04 Sold Down the River

FIVE

There were twenty-five men in the main gang, including three drivers: Ajax, Here, and Dice. Two of the men, Ram Joe and Boaz, were out sick, Boaz with pneumonia and Ram Joe snakebit. In January's opinion at least three others working in the field should have been laid up as well, for he heard the hum of pneumonia in Lago's breathing, and Java and Dumaka both were running fevers. But the most that would happen with Fourchet was that the men were put back as trimmers, working behind the cutters to lop the cane-tops and slash off the leaves. Of the four men whose cabin he shared, three-Gosport, Quashie, and Kadar-were in the main gang as well. "Whoo, lord! " Quashie exclaimed, as they left the cabin in predawn mist and cold, and held up his hand as if shielding his eyes. "We got us a bozal here! Right off the boat, looks like! " He was the thin tall man January had seen at the ring-shout last night, holding hands with the purple calico girl. Ajax the driver and his wife Hope-she of the nine children-had kept their cabin open long into the night, people bringing in food to share after the shout, but January hadn't seen Quashie or the girl there. The young man had not returned to their own crowded dwelling until nearly dawn. "It ain't a tar baby, it's a tar daddy! " he told

"Don't matter none," replied January goodnaturedly. "I'm just thinkin' how you so yellow when you step out at night, all the roosters get up an' crow, wake up everybody in the place." He was tired, for he'd sat up long at Ajax the driver's last night, meeting as many people as he could, and afterward had walked down to the bank above the landing in the pitch-black fog, to tie a black bandanna to the arm of Michie Demosthenes the Oak, knowing he'd be too weary to do so in the morning.

And he'd been right.

Quashie contemplated him for a moment, hearing the challenge in his words. Then he said, "And ugly! " He cringed exaggeratedly as they walked along between the rows of shabby wooden cabins toward the open ground that lay between Thierry's house and the mill. "I never seen a man so ugly! Your whole family so ugly, I hear there's a law in town against more'n three of you walkin' down the street at once."

"Now, I don't know nuthin' bout your family," returned January mildly, as they grouped around the two-wheeled rice cart, set up in front of the line of plantation shops just upstream of the mill. "But you so ugly I hear you was five years old 'fore you realized your name wasn't 'Damn!'" As a matter of fact, neither man was ugly-January had heard himself described as good-looking and Quashie was handsome-but the rules of the game had to be observed. "Yeah, and your mama ugly, too," retorted Quashie, as the men and women around them laughed, holding out their bowls for Minta the cook's helper to fill. "And fat. Your mama so fat when I hump her the other day, I had to roll over two times 'fore I rolled off her." "Oh, that was you?" January raised his eyebrows in mock enlightenment. This was an old game that wasn't quite a game, and in his childhood years at school, he'd been called hulking and black and dirty, and told he looked like a field hand or a newly-arrived African by sharper-tongued opponents than Quashie. "I wondered about that. She said at first she thought she been stung in the ass by a mosquito. Spent half the night lookin' around for lemon grass to burn, keep them bugs out of her room."

They had barely ten minutes to slop down the congris from the gourd bowls, chickpeas and rice with a little sausage in it to give it heart. The men of the night shift were just leaving the mill, men January recognized a little now from one or another slipping away to Ajax's cabin last night for rice or raisin pudding. Rodney the second-gang driver, in his stylish purple coat and halfboots, counted off the day men as they filed in to take their places, like the damned passing through the glowing mouth of Hell. P?r me si va ne la citt? dolente. Dante's words echoed in January's mind.

Through me the way into the suffering city, Through me the way to eternal pain, Through me the way that runs among the lost...

"You ever cut cane, boy?" Thierry stepped up to January. His voice was soft, coming from beneath a mammoth wall of black mustache. His eyebrows were long, too, shelving out in a way that should have been comical and wasn't. His eyes were blue.

"No, sir," replied January, lowering his eyes respectfully to the overseer's boots. "Michie Georges, he grew cotton on his place. I worked the main gang there, til they put me to look out for Michie Hannibal."

"Fucking useless shit," said Thierry.

"Yes, Sir."

Past his shoulder January saw the girl Quashie had been with last night slip out the back door of Thierry's house, spring down the step, and lose herself into the women's gang. The gay purple calico, newer than the frocks of the other women, glowed in the morning dark like a flower. She avoided Quashie's eye, and the women of the gang stepped aside a little to let her pass.

"They give me some fucking useless cottonhand... Gosport!"

The tall man with the scarred arm came forward, one of January's cabin-mates, steady and pleasant. He'd been sold south two years ago from Georgia, for running away.

"Teach Cotton-Patch here how to use a knife and make sure he doesn't cut his fingers off. You use him for trimming?" The overseer turned to Ajax, who tilted back his beaver hat and nodded.

"We sure need somebody, sir."

So January had been handed a cane-knife, marked down by the overseer against his name.

"Most of the men who cuts the cane wears an old shirt and an old pair of pants on over their regular clothes, 'cause of the dirt." Wearing the same engaging smile that had gone last night with the yellow waistcoat, Harry fell into step with January as the men walked out through the darkness to the fields. The cold was brutal, numbing the fingers and the toes through the cheap heavy brogans the men wore. January could see his own breath. The whetstone slapped his thigh through his pocket, and the dripping gourd-bottle hanging from his shoulder cut into his flesh with its strap. "I brung extra for you, knowin' you'd need them."

Having seen Harry in action last night, swapping candles and the stubs of sealing wax for eggs and salt and string at the shout and later at Ajax's, January guessed the young man had ulterior motives in his offer. There'd been a man like that on Belief!eur when he was young-Django, his name had been. You accepted a gift or a favor, and you owed a favor in return. But looking around him January knew he didn't have much choice about refusing. He'd been given a shirt and trousers of coarse osnabrig cloth-new, heavy, and board-stiff-and a pair of badly fitting brogans from the plantation store, and knew they wouldn't last long with the kind of wear they'd get in the cane-fields. So he made his face look as if there weren't a Harry on every plantation up and down the river and said, "Why, thank you. That's sure good of you."

"Don't mention it," smiled Harry, and handed over a worn pair of pants, too large at the waist and cut off at the knees, and a second shirt, faded and patched. These January put on over his new things, and Gosport showed him how to hold a cane-knife-which he knew, having watched the men as a child, though he'd been far too young to wield one himself-and how to top the armload of cane-stalks the cutter would shove at him, cutting off the unripe portion with quick, flicking strokes and then slashing off the leaves.

"Cane piled on the stubble, trash piled between the rows," instructed Gosport. "Watch out for snakes. When you feel the knife start to labor on the cuts you brace it on your shoe like this, give it a couple swipes with the stone. But you be careful with that knife, understand? You got to cross a ditch, or cross the pile row, you throw your knife over first. That cane's slippery, and if you're not careful you'll see your blood."

"Gonna teach him how to tie his shoes, too?" jeered Quashie.

"He cuts his hand off, you want to carry him back?" retorted Gosport, which got a laugh, because of January's size.

They started moving along the rows: the work that would buy acceptance, the acceptance that would buy the right to ask questions.

January hated Simon Fourchet, and the hatred redoubled with every stab of the muscles of his shoulders, with every slice of the sharp cane and razor-tough leaves through the flesh of his hands, with every aching hour.

