Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 14

Why, we have to pay ours at least two dollars a cord during the year-"

"That's a lie," said Marie-Noel. "You pay your men fifty cents as well."

"My dear cousine, I had hoped that a man's attentions would have schooled your manners a trifle," sighed her cousin, with the air of a man teasing a chained dog and hugely enjoying the sport. "Of course I was talking about the extra men we'll have to hire to cut wood to make up the difference. Though it seems to me..."

At that point Baptiste mounted the back steps with a big kitchen tray in his hands, filled with ham and eggs, cakes and pancakes, compotes and pitchers of cream. As he entered the pantry door he glanced in January's direction and January, conscious again of his soot-grimed and filthy clothing, knew the gallery was no place for a field hand to be loitering. The butler said nothing, but January knew he'd better not be there when Baptiste came out. He descended the steps, turning over in his mind the distance from Daubray to Mon Triomphe across the contested acres of Refuge, and how a man might come up from the river through the cane-fields south of the house to within a dozen yards of the woodsheds, unseen.

There was, of course, no question of looking for tracks anywhere near the sheds themselves. The ground was a vast gumbo of mud, slopped water, trampled ash, and burned wood. On the sides of the sheds that faced the mule paddock, the quarters, and the cane-fields, however, January found the scorched fragments of three or four oil jars, and in a weed-grown ditch by the first row of the cane a whole jar, the oil film still slick on its cool clay inner curve.

He straightened, considering the black charred heaps of the burned sheds and the intact, half- empty shed closest to the mill. In the dead of night it would be easy enough to move the jars from the storeroom under the house. Probably rolled, he thought-they contained about forty liters each and would have to come around the back of the kitchen, laundry, hospital, and barns. But they could be concealed in either of the two farther sheds, probably for a couple of days if hidden deeply enough behind the wood. Even a woman, or a man as slight as Agamemnon, could have managed easily given sufficient time.

Easier still, of course, if the jars had originated elsewhere.

As he'd earlier ascertained, when inspected by daylight the paths between the cane-rows downstream of the house bore the scuffed tramplings of dozens of pa.s.sages. The weeds and cane- trash, and the closeness of the rows, prevented him from distinguis.h.i.+ng anything that resembled the print of a man bearing a heavy weight, or of a woman rolling one; moreover, he wasn't sure how long such a mark would have lasted in the rough weeds. All of the prints he was able to make out were the brogans and quantiers of slaves.

He emerged from the cane into the bright morning sunlight in time to see Quas.h.i.+e limp stiffly from the burned ruins of the quarters and intercept Jeanette. The girl, who was helping Hope poke through what remained of Ajax's house, straightened and reached to embrace him, then drew back-his back was still a ma.s.s of bandages and crude dressings, s.m.u.tted and filthy with soot.

He took her in his arms.

Would they have fled together, wondered January, had they been able to find each other in the confusion? He saw how the girl's hands gripped the young man's muscular arms, how Quas.h.i.+e's head bent down over hers. Clearly, neither had been prepared.

Kiki was in bed when January knocked at her door. She called out, "Come!" and he ducked under the lintel; it was low, less than six feet, like most of those in the quarters. The single room, seen by daylight, was swept and neat. Pegs in the wall supported clean ap.r.o.ns, and a dozen white tignons lay folded on a shelf. Beside them gay dresses of red and blue calico had been put aside, in favor of mourning black. On the inside of the door a circled cross was chalked in red, to keep witches away, and in a corner three strands of blue beads and one of sh.e.l.ls hung before a stoppered calabash gourd. Herbs hung drying from the rafters. The blanket on the bed was red German wool, worn and faded but infinitely warmer and cleaner than those of January and his four cabin-mates. The faint scent of the turpentine used to discourage bedbugs ghosted on the air. There were sheets on the bed as well, the perquisite of house-servants the world over, and a pillow in a pillowcase-very worn but neatly mended with yellow thread-behind her back.

"You have no idea," said the cook with a tired smile, "how good it is to just lie here." She held out her hand to him. "Thank you, Ben."

"You feeling all right, Mamzelle Kiki?" He checked the small kettle that hung half-filled over the hearth, the tin cup on the table whose dregs breathed faintly of willow and briory. "Can I get you anything? Do anything for you?"

