The Eden Hunter (13 page)

 

AFTER FIVE MORE days in the chickenhouse he awoke somehow knowing that his voice had begun its slow return. He whispered, “I am a man,” but there was no one there to hear him. He thought maybe he should try to cry out but then checked himself, deciding instead to think on just what it was that he might say should he ever have the opportunity to speak.

 

AT LAST PELAYO did come for him. The farmer tied Kau’s hands behind his back, then slid a long metal key into the butterfly shaft of the slave shackle. The coupling fell open, and Kau was led filthy and naked out into the sun-baked yard. He looked to the cabin and saw that Elisenda and the twins were watching him from the porch.

A copper horse had been hitched to the post oak, and a pair of brindled hounds lay panting in the shade. Beside the horse stood a powerfully built man with almond eyes, high cheekbones and coal skin. He wore white breeches and black boots, a British officer’s redcoat and sword. The man was staring at Kau and seemed fascinated. He spoke to Pelayo: “
¿Con los pollos?
”

“
Sí, General
,” said Pelayo. “
Robó de mí
.” The farmer pointed to the porch, then moved his finger from silent daughter to silent daughter. “
Y atacó a mis chicas
.”

The man came closer and Kau saw that they were about the same age. His hair had been twisted into braids that spilled down from under a battered black tricorn. “
¿Español?
” the man asked him. “English?”

“Yes,” said Kau. “English.” His voice was scratchy and weak, but when he spoke Pelayo stepped back and then crossed himself.

The stranger muttered something to Pelayo in Spanish, and in turn Pelayo yelled to his wife and his daughters still watching from the porch. Marcela and Ramona disappeared into the cabin, but Elisenda remained and seemed to be praying.

The man put his hand on Kau’s shoulder. “I am General Garçon,” he said. “I decided I should come and see you for myself.”

Kau nodded.

“Is it true?” he asked. “Did you attack his children?”

“No, not like he meanin.”

“Well, then did you steal from him?”

Kau glanced at Pelayo and then nodded again. “I was hungry and took me some corn.”

“I see.” And then this general named Garçon gave a thin smile. “So he made you his chicken.”

Pelayo appeared confused and also smiled. Kau looked toward the cabin. The twins had walked back onto the porch carrying his effects—his canteen and saddlebags, his bone club and belt and knife—when suddenly Garçon punched Pelayo hard in the stomach. The farmer sank to both knees, and Garçon slapped him across the face. “
¡Papá!
” said the twins. They made to rush to their father, but Elisenda grabbed them both.

Garçon drew his sword, then told Kau to hold still as he sliced through the rope binding his hands. The rope fell away and Kau rubbed his raw wrists. Garçon offered him the sword and Elisenda screamed. Pelayo covered his face with his hands.

Kau hesitated and Garçon spoke to him. “Only if you wish,” he said.

The frightened twins were now crying, and their sobs sounded almost like the squeals of the gut-eating hogs. Ramona’s eye had healed, and Kau could no longer tell the two girls apart. “No,” he said finally. He started to say more, but again his voice had left him.

Garçon shrugged. “Then collect what is yours,” he said. “I will take you away from this place.”

 

IT WAS PELAYO who brought him his things, and then one of the twins walked slowly down from the porch carrying a small stack of clothes. Garçon smoothed her dark hair back with the flat of his hand, then whispered something in her ear. Kau saw that she was trembling as she held the clothes out for him to take. “
Toma
,” she
said to him. “
Lo siento
.” He lifted the shirt and pants from her arms and unfolded them. These were the osnaburgs of a child, but they were also clean. With his breechcloth lost he had nothing else, and so he nodded and put them on.

H
E WAS WEDGED between Garçon and a fresh bear hide and taken south through the farms that lined the river. Negro families gathered along the narrow and dusty road as they passed by atop the gelding. These farmers cheered their general and threw scraps to his hunting dogs. Kau recognized some among them as visitors to the chickenhouse, but when he locked eyes with them they were careful to look away.