The men sang as they worked, pacing the rhythm of their strokes:

"Madame Caba, your tignon fell down,

Madame Caba, your tignon fell down,

Michie Zizi, he's a handsome man,

O, Michie Zizi, he's a handsome man..."

Or they would sing the African songs, the songs in a tongue no one remembered, the words meaningless now but the music still drawing the heart.

"Day zab, day zab, day koo-noo wi wi,

Day zab, day zab, day koo-noo wi wi..."

Buzzards circled overhead, scores of them, tiny as motes of pepper against the blue of the sky as the mists burned away. Rabbits in the cane fled the men, or sometimes fat clumsy raccoons; small green lizards darted to safety, or sat on the thin stalks of grass that the men called maiden cane and watched with wisely tilting turquoise-rimmed eyes. The cane in this field was second-growth cane and a lot of it lay badly, sprawling in all directions and growing along the ground rather than all of it standing straight. The sprawled cane wound among the standing and had to be dragged and wrestled out, stalks sometimes sixteen feet long, a mess of leaves and insects and dust. Dust and cane-juice plastered January's face and he wished Fourchet had died already and all these people, innocent as well as guilty, had been hanged for the crime before he even knew about it, so it wouldn't be his responsibility to try to save them. His shoulders hurt. His hands hurt.

Sometimes if no one else was singing, a man would break into a holler: wailing solo notes that climbed and descended a scale Bach had never heard of. Nonsense sounds, just "Yay" or "Whoa,

"but soaring like hawks with the sense and meaning of the heart. The other men would join in, as vendors in town would sometimes add their wailing to the drawn-out singsong of the berry lady or the charcoal man, catching the notes and twirling them like dancers: elemental music, like rain or wind or the heartbeat of the earth.

Mid-morning the women came out with the carts, gathering the harvested rows. They set their babies at the ends of the rows among the water bottles of the men, with one of the hogmeat gang to keep cane-rats and buzzards off them. At noon the rice cart came, put together by Kiki the cook or more probably Minta: rice and beans, greens and pone, a little pork in the greens.

When it got too dark to work safely, torches were lit and the men set to helping the women load the rest of the cane, and haul it to the mill. Carrying the piled cane up the short flight of steps to the grinders, January was able to see the setup of the mill. The grinders were set on a raised floor above a roundhouse, where the mules hauled on the sweeps that turned the machinery, the three huge toothed iron cylinders chewed the cane, the glinting new metal of one a vicious reminder of the dead man whose soul had been sung across to the other side last night. The green sap dripped and ran into the iron reservoir beneath, to be tipped from there into the first of the battery of cauldrons. La grande, it was called, and as each successive kettle was boiled down it was purified with alum and ash and emptied into the next: le flambeau, la lessive, le sirop, la batterie, every one smaller than the last, a seething inferno of heat and stink and boiling juice. Moths and roaches roared around the torches set into the walls, and the smoke pouring from the furnace beneath the cauldrons burned January's eyes, and above everything Simon Fourchet presided, a black-coated Satan bellowing at the men who hauled wood, who stirred the kettles, who dipped out the rising scum of impurities or climbed up and down those steps endlessly to feed the chopped billets of cane into the rollers.

Hell, thought January, stumbling on blistered feet, aching, his mind curiously clear. What window had the ancients looked through, to see that Hell would actually be a Louisiana sugar-mill on a November night?

On his way out to the waiting cane carts for another armful he saw Quashie again, holding the hands of the girl in the purple dress. In the firelight January saw again how pretty she was, eighteen or nineteen years old and clearly the sister of the fourth of the bachelors whose cabin he shared, a second-gang youth named Parson. She was one of the women carrying cane to the grinders and Quashie had stopped her, speaking so low that all he could hear was her name, Jeanette. Her gaze, turned up toward the young man's, was filled with a desperate pain in the face of his anger.

Thierry stepped through the mill door. Jeanette instantly dropped Quashie's hands and hastened to gather an armload of cane. More deliberately, Quashie also scooped up a long, awkward bundle of stalks and followed. Thierry did nothing til he'd passed him, then turned casually and licked out his whip in an underhand cut to the young man's calf. Quashie stumbled, dropping the cane, which rolled and flopped everywhere.

The overseer watched the slave, still silent, chewing on the corner of his mustache, while the latter picked it up, a far more difficult task when it wasn't in a pile in the cart. January noticed how careful Quashie was to make sure he got every six-foot stalk.

Thierry let Quashie get a few more steps toward the doors, then he cut him again, this time on the elbow, and with such violence that the young man couldn't keep his grip. The heavy stalks spilled down again around his feet.

For a moment Quashie stood, staring at his tormentor, his hands clenched at his sides. From the mill door Jeanette watched. Then Quashie lowered his eyes respectfully and gathered up the cane again. Blood ran down his arm.

Thierry walked past him to the mill door, took Jeanette by the elbow, and thrust her in the direction of his cottage. The girl glanced back at Quashie once, then went. Quashie didn't look after her, only continued to pick up the cane.

The last of the cane was fed into the grinder a few hours before midnight. Most of the men were released, and the night crew came on, to stoke the fires and tend the cauldrons until dawn. Walking back to the cabin, aching in every limb and shivering as the sweat dried in his filthy clothes, January felt a rush of gratitude that Gosport, who seemed to be headman of the bachelor cabin, had roasted yams and ash-pone in the embers of last night's fire so they'd be ready to eat now. The mere thought of preparing any kind of food before falling asleep was agony.

As the men walked from the mill down the long row of cabins January slipped away from them, into the cane and the darkness, and circled-cautiously, because of snakes-back toward the house. Moving through the uncut cane-rows themselves was a trick he'd mastered as a child, feeling for where the sharp, leathery leaves would give. You swam through the heavy foliage, slithered. Everyone January had seen that day except the house-servants had those little cuts on their faces and hands, from pushing through those secret ways.

The slight drift of air from the river brought him the smells of food from the big house kitchen-chicken and compotes, biscuits and potatoes and ham-and his belly clenched with hunger that had gone beyond any desire for food into the realm of nausea.

From the fields that day he'd looked back toward the big house, seeing it from the upriver side, and he'd asked at nooning about the high dark hedge. "That's old M'am Camille's garden," Harry had said. "She was Michie Fourchet's wife years ago, Michie Robert's mother. It's all growed over and weeds, though young M'am Fourchet's had Mundan diggin' it up again for her to plant herbs."

"Better herbs than the truck M'am Camille grew," had added Will, a small man-even in the second gang he would have been considered small-with the round head and neat features of Ibo ancestry. An "R" had at some time in the recent past been burned into his cheek with a poker-"R" for "runaway." "Flowers you had to wrap up with burlap on cold nights-I used to be Mundan's helper back when M'am Camille was here-pineapples that you couldn't grow 'cept under glass, and them hedges imported from Italy or Greece."

"You got to admit them oleanders are pretty," said Gosport in his mellow deep voice. "And fine apples-the only Ashmead apples in Louisiana, M'am Camille said. She set a store by them." The conversation had turned to the merits and shortcomings of fruit pies, but January had kept the information in his mind, and now in the darkness pushed and wriggled his way like a huge cat through the cane that grew close up on that side of the house.

