Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (28 page)

“Hell, yes.”

Griff's face creased with anger and concern. “That new overseer, he whipped the potter there pretty near to death, just for talkin' to a river trader. Says there's too much carryin'-on with people off the place. Says he won't have it no more, and Berthe-that's my friend Amos' broad-wife-says she's scared she won't be let come to see Amos down here no more. That they'll all be forbid to have wives and husbands off the place.”

“Damn!” January put shock into his voice, which indeed he felt, shock and anger at the stupidity of whites who thought their slaves were no more than livestock, to be controlled for the convenience of their owners. But he felt satisfaction, too: for now he knew where the guns were going.

Indeed, he thought, he should have seen it before. If he hadn't been half-blind from annoyance and frustration, he could have guessed.

He and Rose stopped briefly at the next plantation upriver, Soldorne, to gossip with the moss-gatherers in the cipriere-the harvest of Spanish moss was a major source of spending-money for the slaves during the slack summer season-and gleaned more information about the new overseer's iniquities, .and the power the man had gained during the chaotic weeks of uncertainty since the mysterious death of Guifford Avocet. But by the deepening of the long August afternoon, they were making their way with increasing caution through the cipriere, sticking close, now, to the edges of the cultivated fields, watching and listening.

Mulm would have heard, thought January, of the troubled conditions on Avocet Plantation, probably through one of the river traders who bought everything from garden produce to pilfered tablecloths. Like Mamzelle Marie, Mulm was a gatherer of secrets. Or else the “troublemaker” of the plantation, whatever angry soul it was who demanded to know why he must be enslaved, had somehow gotten in touch with Ti-Jon-maybe he'd originally come from town?-asking about guns. And so the word went to Mulm.. . .

And Mulm and his men would be watching for their chance. That was why he hadn't seen Burke in town at the Nantucket. The overseer-Raffin, had Shaw called him? had dropped out of sight immediately after Hesione's murder. Burke must have been sent out here to wait for the trouble to start, for the lunatic martinet who had replaced Raffln to push too hard. At Soldorne they'd whispered there would be trouble soon, that the slaves were arming. A number of the Soldorne slaves had been getting ready, not to join, but to flee in the confusion. January had to bite his tongue not to say Don't. . . .

It was time, he thought, to retreat and take stock of what could be done.

At January's size, he had never been much of a tree-climber, either during his early childhood on Bellefleur Plantation or later, growing up within a street or two of the cow-pastures and cipriere that in those days lay just beyond the city's old walls. But in the flat riverine terrain there was no other way to get a view of Avocet Plantation by daylight, and by all accounts it would be far too dangerous to try to creep in along the cane-rows by moonlight as they had done at Autreuil and St. Roche.

If for no other reason, he thought, there was the added danger that they'd run into Abishag Shaw. The men at Soldorne and Boscage had spoken of a skinny white man with a rifle, who moved with uncanny silence through marsh and swamp. “He lookin' for somethin', but damn if I know what, and he trouble. You can tell by his eyes.”

Given Shaw's sense of duty, January didn't feel himself up to explaining what he and Rose were doing themselves, snooping around Plaquemines Parish. Shaw was too good a guesser, and there was no telling what he'd learned about the rebellion so far.

January boosted Rose to the lowest branches of a big magnolia on the edge of Avocet's cultivated land. She untied the coil of rope she wore around her waist and let it down so that he could scramble up beside her. They climbed another thirty feet, to two branches that would bear their weight at a little distance out from the trunk, and stretched along these like leopards, trained the spyglass on the house by the river.

The layout was a common one for plantations of this kind. The U-shaped house, bright yellow and green in the Creole fashion, faced the river, its wings extending back to funnel the breezes on hot afternoons. The upstream wing would be for the males of the household, the downstream for the women-the reverse of the pattern that existed above New Orleans.

A woman stood on the gallery, trim and fair-haired, as Guifford Avocet had apparently been, though her mourning gown in no way marked whether she was the dead man's sister or his widow. The boys got all the looks, Shaw had said: with little beauty, and apparently scant hope of a dowry from the impoverished property, what hope did that “little dab of a sister” have of getting away from a family who made her mend clothing and remain in the background?