It was growing late and he was fading with the day. Garçon had asked him about the bone club and even his teeth, but Kau still could not speak loud enough to even give his own name. Twice he had fainted and slid off the back of the horse, and now his ankle was badly sprained. A bugle sounded, and when he opened his
eyes he thought that maybe he was dreaming. Cornfields had given way to an immense dirt field planted with potatoes and turnips and onions. The thin road bisected the plowed land, and farmers leaned on their hoes and watched them. To the east was a smoking cutover and then pine forest; to the west he could see the brown river. From somewhere beyond came the lowing of range cattle, the bray of a mule. A speckled flock of guineafowl was moving through the weed banks of a drainage, scratching for a few last ticks before sunset.

In the dim southern distance the land rose up and a long row of barked pickets ran east from the river like a high fence. A fort, he realized. A breeze came and from atop a tall flagstaff he saw flapping fragments of white, blue and red. Garçon slapped the reins and the gelding sighed under them.

A stagnant moat surrounded the fort with a horseshoe of river water. At a small wooden bridge Garçon gave a broad wave, and a gate swung open to reveal a rectangle of six or seven dusty acres sprinkled with white tents, a few low-slung cabins and structures. A skinny negro soldier touched the curled brim of his felt hat. It was black and round and lacquered. The soldier wore a redcoat and loose white trousers, held a long musket fitted with a bayonet. He stared up at Kau as they passed.

The gate closed behind them and Kau looked around. He saw no one else; the fort appeared mostly empty, abandoned even. Garçon laughed as they made for a far corner. This general seemed able to hear the thoughts in his head. “They come when I call them,” he said. “They are my warrior farmers.”

 

THE INFIRMARY WAS a small cabin with four beds, and it was vacant except for a fat negro woman with a thick head of bushy black hair. Garçon helped him onto a camp bed, and Kau studied the woman. She looked just a few years older than he and wore a great sack of an osnaburg dress. He heard a name—Beah—then she caught him watching her and whistled through a gap in her front teeth. “What the Lord you bringin me here, General?”

“A hurt man,” said Garçon.

“Looks like an African, jus smaller.”

“I believe that he is.”

“My, my, my. This baby got a name?”

“He does not. Not yet.”

“How’s that?”

“You see the bruises on his throat?”

Kau shifted on the canvas bottom of the camp bed, looking on as Garçon pointed down at him.

“I see them fine,” said Beah. “Got a crooked nose, too.”

“True. And a bad foot.”

“He knowin English or Spanish?”

“English. But do not talk him to death.”

“Me?”

“Indeed.” Beah smiled, and Kau thought she seemed about to say something more when Garçon stopped her. “I mean that,” he said.

She laughed but did not speak.

“Let him rest,” said Garçon. “And then you bring him to me when he is better.”

Kau watched him leave and thought of Samuel. What would he have made of all this? A fort under the control of a negro? A negro fort. Chances were fair that the old slave was still alive, would outlive him even—but he wondered whether Samuel would have accepted it. Whether even if Samuel were with him to see these negro soldiers he would just shake his head and say, No suh, I don believe that at all. Them look like white man’s uniforms, I say.

 

HE WOKE AND the nurse Beah rushed over. “Keep still,” she told him. “You been sleepin for two days.”

The cabin was very hot. He tried to sit up but she pushed him back down. The sleeves of her dress had been cut off to accommodate her huge arms, and her flesh jiggled as she held him pinned.

“I mean it,” she said. “Gotta be easy on that foot, hear me now?”

He stopped fighting her and looked around. His skin had been washed clean of dust and chickenshit, and he was wearing a child’s cotton nightshirt. He tried to tell her his name but his voice only crackled. She put a finger to his lips.

“Rest that, too,” she ordered. “Else it won’t never get no better.”

He soon learned that it was true—Beah did not know how to be quiet. The ringing in his ear was gone, and he listened as she told him how lucky he was that the General had found him when he did. She teased at the gap between her teeth with the tip of her tongue. “Lucky, lucky, lucky,” she said.

