Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 7

"Michie Fourchet, sir, they found the knives!"

January un.o.btrusively followed the little group-Fourchet, Thierry, Esteban, and the boys-to the plantation blacksmith shop, un.o.btrusively because he was joined by most of the other men who'd been ordered to search. By the time they reached the low building that stood at the end of the row of plantation shops, there was a sizable gaggle of withesses. The cane-knives had been thrust into the forge, coals piled in, and the bellows plied to heat the fire red-hot. The wooden handles had been reduced to crumbling charcoal. "By G.o.d I'll string them up for this!" Fourchet's flushed face looked almost black in the rose- colored glare of the furnace. "The man who did this is going to suffer, and see his family suffer as well, and that I swear to you. ..."

He swung around, his eye snagging January among the other men at the smithy door. For a moment January feared the planter was so furious he'd start berating him for not doing his job, so he cried in his most gombo French, "My Lordy, could one man carry all them knives in one trip without cuttin' himself? I couldn't hardly manage one and I'm all cut to bits."

The reminder of who he was and who he was supposed to be caught Fourchet up and made him close his mouth again, and Mohammed, who'd stepped back from the forge to make way for the white men, said, "He wrapped 'em in an old blanket. Look." He held up a ragged piece of cloth that had been thrown in the corner. Thierry s.n.a.t.c.hed it from his hands, then threw it down in disgust. It was one of his own.

Stepping close to the forge again, Mohammed remarked, "He sure wasn't a blacksmith, I'll say that. He's lucky he didn't kill the fire, piling coal on like that every which way."

"Can they be fixed?" Fourchet's voice was quiet now, anger eased as quickly as it had flared.

Turning to the door of the smithy, where half a dozen men and women had joined the original witnesses, he yelled, "Out of here! If the lot of you don't have enough to do...!"

They scattered. January remained.

Mohammed tonged a blade from the cooling heap that had been carried to the table near the door.

Laying the metal over the anvil he gave it a smart rap with one of the smaller hammers: The sharp edge fractured like flint.

"Now, wait a minute, you gonna start breakin' these, too-"

"He's testing the temper, you imbecile," snapped Fourchet at the protesting overseer. "That one was ruined before he touched it."

"I'll check and fix as many as I can, sir." Mohammed turned the blade doubtfully back and forth under the weak yellow glow of the smithy lamp. "We'll need handles for all of 'em, though."

January caught Fourchet's eye and the planter said, "Ben, you're no good in the field, we'll leave you here for that. I'll send Random over with wood and a knife and he'll show you what to do.

Thierry, get the rest of the men started with whatever knives are left. The others can haul wood til we have those ready to go." He jerked his head back toward the long sheds of cordwood, looming in the dawn gloom. "You men who made the search, get yourself some food if you haven't.

"Boy-" This was to b.u.mper. "You go to the kitchen and tell Kiki to start cooking up some glue.

Get Ti-Jeanne to give you rags to wrap the handles. And put out the flag on the landing. Esteban, go to town and get fifteen knives. We'll make do til you get back. Understand?"

"Yes, Father."

"And I mean you get back today. No lollygagging in town, or stopping for a cup of coffee with your-"

"I'll be back today, Father." Esteban's jaw muscles jumped in the firelight and he spoke the words between his teeth without meeting his father's eye.

"See you are."

Though the warm radiance of the forge still colored his face January saw how pale the old planter had turned, once the flush of anger ebbed. Pale and a little shrunken. His hand trembled as it rested on the brick sill of the forge and it remained there, almost as if supporting him, for some moments.

Then Fourchet turned, and walked into the misty white of dawn.

"So who is this hoodoo?" January measured the length of the charred and crumbling handle of one of the damaged knives against a billet of the wood that Random, the plantation carpenter, had brought from his shop, and settled himself on a bench just inside the smithy door to shape it.

After a few minutes' wary observation, Random apparently concluded that January was competent to wield tools. He went back to his shop to cut more lengths for the handles. "You spoke of a hoodoo at the dark of the moon. What's going on here?"

