Dead water

EIGHT

It took the Reverend two whacks of the ax to open the trunk. He and the drivers didn't even bother to carry it indoors.

“Piss on it,” said the Reverend, and drove his ax-blade into the ground so he could momentarily remove the cigar from his mouth. “Fuckin' bricks.”

“Fuck me.” The driver scratched his head—not in puzzlement, but with the air of a man who has good reason to do so.

From where he watched, crouched behind a tangle of weed and hackberry under the stilts of a near-by shack and up to his insteps in rank-smelling seepage—January could see that the trunk did indeed contain bricks.

A flash of pink on the gangway behind him made the Reverend whirl, and like a panther he bounded to intercept the dainty form that tried to scurry past him. He caught her by the wrist and dragged her to the dray with such violence that her stylish hat tumbled from her head, but January had already recognized the frock, with its ruffles of blond lace and its bunches of silk roses on the sleeves.

“You been diddled, you little spunk-bait! You and that toss-pot Irish boat-driver of yours!”

“Piss on you!” retorted Miss Skippen, trying to pull her wrist from the Reverend's iron grasp. “Molloy said they'd stole money and was takin' it north! He said he knew the man from seein' him at the bank! This has got to be a trick!”

“Of course it's a trick, you brainless slut! Didn't you think of that when you come here all full of how there's two trunks of money comin' ashore? My God, of all the stupid cunnies I've had to do with, you're the stupidest! But if you think this pays me off for what you owe me . . .”

January backed slowly up the alley, keeping to the cover of the snagged-up deadfalls and the rough stands of brush. At higher water one would have needed a boat to get to the back of the Stump, but now only ten or twelve yards of knee-deep brown river separated it from the muddy shore. A broken-down gallery sagged at its rear, to which a ladder led up, its feet propped in the shallows. The single window was boarded up.

It would be best, thought January, to simply return to the Silver Moon at once, tell Mr. Tredgold that his “master” had been falsely accused and was in the town jail, and to have the boat held until the matter was regulated. He was almost certain that Weems had no intention of pressing the charge—the object of the game was clearly to delay whoever pursued Weems ashore, not to bring up a lot of questions about why Weems would have made the charge.

That would be best. The longer he, January, lingered in the filthy and anonymous precincts of Natchez-Under, the greater his chances became of being spotted and recognized by Christmas. Or of being randomly attacked for the contents of the flour-sack he still carried, with hat and jacket.

Instead of doing what would be best, however, he glanced up and down the alleyway, satisfied himself that nearly the entire population of the Stump had assembled on the front gangplank to observe the screaming-match developing between Miss Skippen and the Reverend Christmas—and waded swiftly across to the ladder and climbed.

The door at the top was locked, but the framing was so rotted, it yielded at once to a sharp blow of his shoulder. Someone in the room beyond scrambled aside in panic. January called out hoarsely, “Bobby? It's Ben.”

“Ben!” The runaway hurried to the door as January pushed it open. “You gonna come after all?” His young face shone with hope, and with delight for his new friend's change of heart.

The tiny back room contained little. A blanket, a bowl that smelled of rice and beans, a couple of bottles: whiskey and beer. The liquor colored Bobby's breath as he spoke.

“Ben, the Reverend Christmas got the beatenist scheme for gettin' me money for when I get to Canada!” Bobby caught January's hand like an eager child. “They gonna take me over the other side of the river to Feliciana Parish, where nobody know me, an' pretend to sell me! Then they helps me escape, an' we go a little farther an' they sell me again! We do that two-three times, then we splits the money fifty-fifty, an' they sends me on north!”

January walked—or rather climbed, because the angle of the floor was almost twenty degrees—over to the inner door that led to the rest of the saloon, and tried it. It was, as he'd suspected, locked.

He looked back at Bobby, infinitely weary, infinitely angry at men who'd ply a boy like this—for he was scarcely more than a boy—with liquor and lies. There were times when January truly hated white men. “You do that two-three times, then they cuts your throat, an' slits your guts so you won't blow up an' float to the surface, an' dumps you in the river. They thieves, Bobby. Thieves an' whoremasters. They out there right now, fightin' over two trunks they stole from the Imperial Hotel.”

Tears flooded the young man's eyes: tears of half-drunken grief, of fractured hope. “What you tell a lie like that for, Ben?” Bobby whispered. “They gonna get me out of here. Get me to freedom.”

A country boy, thought January. A village boy. Born on one plantation and sold to another, or to two or three—he'd probably seen no more than five hundred people, all-told, in his entire life, before coming to Natchez, and four hundred and fifty of those had been country-born slaves like himself.

