Elysium: The Plantation Series Book IV (9 page)

Valentine slapped him on
the shoulder. "Spoken like a born orator."

Alistair tied his horse
to the rail at the back of the Bickell house and stepped onto the porch where
Thomas sat with a book in his lap. He gave Thomas a once-over. "You look
pretty good considering. How’s the shoulder?"

"I’m moving it a
little more every day."

Alistair chose a chair
and stretched his legs out, his hound P.G. curling up beside him.

"Have you found who
was with Valmar?" Thomas asked.

He shook his head. "I
know more about who it wasn’t than who it was. The Knights of the White
Camellia say they were not involved. Not in this particular assault anyway."

"They would deny it,
of course."

"I’m inclined to
believe them. I know a good many of them, unfortunately. They are not shy about
their convictions, or about claiming credit for advancing their aims with means
fair or foul."

"So we don’t know
who busted up my rally and scared people half to death. A lot of them won’t
come to a rally again, not if there’s going to be violence."

"And therein lies
their success, intimidating people into submission. As for who did it if it was
not the Knights, there are plenty of angry men down here, men who were wealthy
and aren’t anymore, men drifting with nothing to do but fume they lost the war.
I’ve heard rumors, that’s all. Nothing to act on. And you?"

"The same. But if
your rumors and my rumors are about the same men, that must mean -- "

"Not necessarily,
Thomas. We need proof if we don’t want the whole parish going up in smoke. If
people thought the white men we charged were innocent . . . It would be like
the Mechanics Institute all over again, and we don’t want to feed that beast."

Alistair suspected he
knew some of the white men who’d perpetrated the massacre at the Mechanics
Institute. The Radical Republicans had convened a convention in New Orleans the
previous July to address the hated Black Codes, statutes that attempted to put
the freedmen back under the white man’s boot. Peaceably assembled outside the
Mechanics Institute, the overwhelmingly black crowd were attacked by armed
police and white supremacists who indiscriminately fired into the unarmed
Negroes. More than two hundred black men died that day.

Alistair watched the
muscle jump in Thomas’s jaw. He was young and passionate and talented. They
didn’t need a man like Thomas charging in the wrong direction.

"Give me your word
you won’t go off and do something before we can prove it. Thomas?"

Thomas blew out a breath.
"All right. You have my word on it. I still want to know – who are the
whispers about?"

 Well, Thomas had promised
– no hot-headed foolishness. "Fisher, Shipton, and Valmar."

Thomas stared at him. "Those
are the same names I hear."

Alistair met his gaze. "That
doesn’t prove they did it. You know that."

Alistair sat a little
longer, and finally brought himself to say it. "Your Mrs. Palmer accepting
company this afternoon?"

Thomas gave him a look
and a little smile. "Shall I ask?" He stood to go in the house and
turned back. "That’s silly. Come on inside with me. I imagine she’s in the
parlor."

Alistair looked down at
his dirty boots. He hadn’t changed his shirt since this morning. "I’m not
really fit for the parlor. Maybe she’d like to walk out in the orchard. It’s
cooler under the trees."

Thomas went in and a few
minutes later, Alistair heard Lily’s light step coming through the house. He
got to his feet and held on to his hat. He didn’t know why he should be so shy.
He wasn’t some green boy.

"Here you are out
here," she said, holding the screen door open. "Thomas said you’re
too dusty for the parlor, but you look fine to me." She smiled at him. "Come
on in and I’ll give you a glass of lemonade."

"Lily, I’m a mess. I
thought maybe you’d like to get out of the house. It’s not bad in the orchard
this time of day. Or maybe you’d like to walk down to the levee and look at the
river. Always a breeze coming off the river."

"Let me just get my
bonnet."

"If … of course."

"What? ‘If’ what?"

He might as well just
tell her. "If you wear your bonnet, I can’t see your face half the time.
Makes it hard to talk to you."

She touched her hair and
looked at the floor. He’d made her self-conscious. You’d think he’d never
talked to a woman before.

She raised her head and
smiled at him again. He felt his stomach drop back into place. She wiped her
hands on her apron, untied it, and hooked it on the wall peg.

He held his arm out for
her, and P.G. sauntered alongside him as they walked up the lane.

So. Now he had her, what
were they going to talk about? He didn’t feel a single word rising to the
surface of his brain.

