet, las.h.i.+ng at Ajax and the field hands with his quirt. "Idle, stupid blacks . . . !"

"Not on my land you're not!"

Fourchet lunged at les freres Daubray one more time and Ajax caught him back, expostulating with him to the extent that Louis and his brother were able to depart without the appearance of flight. The driver then had the task of respectfully talking his master out of pursuing the brothers through the cane and flogging them with Ajax's whip ("If you want to take it, sir, of course, but it'll leave me without anything to beat these lazy n.i.g.g.e.rs here with. . . ."), by which time Louis and Hippolyte were out of range. Trembling, Simon Fourchet leaned against his driver's shoulder, his red face suddenly white and his hand pressed to his chest, looking as he had following yesterday's outburst of rage at the smithy. January had the impression of a horse that has been galloped too far and too hard, windbroken, unable to run again.

Hope broke away from the slow-moving cane cart, picked up one of the water bottles, and brought it silently to the old man. The water spilled as he took it. "Thank you," Simon Fourchet said quietly, and drank. As the planter remounted and rode away January braced his knife on his shoe for two quick pa.s.ses with the whetstone, and returned to cutting.

Just before sunset three more riders appeared along the cart path, rough-clothed men on scrubby horses. "Lordy lordy," murmured the gap-toothed Nathan, "it's Sheriff Duffy." He dropped the billets onto the cut row, scooped the trash over onto the trash row, and nodded back toward the ape-browed, sharp-eyed unshaven man in the lead. The men riding with Duffy were of the rough cracker cla.s.s, spiritual brethren of the original owner of the hog that now hung in Disappearing Willie's cave up Lost Bayou, though one of them, January recognized, had to be related to the Belle Dame's cold-eyed master.

"Got a restraining order here," said Duffy in quite proper though thickly accented French, and extended a folded piece of paper. When Fourchet only crossed his arms and regarded the lawman with stubborn contempt, the man with the Ney eyes took it, handed it to the planter, and repeated the words. His French was, if anything, worse: the backwoods patois of French Acadia, but a native's French.

"You may inform your master, M'sieu Ney," retorted Fourchet, ignoring Sheriff Duffy completely, "that by tomorrow I will have Justice Rauche issue another such order against that thief Daubray and his wh.o.r.emaster brother, forbidding them to set foot upon my wife's land."

"That's as may be, sir," replied Duffy stolidly. "But for the moment you're to remove your men- and leave the cane."

"So Daubray may send his slaves to pick it up and grind it?" Fourchet spat the words, turning for the first time to stare at the sheriff with cold, half-mad eyes. He s.h.i.+fted his gaze to Ney. "Inform this American that I charge him to leave a guard here, lest my cane be stolen in the night by the same thieves who have poisoned my slaves and attempted to torch my mill and my barn."

"Simon, don't be a fool! That cane will be worthless in a day-"

"Tell him, Guy!"

Guy Ney sighed, and obeyed, evidently well aware who was going to get landed with the job of standing guard over nine acres of rotting cane-and he was correct. When Ajax and Hercules had organized the men and dumped the loaded cane back onto the ground, and both gangs walked back between tall green rows followed by the empty carts, January looked over his shoulder and saw the fair-haired Acadian sitting his horse, rifle propped on his thigh, among the stubble and cut rows and trash.

It being only an hour short of dark, January had hoped that the men would be released back to the quarters. This was an optimistic hope at best. Fourchet marched the men to another section of the fields just downstream of the mill, and started them to work, though in the daylight remaining they'd barely fill the carts one time. Exhaustion, hunger, and lack of sleep made January feel like his body was being raked through with steel harrows, but he made it through the twilight, and helped load the last of the carts by the flare of torches the suckling gang-the women pregnant, or too old for heavy work-brought down.

Knowing he'd be working until the moon was high hauling wood, he took the ash-pone and beans Gosport had put together that morning for tonight's supper, and carried it to the smithy.

Mohammed was just concluding his prayers for the night, kneeling on the dirty little square of faded carpet facing east. January recalled seeing the blacksmith so thirty-five years before, and asking him about it-it was the first time he had heard the name of Allah.

"Tell me about Lisbon," said January, "and about how Zuzu happened to be sold."

