Dead water

NINE

“He gonna sell me for a field-hand.” Julie pressed her trembling hands over her lips, as if by doing so she could still the fear and grief cracking in her voice. Spray splashed from the paddle, flecking the deck-hands with wet as they moved about stowing ropes and push-poles, the women as they gathered around their friend among the wood-piles. Behind them, Natchez glowed on its high bluff in the evening light, before the gray-green wall of Marengo Bend hid it from view.

“He gonna sell me for a field-hand, an' whoever buys me'll put me with whoever they got needs a wife, to make babies whether I wants 'em or not, or whether I likes him or not.” A sob shook her, and she hugged her arms around her big, firm breasts, but January saw rage as well as fear in her dark eyes.

Rose put an arm around the girl's shoulders but said nothing. January, sitting beside the four women on a crate of dishes labeled THE MYRTLES—VICKSBURG, understood that there was no room for comforting disagreement: Julie was a big girl, African-featured and dark, and without the refined speech and manners of a house servant. Gleet's jeering voice returned to him: What the hell you need a big buck like that for a valet for, anyway? He's got field-hand written all over him.

Remembered, too, more softly: She's a beauty, ain't she?

From here on up the river was cotton country. The plantations starting up on newly-ceded Indian lands needed field-hands far more than they needed half-trained ladies-maids.

“My granny that's a free woman was savin' to buy me free,” Julie continued in a whisper. “But Michie Binoche, he needed money right then, 'cause of his girl gettin' sick. He wouldn't a' sold me, he said, 'cept that I'd be a ladies'-maid, an' he made Mamzelle Theodora swear she wouldn't sell me off, the dirty bitch.”

“Do you know for sure she's done it?” asked Sophie, grasping at straws. Trying to push aside her own fears of what would become of her on the voyage—as well she should, January reflected. Had Mrs. Fischer put her foot down about selling off her maid rather than letting Weems lead his watchers to the trunks in the hold? “Surely she wouldn't rob herself of a maid while she's traveling?”

“She say, ‘Don't be stupid,' when I ask her.” Julie wiped under her nose with the back of her wrist. “An' she slap me when I ask her again. But when she leave the room I look in her bag, an' she got four hundred dollars there she didn't have before.”

“I don't suppose she could have made that in Natchez,” mused Rose. “Not all in one afternoon, anyway.”

And the women laughed—even Sophie, who looked shocked, too—the wry, bitter laughter of those who lace corsets and wash dirty underwear and tidy away stained sheets. Then they tightened their arms around Julie again, and held the girl close among them as the hard-held tears began to flow. “What'm I gonna do?” whispered the girl, her face pressed to Rose's shoulder. “What'm I gonna do?”

Preparing to climb the steps to assist his “master” in getting ready for supper, January paused, his eyes drawn down the passway to the locked door of the hold. The thought rose in his mind: Queen Régine might help.

Help how? Poison Gleet? That would result only in Julie and the other seven men and women of Gleet's coffle spending several months in a slave-jail in Vicksburg, waiting for letters to make their patient way up and down the river in quest of his next-of-kin.

Help Julie escape? Even this close to shore, among the snags and eddies of low water, the current was strong. Julie could stay afloat on a couple of pieces of furnace-wood, but once ashore, she'd have county patrols to contend with, and almost certainly the Reverend Levi Christmas, dogging the boat like a carrion wolf.

Along the starboard promenade, the men were singing, their voices rolling out across the water:

Ai, tingwaiye, ai tingwaiye. . . .

And from the women's side of the boat, two or three voices at first, then on the next round more, replied, “Ah waiya, ah waiya.”

African words, learned by rote from mothers who'd sung them long ago. Even those who hadn't known them before took them up, drawing comfort from the sound, from the memory of the quarters of their childhood, and the villages on the other side of the ocean, beneath the hot African moon.

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

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

Could Queen Régine hear them, he wondered, down in the terrible dark of the hold? Was she able—he couldn't imagine how—to come out on deck, to move about silent in the night, seeking him like a vengeful ghost? I curse you to the ruin of all you touch, and the destruction of all you hope.

