Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (38 page)

He chuckled again. “I'm told Daubray forbade any of the house-servants to so much as mention the matter in his hearing. He promised a flogging to the man who made up a song about it, if he could catch him.”

Later, January walked back through the cipriere, his mind turning as the buzzards turned in the air high over the burning fields. Circling again and again to Kiki. Others were as much to blame for her pain as Fourchet, but Fourchet was the one closest to her hand. And now Fourchet was dead, and Reuben was dead. . . . And Gilles, who had been good to her, was also dead.

She knew where the oil was stored, he thought. And Rose-who had a surprising streak of matter-of-fact bloodthirstiness in her-had told him enough times about how to make delayed action explosives for him to know that it could be done fairly simply, by one who knew how. The cook had never spoken to him, or to anyone apparently, of her life before she'd come to Mon Triomphe-“Stuck up,” Vanille and the other women called Kiki. Meaning that she kept herself to herself.

The local mambo.
No one to whom January had talked-not even the other mambos-knew she was that.

Was she clever enough to use the same curse-mark over and over when she'd marked the house, to make it look like the work of one copying by rote, not practiced in the art? She was, but his mind snagged on so intricate a fakery. Why pretend the marks had been made by one ignorant of all the various signs of cursing, if she'd kept her own proficiency hidden? Or was that why she'd drawn the blessing sign, the heaven sign, on Reuben's grave at that late a date? To let him, January, guess that she was, in fact, learned in the old ways?

But why purchase salts of mercury rather than make up oleander poison again? Either one, introduced into the medicine bottles, would assure the man's death, and the purchase-from a trader or another slave-would put Kiki into that seller's hands.

Unnecessarily.

Why break the cane-knives? Why burn the mule barn?

Foolish acts, absurd.

He shook his head. There was something wrong with his chain of reasoning. It looked good up to a point Kiki certainly hadn't cared what happened to the field hands, at least before the fire-and then vanished when you drew close, like those illusions drawn by Flemish painters centuries ago.

The sun was halfway down the sky when he heard the singing of the main gang across the fields. He watched and waited until Jules Ney rode away, back toward the mill, then slipped from the cane into the line of women, gathering up the cut rows and dumping them in the carts. The woman beside him whispered, “You in trouble,” but didn't call attention to him, for which January was grateful. He knew any overseer in the country would be within his rights to whip him-it remained to be seen what Ajax would do.

In moments the driver came walking along the row, whip in hand.

This, January knew, was a bad sign. If Ajax was going to ignore his disappearance for most of the afternoon, he'd stay at the other side of the row and then work him back in among the men, as he'd done before. Why, Ben been back for the longest time, Michie Ney, I thought you seen him. . . .

“You in a world of trouble, Ben.”

January stepped from the line of women. “I understand that, sir. I'm sorry.”

Ajax shook his head, tilted back his high-crowned beaver hat. “I don't know what the fuck you did, but Michie Esteban sent for you to come to the house nigh on to a half hour ago. I told him one of the babies had crawled off into the cane. . . .” He nodded toward the swaddled infants, sleeping restlessly or chewing their fists or bits of their wrappings, in the shade of a patch of maiden cane on the field bank. “That you'd gone looking for it. You better head on back there now. Herc'll go with you,” he added, and signed to the driver, who'd paused to talk to Trinette. “Make sure you don't get lost.”

There was wariness in Ajax's eyes, and no wonder, thought January. He knew men who took pride in being outlaws or rogues, but he had never been one of them, even as a child. The imputation of shirking, of lying and cowardice, stung him almost as bad as the cut of the whip would have.

But he only nodded, and started back toward the house at a rapid walk. A half hour, he thought, or more. . . . He thought he would have heard a steamboat's whistle, even in the cipriere, but couldn't be sure. It was impossible that it would be Shaw this soon. It had to be Hannibal.

But when they reached the house Cornwallis met them at the bottom of the back steps, and said, “Wait for Michie Esteban in the office.”