The griot nodded, as if the question did not surprise him. "They was married ten, twelve years, Lisbon and Auntie Zuzu," he said. "Lisbon was born on Bellefleur,"-January carefully made his face blank, with a little knit of his brows as if he had never heard of the place before-"the plantation Michie Fourchet used to own just outside New Orleans, just a year or two before the uprisin' here. Zuzu was brought in when she was sixteen, from the Locoul place dawn in St. John Parish. She was a flighty girl, always givin' this man and that man the eye, but she was good with children. She'd had a child herself by that time, and M'am Nanette Locoul saw how she watched over that baby, and the babies of the other women on the place. Zuzu was put in charge of the nursery down at Bellefleur, when Mamzelle Elvire was born, and just before Mamzelle Solange came along two years later, Zuzu and Lisbon married. She had four children by Lisbon: Nan, Roux, Sidonie, and Beau, Beau dyin' of pneumonia before he was two-it was a bad winter, that year. They did say as how Roux wasn't Lisbon's child but Boaz's, for he was mighty light, like Boaz, and both Zuzu and Lisbon are dark, but Lisbon loved Roux like his own."

"Did he love Zuzu?" January settled his back to the doorpost of the smithy.

Torchlight reflected through the mill windows etched the s.h.i.+ft of lines and wrinkles on the smith's face as Mohammed sorted through the truths of that question. "They got on well," he replied at last. "As to how much they loved each other. . . . When first she came, Zuzu walked out with Cicero, and Boaz, and Johnny, who was one of the footmen on Bellefleur in those days, and as I said she had a roving eye."

He rolled his prayer carpet neatly as he spoke and stowed it inside the door of his little room, built off the back of the smithy. With the path to the mill running a dozen feet from Mohammed's door, January didn't wonder that he hadn't heard someone enter the smithy from the other side and work the bellows; he must have long ago gotten used to noises, in the roulaison.

"But Lisbon was a driver, and a good one. He's slowed down some now after havin' the lung fever two years ago, he never quite got over that. Now, the way Michie Fourchet buys good service from men is to give them the women they want: as he gave Kiki to Reuben, and then later Trinette, after Gilles and M'am MarieNoel both asked him that Kiki and Gilles could be together."

"And I suppose," remarked January dryly, recalling Kiki's words, and Jeanette looking up at Thierry from the dust of the whipping-ground, "that what the woman wants doesn't enter into it."

Sitting down easily beside January with his own supper, the blacksmith met his eyes, not answering for a time: You know as well as I do. Then he said, "Michie Fourchet has never been a man to admit he'd paired up the wrong couple." He offered January salt pork and rice, and water from the covered jar beside the door, sweetened with a little sugar, and January gave the smith one of his yams.

"Even his own son, who hates that wife of his and the children she bore him. Kiki and Gilles were clever, asking him to let her be with Gilles on the day he'd brought M'am Marie-Noel home after their wedding. Reuben had hit Kiki bad that day and marked her face, but even then Gilles had to put it right, saying, 'You know, sir, how Reuben has changed, how he used to be a better man than he was when you first gave Kiki to him.' "

And in the s.h.i.+fted note of the griot's voice, January heard another voice, lighter and more cultured, with the accent of town. Gilles's voice, speaking out of the past, from beyond his grave.

"Meaning Reuben had changed, not Michie Fourchet had made a mistake in the first place. He was clever, that Gilles."

Clever, thought January, except where liquor was concerned.

The path from the woodsheds was quiet now as the men ate their suppers. Up by the front of the mill a baby cried, and a woman's soft voice shushed it-Trinette, January identified the sweet soft lisp. Herc's wife. Reuben's wife, after Gilles's "cleverness" had won Kiki from him, though the ten-month-old child she carried to the fields to work with her, and to the mill at night, was definitely the lighter-skinned Hercules's child.

"Well, whatever Zuzu thought of the matter, Michie Fourchet gave her to Lisbon because he wanted Lisbon's good work, and the pair of them got on well enough. Like I said, there was good reason to think Roux was Boaz's son rather than Lisbon's, and everybody knew for sure that Lisbon fathered girls on Quinette and Heloise. And now and then Zuzu and Lisbon would have it out, like all married couples. But the true thing is that both of them loved the children she bore, loved them dearly. "She loved M'am Camille's children, too. For all her faults Zuzu was a woman of great love.

