04 Sold Down the River

NINE

January bolted straight into the water, plunged and floundered for the opposite bank. The bobbing lanterns were some distance off, where the trees thinned into a muddle of cypress knees, muck, and reeds, and his pursuers wasted time seeking dry ground before they realized there wasn't any; this gave January time to reach the woods. He cursed himself for having followed Harry blindly, without asking the way, and cursed Harry even more. In the lowering moonlight every oak, every hickory, every swamp-maple and thicket of hackberry looked just alike, and as unfamiliar as the landscape of China or the surface of the moon.

Even following the bayou didn't help, for there was no way of telling which way a bayou "ran."

They didn't "run" at all, most of the time, or sometimes seemed to flow in one direction, sometimes in another, depending on the river's rise. In any case it was too dark to tell. The voices called to one another in French, beyond the barking of the dogs: It was the Neys and not the Irish Rankins. "They'll sell you where you don't want to be," Harry had warned.

But running through the moonlit woods, memories came back to January, of childhood stories told by old Uncle Zacky about Compair Lapin and how he'd outwit Bouki the Hyena and Michie Lion by running along fence-rails, or doubling on his trail, or wading through water... All he'd have to do was lick his four paws and jump up in the air... He could still see the agile old man's delighted, ridiculous imitation of the act.

And he smiled, understanding that Uncle Zacky hadn't been telling them about a rabbit at all.

He'd been telling them about this. How to avoid dogs. How to get to safety, and leave the whites behind scratching their heads. And as he doubled on his own trail, and JUMPED up in the air to grab the branch of an oak-as he scrambled along the limbs of the tree to the limbs of the next, watching below for water to land in January felt in his heart the exhilaration of knowing he was going to get away.

Of knowing he'd outwitted les blankittes.

Striding through the woods in the last of the moonlight, hearing the voices, the furious barking fading behind him, he wanted to sing. Nonsense words, alien words, slave-song African words he remembered his father singing:

" Jinga bunga bungala bunga, Jinga bunga baby..."

His old piano master, the ramrod-spined Herr Kovald, who'd worked so hard to make him master of the beauty of Mozart and Bach and the floating wonderfulness of Pachelbel, would die of offended indignation.

"Jinga bunga bungala bunga, Jinga bunga baby."

There were songs for singing when you set forth on Quests for Enlightenment to the Temple of the Queen of the Night, January thought, and there were songs for singing when you'd just outrun a bunch of white Men with dogs who'd sell you down the river if they caught you.

He followed the sinking moon til he carne into the cane-rows, then worked his way along the ranks of silent rustling spears toward the river. The cane was thin, snarled and matted underfoot, cane ratooned so many times it was practically indistinguishable from wild grass, and this told him where he was: in the back fields of what had been the Refuge lands, fields the Daubrays hadn't yet brought back into productivity even after all these years. After a narrow belt of this he came into replanted acres, and worked his way riverward, til he came out of the cane nearly on top of what had been the big house, Gauthier Daubray's Refuge.

Cane was planted almost up to its walls. The oaks that had stood between it and the river had been felled. The house itself was a "house of twenty," as the Senegalese builders would have called it, meaning twenty cypress timbers had been hewn to support its floors on the brick piers that raised it above the ground. The dense shadows that cloaked its silent gallery hid every detail of its swampward side, but January saw that the tiny gar?onni?re was shuttered fast, the pigeon coop boarded up. The cistern still stood beside the kitchen, however, and January ran a little water from its rusted tap, catching the icy flow in his hands. This wasn't particularly satisfactory, and he closed the tap and went to the kitchen to see what had been left by way of gourds or cups.

The kitchen door was closed but unshuttered. January took from his pocket the candle stub he, like Harry, habitually carried, and the little tin box of lucifers. By the new-sparked light he made out vacant shelves, bins emptied of their contents, dough troughs and an old rice cart...

And the mark of the gu?d?, written in red chalk and lampblack upon the wall.