“Yes, sir.”
January followed him up the steps and along the gallery as Herc headed back for the fields. A white man in the scruffy corduroy of a cracker was leading old Pennydip across the yard to the jail. The poor old woman was arguing, baffled, but when she tried to pull her arm free the man yanked her nearly off her feet. Two more whites-one of whom January recognized as the tall skinny youth in cheap jean trousers who'd been part of the posse that had captured Jeanette-came around the corner of the stables leading Mohammed. The blacksmith's hands were chained.

“What's happening?” January asked Cornwallis. “Don't tell me those fools think Mohammed had anything to do with-”

“Go on in,” said Cornwallis. “Sheriff Duffy is taking in those that were on the place all those years ago, when the slaves rose up.”

“That's crazy.” January's heart pounded suddenly hard. “After all these years? Pennydip wouldn't have the strength to climb to the rafters of the mill to stuff kindling up there. Do they think she crawled in Thierry's window after the cane-knives? Or carried them to the forge? Mohammed-”

“You just wait in here,” said the valet impatiently, and opened Fourchet's office door. “Mr. Esteban will be along as soon as he's done with Sheriff Duffy. And don't touch anything.”

“No, sir.”
He supposed he should be thankful Duffy didn't show signs of hanging every bondsman on the place.

Cornwallis didn't motion him to a chair, and he had better sense than to even think about taking one. When the valet departed in quest of Esteban-whose muffled voice could be heard in the parlor, with another man's January stepped over to the desk and had a quick look through the papers arranged with such scrupulous neatness on its top.

A half-written letter to Fourchet's agent in New Orleans, requesting that he make arrangements with the bishop for a funeral on the twenty-ninth.
Announcements of it were to be posted around the French town accordingly; also the agent was to see to the purchase of the appropriate number of gloves, scarves, and candles to give to the mourners.

Robert's note that had incurred such wrath: Three dollars and fifty cents per cord for wood, indeed!

A list of slaves' names, mostly women and second-gang men, with prices jotted after them: Nathan, $900. Jacko, $1000 (?).
Cynthia, $750 (children?). Figures in another column, adding and subtracting the sums paid out for cordwood. Esteban, January realized, was planning which slaves to sell to make up the difference.

A letter from an attorney named Dreischoen: With regard to the evidence to be presented to the Supreme Court on the fifth of December next, regarding Madame Daubray's intention of gifting the Refuge lands outright to her son Gauthier . . .

The door from parlor to dining room opened and January stepped back quickly, lest he should be seen taking an interest in the affairs of his betters. But it wasn't Esteban. It was young Madame Fourchet, pausing beside the dining table to break the bright green wafers on a folded sheet of cream-colored paper. She stood for a moment in the shadows of the darkening room, reading what was written.

Then she crushed the paper against her chest, her face turned aside, her mouth catching tight to keep her lips from shaking. She stood so, looking out through the French doors into the sunlight of the piazza between the house's wings. Her whole body shivered, and her breath came swift, like one who struggles not to weep.

With a kind of deliberate calm she smoothed the crushed paper out on the edge of the table, refolded it, and passed out onto the gallery as Esteban and Sheriff Dutfy entered the room.

January felt his nape prickle at the sight of the sheriff. In the moment it took for the two men to cross the corner of the dining room to the office door, January stepped back, opened the French door onto the gallery, and moved one of the room's plain cypress-wood chairs about a foot, so that it could be seized and flung if, for instance, he had to make a bolt out the door. . . .

“This him?”
Duffy's sharp little black eyes sized him up two seconds after January had returned to his respectful stance in the corner beside the desk. “Big bastard.”

Esteban nodded. “Ben, what was it you-uh-told me yesterday, about my-uh-my-about Michie Fourchet being poisoned?”

“Sir, I was all wrong about that, as you told me.” January bobbed his head, wishing for the thousandth time he wasn't nearly six and a half feet tall and dangerous-looking. He stooped his shoulders and tried to appear oaflike and cowed. “I remembered as how Michie Hannibal's cousin died of drinkin' mercury, and how he puffed up like that, and went off his head, and how his gums bled. And when I seen Michie Fourchet bleedin' from the gums, and him off his head, and I remembered how the folks 'round the quarters was sayin' somebody tried to poison him, and poisoned poor Michie Gilles instead, I just got scared, I guess.”