Lights still burned in Fourchet's office, and in the corner chamber on the nearer side of the house that the women of the household used as a sewing room. The dim flush of candle glow flecked the weed-choked beds and neglected paths. Lying on his belly in the hedge's black shelter, January could just make out the intricate pattern of quatrefoil and circle formed by the curved brick walkways. A statue, indistinguishable in a garment of lichen and resurrection fern, presided over a scummed and stagnant fountain. In summer it would stink, January guessed, and be hellish with mosquitoes. Low box hedges had once outlined each minute, fussy bed, and these, too, had been suffered to run wild in neglect, except in one corner where they'd been pulled out, the pattern of the paths simplified, and beds of earth tilled, presumably to sprout herbs in spring. What had Shaw said about Camille Bassancourt? A Parisian lady who'd come to Louisiana with an aunt. After bearing five children she herself had died-six years ago?-to be replaced by a girl of fifteen or sixteen. January wondered how old Camille herself had been at the time of her marriage, and at her death.

She'd put in this garden, with its impractical Asian lilies, its hedges of Italian oleander, to look at during the eight months of the year when planters' families were required to be on their land. A work of art? January wondered. Or an act of defiance? Clearly Robert's wife Helene hadn't kept it up. Helene's French, like her gown, was very Parisian, but with a Creole intonation, speaking of education there rather than birth.

Fourchet's voice rose from the direction of the house. "God damn it, when I say I want-" Followed by a crash.

Cornwallis? January wondered, remembering the valet's cynical aloofness. The maddeningly slow-spoken Esteban? Madame Helene, whose grating voice and whiny petulance would be almost certain to set off the old man's temper in short order? The young Madame? He treats you like a servant, like a dog... You. Tu.

Belly to the ground, he crawled slowly around the whole of the hedge, peering under the dark skirts of the oleanders and turning the leaves carefully-very carefully, with one of his colored bandannas protecting his fingers-until he found what he had been almost certain he would find. In the rear corner of the garden a small brick shed had been built, clogged now with trash, old pots and wheelbarrows and broken sugar-molds. Behind it, where the shadows were most dense, twelve or fourteen branches had been stripped of their leaves, and a dozen more cut off and barked, to get the milky sap.

Last night Mohammed had spoken the name of Mambo Jeanne.

In his mind January saw the old woman again. He and Olympe used to go gathering herbs with her in the Bellefleur woods. Under her blue-and-white striped tignon, her narrow, wrinkled face had borne two small scars on each temple-most of the Congo women had them. Now that one she's a bad one, he heard her deep, surprising voice, and saw the glossy dark of spear-shaped leaves in her callused fingers. She didn't handle the leaves directly, but wrapped a rag from her collection of rags around her hands, before she'd pluck leaves or flowers or twigs from Simon Fourchet's oleander bushes.

You boil this one, boil it thick, make ob?-but you throw away the pot you make it in, and you throw away the mortar and the pestle both. You burn the rag you pick them with and you don't inhale the smoke.

Four-year-old Olympe had nodded gravely, and wrapped a rag around her own stubby little fingers to handle the sprig.

In Italy, January remembered, the pink blossoms were used to decorate the caskets of the dead. He followed the hedge back to the house's foundations, and kept to the wall under the gallery where he wouldn't be seen in the shadows. Earlier he'd heard Hannibal playing his violin in the gar?onni?re, a graceful glancing Mozart waltz that was a favorite at the balls they'd play in town. When January passed among the brick piers beneath the house now, however, he could hear Robert's voice, fretful with self-pity:

"But he will not listen. I'm sure that, as an educated man, M'sieu Sefton, you've had the same problem. Cotton can't be that different from sugar-cane. Mother made sure I had a very good education-well, as good as one can get in this country. By the time I was twelve I was giving my tutors lessons, though of course none of them would ever admit it. But all these planters will persist in their outmoded empiricism. You know how they are."

The jalousies of the French door stood open, and the light that fell through onto the oaks wavered and glittered as Robert made a gesture of resignation and despair. "They 'know sugar' or can 'feel' when the juice is ready to crystallize-like old women prophesying weather through their bones!"

Hannibal may or may not have made a sympathetic noise. There was movement in the shadows beneath one of the large water-cisterns and January froze, flattening himself back under the piers. He was on the downstream side of the house, within full view of the window of Thierry's three-room cottage, and he could imagine what the overseer would have to say about a slave out spying on his betters. Then he heard a woman's giggle, and Harry's voice: "I knew I could count on you, beautiful..."

Robert Fourchet continued with barely a pause, "When I was only ten or eleven I read journals for months and came up with a primitive form of multiple-effects evaporator of the kind that they're even now experimenting with in France. But will my father invest in such a thing?"

The window of Thierry's cottage creaked sharply, bringing January's heart to his throat. He reminded himself desperately that he had to be invisible, here under the house; that in the event of a confrontation Hannibal would defend him... Then a slim shape wriggled through, and dropped noiselessly to the deep carpet of weeds and long grass that grew thickly and patchily among the oaks. It was so dark, away from the house, that January didn't see where that shadow went, but he heard the muted crunch of feet on last year's dead leaves. The cane lay only a few yards beyond the cottage, and at this point stretched to the levee.

Harry's voice, in the dark beneath the cistern, whispered, "It's nothing, darling. Come here." And there was a woman's soft moan of delight.

"Will he even consider using a polariscope to determine concentrations of sugar in the various, stages of production?" demanded Robert pettishly. "Heaven forfend! And Esteban is just as bad. All he thinks about is getting away to town, and not from any concern about the more civilized things in life, I might add. Tell me, M'sieu Sefton, what is the point of being civilized men-of living in the nineteenth century, in the world where rationalism and scientific methods have finally begun to make inroads against the benighted clutch of outmoded traditions if no one pays the slightest attention to one's advice? My mother made sure I was exposed to the finest..." The woman beneath the cistern gasped, and whispered, "Again!" January wondered where Harry would get the energy to do anything but fall asleep.

"I suppose one has to feel sorry for him," remarked Hannibal later, when after many more minutes Robert took his leave and January slipped up the back steps to scratch quietly on the gar?onni?re door. "Or at least I did before that endless lecture on the subject of how dilute sulfuric acid makes a better detection agent for sugar than lime does. He very kindly left me books, lest I be bored."

Hannibal hefted one volume in either hand. Clothed in a linen nightshirt, long dark hair spread loose over his thin shoulders, he looked like a disreputable wood-elfin the chamber's dim light. "Thomas Brown on the philosophy of the human mind, or this roguish little romp of Saint-Simon's on the industrial system. I wonder if Madame Helene reads?" "How do you feel about Sir Walter Scott?"

Hannibal shuddered. "It may come to that, God forbid. Nulla placere diu nee vivere carmina possunt Quae scribuntur aquae potoribus. Are you all right?" "Compared to what I'll be like a week from today," January replied, surveying his cut hands and filthy clothing, "I'm Bellona's very bridegroom, disdaining fortune with my brandished steel." He flexed his hands gingerly, cursing the stiffness that he knew he'd be weeks getting rid of. "Since you're on your feet I assume the answer to my question is No: You didn't touch any of the liquor in Simon Fourchet's cabinet, did you?"