All he hoped stood a pace from ruin now, that was for certain.

January shivered, and fished in his pocket for the comforting touch of his rosary. He'd lived in Paris, and read the works of Locke and Hume, Kant and Hegel, and had listened to the talk of students in the cafés. He would no more have admitted to belief in a half-crazed old freedwoman's curse than he'd have worshipped God by cutting a lamb's throat and splashing blood on the altar. As a child he'd been told, by old Père Antoine, that the strength of God was stronger than any curse of African devils.

But he still felt safer on the upper deck, where he knew Queen Régine could not come.

After supper January again borrowed Eli's guitar, and played duets with Hannibal for dancing and gaiety in the Main Saloon. There was, he reflected, singularly little glee that night. Led by Mrs. Fischer, the women definitely and completely ostracized Theodora Skippen, who retreated a number of times out onto the promenade to comfort herself, and returned with head held high and a distinct whiff of brandy on her breath. Mr. Weems, still apparently under orders not to advertise his association with Mrs. Fischer, remained in a corner, playing cribbage with Quince and listening to the handsome young man's interminable encomia of Vegetarianism and the Thompsonian system of health through the consumption of honey and onions. Mrs. Fischer for her part kept a wary eye on January and Hannibal, and by the way Mrs. Tredgold avoided the fiddler and Mrs. Roberson drew her daughter away from him, January guessed Mrs. Fischer had been spreading a little gossip about him in the Ladies' Parlor by way of guaranteeing an upper hand.

Still, this left four ladies who consented to dance in a set with one another—Mrs. Roberson, Mrs. Tredgold, Mrs. Fischer, and sixteen-year-old Dorothea Roberson—so the gentlemen took it in turns to dance with them, though the gluttonous Dodd was beginning to demonstrate a disposition to disappear out onto the promenade every time Miss Skippen did. January only hoped the elderly Bostonian's wealth would distract the girl from her smoky glances at Hannibal, but by the way she returned from such encounters with red cheeks and angry eyes, he didn't hold out much hope.

Mr. Souter, not yet on duty, buttonholed Colonel Davis in a corner with a lengthy account of the pilot on the Louisville Belle, who used to navigate the bend above Poverty Point in pitch darkness by ringing the bell and listening for the barking of Rush Thompson's dog—that was Rush Thompson whose brother had run a wood-yard at Kentucky Bend, and had married a woman named Clanton who'd had an affair with Aaron Burr supposedly—the dog's name was Henry Clay. Henry Clay would always bark at the sound of a steamboat bell, and the day after Henry Clay died of being gored by Enoch Andrews's bull, Melchizadek, who had one bent horn and had been calved by this Spanish feller, Dorado's, cow Elizabeth, that was stole from him by river pirates and later he got her back—the day after Henry Clay died the pilot ran the Louisville Belle aground in the fog because he didn't hear the dog bark on the bank. They did manage to save the Belle's engines, though, and put them on a new boat, the Louisville Pride, whose pilot was . . .

Mr. Byrne engaged the two black-clothed Jews who'd come on at Natchez in a game of vingt-et-un. Mr. Cain simply settled back to listen to the music, his yellow eyes half shut like a sleepy cat's and his face transformed by an expression of profound and peaceful joy.

Hannibal's fiddle floated light over the notes of the Marlborough Cotillion, the silk of skirts swishing over the straw matting on the floors.

“Tell you what I'll do, Cain,” drawled Gleet's whining voice. “I'll give you seven hundred for that boy of yours, He-ro-do-tus, plus those two young 'uns I picked up in Natchez, Joe an' Jane.” The slave-dealer spat, not even bothering to aim for the cuspidor. “Now, you can't say you been offered a fairer deal than that. I got a customer in Memphis, a steady customer, always lookin' for smart boys like that 'Rodus, an' you can't tell me he ain't trouble to you.”