The sight of it shocked him so that he nearly dropped the candle. A triangle topped with a cross, and stylized serpents. The skull and coffin of Baron Cemetery. Trailing lines scrawled over the floor, creeping like serpents toward the hearth. January fished automatically in his pocket and touched the blue beads of his rosary, whispered the first few words of the Ave, as a child would have ducked for shelter into the folds of the Queen of Heaven's blue robe.

Then, candle held high, he walked to the hearth, and examined the ashes there.

There were a lot of them. The fire had been kept going a long time. Its ashes were white and sunkenlooking, but clearly not anything like ten years old. A few weeks, he thought, no more.

The dark of the moon.

The moon's dark is the time when ill will lies strongest on the land.

The table had been used, too, though it had afterward been cleared and cleaned. He knelt to search underneath and found an assortment of fragmented leaves and stems, which told him this had been done at night, in bad lighting. He wrapped these in the cleanest rag he could find and tucked them in the pocket of his shirt. In the midden outside, behind the kitchen, he found buried a pot, a knife, a cutting board, and a thick wad of mushed and boiled leaves.

Oleander. He picked the leaves up gingerly, bandanna wrapped around his fingers. She-or he-had made the poison here.

Reuben's new wife Trinette? he wondered. Who had not left so much as a broken teacup at his grave? Jeanette, who'd been Mambo Jeanne's daughter? But surely she'd have poisoned Thierry first of all. Zuzu, who'd been sold away when the children in her care died? Her husband Lisbon?

Or was all this the work of the Daubray uncles, concealed from the wagging tongues in their own overcrowded family house?

But no white, he thought, would have invoked the gu?d?'s blessing on their act. Would they?

Coming back to the kitchen he looked around again, and saw, beside the door, a dozen tiny holes in the wood of the jamb. When he held the candle close they looked fresh, as if someone had stabbed the wood with an awl. Some were enlarged, as nail holes are enlarged when a nail is pried or twisted out; one contained a broken-off point of what looked like wood.

There had been a couple of long splinters, he recalled, on the kitchen floor among the leaf fragments. He unwrapped the rag from his pocket to make sure. A little more search near the door showed him a three-inch splinter of cane-stalk, sharpened to a point with a knife.

This too he wrapped up in his rag.

He'd hoped to find something salvageable in the kitchen, something he could trade to Harry for information or goodwill, but there was nothing. Whoever had come here to make poisons had brought his or her own pot, knife, and cutting board; chalk and lampblack. The small door at the back opened only into a cabinet, a shedlike back room stocked with wood for the kitchen hearth so the cook wouldn't have to fetch it from the main sheds by the mill. There wasn't even a kindling hatchet left.

By the wavering candle-glow the veves seemed to watch him as he came back into the main kitchen. The wriggling snake-trails reached out after him when he turned his back. Field rats had taken residence here: They skittered along the shelves, waiting him out with scant patience, like parry hosts whose guests have lingered overlong.

Half numb with fatigue, January made his way through the thickets of cane that, with a kind of spite, the Daubray cousins had planted where Gauthier's lawns had once stretched to the river. He reached the levee, and from that shallow ridge looked at the moon, round and bright as an alabaster dish just above the trees of the western bank. The Refuge landing was a black tongue among black cypresses, jackstaff still pointing bravely at the sky, and beside it a crumbling boathouse crouched, a velvet shadow-beast lapping at the luminous water's verge.

In the dense chill of predawn January walked along the levee, thinking about Reuben and Trinette, and Lisbon's wife Zuzu. Of Fourchet himself; and young Marie-Noel Daubray. But his tired mind kept straying to Rose Vitrac, asleep in that shabby room on Rue de la Victoire near the wharves, looking young and vulnerable with her spectacles set on a pile of books at her bedside and her soft brown hair spread in waves about her on the pillow in the dark. And from those thoughts, his mind reached out to his father, and the green-black fields of cane that had once grown an hour's walk or less from the center of New Orleans, back when New Orleans had had actual ramparts where the Rue des Ramparts now ran.

He climbed the bluff above the Triomphe landing, untied the red bandanna there, and replaced it with a yellow. Thought for a passing moment about Abishag Shaw, and shook his head at the gangling backwoodsman's familiarity with the myth of Theseus.