Clinging to his dream of freedom.

“Don't believe them, Bobby,” he said softly. “You run now. You follow the river north. You travel at night, and you stay away from people. If you got to leave the river, you follow the stars—you know the stars that make up the Drinkin' Gourd?” He sketched the Dipper on the dirty wall with his finger. “These two stars, they point to the North Star. You follow the Drinkin' Gourd, you'll be headin' north.” He reached in his pocket—wincing, since he was almost certain he was simply handing the sum, through Bobby's agency, to the first scoundrel who happened along—and brought out thirty dollars of Hubert Granville's money.

He pressed the heavy coins into the boy's hand, closed the work-callused young fingers around it. “You got about two minutes to make up your mind,” he said, “before they come back inside.” With a corner of his sleeve he scuffed away the dusty ghost of the star-map from the wall. “Whatever you decide to do, you don't tell a soul it was me who warned you, or they come after me, too. All right?”

Bobby's lips formed the words all right without sound. Tears rolled down his cheeks—of disappointment, and of terror.

January descended the ladder, waded through the stinking tug of the Mississippi current, and back to shore.

Only the faintest wisps of smoke rose from the Silver Moon's stacks when he crossed the muddy landing to the boat. The big stern wheel was still, its upper surfaces dry under the grilling noon sun. Tremendous activity surged around the engine-room door on the bow-deck, and January could hear Molloy cursing.

“I refuse to allow you to let that man speak so in your presence!” Mrs. Tredgold's strident voice soared over the hubbub. “Let alone in mine! If there is damage to one of the boilers, I refuse to continue on this boat. . . .”

“Darling, I swear to you . . .”

Coming up the landing-stage, January could see Mr. Tredgold sweating and wringing his hands as he pleaded with his wife in the engine-room doorway.

“Every inch of the engine was checked before the voyage began! You know I would never let my family journey on an unsafe boat! Now, whoever it was who told you that one of the boilers was faulty could not possibly have known such a thing—”

“She said in her note that she was ‘walking out' with one of the engineers. But her handwriting is that of a lady.” Mrs. Tredgold thrust a piece of notepaper under her spouse's nose. Though not nearly close enough to study it, January felt almost certain that he would have recognized the hand.

“What happened?” he asked Mr. Lundy, who was leaning against one of the pilasters of the promenade arcade near-by.

The former pilot's lips tightened under his white-streaked mustache. “Some woman put a note under Mrs. Tredgold's door, claiming an assistant engineer had told her one of the boilers was faulty, and like to blow.”

All around them the anxious chatter of the deck-passengers covered their words. The Irish and Germans were trying vainly to grasp the nature of the danger, holding their children close and glancing at Tredgold as if debating whether or not to ask for their money back and take another boat, the Kaintucks speculating about how one could tell if the boilers were about to blow and trading tales of similar catastrophes: “I was comin' downstream on a raft and we was but thirty feet from the Queen of Sheba when she blew, this huge spurt of fire come flamin' out frontwise from her bow, then like the whole top of the boat ripped off with boards go sailin' up a hunnert feet in the air in shoots of flame. . . .

“Now it's true the boilers on this boat are American-made, which are likelier to split than the English, owin' to poorer-quality iron,” Lundy told January. “But if a boiler's faulty, nine times out of ten you can't tell by lookin' at it, unless it's a seam starting to give. Mostly you can't tell even by the sound of the steam, or by the shake of the engine, or the feel of the boat when she makes speed. But Mrs. Tredgold won't hear of goin' on until they been checked.” He nodded at the stout garnet-red form that nearly filled the engine-room door. “And she's standin' there until they're all checked in front of her eyes. I reckon if a woman's got her children on board I can understand her fears, and the wife of an owner will have heard more than her share about boiler explosions.”

Tredgold turned from the tugging questions of a German woman to his wife's resolute profile—Mrs. Tredgold averted her face from him and called out in a voice like a parrot's “Cissy! Cissy, you keep those children where I can see them! Don't you let them go ashore!”

“We won't be goin' nowhere till nearly supper-time, given how long it'll take 'em to get up steam again,” added Lundy in his soft, humming voice. “Mr. Roberson and his family already went back to their visit with Colonel Quitman, and Colonel Davis has gone on to more visits, and God help Tredgold now when he tries to get his deck-hands out of the saloons . . . they'll be mostly too drunk to walk. Of course Gleet's taken his whole coffle up to the Imperial Hotel to try to drum up buyers. . . .”