"Don't think we're not nearly crazy tryin' to figure that out for ourselves." Mohammed blew out his breath in a sigh. Outside, a driver cursed at one of the wood-haulers, whose path from sheds to the mill doors ran along the wall of the mill just opposite the smithy's entrance. "It's somebody crazy. It's somebody who don't care what happens to him, it's got to be. Not care what happens to him, not care what happens to anyone else. Which makes me think it's somebody not on the place."

"Who, 'not on the place'?" January marked where the rivets would affix the handle to the shank, and carried the wood to the drill bench. "How is that?"

"You don't think with the hoodoo, and them tools broken-you don't think with what happened to Michie Fourchet's first wife and their child-they wouldn't come after everyone on the place if he was to die?" The blacksmith shook his head, and then grinned a little, as if against his own will.

"The sorry thing is, you could go up and down this river and ask every solitary person you meet, white or black, if they'd like to murder Simon Fourchet and I bet the answer you'd get is 'yes.'

You ever worked a drill? Just like that, yes.

"Michie Fourchet is on bad terms with nearly everyone in the parish," the blacksmith went on.

"It's nearly come to shooting with Rankin, that cracker farmer lives over toward New River.

Michie Fourchet killed Judge Rauche's eldest son in a duel not two years ago, in an argument over the location of the bar that silted up near the old landing, of all the boneheaded things. That trader that comes by here, False River Jones, Fourchet chained him in the jail here last September, and threatened to horsewhip him if he ever saw him on his land again-though every planter on the river's threatened to horsewhip Jones one time or another."

While he spoke the smith carried each blackened steel to the anvil and struck it lightly, testingly, with one of the smaller hammers, then held it to the milky daylight that trickled in now through the smithy doors.

"And if every slave with a killing grievance against his master did as he wished, after that master had sold him off down the river, or beat him for what he didn't do, or sold away his wife or his child . . ." His jaw stiffened with old wounds, old memories, and he shook his head.

"But that slave would know, wouldn't he," said January, pausing in his stroke at the old-fas.h.i.+oned bow-drill, "that coming back to get revenge on the man that sold him, would mean hurting every other person on the place."

"That's why I say," said Mohammed, "whoever's doin' this is crazy."

"And are there any?" asked January. "That he sold off, who might come back? That had their families sold?"

Mohammed thought about it, tapping and striking, testing the metal, shaking his head with a look of pain-as he himself did, thought January, when he'd enter a home and find that the children were suffered to bang on and mistreat the piano, until its hammers were broken and its keys out of tune.

"Well, ten years back he sold off Zuzu, that was Lisbon's wife, and their children." The smith fished, casually and accurately, back into his griot's memory for details like the verses of a song.

"There was some to-do over that, but they're only down on Voussaire plantation, and Lisbon sees them when he can. Michie Fourchet sold off Tabby, that was Yellow Austin's wife, about a year ago, to a guest that came through, a broker from New Orleans who took a fancy to her." As St.-Denis Janvier did, thought January, to my mother. "That man's gonna buy your mama." He still remembered hearing the other children whispering, around the cabin door that night. Gonna buy your mama, and sell you off in New Orleans.

He tried to remember if his father had been there then, and couldn't. "He take her children as well?" Mohammed shook his head. "They're still here-Tanisha and Marbro; that's Marbro." He nodded toward the first of the woodsheds, where the hogmeat gang was picking up chips and bark. "The little one there playin' with that piece of cane." As January watched, an older child showed the boy-who looked about three-how to blow pebbles through the slender stalk; b.u.mper came up and hustled them back to their duties. Already Ajax's son seemed to have grasped the concept of how much work had to be done. He seemed also to have learned from Ajax how to go about it with a laugh.

"M'am Fourchet's taken Tanisha into the house, teach her to sew like her mama," Mohammed added thoughtfully. "They do set a store on the light-skinned ones. I think the dark frightens them, dark like you, and dark like me. But Yellow Austin, he moved in with his sister Emerald and her husband, and they do well, and besides"-he rested the hammer gently on the anvil's horn- "the night the mill burned, Austin was working out in the cipriere, and I've talked to three men who was standing beside him when b.u.mper came running with news of the fire."

