Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (25 page)

“l'm horrified.”

They stepped out of the shed. She put her hands lightly on his arms, her touch as always going through him like an electric shock, dizzying and sweet. Standing on her toes, she kissed his lips.

Thank you. Thank you.

He took a deep breath, with the sensation of having successfully cleared a difficult jump, only to discover the cliff that lay beyond. I must be insane. ..... “What's the quickest way to get to Myrtle Landing?”

Cut-Nose Chighizola loaded a small pirogue into his sloop, the Little Dancer, and took them north across the golddrenched blue stretches of Barataria Bay in the morning, to the head of Bayou Crapaud-Volante. Chighizola grandson-who had developed a passionate quixote-like adoration of Dominique-looked with disapproval at Rose's trousers, calico shirt, and slouch hat, but Cut-Nose laughed and told his grandson, “No, no, now and then you'd have a girl who'd go the whole hog; who wouldn't just be a pirate's woman, but a pirate herself. And believe me, if there was a regular mix-up between crews, you'd get out of the way of anything coming at you with tits and a cutlass!”

For January's part, he found the sight of Rose in a man's shirt and trousers deeply erotic-but then, he reflected, what with having been lovers for less than a month, the sight of her hairbrush on the dresser was erotic, and the freckles on her nose. With a broken-down straw hat covering her hair, her lankiness made her a very plausible boy. When she spoke, which was seldom, her gruff alto and slurred, half-African gombo French transformed her further still. His skin still crawled at the thought of her being taken by slave-stealers, but he understood that he could not say so. Even were he her husband, he could not say so.

And would Ayasha have been safer staying in her own rooms rather than venturing about the streets?

“Were there many like that?” asked January to get his mind off his fear. He recalled Cut-Nose's account of Hesione going after her lover Gambi with a tankard.

“More than you'd think.” The old pirate drew on the line that controlled the sloop's lateen sail, feathering along the wind past Grand Terre's green maze of reed-beds and shell-ridges. Dolphins leaped in the wake, close enough that the faintly acrid sting of their spray dusted January's cheek, and Poivrette, Chighizolas lean-flanked hound bitch, erupted in a frenzy of barking. “Some of the boys that came along for the adventure, and to learn the ways of the sea ... Well, every now and then you'd hear of one that was neither man nor maid. Hellfire Hessy was all girl, though, and pretty as a brig in full sail running on a high sea. Greedy, too, like girls are, always asking for this necklace or that ring, and not always from Gambi, either. Sometimes you'd be cutting up a haul and there'd be a necklace or a pair of earrings, and it'd fall to this man or that, and next thing you'd hear one of the girls had stole it from another, and theyd pinch it back and forth half a dozen times. Used to drive the Boss crazy! Give me two shipfuls of men to command, he'd say, rather than a rowboat of girls. ”

Cut-Nose laughed, a big, rich, rolling sound, and put the nose of the Little Dancer around toward the glittering water northward of the sun. Closer to land a snaggle-haired girl-child poled a raft among the flottants, and with her pole whacked along a half-dozen swimming cows. “Sancho Sangre had three girls, God knows how he did it; they were just like sisters, washing each other's hair and lacing each other up. But they were island girls. The Saint Domingue girls like Hessy wouldn't hardly speak to 'em.”

A dolphin leaped so close to the gunwale that January saw the wise black eye regarding him, and Poivrette lunged to attack, evidently positive she could bring down this aquatic prey. Rose and January caught her collar, laughing. “Serve her right, she fall in and have to swim to shore,” grumbled young Jean at the tiller. “She a pichouette like your pirate girls, Gran'pere; too strongheaded for her own good.”

“Ah, but if they ain't strongheaded, what good are they, eh?” Chighizola smiled, squinting into the sun. “See, originally it was just the island folk,” he said, and glanced down at January and Rose. “Ships would land on the beach, and they'd trade a little, and run the stuff up to New Orleans by Bayou des Familles. Sometimes just up as far as Round Lake and put the word out in town, and people would come down quiet-like to have a look and buy. Gold, wines, slaves, whatever was going-they had a system of signals, so the alcalde's men couldn't get near them, nor the American Navy, after the Americans took over in '03. And Lafitte was their man. He was working out of that blacksmith shop he had on Rue Bourbon. The back room was stuffed with loot, though he kept the slaves down on the old Indian Mound at Little Temple in the swamp. He was probably the only blacksmith in town who never got his shirt dirty.”

