04 Sold Down the River

ELEVEN

There were two sorts of islands in the Mississippi River: low ones, built up from sand or gravel bars in the channel as they accumulated silt and towheads brought down by the river's rise; and high ones, carved off the bank when in heavy storms the river cut new channels behind points of land. Catbird Island was of the latter type. Though the water in the chute was low now, it was very strong, and January felt the pull of it as he waded breast-deep through the muddy flood.

Were the river only a little higher a skillful pilot could probably take a small boat like the Belle Dame inside the island, between it and the bank, avoiding the massive current mid-river.

Personally, January wouldn't have wanted to be on the boat.

Clearly the pilot of the Lancaster wasn't so sanguine about his skill; the long side-wheeler was just negotiating the bars on the outside of the island as January came around the little cove on the downstream side. He stayed in cover behind the inevitable snarl of snags that built up at the tops and bottoms of islands where the current veered, wondering which stoker or striker or deckhand on that boat had been paid off to go to Shaw and say, "Wednesday? Yeah, we passed the point above Triomphe landing that day-that bandanna on the tree was blue."

All is well, King Aegeus. Thy son lives.

Catbird Point had originally been triangular, but once it became an island the action of the current against its outer side had built up a little bar there, with a sheltered cove behind. The belt of weathered gray deadfalls protected it from the sharp chill of the wind, but January still shivered as he pulled his clothes back on. If Harry had been telling poor Baptiste the truth about False River Jones being in the neighborhood, this is where the trader would camp.

The only thing January saw in the cove, however, as he emerged from the thickets of loblolly and cypress, was the scuffed dimple of an old campfire in the sand. Even before he reached it he could see it was weeks old, the earth tamped by subsequent rains. Presumably False River Jones had set up shop here on his last visit. But as January approached, he saw the fresh tracks of a woman's feet, crossing the damp earth.

She'd made no attempt to conceal them. Maybe her conscience was clear, or maybe she'd come here at night, her mind on other things. Her feet were narrow, her shoes the brogans that masters gave to slaves, newer than most but still patched, broken, and worn. The tracks led directly to the masses of snags along the island's outer edge.

Drawn up under them was a boat, a shallow-bottomed pirogue little larger than a canoe. After a few experimental pokes with a stick, January reached in and drew forth a red-and-blue blanket of the kind that had been found in the smithy, dirty and worn. Two cane-knives were wrapped in it, not broken ones but the new ones Esteban had bought in New Orleans. There was also a cooking pot containing a couple of gourd cups, a dozen partially burned candles-both tallow and wax-and a bandanna wrapped around flint, steel, and tow.

January wrapped these things and replaced them. A few yards' search in the woods yielded a bundle hung from a tree. This contained a loaf of bread, two apples, a piece of salt pork the size of his fist, and a slightly smaller chunk of cheese. The bread was a day old. The apples were Ashford russets from Madame Camille's garden.

Stealing a little at a time, he thought, wrapping the food and hanging it once again. Waiting for a cloudy night, or rain, to get away. He wondered where the boat had been acquired.

But even if you had a boat, where would you go? Upstream, through Baton Rouge, Natchez, St.

Louis? He shivered at the thought of trying to row a pirogue through those vermin-nests of river pirates and slave-stealers, day or night. Across the river, and so on foot through the western parishes and on into Mexico? You'd have to be a powerful oarsman to keep from being swept away in the big current.

Or you could just go south to New Orleans, and hope to blend into the mangle of free colored and freedmen, and runaways that nobody bothered to look for. Get a laborer's job with somebody who wasn't going to ask. Try to get someone to forge papers for you. Maybe get a ship, to Philadelphia or New York.

The sun stood directly overhead. He stripped again and waded the channel, dressed in the thickets of the batture, and climbed the steep clay bank, to stand with the cold steady wind flapping and pulling at his clothing, looking down over the dark green acres of cane in the heatless light. The cane-rows churned like the ocean before a storm, and in the distance he could see the men, like ants in long grass, and, antlike, the coming and going around the doorway of the mill. Around the side of the house the rice cart appeared, the boys of the hogmeat gang leading the oldest of the mules out along the cart track into the field. Though it had been in January's mind to stop at the kitchen and speak to Kiki, he knew it was time and past time to return to work.

Quashie and Jeanette, at a guess. She'd have access to the knives. But as he descended the levee and walked toward the fields, he reflected that it might just as easily be someone else, someone who had another reason entirely to be arranging flight at a moment's notice.

Someone had lain in wait, thought January, making his circuitous way among the mule paddocks and sheds toward the kitchen after dinner. Had watched for the moment when the rollers would jam. Someone had prepared the blowpipe and the darts, had boiled both oleander to poison the master and some lesser poison to guarantee that the mill would be shorthanded, that the cane would be full of trash, rocks, roots.

