04 Sold Down the River

TWENTY-TWO

January fully expected that he'd have to haul himself out of the river, limp somehow to the nearest house, convince its inhabitants of his freedom and his bona fides, and make his way into Baton Rouge and hence back to New Orleans-staying one step ahead of Sheriff Duffy's posses all the while-entirely on his own. But as he paddled, trembling with exhaustion, in to shore, two figures waded out to meet him, Gosport and one of the second-gang women, Giselle. They dragged his makeshift raft in among the tangle of the flooded batture, and helped him up to the dry ground of the levee: "We must be ten, twelve miles down from where that boat blowed up," said Gosport. "We're clear round the other side of Duncan Point." On the other side of the levee, dark fields of cane disappeared into the fog. Somewhere voices sang: "Day zab, day zab, day koo-noo wi wi The darkening air stank of burned sugar.

Thank you, Mary, Mother of God. His fingers touched the rosary in his soaked pocket. Thank you God, for bringing me alive out of the fire and the flood.

He wondered if in fact Shaw had survived.

"You all right, Ben?" Giselle had her baby girl with her, tied to her back with a shawl when she'd gone into the river. The child blinked over her shoulder at January with huge liquid unsurprised brown eyes.

January sighed, and touched his forehead with one hand, wincing at the mingled pain of bruises and blisters. "I feel like I did twenty rounds with an iron stove and lost."

Gosport asked, "Will you be all right?"

January reached into his shirt, and smiled. The waxed silk was intact. "I'll be all right."

"You know," said Gosport, "I never did believe all them songs Mohammed used to sing about High John the Conqueror, beatin' all the white men and gettin' his people to safety. I'll believe 'em now. I know they're true."

They walked January to the oyster-shell road that ran along the top of the levee, and made sure he was well enough to stand on his own, before they faded like ghosts into the mist. January never saw either of them again.

Monsieur Conrad, of Le Cheniere plantation, had already gotten word that a boat had blown up on the other side of Duncan Point. He ordered his butler to make up a bed for January at once in one of the several cottages shared by the house-servants; only when January offered to show him his freedom papers did the planter say, "Janvier? Benjamin Janvier? Your wife is here. It was she whom my people first brought from the river with the news..."

January just stopped himself from gaping and said instead, "Kiki?" with what he hoped was a blossoming smile.

Monsieur Conrad's face broadened into a grin. He was a gray-haired, pleasant man of German Creole extraction and quite clearly reveled in being the reuniter of lost families. "Even she."

January crossed himself. "Thank God," he said simply. He wasn't quite sure what else to say, not knowing what the cook had told this man; he felt annoyance that she'd manipulate him in this fashion. "I didn't dare hope..."

Kiki was sitting on the edge of the bed in one of the house-servants' cottages. She was wrapped in a quilt, and one of the maids was combing out her mahogany-black hair. She looked up as January came in, and made her eyes melting as she held out her arms. "Oh, Ben! "

"Thank you," she said, after they'd been served with food and left alone. A small fire burned in the cabin's little hearth, making the borrowed refuge warm and pleasant. The servant had helped her braid her hair into strings, and Kiki finished tying them as she spoke. "I was almost unconscious when Monsieur Conrad's people found me. I was gambling that you'd get ashore all right, too. You might have gone anywhere, but at least you wouldn't be hiding like the others.

And if you did come here..."

"How did you know my name?"

And her dark eyes twinkled. "If you were a free man," she replied, "I knew you had to have your papers hidden somewhere. And since Michie Hannibal was like your white kid glove, the place to hide them would have been in his room."

January sniffed. "You're lucky you're here in this room with me instead of Harry. Or whoever Harry sold the other set of my papers to. Now I'll have to deal with having a duplicate Benjamin January at large, stealing pigs and trading guns..."

"Don't be silly, Ben, in a year his credit will be better than yours."

January sighed, and leaned his back against the pillows she'd heaped between the wall and his shoulders. He ached all over and wanted only to sleep. Outside, the fog was losing the light that had filled it all day.