Lundy glanced behind him at the men still chained to the starboard promenade, and Jubal Cain walking slowly along the rail before them, scanning the landing with his chilly amber gaze. “If it wasn't a woman's hand on the note, I'd suspect Gleet planned the whole thing, to give him time to peddle his wares in town.”

“As it turns out, it's just as well, sir,” said January diffidently. “My master's in trouble in town. Some gentleman”—It would be worse than useless, he knew, to set a hue and cry against Weems until he had evidence—“gave the sheriff the idea my master was a slave-stealer, and they put us both in jail. . . .”

Lundy's eyes narrowed sharply, and January went on. “A gentleman named Mr. Christmas got me out, and claimed he was with the Underground Railway. A churchman, he was. . . .”

“Churchman, my arse,” said the former pilot. “And you had the brains not to go with him? Let me shake your hand, my friend. Levi Christmas is one of the worst scoundrels on the river. For years he'd hold camp revival meetings, and preach so well, not a soul in the tent noticed when his friends went out and stole every horse outside. Lately—since there's been talk of the Underground Railway—he's gone into slave-stealing, promising the poor souls he's going to raise money for them by the old sale-and-escape game, then killing them to keep their mouths shut after he's collected four or five thousand dollars with their help. I'm surprised he let you get away.”

January was a bit surprised, too—and a bit disappointed. He'd have enjoyed beating the tar out of Levi Christmas. It was as he'd guessed, but the confirmation raised a wave of burning rage in him.

“I didn't know that, sir,” he said when he realized how long he'd been silent, and what his expression must look like. He wished he had dragged poor young Bobby out of the Stump instead of simply giving him a choice that the boy was clearly unfit to make. He took a deep breath, trying to keep his voice from cracking. “I told him I couldn't forsake my master. He must have figured he'd need me to consent to play his game, because he pressed me, but didn't try to use force. But my master's still in jail. . . .”

“I'll take care of that.” Lundy straightened up and groped for his cane. “You stay on board here, Ben. No sense taking chances on things getting any more complicated than they are. It's that weasel Rees, I bet . . . he makes a fair-enough living off bribes, he'll end up as sheriff himself one day, and God help the town then. You don't happen to know,” he added with a sharp sidelong look up at January, “who accused your master of slave-stealing, or why?”

And though Lundy tried to cover it with a casual tone, January thought there was a note of deeper and more intent concern in his voice than the query seemed to warrant.

“No, sir, I don't. I thank you for taking care of it—you're sure I can't go and help you in some way?”

“Just get me a cab if you'd be so kind.”

January was, in fact, glad to return to the safety of the Silver Moon after a brief excursion down to the landing to signal one of the hacks waiting in the shade of a warehouse. He had no desire to run into the Reverend Christmas on shore. Even if Bobby had kept his mouth shut about January's warning, he had a feeling that Christmas would be merciless at silencing critics. He made his way down the starboard promenade, past the chained line of Cain's slaves: they were talking quietly, gathered as well as they could around 'Rodus. He felt their silence as he walked past.

At the stern end he found Rose. She was talking with Julie, so he couldn't very well catch her up in his arms and kiss her, as he wished to do, or say, You, my nightingale, are a genius. . . .

“Mrs. Fischer returned about half an hour ago with Mr. Weems,” Rose said, turning to meet his smile. “So I suppose poor Sophie's going to be occupied for the rest of the evening. Mrs. Fischer seemed to be in a frightful mood when she called to Sophie, probably because she realized the boat wasn't going to be able to proceed until nearly dark.”

“I never figured why white folks always got their hair on fire to get somewhere quick,” sighed Julie, squinting in the sharp, hot sunlight as Molloy stormed out of the engine-room's rear door and up the stairs to the boiler-deck. “What's it matter if we stays here another few hours? What's so all-fired important in Vicksburg, or Memphis, that it can't wait? The boiler really gonna blow up if they runs the boat too fast?”

She looked scared, and trying to conceal it. She wasn't even, January guessed, as old as Bobby, and the recollection of Bobby stabbed him with guilt again, that he'd left the boy his own choice about escape.

Even if making your own choice was what freedom was about.

“Most accidents on steamboats are because the pilot gets careless,” Rose soothed. “I think whatever else can be said of him, Mr. Molloy is a good pilot, and not likely to take foolish risks.”

“Then how come they think they got to check all the boilers?” asked Julie. “They wouldn't be check 'em if there wasn't somethin' wrong.”

“I can't imagine,” said Rose with a sidelong glance at January. Eli, the cook, on his way back into the galley, overheard and paused long enough to shoot back.