Hannibal shook his head, and padded back to the bed. "I did set little pans of it about in the storeroom under the house. I tried to set them in different areas, but of course there's no guarantee which particular rat supped which particular dish. If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked. They all died, manifestly in the same conditions attending the death of the unfortunate Gilles, of which Cornwallis treated me to the fullest possible description. Cheery fellow. After that I wasn't thirsty for some reason."

"Throw away the dishes." January started to bring up the Hitchcock chair from beside the desk, then remembered the filthy state of his clothes and sat instead on the floor near the bed. "Oleander, boiled up in water. By the look of the branches, it was done several weeks ago. Mambo Jeanne, the plantation midwife when I was a child, told me and Olympe about that one, and I ran across a number of cases when I was in France. There were two children who died of making whistles from its bark."

"So mortal that but dip a knife in it, Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare, Collected from all simples that have virtue Under the moon, can save the thing from death That is but scratched withal "

"More or less," agreed January. "And though Mambo Jeanne died years ago, according to what I've heard her son and daughter are here-the daughter's the overseer's woman. So it might behoove you to watch what you eat and drink."

"Like a Persian Emperor, ami eus meus." Hannibal opened the case that lay on the foot of his bed and unraveled his violin from its wrappings of silken scarves. "The same goes for yourself."

"One thing that can be said for living in the quarters," said January dourly. "The food may not be lavish or delicious, but a poisoner would be hard put to pick out a single man to kill."

"It's pleasant and reassuring to know there is good in all situations of life. Why would someone who wished to murder Simon Fourchet take the trouble to set fire to his sugar-mill and his mule barn? Why interfere with the harvest by making the work gang sick and putting red pepper and turpentine on the mule harness?" He experimented with the first few bars of the Largo from Vivaldi's Lute Concerto in D, then tightened a string. "Why give yourself away in advance?

Wouldn't it be safer to simply dose the man's blue ruin and look surprised?"

"It would," agreed January. "Hence my curiosity about what may actually be going on. It isn't an organized rebellion, I'm almost sure of that. I think I'd have felt it, at the shout last night.

Everyone in the quarters is frightened, the way they look at each other, the way the men in the fields speak."

"Could they be lying? Or just not in on it?"

"I don't think so." January recalled what Rose had said, about not knowing the unspoken rules, and thought about who'd spoken to him in the fields, and at the shout. The men and women with the position in the quarters to have led a rebellion had been as genuinely perplexed and afraid as anyone. No one had been wary of a newcomer.

Not rebellion, he thought, at least not on a large scale. Something else that looked like it.

But it was that resemblance that would be fatal to the innocent, if the true culprit were not found.

"Have you had a chance to speak to Madame Fourchet?"

"Only briefly. Madame Helene, however, has been in here most of the day, keeping me apprised of her new mother-in-law's perfidious and high-handed alterations in household routine... and I suppose she has a point. When she and Robert left for France in March, Helene was very much the woman of the house, both here and in the town house during the winter season. Now, upon stepping off the steamship, she is informed that she's been usurped by a schoolgirl twelve years her junior with little tact and less tolerance of Helene's sensitive nerves-and not a trace of the schoolgirl admiration which H amp;ne's beauty and sophistication apparently excited in Madame Fourchet's Daubray cousins."

Usurped of more than her position in her father-inlaw's home, thought January.

Il tu traite comme chienne...

"Did Robert know Madame Fourchet before she wed his father?"

"He must have met her, at least. Everyone around here knows everyone else."

"Find out," said January. "And learn what you can about this lawsuit between the Daubrays and Fourchet. If the intention is to damage the plantation, then it might be that..."

Nails scratched at the jalousies. January got swiftly to his feet, stiffening muscles knifing him in the side like an assassin.

It was the plump little woman in black, who had wept at the shout.

She stepped back, eyebrows rocketing tignon-ward as if she were about to demand what a field hand was doing in the big house. Then she glanced at January's face and closed her lips. Looking past him to the bed, she said, "Michie Hannibal?" in the gentle voice that told January that, like every other woman he'd ever encountered, this one had succumbed to Hannibal's courtly and vulnerable charm.

"Kiki, bellissima mia." He set aside his violin and extended his hand. January stepped out of the doorway; Kiki drew her skirts aside lest they brush his clothing, and crossed to the bed.

"I'm just closing up the kitchen now, Michie Hannibal," she said. "I wondered if there was something I could get for you before I do? You barely touched your supper."

"Thank you, no, nothing." He took her fingers in his: Hers were startlingly big and heavy, muscled like a man's. "Kiki, this is my man Benjamin."

"Pleased," she lied, and bobbed the tiniest of polite curtsies. "I've left bread and butter for you in the pantry, in case you do get hungry," she said, turning back to Hannibal with a shy smile she endeavored to hide. From her apron pocket she produced a square businesslike copper bell. "You ring this should you need anything, sir. Agamemnon and Leander, and that Cornwallis"-her sweet-toned voice had a flick of scorn to it as she spoke the Virginia valet's name-"sleep over the kitchen, and I have a little room right behind it. Any of us will hear."

" Acushla-" He kissed her hand. "My slumbers will be the sounder knowing myself so much cared for."

She passed January without glancing at him, only by the tightening of her lips registering his presence at all. January had the impression she was going to instruct the maids to give the floor of the room an extra scrub in the morning.

If Harry and his ladyfriend still reposed themselves under the cistern they'd settled, like the lovers on Donne's moss-grown bank, into silence when January descended the steps. Rather than cross the open ground that lay between the big house and the cluster of kitchen, forge, shops, and stable-illumined still by the reflected glare from the open doors of the mill-he retraced his earlier route under the gallery, around three sides of the house and along the black deadly hedge of Camille's garden, until he could attain the darkness of the stubble cane.

As he went he heard Hannibal begin to play a Vivaldi largo, the sweet sad beauty of the notes a reminder that a world existed beyond the boundaries of Mon Triomphe, beyond the chains of place and time. From the cane's edge he looked back, to the men and women of the night crew still hauling wood along the mill's wall from the closest of the three huge sheds like a trail of torchlit ants. This is not all there is, he told himself.

But as a child he had not known that.

Gosport had seen to it that a couple of yams and a pone of ash-bread had been left for him in a basket hung from the cabin's rafter, to keep it from the everpresent rats. Groping for his blankets January noted the absence of both Jeanette's brother Parson-who was in the second gang and on night duty at the mill-and Quashie. When he rose a few hours later, washed as well as he could, and crept through the raw mist of not-quite-dawn to change the bandanna on the branch from black to white, neither had yet returned.

And the evening and the morning were the first day.

In the iron-cold dark of predawn, the men heard Thierry cursing before they were halfway down the quarters' street. Without a word exchanged among them they passed by the rice cart and went straight on. Even January could tell that someone was going to bleed.

Thierry stood on the steps that led up to the lean-to back room of his house. Through the open door behind him January could see the boxes where the overseer kept the cane-knives, and a portion of the wall above. There was a lamp lit in the room, and the smoky gold light showed up a veve-a voodoo sign to summon the spirits-written on that wall. January recognized the triangles and stars and skulls of one of the evil loa, Baron Cemetery or Brigitte of the Dry Arms. Beneath the sign had been drawn a stylized tombstone surrounded by arrows. Most of the cane-knives were gone.