He glanced from Esteban to Duffy, who'd relaxed-the cringing must have worked-and taken his hand from the pistol at his belt.

“But you're right, when I thought about it, that calomel does make the gums bleed, too. . . .”

“I thought you said it was the brother of your master's father-in-law,” said Esteban, “who drank mercury.”

January thought, Fuck. “It was, sir,” he said, racking his brains to remember whether he'd given this mythological individual a name. “Michie Jacques and Michie Georges both was Michie Hannibal's cousins on his mother's side-”

“Lock him up with the others,” said Duffy. “We'll get to the bottom of this.”

The sheriff was reaching for his pistol as he said the words, but he very clearly didn't expect much resistance. January slung the chair at him and was out the door onto the gallery without seeing whether it struck its target or not. Three long strides took him to the gallery rail and he swung over it, dropping to the ground as Esteban yelled, “Get him! Stop him!” to no one in particular, and Duffy bellowed, “Doyle! Waller! Catch that nigger!”

Because he spoke decent French and was reasonably clean, if shaggy, Duffy had been allowed in the house. But thanks to Esteban's prejudices against Americans, the sheriff's posse had been left on the front steps, chewing and spitting and playing mumblety-peg. If they'd simply run around the corner of the house the minute Buffy yelled, they'd have caught him.

But they didn't. January had bolted across the treedotted strip of land between the big house and the cane beyond Thierry's cottage, when they at last emerged around the corner, riding hell-for-leather on the horses that they'd run to, caught, and mounted. It was a good hundred and fifty feet and January leaned into it, legs driving with all his strength, hoofbeats hammering behind him, and a small corner of his heart zinging with the knowledge that there was no way they could catch him before he reached the cane, and he was right.

He plunged into the cane, slithering through the harsh dark green wall of it, praying he wouldn't tread on a snake. They'd expect him to head for the river. That bought him time, for he veered leftward immediately, inward toward the swamp. Once in the cipriere, he thought, they'd have to separate-and then like High John the Conqueror in the tale, he'd be able to take on both the lion and the bear.

He heard the riders behind him, still trying to drive their horses through the cane-rows. They were crackers, not planters, and had never had the occasion to learn that each row of mature cane was, in effect, a wall. He slithered through two or three, like a flea burrowing in a bale of cotton, then hit one of the narrow paths between ditches and ran, their curses fading behind him.

They'd waste time at that, he thought, before turning inland.

His heart was racing, after a week of slavery wild with freedom and with terror.

Two weeks on Mon Triomphe had given him back his old sense of bearings about distances, too. When he worked his way back through the rows toward what he thought would be about the end of the line of cabins, he found he wasn't far off; just opposite Nancy and Boaz's house, two or three only from the end of the row. At this time of the afternoon, the quarters were empty; everyone in the field, except for the sick and the tiniest children under Pennydip's charge. It was an easy matter to spring over the fence in the last garden in the row, to dart to the well-stocked pig-house, slip his hand under the rafters, and find Harry's rifle.

He threw himself under the house, groped in the long weeds there for the boards that covered holes. He was looking for powder and ball, and found none, although he did find a bullet mold and seven or eight small bags of lead scraps such as he'd collected from Arnaud on Daubray. Also three gourds of liquor, a bag of salt, a woman's blue silk dress, and two cane-knives. He took one gourd of liquor and the salt, in case he needed something to trade, but didn't dare stay to hunt more thoroughly. He was thinking very fast, like a hunted animal-aware that they would indeed hunt him like an animal. What he meant to do had to be done swiftly, in the hunt's first rush, before men came in from all over the parish. Already he could hear the voices of the pursuers, far distant and still near the river. But with rumor and fear of rebellion capping three years of accounts of Nat Turner's depredations, it wouldn't be long, he thought, before more men joined them.

He paused only long enough to help himself to the ash-pone and yams Cynthia had laid out under a pot, then slipped back into the cane, and started to run along the rows-Harry's liquor gourd bouncing and knocking against the small of his back. Once the men turned their horses toward the cipriere, they could travel faster than he.