Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 3

"What service? You can't even do up your bootlaces," Fourchet said.

"Then it's fortunate you don't need bootlaces done up. However, I will do you the service of telling you that the gentleman who arranged a half-hour or so ago to go halves with you in the purchase of Chickasaw lands has no more option to t.i.tle on those lands than I have option to t.i.tle on the Parthenon of Athens."

Fourchet's eyes widened in alarm. "How do you know what Monsieur LaBarre and I discussed?

You haven't been out of this room!"

"I saw you pa.s.s the door deep in conversation with him a few minutes ago, and I know there's only one thing Slinky LaBarre holds deep conversations about with strangers, and that's a tract of territory along the Arkansas River that the government is about to negotiate from the tribes. I hope you didn't give him a draft."

The planter said nothing for a time, only tightened his jaw as if chewing something tough and rancid tasting. January was familiar with the tic. "And what do you know about it?" Fourchet demanded at length.

"Only what I've heard about Slinky from other gamblers, cheats, river pirates, and opium-sodden reprobates in the saloons." Hannibal's voice weakened and he leaned his back against the pillows; January could see the flecks of blood that tipped his mustache hairs. "I'll think of some other service for me to do you if that doesn't suit: the location of one of Lafitte's caches of treasure, perhaps? Or it could be I have t.i.tle to Chickasaw land myself."

"My family knows how I feel about drunkards and opium-eaters." The savage loathing in Fourchet's voice was deeper than any disgust or contempt. "When we go ash.o.r.e at Triomphe I'll thank you to restrict your habits to something that can be accounted for by illness, not dissipation."

"I'll commence practicing my coughing immediately." Hannibal gave him the ghost of a military salute. Mouth almost square-cornered with distaste, the planter resumed his hat and made to go.

January said, "If you could spare us a few more minutes of your time, sir?"

Fourchet glanced pointedly at the door, as if to remind him that anyone could enter at any time.

This wasn't, January knew, actually likely. No one in their right mind would linger in the pa.s.senger cabins of a small steamboat if they didn't have to.

Like most stern-wheelers, the Belle Dame was a smallish boat of shallow draft, and what it lost in the smallness of its hold s.p.a.ce was made up out of the cabins, galley, staterooms, and saloon. The men's cabin was narrow and cramped, odorous from the proximity of the galley, and Spartan at best. Despite its distance from the boiler room, the walls shuddered with the regular thudding pulse of the engine. Trunks, valises, and portmanteaux that either wouldn't fit in the hold or would be required before many hours had pa.s.sed heaped the floor in front of and beside the bunks. Most pa.s.sengers sought the distractions of cards in the saloon, or braved the chill on the hurricane deck above.

Fourchet turned back, nostrils flared with impatience as Hannibal set down his untasted coffee and went into a paroxysm of coughing. "For what?"

"A little information." January knelt, and dug through the valise for the first laudanum bottle he could lay hands on. He had to hold it steady while his friend drank. "Who the members of your household are. Where they were on the night of the fire in the sugar-mill, and when the mule barn caught fire. Who besides Gilles had the keys to the cellaret the cognac was in, and the keys to the mill."

The planter looked about to snap some stricture about the medicine, but drew a breath instead, as if forcibly reminding himself to keep his own affairs in focus. "You've seen Cornwallis," he said at last. "He's my valet, he's been with me about six years. He came warranted honest and sober but I suspect they wanted to get rid of him for some reason, for in the end they let him go for seven-fifty. My son Esteban's valet is Agamemnon-a creeping, sneaking, prissy catamite if you ask me-and Kiki's the cook. The maids are Ariadne and Henna. My son Robert's man and his wife's maid they took with them to Paris, and they weren't even present when the trouble started.

Doucette does the sewing. There's Ti-Jeanne the washerwoman, but she wouldn't have had access to the keys of the cellaret, let alone the-"

"I didn't mean the servants," said January quietly. "I mean your family. The people who stand to profit from your death."

The planter's face flamed. "By G.o.d, if I have to stand here and take this from a-"

"You don't, sir," said January steadily. "But if your wife was with child, and an accoucheur asked after her health, would you keep it from him if she'd had three miscarriages in the past three years?"

Fourchet, who had opened his mouth to shout him down, checked, and closed it again, listening in simmering silence.