This had begun to annoy him, how she liked to say simple things in threes. “Who is he?” he asked. The words cut at his throat and he winced.

She pinched his arm. “Hush, African,” she said. Then, later: “You really don know?”

He shook his head and she leaned into him. Her heavy breasts pressed against his shoulder, and she smelled faintly of molasses. “I know all about that man,” she said. “Morn anybody, I spose.” She looked around the empty room, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “What I could tell you about the General would curl your little toes.”

“Go on with it.”

Again Beah pinched him.

“Don be doin that no more.”

She rolled her brown eyes. “You wantin me to tell you or no?”

He nodded.

“Then quit all your fussin and listen.” She pulled a chair closer and poured them both a mug of water. He took a sip. The water was cool but tasted of sulfur. Beah spoke. “While back he spent two weeks in here crazy with fever,” she said. “Whole time runnin his mouth like a madman, talkin every language—English and French, Spanish and Indian.” She tapped a thick finger against her temple. “And I don forget nothin, at leas not the English.”

 

THE THINGS BEAH told him about the General seemed more akin to myth and legend than truth—things as difficult for him to believe as
they were impossible for him to confirm. The tale she told him held that even the man’s name was in fact uncertain.

According to Beah, the negro who now called himself a British general was born to the name Gustave thirty miles up the river from New Orleans. His master had been a Creole sugar planter named Trépagnier, and the boy Gustave was Trépagnier’s favored slave—something close to a son for a man whose young wife died before she could give him any children of his own. Picture a negro boy in a crushed velvet suit sitting cross-legged under the table. Picture him being handfed dainty scraps of grillade and pigeon, warm bread and sweet praline, cool slices of raw mirliton.

It was obvious that the child possessed genius, and on a wager with a neighbor Trépagnier himself taught Gustave how to read and to write. By age twelve the boy could speak three languages, and soon he was studying and composing poetry. Beah had memorized the final lines of a long poem that the General would sometimes mumble pieces of to her in English. She cleared her throat, then sang the words out carefully:

The narrative Beah recited secondhand held that for Gustave’s eighteenth birthday Trépagnier had promised his emancipation in three years. The young man kissed the hem of his master’s coat
and began to live free in his own head. In Gustave’s mind he was already a gentleman living in New Orleans. His mother was a field slave, and sometimes he visited her in the crowded quarters at night, promising that he would not forget her, that he would one day purchase her own freedom from the blessed Trépagnier.

Of course the others heard Gustave’s talk and became jealous. A quadroon slave had captured the master’s heart, and this beautiful young woman now thought to ask after her own liberation. Her name was Simone, and she and the widower Trépagnier would play all-day games in his room.

The planter had a four-post bed as perfect and square as a cube. His greatest pleasure was to lie spread-eagled on that wide, moss-stuffed mattress, and then Simone would come calling with lengths of torn silk, binding his wrists and ankles to each nearest corner. Trépagnier was in such a state one autumn afternoon when she took to him with a peacock feather. She ran the quill down the length of his naked body, across each arm and across each leg, from the dimple of his chin to the hollow of his crotch.

“I am more to you than that boy,” she told Trépagnier. “Am I not, Maître?”

Simone changed into one of his dead wife’s purple dresses and then kept on. The planter began to shiver and twitch and moan. He begged her to stop but whenever she did he ordered her not to. Gustave watched all of this from behind the cracked door of his master’s enormous armoire. He did this often.

Simone started up again with her shiny feather, teasing Trépagnier in her soft-spoken French. “There are many, many
things I could do to you,” she told him. “But only as a free woman, Maître.”

“Tell me,” said Trépagnier.

She slipped the purple dress from her body and leaned closer. Her dark tresses fell across Trépagnier’s damp face, and Gustave saw her begin to lick at their master’s ear. She whispered something that Gustave could not hear, but whatever words were carried by her hot breath made Trépagnier gasp. The planter pulled against his silk restraints. “Please,” he said. “You must.”

“Oh, but no,” said Simone. “I will not.”