Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 15

"Madame, the boat awaits me." Robert's voice was toneless. "I could not stay to seek you."

"You stayed long enough to have a little tete-a-tete with that snivelly child."

"You are speaking of my stepmother, Madame, and your mother-in-law." "I am speaking of a sly, encroaching hussy who entrapped your father-"

"Madame," said Robert, "we've spoken of this before. I see nothing to be gained by has.h.i.+ng it through again."

"You mean you're so enamored of that pious mealymouthed hypocrite that you won't hear a word against her! Well, good luck in getting any farther than that glove of hers you have secreted in your desk drawer! You'll have your work cut out to add her to your tally of mistresses! And good luck with your father if he ever finds one of the love-notes you've been sending. . . ."

"Madame. . . ."

January had edged his way, silent as a huge black cat, to the door of the storeroom. Even standing far enough back that he could not be visible, he could see Robert and his wife clearly, in that narrow ribbon of brightness: the lively green of that wasp-waisted frockcoat, the woman lush as a peony in her lappets and swags and curls. Robert had taken her wrist in a crus.h.i.+ng grip, twisting her arm to one side; his own countenance, icy with fury, almost a stranger's.

"I have sent nothing to my stepmother," he said, very quietly. "And you'll find if you go to my father with such a lie it will go the worse for you, and for me, and for our children. Do you understand?"

Helene said nothing, but her red mouth worked a little, between the desire to have the last word and the inability to formulate any reply sufficiently witty and cutting to hurt that cold and erudite front. Into that silence children's voices broke, Jean-Luc screeching, "Papa, bring me something!

Bring me something from Baton Rouge!" and little Fantine adding her shrill whistling screams to the din. Tiny feet clattered furiously on the gallery, followed by Marthe's heavy tread.

Robert's face twisted in revulsion. He s.h.i.+fted his grip on his wife's wrist, and bent to kiss her hand. Jean-Luc swarmed down the stairs, grabbing his father's coat. "Can I go? Can I go? I want to go!"

"Is there anything you'd like me to send you from Baton Rouge?" Robert asked Helene.

Helene s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand back. "I hate you!" January heard her feet creak on the boards of the steps, and then of the gallery, as she ran away back to the nursery. The children continued to clutch their father's coattails and scream until Marthe dragged them away. "Shush now! Your grandpere's sick! Shus.h.!.+"

Neither shushed. His own mother, January reflected, would have taken a cane-stalk to him if he'd displayed manners like that.

Robert climbed into the carriage, on whose neat perch Leander stood elaborately admiring the wainscot of shadow on the whitewashed brick of the kitchen, laundry room, and candle shop.

Musenda's voice called out "Away, girls!" to the carriage team, and there was a scrunch of wheels and hooves, a gay retreating jingle of harness. January crossed the damp uneven earth of the storeroom floor to the front entrance, which looked out beneath the gallery stairs, and saw the brightpainted green-and-black vehicle come around the side of the house and head down to the levee, where the Belle Dame steamed impatiently at the plantation wharf.

On the point above, the green bandanna flickered in the wind.

The short winter daylight was beginning to wester when little Obo, the smallest of the hogmeat gang, came running out to the field with the message that Michie Hannibal wanted January back at the house.

"Man, he got to know somethin' about Michie Hannibal that Michie Hannibal don't want known,"

jeered Kadar good-naturedly, as January straightened his aching back.

"Yeah, he say to him, 'Hey, you send for me about sunset, so it'll be too late for me to go back out,' " amplified Taswell with a grin. " 'Oh, and have some chicken ready for me, too,' " added Laertes, and January swiped his hand dismissively at them.

"Chicken?" he said disbelievingly. "Aw, if I knowed anythin' to blackmail Michie Hannibal with, I'd ask him to set me up with Ariadne," and that got a general laugh, for the housemaid was as haughty as she was pretty. In point of fact January guessed why Hannibal was sending for him.

Across the cut acres, the smokestacks of a downriver steamboat could be seen gliding along the levee, and January guessed the flag had been put out again, and Hannibal was bound away for New Orleans.