Where would Marie-Noel Fourchet spend the night? They're all right, Shaw had said, meaning he'd gotten to Mon Triomphe in time. If he knew Shaw, the man had come up on a boat to another landing, and checked the lay of the land before going in. Disappearing Willie had probably gone to ground the same time Duffy had imprisoned Mohammed and Pennydip, and Quashie had been waiting, all that time, watching for his chance to rescue Jeanette...

And a good thing, January thought. Otherwise, preoccupied with their own harvests, the other planters wouldn't have seen the burning house until too late. Would have attributed the smoke to the burning of the cane-fields.

He had a mental image of Hippolyte Daubray riding up on the heels of the disaster, offering hospitality with one hand and three dollars and thirty-five cents for Mon Triomphe and everything on it with the other.

In the stillness he was aware of Kiki watching him. "False River Jones told me about your husband," he said. "And your sons."

Kiki turned her face away, and tied up the last of her many braids with string. Her plump face looked haggard in the warm hues of the fire, as if she understood that from those deaths-deaths she'd learned of at the trader's last visit in the dark of the moon-he had guessed all the rest.

"I should say I'm sorry," she said at last. "But I'm not. About Gilles, yes. He was a kind man, a good man. Even when he was drunk he hadn't an ounce of harm in him. I should have realized, after Michie Fourchet beat him for stealing liquor. But I didn't."

"Did you love him?"

"Everyone thought I should have," she said simply, "so I said I did. And then, M'am Fourchet wouldn't have put in her word for me, if I hadn't said it was love. It wasn't enough that Reuben was a wild pig in his soul. It was the love story that fetched her heart. Well, she's only a girl. But Hector was the only man I ever loved."

January was silent, thinking about how a man dies, who drinks the boiled roots of Italian oleander. Thinking about the stripped leaves beneath M'am. Camille's dark hedges, and the mashed bolus of boiled vegetable matter on the midden at Refuge; the veve of hatred drawn above the stove. The dead rats beneath the house.

"I am sorry," Kiki said.

His eyes met hers again, and he read in them her regret, and her understanding that he would have to take her in to the law if he could. Yet he understood, too, that having told Conrad they were husband and wife, there was no way that he could now announce that this woman was a murderess and his prisoner. It would mean a contest of lies, and Conrad might believe her, or call January's freedom papers into question.

All he wanted to do now was ascertain that Hannibal and the others had indeed survived the fire, and then go home.

"It sounds silly," Kiki said at length. "I am sorry. I didn't think of what it would mean-that others would be blamed, and maybe punished, for that horrid old man's death. And at the time I didn't care. I was so-so angry. So crazy with grief."

January said nothing. He remembered the madness of his own sorrow at Ayasha's death.

Remembered too the sick helpless fury he'd felt, his whole time at Mon Triomphe, as if everything beneath his skin were being consumed by slow fire.

"Reuben was easy," Kiki went on, her voice matter-of-fact. "We all of us, as children, played with blowpipes. There was an old mambo in the quarters where I grew up who made them out of maiden cane or straws, and my brothers and I could hit near anything with thorns or slivers as well as peas. Hector and I used to have contests-I was a better shot than he. Even though I marked the walls for Shango and the other spirits of the fire to help me, I didn't really think I could trap Reuben long enough in the mill for him to smother or burn, but nobody would question, then, if the machinery broke."

She drew the blanket more closely around herself. One of the Conrad servants had lent her clothes, a faded yellow calico gown sewn for a woman even more amply built than she, and the bright color warmed her face more than the blacks of mourning that she had worn. Proud, January remembered Mohammed calling her. Proud and strong.

Of course a man like Reuben would take it as a challenge, to break her.

Someone-Mohammed?-had told him how Kiki had nursed her former husband in his injury, when Trinette would not. Looking at her calm somber face he understood now why she'd volunteered.

What the rollers, and shock, and loss of blood hadn't accomplished, she would have made sure of, one way or another.

"When the mule barn caught fire I thought it was an accident," she went on. "Baron was always a little careless with his lantern. But then the veves showed up in the house, and the other things started to happen-the axles sawn, and the harnesses rubbed with pepper again and again, and I knew someone else was doing it. But I never thought it was Michie Robert."