January brought the drilled handle back, and worked the bellows while Mohammed heated rivets.

From the forge door the damage to the mill didn't appear to be much. Smoke-blackening in areas under the eaves of the steeply slanted roof, and around the small windows high in the walls.

Fortunate, he thought, that the fire had been checked early, for along this side of the mill was piled all the sc.r.a.p lumber and broken packing boxes cleared out from the carpenter's and cooper's shops, mixed in with worn-out baskets and shards of oil jars or damaged clay cones such as the sugar was cured in. Hashed in with all that was an almost unbelievable quant.i.ty of cane-trash: leaves, cut ends, bits of maiden cane, weeds, dirt.

He frowned, and with the air of a man speaking a sudden revelation asked, "Well, couldn't you- couldn't you figure out who's doing this by asking, I mean, who was where when the mill burned?

You say Austin was with these three other men, I guess in the second gang? Since Austin's in the second gang? So if the second gang was out in the cipriere . . ."

"You do got a head on your shoulders," said Mohammed, and January looked fl.u.s.tered, as if he'd never been told this in his life.

"Aw, my mama always said I was the dumb one."

"Well, maybe your mama wasn't payin' attention." The smith's eyes twinkled. "You don't do bad on a drill. You have the rhythm of it, like music." He tonged a rivet into place and upset it with a few neat hammer-taps, so that it held the handle tight. "I tell you this," he added, picking up another blade and cutting the old rivets free, "I've been asking, and I've tried to get as many people as I could trust to ask, and it's like trying to catch fish in your hands. It was near dark, and foggy, and yes, the second gang was in the cipriere cutting wood, two miles from the mill when the fire broke out. But I think, who can watch who in the dark and the fog?"

His powerful hands flipped the next handle's wood over, and with a nail-gouge marked it for the rivet holes; his dark eyes turned somberly inward, seeing what only he could see. "And every time Gosport-who is a good man, and can be trustedsays to me, 'At the time the fire broke out I was with Samson and Balaam, and I saw Dumaka and Laertes and Boaz together, and Dumaka tells me he spoke to Lando only a few moments before,' I think: Gosport could be lying. He's only been on this place two years. What do I know of him before then? Dumaka could be lying, or mistaken. I think I know, and then it turns out that I don't." Random returned, and started shaping the handles as they were marked and drilled. Of the fifteen blades that had been thrust into the forge; five were completely unfit for use and ten were questionable. The day was now bright outside, the mist gone, the breeze from the river fresh and chill. Fewer hands pa.s.sed the doors hauling wood, as other tasks became possible, and from the direction of the fields January could hear the men singing, the women's voices answering them as they went out with the carts. Lisbon-one of the steadiest and oldest men of the second gang-called out, "Giselle, you holdin' up the line, what you doin' there?"

"What about the veves?" January asked. "First in the mill, and now in Michie Thierry's house, and other places, you said."

Mohammed's glance cut sharply to him, but Random said, "The signs turned up all over. On the brick piers underneath the house, and in the mule barn, and in the house, too. When Michie Robert came back from Paris, first thing he did was have the big house searched, and all the barns. They found hoodoo marks on the backs of armoires, and behind the curtains."

"Same as the one in Michie Thierry's house?"

"Exactly the same. The coffin and arrows, and all those triangles and the skull."

January was silent for a time, body swaying with the rhythm of the drill. "I think I'm getting the hang of this," he said. "That bit stayed in the wood and didn't go after my fingers, that time."

And Random laughed.

"Funny thing about those veves, though," said Mohammed. "Here, Ben." He threw him a piece of red chalk. "You go make an X on that wall there. Now look." He took the chalk himself and did exactly as he'd told January to do, demonstrating to Random what January already knew-that, particularly when he's writing in a hurry, a man will mark a wall not much above nor much below the level of his own eyes. "Now, I don't know how far off the floor those marks in Michie Thierry's cottage are," the smith said, returning to his forge. "But I saw the ones they found in the butler's pantry, and in Michie Fourchet's office, and they were maybe as high as my eyes, maybe a little above. Whoever's makin' these marks-" He gestured with a damaged knife. "It wasn't Quas.h.i.+e. He's too tall."

