Dead water

TWENTY-ONE

The sheriff of Issaquena County turned out to be an enormously fat Englishman named Lear, who arrived in a broken-down shay shortly after Roberson and Byrne set out along the river road for Mayersville. Lear immediately sent his single deputy back to town to organize men to search the river banks as far down as Hitchins' Point for castaways, and accompanied the main body of them—including January, Davis, and Rose, with Hannibal and Lundy riding in the shay—back to Mayersville's single boarding establishment, the Montague House.

Shortly after dinner Lear returned, and listened to the combined accounts of Davis, Lundy, and January with narrowed eyes, as if he detected such obvious lacunae as, How could someone have thrown Weems overboard—much less overpowered and murdered the man—without the slaves chained on the starboard promenade having heard it, and, how could anyone have stolen and hidden close to six hundred pounds of gold quickly and secretly on a steamboat?

“The bleedin' thing is,” Lear said, mopping the wide brick-red moon of his face with a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth—for even with evening darkening the windows, the parlor of the Montague House was suffocatingly hot—“that the only ones truly on the spot at the time of the murder are hidin' in the woods. They're not like to be found.”

“Surely the patrols in this county . . .” protested Davis.

“The patrols in this county couldn't find their own arses with a survey map and a Chickasaw guide,” responded Lear mildly. “Every one of those darkies disappeared the minute they stepped ashore, and your friend Gleet's like to give birth over it, not that I blame him. . . . That poor chap Cain didn't really give Gleet title to his darkies, to sell 'em in Memphis and send the money on to Cain's family, did he?”

“Good Heavens, no!” said Davis, startled. “As far as I know, the two men couldn't abide one another.”

“Not to mention a man would have to be feeble in the head to give Gleet title to anything he ever wanted to see again,” added Lundy, sunk in the depths of the landlady's best blue plush armchair. “He tell you that?”

“He did indeed.”

“I understand Mr. Tredgold is going on to Memphis with his family with the next northbound boat,” said Lundy, and Lear leaned close and cupped his ear to hear him. The pilot looked like a dead man, draped over the chair like a pillow-case filled with broken stalks of cane, but his eyes burned sharp and green. “Not feeling so pert myself, I was fixed to stay on here a few days, so if you'd like, I'll take responsibility for any of the runaways that your patrols do find, until I can get in touch with Tredgold again and find out who Cain's heirs and assigns were.”

“That was neatly done,” murmured January as he helped the feeble old man up the stairs to the attic room he shared with Hannibal, January, and Thucydides. The Montague House generally had rooms enough for any steamboat's passengers to board ashore if they wished, but with another boat in port—the Wild Heart, down from St. Louis—and with all the Silver Moon's officers to put up as well, there was a certain amount of doubling up.

Lundy had announced himself quite willing to share quarters with Mr. Sefton and his “valet,” and the steward had offered his services to the pilot. Rose and Cissy shared a room in the basement, Sophie having elected to spend the night with Julie and the rest of the two slave-gangs in the woods. Most of the other white men were doubled up three and four to a bed in the other chambers.

“Hell,” said the pilot as they paused on the landing, “no county sheriff's got more than a man or two at his disposal at the best of times. Lear would have given that job to any white man who asked.” He clung to the bannister, panting, as January tapped at the door of the attic room, a chamber usually reserved for the servants of guests. “Thu an' that brother of his'll have their work cut out for 'em, gettin' those folks past Memphis and on up through Tennessee and Kentucky. 'Specially now, with Gleet's folks to be led, too.”

Thucydides opened the door. Past him, January could see Hannibal propped up in the room's solitary bed with Rose holding a cup of tisane for him. The fiddler looked like he was coming out of his stupor, but his hands were trembling badly—at a guess, out of need for opium as much as anything else.

Seeing the direction of January's glance, the steward said quietly, “He'll be well enough to travel in two or three days. I gather Julie must have told you that whenever my brother and I conduct cargoes north—and this was our fifth—I bring a little snakeroot, or Indian tobacco, in case someone starts getting suspicious and needs to be gotten out of the way. It removes their interference without permanent harm. Most people attribute the effects to sickness, and traveling in summertime. He was never in any danger, you know. We simply couldn't let the boat be held up—which the sheriff would not have done if the most likely suspect were too ill to be questioned anytime soon.”

“No, I understand,” said January. “And I understand your killing Weems. . . . You must have been watching Fischer like a hawk.”

“I was,” agreed Thu. “But I don't think Weems told her what hold he had over Bredon. He didn't entirely trust her.”

