04 Sold Down the River

EIGHT

On his return from the graveyard January slept for an hour. Quashie still lay unconscious, though Jeanette had gone. Waking on his corn-shuck pallet, January listened for a time to the young man's breathing, and by the grimy light of a half-burned kitchen candle checked the dressing he'd put on the bloody welts. Then he went to work in the mill, hauling wood and stoking the fires in the vast roaring brick furnace under the kettles.

There was no singing in the mill. During the day the brick walls picked up the endless creaks of the iron grinders, the groan of the timbers that supported and turned them, and the wet sticky crunching of the cane as it was devoured. Even in the dead-night hours, when the grinders were still, the fires beneath the kettles roared with the thick greedy panting of a vast beast, and the smoke gripped and grated at the throat. The heat was dizzying; more than once January saw Simon Fourchet stop in his cursing, his pacing, his watchful gauging of the boiling juice, and lean against one of the rough wooden pillars that held up the high roof, pressing his hand to his side. Watch and boil and skim; add lime and ash and tilt the heavy kettle to pour the rendered juice into a kettle smaller still. Rake away the wood-ash and charcoal from one door of the furnace and thrust in wood at another. Exhaustion and sweat, and stumbling out on blistered feet rubbed raw by ill-fitting shoes into the icy cold of the night to fetch more wood from the sheds, to feed the fires' greed.

By the flaring holocaust light the toothed wheels, the soot-blackened timber cage of the raised grinders seemed more than ever some Dantean vision of torment. He was an angry man, Kiki had said of the one who had been her husband. Stupid and mean. Yet the thought of those huge timbers snapping, the squeal of the mules already infuriated by the irritants rubbed into their harness...

Just how long, January wondered, would a cypress beam four inches thick have to burn, that it would snap when the mules spooked?

He paused in the chilly darkness outside the hot hellmouth of the mill, studying the timbers, and the grinders, and the now-empty roundhouse visible through its low arched windows below. The milling equipment hadn't changed much since his childhood on Bellefleur. The grinders were essentially enormous spindles, their bottoms resting in sockets in a huge trough into which the squeezed cane-juice ran down, the timbers that ran up their central axes disappearing into a wooden frame above. The two side wheels were simply mounted in the frame, but the axis of the central roller was in fact the axle of a geared wheel, rotated by another geared wheel that was in its turn powered by the mules walking in their circle in the chamber below. It was one of the outer rollers whose timber had broken, weakened by the fire, and the weight of it lurching free had cracked the axle of the central roller as well.

The timber of the surviving roller was fire-blackened, but it seemed little damaged. January raised his eyes to the walls and rafters of the mill. These bore out his earlier impression that the fire hadn't spread far or lasted very long. He could see where the bagasse and cane-trash had been shoved into joists and cracks and crannies; maybe an hour's work, he thought, and nothing so high or so awkwardly placed that a woman, or a man without particular strength or agility, couldn't have been responsible.

Danny, the second-gang driver in charge of the night crew, looked over in his direction and January returned to work, dragging his rough little wood cart the length of the mill to the first woodshed, loading it up and dragging it back, with the hot gold sullen glare of the fires showing up through the high smoke-streaked windows and reflecting on the faces of the men.

More smoke than fire, thought January. Though he knew from years of work at the clinic of the Hotel Dieu in Paris that in fact smoke and heat could kill, as surely as flame itself. He thought again about Trinette, sullen and pretty and unweeping with her baby in her arms. About Here putting his arm around her, leading her away into the woods. She was Here's wife now, he had heard them say at the wake following the shout, and, as Kiki had said, had not put so much as a broken teacup on Reuben's grave.

Where had she been, he wondered, when the mill caught fire?

Or had Reuben's death been only a stepping-stone, a way of making sure of exactly where Simon Fourchet would have to be every night for the remainder of roulaison?

Morning came and the main shift took over. "You be out in the field by the noon bell, you hear?"

In the open ground between the mill door and his cottage, Thierry counted the night-shift men and women over with his eye by torchlight: January, Okon, Balaam, Danbo, and Black Austin from the first gang, plus the second-gang kettle men and Yellow Austin who looked after the machinery. "If I have to come roust you, you're gonna wish I hadn't."