Someone who'd written signs to summon the dark spirits to the poison's making.

A slave. Or someone who had been a slave.

He glanced around him uneasily, lest Ajax or Thierry or even one of his cabin-mates see him and demand where he was going when he was due back for the night work at the mill.

Maybe Harry had lost his spare key; maybe it had been stolen. But someone had to have gained access to the pots of grits and congris and sausage that the men ate before they went out to the fields. Kiki was just as likely to chase him off with a broom as to answer his questions. Still, it was worth a try.

But as he ducked around the back of the laundry January saw the unmistakably short, stout, black-clad figure of the woman he sought slip quietly from the kitchen door with a bundle beneath her arm. Still hidden in the shadows himself, January saw her look furtively around in the glimmer of the moon's rising light.

Meeting Harry? But on any number of occasions Kiki had expressed her contempt for all the field hands-including January-and her complete disdain for Harry.

Meeting False River Jones herself with coffee grounds or used tea leaves to sell?

Kiki set out at a swift walk, the night's chill wind jerking at her shawl, flapping her skirts.

January followed, through the velvet dark between stable and carriage house, past the rude huts of pigsties and chicken runs, until she disappeared into the cart track between two rows of the wind-thrashed cane. It was easy enough to follow her then, a row over and a little behind, the noise of his own body shoving through the thick leaves masked by the roar of the wind. A short ways into the fields, Kiki lit a lantern: The gold light bobbed between the clattering stalks. To their right the quarters lay, lightless houses and weedy plots of corn and yams, huddled against the thrashing wind.

When they reached the cipriere the wind was less, though the tops of the trees tossed and muttered, and even down below the air was achingly cold. A half-mile in, close by the place where the ring-shout had been, was a hut used sometimes by those Fourchet sent out to burn charcoal for use in the forge, and sometimes by the men who gathered Spanish moss. Its single window was shuttered, but most of the moss and mud that chinked the walls had fallen out. January could see the lantern's light inside like a pile of gold needles in the dark. The one knothole big enough to see through didn't give a very good view, but he saw a few rough bales of moss stacked along the opposite wall, and a black-skirted knee and foot. Kiki was sitting on the moss. Waiting.

January knew, at this point, that the supper hour was well and truly over and he would be beaten by Ajax when he returned to the evening's work at the mill. For Hannibal to protest would mean the loss of his position in the work-gang, and with it the loss of any chance for further information.

Stealthily he backed into the shadows of a hackberry thicket and thought, This had better be worth it.

And waited, while the moon sailed high over the heaving trees, and the ghosts whispered in the darkness. Waited, to see who would come.

Frost on the way, January thought. His bones twinged with the reminder that he was no longer a young man. If not tonight, then soon. Maybe the attempts on Simon Fourchet were only anger, against his merciless drive to make the crop. Maybe the break January sought in the pattern was too small to see, a flaw in the mind of a man or woman pushed to personal extremity, like the hairline fracture in a steamboat's boiler that one night will bear the pressure of the steam no more. It wasn't as though the planter hadn't pushed his slaves to murder and rebellion before. His land, Fourchet had said. All that he had to show for his life, and everything that was precious to him. Devotion to it had cost him the life of the woman whose portrait still hung on the parlor wall, and the life of the daughter she'd borne him. Had cost him the love of Madame Camille, fleeing to New Orleans in the wake of her babies' deaths. Would they have lived, had they had the services of a doctor in town?

He thought about the piroque waiting in the darkness of the snag-piles on Catbird Island, and of the butler lying dead in the storeroom, a glass in his hand. Voodoo marks on the walls... The smell of blood.

January's head came up as he scented it, sudden and raw as the wind momentarily slacked. Then he heard her moan.

He strode to the hut and hurled open the rickety door. Kiki raised her head from the floor where she'd fallen when the convulsions overtook her. Her skirts were hiked around her waist. The thick pad of moss and rags over which she'd been squatting, now drenched with blood and fetal matter, made clear to him why she had come. Mute eyes, huge and terrified, met his, then she doubled over again. An animal sound was wrung from her, hoarse and dreadful. "What did you take?" Without waiting for a reply January plucked aside the towel that covered her basket, unstopped the half-empty gourd of brownish liquid inside, and sniffed it, not even needing to taste. Quinine. Of course she'd have access to the plantation medicine chest, and there was never any telling how strong the bark was, when you boiled it.