What Cain's reaction was to this, January didn't know, because movement in the doorway drew his eye; Thu pausing there to look back at the two slave-dealers, his thin face impassive but his eyes wary and listening. In the dim light of the overhead lanterns his face looked suddenly very African, despite its fair complexion, the narrow Fulani bone-structure thrown into sharp relief.

And January understood, as if he'd known it all along: Herodotus and Thucydides are brothers.

Then the steward stepped through the door and was gone.

Through the following day, as the Silver Moon thrashed through the endless tangle of loops, false bends, chutes, snags, and bayous that surrounded the mouth of the Arkansas River, January watched the men of Cain's coffle, and was almost certain he was right. It wasn't merely the tribal similarity of bone-structure and features. Both young men had the same gestures, the same ways of walking, the same expressions. The way Thu folded his arms and nodded when Mrs. Roberson gave long and elaborate instructions about bringing the Parlor tea-things was mirrored in the angle of 'Rodus's head when two of the boys in Gleet's coffle asked him about whether they'd be unchained if the boat snagged and sank.

Does Cain realize? January wondered, watching in fascination from behind the piled cordwood as the Silver Moon lay behind yet another bar while the leadsman took soundings in the skiff. Thu was passing along the starboard promenade, and stopped to trade a word with the men of Cain's coffle—How can he not see?

But whites, January had found, frequently had trouble distinguishing the features of blacks.

And the man might have no knowledge of ancient Greek historians. It was common, January knew, for masters to name slave children the way they named dogs, for characters in literature or the Bible, or for sets of things: Faith, Hope, and Charity for girls, Marquis and Baron and Duke for boys. There were two boys in Gleet's coffle, brothers fifteen and sixteen years old, named, of all things, Jeremiah and Lamentations, testifying to some white man who knew the names of the books of the Bible but hadn't the slightest idea what they meant.

Would it matter, he wondered, if Cain knew?

“Quarter twain!” called out the leadsman, and Molloy's voice could be heard roaring curses from the pilot-house. “Quarter less twain!” The brown water barely stirred among the black army of snags that lay between the boat and the shore, the drips from the paddle like diamonds in the burning sunlight. “Quarter less twain!”

Jubal Cain came walking down the promenade, glancing sharply around him; Thucydides turned at once and left, passing the white man with neither a glance nor a word.

They tied up at the Vicksburg landing at midnight; Weems and Mrs. Fischer disembarked at once. From the shadows of the boiler-deck promenade, January took note of their luggage as they had it loaded onto a dray: three trunks this time, and two heavy portmanteaux. Sophie stood back, laden down with valises. “Looks like business,” murmured Hannibal, standing beside January in the darkness, and Rose replied softly, “It's supposed to.”

Across the muddy flat of the landing, a gaping space now studded with boxes, bales, and deadfall debris washed up with the river's summer retreat, lanterns burned even at this late hour in the gaggle of barrooms, whorehouses, and gambling-dens that clustered at the foot of Vicksburg's tall hill. Shouts of drunken anger floated on the dark air that hummed with mosquitoes and reeked of thrown-up booze and untended privies. Since the big vigilante crackdown the previous year at Natchez, Vicksburg had, if anything, a worse reputation than the larger port.

“Well, they can't very well board again before daybreak without drawing attention to themselves.” January shrugged his rough jacket straight: the sorry garment he'd gotten from Levi Christmas could pass him as either slave or a laboring freedman. He felt in his pocket again for the pass Hannibal had written him. “If they check into a hotel, I'm guessing the night porter will just store the trunk somewhere until more staff arrives in the morning. It may be another ruse, but we can't afford to assume that it is. There they go.” Turning, he clasped Rose hard in his arms. As he kissed her he seemed to hear a whispering voice hiss in his ear: Marinette-of-the-Dry-Arms will tear your woman from your arms. . . . “Whatever you do, stay on the boat. We'll get you word as soon as we can.”