A steamboat passed in the darkness behind him, amid a shower of uprising sparks, like American fireworks on the Fourth of July. Among the oak trees the big house slumbered dark and still, the kitchen shuttered fast, the overseer's house a coal-lump of malice against the beating glare of the mill. As January watched, a light flared in its window: Jeanette making coffee for the white man whose concubine she was. Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the grain.

Sorrow and rage filled him. Bitter helplessness, and fear that edged daily toward the uncaring violence of outlawry and revolt. How dare they? he thought. How dare they do this, to her, to Quashie, to me? To everyone here?

The rage and rebellion that had scorched him since he'd helped punish Quashie boiled to a blistering head in him, poisoned by the knowledge that revolt was useless. As Nat Turner and all who'd followed him had found. Rebellion would only make matters worse. You couldn't fight them.

But like the skirl of bright unbidden music, he remembered half a dozen white men running madly about with their dogs in the bitter-cold woods, blaspheming and blowing on their fingers while they looked for his trail, like Bouki the Hyena when Compair Lapin ran off with his supper or his shoes or his wife.

You can't defeat the army, he thought. But if you lie quiet in cover you might save yourself and win a skirmish or two.

He was singing softly to himself as he came down the levee, as the first bell of morning sounded.

At noon, January lay down on the strip of waste ground at the end of the cane-rows and fell asleep as if he'd been struck over the head, not caring that it meant missing his dinner. Harry, he noticed-in the two seconds of consciousness between recumbence and blackness-didn't. In fact, Harry disappeared the moment Ajax yelled "Rice cart!" and didn't reemerge from the cane, sleek and pleased with himself, until seconds before the men were choused into the rows again. Time enough to rendezvous either with one of his many girlfriends or, more likely, with someone from the house or from one of the nearby houses.

He's got to be a machine.

They were cutting quite a ways downriver of the house, and back towards the cipriere. January had to fight to keep his mind from drifting, a dangerous thing when you were swinging half a yard of edged metal full force, the dust of the fields gummed with cane-juice to his hands and face and hair. Lack of sleep slowed his mind, and that was deadly. Hunger, too, now that he had no choice but to be awake. The singing helped, the rhythm of it focusing the mind without distracting it. Now and then some shouted phrase, some wailing fall of the music, would lift and turn his heart. Then down the line one of the women called out, "Look alive!" and he heard the crash and rustle of a horse, riding through the scattered stubble and trash.

Thierry, he thought, his stomach clenching, but it wasn't.

"What on earth is the meaning of this?"

Two men, mounted on bay hacks that January recognized as expensive. The younger rider was about January's own age, large and fair and portly, and clothed in a coat of costly malt-colored wool. His neckcloth was striped a vivid gold, and a tad too fancy for riding one's acres in. The older, perhaps eight years senior, had the same square chin and the same fair hair, though what was thick and mostly still flaxen, lying on the shoulders of his companion's inappropriate coat, was thin and graying on the older man's head; the man himself was narrower, smaller, and more compact. The difference between a hank of jerky, thought January, and a fat-marbled roast with sauce B?arnaise.

"Tell your men to stop," ordered the older man, drawing rein beside Ajax. "You're on Daubray land."

Ajax doffed his beaver hat at once, respectfully avoiding the mounted man's eyes. "Michie Louis, sir, it'd give me great happiness to oblige you, but Michie Fourchet'd skin me alive if I did." The driver's scarred, ugly face wore an expression of wholly specious concern. "He told us off to cut these fields today, and I can't go against what he said. Bumper! " he called, and his son, with the inevitable Nero at his heels, dashed up, water gourd dripping from his hand. "You run back to the house and get Michie Fourchet fast, so he and Michie Daubray can work this out between them."

The two boys fled, and Louis Daubray looked annoyed because the driver had refused to be bullied. The younger man, whom January guessed to be Hippolyte, said, "I told you he'd try something like this." And smote the field dust from his sleeves. "Well, look at the bubbies on that one," he added, small gray eyes twinkling in their pouches of fat, and he gestured with his quirt at Ajax's daughter Eve, working her first season at the cane carts with her mother in the women's gang. "Wonder what old Simon would charge for the pleasure of breaking her in?"