Her round, powerful hands toyed with a frayed place in the blanket, her dark beautiful eyes downcast. "I thought I'd best stay quiet and wait. I wanted to kill Michie Fourchet and I knew when I did I'd have to run, and I couldn't do that carrying a child. I'd already got rid of the baby Reuben put in me, a few years ago... And then the sheds burned. And so many people hurt, and those poor babies killed, and it was as if I woke up after a bad, bad dream. Maybe what you said to me, about how a man will burn down a house just to cook eggs, made me think. And I understood I just couldn't do it. After that, all I wanted was to be away."

"And that's when you offered to help Quashie and Jeanette escape, if they'd take you with them?"

She nodded. "I was scared. I can't tell you how scared I was. I wouldn't have done it, if I'd known someone would come along after me, masking his footsteps in my own."

"Wouldn't you?"

Their eyes locked. For a moment it seemed to January that a man's body lay between them, a man who she knew was likely to drink his master's liquor, if he couldn't get his own.

It was her gaze that fell.

She said, very softly, "I don't know. That's the honest truth, Ben. I don't know. I know for five years I got by on hearing those little notes Hector would send me by False River Jones. I know I have them memorized, every word, about what Daniel and Adam looked like, and what they loved, and all the things they did in those five years. I have a hole in my heart a thousand miles deep that it doesn't feel like anything is ever going to fill. And that's all I know."

When January woke-with a splitting headache-Kiki was gone.

"She said you'd know where to catch her up," said Monsieur Conrad's butler, who knocked while January was still lying in his borrowed bed wondering where the woman had managed to secrete a bottle of opium on her person. "She said you'd talked about it last night." He regarded January doubtfully, as if rethinking the whole tale of freedom papers and matrimony, and January put a hand to his head and said, "Of course we did. I have such a headache this morning I can't rightly think."

The butler smiled. He was young and businesslike and had the air of a man who ran the entire household with neat efficiency. Like Esteban, not imaginative, but greatly desirous to have all books balance at day's end. "I understand that. Your wife said you was one of the last ones off the boat, and those blisters look like you was burned bad. Why don't you rest here for another day?

She said she'd stay with your brother in town til you came."

January was very tempted to avail himself of the offer, for he ached all over and the lassitude of shock pressed on him, physically and mentally. If Shaw had survived-and January prayed that he had, and not simply because Shaw could vouch for his identity-the policeman could keep Duffy and his posses at bay. If he hadn't, if he'd been badly hurt, January was still a fugitive. In any case it would take weeks for the garbled tales of slave revolt, house-burning, poisoning, and kidnapping to sort themselves out, if they ever did.

It was best, he thought, that he exit the whole situation through the first door that opened, and not ask questions that would cause delay.

Though frantically busy with his own harvest and boiling, Monsieur Conrad lent January money to take a boat south that afternoon, as, he said, he had lent money to Kiki. The river's rise brought several boats a day past La Cheniere. The butler recalled that Kiki had taken the Achtafayala.

January was willing to bet she wouldn't be aboard it when it docked in New Orleans.

When the Boonslick passed Lescelles plantation there was a flag out on the landing, and Hannibal, Esteban, les deux Mesdames Fourchet, and the children boarded. January concealed himself in the stern section of the deck where the poorer free colored and the slaves were relegated, and it was there that, much later, Hannibal sought him out.

"All I can say is, for a man raised by an opium addict, Michie Robert has only the dimmest possible idea of how much Patna Naptime the really hardened system can absorb with impunity," said the fiddler, perching like a rather worse-for-wear grasshopper on the top of a hogshead of nails. "They dosed me with enough so that I didn't really feel up to much derring-do~not that I'm much in the derring-do line to begin with-but I had plenty of leisure to chip off the business edge of every gun-flint in their boxes there, and dump most of my ration of water into the powder. As I observed before, Solus pro virili parte ago: I can only do the best I can."

"And what you did saved all our lives," said January. "I don't think Shaw and Quashie would ever have gotten on board if the crew had been fully armed. How did you happen to end up as a guest at Refuge anyway?"