"How’s the school
coming along?"

Ah. He could talk about
the school for an hour or three, not that she’d agree to walk with him that
long. "They’ve nearly finished the roof. We’re still waiting for the
window glass to arrive. Somebody over in Vacherie is making the desks."

"I gather you’re
investigating the raid on Thomas’s rally."

He nodded.

"The sheriff won’t
help?" 

"He’s doing what he
can. The Army no doubt is pressuring him to make arrests, but you don’t arrest
somebody you know you can’t successfully prosecute. Proving identities – it
just isn’t going to happen when the criminals were all masked."

"But when all the ex-slaves
have the vote?"

"We’re a long way
from that. This vote in September, the legislature authorized it for this one
time only. It’s the convention that must write Negro suffrage into the
constitution if Louisiana is to be a state again."

"And that’s why they
targeted Thomas."

"Exactly."

They ambled along the
lane, comfortable together. He was glad she wasn’t wearing those ridiculous
hoops. Silliest fashion he’d ever seen, worse even than a gown being bedecked
with ribbons and bows and laces and flounces till it must have weighed twice
what a dress ought to weigh.

Lily’s pale blue dress
was modest, but very becoming. There were slanted tucks leading down from the
bosom, showing what a little waist she had. And a generous . . . well, a
gentleman did not speculate what was underneath a woman’s clothes. He smiled to
himself, as if there were any truth to that.

She was walking along,
her hands behind her back, her head bent. He was so very taken with her, but he
needed to know her, and she needed to know him. His own ideas were not popular,
and she would have to be able to live with that. She sent Maddie to his school,
but maybe that was mere convenience, a way to keep a restless six year old
entertained.

"What do you think,
Lily? About Negroes going to school?"

She looked at him in
surprise. "Well, I’m for it, of course. They’re going to need to read and
write and figure to make all of this work."

He reached for her arm
and placed her hand on his sleeve. A primitive sort of ownership settled over
him. A sense of the last obstacle being swept away. He felt lifted by a surge
of well-being, of optimism, of – did he dare think it – of happiness. He was
going to marry Lily Palmer. Ridiculous, he knew, as little time as they’d known
each other, but there it was. He’d just have to give her time to realize it.

Still, he wanted to be
fair. Race was a complicated issue, one she may not have had the need to think
about as much as he had. Even though she seemed pleased with the school, with
Fanny Brown and the students, letting her own child attend in the fall was a
different level of approval.

"Lily, I think I
need to clarify something."

She tipped her head to
look at him.

"I encouraged you to
let Maddie come to our school, but you’re new here, you’ll be making new
friends, making a place for yourself. I didn’t make you aware that many people,
neighbors up and down the river, are still hostile to the ex-slaves becoming
literate. Having your child associate with the Negro children will not be
acceptable in all circles."

In fact, there were women
in Alistair’s social set who had cut him to the bone when they learned he’d
built a school for the Negroes. Curled and powdered, these ladies in their
satin slippers and lacy shawls hissed
traitor
, and worse, behind his
back.

"I’ll give that some
thought, Major."

If she couldn’t extend
her tolerance so far, to allow Maddie to be burdened with what some people
would see as a taint, he could accept that. Her first obligation in life, after
all, was to her child.

"People knew about
your school – that’s why they burned it down," she said with a line
between her brows. "They’ll know you’re rebuilding, too."

"Not many secrets in
this parish, Lily. I’d bet before dawn two or three hundred people will know we
strolled down to the river together."

Lily laughed, as he hoped
she would. This was so much better, no bonnet obscuring her face. When she
laughed she threw her head back and he could see her mouth and the sparkle in
her eyes. When they were married, he’d persuade her to throw all her bonnets
out.

He helped her climb to
the top of the levee where they could walk onto the Toulouse dock.

"It is cooler here,"
she said. "And here comes a paddle boat."

"How did you find
your trip down the river on a steamship? Had you been on one before?"

"Never! Maddie was exhausted
every evening just from the excitement of watching the towns and the forests
and the fields go by."

"But it was not
exciting for you?"

She looked away. In a
moment, she said, "Alistair, forgive me if I’m presumptuous, but I must make
something clear to you." She kept her gaze turned from him. "I don’t
intend to marry again. Ever."

What he thought of as
simply a pump for blood suddenly showed him it was more than that. It felt like
a lead weight in his chest.