"Tell your men to stop," ordered Louis pettishly again, and gestured around him. "Your master may claim that this is his land, but it is indubitably my cane."

"Sir, the fact is I don't remember whether we planted this cane or you planted this cane, so you may very well be right." Ajax bowed again as he spoke, hat in hands and voice carefully neutral.

"But I can't go against Michie Fourchet's orders-"

"You very well can, when his orders are in direct contravention of the law! "

"He gets any more mad," murmured Gosport, in the thick African patois that was barely French at all, "he'll pop right up off that horse and spin around in the air," and there was a silent ripple of laughter among the men.

"Little bitch put him up to it," muttered Louis Daubray, shading his eyes and gazing in the direction of the house. "Under that piety she always was a schemer."

"She'll find her claims-if she wins them-come a little more expensive than she thought," remarked Hippolyte. "If she hasn't found so already. The first time he takes a knife to her dresses, or starts smashing things she treasures..." He shook with a sudden chuckle of reminiscent laughter. "Do you remember the night old Simon took a hammer to Camille's pianoforte? And her staggering along the levee all done up in that ridiculous yellow ball dress, waving her opium bottle and screaming to all the boats to take her back to France?"

"That sour little puritan wouldn't care about her dresses, and if she ever fancied anything in her life other than the Bible I'd be surprised," muttered Louis. "That's the only reason Simon hasn't driven her off yet. She treasures nothing: no novels to tear up, no pianoforte to take a sledge to, no glass birds and music boxes to stamp, no lace to rip.. What, sir, is the meaning of this?"

For Simon Fourchet had appeared at a hand-gallop across the stubble, hatless, gray hair jerking behind him in the breeze.

"The meaning of this, you mangy weasel, is that it's harvest..."

All work in the cane-rows had ceased by this time, men and women both gathered around the cane carts, listening as unobviously as they could. Finding himself next to Jeanette, January touched her shoulder gently, asked, "Is there someone on Daubray who'd know how to make grisgris?"

"Mambo Hera," the girl said promptly. "Even my mama was afraid of Mambo Hera."

Like most of the women, she'd stripped off her coarse woolen jacket and hiked up her skirt almost to the thigh. Sweat gummed her calico shift to her breasts and ran down her cheeks from beneath the tignon that bound up her hair, making cedar-red tracks in the mousy dust. "Before she got so crippled she was them boys' mammy-Michie Louis and Michie Hippolyte. My mama said in her prime she had the Power, more than any other woman in this parish. I remember Mambo Hera when I was just little: She was a scary woman in those days."

"But not now?"

"She's near ninety," put in Disappearing Willie, who stood just behind them. "And this past summer she had a palsy-stroke, and doesn't get around much. She's near blind, too."

"When she looks at you with those white eyes it still seems like she looks right through you, though." Maybe, thought January. But somehow he couldn't imagine a dim-sighted and crippled nonagenarian accomplishing even the modest scramble up to the timbers of the mill, or slipping through Thierry's window to fetch a blanketful of knives to dump in the forge.

"I think all of'em was scared to death of her," Jeanette went on. "Warn Enid's daughters, and Michie Louis's, and all of'em over to Daubray. All except Mamzelle Marie-Noel-M'am Fourchet, I should say."

"It was the labor of my men who planted this cane here last season, and three years ago," Louis Daubray was shouting, waving his quirt before Fourchet's face. "My men who cleared the trashy wasteland that was all that was left here of the ruin our cousin had made of family land..."

Gosport was right, thought January. If Daubray got any more riled he would fly off his horse like a badly made toy.

"Mama would take me over there, and I'd see the girls, M'am Enid's daughters Aimee and Rosine, that were always dressed so pretty, and Michie Louis's daughter Loie. They were fifteen, sixteen then, and Michie Robert and all the other boys would ride over to court them, all but Michie Esteban, of course. The girls, they'd give Mambo Hera sugar and candy and sometimes they'd steal things like tobacco or earrings, when their mamas would get them from off the steamboats, to bribe her to make them gris-gris to get this boy or that boy they wanted."