As at Natchez, it was no difficult matter to follow Weems's cab up the hill. Clay Street was nearly as steep as Natchez's bluff, and the hill, though set a little farther back from the river, was just as high, one of the long line of bluffs that rose like a wall on the east side of the river. Once away from the torchlight and clamor of the red-light district along the landing, Vicksburg, in its darkness and silence, seemed a much more American town than Natchez. Though the town was only twenty years old, it already had showy houses, pillared like Greek temples in the style favored by Americans: cotton-planters whose lands lay across the river on the flat, fertile, and smotheringly hot delta plain.

The Majestic Hotel was of this style, new and freshly-painted, with very young elm-trees planted on either side of its door. The night porter who opened for Weems and Mrs. Fischer had a gimcrack and brightly-painted air to him, too, fresh-faced and busy. From the darkness beneath the oak-trees across the street, January left Hannibal to watch the front door and followed the cab around to the rear yard. There Sophie got down, saw to it that the trunks were put in a locked shed, tipped the porter, and went inside, carrying her own modest bundle of clean apron and fresh petticoat.

There was no gate on the yard. January stepped back out of sight as the cab passed him—the single lantern above the hotel's rear door threw about as much light as a tallow candle—then slipped around back to Adams Street, where Hannibal waited under the oaks of the vacant lot.

“They've taken a room.” The fiddler pointed to a curtained window now glowing with the illumination of lamplight within. “Goodness knows what name they gave. The merchant, to secure his treasure / Conveys it in a borrowed name. . . . Though they may in fact just spend the night playing backgammon, as they cannot, as you pointed out, get back on the boat without drawing attention to themselves until morning. Are the trunks back there?”

“In a padlocked shed.”

“Two massy keys he bore of metals twain / The golden opes, the iron shuts amain. I shall return 'ere the leviathan can swim a league. . . . though I wonder now whether that's in low water or high. For some must watch, while some must sleep / So runs the world away. . . .” He darted across the street and vanished like a wayward elf into the darkness.

The lamp upstairs was still burning when Hannibal re-materialized at his side.

“Stand, and unfold yourself,” whispered his voice from the shadows, and quite properly January gave back the next line from the opening of Hamlet,

“Long live the king. You come most carefully upon your hour.”

“Wretched newfangled patent Yankee locks on the trunks.” Hannibal flexed his long fingers, and shivered, though the night was gluily warm. “But worth the effort. They're full of old books, Bible tracts and collections of sermons . . . perhaps we should reclaim them and make a present of them to Mr. Quince.”

“They'll be heading back to the boat as soon as they think they're unobserved, then,” said January. He glanced up at the moon, trying to gauge how many hours had passed. “Would you do me a favor? Go back to the boat and see what they've done with the engines? See whether they've let the steam down—which will mean the boat's here until noon at least—or just banked the furnaces so they can get up steam in a few minutes. You don't need to rush coming back,” he added, taking a second look, by the reflected glow of the single door-lantern across the street, at his friend's rather drawn face.

“Will ye reach there by moonlight / If your horse be good and your spurs be bright,” said Hannibal, saluting. “I will be bloody, bold, and resolute. You be bloody, bold, and resolute as well, amicus meus, and watch your back. We may be away from the waterfront, but personally, I wouldn't trust myself anywhere in this town—or anywhere around our precious friends up in that hotel-room.”

With that he departed, and January didn't begin to worry about him until cock-crow. The light burned steadily in the window until almost dawn; by four, first light began to flush the sky above the tangled morasses of cow-pastures, swamps, and willow-choked ravines that stretched out behind the town. Despite the high, breezy situation of the town and the oil of citrus January had smeared on his face and hands, mosquitoes whined around him. Hannibal, he guessed, had rested when he returned to the Silver Moon—it was a long walk up and down a steep hill, and though the fiddler had lost the hoarse, wet cough of consumption last year, one never really recovered from the disease.

But when the shapes of trees and houses began to emerge from the blackness of night—when, as Ayasha quoted the blessed Koran, “a white thread could be told from a black one”—January began to wonder whether his friend had made it through the noisome alleys of the district Under-The-Hill in safety. They'd passed through a little after midnight coming here, but they'd been two men together, Hannibal's whiteness protecting January from molestation and January's size protecting Hannibal. Though Hannibal wasn't visibly wealthy, January was well aware that the men who haunted such dockside establishments would kill a man for his watch and boots.