"Why is that, Lily?"

She stared at the steam
boat churning by.

"You loved your
husband that much?"

She gave him a sharp look
then turned her head back to the ship. But without her bonnet, he could read
her face. So it wasn’t that she’d loved her husband too much to marry again. Did
that mean she’d hated him? Hated being married?

"You’re still young,
Lily."

She shook her head. "No.
I won’t marry again."

She turned abruptly and
headed down the levee. She had said "won’t," not "can’t."
Maybe someday she’d trust him enough to explain that to him. As it was, the
lead weight turned to something less dense, like maybe copper, or even tin.
Whichever, he did not think "won’t" was so hopeless. Whatever "won’t"
meant could change.

Thomas looked up from the
length of leather he was braiding on the back porch when he heard voices coming
around the house. Four men appeared. A delegation, in effect. Thomas welcomed
them, inviting them to take the other cow-hide chairs.

"You all look like
you got something on your mind."

"You know who Jacques
Valmar is," Valentine said.

"Won’t likely forget
a man left a whip lash on my back."

"Paget locked him
up, all right. Couldn’t do anything else with Mr. Chamard and Major Whiteaker
standing right there waiting for the door to clang shut behind the bastard.
Course he had to let him out on bail the next morning."

Thomas nodded. He knew
that much.

"Yesterday, Valmar
had his day in court. The court charged him with disorderly conduct. That’s all." 

"Any more than that,
Thomas," Valentine said, "then Valmar would have counter charged with
assault."

"I understand. So
what did the judge do?"

"Fined him a dollar."

The five men contemplated
that for a while. Finally, Reynard, who chewed on a sliver of pine wood, said, "Could
have just dismissed the case. A dollar fine is something, anyway."

Cabel stood up. "It’s
something, but it ain’t enough. Valmar is going around the parish boasting
about what he done. The major says the Knights of the White Camellia wouldn’t
have scum like Valmar with them, but he was one of them stampeding the rally in
Donaldsonville. He had on a hat and a bandana, but I knew him."

"Can you prove it?"
Valentine asked.

"No."

Cabel paced from one end
of the porch to the other. "Thomas, two of our women were raped later that
night you was beat up. Both of them from up in the north of the parish. Rumor
is, one of the rapists was Valmar."

Thomas wiped a hand
across his mouth. "I didn’t know that."

"Nobody wanted to
tell you, you half dead yourself."

Reynard spit over the
porch rail. "Dead is what they ought to be."

Thomas shook his head. "Look,
they deserve killing, I’m not denying that. But we got to be smarter than that.
You understand, Cabel? Reynard? No violence. We got to obey the law if we want
them to."

Cabel stopped pacing
abruptly. "You want to do nothing, then? Cause the law ain’t doing a damn
thing."

"The law will do
something when we get proof. We got to have more than witnesses who saw
somebody wearing a hat and a bandana."

"I’m working on
that," Valentine said. "These pigs ain’t going nowhere. We got time
to gather evidence. That’s what they want. Evidence."

"There’s things we
can do short of killing a man," Cabel said.

"No beating him up
either. I can tell you first hand it’s punishment, being beaten, but – again –
all we’d do is rile folks up and the violence would escalate." Thomas
looked at each man. "No beatings."

Cabel, ever on a short
fuse, blew up. "You act like you don’t give a damn two of our women got
raped. You act like you okay with waiting till
some day
when this magic
evidence gone turn up. You don’t know these women, so it’s nothing to you."

Thomas stood up and
stepped up nose to nose with Cabel. "You know that is not true." Cabel
pushed and pushed, all their lives he had done that. He pushed until he pushed
too far, and then – .

"You take it back,
or you step off the porch with me. Won’t be the first time I busted your stupid
head."

Cabel’s eyes glowed he
was so riled. His hands were fisted as tight as Thomas’s were. Thomas was going
to have to beat him – or get beaten more likely since he wasn’t healed up all
the way from the last beating. Whichever, he was taking Cabel into the yard if
he didn’t take it back.

"Cabel,"
Valentine said.

Reynard talked around his
sliver of pine. "Those white devils sure would be happy to see our finest
tussling around in the dirt. Yes, sir, you do us proud beating the shit out of
each other."

Cabel glanced from
Valentine to Reynard. He opened his hands and stepped back. "All right. So
you care."