And if one of her brothers was hanged for the murder of the other, what then? An isolated plantation, a rundown house, slaves on the point of revolt?

A short distance downstream, the sugar-house stood. January identified the marshy clump of laurels and oaks behind it where Guifford's corpse had been found. Past that, brick piers and a straggle of lumber marked the second house that had been begun, and stopped, and begun again a number of times in the course of the enmity between the brothers Guifford and Bertrand Avocet, snaggy now with fern and undrained pools of standing water. At one point, Shaw had told him, Guifford had had his slaves tear down what Bertrand had leased slaves from New Orleans to build, which couldn't have done the family's already precarious finances any good.

What had Annette Avocet thought about that?

The wood-sheds stood well upriver from both of these buildings, perfectly situated to hide things in: so close to the edge of the cane that January wondered how they kept them from catching fire when they burned the fields after harvest, and very near also to the river's edge. A sand-bar above them made a perfect landing-place for illicit cargo on a moonless night. It would be fairly easy, he calculated, to make his way through the cane-rows to the sheds to confirm that guns were indeed hidden there, and to get enough information about type, quantity, and caliber to match up with whatever records could be found of Mulm's purchases. Fortunately they were far enough from the house to be out of immediate range of the household dogs.

For the rest, the place was much as Shaw had described it. The infamous bloodied shirt-Bertrand's? The missing overseer's?-had been found there in that clump of swamp laurel-and Shaw was right, Bertrand would have to be an idiot to think the shirt wouldn't have been seen immediately, that close to the house. And that window would be the ladies' parlor, where Madame Vivienne, her twelveyear-old daughter Laurene, and Mademoiselle Annette had been sewing together when the murder took place....

“And what the fuck do you think you're doing?” January nearly pitched out of the tree. He froze, not moving, as the man's harsh voice repeated in garbled French, “You think you done for the day, Sambo?”

“It's sunset, sir.” The slave's voice, replying, spoke English, and fairly good English, too. And January thought, Of course. He looked down to where the voices were, a dozen yards off, although they'd sounded at first to be almost under his feet.

The “troublemaker” had indeed been bought from town. The educated speech was unmistakable. Which was how the leader of the rebels would know Ti-Jon, that nexus of information among runaways and would-be runaways. Any river trader would have carried him a message, for a price....

“If you ask Madame Avocet...”

The leathery thwack of a riding-whip cut off the slave's words. Below and to his left, January saw them: the woodgang standing on the path, the overseer beside the horse he had just dismounted. The “troublemaker” still bore his load of wood on his back, a young man, like most fieldhands, but lighter-skinned than most. Quadroon, thought January.
Almost certainly an import from town. With his hands gripping the cordwood's ropes, the young man could not wipe the blood running down his face.

“Mrs. Avocet hired me 'cause she didn't want nobody runnin' to her every five minutes askin' this and that, Hyacinth.” The overseer's voice jeered the name, a perfectly usual one-if not common-among the French: Jacinthe. But, January knew, such names were regarded with scorn by Americans of the rougher type, as all things French were regarded. “Now I told you that before. And I told you, too, we need twenty cords of wood here. I count only sixteen.”

“There are but the six of us, sir.” Jacinthe's voice grated, very slightly, on that final honorific. “We have been working-”

The whip lashed out again; Jacinthe barely flinched. “If I can count to sixteen, you think I can't count to six, boy?” The man was nearly spitting with anger. “Now, you boys put down that wood here by the path and bring me what I asked you to bring me and don't give me no more back-talk. And that goes for the rest of you shit-eatin' niggers!”

There was a dangerous silence, and even at that distance January could feel the anger like the eerie moan of a wind-harp before a storm. But they put down their bur dens and turned back silently into the woods. The overseer took off his wide-brimmed hat to strike the nearest man on the back with it as he rode by.

And January felt his breath catch again, this time with bafflement and shock.

Because the overseer was unmistakably Tyrone Burke.