“No sane man would.” January recalled the hardness of those dark, intelligent eyes. “Would you have killed her? If you'd learned she knew?”

Thu hesitated, his face troubled. Then he let out his breath in a sigh. “I'd like to say something comfortable and respectable like ‘I don't know' or ‘I'd have found a way not to. . . .' But in fact, yes, if she'd showed signs of knowing—or telling—I'd have killed her. They lynch conductors of the Railway, Mr. January. In Virginia they were trying to put through a law allowing black conductors to be burned alive, as fomenters of rebellion and discontent. We can afford to trust no one. We can afford no mistakes.”

The young man glanced back at Hannibal, who had sunk back on the bed and closed his eyes again, then returned his gaze to January. “I know you care a great deal about your master, and I know you trust him . . . but I never met a slave-holder who could be completely trusted. Not even the ones who claim they ‘understand.' If they ‘understood' so well, why do they still own other men?”

January grinned wryly, and produced his much-battered freedom papers from the inner pocket of his jacket. “It's a question that's always bothered me,” he said. “As much as the question of why a slave can come and go on the upper deck—in service to his ‘master'—but a free man can't. But I've given up trying to figure out how les blankittes think. My friend could still have been killed in the duel, and that would have been no kindness, completely aside from landing me in a lot of trouble.”

Thucydides shook his head. “Believe me, my brother is too good a shot to have let your master—your friend,” he amended, handing the freedom papers back with his slight smile, “—be killed. Our father had a rifle that he hid in the rafters of our cabin. He taught us to hunt whenever our master was away from the farm. Later, after we escaped, we lived in the Wisconsin Territory, where it was only a short walk from our mother's house to the woods. We would shoot game to eat, and for Mama to sell to the loggers. It was how we survived. 'Rodus can take the head off a finch at a hundred yards, before it lifts off a branch. I promise you, your friend was never in any danger.”

“But you were,” said January, and after a moment, Thu nodded. “And two people falling over the side would have been a little . . . obvious.”

“Specially with you twitterin' around the boat askin' questions,” put in Lundy, and Thu smiled again, and began to help the old man off with his coat and cravat.

To January, the steward said, “Weems had the issue of the Liberator that contained, not only one of Bredon's speeches, but a description of him. That was before he began running cargoes for the Underground Railway. The article spoke of his eyes, which are—were,” he corrected himself, “—were an uncommon color, and of the pockmarks on his skin.”

He was silent a moment, the muscles of his jaw standing out in hard relief under the fine-grained skin. Then he shook his head and went on. “Weems used that article to get money out of Bredon, after your friend and Byrne cleaned him out at whist . . . and don't think some of us didn't see what was going on in that game. I searched Weems's stateroom as soon as 'Rodus and I pitched his body overboard, but Molloy had been there that afternoon, when all the men were on deck setting the spars. The paper was gone. I don't know how Molloy even knew it was there. . . .”

“He didn't,” said January. “He was looking for something else. Weems probably kept them in the same place.”

“How did you know?” Thu helped Lundy to sit on the bed, then went to the small china veilleuse on the dresser, where Rose had put on a small amount of tisane to keep warm. “'Rodus tells me you said to him, ‘Give me the key,' as if you knew Cain wasn't a dealer, and 'Rodus wasn't a slave. How did you figure it out? If you don't mind telling me,” he added, suddenly a little shy. “We do need to know where we went wrong, so it won't happen again.”

“I don't think it will happen again.” January pulled off Lundy's boots, settled the old man back on the pillows. “You were both very good. I don't think a white man would have suspected. But I was a slave once myself. Since Hannibal and I were doing the same thing—and had to watch out for the same things—it was clear to me that 'Rodus and Bredon were acting like partners, not like slave and master . . . and certainly not like slave and slave-dealer.”

Thu nodded. “They worked together well,” he agreed. “'Rodus had helped Bredon with five cargoes. They tried to keep up the act of hate and mistrust, but sometimes there simply wasn't time to go through the . . . the dialogue.”

“Make time,” advised January. “Trust and cooperation show. It was clear to me by the way the men's gang was acting that Weems had been murdered in their presence. The fact that they all denied seeing or hearing anything told me the culprit had to be someone they considered one of themselves. The fact that you and 'Rodus are clearly brothers pointed out a strong probability that you had something to do with it.”

The steward chuckled. “That's something whites just don't see, you know. Because 'Rodus is darker than me, not a single white man has ever asked if we're related. It's as if men of dark skin are all invisible to them—they don't look at our faces.”

“Which Bredon was counting on,” said January quietly, “when he took that big a gang across in the skiff to pick up Molloy's body after the duel. I take it 'Rodus swam across sometime during the night, and stationed himself on the high ground?”