"You can make us a little tea." She pointed to the dented canister on the mantel. Used tea leaves from the house, another perquisite. But during his years in Paris, before January had forsaken the ill-paid surgery of the Hotel Dieu for a musician's life, he'd routinely bought used tea leaves from the cooks of the rich.

"What'll happen now?"

"They got a flag out on the landin', for Michie Robert to go upriver lookin' for cut wood. They don't get wood, Michie Fourchet is ruined."

"Good." There was bitter pleasure in her voice.

January thought about the fetus he had buried, and recalled her words of the night before: I cooked dinner for twenty people five hours after birthing a child. She who had no child now.

He'll only sell it. . . . Kneeling, he tested the side of the kettle with the backs of his fingers.

Finding the water almost boiling hot, he tipped it into the teapot with the leaves. "What's gonna happen to us-to the field hands-is we're in for hard work if nuthin' else. Maybe worse. Maybe a lot worse."

She said nothing, only sat with her hands clasped around her knees under the faded blanket, the bronze rosebud of her mouth set with the steadiness of one who understood early in life that she had to be strong. He found part of a sugarloaf and a cutter, arranged the chunks neatly on a small plate which he brought to her, balanced with the cup in his big hands. By the way she turned her face aside, January knew instinctively that she had not let even Gilles see anything she thought or felt.

After a moment she said, still not meeting his eyes, "This scares me, Ben."

"It scares me, too." He poured himself tea, a little bitter but drinkable. "Michie Hannibal, he told me this mornin' what a English fella, a Michie Bacon, said one time: It is the nature of extreme self-lovers, that they'll set a house on fire just to roast eggs. And that's what we're dealin' with here. Someone who don't care who gets hurt."

"That's fitting," said Kiki, her voice metallic calm. "For if ever there was a man who didn't care, it's him." January sighed, and gazed out through the door of e little back room, which faced, not the big house among its peaceful oaks, but the yard between kitchen, landry, hospital, and the little shop where an old slave named Pennydip made candles and soap. Beyond, the new sun glared harsh and heatless on the cane, a dark green wall that drank sweat and life and spirit.

Mon Triomphe. My Victory. "Even so," he said, caught between his earlier anger and a vast weariness. "You sow the wind and you'll reap the whirlwind-and the whirlwind doesn't care whose child lies asleep in its path. Six families just lost everying they had. Every white man in the parish is now thinking Rebels, and getting ready to kill. Two children are dead, and men and women are crying in pain, because somebody wanted to hurt Fourchet. And yes, he deserves to be hurt. But whoever boiled up oleander and dumped it in Michie Fourchet's liquor, they knew other people might drink that liquor. They knew your husband might be one of 'em, and from all I can tell he never hurt a soul in his life. But they wanted what they wanted more than they cared about Gilles or you or Reuben or Rodney, or what'll happen if les blankittes decide this is a revolt. They were like Baptiste's master, who sold him off because he'd rather have that eleven hundred dollars, thank you very much. Whoever this was, he sold your husband down the biggest river of 'em all, for the pleasure of seein' Fourchet ruined and dead."

Sharp and clear, the plantation bell began to ring. January flinched, a thousand memories cutting at him from whenever the bell rang at the wrong time of the day. The queasiness he hadn't experienced since his childhood; the dread of whatever les blankittes had decided to do.

Kiki put back the blankets and started to rise. "You got a bandage on one of your feet?" he asked.

She pulled up her nightdress to show him a surprisingly dainty foot for so heavy a woman, ankle delicate as a young girl's.

"I stepped on a piece of cane in the dark, if anyone asks," she said.

He answered her fleeting smile with one of his own, and handed her a black dress from the shelf.

She slipped it on over the white calico of the s.h.i.+ft and b.u.t.toned its big black b.u.t.tons.

"Just remember to limp, then." He took her arm and helped her to walk down to the open ground between the mill and the overseer's house.

?THIRTEEN.