"Silly bastard came out onto the gallery as the Heroine went past. There aren't even any trees in front of the house nowadays, just cane. I don't suppose it would have mattered if it wasn't me on board, or if I hadn't seen him board the Belle Dame that morning bound in exactly the opposite direction. That green coat of his stood out a mile. We stopped at Daubray to pick up a letter, and I disembarked and walked up the river road. I hid my luggage in the cane-they must have found it after Jules Ney caught me behind the kitchen that evening."

The fiddler unfastened the clasps of his violin case for the fifth or sixth time, peeking inside as if to reassure himself that the instrument was safe and undamaged; touching the varnished wood as a lover would have touched his lady's cheek. He looked desperately thin but surprisingly well, despite singed hair and an angry burn on his forehead, earned when he'd dragged young Fantine Fourchet out of the inferno of smoke and flame that had been Mon Triomphe.

January could see the charred ruin of the house as they passed it, veiled in the smoke-clogged white mists that still blurred the river. Through the trees his eye picked out the pale tumbledown planks of the slaves' graveyard, the broken crockery and bottles around the graves slowly sinking into the earth.

Mon Triomphe.

Simon Fourchet's pyre, consumed like a barbarian prince with all he owned.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

"Papa Ney was all for scuppering me on the spot, but Robert argued that as I'd written to my fictitious cousins on New River-thank God!-if my body wasn't found among the victims of this slave revolt there'd be a search. After romancing his father's wife for weeks-unsuccessfully, as it turned out-Robert brought her to her father's old house with a note swearing he'd kill himself for love of her if she didn't see him..."

"And Marie-Noel fell for it?"

Hannibal gestured forgivingly. "She's only sixteen. In any case he forced her to drink paregoric that night, and she was still logy from it the next morning, not that any woman's going to endanger the life of her unborn child when a man has a pistol to her side. After Robert forced her and Esteban to tell the slaves they were being sold, and to cooperate, Ney and his father drugged everyone in the house-as you guessed-then put it to the torch. They didn't tie anyone, because we were all supposed to have been driven into the house before it was fired by rebelling slaves. God only knows what possessed me to rescue the children. I quite agree with Robert that murdering the pair of them-and their mother-was not only necessary to his scheme but intensely gratifying as well."

And from the upper deck, Jean-Luc's voice called shrilly, "You give that here! That's mine! It's MINE! " followed by strident and uncomforted tears. Madame Helene remained in the women's cabin, prostrate with shock at what she had undergone.

She recovered sufficiently to go down to the ship wharves the following day, however, in company with January, Hannibal, a slightly singed and bruised Lieutenant Shaw, Madame Fourchet, and a trio of stout, blue-clothed City Guards, and intercept her husband as Robert was boarding the steam packet Anne Louise. January went with Shaw and his minions along the crowded levee, while Hannibal and the women waited in the market arcade, at the same little table by the coffee-stand where January had so often sat with Rose. It was unlikely, Shaw said, that Robert Fourchet would recognize a tall, well-dressed gentleman of color as one of his father's field hands.

But January would certainly recognize him.

The sailing-ship wharves lay downstream of the French town, the levee jammed at this time of the year with the world's commerce. Hogsheads of sugar, pipes of wine, bales of cotton; voices clamoring in every language God distributed at Babel: whores and Yankee sailors and Greek oyster-fishers and market women selling bandannas. Clothed in his high beaver hat and new black nip-waisted coat, January strolled toward the Anne Louise and scanned the faces, looking not only for Robert, but for Kiki.

January was still not entirely certain what he felt about Kiki. She had murdered an innocent man, and had calculatedly and coldly murdered a guilty one, not to free herself from him, but out of pure revenge. If you cut us, do we not bleed? Shylock had asked of men who, later in the play, had put their boots on his neck and made him eat filth. Having only sipped the cup Kiki had drunk of all her life, January understood exactly why she had done what she had done.

But he understood too that pain and fear are no pardon for murder. On the whole he was glad that Kiki had drugged him-in his exhaustion it had not taken much-and made her escape. He was fortunate, he supposed, that she hadn't killed him as he slept. She was quite capable of it. If he saw her on the wharf he knew he must-and would-raise a hue and cry.