The scars on his face all bent with his gargoyle grin, and he fished in his pocket for a blackened pipe, holding the rope wrapped in one hand while he squished tobacco into the bowl with his thumb.

“The English were always fighting the Spanish around Cuba and Saint Domingue anyway, and raiding each other's ships, and it'd all end up here. Most of the corsairs put up around the far side of Saint-Domingue, or on Guadeloupe or Martinique, though we'd go drinking in Havana, bold as paint. What were the sbirri going to do against a hundred of us, eh?” He laughed again. “But then the British captured Guadeloupe. So we came here.” He gestured toward the flat green shimmer of Grand Terre, already dropping behind them, and January saw the reflected fire of burning towns, transmuted by memory in the old man's eyes.

“And there'd be fights between us and the Grand Isle boys. Over girls, or sometimes we'd clean up on a Spanish ship and they'd be waiting in luggers around behind the island and try to take us as we came through the pass. Bad for us, bad for them, bad for business. Finally it got so ugly, we had to parley, and that's when Lafitte got called in. Before he was just the broker, but he was a special man, Lafitte. I never met another like him.”

“No,” said January softly. He thought of that tall form in black, with the general who'd fought in Napoleon's army weeping on his chest. “No, I don't think there was another such.”

“Well, what started out as Lafitte getting us to agree with each other ended with him taking over the whole show... us giving him the whole show, both sides, because that's the kind of man he was.” Cut-Nose curved his heavy shoulder to the wind to strike flint and steel. January would have bet money that no fire could have been made in the sharp breeze off the bay, but he'd have lost, because a moment later the former pirate was drawing contentedly on his gruesome old pipe, black and shiny with the residue of a hundred thousand lightings. “That's what it means barataria. In Portugee. When the master of a ship turns around and embezzles the cargo ... and didn't he just, Lafitte! But we didn't mind. He had more brains than the rest of us, and we knew it-or everybody but Garnbi knew it. Gambi always thought he was as smart as Lafitte. That Hesione, she saved Gambi's life two, three times, when he'd disobey Lafitte, and she'd have to go make the peace.”

He shook his head, leaned to unwrap the rope from the belaying pin: “Hold course for that chenier, would you, Jean?” He pointed to the mound above the waterline, a clump of oaks whose roots held the soil, dark against the light-drenched sky. “The bottom here gets a little close. One night...” He laughed. “One night Lafitte and I, we were coming back from town, across the bay in a lugger like this, and he ran it aground on a bar. We could see Dominic Youx, out in the brig from the Pandora, and Lafitte, he's saying, No, no, don't call out! Well wait for the tide to get us off! I'll never hear the end of it! But that Gambi. . .”

January remembered the hard-faced little man, striding into the hotel dining-room a few paces behind Lafitte's other captains. Remembered how he'd glanced around at the silver and the crystal-at the women, too, the free plaçees of the town men-as if all things were only cash to be pocketed and spent.

“Gambi never liked to take Lafitte's orders. Thought Lafitte was soft for not taking the Americans, when most of the rich ships were under the American flag by then. But Lafitte knew what side the bread was buttered on. I never believed he sank that ship, that Independence, that everyone got so hot about.... Put her around, Jeannot, point her toward the head of Bayou Fevier. And of course the girls were worse than the men, always stealing each other's jewelry, and hiding it . . . that's the only buried treasure anyone's likely to find on the island, that is! Hesione must have had six or seven caches of earrings and pearls, stuck away under the huts or in thatch or in some tree or other out in the marsh.... Then like as not she'd give them away. We were all like that. They were good days.”

He smiled, the wicked, contented smile of an old man who has lived lushly. “They were good days,” he repeated. If you didn't happen to be merchandise yourself, reflected January. At a guess, the hot, lazy days at the pirate camps on Grand Terre looked different from the barracoons than they did from the deck of a pirate brig. And different still if the pirates didn't happen to get you unchained from below-decks before the ship they were robbing went down.