Thu nodded. “He had one of the rifles from the purser's office wrapped in oilskin, and pushed it in front of him on a plank.”

“That's what the final clue was, you know. After Molloy was shot, I came across in the skiff with Bredon and the slave-gang, and I didn't think 'Rodus was among them. If I hadn't been so worried about Hannibal, I'd have thought more about it. When the group of them came back from the trees on the knoll, and there was 'Rodus with the others, I simply thought I'd been mistaken. I don't think a single soul on the boat gave the matter an instant's thought. ‘There goes Cain with a gang of slaves. . . . Here comes Cain with a gang of slaves.' As if that ‘gang of slaves' was one single entity, and not six—or seven—individuals, each with his own face, his own fears, his own heart.”

“If any whites thought like that,” said Rose, looking up from the bed where she had sat in silence, “they couldn't hold slaves, could they?”

“Don't you believe it, Madame.” Thu's mouth twisted as if he'd bitten into something spoiled. “Trust me, I've dealt with white men who went on for hours about what is best to be done with ‘poor Negroes' but who wouldn't share a tin cup with me, let alone a hotel room. I underestimated your friend,” he added, looking down at Hannibal. “I owe him an apology.”

“For many things, I think,” said Rose.

Thu glanced over at January with a lift of one eyebrow. “I wondered if anyone had noticed that 'Rodus was missing that morning until the detail came back from the shore. Bredon kept the men busy about the boat, so no one would comment that he was gone—they would assume he was simply somewhere else.”

“It worked well,” agreed January. “Except that it was one thing too many. Any single one of those circumstances: Bredon making sure that Gleet was with him on the night of the murder; Bredon keeping the slaves busy on the morning of the duel so no one would know quite where 'Rodus was; 'Rodus re-appearing with the gang . . . any of those might have been co-incidence by itself. Taken together, it was clear to me, at least, that Cain—Bredon—was using 'Rodus as his agent. And that, therefore, the relationship between them was not what it seemed. And given the social position of the average slave-dealer,” added January wryly, “just about the only thing worse that one could accuse him of being was . . . an Abolitionist.”

“Oddly enough,” said Rose, “I never quite accepted Cain as a slave-dealer. And I realize now what troubled me about him. On the first day he came on board at Donaldsonville, he came onto the promenade to look at the women, and he encountered me there. And he stepped back out of my way, to let me pass. The way any gentleman would, for any lady. Any white lady.” Her green eyes were wry behind her spectacles. “And he looked at me, for one instant, politely, as if I were indeed any common lady in the street, and not something to be raped or worked to death with indifference. Mr. Bredon was,” she concluded softly, “an exceptional man.”

Thu nodded, and briefly closed his eyes. “He was that,” he murmured “I only wish—” He stopped himself, and shook his head again. “What was it that Molloy was looking for in Weems's stateroom, when he found the paper?” he asked. “The gold that Weems was supposed to have stolen?”

“Not the gold exactly,” said January. “And that brings me, Mr. Lundy”—he turned to the old pilot—“to a great favor I would like to ask of you.”

The following day, while Rose remained with the still-groggy Hannibal, January and Lundy borrowed Sheriff Lear's shay and drove down the river road to Hitchins' Chute. Davis, Jim, and Thucydides went along as armed and mounted escorts in case Levi Christmas's surviving bravos still lurked in the woods, but they encountered no trouble. As they passed under the mottled shade of willows and sycamores, January would hear, now and then, the far-off drift of voices from some hoe-gang or wood-cutting detail, singing as they worked under an overseer's eye:

Ana-que, anobia,

Bia tail-la, Que-re-que,

Nal-le oua, Au-Monde,

Au-tap-o-te, Aupe-to-te,

Au-que-re-que,

Bo.

Or sometimes it was,

Run to the rock, rock will you hide me?

Run to the rock, rock will you hide me?

And he'd see Thu turn his head, listening, a look of calculation in his eyes.

As if he flew high above the land in a dream, January saw in his mind the cautious figures slipping from rock to rock, from brush-thicket to brush-thicket, working their way toward whatever point along the river they had heard was a meeting-place. And 'Rodus—and others—were out there somewhere, gathering them in, patiently, like the Good Shepherd going back into the stormy night when he realized one lamb was unaccounted for. . . .

Once Jim turned his head at the sound of the singing, and January thought the old valet caught Thucydides's eye. Knowledge passed between them; Jim shook his head slightly, and smiled.

And Colonel Davis of course, riding importantly ahead with a rifle on his arm, saw nothing.

