Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (7 page)

“And the people who remained at the house?”

“Just those I've told you of.” The planter hurled the mangled end of the cigar into the spittoon. “Cornwallis, Agamemnon, Gilles the butler, the two maids, the sewing women, the washerwoman. The yard hands like Scipio the potter, who's too old to be out in the woods, the cook, and the woman who makes the soap and candles-”

“And your wife,” said January.

Fourchet bolted to his feet, veins bulging in his forehead. “My wife is the gentlest and most honorable soul who walks the face of the earth,” he said, in a voice of iron quiet. “You will not speak of her in connection with anything-anything!-concerning this . . . this hoodoo, this vandal, this enemy of mine. She would no more have anything to do with such activities than she would-would-would forswear her faith or betray her country! If you speak again of her as you have, to me or to anyone else, believe me, I will have you whipped.”

His hand lashed out and January flinched, but Fourchet in his anger only caught the back of the chair on which he'd been sitting, sending it crashing into the wall. “And that goes for you.” He jabbed a finger down at Hannibal. Then with the vast savage violence January had remembered with terror in over thirty years of dreaming, he slammed from the cabin.

His footfalls crashed along the deck, then up the stairs to lose themselves in the promenade above. The engine clanked in the silence like the labored panting of a wind-touched horse.

“I look forward to making the acquaintance of the gentlest and most honorable soul who walks the face of the earth.” Hannibal spoke without opening his eyes. “Any reason for suspecting her of doctoring her husband's tipple? Beyond the obvious one, I mean.”

“A woman married to a man who is habituated to violence doesn't need a reason beyond the obvious,” said January quietly. “But no. And at the moment I don't suspect her particularly. It's just that she had as much opportunity as anyone else, and more than some, and she's among the group that stands to profit rather than to lose by her husband's death. And then again, if someone cries, Don't look over there, don't look over there, I generally can't resist a peek, to find out what it is I'm not supposed to be seeing. On the whole I'd like to know where all the snags and bars lie, if I'm going to navigate these waters.”

No man of color-unless in the service of a passenger-being permitted on the rooftop promenade, January spent the remainder of the day watching the river from the cluttered lower deck. Beyond the saw grass and cypress of the batture, and above the low brow of the levee on the landward side, plantation houses seemed to drift by-square, white, ostentatious with pillars and summerhouses if the owner was an American; smaller, plainer, and brightly painted if Creole. When the Belle Dame slowed to maneuver among snags, or labored to buck a sandbar, January could pick out clearly the men and women on the galleries: planters' wives in dark neat wooh and poplins, servants in plain calico dresses or simple dark livery. Children now and then raced in and out the long French doors, muslin-clad girls and boys in tight-buttoned skeleton suits, whose older sisters would be in the convent in town, whose brothers would be away at school.

And between the houses lay the endless dark green of the cane-fields, buzzards circling lazily overhead. Smoke poured skyward from mill after mill, and from the fields the still air shimmered with voices singing:

"The English guns they go bim-bim,

The Kaintuck guns, they go zim-zim,

I say to myself,

Run save your skin,

Run to the water's edge,

O, Run to the water's edge . . ."

The main gangs, the big men, January remembered, leaning on the rail, would be chopping the cane, while the women gathered and carted, and the second gang worked the mill. Fed the cut cane into the grinders and kept the fire going beneath the cauldrons with wood that had been cut and stored up all year against this grueling and terrible season. Once the mill was started, it never stopped. The grinders would halt only for a few moments, to change the mule teams, or to clear knots or rocks picked up with the cane. But the fires were never suffered to go out.

His father was a main-gang man. That much he recalled. Leaning on the rail, he tried to remember that tall quiet man with the tribal scars-country marks, they were called-on his face. But it hurt, like probing an unhealed wound.

Night after hot summer night in his childhood, January had sat on the gallery of the garçonniere, watching the lights across the yard where his mother entertained St.-Denis Janvier. January would watch until the lights went out and sometimes for hours afterwards, waiting for his father to come. He'd never spoken to his mother about the man, nor she to him. But those nights were printed so clearly on his mind, the dim glow of candles in the garrets and town houses visible beyond the roof, and the patterns of the stars in the dark velvet sky. Cicadas thrumming above the whine of mosquitoes, and the shrill cheep of crickets. In those days the cipriére had lain close to Rue Burgundy, a few streets away only.

