Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (27 page)

January talked to a herdboy from Plaquemines Plantation, watching over the cows in the marsh: “They just strange, over to St. Roche,” the boy declared. His name was Tibo and he looked about ten, a wiry, cheerful boy who seemed to accept a couple of probable runaways making their way through the marsh as a welcome change from the company of cows. “Michie Joffrey there, he don't let his folks marry off St. Roche, or go off, much, an' he sure don't let nobody come on. They ain't had a overseer for as long as I can remember. Just Serapis, an' Serapis' daddy before him. They like still Africans over there, you know? They don't hardly speak no French, and they go hunt in the woods with blow-guns.”

He shook his head, clearly afraid of the place. “Crazy. My mama say, Michie Joffrey crazy, an' his sons crazy, too. They ain't been off that land in twenty years. Michie Pierre up at the Big House here, he goes up to town all the time, and his daughters they go to school with the nuns there, and the nuns whacks 'em over the hand with a ruler when they mess up.” He sounded pleased about that.

In the course of the conversation, which ranged over the usual gossip of the quarters, January got no sense of the touchfire rage that fueled rebellion. Only the petty griefs and tyrannies of bondage itself. Tibo's aunt Josie was whipped for being insolent, when it was Michie Gerard's wife who didn't like the way Michie Gerard looked at Josie; Michie Pierre was making everyone work in the woodgangs and nobody could tend to their gardens so everything was full of weeds. A cow got sick from eating loco-weed and Tibo had got blamed. Always more work than could be easily done; never quite enough time to rest, to sleep, to watch the flotillas of clouds that rolled up over the flat, monotonous land from the Gulf. Three of Michie Pierre's children sick down with the fever, and had to be bled, and M'am Helaine blaming their nurse for not watching them well.

Only once did Tibo say, “There's talk, if there's trouble, some of the folks runnin' off, hidin' in the marsh. But Nate-he the main-gang driver-he say that's a stupid idea.”

“What kind trouble?” January tossed a pebble at a lizard on a deadfall log, and the boy shrugged.

“Nobody sayin'.
But they kind of look at each other”-and he aped the tucked-chin, eyebrows-raised face of We-won't-say-this-in-front-of-children-“and say, `If there's trouble.”'

At Myrtle Bank, where January and Rose begged lunch with one of the wood-gangs, there was definite talk of trouble: “But it may all be rumor,” said a slave named Zeno, and cast a quick glance at the trail that led back to the plantation fields-watching for Michie Turnbull, the overseer, about whom every member of the wood-gang warned January and “Alejo.” “You hear all these rumors, that somebody's broad-wife hears from one of her friends she sews with, that somebody she's walking-out with heard. . . .”

“What may be rumor?” asked January, and tried to look like a man who, since he's running already, would at least like to know what direction to avoid.

“Big trouble.”
Zeno sank his voice. “Killin' trouble.” “Trouble that'll get the army and the militia down here, you mean,” retorted another of the gang. “You remember back a couple years ago, when Michie East hear about some slaves risin' up an' killin' their masters in Virginny. He hired about three new overseers, just to lock all of us in at night-put locks on the doors of all the cabins......”

“Like we couldn't get out the windows,” added another man, laughing.

“Nuthin' came of it,” said Zeno. “But there was talk of shootin' people just for the kind of back-talk you do when you get mad enough. Trouble is, when things get bad like that, and everybody's sayin' We're doin' this so's you won't rise up in arms an' We're doing that other so's you won't rise up in arms... Well, pretty soon you think Hell, I guess I'll rise up in arms.”

“Like when you start gettin' jealous of your woman,” added a sour-faced man. “An' once you start doin' that, then she starts thinkin' Hey, he all over me about it already so I might as well.”

The presence of a white overseer with the wood-gang at Autreuil Plantation prevented January from approaching them later in the afternoon, but at a guess, had the trouble been at Autreuil, the slaves at Myrtle Bank would have known more. “You find most of the broad-wives and husbands, or the men and women walking-out with each other, within one or two plantations up or down the river,” he told Rose as they watched the lights moving around the Autreuil Big House and quarters, waiting for all to sleep. “Nobody had much to say about discontent on Autreuil, either. .....”