“The whole revolt couldn't have been contrived?” Rose set her rifle against the trunk of a cypress, settled tailor-fashion beside it, and uncorked her water-gourd as January slung the bundle of their food to the ground. “Could it? From the start? When did Burke replace the old overseer here?”

It wasn't a thought that had occurred to January, and the scope of the scheme appalled him. “Raffin disappeared two days after Guifford's murder,” he said. “The day after Hesione LeGros was killed.” He frowned, trying to recall details Shaw had given-details to which he had been paying less than close attention, owing to his own anger over the neglect of Hesione's murder.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, he reflected dryly. And it's probably Don't mess in anything that doesn't concern you.

“By Burke.”
Rose shook her head. “So there was time for Mulm to get word that the old overseer-who appears to have contributed considerably to the climate of resent ment in the first place-was gone, and to send Burke here to take the man's place. To exacerbate an already volatile situation, and push the slaves into armed revolt, so that Mulm could sell them guns. Does that make sense?”

“No,” January said bluntly. “It's lunatic.”

Darkness was coming on, dense as doom, and though the stifling heat remained, the queer electric wildness of the air had increased, the cypresses fidgeting around them, whispering of a storm. Far off January could still hear the strike of axes. He hoped Burke had sent back to the quarters for torches. Trying to cut chunks of wood into pieces small enough to be bundled and carried would cost someone a hand. The extra work would come out of the time slaves had to work on their own patches of vegetables and corn-shell-blow grounds they'd been called in his time, when the sound of a conch divided the day into what the slaves owed their master, and what little time they had for themselves. With a storm coming that night there was even less time to spare.

No wonder the slaves were angry. What the weeds choked, or the birds got, was food they wouldn't have, come winter. Masters who provided land for their slaves to work themselves did so in preference to doling out food from a central store. A man like Burke, put in charge of that store, would often sell it to the river traders, robbing the slaves of even that pittance.

Maybe Burke was doing that, too, reflected January angrily. Just for the pocket-change.

“Can you think of another reason Burke would be here? Deliberately antagonizing the field-hands? He can't be that stupid, can he?”

“I wouldn't want to put money on either his good sense or his good manners.” January tore a hunk of the bread they'd bought the day before from the Myrtle Bank gang, and cut slices of cheese with his knife. “But it explains why I didn't see him at the Nantucket. Mulm must have sent him away the morning after he killed Hesione. Maybe because he killed her, though I can't imagine either of them would think there'd be the slightest inquiry made.... It doesn't make sense.”

Thunder grumbled, a counterpoint to the strike of axes, the uneasy cicada thrum.

“Mamzelle Marie said Mulm collected information for blackmail,” January went on. “So he'd know about the dissension in the Avocet family. Building the foundations of the house and tearing them down again; duplicating work; selling off each other's favorites.”

“That situation must have been a joy to work in.” Rose wet her bandanna, wiped her grimy face.

“You never were a slave, Rose. It's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't lived like that. The ... the sense of fragility about everything. Even at the best of times, you never feel that anything is certain. Anything can be taken away at a moment's notice. People-blankittes-talk about how slaves are `lighthearted' and `lightminded,' living only for the day. But the day is all they have. Whites make jokes about how slaves gossip-”

“They should talk.”

“Yes, but it's more than that. We-slaves, I mean-we had to keep an eye on what les blankittes were doing up in the Big House, even if we were just field-hands, because the decision to send Mamzelle to finishing-school in Paris instead of to the Ursulines in town could translate into somebody you know losing his wife. A new overseer, or a new wife, or even a tight-fisted aunt coming to stay meant that the way you got along in life, and got enough food for your family, was thrown into jeopardy: Oh, you feed those niggers too much, they're eating their heads off doing nothing. You don't need to give the men two suits of clothes, just one is fine and we can save seven hundred dollars on the cloth. And that's little things, Rose.”

He tore hungrily into the bread and cheese with the sense of feeding the firebox of a machine on the coarse fare and having but little time to work up enough steam to continue to move. The day had been a long one, struggling along soggy and difficult terrain.