But he did not. He did, however, see Robert Fourchet, decorously clothed in mourning black, hastening along the levee toward the Anne Louise, with a new valet carrying his valise in his wake. January raised his tall beaver hat and wiped his forehead, which was the signal, and Shaw and his myrmidons closed in.

He was close enough to hear Shaw say, "Mr Fourchet?"

There was a momentary hesitation; January thought he saw the young man's eyes dart among the crowd, pick out the blue-clad forms of the City Guard moving in on him. "I'm Robert Fourchet, yes."

"If n you'd care to come along here to the market for a minute, there's a couple ladies would like to have a word with you."

"Thank you." Marie-Noel Fourchet rose from her seat after Robert had been led away, and walked across to where January stood, unobtrusive in the curious silent way he'd practiced since early adolescence, against the brick pillars of the market. She'd put back her veils of mourning crepe to speak the few words that identified her stepson as the man who'd held her at gunpoint, forced her to drink opium, left her and her family unconscious in a burning house. In their sooty frame her triangular, homely face looked even paler and more lashless. She held out a black-gloved hand.

"M'sieu Sefton tells me you were working for my husband." She nodded back toward the table under the arcade, where Hannibal was charming Madame Helene out of the hysterics that she'd considered an appropriate accompaniment to her husband's arrest. "That you tried hard to save him."

At the table, the dark, florid woman-in crepe and jet beads and veils to her knees despite the fact that she was mourning only a father-in-law-clutched Hannibal's hand and sobbed, "We have been left destitute! Destitute!"

"Will you be all right, Madame?" asked January. Whatever the courts decided to do with January's evidence from the slaves and Madame Fourchet's account of an attempted murder, Robert's valise had contained two of Thierry's pistols, which could have come into his hands no other way. The rest, January surmised, could safely be left to Shaw.

"I think so. Robert had most of the fifty thousand dollars those men paid him for the slaves..." Marie-Noel raised her glance to January's face. "Were all of them killed?" Tears glimmered in her pale eyes.

"I think so, Madame. Some of them got into the water before the boat blew up, but not many, I don't think. And the boat was out in mid-river by then, and rolling with the current. I myself barely got to shore."

She bit her lips and crossed herself. "Those poor people," she whispered in real distress, that had nothing in it of sorrow over the loss of an investment of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. "Those poor people." A gawky, familiar figure edged its way toward them through the gaudy press of market women and keelboat thugs, stevedores and flaneurs, and January recognized Esteban, followed closely by a tubby, pleasant-faced little gentleman wearing an overly elaborate lilac-striped cravat.

The pair paused by Hannibal and Madame Helene, and Hannibal gestured toward where January and Madame Fourchet stood. January heard Esteban say, "... settlement out of court... sixty thousand dollars plus help to get the rest of the harvest in..."

Evidently, January thought, in spite of losing all their slaves, Marie-Noel-and the child she carried-were not going to starve.

"Hannibal tells me my husband agreed to pay you for your time and your pain." Madame Fourchet opened the beaded reticule at her belt, and drew out a stiff piece of pale brown paper-a draft on the Louisiana State Bank for five hundred dollars. "I'm sorry it cannot be more, for we owe you more than we can say, Esteban, and my... daughter-in-law..."-her voice stuck on the words-" and myself. But we've lost most of the crop, and it will take everything we have to keep the plantation itself. I hope you understand."

January took the paper from her black-gloved hand. "I understand, Madame." They'd probably sell the town house, he guessed. And use the proceeds, and the settlement, to buy more slaves.

And after everything that he had passed through, to save the people who'd plunged into the river, the people among whom he'd lived, nothing had changed.

Vast weariness crushed him and he wanted to tear the bank-draft up and walk away, rather than have anything further to do with the Fourchet family. Even that five hundred dollars, he understood, had come from human sweat and human blood. His mother's and his friends' and his own.

But he put it in his pocket.

"You must not think too harshly of my husband," said Madame Fourchet, in her soft, gruff voice.

"He was a man who lived with a great deal of pain in his heart. He did the best he could."

January recalled the dark face creased with rage, that yelled at him in nightmares. The sickening slap of a broom handle on his flesh and the sound of his own ribs breaking.