Rather than return at once to his cabin, January took a pine-knot torch and walked slowly back around the downstream side of the mill, where the path to the sheds didn't run. Here were heaped the long piles of trash and broken barrels and cracked sugar-molds, all trampled and mixed up with dirt where they'd been dragged clear of the wall during the fire. There were barely ten feet between the cane on that side and the mill wall. They must have to keep a close eye on it, he thought, when at harvest's end they burned the canetrash in the fields.

He found the broken grinder there, teeth snapped off and the iron cracked by its own falling weight. There were black stains on it, too, of what could have been a man's blood.

As he'd guessed, the timber had been sawn nearly through, and the cut place smeared with soot and lampblack to cover where the wood shone bright.

"Marie-Noel Fourchet is the great-granddaughter of Alysse Daubray, one of those fearsome Creole matriarchs whose rule terrorizes half the plantations between here and the mouth of the river, and nearly all of New Orleans society." Wrapped in a robe of quilted lettuce-green silk that appeared to have been borrowed from Robert, Hannibal set aside his violin and picked up the cup of cocoa from the bedside table. As January had approached the house he'd heard the sad sonorous strains of "Espagnole" through the shut doors of the gar?onni?re, and had seen several of the house-servants lingering close to listen. The walls were thin. Drifts of sound filtered in from outside.

Footsteps creaked by on the gallery: Agamemnon taking coffee to Esteban's room next door. Across the piazza, little Jean-Luc screamed hysterically, "That's mine! That's MINE!" and the even-littler Fantine shrieked as if she were being murdered.

"The Daubray s own forty arpents of riverfront immediately south of here," Hannibal went on, "which after the Creole custom was equally the property of Alysse's children, to wit Gauthier, Enid, Corinne, Louis the Worthy, and Hippolyte. Gauthier as eldest son married early and profitably, and his son was Raymond, only a few years younger than his uncle Hippolyte. In true Creole fashion la famille lived together beneath one roof for a number of years, which is one of the best arguments I've ever heard for primogeniture." "Napoleon has a great deal to answer for," January remarked.

"Perhaps too many of his friends asked him to provide for younger sons. Be that as it may, Gauthier's wife and Mama Alysse did not get on-apparently Gauthier's wife didn't get on with anyone-and by common consent shortly after the slave revolt here in '98, Gauthier and his bride obtained permission from the rest of the family to build another house about three-quarters of a mile upstream of the main Daubray residence, and slightly more than that distance downstream of here. They called this refuge Refuge, and evidently such was the animosity between Gauthier and the rest of the clan that Gauthier, instead of leasing family slaves to cook and clean, bought them out of his wife's money. In time they bought cane-hands from the same source of funds, and even built their own mill rather than use the family one."

"I'm not surprised." January leaned one massive shoulder against the doorjamb, looking out through the jalousies into the piazza between its enclosing wings. The new-risen sun sparked on the French doors of the dining room, and made a bright splash on Madame Fourchet's silvery dimity as she emerged to stand leaning with her elbows on the gallery rail, looking out toward the kitchen and the fields, telling over her rosary beads. "Given the Creole system of keeping land and family together and everyone living and working under one roof, I'm a little surprised there aren't more murders in such households."

Madame Helene came out of the dining room talking, and cornered her new mother-in-law against the railing: "Of course, as mistress of the house now it's up to you to discipline the servants however you see fit, but I've always found that..."

"It's worth looking into," remarked Hannibal. "In the case of the Daubrays, homicide was apparently considered on both sides. Gauthier got family permission to work about fifteen arpents as a semi-independent fief, always with the understanding that he'd come to Daubray on Christmases and Easters and pledge fealty to Mama. Son Raymond spent a lot of time in New Orleans gambling and drinking and getting into duels, and at the age of nineteen showed up at Refuge one morning with a completely unsuitable wife-according to Madame Helene she was Irish and made hats-and an infant, the girl Marie-Noel. Gauthier died a year or so later-of outrage, presumably-and Raymond spent about seven years running his fifteen arpents' worth of Refuge into the ground with unsound business practices, foolish decisions about planting, and too few slaves. I don't know anything about cane, but Robert assures me that the fields weren't replanted at all in that time, the cane just growing again and again from the same roots, which I gather isn't something that answers."