Whatever Michie Robert says, this wasn't true of M'am Camille. She was a beautiful woman, and a brilliant one, but M'am Camille wasn't happy, especially not after Michie Fourchet sold his place Bellefleur. His sister died, who'd been running Triomphe ever since the uprising here in 'ninety-eight, and Michie Fourchet fought with her husband at the funeral and told him never to come back. And the town was growing. Men offered Michie Fourchet a lot of money for the Bellefleur lands. So he sold Bellefleur, and most of the slaves from it, and moved the rest of us up here to Mon Triomphe."

January was silent, remembering that place, that world of his birth. Remembering in his childhood how close the cipriere had lain, a wildness of marsh and silence, endless in all directions, save for just around the little walled town.

Mohammed mopped the last of the beans with a fragment of corn-bread. "M'am Camille had been all right mostly," he said, "when she'd been able to go into town to the opera, and to buy books and see her French aunt and her friends. Out here I think she felt alone. Well, a lot of us did, that had friends, or abroadwives or husbands in town, and in the plantations round about town. M'am Camille, she'd always been hot and cold towards those three children of hers, holding onto them tight one minute then pus.h.i.+ng them off the next because she had to get dressed for some party, or wanted to play her piano or read. She left Michie Robert in school with the Jesuits and came into town to see him whenever she could-to see him and to see her friends-but the little girls she mostly ignored, and it was Zuzu that raised them. All she wanted was to go back to France. It wasn't a good time."

"No." January thought of his own anger at being separated from the music he loved. At feeling his hands grow stiffer and more clumsy each day, and seeing the tide of days flow between himself and Rose, days that could be sweet and were instead bitter with hard work, isolation, and fear. No novels to rip up, Hippolyte Daubray had chuckled. No gla.s.s birds and music boxes to stamp. . . .

As if he'd pa.s.sed her ghost on the levee last night, January saw a woman in a yellow dress staggering beside the river with an opium bottle in her hand, screaming to the boats to take her back to France. And Camille had to come down from the levee sometime, he thought. And there was only the house to go back to when she did.

"Zuzu kept the girls away from their father as much as she could," went on Mohammed, "for he'd take out his hate of his wife on them. When Mamzelle Solange was two or three, M'am Camille bore another son." Glancing aside at him January saw the untold half of that tale in his eyes: how it must have come about that she conceived them, to a man she would never have willingly bedded.

"A year later she bore another, and the first one a stout boy by then, crawling all around the place with Zuzu after him, laughing. M'am Camille was jealous that little Toussaint would go to Zu rather than to his mother. She used to slap Zuzu, and once or twice thrashed her with a cane-stalk for being uppity, when she'd catch her playing with the children. She'd seldom play with them herself. Then one summer little Toussaint died, laid down on his bed in the nursery taking a nap.

It was like Zuzu had lost one of her own sons. The boy'd had no fever, though there was some sickness in the quarters that summer, like there always is. And two weeks later the baby died, too, the same way: was alive when Zuzu laid him down, and when she came back into the room he was dead."

Down at the front of the mill Danny the night driver's scratchy tenor sang out, calling, "Time to pick it up again, boys," and from the direction of the quarters the men who'd gone to their cabins straggled back along the path by the mill wall, talking to one another and laughing. January heard Parson say, ". . . so fat they hired her out to schools for a globe . . ." and wondered where he'd picked up that fragment of Shakespearean insult.

It was time, he knew, to go back to work. "And that's when they sold Zuzu?"

Mohammed nodded. "M'am Camille took on somethin' desperate, of course, and Michie Fourchet was drunk for near on to two weeks. Michie Esteban and Michie Robert ran the plantation. Zuzu was sick with grief, swearin' she'd sooner have died herself than see those two babies come to harm, but for spite Michie Fourchet sold her off separate from her children. Sold her for a field hand, too. M'am Camille never got over it," he added, brus.h.i.+ng the last of the cornmeal crumbs from his hands.

"Yet they only sold her down to Voussaire."

The blacksmith nodded. "Nan and Roux went to Lescelles, just upriver from here, but it's a little place. They was sold away from there this summer, to a dealer. But Sidonie's still on Daubray itself. Pretty, she is, and just married this spring-isn't she, Lisbon?" For the driver himself had come walking along the path from the quarters, a stout spry man arm in arm with a young woman named Zarabelle, with whom January had seen him at the shout.

"Sidonie?" Lisbon smiled with gap-toothed pride. "She's so pretty the roses take shame and ask her pardon when she walks by."