There was a rain barrel behind the hut, at this season clear even of mosquitoes. The water was fairly fresh. Among the packets and boxes in her basket there was powdered tobacco, which he mixed-carefully-with gourdful after gourdful of water, forcing her to drink. She vomited twice, January holding her shoulders, the smell of the blood nauseating in his nostrils but familiar. How many times, during his six years at the hospital in Paris, had he dealt with women in similar case? He'd known women to take anything, any sort of poison, to purge unwanted pregnancies: foxglove, ipecac, arsenic. He was preparing a third dose of tobacco water when Kiki raised her head-hair sweat-matted around her face, dark eyes huge and sunken in the candlelight-and gasped, "Paper. Herbs. The basket." And vomited again, and again, as if all her guts and soul would come up as well.

They were powdered up in a twist of paper and January wasn't certain what they were-fragments of honeysuckle at least, and a smell of licorice. But he mixed them with a little water, and held the gourd for Kiki to drink.

She retched, gagged, fingers digging into his biceps like iron vises. She had kneaded pounds of bread every day for years, and her grip was like a blacksmith's. Then she lay back, gasping, in the crook of his arm, and began to weep.

Gently, January lifted her, carried her to the moss bales. He tucked her skirt up out of the way and laid more of the rags from her basket under her bottom to absorb the last of the blood. The mess of bloodied rags, moss, and aborted flesh he gathered together and carried outside, locating a charcoal-burner's bucket and upending it over the sorry little heap to keep the foxes out of it until he could come back and bury or burn it. By lantern light, the fetus had looked to be about three months along. A dangerous time to abort.

When he came back Kiki had pulled her skirt down over her legs. She lay breathing shallowly, eyes closed, tears running from them down her plump cheeks. January took off his coarse jacket and tucked it around her, then used his clasp-knife to cut the cords on one of the moss bales, piling the wiry gray masses around her like a rude blanket. Kiki groaned, and whispered,

"Gilles."

"Was it Giles's child?"

She opened her eyes, not surprised at the question. He gave her the gourd he'd filled from the barrel; she drank thirstily. Not the cleanest, he thought, but she'd lost blood and it was exactly what she'd have drunk back in the quarters.

After a time she nodded, and wept again without a sound.

January turned away, and sorted through the basket on the table. There was slippery elm there, and willow bark. It wasn't part of a surgeon's training, but he'd learned from Olympe and, long ago, from old Mambo Jeanne. He hunted through the little hut til he found a tin cup, which he filled with the last of the water in the gourd and set over the lantern's candle, so that the bark could steep. As he worked he felt Kiki's gaze on his back, and saw she had turned her head a little to watch him work.

She whispered, "He'd have sold it. Michie Fourchet would have sold it."

January couldn't argue.

"Gilles was so good. And it made him so happy, when I told him I was carrying." She shook her head. " 'She gonna be a beautiful gal,' he said. She gonna look just like you.' "She closed her eyes, and laid her forearm over them, not sobbing, but with the tears still flowing down.

Still January said nothing. He knew-they all knew-what generally happened to beautiful gals who were not free. The water hissed and bubbled in the cup. He wrapped a corner of his outer shirttail around his hand and brought the cup to her, helped her sit up to drink. "We'd better be getting back," he told her. "You're chilled, and you've lost blood. I'll get you to your cabin and then come back here and bury the child. Should anyone find it, with you sick tomorrow, they'll guess." It meant a day in the fields with little more than an hour's sleep, but he had no thought of not helping her. For a slave woman to induce abortion in herself or anyone else was punishable by whipping, an act of robbery from her master.

Kiki sighed, and struggled to sit up. "I won't be sick tomorrow," she said. There was infinite weariness, an endless chain of days on which she had been strong; in her tired voice. "Nobody will know."

"They'll know if you faint dead on the kitchen floor. Can you put these on yourself?" January handed her the long rags she'd folded as clouts to absorb the bleeding and, though he'd performed the most intimate care of her less than an hour ago when she was semiconscious, now turned his back on her, and let her tend to herself. "Tell 'em you broke ajar and cut your foot, and need to stay off it for a day, and let Minta do the cooking."

"I do that and the whole family'll die of poisoning, not just Michie Fourchet."

January laughed, and turned back in time to see her rising shakily to her feet. "No, you don't."

Again, he picked her up, not easily, for she could not have weighed less than two hundred pounds, but without trouble. He had worked with the dying and the dead, both as a surgeon in Paris, and before and after those years during the fever summers in New Orleans. He had learned the knack of lifting bodies. "Which is the best way back to your cabin?"

The candle in the lantern was flickering out, so he left it on the table with the basket. The gibbous moon stood high, shedding sufficient silvery light through the bare trees to find their way back to the fields. January hoped he'd be able to return as easily to the hut when he'd left Kiki at her quarters.

It worried him, until they emerged from the woods, and saw the yellow fountain of upwelling fire from the direction of the quarters; heard the shouting, and smelled the smoke.