"It isn't." On the gallery, the conversation between young Madame Fourchet and Madame Helene had developed into a lively quarrel, with all the talking evidently on Madame Helene's side. In her gown of swagged bronze-gold silk and blond lace lappets, she resembled nothing so much as a gorgeously plumed pheasant pecking a half-grown partridge chick. "The cane comes up thinner and thinner each year and won't stand. It falls and grows sideways and is almost impossible to harvest, and is so thin it's barely worth grinding when you do. But digging it out and replanting takes a tremendous amount of labor. You need slaves."

Robert came out of the dining room. His wife seized him and thrust him at Marie-Noel in the hopes that he'd back up her contentions, whatever they were. January caught the words "... worthless maid must have cut off a piece of it... I distinctly ordered fourteen yards and there's barely twelve in the package! Now what am I going to do with twelve yards of pink silk?" Robert's eyes sought Marie-Noel's, and the girl quickly turned her face away. "In due time, and to no one's unbearable surprise, Raymond got himself killed in a duel," Hannibal went on. "The unsuitable Irishwoman having already been gathered to her ancestors, little Marie-Noel returned to Daubray to be raised as a poor relation-mending her cousins' ball dresses and running their errands for them and cleaning out the kitchen grates a la Cinderella for all I know. At this time the beautiful Camille was still alive, though I think she'd gone to live permanently in New Orleans by then, and in any case Marie-Noel was only six. Robert was eighteen, and went with his mother. He did not return to Mon Triomphe with any regularity until the time of his marriage seven years ago to Helene Prideaux, whose father had some sort of business dealings with the good Michie Simon, though they subsequently ceased to speak to one another. "

"So Marie-Noel Daubray would have known Robert Fourchet only as a handsome young neighbor who regarded her as a child." January thought of Robert saying Tu, of the way their gazes had crossed, and Marie-Noel's had fled.

"Well, she was a child. And still is, by any standards but Creole. In London she wouldn't even be out." Hannibal picked up his violin again, sketching the outlines of an old galliard, like an artist noodling the shape of an eyebrow or the refraction of a rose through a water glass while his mind was on other things. Is it not strange, Shakespeare had said, that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?

"But time's wheel turns. At some point it apparently occurred to our delightful host that a) legal claim might be made on the fifteen arpents' worth of Refuge through the person of its sole heiress, and b) that said sole heiress might be tired of cleaning kitchen grates and mending flounces for the daughters of Louis the Worthy."

"And he rode over and they put their heads together."

"As Cinderella would probably tell you, even a prince who only recognizes your footwear is preferable to a lifetime cleaning out grates."

On the gallery Madame Helene gesticulated angrily, the argument evidently not going her way.

Robert stood back, shaking his head in silence. If Madame Fourchet resembled a half-grown partridge chick being pecked by the opulent pheasant, then, Robert was a trim little grass-parrot, fastidious and overwhelmed.

At Daubray, thought January, the girl must have had her fill of tantrums and abuse. But even Cinderella had not been married to a furious and violent man four times her age. Madame Helene burst into noisy tears and stormed away toward the sewing parlor that faced the ruined garden.

"Of course I haven't heard the arguments for the other side, but apparently Gauthier did get a legal sequestration of the Refuge lands in writing from Alysse. Who is of course now claiming that she never signed any such document. Grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est."

How had it answered, January wondered, to wed in April, and in November to be confronted with a daughter-in-law more than ten years one's senior who had had no notice that her place as head of the household had been usurped?

Robert turned, and caught Marie-Noel's arm as she would have left. He said something to her, apparently urgent, by the bend of his body, the gesture of his free hand. She shook her head, withdrew to the length of his arm and hers, but he would not release her fingers. In the gar?onniere's other room-Esteban's room-a man's voice said passionately, "He doesn't run my life!"

Marie-Noel met her stepson's eyes, and after a long moment he let her go. She turned and hurried along the gallery and down the steps to the piazza, and hence across to the kitchen. From the sewing parlor Helene's voice cried, "You uppity slut! " and there was a woman's cry of pain.