After his outburst Thierry was even more softspoken than usual, but standing among the bachelors in the main gang, January saw how the man was nearly trembling with rage. "You think maybe you're going to scare us, hunh?" he asked, almost pleasantly, voice smooth as a razor's blade. "Think you'll make things easier for yourselves? Well, let me tell you, before I'm done you're the ones gonna be scared."

He snaked the whip out along the ground, cracked it savagely inches from the nearest man's feet. "You think I don't know who's behind this? Ajax, Here, you take that Quashie and you lock him in the jail-"

"I didn't do nuthin'! " Quashie fell back a pace as the two drivers handed off the torches they held to others, and stepped up to flank him. "I went right straight back to the cabin when I was done workin'! Ben, Gosport, Kadar, you seen me!"

"I did, sir," put in Gosport, who had probably been unconscious before his head hit his corn-shuck pillow and hadn't stirred until January's return from the oak on the levee. "We was all of us there."

"You lie to me, boy, and you'll get a couple of your friend's licks. That what you want?" The whip cracked the air so close to Gosport's chest it stirred his shirt, though the man-eyes respectfully downcast-didn't flinch. And to Quashie, "Now where'd you dump those knives, my friend?"

"I didn't touch 'em! I didn't-"

"Seems to me you're in trouble enough without lying, son."

"I didn't touch 'em! " yelled Quashie again, as Ajax and Here took him by either arm. "You think if I was in your house and you sleepin'..." His voice faltered and for a moment his eyes met the white man's, as if he were not a slave, as if the man were not the whip in his master's hand. Thierry regarded him for a moment with a certain amount of surprise, as if a lump of his own excrement had spoken to him. "Maybe somebody you know had somethin' to do with it?" he asked pleasantly. And then, in a voice like an ax in wood, " Jeanette! "

She appeared in the lamplit golden doorway, hair over her shoulders in a cloud like sheep's wool. He hadn't given her time to dress and she was barely breathing with shame as she buttoned her bright calico frock. It was one thing, thought January, for all your friends and all your family and everyone you grew up with to know you shared the overseer's bed, and another to be called publicly to the door of his house at dawn. "Yes, Sir?" It was the first time January had heard her voice and in it he heard old Mambo Jeanne's, like woodsmoke and honey.

"You and this boy here been up to something?" Behind the softness there was an edge of terrible danger in Thierry's voice. "You maybe let him in my house while I was asleep, and the two of you threw them cane-knives in the river?"

Quashie's face was like stone. "No, sir," the girl said.

"I slept real hard last night. You hear anyone coming or going in the night?"

Her jaw set and January remembered how the window had creaked open last night, and the light swift scrunch of feet in the oak leaves. He glanced beside him at Parson, Jeanette's brother. Saw the thin young face set expressionless, giving the Man neither shame nor fear.

"No, Sir. I slept sound, too, sir."

He said, "Slut," and turned to glance at Parson. "Your sister's a whore, Parson."

"Yes, Sir."

Thierry waved impatiently at Quashie, standing between the two drivers. "Get him out of here.

There's ten knives left," he went on, as the young man was led away toward the small brick jailhouse, twisting against their grip to look back at Jeanette. "And if those fifteen that's missing ain't found I'll have the rest of you out chewing that cane down with your teeth."

Eight men were given torches and detailed to search for the knives. Most of the search concentrated on the riverbank, the levee, and the narrow channel that lay between the bank and Catbird Island. Doing the best he could to look as if he were searching for cane-knives, January checked in the grass and weeds around the overseer's cottage itself.

It was built in the old Creole fashion, river mud and moss between studs, the New World version of the half-timber houses of England and France. Two rooms opened onto a gallery that faced the river, with the narrow lean-to built all across the back, the whole of it lying some twenty yards downstream of the big house. Under the window that he'd seen open last night, January found scuff marks in the weeds. There were more a little farther off where the long grass gave way to the mats of oak leaves between the cottage and the cane-fields. He checked in the cane-field itself, as well as he could between the close-growing rows, and found, as he'd expected, various sorts of scuffs and partial prints, but no convenient outline such as invariably presented itself to the Deerslayer when culprits needed to be identified or evildoers trailed across several hundred miles of wilderness. By the unsteady glare of his pine-knot it wasn't easy to tell, and in any case that stretch of cane was a logical pathway from the quarters to the river, and the whole unfree population of Mon Triomphe had probably trodden it during the past week.

"God curse you, man! " Fourchet's roar sliced the chilly gray gloom from the other side of the house. "I pay you to keep those niggers in line and if you can't do it I'll find someone who can!"

Thierry's reply, if any, was inaudible, but Esteban's voice said, "Father-uh-now isn't-isn't the time-"

"Don't you tell me when I can speak and when I can't, you bastard weasel! I wish to God those niggers had killed you instead of your mother..."

"Michie Fourchet!" a child's shrill voice interposed. Looking around the corner of the house January saw Bumper, Ajax's eleven-year-old son, running toward them through the weeds. The boy was accompanied as always by his seven-year-old brother Nero, a chubby silent shadow.

"Michie Fourchet, sir, they found the knives! "

January unobtrusively followed the little group-Fourchet, Thierry, Esteban, and the boys-to the plantation blacksmith shop, unobtrusively because he was joined by most of the other men who'd been ordered to search. By the time they reached the low building that stood at the end of the row of plantation shops, there was a sizable gaggle of withesses. The cane-knives had been thrust into the forge, coals piled in, and the bellows plied to heat the fire red-hot. The wooden handles had been reduced to crumbling charcoal.

"By God I'll string them up for this! " Fourchet's flushed face looked almost black in the rose-colored glare of the furnace. "The man who did this is going to suffer, and see his family suffer as well, and that I swear to you..."

He swung around, his eye snagging January among the other men at the smithy door. For a moment January feared the planter was so furious he'd start berating him for not doing his job, so he cried in his most gombo French, "My Lordy, could one man carry all them knives in one trip without cuttin' himself? I couldn't hardly manage one and I'm all cut to bits." The reminder of who he was and who he was supposed to be caught Fourchet up and made him close his mouth again, and Mohammed, who'd stepped back from the forge to make way for the white men, said, "He wrapped 'em in an old blanket. Look." He held up a ragged piece of cloth that had been thrown in the corner. Thierry snatched it from his hands, then threw it down in disgust. It was one of his own.

Stepping close to the forge again, Mohammed remarked, "He sure wasn't a blacksmith, I'll say that. He's lucky he didn't kill the fire, piling coal on like that every which way." "Can they be fixed?" Fourchet's voice was quiet now, anger eased as quickly as it had flared. Turning to the door of the smithy, where half a dozen men and women had joined the original witnesses, he yelled, "Out of here! If the lot of you don't have enough to do...!" They scattered. January remained.

Mohammed tonged a blade from the cooling heap that had been carried to the table near the door. Laying the metal over the anvil he gave it a smart rap with one of the smaller hammers: The sharp edge fractured like flint.

"Now, wait a minute, you gonna start breakin' these, too-"

"He's testing the temper, you imbecile," snapped Fourchet at the protesting overseer. "That one was ruined before he touched it."