Thierry stood on the rear steps of his cottage, whip lying loose against the leather of his boot. The last feathers of the night's deadly wind stirred the skirts of his coat. b.u.mper, dust-smeared and scared-looking, still banged at the bell; Esteban and Robert, rifles on their arms, flanked the overseer, their eyes blank as smoked beads. From around the corner of the garconniere the house- servants filed in a line, the three maids clinging close beside Baptiste, whom they already seemed to have taken to as a father or an uncle. The valet Cornwallis-the American and the Protestant- strode ahead, haughtily alone.

Madame Fourchet could be seen in the shadows of the big house's gallery, still in her soot- damaged shawl and gown. Taller and more opulent, Madame Helene was beside her, little Jean- Luc yanking furiously at his mother's grip on his arm. Fantine was still screaming.

This sound fell curiously distant and detached, against the silence in the yard, when the bell ceased. In the mill, the rollers were still.

"Now you listen to me." Thierry's soft voice cut the hush like rusted iron. "We had about enough of these little games. You think we don't know that some of you know who set those fires. Some of you know who damaged the knives, and set the fires in the mill and the barn. Know who's been writin' hoodoo to scare each other with. You think we don't know, but we know."

From the crowd's edge January watched the faces, the flicker of eyes meeting eyes. A gust of smoke from the mill doors blew over him, and an exhalation of heat, like the belch of h.e.l.l. No one spoke.

Thierry s.h.i.+fted his weight, like a dog setting itself to spring. "So I'm tellin' you. Whoever knows anythin' about the fires, or about them juju marks, or about the knives-you come forward right now. Juno-Ancilla. The man you're protectin'-they're protectin'-killed those kids of yours. You gonna let him get away with it?"

Ancilla cried out and pressed her face to Rodney's shoulder. Juno, an older woman, listened with a countenance of stone.

"All right." Thierry nodded as if he had expected this. "You want it this way, it'll be this way.

Ajax, Herc, line 'em up."

b.u.mper's tiny sister Milly started to cry. The men shuffled and milled, frightened and not certain what was wanted of them, looking at Ajax with questioning eyes. But the big driver just pushed them into line, so they went, each trying to garner a minute advantage in placement as the drivers pushed each gang into order. "Stand 'em straight, G.o.ddammit! Single file! I gotta draw you a picture?"

They formed up in lines, by gangs: main gang, second gang, women's gang, suckling gang. Old Pennydip, who watched the toddlers during the day, clutched her charges around her, face working with terror. "Get those brats in line, dammit!" bellowed Thierry, the unexpected roar making everyone jump.

"If they can't walk they go with their mamas, now how hard is that? House n.i.g.g.e.rs over there.

Baptiste, don't you know what a f.u.c.kin' line is? Now number off."

January had guessed already what was coming, and discreetly worked himself into a position a few places from the front of the main-gang line. The other men mostly hadn't had the advantage of a cla.s.sical education.

His number was eight. Gosport was ten. Nathan was twenty, that gap-toothed friendly man remarkable only for his ability to whittle the best toys in the quarter for the children. In the second gang Philippe was ten, Ti-Fred twenty. The four women taken were Flora, Ajax's daughter Eve, Chuma, and Cipria. Among the houseservants they were Baptiste, Agamemnon, and Vanille, Madame Helene's maid.

And if you touch the children, thought January, cold fury twisting in his chest, I will personally step out of this line and break your neck.

But even as he thought it he felt something in him falter, something in him ask, Will you really?

What good would it do? And he knew it would do no good at all.

After a long moment of standing and looking at the weeping youngsters of the hogmeat gang, Thierry seemed to realize-if he had not before-what would happen, should he decimate them as he was about to decimate their seniors. He turned away, and with his whip signed to Ajax and Herc to separate out those whose numbers were ten, or twenty.

"Now every one of those people is gonna be whipped." He spoke calmly again, surveying the crowd that had already begun to fall out of line, to clump and cling and seek comfort among themselves. "And it ain't me who's makin' it happen. It's you." January saw Esteban flinch and turn toward Thierry; saw him put aside what he was going to say. Saw him glance away from Agamemnon's horrified look of appeal.

"For the last time-Who started the fire in those sheds?"

A rising ripple of voices, a deadly muttering. Angry, and yet knowing already that a dozen lashed was better than what would happen if all rose up. January felt the violence like the breath of heat from the mouth of the mill. Felt every man look again at Ajax, and at Herc.