Robert watched Marie-Noel until she disappeared into the kitchen. Then, visibly bracing himself, he walked down the gallery to see what his wife might be up to now.

When the work ended for the day, instead of seeking his mattress, January paused at the bachelors' cabin only long enough to wash, then continued along the quarters street in the clear blue wash of the winter moonlight to Harry's cabin at the far end. A couple of yellow candles burned, filling the place with the stink of tallow, and as January paused in the doorway Harry was saying to Ti-Jeanne the washerwoman, "Good. These are good." He held up to the candlelight one of the objects from the sack on the little table, a golden-brown russet apple. Going to a corner of the cabin he removed a loose board from the floor and, kneeling, felt around the space between the floor and the ground below, eventually leaning down to the full extent of his arm.

He drew up a small sack of coarse hemp-January guessed he'd had it buried under a brick beneath the house for protection. Indeed, though many planters would argue that the cabins were raised on piers, and floored with plank instead of earth, for reasons of health and cleanliness, in fact they were so built to curb the slaves' propensity for burying stolen goods under their floors.

Harry brought out a twist of paper containing salt, which he put into Ti-Jeanne's hand. "Now, if you should happen to find a couple of wore-out pillowcases that they're going to throw away anyhow, I think I could probably talk Ned into parting with one of his cat's kittens, when she gets old enough to mouse good."

There was no one named Ned on Mon Triomphe.

The nearest Ned January had heard of lived on Lescelles, the small plantation immediately upriver-his cat Ika was a mouser noted throughout the parish.

Harry knelt again to replace the sack and the board. He shared the space with his brother Bello and Bello's wife Cynthia, they and their baby daughter sleeping now behind a hanging made of thick osnabrig sheets and presumably long inured to Harry's huckstering. Other than having more chickens than anyone else in the quarters, tucked up in the African fashion in baskets dangling from the rafter-ends outside to keep them safe from rats, more pigs in the sty behind the cabin, and a half-dozen strings of bright-hued beads hung on a peg near the hearth, there was little sign of Harry's activities in the dwelling.

"M'am Fourchet, she set a store by those pillowcases," said the washerwoman worriedly, and Harry nodded with an understanding smile.

"Maybe a shirt, then? Or a couple handkerchiefs? I hear Michie Robert has a lot of fine shirts. He won't miss one. That's my sweetheart." He kissed the stoop-shouldered, gray-haired woman, and she giggled like a girl.

"You are bad." Passing January in the doorway she grinned up at him. "You watch out for that Harry, Ben, because he's as bad as they come." She sounded pleased.

When she'd gone, Harry picked up another loose board and retrieved another sack. This one contained a powder-flask, bullets, and a small box of waxed linen patches. He wrapped up the apples and handed the sack to January, except for two left on the table-presumably for Bello and Cynthia-one that he stuck in his own pocket, and another he threw to January.

"Best apples in the parish," he said, as they slipped outside and went around to the pigsty in back of the house. "M'am Camille, she had the trees brought in special, like everything else in that garden of hers. Here." He stepped over the fence and reached under the roof of the pig-house, bringing out a Kentucky long-rifle with its lock wrapped carefully in greased cloth. "Sweet as candy. Pigs love 'em."

"That what we're huntin' tonight?" asked January, fascinated. "Pig?"

"Nuthin' in the world like a good pig," replied Harry cheerfully. "And Tim Rankin's are the best."

While sugar plantations lined the river from its mouth to Baton Rouge, January was aware that most of the whites of the river parishes were, in fact, not of the planter class. Along New River, and Bayou Conway, in the Achtafayala country and on the nameless little bayous of the cipriere, lived a scattered population of small farmers, Scots-Irish or Welsh or descended of the old Acadians of Canada, crackers who raised a haphazard selection of cotton, corn, and yams and lived largely on the increase of their herds of cattle and swine. Most kept a few slaves-Aniweta, one of Harry's girlfriends, was broad-wife to a man whose master lived over on New River-but on the whole they had as little to do as possible with tillage or agriculture. They were, January had found, a curious combination of autodidactism and ignorance, squalor and pride, and he mistrusted them wholeheartedly.

"From what I hear," said January, "Tim Rankin's dogs are the best, too, and he won't take kindly to one of his hogs takin' a little walk out in the country."