"I'll check and fix as many as I can, sir." Mohammed turned the blade doubtfully back and forth under the weak yellow glow of the smithy lamp. "We'll need handles for all of 'em, though." January caught Fourchet's eye and the planter said, "Ben, you're no good in the field, we'll leave you here for that. I'll send Random over with wood and a knife and he'll show you what to do. Thierry, get the rest of the men started with whatever knives are left. The others can haul wood til we have those ready to go." He jerked his head back toward the long sheds of cordwood, looming in the dawn gloom. "You men who made the search, get yourself some food if you haven't. "Boy-" This was to Bumper. "You go to the kitchen and tell Kiki to start cooking up some glue. Get Ti-Jeanne to give you rags to wrap the handles. And put out the flag on the landing. Esteban, go to town and get fifteen knives. We'll make do til you get back. Understand?" "Yes, Father."

"And I mean you get back today. No lollygagging in town, or stopping for a cup of coffee with your-"

"I'll be back today, Father." Esteban's jaw muscles jumped in the firelight and he spoke the words between his teeth without meeting his father's eye. "See you are."

Though the warm radiance of the forge still colored his face January saw how pale the old planter had turned, once the flush of anger ebbed. Pale and a little shrunken. His hand trembled as it rested on the brick sill of the forge and it remained there, almost as if supporting him, for some moments.

Then Fourchet turned, and walked into the misty white of dawn.

"So who is this hoodoo?" January measured the length of the charred and crumbling handle of one of the damaged knives against a billet of the wood that Random, the plantation carpenter, had brought from his shop, and settled himself on a bench just inside the smithy door to shape it.

After a few minutes' wary observation, Random apparently concluded that January was competent to wield tools. He went back to his shop to cut more lengths for the handles. "You spoke of a hoodoo at the dark of the moon. What's going on here?"

"Don't think we're not nearly crazy tryin' to figure that out for ourselves." Mohammed blew out his breath in a sigh. Outside, a driver cursed at one of the wood-haulers, whose path from sheds to the mill doors ran along the wall of the mill just opposite the smithy's entrance. "It's somebody crazy. It's somebody who don't care what happens to him, it's got to be. Not care what happens to him, not care what happens to anyone else. Which makes me think it's somebody not on the place."

"Who, 'not on the place'?" January marked where the rivets would affix the handle to the shank, and carried the wood to the drill bench. "How is that?"

"You don't think with the hoodoo, and them tools broken-you don't think with what happened to Michie Fourchet's first wife and their child-they wouldn't come after everyone on the place if he was to die?" The blacksmith shook his head, and then grinned a little, as if against his own will.

"The sorry thing is, you could go up and down this river and ask every solitary person you meet, white or black, if they'd like to murder Simon Fourchet and I bet the answer you'd get is 'yes.'

You ever worked a drill? Just like that, yes.

"Michie Fourchet is on bad terms with nearly everyone in the parish," the blacksmith went on.

"It's nearly come to shooting with Rankin, that cracker farmer lives over toward New River.

Michie Fourchet killed Judge Rauche's eldest son in a duel not two years ago, in an argument over the location of the bar that silted up near the old landing, of all the boneheaded things. That trader that comes by here, False River Jones, Fourchet chained him in the jail here last September, and threatened to horsewhip him if he ever saw him on his land again-though every planter on the river's threatened to horsewhip Jones one time or another."

While he spoke the smith carried each blackened steel to the anvil and struck it lightly, testingly, with one of the smaller hammers, then held it to the milky daylight that trickled in now through the smithy doors.

"And if every slave with a killing grievance against his master did as he wished, after that master had sold him off down the river, or beat him for what he didn't do, or sold away his wife or his child..." His jaw stiffened with old wounds, old memories, and he shook his head.

"But that slave would know, wouldn't he," said January, pausing in his stroke at the old-fashioned bow-drill, "that coming back to get revenge on the man that sold him, would mean hurting every other person on the place."

"That's why I say," said Mohammed, "whoever's doin' this is crazy."

"And are there any?" asked January. "That he sold off, who might come back? That had their families sold?"

Mohammed thought about it, tapping and striking, testing the metal, shaking his head with a look of pain-as he himself did, thought January, when he'd enter a home and find that the children were suffered to bang on and mistreat the piano, until its hammers were broken and its keys out of tune.

"Well, ten years back he sold off Zuzu, that was Lisbon's wife, and their children." The smith fished, casually and accurately, back into his griot's memory for details like the verses of a song.

"There was some to-do over that, but they're only down on Voussaire plantation, and Lisbon sees them when he can. Michie Fourchet sold off Tabby, that was Yellow Austin's wife, about a year ago, to a guest that came through, a broker from New Orleans who took a fancy to her."

As St.-Denis Janvier did, thought January, to my mother. "That man's gonna buy your mama." He still remembered hearing the other children whispering, around the cabin door that night. Gonna buy your mama, and sell you off in New Orleans.

He tried to remember if his father had been there then, and couldn't. "He take her children as well?" Mohammed shook his head. "They're still here-Tanisha and Marbro; that's Marbro." He nodded toward the first of the woodsheds, where the hogmeat gang was picking up chips and bark. "The little one there playin' with that piece of cane." As January watched, an older child showed the boy-who looked about three-how to blow pebbles through the slender stalk; Bumper came up and hustled them back to their duties. Already Ajax's son seemed to have grasped the concept of how much work had to be done. He seemed also to have learned from Ajax how to go about it with a laugh.

"M'am Fourchet's taken Tanisha into the house, teach her to sew like her mama," Mohammed added thoughtfully. "They do set a store on the light-skinned ones. I think the dark frightens them, dark like you, and dark like me. But Yellow Austin, he moved in with his sister Emerald and her husband, and they do well, and besides"-he rested the hammer gently on the anvil's horn"the night the mill burned, Austin was working out in the cipriere, and I've talked to three men who was standing beside him when Bumper came running with news of the fire."

January brought the drilled handle back, and worked the bellows while Mohammed heated rivets.

From the forge door the damage to the mill didn't appear to be much. Smoke-blackening in areas under the eaves of the steeply slanted roof, and around the small windows high in the walls.

Fortunate, he thought, that the fire had been checked early, for along this side of the mill was piled all the scrap lumber and broken packing boxes cleared out from the carpenter's and cooper's shops, mixed in with worn-out baskets and shards of oil jars or damaged clay cones such as the sugar was cured in. Hashed in with all that was an almost unbelievable quantity of cane-trash: leaves, cut ends, bits of maiden cane, weeds, dirt.

He frowned, and with the air of a man speaking a sudden revelation asked, "Well, couldn't youcouldn't you figure out who's doing this by asking, I mean, who was where when the mill burned?

You say Austin was with these three other men, I guess in the second gang? Since Austin's in the second gang? So if the second gang was out in the cipriere..."

"You do got a head on your shoulders," said Mohammed, and January looked flustered, as if he'd never been told this in his life.

"Aw, my mama always said I was the dumb one."

"Well, maybe your mama wasn't payin' attention." The smith's eyes twinkled. "You don't do bad on a drill. You have the rhythm of it, like music." He tonged a rivet into place and upset it with a few neat hammer-taps, so that it held the handle tight. "I tell you this," he added, picking up another blade and cutting the old rivets free, "I've been asking, and I've tried to get as many people as I could trust to ask, and it's like trying to catch fish in your hands. It was near dark, and foggy, and yes, the second gang was in the cipriere cutting wood, two miles from the mill when the fire broke out. But I think, who can watch who in the dark and the fog?"