Chighizola put the sloop about near the mouth of Bayou Crapaud-Volante, and while Jean and January offloaded the pirogue into the chop, took Rose aside and went over with her the map he'd made of the whole river-front between the head of Bayou St. Roche and Myrtle Grove. Clumsy-looking, of shallow draft, and fifteen feet long, the pirogue would, as the island saying went, run upon dew. January heard the old pirate rattle off a whole string of signs to look for, to tell Rose how high the water was likely to stand in any of a dozen of the small bayous in the marsh country; Rose nodded, leaning on the jib sheets, her spectacles glinting in the hot light.

Athene was what Hannibal would call Rose in jest, after the intellectual warrior-goddess of the Greeks, meaning sometimes her erudition, and sometimes her spectacles.

January understood now that it meant other things as well. “I suppose it won't do me any good to make you promise to run if I yell Run?” he asked as he helped her down into the pirogue. “Run and hide, and don't make any attempt at rescuing me if I get into trouble?” He poled the pirogue away from the Dancer; beached her up against what he thought was an islet but which turned out to be a flottant, as he discovered when he stepped off onto it to adjust the lie of the provisions in the boat and went down instantly crotch-deep in the bay. Something moved under his bare foot, and he scrambled back into the pirogue, fast. Though the water was too brackish for alligators, a snapping-turtle or gar-fish could do tremendous damage if annoyed.

“Now, you don't worry about smugglers, hear?” Cut-Nose called down to them from his deck. "I tell Captain Chamoflet, These folks are my friends, hear? You let them alone.?'

“I appreciate it,” January called back, though he wouldn't have been willing to bet ten cents much less his own and Rose's freedom-on the good-will and forbearance of Chamoflet, the current chief of what was left of the Barataria smugglers. Gnats hung over the water in stinging clouds. As far as the eye could see, the world consisted of blue, shining water, speared by armies of waving reeds and dotted with flottants, as if someone had thrown a hundred thousand shaggy green blankets down off the deck of a boat. It was noon, and January prayed they'd make it to relatively dry land before the night came on.

“You go careful, eh?” The old pirate-captain gathered the sloop's jib-sheets in hand, while his grandson leaned over the side with a long pole, thrusting off the muddy bot tom to angle the boat toward clear water and home. “And good luck.”

We'll need it, thought January, looking around him at the shimmering world of green and reflected gold. Two free colored, journeying through the Barataria country alone... We'll need it as few have needed it before.

At one time the head of Bayou St. Roche probably came to within a mile of the river. With the low water of summer it finished in a sort of shrub-choked flatland of deep grass, sugarberry, palmetto, and mimosa, but its high-water course was marked by an intermittent line of cypress and magnolia, leading to a thin belt of trees that screened the higher ground. Though there was less cover in the marsh than among the trees of the cypress swamp, there was also more air, and fewer mosquitoes. Among the trees, January knew, the summer stillness would weigh like a barber's steamed towel.

A mile or two before the bayou's end, January first heard the swish and rustle of movement, and the voices of men singing: a soft humming murmur, rising now and then to words in a tongue he did not know, if they were words at all.

“Afa ya ya, afa ya ya, iye-wo, ya ya. . . . ”

He grounded the pirogue deep in a stand of alligator-grass, and left it to circle toward the sound, walking warily for fear of snakes. He came on a trail, winding among tus socks of harsh, muddy grass. A file of men followed it back toward where the plantation fields would lie, each bearing on his back a load of wood more suitable for a donkey. All were naked but for madras loincloths, and slick with sweat. The smell of their bodies drifted pungent over the sappy odors of mud and reeds, like clean animals well-kept. Even the overseer, a slave like themselves, wore only a loincloth, though in keeping with his elevated position he carried a whip, and wore a top-hat, the privilege of overseers throughout the district. Walled in by the tall grasses, cut off from sight of the plantation buildings by the trees, the scene was startlingly African, as if neither America, nor France, nor slavery, nor the nineteenth century had ever existed for these strong singing men. January stayed kneeling in the green twilight, and watched them out of sight.

They're hiding the guns among the wood, Dominique had said. A moderate-sized plantation would burn thirteen hundred cords of wood to render its harvest down to sugar, sometimes more; there was never a time when gangs weren't out cutting trees. With the cipriere mostly lying to the north, they'd be cutting on the cheniers, and what stands of woodland they could find.