Always & Forever: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 1) (26 page)

“Oh, and Mademoiselle Josephine,” Lalie continued, “is in
New Orleans, too, staying with her maman’s sister.”

After the letter, Phanor constantly thought, Surely I’ll see
her today. She’ll be promenading, or riding in a surrey. She’ll be very grand
in her town clothes, and she’ll be happy to see me. After all, he looked rather
grand himself in his stylish hat and coat.

On the day Phanor at last spotted Josie in the square with
the
américains
, he’d had a moment to look at her before he approached
her party. She was even prettier than he’d remembered. The pallor of last
summer was gone, and Josie’s cheeks were rosy. He thought he might be able to
reach all the way around her waist with his two hands, and he longed to finger
one of the curls peeping out from her black bonnet.

When she recognized him, Phanor watched the light in her
hazel eyes. She was glad to see him, but he knew better than to rush to her and
grab her hands. He had acquired enough polish to approach the gentleman who
escorted her first, and with the restraint the
américains
preferred.

“I am always in the square on Sunday afternoons,” he’d told
her. Josie had smiled and he knew she’d understood. After that, Phanor appeared
in the square in front of the cathedral rain or shine. But she didn’t come.

He began to habit the square earlier and earlier, and he
took his fiddle along for company. He wore his old clothes, patched and mended
as they were, so that his new suit might be cleaned and pressed by his landlady
to be ready for the work week. He’d play his old favorites, easing the
loneliness and passing the time. The people seemed to enjoy it, and he enjoyed
having an audience to play for. The money they threw in his hat meant nothing
to him; Monsieur Cherleu paid him more than he ever dreamed he’d have. But the
men and women, however poor they were, seemed to want to pay him. They expected
to, and they valued him the more for having paid for his music.

When the worst of the winter was over, but spring had not
yet announced herself, Phanor took a steamboat upriver. He hadn’t been home
since late last August.

Phanor hopped from the steamboat onto the dock at Toulouse.
He turned and waved to the captain once, and then climbed the levee. Before him
lay the rows of oaks and Josie’s house clearly visible through the bare trees.
The bright yellow walls with the green shutters, the long row of windows, the
expanse of gallery and roof – the house seemed the same, yet somehow smaller
than he’d remembered.

He recollected Cleo slogging through the mud on those silly
patens the first time he’d played the fiddle for her. His keenest memory,
though, was the night on the levee when he’d played while Cleo and Remy, Josie
and Thibault sang around the fire. Their knees touching, Josie had sat on the
log next to him. He’d wanted to kiss her, had nearly done it. How many times he
wished he had.

Phanor walked through the corridor of trees and stood at the
front gallery steps. He was no longer the barefoot Cajun boy come to sell eggs
or hickory nuts. He was a man of business. Surely this time he should announce
himself at the front door.

He raised his hand to pull the bell chain, but before the
first ring, Cleo opened the big cypress door. “Monsieur DeBlieux, I believe.”
Cleo said, her manner as formal as a fine butler in some grand house. “Do come
in, monsieur.”

He laughed at her overplay of propriety, caught her in his
arms and whirled her around.

When she stepped back, Cleo said, “Let’s see how fine you
look.” She touched the velvet collar and the linen cravat. “You the same boy I
know?” she teased.

Phanor straightened his jacket. “You mean that boy, the one
who play for you on the levee? That’s me, sure. But me, I don’t plan to be
barefoot no more, Cleo,
non
.”

“I’ve missed you, Phanor. Lalie brought a letter over to
send with Madame’s dispatches. Did she tell you about Remy?”

“
Oui
, I know Remy is back.”

Cleo looked toward Madame Emmeline’s office door. “I’ll tell
you about it later. First I better let Madame know you’re here.”

Phanor spent more than an hour with Madame Emmeline. She had
taken an interest in his new life, and not just for her old friend Cherleu’s
sake; she’d even written Phanor a letter suggesting he let her review his
records. They went over his book, and she showed him a better method of
accounting for the cases of wine he brokered. He told her how he had been
investigating warehouses to find the best prices for storing Monsieur Cherleu’s
wine shipments, and she suggested he include in his comparisons which companies
included the cost of stevedores in their figures.