This indeed proved to be the case. When January reached the garconniere, Cornwallis was just finis.h.i.+ng strapping up Hannibal's valise; the valet looked out through the French doors and said in a dry voice, "We're doing fine, Ben," accompanied by a glance that brought a hot flush to January's face with his consciousness of the field dust in his clothing, the stink of sweat that, in spite of a wash in the stable trough, still permeated his flesh, the muck on his coa.r.s.e shoes.

"Ben, thank you for coming." Hannibal rose from the chair, where he'd been doing a good imitation of a man too exhausted by the effort of dressing himself to continue to pack, and staggered artistically to the door. January caught his arm to steady him and, with the neatness of a gentleman turning a lady in the waltz, guided him out onto the gallery. "You be good, and mind what Michie Fourchet and Madame Marie-Noel tell you," admonished Hannibal. "I should be back tomorrow evening, or the day after at the most. It shouldn't take me very long to see Dr.

Aude-clay." His eyes flicked back toward the room and Cornwallis, as he twisted the name of Esteban's lover into childish pig-Latin.

January inclined his head to show he understood. A hush hung over the house and grounds-on his way in from the fields January had heard the crack of the whip, and coming past the jail had seen Ajax just untying his own daughter Eve from the whipping frame. The girl was still on her feet, though she held tight to Ajax's arm. January guessed she'd had only a few strokes. Thierry was already walking toward his house. Tired from a day's hard work.

"I wish you would take my excuses to Michie Capulet in New River about coming to see his sister. I've spoken already to Madame Fourchet about letting you go tomorrow." January yanked his mind back with an effort as Hannibal handed him the letter he'd written, and a pa.s.s. The packet of papers felt thick and January thumbed them apart. There were three pa.s.ses. Two were dated simply November, the numerals left blank.

January nodded again. "I surely will do that, Michie Hannibal. Now, you take care of yourself on that boat, and when you get to town you go straight back to Michie Georges's and lie down. You still look mighty peaked."

"I a.s.sure you, amicus meus, I'll be fine. As the great Homer says: Quid plus me oportet Shavum quaero." The fiddler spoke the Latin phrase as though it were a quote, but in fact it was a query: Is there anything further I need to ask of Shaw?

January manufactured a hearty chuckle. "Lordy, Michie Hannibal, you're as bad as Michie Georges, with all them foreign tongues. What's he say, that business about jurisconsultum consulere and findin' condicionem testamentum domino?"

Hannibal laughed, as at a quaint misp.r.o.nunciation of words-which were in fact seeing a lawyer and provisions of the master's will. "We'll make a scholar of you yet, Ben. Testamentum loc.u.mquae actz?" The will and the status of the lawsuit?

January nodded. "And-what's he say?" He furrowed his brow. "Oh, Quid scire Shavus de Fluvius Fictus."

The steamboat groaned at the landing: the Heroine, a far larger boat than the Belle Dame. The steam was more than a signal, for the water pumps on most boats were operated by the engines, and a vessel that lay too long at wharf had to damp its fires or risk a boiler explosion. Hannibal clapped January fraternally on the bicep and said, "Solus pro virili parte ago. Mind yourself while you're here." He turned to take his leave of Madame Fourchet, who had emerged from the dining room looking tired and worried. She smiled shyly as he bent over her hand.

'Mine eye hath played the painter and hath steeled Thy beauty's form in table of my heart."

He even managed a creditable translation of Shakespeare into French.

Marie-Noel drew her hand back, uncertain-probably, thought January, she'd had enough poetic flirtation from Robert-but something about the bright twinkle in Hannibal's eye informed her that this tribute to her moderate prettiness was tendered in grat.i.tude and friends.h.i.+p, not in entreaty for response.

She smiled, and blushed, and looked aside, and didn't know what to say.

"Until I return, oh beautiful lady. Thank M'sieu Fourchet for his hospitality for me, and please convey my best wishes for his swift recovery."

He descended the steps to the waiting carriage, as Robert had done earlier in the day, Cornwallis following with the portmanteau behind. From the back step January watched the carriage swing around the end of the garconniere wing, and so past Thierry's house and out to the levee in the long gold slant of the westering sun, leaving him alone.