The two drivers folded their arms, impa.s.sive as statues, on either side of their charges. Behind Thierry, Robert and Esteban s.h.i.+fted the rifles in their arms.

From the river the hoa.r.s.e whistle of a steamboat sounded, an upstream boat putting out of the main channel toward the landing where a white flag flew from the jackstaff; Robert Fourchet turned his head. "You better get on, sir." Thierry spoke without taking his eyes from the slaves.

Gauging them. Understanding that the moment for rebellion had slipped past. "We can handle it from here."

Robert started back toward the house.

"Rodney, get your gang back into the mill," ordered Thierry. "We got little enough wood there as it is, let's not waste it. Ajax, Herc, take those folks and lock 'em up. 'Ceptin' for Ti-Fred. He's first."

Esteban wavered, looking as if he might speak, but it was Mohammed who stepped forward out of the milling crowd.

"Michie Thierry, Sir." The blacksmith bowed. "Michie Esteban. Beggin' your pardon, sir, but Baptiste, he's the one n.i.g.g.e.r on this place who can't possibly have done or known anythin' of this.

He only came here six days ago, not knowin' a soul, sir. Him and Ben."

"Why, I guess you're right, boy." Thierry stroked his mustache and nodded as if with deliberation.

"Guess maybe you better take Baptiste's place. Ajax," he added, as, without so much as a hesitation, the smith crossed over to the little knot of the selected. "Maybe we better get M'sieu Quas.h.i.+e in there for good measure. Somehow I just can't believe there's any hijinks here that he don't know about."

"G.o.d d.a.m.n it, you got no f.u.c.kin' right-!" Quas.h.i.+e, who had dodged along behind the crowd at once to speak to Jeanette, jerked his arm free of the driver's grasp. At once Esteban raised the muzzle of his gun.

"Me, too!" screamed Vanille, and threw herself forward as Herc began to push and nudge the prisoners toward the squat brick jailhouse. "Me, too! I wasn't here, me and Leander, we wasn't even here when the mill burned! M'sieu Robert, M'sieu Robert . . . !" Robert paused a step, already several yards off in the direction of the house. By the levee the steamboat whistled again, maneuvering in to the wharf. Thierry looked from Robert's face to Esteban's, and let out a crack of rude laughter.

Trying not to look as if he were trembling with relief, Leander bustled self-importantly to his master's side. "Best we get going, sir." He cast a spiteful glance back at the maid, with whose airs and self-importance he'd shared the small servants' quarters of a packet-boat from France not many weeks ago. "I've got your bag all packed, Michie Robert, and you know how Michie Ney hates to wait with a head of steam in the boilers."

Robert allowed himself to be led away. Grinning behind his mustache, Thierry said, "What about it, Esteban?" and the older son opened his mouth, then closed it again. Even as there wasn't a man in the quarters who would have come forward with information about another's transgressions, by instinct and custom and habit ingrained just as deeply, no white man was going to tamper with another white man's authority before the slaves. It was simply something that wouldn't happen.

Thierry grinned at the shocked betrayal on Agamemnon's face, and nudged Esteban with a conspiratorial elbow. "Don't worry, I won't scratch him up much! I'll skin his back for him but I won't touch his a.r.s.e!" And turning to Ajax and the main gang, he commanded, "Get that boy triced and then get those n.i.g.g.e.rs back to work! We got wood enough for a day's fires yet! And you," he added to January, as January started to lead the limping Kiki back toward the kitchen.

"You get out to the field right smart, understand? Your master gave you to us for payment while he's here and you ain't done two days' solid work yet."

"No, sir," agreed January, bobbing his head and trying to look frightened, and gritting his teeth til his jaw hurt. "Yes, sir."

Kiki stumbled with a gasp and a cry, and grasped at his arm for support. As January scooped her up into his arms he could feel the steady rhythm of her breath, not the shallow quick panting of pain. Meeting her eyes for an instant he saw no pain there either, only complicity, and he was hard pressed to keep his smile hidden. "I be out there right quick, sir."

"Whew, look at him tote that load!" he heard the overseer jest behind him. "Now, that's one strong black boy!"

"What can I do?" Kiki asked, as January laid her down on her bed again.