He didn't remember when he'd quit waiting like that. Didn't remember anything about the last night that he'd done so, or the first night that he had not.

Only eventually, it became something that he no longer did.

“Ben?”

He turned his head to see the butler Baptiste. “Michie Fourchet sent me to find you, to let you know that your master Michie Sefton's going to be going ashore at Mon Triomphe, to stay til he's feeling better.”

January raised his brows and widened his eyes in what he hoped was a convincing expression of relieved joy, and gusted a sigh. “Thank God,” he said. “All day I been wonderin' just what we'd do, with him sick and gettin' sicker by the look of it, and us bound all the way to St. Louis. Thank you. And bless your master, for such a kindness.”

Baptiste managed a trace of a smile. “I must admit I'm astonished. Michie Fourchet seems to me to be a-a hard man.” He stammered a little over the words. His French was good, if a little Creole in its treatment of articles-he used je instead of mo to refer to himself, a refinement January was careful, in his new persona, to avoid. “I hope your master will feel better soon.”

“Thank you.” January shook his head. “It's the consumption, the doctors say. Seems like he get a little worse every year, no matter what they do.”

“I know.” Baptiste leaned his elbows beside January's on the railing and watched the miniature drama enacted in dumb show on the gallery of a white-pillared house: mistress chiding a sewing-maid, leaping to her feet, rustling into the house; the master emerging, catching the girl by the arm, speaking intently. Kissing her.

Trees intervened.

“My mistress      my old mistress, M'am Grasse-was consumptive also, and there wasn't a thing Michie Pierre didn't try to get her well. In the end he took her to Paris, where the doctors are better, they say.” He stared out at the glittering riffle along the water's surface, while from the bow a leadsman called out “Deep four . . . deep four . . . quarter less four . . . ”

“It help?” asked January, after several minutes of silence.

The little man glanced sidelong at him. “That I don't know. I hoped they'd take us with them-which was what Michie Pierre said they'd do.” He opened his mouth to say something more, then closed it.

But they found they needed another fifteen hundred dollars instead.

January could see it, in the tears that slowly filled the elderly man's eyes. But there was nothing-literally nothing-that he could say.

Traveling without interruption, a fast boat could have covered the distance between New Orleans and two rusted smokestacks poking up from the black waters. Here a boat had either been gutted on a sawyer or blown up her boilers. Above him the ship's bell clanged and a voice called, “Give us a little more steam.”

At about eight the engine's thud-thud-thud altered yet again to a steady shuddering, and the whistles howled as the engine let off steam. From the darkness a voice called, “Mon Triomphe!” and yellow smears of torchlight spotted the batture's indistinct bulk.

Men put out in a boat with towlines. The Belle Dame could not maneuver into a dock the way a sidewheeler could. After a few minutes the boat began to move again, with the silent sideways steadiness of dead weight being hauled by main force. The mate, a short bearded man with a Spanish lilt to his voice, yelled, “Let's do this, then! Captain don't want to have to damp the fires.”

Voices on the wharf, and the jangle of harness.
A lookout would have warned the coachman of the steamboat's approach. January remembered angling for the job of lookout, a task more interesting than pulling weeds or gathering kindling, and being trumped out of it every time by a boy named Gideon, who was older and quick and silver-tongued. He wondered what had become of him.

The batture took shape through the mist. Above the landing loomed the dark baroque shape of a twisted oak tree, gesturing like Demosthenes warming to a Philippic peroration-an ideal place, January thought, to hang his bright-hued bandannas.