"Ben... No wonder Michie Hannibal's daddy-in-law put you nursemaidin' him. You worry more than any man I ever met. You worry so much it's a wonder you don't chop your hand off cuttin' cane."

And Harry led the way off, through the cipriere. In January's childhood, when Louisiana had been Spanish land, the cipriere had stretched unbroken, mile after mile of marsh and pond and oak ridge, as far as you could walk in a day. Indian tribes, Natchez and Chickasaw and Houmas, had wandered it. Runaway slaves had established whole villages in it and had lived in peace for years, and so in places it remained. But after an hour on the winding trail, with the moon's thin dappling filtered by moss and cypress branches, January smelled the stinks of settlement, the sweetish revolting stench of hogs and the murkier pong of outhouses nobody had bothered to clean in decades, and among the oaks the milky light showed a straggly field of cotton, the stumps left in where the land had been cleared.

Beyond that squatted the usual squalid cracker dwelling of boards and bousillage, sagging on its piers and possessed of not a single glass window, though by its size it was clearly the home of the master, not a slave.

There were no barns. Crackers tended to let their stock live as untrammeled a life as they did themselves, though a kind of shed offered minimal shelter to a couple of mules. Near that, as he and Harry circled through the silent woods, January glimpsed a rough zigzag of split rails, and heard the mumbling grunts of swine.

"Once we get goin'," said Harry, producing a caneknife and chopping down a sapling which he stripped and topped with the deftness of long practice, "we gotta go fast. I'll take care of the dogs."

"You just do that." What the hell, January wondered, had he gotten himself into? But it was all a way of buying his way into the community, a way of listening...

If he didn't get himself killed for the benefit of some benighted barter of Harry's.

Had he been picked because he was a new boy and dumb enough to go along with one of Harry's schemes? Or simply because he was big enough to lug a dead hog at a run through the woods?

Harry had slipped away into the ghostly silence of the woods. A few moments later January heard the dogs, first barking, then barking and crashing through the trees on the far side of the house.

Keeping hold of the stripped pole with one hand and the sack of apples with the other, he darted from the cover of the trees, pulled open the crude gate of the hog pen, and tossed the first few apples out a couple of yards away. He poked and prodded the pigs in the pen until they were on their feet, snuffling and grunting as he fed one of them an apple. Then he retreated toward the woods again, breath coming fast, dropping apples which the pigs, with the gourmandise of their kind, trotted out to devour.

The crash of a gun in the undergrowth nearly made January jump out of his skin. A hog squealed and dropped, kicking, in the tangle of laurel and hackberry, and Harry called out in a triumphant whisper, "Got him!" Distantly, the dogs still barked.

"You could have got me!" January had been about four feet from the quarry, and having fought the British under Andrew Jackson he knew all about the accuracy of the average rifle.

"I didn't, though." Harry bent down with his caneknife and slashed the hog's throat. "Not a bad shot for moonlight."

January recognized the cane-knife as one of those he and Mohammed had repaired the previous day, and wondered how that one had been extracted from the "fixed" pile without Thierry's knowledge.

"Let's get this boy out of here. They'll be along any minute."

He was tying up the pig's feet as he spoke and sliding the pole between them. January groaned inwardly, guessing what kind of evasion procedures would follow. He was right. They set off along the path, the pig borne between them on the pole with its blood dripping copiously; crossed a small bayou and continued through the woods with the ground getting lower and marshier around their feet. In summer the night would have been alive with frogs and crickets, the air a humming torture of mosquitoes. Winter had stilled the land, and January breathed a prayer of thanks for small favors. Distantly he heard the baying of dogs in the woods-more than before, he thought.