Over the course of the next two hours, during which Ti-George the scullery boy appeared with a stinking pot of isingla.s.s, mastic, and turpentine glue to wrap the knife handles-Kiki apparently disdaining the thought of bringing it to field hands herself-January pieced together a rough chronology of the hoodoo's depredations on Mon Triomphe. As Fourchet had said, the first sign of trouble on the plantation had been the fire in the sugar-mill, which had broken out on the evening of the second of November All Souls' night-shortly after darkness fell. It was difficult to get a definite idea of where anyone was when Reuben had first seen the blaze in the mill, but the drivers in each gang were definitely accounted for. The main-gang men leading the mules were accounted for. Little groups-unless they were all lying together, as Gosport had lied for Quas.h.i.+e that very morning-accounted for one another.

Of the main gang, a man named Pancho had definitely been missing ("He has a broad-wife over at Lescelles, though," pointed out Random, "he was gone most of the day."). Harry had definitely been missing ("Well, Harry!"). No one specifically remembered seeing Quas.h.i.+e, and no one remembered seeing a man named Taswell, who was as inoffensive as a milk-cow and occupied primarily with his wife and children. The second gang was more difficult to pin down, owing to the more diffuse nature of their work, but everyone had a general idea of having seen everyone else in the gang too recently before the fire started for anyone to have run nearly two miles to the mill and back.

If everyone was telling the truth. "Jasper and Scipio were out with the main gang," provided Random, speaking of his fellow artisans, the plantation cooper and potter. "Besides, they're both married, they have children. . . .

They had no call to do such a thing."

Didn't they? thought January. What might be a catastrophe to one man, a hammer-blow to his pride, might to another be simply the way of the world. The custom of the country.

On the other side of the low rise of the levee a whistle shrilled. The black smokestacks of the steamboat Vermillion could be seen past the big house and the oak trees, bound south from St.

Louis and pulling out of the big current at the sign of the white flag on the wharf. January wondered whether one of the strikers or the firemen would report to Shaw that that morning, Sunday, the bandanna on the tree branch was white.

Like that old Greek fella.

"I tried to find out some about the house-servants." Mohammed wrapped a strip of rawhide, glued on one side, carefully and tightly around one of the new handles, set it aside on the table outside the smithy door. "You'd have thought I was Benedict Arnold out trying to sell the country to the British. Catch Michie Cornwallis talking to a yard-man: hmph!" He grinned.

"You need to have a try at Leander," suggested Random, returning the blacksmith's grin, "now he's back from Paris-That's Michie Robert's man," he explained to January. "My lord, that man gossips! You want to know the colors of M'am Helene's stockings, that's the man to ask."

"Leander wasn't here at the time of the fire in the mill," said Mohammed. "Nor when the breakfast pots were poisoned."

"Couldn't you figure out who did it by who was around the rice cart? Who fixes that? You say Jeanette's mama was a voodoo."

"So she was," agreed Mohammed. "And lord, you'd have thought Michie Fourchet was going to give birth, the way he carried on! But you've seen yourself Jeanette doesn't leave Michie Thierry's house til all the men get their day's work, and she goes straight to the women's gang.

The men have already eaten by then. Minta brings it out, but she's got to help Kiki with takin'

breakfast up to the big house, so most mornin's the rice cart just sits out with a board over the top of the pots. Anybody could come and stir something in."

"And Kiki? . . . "

"Has her own reasons to want to see this hoodoo caught," said Mohammed quietly. "Gilles was her husband."

"They fixed?"

Thierry's shadow blackened the smithy door.

"Fixed as I can make 'em, sir." Mohammed finished wrapping the handle he was working on and rose, drying his hands on a rag. Thierry took the first knife they'd worked on and whacked it savagely into the doorpost half a dozen times, so that January winced. But the blade held up. The overseer turned it in his hand a moment, then tossed it carelessly back among the others.

"Ten was all you could save?"

"I'll show you the others, sir: edges cracked, metal split. And these won't last long, beggin' your pardon."