Thomas was still furious
with him. Damn hot head. It was because he didn’t know those two women that he
could think about it without turning himself into a fool as hot as Cabel.

"Sit down, son,"
Valentine said softly. Thomas sat, but he could still hear his heart beat
thumping.

Cabel looked at Alfie. "You
ain’t said nothing yet. You happy to let Valmar walk around bragging about what
he done?"

Alfie’s hair was
grizzled, his eyes pale with cataracts. "Ya’ll ever seen a man tarred and
feathered?"

No one had. "It’s a
sight, I tell you. Now, Thomas got the right of it. Ya’ll all know that. But a
tarring and feathering, it don’t do no lasting damage to the body. What it do
is make the man a laughed-at fool. A man been tarred and feathered ain’t going
to strut around all proud-like once he been shown a fool."

Thomas wiped his brow.
His head still ached from the concussion, but it didn’t make him stupid. "It’s
still violent," he said. "It’s still assault."

"Well, then, I
reckon we learned something from the white bastards. We all got hats. We can
get ourselves some old rag to wear around our faces. Who they gone charge with
assault?"

Thomas had to laugh. They
were going to do this with or without his blessing. "What’d you come
around here for if you’re going to do the opposite of what I say?"

Valentine grinned at him,
but only for a moment. "Guess we didn’t need to. Look, ya’ll. We got to
get Thomas elected to the convention in September. We was foolish to come over
here and involve him. Any hint he ain’t respectable gone cost him votes."

"Should of thought
of that fore we come over here then," Alfie said.

"Well, we gone fix
that. Thomas, you telling us to bide our time, wait for the law to make things
right. You are a wise young man. We going to do exactly as you say, ain’t we,
boys?"

"Yes, sir. That’s what
we gone do."

"Yeah, me too. I
gone do what Thomas say."

"Cabel?"
Valentine said.

Thomas knew he’d smirk.
He did.

"Sure. Just what
Thomas say do, that’s what I’m gone do. Always have, always will, right,
Thomas?"

Thomas snorted. "Right.
You were always docile as a lamb."

They talked for a while
about getting people ready to vote for the first time in their lives, about how
the cane was growing, about who was paying what wages.

"You hear Gracie
Evans found her people? The ones sold off seven, eight years back."

"Where were they?"

"Witherspoon, the
agent over to the Freedmen’s Bureau – he found them on a Bureau list, working at
a place down below New Orleans. Gracie going down there to be with them."

"All right,"
Valentine said, standing and stretching. "We gone go on, Thomas. Gone heed
what you say from here on in. Ain’t we, boys?"

Oh yes they surely were,
they all said.

Thomas went back to
braiding the strips of leather, worrying as he worked. If they acted in any way
against the law, it would hurt them in the long run. But he’d said his piece.
He had no more authority than anybody else, when it came down to it. He guessed
he ought to be flattered they’d come by at all.

Five nights later, it was
Saturday and Tully’s Tavern was full. By eleven o’clock, most of the patrons
were far gone. Happy, some would say. Inebriated, in truth.

Three men in hats lingered
in the shadows, patient and quiet. Along about midnight, men started dribbling
out of the bar. Some of them were too far gone to walk straight while others
walked the extremely careful gait of a drunk compensating for the undulating
road.

"That ain’t him,"
Reynard whispered. "Wait."

Eventually, Jacques
Valmar tottered out of the tavern. But there were other men with him.

The three shadows followed
along until the drinkers began to split off for their own homes. The tail
stayed on Valmar. Donaldsonville already had some streetlights up and they
watched him saunter into the pool of light on the corner. They pulled up their
bandanas and melted around the light, staying in the shadows. They had maybe
fifty yards before the next streetlight. Plenty of time.

"Case somebody can
see in the dark, let’s act like we all good friends."

The other two nodded. They
increased their pace till they were only ten feet behind him. Valmar hadn’t
noticed a thing.

"Hello, friend,"
Cabel called. "You not going home yet, are you? Come on with us, we’ll buy
you a drink."

Valmar whirled around and
nearly lost his balance. "Who the hell are you?"

"Now don’t be that
way, Jacques. All the drinking we done together, and you act like you don’t
know us?"

Cabel and Reynard wrapped
their arms around his shoulders in a tight grip. "Come on with us. We got
us a jug of shine. We gone have a good time."