"Don't think I'm not aware that you'd rejoice if my crop failed! " Fourchet stormed at the two Daubrays. "And don't think I don't know that it hasn't stopped at rejoicing! I know perfectly well you were on my land the night my mill burned...! "

"Don't be ridiculous! " Hippolyte, who'd been lounging in his saddle eyeing Eve and Jeanette and the petite sullen-faced Trinette, straightened with a jerk. "I was pursuing that pestilent thief of a goods-trader whom you permit to tie up and set up shop on your land! "

"And who saw you, eh? I've heard all about how you followed Jones halfway down the river, but who was with you?"

"Do you call my brother a liar, sir?"

"But Mamzelle Marie-Noel," Jeanette went on softly, "she'd go by in her old made-over gown that she'd turned herself, just holding her Bible and her beads in her hands, and she wouldn't even so much as look at Mambo Hera. And Mambo Hera'd look after her and laugh."

"... making free with the goods that are stolen from the rest of us! Why, I shouldn't be surprised if Jones gives you a cut of what he receives."

"Liar!" Fourchet lunged from his saddle, hands reaching for Hippolyte's throat. "Pig of a liar!"

Hippolyte's horse, not surprisingly, threw up her head with a squeal of indignation and reared, blundering into Louis's mount, and by the time Ajax, January, Gosport, and Hope had grabbed bridles and steadied would-be combatants from clambering down to take up the challenge on the ground, the immediate danger of assault was past. "I will send my friends to call an you, you perjuring filth, and in the meantime get your fat bottom and your scrawny brother off my wife's land!"

"Should you find any friends the length of this river willing to call on me or to perform any office whatsoever on your behalf, I will own myself to be astonished beyond speaking, and this is our family's land, and no possession of any thieving bastard of our cousin's Hibernian drab!"

"I thought you was good at the dozens, Ben," remarked Gosport, coming up beside January, after Hippolyte, Louis, and Fourchet had been separated once again. "But I would purely love to hear those two go at it!"

"And you get back to work!" screamed Fourchet, lashing at Ajax and the field hands with his quirt. "Idle, stupid blacks...! "

"Not on my land you're not! "

Fourchet lunged at les fr?res Daubray one more time and Ajax caught him back, expostulating with him to the extent that Louis and his brother were able to depart without the appearance of flight. The driver then had the task of respectfully talking his master out of pursuing the brothers through the cane and flogging them with Ajax's whip ("If you want to take it, sir, of course, but it'll leave me without anything to beat these lazy niggers here with..."), by which time Louis and Hippolyte were out of range. Trembling, Simon Fourchet leaned against his driver's shoulder, his red face suddenly white and his hand pressed to his chest, looking as he had following yesterday's outburst of rage at the smithy. January had the impression of a horse that has been galloped too far and too hard, windbroken, unable to run again.

Hope broke away from the slow-moving cane cart, picked up one of the water bottles, and brought it silently to the old man. The water spilled as he took it. "Thank you," Simon Fourchet said quietly, and drank. As the planter remounted and rode away January braced his knife on his shoe for two quick passes with the whetstone, and returned to cutting.

Just before sunset three more riders appeared along the cart path, rough-clothed men on scrubby horses. "Lordy lordy," murmured the gap-toothed Nathan, "it's Sheriff Duffy." He dropped the billets onto the cut row, scooped the trash over onto the trash row, and nodded back toward the ape-browed, sharp-eyed unshaven man in the lead. The men riding with Duffy were of the rough cracker class, spiritual brethren of the original owner of the hog that now hung in Disappearing Willie's cave up Lost Bayou, though one of them, January recognized, had to be related to the Belle Dame's cold-eyed master.

"Got a restraining order here," said Duffy in quite proper though thickly accented French, and extended a folded piece of paper. When Fourchet only crossed his arms and regarded the lawman with stubborn contempt, the man with the Ney eyes took it, handed it to the planter, and repeated the words. His French was, if anything, worse: the backwoods patois of French Acadia, but a native's French.