Screams in rainy darkness. The stink of cigar smoke. I have tried to make amends where I can.

This woman, he thought, looking down at her, had sat beside his bed all through that night, while his son sat out in the rain for the pleasure of hearing him die. "Did you love him, Madame?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, I did," and there was no mistaking the warmth in her eyes, as she drew her veils down.

She turned and walked back to her family, leaving January alone.

"So they all live happily ever after," said January a few nights later, as he walked Rose home from supper at Dominique's house. His sister's white protector was still on the family plantation, seeing to the last of the harvest, and Minou was taking advantage of the chance to entertain friends of color who would not, of course, be admitted to her house when a wealthy white gentleman was either there or expected to arrive. "Esteban with his dear friend M'sieu Molineaux, Madame with her child, Madame Helene as a poor relation among the Prideaux clan... She's apparently suing her mother-in-law for upkeep, on the grounds that they had enough money to give me five hundred dollars."

Rose laughed at that, a joyous whoop at the absurdity of humankind, and January shook his head. He had found rooms of his own that day, in what had been the gar?onni?re of a neat cottage on Rue Ursulines: slightly more than he could afford, but the woman who owned the house, a former plac?e like his mother, would allow him to use her parlor for piano lessons three days a week. "What did your mother say?"

"Nothing. She thinks I'm a fool for leaving, and points out-quite rightly-that I'll be paying twice as much for the same accommodations and no meals thrown in. I suspect she's going to rent out my old room to someone else for three times what I was paying her. She doesn't understand that what I'm paying for is freedom."

"Of course she doesn't," said Rose. They passed the lights of the Cafe du Venise, and for a moment the music of Hannibal's fiddle flowed through the illuminated doorway to infuse the mist around them. "Because of course you're no more free of her than you were before." "I may not be free," he said, "but at least I have choice. And that's something." She smiled. "With your mother, that's a great deal."

"But I'm angry, Rose." Their steps turned along Front Street, toward Rue des Victoires where her rooms were. To their right the levee spread out in the cobalt luminance of the winter night, torches blazing like golden footlights, outlining some incomprehensible spectacle on a stage. The smells of the eating-houses swirled around them-oysters frying, onions, syrup-meeting the stinks of salt and fish and tar and engine smoke from the wharves like a tidal river, and from somewhere close by a woman sang, "One cup of coffee, just five cents Make you smile the livelong day..."

"The way the people in the quarters were treated-the way I was treated-I can't forget it. I thought I'd left it behind when I was a child and I found I hadn't. I'd just buried it, deep. And now it's come up out of its grave like a dead man's haunt, and it speaks to me all the time." He shook his head, as a hobbled animal does when tormented by summer flies. "I see Quashie tied and beaten for no better reason than that he loved Jeanette. I see Kiki given in marriage to a man she hated just because Fourchet wanted Reuben to do his job well. I know there are good masters and bad masters and that the poor in the big cities are treated just the same, and yet I walk down the streets now and I see white men-strangers-and I hate them, I feel rage at them, killing rage, and this isn't a good way to feel. I know, because I saw what it did to Simon Fourchet. And I don't know what to do."

He spoke desperately, words he had not voiced to anyone, and as he spoke them he felt anger all over again at Simon Fourchet for having changed him, put this in his heart. Anger and helplessness and burning shame.

"Have you spoken of this to your confessor?" Torchlight flashed across her spectacle lenses as she turned her head, made a golden halo of the white tignon she wore. He knew that Rose was not a religious woman-a logical Deist, whose God was mathematics-but in her voice he heard her understanding of his own faith.

"He told me to pray. To pick out one white face-and one black face-from all the strangers I see, each day, and to burn a candle, and say a prayer, for those two every day. But I'm still angry. I think I may be angry for a long time."

"Are you sorry you went?" she asked. "Sorry you lived among these people? Sorry you remembered?" He said, "No."

"It's an injury," she said. "A wound. There will be a scar, and the scar will hurt-mine certainly do-but wounds do heal." Her long slim hand, cold within its glove, slipped into his.