"Prettier than Zarabelle?" teased Harry, ambling along the path just behind them, and Lisbon and Zarabelle laughed and nudged each other the way that lovers do. "You better watch out, or one day she'll go down to Voussaire and sit down with Zuzu for tea. . . ."

"Now, whoa, how fair is that?" objected Lisbon. "How is it women can sit and talk about men, and they get all p.r.i.c.kly and hot when they think men are talking about them? What if I went and had tea with Syphax, and talked to him about Zuzu?"

"Syphax is Zuzu's husband?" January fell into step with them as they headed along the trash piles toward the lights of the roundhouse windows.

"Her latest," said Harry, which made Lisbon laugh. "You wouldn't happen to know," asked January, in a softer voice, as Lisbon and his ladyfriend moved out ahead of them and left him and Harry in the dense shadows along the wall, "whether Zuzu knew any juju, would you?"

Harry paused, mobile eyebrows' flicking up. "You don't think Zuzu might be our hoodoo?"

"I don't know," said January. "I'm sort of curious."

He saw something alter in the young man's bright intelligent eyes. Something in the back of them, as if he were sorting out a hand of cards. "You curious enough to do another little favor for me tonight? Because it so happens," Harry added, with an ingenuous smile, "that I'm headed on down to voussaire myself tonight, as soon as I can bribe Herc to let me slip away."

?TEN.

"Somebody told you I was a mambo?" Auntie Zu made a shooing gesture with one big bony hand. "Shus.h.!.+"

January had already taken note of the stoppered bottle on the shelf in the corner of Zuzu's cabin, nearly invisible in the shadows thrown by the single tallow dip, before which sat a saucer filled with white sand and mola.s.ses, and of the sieve that hung beside the door.

"They did tell me you might be the one to take the fix off me," he said apologetically, and s.h.i.+fted his aching shoulders. Carrying twenty-five pounds of pork five miles through the twisting paths of cipriere and canefield was no joke. "I don't know who put it on me, whether it was just Mamzelle Jeanette, or Mambo Hera on Daubray, or maybe somebody else. . . ."

"That Harry," sighed the woman, and shook her head. "What'd you find . . . ?"

"Ben," he supplied, to the questioning tilt in her voice. "I'm the one staying at Triomphe while my gentleman gets better enough to travel."

She nodded, evidently familiar with the story. There was enough coming and going between Triomphe and Daubray, and Daubray and Voussaire, to have spread that piece of information over half the parish.

"When I unrolled my blankets last night I found a chicken-foot in 'em," January went on. "I didn't tell n.o.body, because-well, you're in a new place . . . But I can see I could have got somebody angry at me. I did help trice up another man, Quas.h.i.+e, for the overseer to whip, but if I hadn't . . ."

"Jeanette's man," sighed Zuzu. She shook her head. From what Lisbon had said of her, and Mohammed, January had expected a pert if aging strumpet, but Auntie Zuzu was tallish, thin as a slat, and plain-and none of it made the slightest difference when that big mouth smiled, and those bright black roving eyes sized him up with playful ravenous joy. She was in her midthirties and missing a few teeth, her black frizzy hair braided in dozens of strings, and like every other field hand on every plantation up and down the river during roulaison was ill-washed and worn- looking. The cabin bore signs of hasty and perfunctory cleaning, and when Harry had knocked, Zuzu had been in the process of bedding down three weary but relatively clean children.

"If it's a chicken-foot I'd say it's just Jeanette." Aunt Zuzu went to the shelf where the bottle sat, and took a couple of jars, which she carried to the doorway. "And I can't blame her for being angry, for all you didn't have any choice about what you did. Get me a dipper of water, would you? Thanks." January followed her outside, carrying a dripping gourdful of water from the jar.

The quarters on Voussaire were quiet. Dim splotches of orange light marked where the women had come back from the mill, whose fires still blazed at the far end of the muddy street, and January could hear a woman's voice from somewhere nearby: "And the bear say, 'Who is this High John the Conqueror, that everyone say is the King of the World?' And he laid in wait for him behind a bush. . . ."

His father had told him that story, January remembered, smiling. And like this unknown woman he'd given Compair Bear a big gruff deep voice, and had rolled that line of it over on his tongue, how the bear lay in wait for High John the Conqueror . . . and came to some serious grief.