"I swear I never met a man who worries as much as you! " Harry shook his head. "It'll just be Rankin and his brothers and the Neys. Old Jules Ney and his boys live just on the other side of Lost Bayou. They're the ones you have to watch out for, not Rankin. Watch it here." They had stepped into water again, one of the wide sodden sloughs that dotted the cipriere. The water was freezing: January could only be grateful that snakes and gators would be asleep at this season. "Are these Neys any relation to that charming gentleman who owns the Belle Dame?" "That's them." They waded among the sedges and cypress knees. Then, at the point where a dirt road passed the slough beneath a low-limbed oak, they turned on their tracks and worked their way back, emerging from the marsh at the same place they'd gone in and following the blood-trail back to the bayou, with the baying of the dogs growing louder all the time. "We'll leave our friend here in the back of Disappearing Willie's cave. It'll be safe there and it's cold enough in that cave to freeze water, nearly. The Neys are a bad bunch. If you get caught by them out without a pass, you tell them you belong to Michie Fourchet and not to a guest of his. They'll pass you along to Captain Jacinthe on the Dame if you're not careful, and you'll end up for sale in someplace you don't want to be."

"Here is where I don't want to be," said January through his teeth. "That's just what you think now."

The watercourse grew narrower and more winding and the darkness more dense as the cypresses crowded in close and the moon sank. It was, January guessed, only a few hours until first light, with the prospects of a full day in the cane-fields to come. This had better be worth it. In time they reached the oak-hummock in the midst of the waters that housed Disappearing Willie's shack. Disappearing Willie, the friendly little Ibo who had long ago lost his position of assistant gardener to M'am Camille, had, in addition to the brand on his face, more whip scars on his back than any man on Mon Triomphe. He wasn't surly or quarrelsome or disobedient or a thief. Simply, he could not be broken of the habit of running away. He'd never be gone long-two days or three days or four days. Willie had any number of hideouts in the cipriere, and seemed to consider a whipping the reasonable price to pay for a few days' liberty in the woods. "He's crazy if he thinks Fourchet isn't going to kill him one day," January remarked, as he helped Harry suspend the hog in the damp-floored hollow cut in the bank beneath the shack. Harry was right-it was icily cold there, and at this season there was little danger the meat would spoil before the entrepreneur could dispose of it. "I've seen how crazy it makes Fourchet if anyone-a slave or one of his sons or whoever-goes against him. One day Willie's going to come back from hiding out and Fourchet's going to beat him to death."

"I think he knows that," said Harry. The cave was guarded by a couple of boards propped over its low opening to keep foxes and gators out. He took a couple of tallow candles from his pocket and lit them-he had lucifer matches, not flint-his breath glittery smoke in the light. January's wet clothes clung to his body and he shivered as he worked. "I sure wouldn't do it. But I think Willie figures, So what? Where else is he going?" Harry finished tying the hog's feet to the rough beam driven from wall to wall, and regarded January in the candle-gleam. Without his habitual engaging smile his face seemed older-he was barely twenty-and tired. "What else is he going to do with his life, 'cept enjoy a couple days here and there, and put up with what it costs him? Isn't that what everybody does?"

Was it? Stepping out of the wet dampness of the cellar, January looked across the cobalt glimmer of the bayou, of black lumpy cypress knees and gray moss like chalk smears on the velvet gloom. He thought of the men who'd knocked him down in the street, slit his clothing with their big Green River knives and tore up his music, who would have happily beaten him or killed him... The white oafs in the taverns, whom he had to call "sir."

It was the price he paid to sit at the dinner table with Olympe's children and listen to his brother-in-law tell them stories about High John the Conqueror by mellow candlelight. What he paid to have coffee with Rose in the arcades of the market by the levee, or to walk across the Place d'Armes in the multicolored delight of autumn mornings when everyone was out with their market baskets in the freshness of the air.

He'd lived in Louisiana for twenty-four years, before leaving for Paris. When he thought-when he knew-that remaining in Paris in the wake of Ayasha's death would destroy him with grief, he'd known also what it would cost him, to come back to the only family he had. What had his mother paid, he wondered, for the freedom she'd bought for herself and her children? Had she loved the tall black man with the country marks on his face? Was that why she never spoke his name? Or had she had any choice?

Velvet silence. Bitter cold. The far-off smell of smoke from every mill along the river and the green musky scent of the water, only inches from the entrance of the cave. And then, suddenly, much nearer now, the baying of the dogs.

"Shit," said Harry, not much discomposed. "We better split up. I'll see you back at the quarters." "Wait a-!"

But Harry was gone.

And the clamor was far too close, now, for him to dare shout, I don't know the way back, dammit! Somebody yelled, "There he is!"