“You call that tale Tibo told us about the woman here getting whipped, `no discontent'?”

“No,” said January tersely, “I don't. And they didn't, either. If there was real trouble here, real anger, they'd have heard of it there.” He glanced sidelong at Rose, nearly hid den in the gloom among the cane-stalks. There was no dancing in the quarters as there had been at St. Roche, but someone was playing the banjo, “My Beautiful Suzette,” a popular tune in town.

Ah, Suzette, you do not love me,

Why do you not love me?

I will go to the bush for you,

I will cut cane for you,

I will make a lot of money,

And I will bring it all to you.

January sighed, studying that long, delicate profile and wondering if it was ever that simple.

I will make a lot of money,

And I will bring it all to you....

Not as romantic as the golden apples of the sun, he thought, but it would certainly help.

The Big House showed lights in half a dozen windows, blotted out now and then as people walked about the gallery. A flurry of barking sounded from the household dogs.

“Damn,” muttered January, and fished in one of the food-sacks for the scraps of salt-pork he'd cut for the purpose. “I'll draw the dogs. When you hear them barking, get in fast, look around the back and sides of the wood-sheds for scraped wood, as if cords or bundles had been pulled out and pushed back in, then get out as quick as you can. We'll meet back at the magnolia at the far edge of the fields. But I'll bet you find nothing.”

“Nothing would be fine,” said Rose. She settled her spectacles more firmly onto her nose, and adjusted her hat. “No guns, no snakes, no overseers, no dogs who might be smart enough to ask themselves Why's this man leading us into the woods with salt pork...?”

No slave-stealers waiting in the marsh for you when you leave, January added to the list as he circled wide around the quarters, approached the house from the side away from the sugar-mill and sheds. No slaves with shotguns and top-hats and reasons why they want you off their master's land. No quicksands, in those black-shadowed reedy pools, to leave me to wonder forever why you didn't make the rendezvous. . . . Ayasha's death of the cholera had done something to him, he realized then. Had broken his trust in a way he hadn't even been aware of at the time. True, he and Ayasha had lived fairly quietly in Paris-no hare-brained treks through slave-stealer country in quest of rebelling slaves....

Not that Ayasha would have hesitated for so much as a heartbeat to put her life in danger exactly as Rose was doing.

It occurred to January for the first time that Ayasha would probably have gotten on very well with Rose.

The dogs behaved exactly as he'd hoped the dogs would behave, bounding off the gallery in a barking- pack and chasing him across the ground upriver of the house, and into the dark of the fields. He had to move quickly to elude them, listening to them sniffing and barking-they weren't watch-dogs, but just the household hounds, as ready to turn back and settle again on the porch as they were to continue pursuit. As he led them farther and farther afield, running in the flooded ditches to lose his scent, he had to use the salt-pork to keep them interested. When at last he judged Rose had had time to investigate as much wood as she could deal with by the light of a single candle, he retreated beyond the territory that the dogs considered their own, and made another wide circle through the canerows in the dark, heading for the damper ground inland from the river, for the cypresses and the palmettos. Certain that he would reach the rendezvous and find no one-that Rose would be taken from him as Ayasha had been-he came near the white-starred black cloud of the magnolia tree and whistled his two-note inquiry. He heard the soft flicking bobble of Rossini-the overture of Barber for All's Well-whistled back.

The next plantation upriver was Bois d'Argent, and there was a white overseer there, too. From a distance, through Rose's spyglass, January observed the layout of the place in the next morning's clear light: large and prosperous looking, with a lot of cattle grazed on the marsh, and extensive stables. “According to my mother-and to Dominique-they run this place mostly with an overseer,” January told Rose. “Since the Viellards seem to run to girls, you don't have here the phenomenon you find in so many French Creole plantations, of three and four families sharing a single house. The Viellard branch of the clan alone has four plantations, for one thing, and only one of them is occupied by an uncle and his family.”

“And God forbid a mere uncle's worthless bastard should lay hands upon the family's sacred account-books.” Rose lifted herself to her knees and took the spyglass from him-they were concealed among the cane-rows, about two hundred yards from the Viellard house. Between guarding each other's slumber and coupling like rabbits in the cipriere all night, neither had had much sleepJanuary felt like his eyeballs had been breaded and deepfried and his heart infused with brandy and champagne.