"Here." Aunt Zuzu took his hand in hers: rough warm fingers, cramped and clumsy from a day's work with the cane. She sponged water over it, and January smelled in the flickering darkness the vague sweetness of crushed flowers. The light from the doorway limned her profile, and through the aperture he could see the children sitting up and watching their mother from the room's single bed. A boy of eight, a boy of six, and a little girl just big enough to walk, three pairs of great s.h.i.+ning dark eyes. Zuzu took his other hand and washed it, too-honeysuckle on the right, January guessed, and verbena on the left, just as Mambo Jeanne had taught Olympe when Olympe was barely bigger than that little dark-eyed girl.

Here again, thought January, he walked in the world les blankittes didn't know about and couldn't know about, the nighttime world of the quarters and the pathways and the cipriere. The world of Compair Lapin and magic dogs and the platt-eye devil and tales about little boys and their wise grandmothers. The world beyond the big house. He sensed it all around him in the quarters, that secret life. Smelled sausage and rice cooking for tomorrow's dinner beneath the gritty sweet of boiling sugar, and heard voices mutter over small barters and bits of gossip, the cluck of chickens hanging up in their baskets for the night and the slosh of water behind the next cabin as someone washed the field dirt from her hair. Through the black wriggly outlines of the oaks, he could glimpse the lights of the big house, where Monsieur Voussaire and his family consumed the cook's roasts and tarts and sauces, before Monsieur and his son or sons returned to supervise the night-work at the mill.

All those people he saw on their galleries from the deck of the Belle Dame, thought January, the women in their bright dresses and the children playing with dolls and toy guns. Women who were lonely, maybe, whose husbands treated them like dogs and who had no family they could turn to for protection. Men who drank to ease an anger they could not bear. He felt as if the whole night sang to him and he understood its mingling song, about time and lives and change, but his heart and his body were too sore and too weary to take it in.

"There," said Aunt Zuzu. "If you find anything else, you bring it on here to me and I'll take a look at it, but I think you won't. And don't blame Jeanette for being mad. You see someone you love get hurt like that, you hit out at whoever you can. It does no good. . . ." She shook her head, her face grave and sad and her eyes, as Rose's sometimes were, gently amused. "But sometimes it's all you can do. And you," she added, her tone changing to playful annoyance as Harry appeared once more in the dark of the street, "you don't go around tellin' half the parish I'm a witch, you hear me? I have enough trouble gettin' people to respect me as it is."

Harry was with a big bearded balding man whose sooty clothing and leather ap.r.o.n identified him as the plantation blacksmith; the smith stepped over to Aunt Zuzu and gave her a mighty hug around the waist, and the two of them kissed. "Got that pork ready to salt away?" the smith asked, and Aunt Zuzu nodded.

"I'll get it cookin' 'fore we go to bed. Tom!" she added, furious, as a child squealed in the house and the oldest boy attempted to hide something in the blankets. "You let your brother alone! I swear . . ." She sprang up the step and into the cabin, and there was a great flurrying of bedclothes and protesting denials.

"Gettin' late," said the smith. "This boy here and his keys!" And he poked Harry, who tried to look innocent.

"Keys?" Zuzu came out of the cabin again, a tube of maiden cane in her hand and an expression of indignation on her face, "One day somebody's going to dig up under that house of yours, Harry, and they'll find copies of all those keys to this smokehouse and that brewery and the other place all over the parish-"

"Never!" protested Harry. "Never! Besides, if I didn't keep up with getting new keys every time Michie Fourchet got a new cellaret or a new lock on his salt-box, how'd you get rum or cinnamon or whatever when you need it?"

"I can buy whatever I need from False River Jones,' Zuztz replied haughtily. "I don't need the likes of you spreading stories around about me." She held up the maiden cane, evidently the forbidden toy, and dropped a long thin thorn into it, which she then blew, like a dart, at the door of the cabin across the way. "You as bad as they are," grinned the smith, whom January deduced to be her husband Syphax.

"'Worse," said Zuzu. "I can't hit the broad side of a barn with one of these, and Tom pegged one of Michie Randall's carriage horses in the hock with it the other day and nearly started a runaway.

I thought I'd die laughing. And just as well Harry did lose the key to that cellaret when he did,"

she added, glancing over at January, bringing him back into the little group, as if he were a longtime friend. She gestured with the confiscated blowpipe. "I asked him for a little whiskey about three weeks ago, when I needed some for a conjure and it was before the trader comes. He said he'd lost the key to the cellaret-"