"You may inform your master, M'sieu Ney," retorted Fourchet, ignoring Sheriff Duffy completely, "that by tomorrow I will have Justice Rauche issue another such order against that thief Daubray and his whoremaster brother, forbidding them to set foot upon my wife's land."

"That's as may be, sir," replied Duffy stolidly. "But for the moment you're to remove your menand leave the cane."

"So Daubray may send his slaves to pick it up and grind it?" Fourchet spat the words, turning for the first time to stare at the sheriff with cold, half-mad eyes. He shifted his gaze to Ney. "Inform this American that I charge him to leave a guard here, lest my cane be stolen in the night by the same thieves who have poisoned my slaves and attempted to torch my mill and my barn."

"Simon, don't be a fool! That cane will be worthless in a day-"

"Tell him, Guy!"

Guy Ney sighed, and obeyed, evidently well aware who was going to get landed with the job of standing guard over nine acres of rotting cane-and he was correct. When Ajax and Hercules had organized the men and dumped the loaded cane back onto the ground, and both gangs walked back between tall green rows followed by the empty carts, January looked over his shoulder and saw the fair-haired Acadian sitting his horse, rifle propped on his thigh, among the stubble and cut rows and trash.

It being only an hour short of dark, January had hoped that the men would be released back to the quarters. This was an optimistic hope at best. Fourchet marched the men to another section of the fields just downstream of the mill, and started them to work, though in the daylight remaining they'd barely fill the carts one time. Exhaustion, hunger, and lack of sleep made January feel like his body was being raked through with steel harrows, but he made it through the twilight, and helped load the last of the carts by the flare of torches the suckling gang-the women pregnant, or too old for heavy work-brought down.

Knowing he'd be working until the moon was high hauling wood, he took the ash-pone and beans Gosport had put together that morning for tonight's supper, and carried it to the smithy.

Mohammed was just concluding his prayers for the night, kneeling on the dirty little square of faded carpet facing east. January recalled seeing the blacksmith so thirty-five years before, and asking him about it-it was the first time he had heard the name of Allah.

"Tell me about Lisbon," said January, "and about how Zuzu happened to be sold."

The griot nodded, as if the question did not surprise him. "They was married ten, twelve years, Lisbon and Auntie Zuzu," he said. "Lisbon was born on Bellefleur,"-January carefully made his face blank, with a little knit of his brows as if he had never heard of the place before-"the plantation Michie Fourchet used to own just outside New Orleans, just a year or two before the uprisin' here. Zuzu was brought in when she was sixteen, from the Locoul place dawn in St. John Parish. She was a flighty girl, always givin' this man and that man the eye, but she was good with children. She'd had a child herself by that time, and M'am Nanette Locoul saw how she watched over that baby, and the babies of the other women on the place. Zuzu was put in charge of the nursery down at Belief!eur, when Mamzelle Elvire was born, and just before Mamzelle Solange came along two years later, Zuzu and Lisbon married. She had four children by Lisbon: Nan, Roux, Sidonie, and Beau, Beau dyin' of pneumonia before he was two-it was a bad winter, that year. They did say as how Roux wasn't Lisbon's child but Boaz's, for he was mighty light, like Boaz, and both Zuzu and Lisbon are dark, but Lisbon loved Roux like his own."

"Did he love Zuzu?" January settled his back to the doorpost of the smithy.

Torchlight reflected through the mill windows etched the shift of lines and wrinkles on the smith's face as Mohammed sorted through the truths of that question. "They got on well," he replied at last. "As to how much they loved each other... When first she came, Zuzu walked out with Cicero, and Boaz, and Johnny, who was one of the footmen on Bellefleur in those days, and as I said she had a roving eye."

He rolled his prayer carpet neatly as he spoke and stowed it inside the door of his little room, built off the back of the smithy. With the path to the mill running a dozen feet from Mohammed's door, January didn't wonder that he hadn't heard someone enter the smithy from the other side and work the bellows; he must have long ago gotten used to noises, in the roulaison.