Shortly after the New Year, January was passing a blacksmith's yard on the Rue St.-Pierre, coming home late from rehearsals with an opera company visiting from Italy, which would open in the Carnival season. The mist lay thick in the wet streets, and his head was filled with arias and duets and the precise placement of half-notes, but out of the dark he heard a man's single voice lifted in wailing, gentle song:

"They carry them down to the river, They throw them in the stream. They carry them down to the river, They throw them in the stream."

He stepped into the torchlit yard, and saw the smithy brimming over with the warmth of lamps. A small broad-shouldered man bent over an anvil, like a bee in the center of a rose of crimson light, drawing out an iron bar flat for some future project, the forge-light edging his cropped gray hair with gold. From the yard gate January added his voice to the song: 'Papa, I'm afraid I'm dying, Papa, I'm gonna die..."

Mohammed looked up, and his teeth glinted in a smile. "Ben!" He laid his hammer aside, and his hand was rough and hard as the forged iron as it clasped January's. "I'm glad to see you well." "And I you."

"It is still Ben, isn't it?" asked the smith. He'd grown a beard, which with the broken nose and the scars left by Duffy's beating altered the look of his face. "I go by the name of Moses these days. Moses LePas. M'sieu Theroux, that's the owner here, speaks of taking me on as a partner." "He couldn't get a better," said January. "Man, it's good to see you. Are any of the others in town, do you know? Are they well?"

"Just about everyone's well," the blacksmith said. "I heard from Here only last week-he and Trinette are in New York. Ajax has his own gang of stevedores on the waterfront there, and Bumper and Nero are in school. They come home and teach Hope what they've learned, to read and to figure. Marquis-you remember how bad he was burned-he's got a little farm on Cane River, and a Chickasaw wife. Agamemnon's up there, too, working in a tavern; old M'am Pennydip cooks for him and keeps house. Quashie and Jeanette are expecting a child, over in Mobile."

"And Kiki?" asked January, and the look Mohammed gave him, sidelong, told him what the blacksmith guessed.

"I've heard no word of her," he answered. "Mostly everyone else, though. Not many are here in town, of course, for fear of running into Michie Esteban, but there's some. They all ask after you, you know."

And what did they feel? January wondered. Did they feel that hideous, despairing sense that whatever they did, it would accomplish nothing? Did they feel hate every time they saw a white face, or wake in the night with memories that would be part of them forever? But it would be forever, he thought. And it was a part of them, and a part of him as well, a blood-link that joined them. At that realization some of his anger shifted, and sorrow and understanding entered to ease a little of its pain. Joy warmed him at the,thought of all those friends, as if he'd received word of a family long lost.

"Tell them I'm well," he said, smiling then. "Tell them I'm fine." He filled the blacksmith in on what he'd heard of Esteban's activities, and those of Madame Fourchet. "Not bad," he said, "for one who had to start all over again."

"No." Mohammed grinned. "No, that's a woman who'll go far. It was a good thing that you did, you know," he went on. "I always meant to tell you at the time. So many men say to Allah, ' Show me your will and I'll do it,' and then when Allah says, 'Take this staff and go save that flock of sheep from wolves,' they say, ' Show me your other will.' We weren't your sheep. You didn't know us at all. I wanted to tell you how proud your father would have been of you." January had been about to speak, to deprecate what he had done, but he found he could not. He stood with his breath indrawn, looking at the griot's face in the lamplight, unable to say a word.

Mohammed went on, "You are Jumah's son, aren't you?"

Jumah.

Up until that moment January had never recalled his father's name. It had been buried under the pain of losing him, under the terrors of being taken away from the only home he had known; under the fear of his mother being taken from him as well. But now the name came back to him, not as a new thing, but as something always there. He said, "Yes. Yes, Jumah was my father."

And something cracked inside him, like ice breaking on a river in spring. He put his hand to his mouth but could do nothing else. Only stand in the lamp light of the smithy, sudden tears running down his face.

Old scars hurting. Dried wounds opening with lifegiving blood. Old memories singing from out of his dreams.

"No," said Mohammed gently. "Here, no, it's not a thing for tears, Ben. Your father was a good man, a righteous and upstanding one. He'd have done what you did."

