Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (16 page)

As if, thought January, in another five years anyone would care.

No marble angels here, as there were in the great walled necropoli in New Orleans. No brick tombs to be whitewashed every November second, by families who picnicked between cleanings and hung up immortelles of beads and tin. If a slave knew his grandfather's name he was lucky.

And yet there was peace here, a sleeping quiet, all anger and all pain laid to rest. January recalled what the Romans had said, that Death was Freedom for a slave.

Gilles's grave had been decorated with broken bits of white china-the remains of two cups and a plate, it looked like-and with bottles driven neck-down into the soft earth. Broken horn forks and spoons, the bright-colored lids of tin boxes, stumps of red candles and sealing wax, broken strings of cheap beads, fiagments of lamp chimneys. Reuben's grave was bare.

These fragments of pottery were the only markers many of the older graves had, like Lilliputian fences, or eroded teeth rising out of the sunken earth. The cheap paint on the few crosses left standing had long been rinsed away, leaving only phantoms of names in places-PUSEY, said one. Someone had cut the letters deeper with a shell fragment or a knife. LAVINNIA, said another. In most cases, there was now nothing at all.

Forgotten.
Twenty or thirty or maybe only fifteen years of living in hard work, loving where they could, crying not to hurt others or be hurt themselves, and for what?

January wondered who they were, and what they'd died of; whether they had left children in the hogmeat gang to mourn them or whether those children had been sold away already; whether these women themselves had been sold away from children, and husbands, parents and friends whom they would never see again. When he was a child he'd often asked himself, Do les blankittes think a woman'll forget the husband she loved if she gets sold to another place, assigned a new husband? Do they REALLY think that bearing new children makes the memory of the lost ones fade?

But now he knew the answer. And the answer was: Yes, they do. Most of them. And the others-he'd overheard them, at the parties he played for in town, at the quadroon balls and receptions-would only say, “Oh, she's still sad 'cause she misses her husband back in Virginia, I bet,” in the same tones, exactly the same tones, in which they'd say, “Poor puss! She's still looking all over the house for her kittens that I had to have the coachman drown. Just breaks my heart.”

The soft clink of glass somewhere nearby.
January whirled and called out “Who dat?” doing his best to sound like a man nervous in the dark.

“Just me.”
It was the cook Kiki's voice, a light sweet soprano, like Rhineland wine. “You want to be careful, here alone in the dark, Ben. The witches'll ride you.” She stepped from the velvet abyss beneath the trees, a white blur of tignon and apron against the black of her dress, her hands, her round decisive face. She carried her apron gathered up, and the clinking came from it.

“I got a blue bead and mouse bones tied round my ankle, and some pepper in my pocket. I should be safe.”

“No one is safe.” She moved past him, and knelt beside Reuben's bare grave. “Not with the anger of the dead.”

“Is that why you're here?” He nodded at Reuben's cross. “To keep him quiet?”

“I'm here because I owe him.” She took fragments of a broken oil jar from her apron-those oil jars that were bought in such numbers on plantations, not for the oil but for their massive usefulness as containers-two smashed plates, and five or six medicine bottles, caked and crusted with dirt. “Everybody had something to put on Gilles's grave, look. Even the field hands.” She shook her head. “Reuben. . . . Not even Trinette, who was his woman, put so much as a broken teacup here, to show where he lies once the headboard falls over and the name washes out. It may be only what he earned in life,” she went on, methodically working the bottles mouth-down into the soil around the edge of the mound. “But it isn't right.”

“Jeanette tells me he was your husband.”

“Four years.” The moonlight showed the little pinch of the mouth that women sometimes get, speaking of bad times survived when the distance from those times widens a little. “God forgive me, I could have treated him better than I did, for all he was a hard man.”

“Michie Fourchet gave you to him?”

“Isn't it Michie Fourchet who gives every woman to every man here?” She didn't raise her head, but he felt her glance at him under her long lashes.

He took up another bottle, to stick into the earth on the other side of the grave, and chipped away a little of the dirt sticking to it with his nail. The label had faded, but he recognized the shape of the bottle: Finch's Paregoric Restorative Draught, a staggeringly powerful opiate much favored by Hannibal, who was a discerning connuisseur of such things. Glancing down he saw that the other bottles were the same.

“Where'd these come from?”

She glanced up at him again, and he saw his own awareness of what they were reflected in the irony of her eye.

“Look around you at these graves here,” she said. “Every bottle you see is one of these.” White lady medicine, the field hands call it. “There's a mound of them higher than your knee, behind the shed in the old garden.”

The women's side of the house, thought January.
Easily reached if you went down the back stairs and passed under the brick piers that supported the nursery wing, keeping to the oleander hedge so that you wouldn't be seen from the house. The empty bottle hid in the folds of your skirt.

I'm at a loss to determine why anyone would think I'd offer the shelter of my roof to a sodden reprobate. . . . The boy is a fool like his mother.

“Did you know her?” he asked, holding up the bottle. “Ma'am Camille?”

Kiki's mouth twitched a little at his deduction, and she only said, “No. I came here five years ago. She was dead by then.” She worked a brown curved shard of oil jar into the ground, adding, “By the number of those bottles out there, I wouldn't be surprised if those children of hers that died, the ones that poor nurse Zuzu was sold away for not looking after, didn't die of something else.”

She got to her feet, and shook out her skirts, standing back to admire the look of the grave. January stood, too, and he had to admit he felt better, seeing the bare turned mound properly decorated, the points of the broken china like a protective hedge against the angry ghost.

“Was he so bad?” he asked, as they walked together along the trace back toward the house. “Reuben?” She glanced at him again, and her mouth made that same little pinch, as if tasting the memory of her own blood.

She said, “He was an angry man, like Michie Fourchet. Maybe that's why he understood Michie Fourchet as well as he did.” In the moonlight she looked tired, and there was a haunted expression in her eyes, as if she listened behind her for a heavy step and muttered curses. “Once, after Michie Fourchet broke up the marriage, and let Gilles and me be together, Reuben found Gilles when Gilles was drunk and beat him, as if he thought that would make me turn against Gilles and return to him. Reuben was stupid that way. Stupid and mean, and dangerous.”

“But you cared for Reuben after he was hurt.”

She averted her face. “He was my husband,” she said. “A man who's been your husband once, in a way he always is. Like your child is always your child, living or in death. Surely you know that.”

Ayasha.
The way she used to sit in the window of their rooms in Paris, listening to the workmen's voices down in the estaminet, seven flights below at the bottom of the canyon of the street; brushing out her long black hair. One day, January hoped, he would marry Rose, when the broken trust in her healed, that shrank from any man's touch. The thought of her was tender in him, like the scent of flowers, the wry glint of her eyes behind her spectacle lenses and the astringent beauty of her voice as they walked along the levee together. But Ayasha would always be his wife.

“Yes,” he told Kiki. “I know.”

As they came out of the trees the alto groan of a steamboat's whistle sounded from the landing, and January saw the carriage swing around from the side of the house. The lamps from the gallery twinkled on its brass and the emerald lacquer of its sides, as Musenda the coachman drove down to the landing to fetch Esteban, returned with a box of new cane-knives from New Orleans.

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 Herc putting his arm around her, leading her away into the woods. She was Herc'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 garçonniere, and had seen several of the house-servants lingering close to listen. The walls were thin. Drifts of sound filtered in from outside.