Alone on Mon Triomphe, he thought.

Behind him he heard Fourchet hoa.r.s.ely cursing Cornwallis for not bringing him his cigars, and distantly, the sound of Eve weeping as her father led her back to the shelter of a friend's cabin.

Alone and, for all anyone there knew, a slave.

He put the thought from his mind as well as he could. The address Hannibal had given as his own was, in fact, Shaw's. Given the fiddler's fragile health, should anything adverse occur, January would simply be "returned" to the "family."

He was safe, he reminded himself. He was in no peril. All he could do now was trust.

Trust that Hannibal would reach New Orleans more or less sober, and remain sober for as long as it took to locate Shaw and find out who Claude Molineaux was and whether his dealings with his dear and lifelong friend Esteban Fourchet went any farther than dear and lifelong friends.h.i.+p.

Trust that Shaw would know something about Fourchet's lawsuit against the Daubrays, or something concerning the elusive False River Jones.

Trust that he himself wasn't so exhausted, so numbed by work and lack of sleep-even s.h.i.+rking a few hours a day as he was-that he wasn't missing something vital, something that he should be seeing.

Trust, he thought, turning away and walking back toward the fields, that some disaster wouldn't befall his hapless friend and leave him stranded here, sold down the river into this small domain ruled by death.

When he looked back later on that chilly glittering afternoon by the river, he reflected that not only was his trust betrayed on all four counts-a good round average, for a black man relying on Fate's good will in Louisiana-but he missed even considering the biggest catastrophe of all, lying hidden under the calm surface of the next forty-eight hours like a snag in the river that rips the heart out of a boat, and slaughters all on board.

The worst was that it was one he should have foreseen.

?FOURTEEN.

"Ben." Kiki must have been watching the back of the house, for she stepped from the kitchen as he made his way through the yard and toward the field path once more. The shadows were slanting over but January guessed there was another hour and a half of work in the full daylight, plus whatever twilight, torch-lit labor Thierry would decree.

The scents of new biscuits, of long-roasting pork, of chicken and garlic surged over him like bathwater as he crossed the yard to the brick loggia under the kitchen gallery. His stomach flinched and he hated Fourchet anew. "What is it?" Kiki's foot, he saw, was still swathed in bandages. She even remembered to limp on it until they got away from the house.

"A couple of them that Thierry whipped." She spoke quietly; spoke too as if he'd never made the pretense of being an ignorant field hand, and she had never scorned him. "Would you have a look at them? They're bad off."

January nodded. He'd planned to look in at the hospital. "You got prince's pine in that satchel of yours? Ground holly? Sa.s.safras?"

"I don't have ground holly but I know where it grows."

"Get me some, if you would, please. Make a strong tea out of the roots, the color of coffee if you can get it that dark." He followed her to her door and took the packets of herbs she handed him.

"I used willow bark on them already. Ti-Fred and Vanille are running a fever, it's them I worried about most. That Vanille, she's too thin. She has too much white blood in her to be tough."

She'd been raised too gently, rather, thought January, as he climbed the steps of the rough-built cabin that served as a slave hospital. This was probably the first real beating of her life.

Most of those Thierry had lashed throughout the day had already returned to their cabins. January never ceased to marvel at the physical toughness, the matter-of-fact stoicism, of those who'd been born his brothers and sisters in bondage. Of those who'd been burned in last night's fire only Marquis remained, moaning softly in the wet sheets propped around him. Throughout the day the children in the hogmeat gang had come out to the fields with the latest bulletins: He beat Quas.h.i.+e fifty strokes an' Quas.h.i.+e never made a sound, but Jeanette, she sat behind the kitchen an' cried an'

cried. Agamemnon, he fainted dead away after five strokes. Mohammed, he prayed when Thierry beat him, yelled out loud to his Allah-G.o.d to help him.

Two of the women, Flora and Chuma, had simply pulled their blouses up over their bleeding backs and gone out to the field to finish their workday. January had seen them loading the cane cart on his way in to speak to Hannibal.