January slipped his hand into his pocket to touch the rosary of blue beads, the cheap steel crucifix. Holy Virgin, Mother of God, get them safe north. Cover them with your mantle of invisibility, your mantle as blue as the sky. Lead their feet, and guide them when they get there.

Guide me, too.

As they neared Hitchins' Chute, January, who was driving the shay, said quietly to the pilot, “The more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed to me that Weems—and Mrs. Fischer, no doubt the brains of the outfit—ever took the money out of New Orleans at all. Six hundred pounds of gold, and God knows how many cubic feet of banknotes and securities, would be both heavy enough and bulky enough to call attention to itself, even split up among many trunks and crates.

“But gold, even more than banknotes, is anonymous. Once they convinced their pursuers, by their rather ostentatious flight, that the gold had been taken out of New Orleans—once they'd scattered the pursuit—how much easier to leave the gold in New Orleans itself, in some safe place to which they could return in a year, or two, and slip it out of the country a little at a time.”

“Given that wildcat Fischer's nerve,” muttered Lundy, “I wouldn't put it past her to open her own bank in New Orleans.”

January laughed, “She might have, at that. By the places she and Weems were searching on the boat, it became fairly obvious to me that what they were looking for was not gold and banknotes, but a key—the key to wherever they'd hidden the gold. It was easy for Molloy to steal that key, but Molloy knew it was easy for someone else to take it back, either Fischer or Theodora Skippen. . . .”

“Who folded her tents and vanished during the night,” put in Lundy. “Without paying the landlady, I might add—and helped herself to the jewelry of Mrs. Roberson's daughters, whose room and bed she was sharing. I'm guessing Miss Skippen went south on the Wild Heart this morning. There's no other way out of town.”

“Minx,” said Davis, who had dropped back to ride beside the shay. The side of his face twitched convulsively.

“If she shows up in Natchez again,” said Lundy comfortably, “she'll get what she deserves.”

And just what did a girl deserve, wondered January, who was born poor and recognized at least that marrying a stevedore and bearing a child a year—the only options open to a poor girl—was not what she wanted?

What had Mrs. Fischer deserved? To end as no more than a streak of blood in the river's muddy stream?

“So you think Molloy disposed of the key the same way Weems disposed of the gold?” Thu, riding on the other side, glanced down at January. “Why not keep the key on his person? Around his neck, or in a pocket?”

“Because it was a big key, an old key, wrought-iron and heavy. . . .”

“How do you know that?” demanded Davis.

January smiled. “Because I know now what it opens,” he said. “And yes, I think the first thing Molloy did, when he got the key, was to look for a way of getting it off the boat entirely, so that he could come back for it after he'd gotten rid of pursuit. Once Molloy had the key, I'm not sure that either Weems, or Fischer, would have finished the voyage”—his glance crossed Thu's—“no matter what else went on.”

There were at least three places behind Hitchins' Point where water would break through to form a chute on a high river. As January suspected, it took a pilot to recognize which of the low sloughs behind the tree-covered rise had been the chute through which Molloy had attempted to take the Silver Moon—January would never have believed that a steamboat, even a small stern-wheeler, could have maneuvered down that swampy aisle of mud and trees.

But Lundy found the place without trouble. Moreover, once January and Davis had helped him hobble along the bank from where they left Jim with the shay, Lundy guessed exactly which tree it was likeliest Molloy had concealed the key in. “Lord, everybody uses that big black oak that overhangs the chute in high water. It's got a box on it that pilots use to drop messages off to one another.” The old pilot pointed ahead of them, to the oak on the muddy rise of ground, far above the few nasty pools that were all that remained of the chute. The tree was the largest on the bank and shaped distinctively, bending forward like a beggar-woman, with two limbs that reached out like arms.

“So he wouldn't have used it to hide the key in,” remarked January. “But as a marker.”

Lundy winked at him. “You're getting good, son. So which tree would we find your key in?”

“That sweet gum next to it. It's a little lower down the bank. Molloy could have reached it easily without getting out of the skiff. The whole left side of it's dead; look at how the branches are leafless. It has to be hollow inside.”

Having learned painful details about hollow trees as a child, January threw a couple of rocks at the sweet gum from a safe distance, to satisfy himself that bees had not taken up residence in the hollow. Then he clambered up the mess of deadfalls and graying dry debris to the old tree's side.

The key was in a hollow in the tree's trunk, tucked in a tin candy-box only slightly larger than the one he'd found in Molloy's cabin. There were two keys, one of them small and modern, the other four or five inches long, and made of heavy wrought iron—too big to be hidden easily around the neck or in a pocket.