Today had been Friday. Tomorrow, Saturday, the kerchief would be black: purple for Christ's blood shed on a Friday, black for the day Our Lord spent in Hell. White for His resurrection-and then red for the red beans everyone in New Orleans cooked on Mondays when they did the wash. After a day of observing what

Mon Triomphe in five hours. But all the way upriver, the Belle Dame stopped at plantation landings, to take on cargo or passengers, to drop off letters and small consignments of goods. January checked on Hannibal twice, and found him as well as could be expected-though bored senseless with nothing to do but pretend to be on his deathbed-and tried to get up a conversation with Cornwallis, only to meet with a cold sarcasm and the kind of mocking double-entendres that couldn't be answered without revealing himself to be a good deal more intelligent than he was supposed to be. Once, in his idle rounds of the decks, January heard the valet describing in detail to the new butler their master's habit of nailing up malefactors in a flour barrel in the barn, and Cornwallis's eyes glinted with spiteful satisfaction at the tale.

January wanted to say, Don't pay any attention to that, but couldn't. He knew Cornwallis spoke the truth. Darkness fell. Mists rose from the river and rendered the moon away to a ravel of shining wool. Smoke from the mills hung thick in the raw air, and through night and fog smudges of gold burned like the maws of ovens, where the mills of every plantation blazed on through the night. January shivered, for it seemed to him they ran awfully close to the shore for low water, fog, and night, but Captain Ney, standing in the open pilothouse in his long coat of scarlet wool, seemed to know what he was doing.

“Hell, he was born hereabouts, him,” said the cook, when January went to fetch another pot of coffee for Hannibal. “I seen him take her so close to shore you could kiss a girl that was standin' on the batture. One day he may blow her up, for he do like to lay on the speed, but he never snag her.”

Following the receipt of this Dutch comfort January reemerged from the galley to the unpromising sight of every woman on the river was wearing, he had no doubt that the stokers and stewards would report the colors accurately to Shaw.

His hand sought the rosary in his pocket, the rosary that never left him, and the touch of the blue beads like the grasp of God's reassuring fingers around his own.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee . . . Pray for us sinners. Pray for us sinners.

Me,
and those I'm seeking to help in the house of chains.

Men pelted by him, manhandling the gangplank into position. A rope was tossed across the narrowing space of black water. Captain Ney descended the steps from the hurricane deck and spoke to Fourchet as the planter came around the corner of the boat's barnlike superstructure. The younger man was distant and wary, January saw, as if the captain had indeed grown up watchful of this unpredictably violent man.

In the torchlight on shore, January identified Esteban Fourchet at once-was it possible a man nearing fifty could look that much like the shuffle-footed boy he'd been?-and guessed the narrow-headed leathery gent in dark corduroy to be the overseer Thierry. The neat little fop in a beryl-green tailcoat would be the surviving son of Camille Bassancourt.

It was time to get Hannibal and the luggage, and go ashore.

And let's hope, January thought, as Fourchet's voice slashed the fog like an oyster shell tearing flesh, Shaw keeps the colors straight in his mind as well, and comes hotfoot if the bandanna says the same color two days running.

Because if something prevents me from changing the signals, I'll be either dead, or a slave somewhere for life.

“This is Monsieur Sefton.” Simon Fourchet gestured stiffly as January carried Hannibal; wrapped in a number of blankets against the night's raw chill, down the Belle Dame's gangplank to the rough wharf floating at the river's edge. “He did me a good turn on the trip up from town, saved me from a bad investment. He'll be staying in the garçonniere until he's well enough to go on to St. Louis.”

“Thank you,” whispered Hannibal, and coughed-for effect, this time. In Paris, January had seen the great Kean expiring as Romeo. So, it appeared, had Hannibal. “I am indebted to you beyond what I can say.”

It was sixty feet from the levee to the house, but a green-lacquered barouche waited for them at the top of the flight of shallow plank steps. “Ben, give Lundy M'sieu Sefton's bags and get on the back,” ordered Fourchet curtly, as January helped Hannibal into the carriage and tucked the blankets around him. “Lundy, give Ben your torch and follow with the men. This is Baptiste.” He nodded toward the new butler. “He'll be taking Gilles's place.”

January took the torch from the slim white-jacketed man who bore it, and stepped up onto the footman's perch at the rear of the carriage. Thierry, the overseer, sprang up beside the coachman with a catlike lightness, and the driver's wary flinch told January what he had to expect from this man, when he was working under him in the fields.