“Me, I can do that, Madame Emmeline,” Phanor said. “I know
many of these men, now, and others will do business for the price of a bottle
of ordinary Bordeaux.”

“Well worth the persuasion, I’m sure,” Madame said. “You’ve
done well, Phanor. You may stay for supper, if you like.”

“Thank you, Madame. But I have not seen my papa or my sister
since August. I will go home.”

“Of course. Before you go back to New Orleans, then.”

“
Merci
. I will come another day, if you wish, before
I leave.”

Phanor said good-bye and found his hat on the parlor table.
He heard Cleo sweeping on the back gallery. When she saw him, she leaned her
straw broom against the wall.

“Do you have time to see something before you go home?” Cleo
asked.

Phanor glanced at the weak sun in the west. He’d need to be
at the house on the swamp’s edge before dark, and the winter sun set early. “I
have a little time.”

“We have to walk out to the fields. If we find Elbow John,
he can bring me back.”

Phanor looked at her. Since when had Cleo needed any kind of
escort? She was the most fearless girl he knew.

“Never mind about why,” Cleo said. “That’s not important
now. Let me get my shawl, and we’ll go.”

Phanor followed Cleo through the pecan grove and to the
south fields where the slaves were planting the last of the cane in the
reclaimed land. When Cleo stopped abruptly and held up her hand, he was silent.
He looked around, but all he saw were the usual men and women laboring over the
soil and a white man on horseback nearby.

Cleo motioned for Phanor to go with her back among the trees
that skirted the field. “We can see well enough from here,” Cleo said.

“See what? Are you afraid of the overseer?”

Cleo’s face distorted into a sneer. “He can’t hurt me any
more than he has.” She showed him the folded razor in her pocket. “I’ll take
care of myself if he tries me again. But it’s better for Remy this way. If he
knew what LeBrec did . . . ”

Phanor looked at Cleo closely. He understood.

“Listen,” Cleo said. “You hear?”

A tinkling of bells came to Phanor across the field. He
nodded and looked at the people bent over punching cane sections into the black
earth.

Cleo pointed. “See Remy in the last row?”

“What is that thing on his head?” Phanor squinted his eyes
to make out the contours of the head cage Remy wore strapped on his shoulders.

“It’s to keep him from running again. And to humiliate him.
Every movement he makes, those bells on the top of the cage ring. All day,
those bells clang in his ears. And when he bends over, the cage slaps him in
the back of the head. You should see the scars on his shoulders where it cuts
into the flesh.”

Phanor stared at Remy. How the man could bend over and keep
his balance Phanor couldn’t imagine. It was inhuman.

“How long?” Phanor said. “How long does he have to wear it?”

“As long as it pleases Monsieur LeBrec.”

Phanor gazed at the white man on the horse. LeBrec sat
lazily, one arm propping his body up against the saddle horn, his hat pushed
back, his eyes on the slaves.

“Remy is going to try again,” Cleo said.

“Run away? With that thing on his head?”

Cleo’s face was turned to the scene in the cane field. “He
said he’s thinking about how to get it off. But I don’t see what he can do
without the blacksmith to help him. And Smithy can’t risk it. Or anyway, he
says he won’t.” She looked at Phanor. “LeBrec loves the whip.”

Phanor grimaced when Remy bent over to his task and the
weight of the cage caused him to misstep. A man should not have to live like
that. Not any man.

Phanor watched LeBrec spit over his horse’s shoulder. The
man’s build was powerful. Phanor guessed he was short in the leg, but even from
where he watched with Cleo, he could see the thigh muscles tight against
LeBrec’s trousers. Sometimes short men, his papa had always said, were the
meanest. Like God had cheated them of the stature that fit their opinion of
themselves, and they could not rest without punishing God’s other people. Even
the slaves. No, Phanor amended to himself, especially the slaves.

“I’ll think about it,” Phanor said.

Yellow light glowed from the windows of the little gray
house as Phanor walked up the path among the moss-draped tupelos. Fog was
moving in from the bayou, and the house of his birth seemed to float on the
mist.

The weathered boards of the porch were warped, and the floor
sagged on one end. Light seeped from the roof where the winter had claimed a
shingle. If the pneumonia had not filled her lungs, Phanor’s maman would have
been stirring a pot of rice and beans on the woodstove. It seemed so long ago,
and Phanor wondered he had never noticed how shabby the place was.