Ti-Fred, as the first man beaten that morning, had gotten the overseer's first anger and first strength. He lay on his belly like a dead man, barely breathing, face and hands clammy with shock. In the next cot Boaz, a man of about January's age, lay far gone in the pneumonia that his body was too exhausted by a lifetime's overwork to resist. Quas.h.i.+e, on another bunk, was motionless as the image of a dead G.o.d. Two beatings in five days, thought January, checking Boaz's pulse, then Quas.h.i.+e's, with a sickening sense of despair. For Quas.h.i.+e it was truly, now, flee or die.

He examined Marquis's raw, blistered skin for sign of infection, and added another chunk of wood to the fire in the cabin's little hearth. The last one. Thierry must have raided even the hospital's small store to feed the mill furnaces.

Madame Helene's maid Vanille was weeping, feverish exhausted tears, the kind of broken sobbing that feeds on itself. A small pot sat on the grate above the hearth flames-there was no pothook-and January poured water into a gourd and washed his hands again. In a second gourd he made up a sa.s.safras wash, and set the little kettle of willow-bark tea closer to the flames to warm again.

"Michie Robert?" whispered Vanille, when January carefully removed the poultice from the young woman's back.

"Ssshh, shush. You'll be all right."

Vanille pressed her face into the corn-shuck mattress and began to cry again as he trickled the warm water over her flesh. He counted the stripes-ten lashes. Nothing, to a field hand. "He didn't speak a word," she whispered. "He let me be beaten and he didn't speak a word."

January thought of the valet Agamemnon, turning anguished eyes toward Esteban. "Did you think he would?" he asked gently, and she shuddered.

"He should have looked after me," murmured the girl. The smell of sa.s.safras was a strong clean sharpness, summery against the smells of sweat and blood. "He should have spoke. He did before, when M'am Helene would get mad. He said, 'Don't you take it out on her, 'cause you hate M'am Fourchet.' Why didn't he speak now?"

"Is she jealous about the love letters?" January patted lightly with a clean cloth, spoke in his softest voice, in his best French, masters' French, house-servant French. Under the gentle warmth of the rinse the gashed skin grinned in red slits. She would always carry these marks; they would lower her price if she were sold, maybe prevent her from being bought for a house-servant at all.

"The love letters Michie Robert writes?"

"It was that woman in Paris. First her, and now M'am Fourchet. She thought he was all hers, when his papa made him marry her. But there was that woman . . ."

"A mistress?"

"A wh.o.r.e," whispered Vanille. "If she's a mistress, he'd have given her someplace nice. After he went out three, four, five times, M'am Helene followed him in a cab, she and I together. We followed him to this dirty house in a dirty part of town, and saw them through a window. Saw her on her bed, and Michie Robert sitting by her, holding her in his arms. M'am Helene was so angry she cried. When he gave her diamond earrings-same as he gave his sister when he left her at that school-M'am Helene said, Did you give a pair to your old wh.o.r.e, too? 'Cause she was old. Old and ugly, in that torn-up lace wrapper. And he hit her."

She laid her forehead against January's arm, tears hot against his flesh. She had been bought in town, January remembered hearing someone say, and like Kiki, was "proud." She had no one on the place to turn to.

"When he went out again she beat me. And she beat me the other day, when she saw him talking to Madame. Now he's not here to stop her, what'll happen to me?"

What indeed? January felt sickened. In this soured and unhappy household it was indeed the slaves who reaped the whirlwind of their masters' sowing: men and women who had nothing to do with the reproaches and rage pa.s.sed from generation to generation, who would happily have been anywhere else, leading lives of their own.

And there was worse to come, if he didn't find the killer.

Under his soothing touch Vanille was sinking into drowsiness. He had best, he knew, put the astringent solution of ground-holly root on her wounds before she slept. Gently he covered her back with Kiki's poultice again, to keep the flies off, and crossed again to the kitchen. As he approached it he saw Jeanette by its door, glancing around her at the other doors that let into the yard-the laundry and the candle-room. A moment later Kiki herself appeared in the doorway. She handed the girl a large basket with a towel tucked around it, and what looked like a rolled-up quilt. Jeanette slipped around the corner and was gone. "I'm sorry." Kiki went to the hearth, moving slowly and painfully still, and with a crane-hook brought forward a small pot that had been boiling over the flames. "I was about to bring you this out to the hospital when Baptiste came over and told me Dr. Laurette's come from Baton Rouge on the boat that Michie Hannibal took to town. He's that fond of meringues, Dr. Laurette, and Madame thought it'd be nice if we had some."