"Would you keep silent about her pa.s.sing blood, or fainting? I'm a doctor, M'sieu." Well, a surgeon, anyway, he thought, but Fourchet didn't have to know that. "I've seen men who do all this and more, and in so doing endanger the lives of those they love by their unwillingness to tell the complete truth."

Footfalls clumped outside the door. January knelt at once and pretended to be rearranging something in Hannibal's valise. Since the cabin did not go all the way through the width of the boat, but backed its inner end onto the wall of one of the staterooms, Fourchet left it entirely, pa.s.sing in the doorway the man who entered, a stout fair gentleman who nodded a friendly greeting to him and was roundly snubbed.

Nothing discomposed, the newcomer nodded to Hannibal. He asked, "Is all well with the Herr?"

Hannibal lifted a hand in a.s.sent and replied in the German in which he'd been addressed. "I'm better now, thank you."

The German gentleman went to his own bunk and fetched a greatcoat. "Might I ask where you are bound, sir? You seem in no fit case to travel."

"St. Louis," said Hannibal faintly. "If I make it so far."

"T'cha, that is not good." The stranger divided his worried glance between Hannibal and January.

"Please let me know if I may be of any a.s.sistance."

"Fool," muttered Fourchet after the German left. "That's the kind of man who ends up with parasites on his hands and in his house for months, sucking him dry." He had kindled a cigar while on deck, chewing it now angrily as he stared down at the fiddler lying on his bunk. "And serve him right."

Resentment in every craggy line of his face, he dragged up the room's solitary chair and settled in it. "These are they who'd have access to the keys to the cellaret," he said abruptly. "My son Esteban; and through him that sneaking valet of his, Agamemnon. My wife . . ." He could barely bring out the words. "And I presume either of the maids, who could have lifted them from her room if they'd had the wits to do it. My son Robert and his wife weren't back yet from Paris when the mill burned, and they had, as I said, their servants with them: Leander and that good-for- nothing s.l.u.t Vanille."

"What about your overseer?"

"Thierry? He keeps his own liquor in his own house." Disgust tinged Fourchet's voice, as if he'd sniffed wormwood. "He has no call to have a key. But you know as well as I do the thievery that goes on among blacks. Any one of them could have taken the key."

Well, it would be harder for a field hand to get it, January thought, unless of course he worked out trade or blackmail with one of the house-servants, who generally held the field hands in complete contempt. At that point a copy could be made, if the plantation blacksmith was clever enough. But he said nothing. These were the secrets of the quarters, not to be shared with les blankittes, for you never knew against whom information might be used.

Instead he said, "Tell me about the day the mill burned."

"Evening." Fourchet bit savagely on the cigar with one side of his mouth and leaked smoke from the other. "Just at sunset. The men were still in the cipriere. Reuben, my sugar-boss, saw the mill door open and fire inside. He ran in and started beating at the flames, and only fortune saved him, for the mill door blew shut behind him and jammed. We had to open it with an ax, and by that time smoke had overcome him, and the fire spread. We found trash---cane leaves and hay, and last year's dried baga.s.se-jammed up under the rafter joints, and in the timbers that supported the grinders."

"Who is 'we'?" asked January. "If Reuben was alone and ran in and the door blew shut behind him, how was he saved?"

"One of the pickaninnies. Boy claimed he was gathering kindling-playing in the mule barn more likely, where he'd no business to be-and saw the smoke, and heard Reuben shouting. He and his brother ran to the ciprierrie and got the men."

January sat silent, gazing at the narrow glaring rectangle of the half-open door and the brown river beyond. It was low water, and gray snags reached up like demon hands, clutching for the hulls and the wheels of the boats. More dangerous still would be those just beneath the surface, mere scratches or ruffles on the gla.s.sy flow. Sandbars made slanting riffles, or accrued enough flotsam to build up into islands the larger side-wheelers veered into the heavy current of the main channel to avoid them, but the Belle Dame skimmed "inside" these obstructions, between them and the tree-grown bank. Above the engine's jarring heartbeat, January heard the leadsmen calling the depth: "Quarter twain. Quarter twain. Mark twain."

"There were no men nearer?"

"We were behind the harvest, I tell you," snapped Fourchet. "We'd had rain for three days. I had both gangs out cutting wood, Sunday or no Sunday, and most of the yard-men as well. Even the gardener. There was no one about the place except the houseservants."