His powerful hands flipped the next handle's wood over, and with a nail-gouge marked it for the rivet holes; his dark eyes turned somberly inward, seeing what only he could see. "And every time Gosport-who is a good man, and can be trustedsays to me, 'At the time the fire broke out I was with Samson and Balaam, and I saw Dumaka and Laertes and Boaz together, and Dumaka tells me he spoke to Lando only a few moments before,' I think: Gosport could be lying. He's only been on this place two years. What do I know of him before then? Dumaka could be lying, or mistaken. I think I know, and then it turns out that I don't."

Random returned, and started shaping the handles as they were marked and drilled. Of the fifteen blades that had been thrust into the forge; five were completely unfit for use and ten were questionable. The day was now bright outside, the mist gone, the breeze from the river fresh and chill. Fewer hands passed the doors hauling wood, as other tasks became possible, and from the direction of the fields January could hear the men singing, the women's voices answering them as they went out with the carts. Lisbon-one of the steadiest and oldest men of the second gang-called out, "Giselle, you holdin' up the line, what you doin' there?"

"What about the veves?" January asked. "First in the mill, and now in Michie Thierry's house, and other places, you said."

Mohammed's glance cut sharply to him, but Random said, "The signs turned up all over. On the brick piers underneath the house, and in the mule barn, and in the house, too. When Michie Robert came back from Paris, first thing he did was have the big house searched, and all the barns. They found hoodoo marks on the backs of armoires, and behind the curtains."

"Same as the one in Michie Thierry's house?"

"Exactly the same. The coffin and arrows, and all those triangles and the skull."

January was silent for a time, body swaying with the rhythm of the drill. "I think I'm getting the hang of this," he said. "That bit stayed in the wood and didn't go after my fingers, that time."

And Random laughed.

"Funny thing about those veves, though," said Mohammed. "Here, Ben." He threw him a piece of red chalk. "You go make an X on that wall there. Now look." He took the chalk himself and did exactly as he'd told January to do, demonstrating to Random what January already knew-that, particularly when he's writing in a hurry, a man will mark a wall not much above nor much below the level of his own eyes. "Now, I don't know how far off the floor those marks in Michie Thierry's cottage are," the smith said, returning to his forge. "But I saw the ones they found in the butler's pantry, and in Michie Fourchet's office, and they were maybe as high as my eyes, maybe a little above. Whoever's makin' these marks-" He gestured with a damaged knife. "It wasn't Quashie. He's too tall."

Over the course of the next two hours, during which Ti-George the scullery boy appeared with a stinking pot of isinglass, mastic, and turpentine glue to wrap the knife handles-Kiki apparently disdaining the thought of bringing it to field hands herself-January pieced together a rough chronology of the hoodoo's depredations on Mon Triomphe. As Fourchet had said, the first sign of trouble on the plantation had been the fire in the sugar-mill, which had broken out on the evening of the second of November All Souls' night-shortly after darkness fell. It was difficult to get a definite idea of where anyone was when Reuben had first seen the blaze in the mill, but the drivers in each gang were definitely accounted for. The main-gang men leading the mules were accounted for. Little groups-unless they were all lying together, as Gosport had lied for Quashie that very morning-accounted for one another.

Of the main gang, a man named Pancho had definitely been missing ("He has a broad-wife over at Lescelles, though," pointed out Random, "he was gone most of the day."). Harry had definitely been missing ("Well, Harry!"). No one specifically remembered seeing Quashie, and no one remembered seeing a man named Taswell, who was as inoffensive as a milk-cow and occupied primarily with his wife and children. The second gang was more difficult to pin down, owing to the more diffuse nature of their work, but everyone had a general idea of having seen everyone else in the gang too recently before the fire started for anyone to have run nearly two miles to the mill and back.

If everyone was telling the truth.

"Jasper and Scipio were out with the main gang," provided Random, speaking of his fellow artisans, the plantation cooper and potter. "Besides, they're both married, they have children... They had no call to do such a thing."

Didn't they? thought January. What might be a catastrophe to one man, a hammer-blow to his pride, might to another be simply the way of the world. The custom of the country. On the other side of the low rise of the levee a whistle shrilled. The black smokestacks of the steamboat Vermillion could be seen past the big house and the oak trees, bound south from St. Louis and pulling out of the big current at the sign of the white flag on the wharf. January wondered whether one of the strikers or the firemen would report to Shaw that that morning, Sunday, the bandanna on the tree branch was white. Like that old Greek fella.

"I tried to find out some about the house-servants." Mohammed wrapped a strip of rawhide, glued on one side, carefully and tightly around one of the new handles, set it aside on the table outside the smithy door. "You'd have thought I was Benedict Arnold out trying to sell the country to the British. Catch Michie Cornwallis talking to a yard-man: hmph!" He grinned. "You need to have a try at Leander," suggested Random, returning the blacksmith's grin, "now he's back from Paris-That's Michie Robert's man," he explained to January. "My lord, that man gossips! You want to know the colors of M'am Helene's stockings, that's the man to ask." "Leander wasn't here at the time of the fire in the mill," said Mohammed. "Nor when the breakfast pots were poisoned."

"Couldn't you figure out who did it by who was around the rice cart? Who fixes that? You say Jeanette's mama was a voodoo."

"So she was," agreed Mohammed. "And lord, you'd have thought Michie Fourchet was going to give birth, the way he carried on! But you've seen yourself Jeanette doesn't leave Michie Thierry's house til all the men get their day's work, and she goes straight to the women's gang. The men have already eaten by then. Minta brings it out, but she's got to help Kiki with takin' breakfast up to the big house, so most mornin's the rice cart just sits out with a board over the top of the pots. Anybody could come and stir something in." "And Kiki?..."

"Has her own reasons to want to see this hoodoo caught," said Mohammed quietly. "Gilles was her husband." "They fixed?"

Thierry's shadow blackened the smithy door.

"Fixed as I can make 'em, sir." Mohammed finished wrapping the handle he was working on and rose, drying his hands on a rag. Thierry took the first knife they'd worked on and whacked it savagely into the doorpost half a dozen times, so that January winced. But the blade held up. The overseer turned it in his hand a moment, then tossed it carelessly back among the others. "Ten was all you could save?"

"I'll show you the others, sir: edges cracked, metal split. And these won't last long, beggin' your pardon."

"Fuckin' hoodoo." Thierry tapped the handle of the most newly repaired, feeling the slight tacky give of the wrapping, then ambled into the smithy to look at the blades that were past use. "It'll be a good hour, sir, 'fore the glue sets up on those we fixed."

The overseer regarded the smith with narrowed eyes, as if, gauging how much truth was in the statement, then glanced past him at the confusion around the doors of the mill. Baron the mule-drover was leading new teams down the short slope into the roundhouse. Through the arched windows between the brick piers that held up the floor of the grinder, January made out dim comings and goings as Rodney checked the harness. Mohammed and Random had agreed that the first time the mule harness had been rubbed with red pepper and turpentine was the day of the poisoning, when the grinders broke as the poor beasts had bolted. After that the harness had been contaminated twice more-two nights after the fire in the mule barn, apparently during the night, and again on the night Gilles had died. On those same occasions other harness had been cut, and cart axles sawed.

