Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (20 page)

“Should you find any friends the length of this river willing to call on me or to perform any office whatsoever on your behalf, I will own myself to be astonished beyond speaking, and this is our family's land, and no possession of any thieving bastard of our cousin's Hibernian drab!”

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

“And you get back to work!” screamed Fourchet, lashing at Ajax and the field hands with his quirt. “Idle, stupid blacks . . . !”

“Not on my land you're not!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tell him, Guy!”

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

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

Knowing he'd be working until the moon was high hauling wood, he took the ash-pone and beans Gosport had put together that morning for tonight's supper, and carried it to the smithy. Mohammed was just concluding his prayers for the night, kneeling on the dirty little square of faded carpet facing east. January recalled seeing the blacksmith so thirty-five years before, and asking him about it-it was the first time he had heard the name of Allah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clever, thought January, except where liquor was concerned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A year later she bore another, and the first one a stout boy by then, crawling all around the place with Zuzu after him, laughing. M'am Camille was jealous that little Toussaint would go to Zu rather than to his mother. She used to slap Zuzu, and once or twice thrashed her with a cane-stalk for being uppity, when she'd catch her playing with the children. She'd seldom play with them herself. Then one summer little Toussaint died, laid down on his bed in the nursery taking a nap. It was like Zuzu had lost one of her own sons. The boy'd had no fever, though there was some sickness in the quarters that summer, like there always is. And two weeks later the baby died, too, the same way: was alive when Zuzu laid him down, and when she came back into the room he was dead.”

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

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

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