"And Reuben, evidently."

"He'd been working in the mill on and off all day, making it ready for the grinding."

During the roulaison, the near-universal rule of Sunday as a day of "rest"-which for a slave meant labor on one's own provision grounds instead of for the master's cash crop-was suspended in the interests of the cane. January remembered how the field dust gummed in the cut-cane-juice on his hands, his clothes, his face; how everything was sticky with it.

Suddenly and clearly he had a vision of his father rising in freezing darkness and going outside to wash before joining the men for work, a tall shadow in the banked sulfurous dimness of the hearth.

Where had that memory come from? he wondered. As a rule he had few memories of his father.

"And how long was the grinding delayed?" "Over a week. Too long-cane'll rot within two days. The sugar goes sour." He blew a vile- smelling cloud. "Reuben spent the day after the fire going over every inch of that mill. That's when he found the hoodoo-marks. The axle-beams of the grinders were charred black, but he said they hadn't been damaged, so he got the grinders running by the Tuesday. Two days later the main gang was down sick, puking and purging. More hoodoo work. I put as many as I could spare from the second gang in the fields with the women, and the women were more use than they at the work. The cane came in full of trash and stones, jamming up the grinders every five minutes. Reuben tried to pull a knot or something free and the mules spooked. The whole business broke and the grinding rollers came down on him, and what with Esteban having to go to town and get new, and the delay of having a man set them up, we lost another week."

January was silent, trying to piece the images together in his mind. Sick at the thought of those huge toothed iron cylinders, monster jaws drooling the green sticky sap of the cane . . .

Came down on him . . .

Dear Jesus!

And all Fourchet saw was the delay. The planter pulled on his chewed cigar and brooded about the injustice of it all. On his bunk Hannibal lay with shut eyes, thin hands folded around the empty coffee cup. Above the thwack jerk of the engine, the voices of the slaves on the deck outside could be heard: 'Suzette my beautiful friend, Suzette my beautiful friend, Pray to G.o.d for me.

I will wait for her, I will work for her, I'll carry cane for her upon my shoulder."

And they'll sell you down the river all the same, thought January. He knew the song in another form from town, but among the unfree, music was a thing to be trans.m.u.ted, quickened or slowed to fit the changing seasons of the heart. He thought of Rose, sitting in the market arcades late last night after everything had been settled, looking out over the levee and drinking coffee. Of the moon near full, above the rising river mists. Of Baptiste's plump woman, running to the gangplank that morning with her bright skirts bunched up in her hands, to see her man one last time.

"You were with the men in the cipriere on the night of the fire?"

"Of course! Where else would I be? d.a.m.n blacks won't do a thing unless you're standing over them with a whip."

January opened his mouth to reply and then closed it. At the time-in the days of his childhood, his slavery-the endless, intricate dance of slave and master, of work and avoidance of work, had seemed to him the only manner in which life could be conducted. Looking back on it, he was still amazed that grown men and women should be astonished by their slaves' efforts to evade tasks that they themselves found too hard or too nasty, tasks demanded with no recompense but the simplest of food and the cheapest of shelter and clothing, with the constant threat of losing their friends and families thrown in.

He should, he reflected, never have gone to Paris. Or else he should have stayed there, no matter how desperate the agony of his grief at his wife's death. He was no longer capable of accepting the custom of the country that at one time had been second nature to him.

A Frenchman would have burst out laughing at Fourchet's indignation.

And would probably have been shot. "We were all there," continued the planter truculently. "Thierry'd been back at the mill with Reuben earlier in the day, but came out to the cipriere around noon. Esteban was working with another part of the gang, deeper in the trees."

Of course, thought January. Cutting trees wasn't like cutting cane. The main gang would have been split into a dozen little groups, scattered throughout the marshy tangle of cypress, black oak, hackberry thickets, and bramble.

"And the people who remained at the house?"

"Just those I've told you of." The planter hurled the mangled end of the cigar into the spittoon.

"Cornwallis, Agamemnon, Gilles the butler, the two maids, the sewing women, the washerwoman. The yard hands like Scipio the potter, who's too old to be out in the woods, the cook, and the woman who makes the soap and candles-"

"And your wife," said January.