"But Lisbon was a driver, and a good one. He's slowed down some now after havin' the lung fever two years ago, he never quite got over that. Now, the way Michie Fourchet buys good service from men is to give them the women they want: as he gave Kiki to Reuben, and then later Trinette, after Gilles and M'am MarieNoel both asked him that Kiki and Gilles could be together. "

"And I suppose," remarked January dryly, recalling Kiki's words, and Jeanette looking up at Thierry from the dust of the whipping-ground, "that what the woman wants doesn't enter into it."

Sitting down easily beside January with his own supper, the blacksmith met his eyes, not answering for a time: You know as well as I do. Then he said, "Michie Fourchet has never been a man to admit he'd paired up the wrong couple." He offered January salt pork and rice, and water from the covered jar beside the door, sweetened with a little sugar, and January gave the smith one of his yams.

"Even his own son, who hates that wife of his and the children she bore him. Kiki and Gilles were clever, asking him to let her be with Gilles on the day he'd brought M'am Marie-Noel home after their wedding. Reuben had hit Kiki bad that day and marked her face, but even then Gilles had to put it right, saying, 'You know, sir, how Reuben has changed, how he used to be a better man than he was when you first gave Kiki to him.' "

And in the shifted note of the griot's voice, January heard another voice, lighter and more cultured, with the accent of town. Gilles's voice, speaking out of the past, from beyond his grave.

"Meaning Reuben had changed, not Michie Fourchet had made a mistake in the first place. He was clever, that Gilles."

Clever, thought January, except where liquor was concerned.

The path from the woodsheds was quiet now as the men ate their suppers. Up by the front of the mill a baby cried, and a woman's soft voice shushed it-Trinette, January identified the sweet soft lisp. Here's wife. Reuben's wife, after Gilles's "cleverness" had won Kiki from him, though the ten-month-old child she carried to the fields to work with her, and to the mill at night, was definitely the lighter-skinned Hercules's child.

"Well, whatever Zuzu thought of the matter, Michie Fourchet gave her to Lisbon because he wanted Lisbon's good work, and the pair of them got on well enough. Like I said, there was good reason to think Roux was Boaz's son rather than Lisbon's, and everybody knew for sure that Lisbon fathered girls on Quinette and Heloise. And now and then Zuzu and Lisbon would have it out, like all married couples. But the true thing is that both of them loved the children she bore, loved them dearly.

"She loved M'am Camille's children, too. For all her faults Zuzu was a woman of great love. Whatever Michie Robert says, this wasn't true of M'am Camille. She was a beautiful woman, and a brilliant one, but M'am Camille wasn't happy, especially not after Michie Fourchet sold his place Bellefleur. His sister died, who'd been running Triomphe ever since the uprising here in 'ninety-eight, and Michie Fourchet fought with her husband at the funeral and told him never to come back. And the town was growing. Men offered Michie Fourchet a lot of money for the Bellefleur lands. So he sold Bellefleur, and most of the slaves from it, and moved the rest of us up here to Mon Triomphe."

January was silent, remembering that place, that world of his birth. Remembering in his childhood how close the cipriere had lain, a wildness of marsh and silence, endless in all directions, save for just around the little walled town.

Mohammed mopped the last of the beans with a fragment of corn-bread. "M'am Camille had been all right mostly," he said, "when she'd been able to go into town to the opera, and to buy books and see her French aunt and her friends. Out here I think she felt alone. Well, a lot of us did, that had friends, or abroadwives or husbands in town, and in the plantations round about town. M'am Camille, she'd always been hot and cold towards those three children of hers, holding onto them tight one minute then pushing them off the next because she had to get dressed for some party, or wanted to play her piano or read. She left Michie Robert in school with the Jesuits and came into town to see him whenever she could-to see him and to see her friends-but the little girls she mostly ignored, and it was Zuzu that raised them. All she wanted was to go back to France. It wasn't a good time."

"No." January thought of his own anger at being separated from the music he loved. At feeling his hands grow stiffer and more clumsy each day, and seeing the tide of days flow between himself and Rose, days that could be sweet and were instead bitter with hard work, isolation, and fear. No novels to rip up, Hippolyte Daubray had chuckled. No glass birds and music boxes to stamp...