"You can tell me how many jars of oil they had stored under the house. The small jars, forty liters or so."

"Eight," said Kiki immediately. "Maybe ten. Michie Fourchet used to have me just pour out the oil so we could use the jars for drinking water, but Madame says, there's no point wasting it. . . .

Only of course we do pour it out, as soon as we need a jar for something. But there's eight or ten at the north end of the storeroom under the house."

January nodded, and glanced through the door again, as Pennydip climbed slowly up the brick step into her little shop, her thin back bent nearly double under the weight of her years. Ti-Jeanne the laundry woman hurried up after her, helping her inside.

"Can you get into the laundry room between now and Sunday night and have a look at the clothes before Ti-Jeanne puts them in to soak?" he asked. "Our hoodoo was working fast and working in the dark, and you and I have both emptied enough wash-buckets to know that somethin' almost always gets on you, of what you throw around. Will you do that?"

Kiki's eyes widened as she realized what he was talking about. "I'll do that," she said. "The house-servants and the family both. But what then? What if I find something?"

January was silent, knowing what she meant. Understanding her, because he too had been a slave, and he knew what all slaves know: that once you pa.s.s information, any information, along to the Man, it's out of your hands. Les blankittes are going to do about it what they will. It will be the worse for someone, and maybe not the person you thought.

He said softly, "We have to do something, Kiki. There's two children dead this morning."

"Children die all the time, Ben." Weary defeat stained her voice and he remembered the b.l.o.o.d.y sc.r.a.ps of flesh he'd buried not eight hours ago.

But that had been her choice. Juno and Ancilla, Bo and Claire had had none. He could only shake his head and repeat, "After last night, we have to do something."

He came around the corner of the kitchen in time to see the coachman Musenda bring the carriage to the rear of the house. The natty Leander emerged onto the gallery from the French doors of the room Robert shared with Madame Helene, burdened with a small portmanteau and a valise. As the valet hastened down the rear steps and loaded the luggage into the vehicle, Robert himself came out, and at the same moment Madame Fourchet emerged from the dining room, in a clean dress now, properly corseted and combed.

Their eyes met. She turned quickly to go back inside, but Robert reached her in a stride and caught her hands. There was desperate urgency in every line of his slim shoulders and straight back as he bent his head toward hers.

" . fear that something terrible may happen in my absence," he told Marie-Noel, as January stepped neatly under the shadows of the gallery and circled the house so that he stood almost beneath them. "You saw the marks on the walls, beneath the house, in the very room where you sleep. My darling, my darling, I fear for you. . . ."

"You have not the right to call me that."

"I know. Yet though you were only a child when first I knew you, I feel as though we have known each other for years. Can't you feel it? Don't turn away, my darling! Deny that you feel it if you can!"

"I deny it." Her voice was unshaken but so soft that January could only guess at what she said.

He heard the boards creak as Robert stepped back. "Then I can only beg you, take care."

"I will take care of him," she replied. And her footfalls retreated swiftly along the gallery, to the doors of her husband's office and so through to the room where Simon lay.

January slipped quickly through the door that led into the storerooms beneath the house. It was cold there, a long shadowy earth-smelling chamber whose low ceiling made him stoop his great height. The Senegalese builders who'd put the house together had founded it on piers of brick, each pier widening into a pyramid underground, so that the bricks drew up the groundwater and the storeroom was always slightly damp and cool. Long wooden wine racks stood at the upstream end, the bottles held in place by boards pierced and hinged and locked like stocks. Presumably Harry had copies of those keys, too.

The oil jars stood next to the wine rack. There were a half-dozen of the larger ones, three feet tall, standing in another corner, full of drinking water for the household. All over the quarters, in addition to everything else, women and children were patiently stirring blocks of alum in similar jars of rain water to purify it, to replace what had so casually been hurled on the flames.

Of the smaller jars, still sealed, only six remained. The earth floor around them was much trampled, but he saw where the jars had been tipped on their sides and rolled to the door.

"And I suppose," snapped Madame Helene's voice, so close to the storeroom door that January nearly brained himself on a ceiling-beam, straightening up in shock, "that it never occurred to you to bid good-bye to your wife?"