Fourchet bolted to his feet, veins bulging in his forehead. "My wife is the gentlest and most honorable soul who walks the face of the earth," he said, in a voice of iron quiet. "You will not speak of her in connection with anything-anything!-concerning this . . . this hoodoo, this vandal, this enemy of mine. She would no more have anything to do with such activities than she would- would-would forswear her faith or betray her country! If you speak again of her as you have, to me or to anyone else, believe me, I will have you whipped."

His hand lashed out and January flinched, but Fourchet in his anger only caught the back of the chair on which he'd been sitting, sending it cras.h.i.+ng into the wall. "And that goes for you." He jabbed a finger down at Hannibal. Then with the vast savage violence January had remembered with terror in over thirty years of dreaming, he slammed from the cabin.

His footfalls crashed along the deck, then up the stairs to lose themselves in the promenade above. The engine clanked in the silence like the labored panting of a wind-touched horse.

"I look forward to making the acquaintance of the gentlest and most honorable soul who walks the face of the earth." Hannibal spoke without opening his eyes. "Any reason for suspecting her of doctoring her husband's tipple? Beyond the obvious one, I mean."

"A woman married to a man who is habituated to violence doesn't need a reason beyond the obvious," said January quietly. "But no. And at the moment I don't suspect her particularly. It's just that she had as much opportunity as anyone else, and more than some, and she's among the group that stands to profit rather than to lose by her husband's death. And then again, if someone cries, Don't look over there, don't look over there, I generally can't resist a peek, to find out what it is I'm not supposed to be seeing. On the whole I'd like to know where all the snags and bars lie, if I'm going to navigate these waters."

No man of color-unless in the service of a pa.s.senger-being permitted on the rooftop promenade, January spent the remainder of the day watching the river from the cluttered lower deck. Beyond the saw gra.s.s and cypress of the batture, and above the low brow of the levee on the landward side, plantation houses seemed to drift by-square, white, ostentatious with pillars and summerhouses if the owner was an American; smaller, plainer, and brightly painted if Creole.

When the Belle Dame slowed to maneuver among snags, or labored to buck a sandbar, January could pick out clearly the men and women on the galleries: planters' wives in dark neat wooh and poplins, servants in plain calico dresses or simple dark livery. Children now and then raced in and out the long French doors, muslin-clad girls and boys in tight-b.u.t.toned skeleton suits, whose older sisters would be in the convent in town, whose brothers would be away at school.

And between the houses lay the endless dark green of the cane-fields, buzzards circling lazily overhead. Smoke poured skyward from mill after mill, and from the fields the still air s.h.i.+mmered with voices singing: "The English guns they go bim-bim, The Kaintuck guns, they go zim-zim, I say to myself, Run save your skin, Run to the water's edge, O, Run to the water's edge . . ."

The main gangs, the big men, January remembered, leaning on the rail, would be chopping the cane, while the women gathered and carted, and the second gang worked the mill. Fed the cut cane into the grinders and kept the fire going beneath the cauldrons with wood that had been cut and stored up all year against this grueling and terrible season. Once the mill was started, it never stopped. The grinders would halt only for a few moments, to change the mule teams, or to clear knots or rocks picked up with the cane. But the fires were never suffered to go out.

His father was a main-gang man. That much he recalled. Leaning on the rail, he tried to remember that tall quiet man with the tribal scars-country marks, they were called-on his face.

But it hurt, like probing an unhealed wound.

Night after hot summer night in his childhood, January had sat on the gallery of the garconniere, watching the lights across the yard where his mother entertained St.-Denis Janvier. January would watch until the lights went out and sometimes for hours afterwards, waiting for his father to come. He'd never spoken to his mother about the man, nor she to him. But those nights were printed so clearly on his mind, the dim glow of candles in the garrets and town houses visible beyond the roof, and the patterns of the stars in the dark velvet sky. Cicadas thrumming above the whine of mosquitoes, and the shrill cheep of crickets. In those days the cipriere had lain close to Rue Burgundy, a few streets away only.

He didn't remember when he'd quit waiting like that. Didn't remember anything about the last night that he'd done so, or the first night that he had not.

Only eventually, it became something that he no longer did.

"Ben?"