Valentine, the tallest,
reached around Valmar from behind and got a gag in his mouth, then tied it
tight at the back of his head. Valmar struggled, of course, but he was drunk
and they weren’t. They had him off the street in under ten seconds.

In a dark alley, they
tied his hands behind him and wrapped a rope around his ankles, him all the
time grunting and carrying on. They hoisted him like he was a log and carried
him to the wagon.

"Damn if he don’t
wiggle like a eel."

"Wrap that quilt
around him. Two of us can sit on him while you drive."

Taking the back roads, they
drove by a little moonlight and a little starlight until they’d traveled most
of an hour.

"Here’s the cut-off.
I ain’t heard nothing from our guest in a while. You ain’t suffocated him, have
you?"

"You cain’t hear him
snoring up there? He’s dead asleep."

At the end of an old
logging trail, they came to a clearing where an old man sat at a campfire, a
big pot sitting near the flames.

"Remember," Valentine
said. "No names."

"You got the pine
tar warm?"

"Yeah," the old
man said. "It just right. Not too hot, not too cool."

"Let’s get these
bags open then."

They had three bags of
feathers. "That gone be enough?" Valentine himself had not collected
feathers. He had been a valet and a butler all his life. He did not condescend
to enter chicken yards.

"It be plenty,"
Alfie said.

They couldn’t collect
that many feathers on the quiet, chickens being excitable creatures, so there
were others in the neighborhood had a pretty good idea what they were doing
tonight. Couldn’t be helped. Nobody whose chicken yards they’d raided would
talk, anyway.

"Wake him up."

Two of them went to the
wagon and rolled him out of the quilt. "Come on, get out of the wagon."

"He’s too stupid
with liquor to know what’s going on."

"Give him a slap
across the face."

That woke him up
considerable. He tried yelling and he tried screaming, but the gag kept him
pretty quiet.

Reynard untied his ankles
and he tried to kick past his kidnappers. They simply knocked him to the
ground. "Hush up, not nobody out here to hear you anyway."

"And be still."
Valentine shook his head. "One of you sit on him so I can get his boots
off."

"Look at them boots.
They cowboy boots, ain’t they? All shiny and new." Reynard held a boot up
to his foot for size. "Reckon they too little, and they call attention to
themselves anyway."

"Pull his pants off."

"His underbritches,
too?"

"Yeah. Them too."

"Better do the
pecker before we do the tar," Alfie said.

Cabel made a great show
of unsheathing his big hunting knife. Held it over the flames and let the light
glint on the metal.

They were all in on this.
The law didn’t say a thing about scaring a man half to death, and flashing a
big blade would add to the quality of the experience for Valmar.

Valmar started screaming.
Muted through the gag, it was tolerable.

Naked and scared, his
privates right out there for all to see -- the excitement, the fear, whatever
it was, gave the man an erection.

"If that don’t beat
all," Reynard said.

"Just makes it
easier," Cabel said. He approached with the knife. "Hold him still."

Cabel sat on his knees
and readied himself to shave the hair off Valmar’s private parts. Cabel figured
there wasn’t likely to be a law against shaving a man’s privates.

He held the knife up for
Valmar to get a good look at it. Then he grinned. Valmar went crazy, bucking
and screaming through the cotton in his mouth.

The men contemplated him
in his throes. "I reckon we going to have to skip the shaving, what do you
think?" Valentine said.

"Couldn’t help but
cut him, him flailing around like that."

"Well, hell." Cabel
stood up and put his knife back in its sheath.

Reynard approached with a
small tin of red paint. "You want to do it? It was your idea."

"Pretty good size
pecker on you, mister. Likely lots of folks will enjoy looking at it when we get
you back to town."

Valmar was shrieking, his
eyes huge and rolling, like a horse half scared out its mind.

Cabel brushed bright red
paint all over Valmar’s privates from the base of the sack right on out to the
tip of the pecker. He stood back and looked at his handiwork. "Now that’s
a sight."

"Where we start with
the tar? Feet or head?"

"Head. He got to
stand on his feet while we do the rest. Get him up and tie him to that pine
tree over there."

Alfie swabbed pine tar
all over Valmar’s back, on up into his hair, in his crack, under his arms. They
opened one of the bags and all of them patted feathers all over him.