Equipment was now guarded by Baron and his son Ulee, as their personal responsibility.

Through the low arched windows Fourchet's voice could be heard, savagely informing someone or other that those mules were a damn sight more valuable than he was, and smarter, too.

Thierry's eyes squinted up a little, and the anger in him resonated with his employer's like the drone-string on a banjo.

"Ben, you get on back to the field and tell Ajax to put you to work." Thierry tossed him the first of the knives, the one he'd struck at the doorpost with. "Stop at the mill and tell Rodney to send another nine here to pick up the knives as soon as they can be spared."

"Right away, sir." January put from his mind the seductive image of his own fist smashing into the man's dark lean face as the overseer strode away toward the path that led to the fields.

As he limped along the wood-haulers' path-cursing the poor fit of his shoes-January pieced the days together in his mind. Trying to see a pattern in them, of who could have gotten to the harness, and the mill, and the barn, and the rice cart; who could have gotten into the house and when. Who knew enough about poisons to kill the drinker of the cognac but only make the main gang sick. Where the oleander had been cooked. Where the turpentine and pepper mixed.

Off the place entirely?

How visible would a stranger have been, slipping up through the cane-fields from the old landing in the dark? But how could a stranger have known that everyone would be away and busy, that foggy afternoon at the dark of the moon?

In the blazing heat of the sugar-mill Fourchet was yelling, "Get the hell out of the way, you black fool!" at one of the men who skimmed the black foam from the boiling cane-juice in la grande.

The man leaped aside to make way for the barrel in which the foam would be settled and dried to add to cattle-feed. "You think we got all goddam day? All goddam week? Stupid bastard apes...

What in hell you want?"

He glared at January, his furious eyes blank black pits of rage, and January knew very clearly that Fourchet would think no more of striking him than he'd think before striking one of his slaves.

January waited a moment, eyes downcast, before saying, "Michie Thierry sent me to let the men from the main gang know the cane-knives are fixed, sir, and they can get back to the cuttin' if you have no more need of'em here."

"Need 'em?" bellowed Fourchet. He flung his cigar end to the ground. "We need 'em everywhere, you brainless bozal! I'll send 'em back when we've got the next run cooking properly! Fucking niggers don't know the difference between-"

"I'll tell Michie Thierry that, then, sir." January bowed. He flinched at the thought, but added,

"And if you're free just for a moment, sir, there's somethin' regardin' the knives gettin' broke."

And, ready to duck, watched Fourchet's hands and body. He saw the planter's hand tighten on the sugar-paddle, but Fourchet stopped himself, glanced around the mill with those bloodshot, bestial eyes. "Come outside. Rodney!" The dapper little driver bounded over from la lessive, which men were just filling from the second after another round of boiling and skimming. "You know how much ash and lime goes in when this mess is skimmed? Good. When I come back in every man jack here better be working or there'll be sore backs."

He shoved the paddle into Rodney's hand and stalked from the mill, January at his heels. They pushed through the women unloading cane and rounded the downstream end of the mill where the brick walls of the jail sheltered them from view of the confusion at the mill doors. Only a few yards away, the dark cane rose in a knotty wall.

"What is it?" Fourchet bit the end of another cigar as if it were personally responsible for all the woes that had beset Mon Triomphe. "What have you found?"

"First, sir, that I think you're right-I don't think it's a revolt being planned. They're giving themselves away, giving too much warning."

"Hmph," muttered Fourchet. "I told you as much." But in the slight relaxation of his shoulders January saw the portrait of the dead woman, the dead child, on the parlor wall, and thought, He was afraid for her. Afraid for Marie-Noel.

"Secondly, I don't think Quashie was the one who damaged the knives." And he related what Mohammed-and he himself-had already observed about the height of the voodoo marks on the walls. "It automatically rules out a number of people."

"It does, does it?" Anger flooded back into those bitter eyes, a rage at the world so deep it had forgotten its origins, had it ever known them. His shirt beneath his black wool coat was sweat-sodden and his grizzled hair hung in lank and dripping strings. "Then you'd better automatically rule him back in, because Robert's man Leander saw him around the front side of Thierry's cottage. After midnight, which is when those other niggers swear he was tucked up like an angel in his bed! So how about that?"

January shut his teeth hard and took two deep breaths before replying. No wonder Esteban couldn't get a sentence out of his mouth. Already after two days he'd found himself less and less willing to go anywhere near Fourchet if he didn't have to, an attitude, he knew, that wouldn't help his inquiries. "Did Leander see Quashie take the knives, then, sir?"

"You think my son lets his man stand around the gallery half the night staring into nothing? The boy's a self-conceited pup and his man is worse, but at least he knows how to keep a servant at his work."

"Then Quashie might have been there for another purpose? Waiting for someone, maybe?" Fourchet's eyes slitted. After a long time he said in a quieter voice, "I told that bitch she was too good for him. And Thierry's worth more to me than the brats that field hand would sire on her. He'll sire 'em on someone else, they all do." "Perhaps Quashie was waiting for someone else, then, sir."

Fourchet opened his mouth to snap something at him, then let his breath out, and came down off his toes exactly as a fighting cock settles back when its opponent is taken from the ring. Some of the fury receded from his face, and his mouth untwisted from a grimace to a bleak and weary line.

He looked at the cigar in his hand, then looked around for a light. January reminded himself that Fourchet didn't know he, January, carried lucifers in his pocket-and cursed himself for that impulse to appease the man by producing one. What the hell is wrong with me? But he knew the answer to that.

"God knows I've done ill enough in my life," Fourchet said. "I've tried to make amends where I can." Turning abruptly, he strode back to the mill doors, as Thierry came around the other corner, whip coiled beneath his arm. Here was behind him, his round baby face wooden, and they were clearly headed for the low brown brick box of the plantation jail; Fourchet said, "Thierry," and they stopped. "Doesn't look as though Quashie had anything to do with them knives." The overseer stared at him, then past him at January, bleak blue eyes like glass. "You don't mean you believe anything this-"

"It's none of your lookout what I believe or don't believe, or why," Fourchet snarled. "For now I don't think Quashie did it, and let it go at that. So you just give him a couple of licks for wandering around outside at night, you hear? Now I've got to get back to the mill. God knows what that imbecile Rodney's been dumping into the boiling while we've been out here wasting time in talk."

He shoved the unlit cigar into his mouth and stalked back into the mill, a rigid bristling figure:

January could hear him shouting at Esteban for not skimming la lessive quickly enough, and did he want the sugar to sour on him?

Thierry said, "Cunt fool," in his soft mild voice and slapped his whip on his boot. Then he glanced up at January. "So. With me, Cotton-Patch. Let's get that nigger triced and laced so's the both of you can get back to your work."

January hesitated, helpless and angry that, accepting his story as truth, the planter had decided to have the man whipped anyway, simply to prove to everyone that he could...

"Step along, boy. I said give me a hand, unless you want a dose of the same."

Fourchet had already vanished into the darkness of the mill. In any case January knew that no white man would countermand his overseer's orders in front of and certainly not regarding-a slave. He said, "Yes, sir," and followed Thierry and Here to the jail, hating himself and Fourchet more completely at every step.