“Not to speak of a son-in-law's child, whose other grandmother Madame Viellard undoubtedly despises ... And there he is. The man behind all this to start with.”

She handed the spyglass back.

Henri Viellard, tall and fat and dandified, took off his spectacles to wipe his sweating face, and nodded at something being said to him by a cool little wisp of a girl in celery-green voile. He looked unhappy, but bent to give her a dutiful kiss.

Chloe St. Chinian. Now Chloe Viellard. Artois' sister, and the woman who would be responsible, if Henri left Dominique to fend for herself, to bear his baby alone. With a curious, bitter despair January studied that flatchested, girlish shape, the flaxen hair, and precise movements. Chloe Viellard paused as if she would have said something else to her new husband, then turned and went briskly into the house. Henri stood for a time, gazing at the river in silence.

“Ben.” Rose's voice called back January's thoughts from Dominique. “When we do find where the rebellion is    if we find it-what are we going to do?”

January folded up the spyglass. The air was moist and stifling and alive with gnats. The cicadas kept up their metallic beating in all the oak-trees between the field's edge and the house. Though no wind could be felt, the cane rustled and whispered all around them, splashing their faces with occasional blades of hot light; the smell of the earth was overpowering, and the sticky smell of the sap.

“Henri-and certainly Chloe-won't heed a warning to get out, unless we give specifics. And if we warn them, who knows what reprisals will take place?” Beneath the brim of her dilapidated hat, Rose's face was streaked with nearly a week's dirt and grime, freckled with the sun and dotted with the puffed swellings of insect-bites. Her hazelgreen eyes looked tired, haunted by the dilemma at the core of who and what they were.

“Where we find the guns,” said January, “we'll find Mulm-or with luck, enough of his tracks to have him caught and probably hanged. For the rest of it ... We won't know what to do until we see what the circumstances are.”

“But you know Mulm's going to talk,” countered Rose. “You know he'll thrust the blame onto the slaves who're buying the guns.”

“He can't do that without admitting to complicity himself. Either way, people have to be warned, somehow. Maybe the warning itself will abort the rebellion. But we won't know the shape of it, we won't know the circumstances, until we find where it's being planned. And who's planning it.”

Rose was silent, turning the telescope over in her hands.

“I want the men who murdered Artois to die,” said January quite softly, thinking of that young face, that young body with its bruised arms and bruised neck, so still on the mortuary table.

The memory was always like a knife in his guts.

“And I want the slaves they're deceiving-and I don't know how they're deceiving them-to get clear of whatever it is Mulm's planning. But how that's going to happen is still in the hands of God.”

“You truly think God concerns Himself with such things?”

January stood, and held out his hand to help her up. “If I didn't, Rose, I don't think I'd have lived as long as I have.”

But at the next plantation, Boscage, the men they met gathering Spanish moss in the cipriere were clear. There was trouble in the wind, they said, and people in the quarters were murmuring of rebellion near-by.

“The broad-wife of one of the men here, she say they even got guns,” whispered one of the moss-gatherers, a young man called Griff.

“That's bad,” said January with a look of horror and a glance back up the narrow trail through the stifling gloom of the cypresses, toward where the plantation would lie. At this point the cipriere had widened from a narrow belt of trees into the swamplands with which January had been familiar in his childhood. “That's crazy! The blankittes, they'll bring in the army, like they done before.”

“It sure sound crazy to me,” agreed Griff. “But they say they got guns, and they got boats waitin' on 'em, and they're gonna get clear out of this country and go straight to Mexico. And what I hear of what's happenin' on that plantation, I don't blame 'em.”

“That bad?”
January knew better than to ask What plantation?

“Man, it's crazy.” The other gatherer set down his basket on the pile of harvested moss. “That new overseer there, he's like a crazy man. It was always bad, 'cause the two brothers that owned the place was always fightin' and blamin' the folks in the quarters for what they'd do to each other. But now one of the brothers got himself stabbed to death, and his wife and the new overseer and one of the lawyers is tryin' to make out it was one of the field-hands that did it, and the new overseer's sayin' as how this ain't done right and that ain't done right, and nobody gets food unless the work gets done.... You keep clear of that place when you head out from here,” he warned.