An old key.

The key, in fact, to the grillework that surrounded the crumbling tomb in the St. Louis Cemetery, where January had seen a small man whom he'd taken for an undertaker, and a tall woman in a green dress figured with rust and cream, bestowing what he had thought to be the coffin of a child by night.

The following day the Gloria Zicree put in at Mayersville, and January, Rose, and Hannibal took passage south for New Orleans. Hannibal slept for nearly twenty-four hours in his stateroom—with January again acting as “valet,” this time simply to make sure he was all right—before he was himself again.

Thu had calculated well, thought January. Mrs. Tredgold, manipulated by Mrs. Fischer, would never have consented to holding the Silver Moon in port long enough for the fiddler to recover sufficiently to be questioned. Sheriff Lear, though both intelligent and kind, was at heart a lazy man, and January had no doubt that he'd have yielded to pressure and let the boat go on, simply taking everyone's depositions and holding the most likely suspect.

And Rose would have been on her way to Memphis alone.

“You don't think I could have dealt with Mrs. Fischer on my own?” Rose teased as she and January sat on the lower promenade deck somewhere between Vicksburg and Natchez, listening to Hannibal and two of the several servants play an impromptu trio on Stradivarius and spoons.

“I think you could have,” said January, “had the playing-field been a level one. But it wasn't. I think the minute Hannibal and I were out of the way, Mrs. Fischer would have done something—forged papers, or sworn out an affidavit that she'd seen you owned by someone in some other town—that would have ended up with you being taken as a slave by Gleet. Then God knows where you would have ended up.”

Rose thought about it, her face growing still. Then she glanced at the promenades along both sides of the engine-room of the Gloria's main deck, where lines of slaves were chained, going to market in New Orleans. “I think you may be right, Ben. There are some things that we simply cannot fight.” She closed her hand around his as clouds of ash and paddle-spray drifted over them and, along the banks, vociferous bullfrogs croaked in the gathering darkness.

They reached New Orleans on the third of July, in hot darkness with palmetto bugs roaring around the cressets that illuminated the levee. January half expected, with all that had gone wrong on the river, to find their home reduced to a pile of ashes. But his sister Olympe's son, fourteen-year-old Gabriel, greeted him at the door with the news that he and his father had been trading off sleeping there at night—that Cosette Gardinier was just fine at her grandmère's out at the lake, and that no, there wasn't much sickness in town except a little bit of fever and no, the house was fine except for the fire in the kitchen and that hadn't burned up too much. . . .

January sent a note via Gabriel that night, to Hubert Granville, and though it was past two in the morning, he, Rose, and Hannibal walked along Rue des Ramparts in the cicada-sounding darkness, to the cemetery of St. Louis. In the thick summer heat the town was silent, except for the far-off clamor of the gambling dens along Gallatin Street and the quieter din of the more respectable gaming parlors on Rue Orleans. Had the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ridden their steeds into those establishments, January didn't think the play there would even pause.

Somewhere in one of the dark houses, a man and a woman sang an aria from a popular opera to the light, tinny music of a piano. It was a lilt of joy against the leaden hum of mosquitoes above the gutters.

Congo Square was empty, whispering with the scent of ash and burned flesh. On one of the plane-trees there, January glimpsed the ant-creeping corpse of a snake, nailed to the wood with a rolled-up paper in its mouth. January helped Hannibal—and Rose, who was dressed in a pair of Hannibal's trousers and a calico shirt—to clamber over the wall, the resurrection fern that grew atop it flicking like ghost fingers at his flesh as he followed them over.

He found the DuFresne tomb, near which he'd waited for Queen Régine, and the statue of the sleeping child. Close to it, after a little search, he found the crumbling nameless tomb where he'd seen Mrs. Fischer in her green and cream-colored dress, with Weems pushing a barrow behind, a little coffin resting upon it.

It must have been the final load of several, January thought. The two of them couldn't have lifted any box containing all the gold at once. The big lock on the wrought-iron grille that surrounded the tomb gave silently, recently oiled.

Rose's eye met his with a glint of triumph as they grasped the iron ring and, with a shrill scraping of iron on marble, opened the door of the tomb itself.

There were five little coffins there, all crowded into the cramped brick space that whispered with insects and rats.

January unlocked the padlock of the top one's lid, and took the lantern from Hannibal to hold it close as he untied one of the sacks within.

“It's six hundred pounds of vegetarian tracts,” he said in a disappointed voice.

But both his friends saw the dancing light of triumph in his eyes, even before he gave himself the lie and held up the handful of glittering gold.