And January shook his head, his shoulders shuddering as he fought to steady his breath. "Why didn't he come?" he asked, when he could speak. "All those years. Bellefleur was only a few miles from town, an hour's walk at most. Why didn't he come?"

"But he did," Mohammed said. "He came every week, whenever he could get a pass and many times when he couldn't. He'd walk into town and stand across the street, or around the corner, watching you come and go sometimes, or listening while you practiced on the piano. He said you played music like the spirits all praising God together, music like the sun coming up. He'd come back all glowing with it, and whether he spoke of it or not, we knew he'd been to see his son."

"He never spoke! " The words came out of January like broken potsherds working up through the earth of a grave. "He could have stopped me on the street, he could have come around the corner.

He didn't have to let my mother keep him away. I used to sit on the gallery behind the house, waiting for him at night. And he never came."

"Ah, Ben." The smith spoke, not to the musician standing before him, with his new black coat and his music satchel, but to the child on the gallery, the child who dreamed of the tall naked man with the country marks on his face. "Ben, he would not have done that to you. 'My son is a free man,' Jumah would say to us, those days when we'd ask him the same thing. 'Ben has to learn to stand like a free man, and to look other men in the eye. He has to learn to speak like a free man, so that no one will even have to ask him to prove he's free. They'll know it. And he can't learn that from a father who's a slave.' "

January was silent for a long time. Thinking about those nights, and the stillness and peace of the country. The silence of the sunlight, lying on the cabin floor.

"What happened to him?" he asked at last. For he knew then that the griot would know.

"In time Fourchet had him moved up to Triomphe."

"Because he'd run away all the time?"

Mohammed hesitated, then shook his head. A lie, but January understood. "I think he just wanted more hands there, or maybe it was after he sold Bellefleur. I don't remember."

As if, thought January, there wasn't a lost pot or a cast horseshoe that Mohammed didn't know about the people of the quarters in thirty-three years.

"He ran away from Triomphe, and three days later they found his body in the cipriere. He'd been bit by a snake, and he died there underneath a sweet-gum tree, about a hundred feet from where Disappearing Willie had his house. By what we could tell, he'd made no effort to cut the wound, or suck the poison clean. He was just tired, and had lived enough, and so he fell asleep."

January closed his eyes, the tears still running down his face.

"There's no call to weep," said Mohammed gently again. His hard hand rubbed January's arm as if to remind him of his own bone and flesh. "It was a long time ago-nearly twenty-five years. He died a proud man, and a happy one." "He died a slave."

"He died knowing his son was a free man, and a man who could make music that the angels in Heaven would sneak away from their work to listen to. He died in the wilderness, where it was quiet and green. We all sang a ring-shout for him, and laid him to rest, there on Triomphe, for his dust to mingle with the dust of his friends. How many other men die that happy?" January nodded, and drew in his breath, remembering the burying-ground near the levee. Recalling those anonymous marker-boards, and the still silence where hundreds lay unmarked, reabsorbed into the womb of the earth. His father was buried, he realized, with Reuben and with Gilles, with those others who were little more than names-LIVINNIA and POSEY. He could say now to Olympe's children, This was your grandfather, a good and wonderful man. Maybe one day say it to a child of his own. He had seen his father's grave, and that gave him peace. "How did you know it was me?" he asked Mohammed. "I couldn't have been eight years old when I left Bellefleur. You couldn't have known me."

Mohammed almost laughed. "Ben," he said, "you're the mirror of him, his living double. I knew your name was Ben. And like you he was a music-maker, with his hands and his voice and his heart."

"Thank you," said January softly. "I didn't know all that. And I'm glad now that I can tell my sister and her children."

"That's good," said the smith, nodding. "He'd want his grandchildren to know his name." January stepped into the dense lapis midnight of the streets, and though he'd spent the evening playing Bellini's bright flamboyant airs-and those airs still resonated golden within him-as he walked he raised his voice in a wailing field-holler with all the joy in his heart. And as he passed each dark alleyway, each slaveyard or carriageway, voices answered him, as they would have out in the cane-fields, lifting in harmony, catching and twirling his notes like a dancer. The reverberance of sorrow and joy echoed around him, and followed him all the way home.