Her round face was gray with weariness, and, January thought, there remained at the back of her dark eyes some of the haunted look they'd worn in the firelight last night. He recalled Jeanette's scornful words, She wouldn't spit on the back of a field hand to wash it, and thought about the poultices laid not only on Vanille's back, but on Quas.h.i.+e's and Ti-Fred's in the hospital from which he'd just come.

She had spoken of children. Was it that loss which had touched her, finally? Or simply the understanding that what was happening could break into violence at any moment, and destroy them all? Her hands twitched-not quite a tremor-as she poured the tisane into a gourd.

"Michie Fourchet going to be all right?" he asked.

"Dr. Laurette thinks so." Kiki handed him the gourd. "He bled him good. Laurette's a great bleeder; I think he wants to be a soldier in his heart. Most of the time I look at these blankitte doctors that bleed everyone no matter what's wrong with them and I think they're crazy, but for Michie Fourchet, it makes him weak and keeps him quiet, and right now quiet is what he needs.

Dr. Laurette gave him some bromide, all mixed with sa.s.safras and sugar to kill the taste of it-it's better than hartshorn, they say."

As Kiki talked she broke eggs into a white Germanware bowl, neatly separating the whites from the yolks, and sc.r.a.ped a little sugar from the loaf on the table. "How do you use it?" She nodded at the gourd. "Ground holly? I never heard of that."

"It's an astringent, mostly," said January. He sloshed the liquid-it was dark, the color of strong tea. "It keeps wounds clean better than brandy or rum. My sister learned of it from an old Natchez woman. My sister's a voodoo. Olympia Snakebones. Watch it," he added, as Kiki's hand twitched again and the pinch of cream of tartar she was carrying to the meringue bowl scattered fluffily over the table.

"I'm all right." Kiki braced herself on the corner of the table, rosebud mouth caught together tight.

"It just . . . takes me sometimes."

"You shouldn't be up."

"I'll be all right. You go out and take care of Vanille. I'll get Minta to do the was.h.i.+ng up tonight and lie down as soon as supper's done."

Yesterday's clear hard cold seemed to be breaking as January walked back to the hospital through the chill, slanting light. Rain coming. Clouds piled in the southern sky. He'll only sell it. And, I cooked dinner for twenty people . . . after giving birth to a child. . . .

What had become of that child?

When January emerged from the hospital again the shadows were long across the yard, and under the dark of the gallery candlelight showed in a window or two, like sleepy-lidded eyes. Had Marie-Noel Fourchet burned the letters Robert denied he'd written her? Or did she take them out of some compartment in her desk sometimes and read over words of tenderness that her husband never spoke?

Did she believe them? A middle-aged wh.o.r.e in a dirty part of Paris. An odd choice, for a man as fastidious as Robert Fourchet. On the whole, he thought, it was likelier that she'd burned them. Marie-Noel didn't look like a foolish woman. And she'd be a fool to think Madame Helene wouldn't search til she'd found them, in order to throw them in Simon Fourchet's face.

But sixteen is an age that treasures sc.r.a.ps of comfort. He worked through the night in the mill, hauling wood, stoking fires, thrusting cane into the grating iron teeth of the rollers and later piling cut stalks along the downstream outer wall of the mill, so that it could be carried in easily once the mill was running full-out again. Thierry went up to the house just after supper and returned in a savage mood, wielding his whip as if he suspected every man and woman present of destroying the wood stores in order to threaten his position as overseer. It was a relief when the overseer went off duty a few hours before midnight. Esteban stayed later. He worked without shouts or curses, frequently consulting the silent, ashen-faced Rodney about the appearance of the boiling sap, and when it should be skimmed, or struck, or moved from kettle to kettle.

"Will you be all right?" January overheard him ask Rodney at one point during the evening, and the bereaved father nodded.