He turned his head to see the butler Baptiste. "Michie Fourchet sent me to find you, to let you know that your master Michie Sefton's going to be going ash.o.r.e at Mon Triomphe, to stay til he's feeling better."

January raised his brows and widened his eyes in what he hoped was a convincing expression of relieved joy, and gusted a sigh. "Thank G.o.d," he said. "All day I been wonderin' just what we'd do, with him sick and gettin' sicker by the look of it, and us bound all the way to St. Louis. Thank you. And bless your master, for such a kindness."

Baptiste managed a trace of a smile. "I must admit I'm astonished. Michie Fourchet seems to me to be a-a hard man." He stammered a little over the words. His French was good, if a little Creole in its treatment of articles-he used je instead of mo to refer to himself, a refinement January was careful, in his new persona, to avoid. "I hope your master will feel better soon."

"Thank you." January shook his head. "It's the consumption, the doctors say. Seems like he get a little worse every year, no matter what they do."

"I know." Baptiste leaned his elbows beside January's on the railing and watched the miniature drama enacted in dumb show on the gallery of a white-pillared house: mistress chiding a sewing- maid, leaping to her feet, rustling into the house; the master emerging, catching the girl by the arm, speaking intently. Kissing her.

Trees intervened. "My mistress my old mistress, M'am Gra.s.se-was consumptive also, and there wasn't a thing Michie Pierre didn't try to get her well. In the end he took her to Paris, where the doctors are better, they say." He stared out at the glittering riffle along the water's surface, while from the bow a leadsman called out "Deep four . . . deep four . . . quarter less four . . . "

"It help?" asked January, after several minutes of silence.

The little man glanced sidelong at him. "That I don't know. I hoped they'd take us with them- which was what Michie Pierre said they'd do." He opened his mouth to say something more, then closed it.

But they found they needed another fifteen hundred dollars instead.

January could see it, in the tears that slowly filled the elderly man's eyes. But there was nothing- literally nothing-that he could say.

Traveling without interruption, a fast boat could have covered the distance between New Orleans and two rusted smokestacks poking up from the black waters. Here a boat had either been gutted on a sawyer or blown up her boilers. Above him the s.h.i.+p's bell clanged and a voice called, "Give us a little more steam."

At about eight the engine's thud-thud-thud altered yet again to a steady shuddering, and the whistles howled as the engine let off steam. From the darkness a voice called, "Mon Triomphe!"

and yellow smears of torchlight spotted the batture's indistinct bulk.

Men put out in a boat with towlines. The Belle Dame could not maneuver into a dock the way a sidewheeler could. After a few minutes the boat began to move again, with the silent sideways steadiness of dead weight being hauled by main force. The mate, a short bearded man with a Spanish lilt to his voice, yelled, "Let's do this, then! Captain don't want to have to damp the fires."

Voices on the wharf, and the jangle of harness. A lookout would have warned the coachman of the steamboat's approach. January remembered angling for the job of lookout, a task more interesting than pulling weeds or gathering kindling, and being trumped out of it every time by a boy named Gideon, who was older and quick and silver-tongued. He wondered what had become of him.

The batture took shape through the mist. Above the landing loomed the dark baroque shape of a twisted oak tree, gesturing like Demosthenes warming to a Philippic peroration-an ideal place, January thought, to hang his bright-hued bandannas.

Today had been Friday. Tomorrow, Sat.u.r.day, the kerchief would be black: purple for Christ's blood shed on a Friday, black for the day Our Lord spent in h.e.l.l. White for His resurrection-and then red for the red beans everyone in New Orleans cooked on Mondays when they did the wash.

After a day of observing what Mon Triomphe in five hours. But all the way upriver, the Belle Dame stopped at plantation landings, to take on cargo or pa.s.sengers, to drop off letters and small consignments of goods.

January checked on Hannibal twice, and found him as well as could be expected-though bored senseless with nothing to do but pretend to be on his deathbed-and tried to get up a conversation with Cornwallis, only to meet with a cold sarcasm and the kind of mocking double-entendres that couldn't be answered without revealing himself to be a good deal more intelligent than he was supposed to be. Once, in his idle rounds of the decks, January heard the valet describing in detail to the new butler their master's habit of nailing up malefactors in a flour barrel in the barn, and Cornwallis's eyes glinted with spiteful satisfaction at the tale.