As if he'd passed her ghost on the levee last night, January saw a woman in a yellow dress staggering beside the river with an opium bottle in her hand, screaming to the boats to take her back to France. And Camille had to come down from the levee sometime, he thought. And there was only the house to go back to when she did.

"Zuzu kept the girls away from their father as much as she could," went on Mohammed, "for he'd take out his hate of his wife on them. When Mamzelle Solange was two or three, M'am Camille bore another son." Glancing aside at him January saw the untold half of that tale in his eyes: how it must have come about that she conceived them, to a man she would never have willingly bedded.

"A year later she bore another, and the first one a stout boy by then, crawling all around the place with Zuzu after him, laughing. M'am Camille was jealous that little Toussaint would go to Zu rather than to his mother. She used to slap Zuzu, and once or twice thrashed her with a cane-stalk for being uppity, when she'd catch her playing with the children. She'd seldom play with them herself. Then one summer little Toussaint died, laid down on his bed in the nursery taking a nap. It was like Zuzu had lost one of her own sons. The boy'd had no fever, though there was some sickness in the quarters that summer, like there always is. And two weeks later the baby died, too, the same way: was alive when Zuzu laid him down, and when she came back into the room he was dead."

Down at the front of the mill Danny the night driver's scratchy tenor sang out, calling, "Time to pick it up again, boys," and from the direction of the quarters the men who'd gone to their cabins straggled back along the path by the mill wall, talking to one another and laughing. January heard Parson say, "... so fat they hired her out to schools for a globe..." and wondered where he'd picked up that fragment of Shakespearean insult.

It was time, he knew, to go back to work. "And that's when they sold Zuzu?"

Mohammed nodded. "M'am Camille took on somethin' desperate, of course, and Michie Fourchet was drunk for near on to two weeks. Michie Esteban and Michie Robert ran the plantation. Zuzu was sick with grief, swearin' she'd sooner have died herself than see those two babies come to harm, but for spite Michie Fourchet sold her off separate from her children. Sold her for a field hand, too. M'am Camille never got over it," he added, brushing the last of the cornmeal crumbs from his hands.

"Yet they only sold her down to Voussaire."

The blacksmith nodded. "Nan and Roux went to Lescelles, just upriver from here, but it's a little place. They was sold away from there this summer, to a dealer. But Sidonie's still on Daubray itself. Pretty, she is, and just married this spring-isn't she, Lisbon?" For the driver himself had come walking along the path from the quarters, a stout spry man arm in arm with a young woman named Zarabelle, with whom January had seen him at the shout.

"Sidonie?" Lisbon smiled with gap-toothed pride. "She's so pretty the roses take shame and ask her pardon when she walks by."

"Prettier than Zarabelle?" teased Harry, ambling along the path just behind them, and Lisbon and Zarabelle laughed and nudged each other the way that lovers do. "You better watch out, or one day she'll go down to Voussaire and sit down with Zuzu for tea..."

"Now, whoa, how fair is that?" objected Lisbon. "How is it women can sit and talk about men, and they get all prickly and hot when they think men are talking about them? What if I went and had tea with Syphax, and talked to him about Zuzu?"

"Syphax is Zuzu's husband?" January fell into step with them as they headed along the trash piles toward the lights of the roundhouse windows.

"Her latest," said Harry, which made Lisbon laugh. "You wouldn't happen to know," asked January, in a softer voice, as Lisbon and his ladyfriend moved out ahead of them and left him and Harry in the dense shadows along the wall, "whether Zuzu knew any juju, would you?"

Harry paused, mobile eyebrows' flicking up. "You don't think Zuzu might be our hoodoo?"

"I don't know," said January. "I'm sort of curious."

He saw something alter in the young man's bright intelligent eyes. Something in the back of them, as if he were sorting out a hand of cards. "You curious enough to do another little favor for me tonight? Because it so happens," Harry added, with an ingenuous smile, "that I'm headed on down to voussaire myself tonight, as soon as I can bribe Here to let me slip away."