“Hey, Julie, these is white folks we're talkin' about.”

And all three of them laughed.

“Shit,” sighed Julie. “Here she is.” Across the open mud-flat of the landing, Theodora Skippen appeared out of the mouth of a scummy alley. “God, I hope she ain't drunk again.” As Miss Skippen hurried toward the Silver Moon, her white bonnet-plumes nodding with her step, one of the stevedores said something to her that elicited an obscene gesture, quickly released as she realized there might be respectable ladies on the upper-deck promenades who might see her. She was not, January reflected, particularly bright—or else she'd had enough liquor at the Stump to blunt her animal cunning for survival.

Julie rubbed her ear, which, dark as she was, showed fresh bruising as well as the earlier nail-gash cuts, and went up the rear stair to be in Miss Skippen's stateroom when Miss Skippen returned there. Across the confusion of the wharf, January could see the Reverend Christmas leaning in the mouth of the same alleyway, watching the Silver Moon.

An hour later Mr. Lundy returned, with Hannibal in tow.

“Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames,” sighed Hannibal as he slumped onto the nearest wood-pile next to the galley passway and took a sip of opium. “And now, of course, our precious friends know who we are. At least they know about you and me, Ben. Owl-eyed Athene still wears the hood of invisibility. . . .”

“Which I won't much longer,” retorted Rose, “if I persist in being seen in your company.”

“What, will you join the regiment of women who tell me my friendship does their reputations no good?”

“You don't think La Pécheresse will believe that you were overcome by my charms when we met on the boat?” January drew himself up in mock indignation. “I am cut to the very heart. I wish now I'd stayed a little longer hiding near the Stump, to know whether Miss Skippen escaped from the Reverend Christmas or whether he sent her back here as his spy.”

“You'd only have gotten yourself killed.” Hannibal followed his eyes to where the young lady in question was briefly visible, crossing the landing-stage before being swallowed up in the crowd still milling before the engine-room's bow door. “Christmas doesn't sound like a man whose suspicions take much arousing. I wonder if asking her to my cabin for a few sips of Black Drop would induce in Miss Skippen a confiding mood?”

“It would be likelier to induce a duel with Molloy,” replied January grimly. “He regards the girl as his property. . . .”

“Well, everything she owns apparently is,” remarked Rose uncharitably.

“And I have no desire to spend the next three months in a slave-jail awaiting the arrival of your putative next of kin. Or to see you killed.” January spoke roughly, his anger at the Reverend Christmas, and Ned Gleet, and Miss Skippen breaking through his voice like the black limbs of trees breaking through the river's surface; Hannibal's eyes met his, for a moment reading the affection that underlay the rage.

It was the affection that Hannibal answered a moment later: “Well, I have no desire to see me killed either,” he said, and rose to head for the steps back to the white purlieux of the boat. “And the thing that troubles me now is that, having seen who we are, and failed to have us detained in Natchez: what is La Pécheresse's next attempt going to consist of?”

January's mood was not improved when, later in the day, he saw Ned Gleet return with two slaves gone from his coffle, and two more added, a boy of fifteen or so and a girl so young that January suspected there'd been chicanery about her birth-date. Or maybe the law in Mississippi had never heard of the Louisiana provision that a child not be sold from her parents under the age of ten.

Of course, the law only said “where possible.”

Gleet looked so pleased with himself as he chained them to the wall, rubbing his hands and chuckling, that January had to remind himself who he was and where he was, lest he stride down the promenade and drive the man's teeth through the back of his head with his fist. Even Jubal Cain, walking past, remarked sourly, “You like 'em a little short, don't you, Gleet?”

“You say what you please,” chortled the other dealer, wagging his finger. “I'll get five hundred apiece for 'em in Memphis. . . . What's your name, boy?”

“Ephriam,” whispered the boy.

“It's Joe now,” retorted Gleet. “Damn silly name, Ephriam—you ought to re-name the lot of yours, Cain. That Fulani boy—Herodotus, what kind of name's that for a field-hand?”

“Not my damn business what a nigger's name is,” returned Cain. “'Rodus does just fine. Sometimes you make me damn sick, Gleet.”

He stalked away, stopping at the end of the promenade and standing aside to let Miss Skippen pass in a flurry of pink muslin and blond lace. She hurried up to Gleet; they stood together talking for some time.

The Silver Moon achieved full steam and was poled off the Natchez landing just before sundown, steaming north again into the hot evening light. About an hour later, a rumor went around the galley passway that Miss Skippen had sold her slave Julie to Ned Gleet.