Even worse, the thought crossed his mind that Rose might have come on Hannibal resting on deck and said, “I'll go instead. . . .”

The thought brought him out in a cold sweat. Had she tried to come up here sometime during the small hours? Tried to pass through those filthy alleyways that were darker than the inside of a black cow?

He looked back at the nearest house. Servants were waking up. At certain times of the day a black man could idle unremarked, but early dawn wasn't one of them, not across the street from the best hotel in town. He moved off to loiter behind the corner of a closed-up wine-merchant's store halfway down the block.

A porter came out of the hotel and began sweeping the steps. A cab drew up, depositing the stumpy black forms of Mr. Rosenfeld and Mr. Goldblatt from the Silver Moon, with more luggage than January could have imagined possible. He wondered how much of their money Byrne the gambler had managed to lift.

All over town, cocks shrilled the coming morning, above a rising, insistent twitter of lesser birds. Wagons passed on the street, heading to the wharves. A burly-bearded gentleman emerged from the hotel, nearly dragging his dainty wife into the waiting cab.

The grass went from indistinct gray to clearest emerald, and a cart rattled up the street with cans of morning milk for the patrons of the hotel. Smells wafted from the hotel kitchen and that of the house across the way, first smoke, then bacon. A dog barked.

Do I go back to the boat and risk losing them? January wondered. If by some chance they weren't returning—if they'd had other trunks delivered to another location in Vicksburg, for instance . . .

Chambermaids threw open the hotel windows and hung bedding out to air.

When one did so in the room where Weems and/or Fischer had passed the night, January realized, with sinking heart, that the burning lamp had been no guarantee that the room was occupied.

He scrawled a quick penciled note in his memorandum-book—I shall be at the American Hotel in Memphis on the 7th, but it didn't really matter what the message was—and hastened across the street with it, entering the side door of the lobby and hurrying to the desk with the air of one who has strode fast and far. The clerk was just polishing the smooth oak counter, black instead of white and an older man than had admitted Weems and Fischer last night but just as smart-looking.

“May I help you?”

“I have a message here for Mr. Weems, that come in last night.” January held up the note. “Weems may not be the name he signed under,” he added as the clerk frowned over the register. “He travelin' with a lady, taller'n him. . . .”

“Must be Mr. and Mrs. Gordon,” said the clerk. “They're the only ones signed in last night. Charlie, the night man, signed 'em in, and there's a note here that they have to be out early, so they paid up right then.”

And slipped out the back when nobody was looking?

Damn, damn, damn. . . .

“Thank you. You didn't happen to see 'em leave?”

The clerk shook his head. “That may have been the couple that left an hour ago. I didn't recognize them, so they might have come in last night. But she wasn't taller than him.”

January frowned as if puzzled, though a rush of suspicion washed over him. “That's funny, I thought that's what my master said . . . I ain't never seen 'em, myself. He said for sure they'd be carryin' green-and-black-striped portmanteaux. . . .”

“That's them,” agreed the clerk promptly. “They sent the boy for a cab around four-thirty, said they had to catch an early boat.”

“Thank you,” said January again, cursing himself for not having looked more closely at the luggage borne behind the bearded gentleman who had emerged from the hotel, and his fluttery, veiled wife. “I reckon I'll catch 'em down by the landing.”

He left through the yard and the alley, loitering a little, though he couldn't imagine that if Hannibal had returned—or if Rose had taken his place—one or the other of them wouldn't have come seeking him. In any case, neither accosted him as he circled back to Adams Street. Deeply worried now, he made his way through the quiet neighborhoods and up and down the rolling slopes of the hill, back toward Clay Street and the levee.

As he came around the corner onto Washington Street and looked down at the waterfront, he froze.

It was barely six in the morning—activity was only just beginning to stir among the boats, wood-piles, heaps of cargo along the mushy fringes of the river; the time when boats were just beginning to take on their cargoes and work up the final heads of steam.

But the Silver Moon was gone.