But the chimney smoke carried the aroma of sizzling bacon,
notes from Papa’s dulcimer penetrated the thickening air, and Phanor heard
little Nicholas let out a shout and a peal of laughter. Phanor hurried to
immerse himself in his family.

The days that followed were filled with music and singing
and story-telling. Phanor, his father, and his brother-in-law Louis sat up late
into the night talking and drinking Papa’s ‘shine. Phanor had brought them two
bottles of good Burgundy, but his Papa said, “It’s mighty fine going down, Son,
but I tell you true, it lacks the kick of my corn.”

Phanor carried Lalie’s little Nicholas around on his
shoulders, showed him the hollow tree where the bees lived, and handed him back
to his mother when he became odorous or fussy. Louis and Phanor took the
pirogue out and gigged for frogs at twilight. It was good to be home, but
before long, Phanor grew restless. He missed the hum and buzz of New Orleans.

Throughout the days, Phanor thought about Remy. It was
dangerous to help a slave escape. It was grand theft. And Phanor depended on
Madame Tassin’s good will for the future he had glimpsed for himself.

But Remy had to be freed from that cage.

Papa would not want to make an enemy of his old friend
Madame Emmeline. They were not in truth equals, but there was friendship of a
kind, based on long association between their families over three generations.
Phanor didn’t want to place his father in a position of having to lie. He was
not good at it anyway. But Louis might help him.

Louis owed nothing to Remy, and Phanor didn’t remember his
ever having spoken against slavery. But his brother-in-law was a fair man, and
in Remy’s favor, not above raiding a neighbor’s fish pond or log pile.

When Phanor explained Remy’s situation to Louis while they
were out in the pirogue, Louis presented the obvious arguments. Remy was
property, after all. Phanor had to think of himself first.

“What you want to get messed up in that for?” Louis said.
“He belong to that Madame Tassin. He no concern to you.”

“Maybe.”

“Sure, this slave, he not your problem, Phanor.”

“If you could see what they’ve put on his head, Louis. And
Cleo, she wants her babies to be free. You remember Cleo.”

“Sure, me, I know Cleo. We find her maman and her papa in
the flood. That girl, she have a hard time.” They listened to the frogs’ chorus
while they drifted in the boat. “So this Remy, he Cleo’s man, eh?”

Phanor nodded. He told Louis about the overseer being after
Cleo, and how that made it even more dangerous for Remy to be on the place.

“Sound like Cleo, she the one need to get off Toulouse,”
Louis said.

“Cleo can take care of herself, I think. Until Mademoiselle
Josephine comes home.”

The moon had risen and lit the edge of the shallows. Louis
stood up and poised with one foot on the gunwale. He stabbed his gig into the
water and raised up a writhing frog on the barbs. “Lalie, she fix us a late
supper, we catch a mess of these.”

Phanor stood too and searched the night for the eye gleam of
bull frogs. He gigged an old bull bigger than his two hands together, and the
men frogged for another half hour without talking. Even in the cool darkness,
the teeming bayou smelled of the living and the dead -- birds, reptiles, fish,
trees and vines – and of ripe, rich earth.

When the men field dressed the frogs and threw the offal
back in, the splashes attracted a silent gator. Its body glided under the
water, but its eyes caught the moonlight and gave it away. Louis thwacked it on
the head with the gaff. It retreated, and they sat down again and picked up
their oars.

As they pulled back toward the house, Louis said, “So, Phanor,
how we gone do this?”

Timing was the most important part of the plan. Remy needed
help to remove the cage. Phanor needed to be seen boarding the steamboat at the
Toulouse dock alone. Louis would take Remy through the bayous to a point
downstream where the two of them would board a boat for New Orleans. No one
knew Louis on the boats, and no one would question a white man traveling with
his slave. If they planned carefully, the Hue and Cry would not have reached
the settlements downriver until they were clear.

Once in New Orleans, Louis would turn Remy over to Phanor,
who would find him a safe place, and Louis would return home to Papa, Lalie,
and Nicholas. If anyone asked where he’d been, he would say he’d been hunting
gators in the swamp.