"f.u.c.kin' hoodoo." Thierry tapped the handle of the most newly repaired, feeling the slight tacky give of the wrapping, then ambled into the smithy to look at the blades that were past use.

"It'll be a good hour, sir, 'fore the glue sets up on those we fixed."

The overseer regarded the smith with narrowed eyes, as if, gauging how much truth was in the statement, then glanced past him at the confusion around the doors of the mill. Baron the mule- drover was leading new teams down the short slope into the roundhouse. Through the arched windows between the brick piers that held up the floor of the grinder, January made out dim comings and goings as Rodney checked the harness. Mohammed and Random had agreed that the first time the mule harness had been rubbed with red pepper and turpentine was the day of the poisoning, when the grinders broke as the poor beasts had bolted. After that the harness had been contaminated twice more-two nights after the fire in the mule barn, apparently during the night, and again on the night Gilles had died. On those same occasions other harness had been cut, and cart axles sawed.

Equipment was now guarded by Baron and his son Ulee, as their personal responsibility.

Through the low arched windows Fourchet's voice could be heard, savagely informing someone or other that those mules were a d.a.m.n sight more valuable than he was, and smarter, too.

Thierry's eyes squinted up a little, and the anger in him resonated with his employer's like the drone-string on a banjo.

"Ben, you get on back to the field and tell Ajax to put you to work." Thierry tossed him the first of the knives, the one he'd struck at the doorpost with. "Stop at the mill and tell Rodney to send another nine here to pick up the knives as soon as they can be spared."

"Right away, sir." January put from his mind the seductive image of his own fist smas.h.i.+ng into the man's dark lean face as the overseer strode away toward the path that led to the fields.

As he limped along the wood-haulers' path-cursing the poor fit of his shoes-January pieced the days together in his mind. Trying to see a pattern in them, of who could have gotten to the harness, and the mill, and the barn, and the rice cart; who could have gotten into the house and when. Who knew enough about poisons to kill the drinker of the cognac but only make the main gang sick. Where the oleander had been cooked. Where the turpentine and pepper mixed.

Off the place entirely?

How visible would a stranger have been, slipping up through the cane-fields from the old landing in the dark? But how could a stranger have known that everyone would be away and busy, that foggy afternoon at the dark of the moon?

In the blazing heat of the sugar-mill Fourchet was yelling, "Get the h.e.l.l out of the way, you black fool!" at one of the men who skimmed the black foam from the boiling cane-juice in la grande.

The man leaped aside to make way for the barrel in which the foam would be settled and dried to add to cattle-feed. "You think we got all G.o.ddam day? All G.o.ddam week? Stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.d apes . . .

What in h.e.l.l you want?"

He glared at January, his furious eyes blank black pits of rage, and January knew very clearly that Fourchet would think no more of striking him than he'd think before striking one of his slaves.

January waited a moment, eyes downcast, before saying, "Michie Thierry sent me to let the men from the main gang know the cane-knives are fixed, sir, and they can get back to the cuttin' if you have no more need of 'em here."

"Need 'em?" bellowed Fourchet. He flung his cigar end to the ground. "We need 'em everywhere, you brainless bozal! I'll send 'em back when we've got the next run cooking properly! f.u.c.king n.i.g.g.e.rs don't know the difference between-"

"I'll tell Michie Thierry that, then, sir." January bowed. He flinched at the thought, but added, "And if you're free just for a moment, sir, there's somethin' regardin' the knives gettin' broke."

And, ready to duck, watched Fourchet's hands and body. He saw the planter's hand tighten on the sugar-paddle, but Fourchet stopped himself, glanced around the mill with those bloodshot, b.e.s.t.i.a.l eyes. "Come outside. Rodney!" The dapper little driver bounded over from la lessive, which men were just filling from the second after another round of boiling and skimming. "You know how much ash and lime goes in when this mess is skimmed? Good. When I come back in every man jack here better be working or there'll be sore backs." He shoved the paddle into Rodney's hand and stalked from the mill, January at his heels. They pushed through the women unloading cane and rounded the downstream end of the mill where the brick walls of the jail sheltered them from view of the confusion at the mill doors. Only a few yards away, the dark cane rose in a knotty wall.