Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (24 page)

“Dear God.” Kiki's eyes were wide with shock. When he set her down to open the door she clung to the doorpost, staring back at the flames in horror.

“What do you have for burns?” January scooped her up again, carried her into the little chamber and over to the bed she had shared first with Reuben, then with Gilles. Though none of the field hands had spoken of it, the presence of the healing herbs in the basket told him she did at least some doctoring. “I'll need bandages, beeswax . . .”

“There's wax in the kitchen.” She started up from the bed and he pressed her back by her shoulder, met her eyes. “Oh, for God's sake, Ben, I've cooked dinner for twenty people five hours after I birthed a child.”

“Well, somebody else got the fire going tonight. You have sassafras? More willow bark?” He'd already gone to the hearth, thrust a stick of kindling into the banked embers, and breathed on it gently, adding more kindling as the yellow flame licked up. The brighter light showed him her medicine box beside the bed. “May I?”

She nodded, and he flipped back the lid, sniffed the tiny bundles wrapped in worn clean sheeting. “Make yourself a tea of these and take it,” he ordered, setting willow bark and briory on the bed beside her. “Then lie down and stay down. I'll be back as soon as I can.”

Bandages and herbs in his pockets, he set out for the quarters at a run.

Ajax's house, first in the line and nearest the mill, was a torch-even as January arrived the driver flung himself out of the flames, naked and gasping, with his two-year-old daughter Milly clasped to his chest. Rodney's little son lay screaming on a blanket near the cane, his mother Ancilla crouched above him, frantically pouring water over him from a gourd. The child's shrieks made a keening, hideous background to the greedy din of the fire.

Rodney's cabin was ablaze and Dan and Minerva's just beyond. It was just past midnight and most of the inhabitants of the quarters had sunk into the first depths of heavy sleep-Giselle and Emerald were running along the dirt street, pounding on doors, thrusting into dark cabins to drag their friends out of paralyzing slumber and shove them to safety. Someone had gotten to the plantation bell. It was clanging furiously, the iron racket penetrating the dreams of the unfree as no other sound could.

“Get the buckets and make a line for the river!” Fourchet was yelling. “Get the trash away from the walls!”

January slung his coat into a safe corner near the mule barn, caught up a rake, and joined the gang of women frantically clawing the piles of loose trash--cane-tops and leaves and fragments of dropped wood--away from the walls of the first woodshed, the one nearest the mill, which had not yet caught. The second and third, stocked and ready with enough wood to complete the sugar-boiling, lay downwind. If the wind didn't shift, the first shed and the mill would be safe. He saw Thierry, in shirt and boots and no trousers, thrusting and shoving men toward the burning sheds. “Pull the walls out! Save the wood!” Looked beside him and saw Madame Marie-Noel, dressed with a shawl around her shoulders, wielding a rake beside the nightgowned housemaid Ariadne. Saw Esteban and Robert, both in their nightshirts, running from the direction of the house.

Men were already forming up a line past the smithy and the mill, across the open square and Thierry's house, through the oaks and over the levee to the river. Nearly two hundred yards, buckets being passed from hand to hand, while Herc, stumbling and naked, shouted a second gang into order to clear the trash from the walls of the mill. Frenzied mules brayed and kicked in their barn, the horses in the stable, maddened by the scent of the smoke. Another woman shrieked “Claire! Claire!” Juno, January identified her: He'd seen the baby Claire only that morning, one of the swaddled infants along the edge of the field. . . .

Through the battlefield scud he glimpsed Hannibal in night-gear and Agamemnon trouserless in a ruffled linen shirt, running past with hooks and axes to join the women in the quarters. In the milling mass, the blinding smoke, they doused Random and Charity's house, Rachel and Chevalier's, with the contents of every rain barrel they could find, desperately trying to keep the fire from spreading along the line. Water flashed in the red glare as January ran to join the gang pulling at the rickety wooden walls of the third shed, the one nearest the quarters, dragging the burning wood out and dousing it.

Fourchet yelled something, plunged in with a small gang of men to drag at the woodshed walls. His hat was gone but he was fully dressed-when had the man last slept?-and his gray hair framed a face twisted with fury and desperation. January was beside him, shrinking back from the hammering heat of the flames, when someone yelled, “It's coming down!”

Looking up, January saw the wall of burning logs above them crumple. It seemed to take forever, as time does in a dream, the light growing brighter and brighter as the flames poured down onto their heads. Thinking about it later he realized how easy it would have been to dodge out himself and leave Fourchet standing. The old man had certainly earned that kind of death.

But whether because he'd spent his adult life tending burns and trauma, or because the Virgin Mary had, in fact, put in his heart the forgiveness he had grudgingly asked for-or simply because he could not let another man die three strides from him if he could help it-he hooked one massive arm around the planter's chest and shoulders as he plunged back, dragging him bodily from under the collapsing logs.

“Father!”
Robert was shouting, clutching at Fourchet from the other side as they stood panting in the maelstrom of men. “Father!”

Fourchet started to speak, then doubled over, choking, face flushed dark in the firelight.

“Get him out of the heat.” January scooped the old man effortlessly up in his arms-after Kiki he was nothing-and carried him back toward the barns. “Sit him up. Let him breathe. Keep him still.” Confusion swirled around them, the fire's roar blending with the sinister, breathing rattle of the wind in the canes. The scattered wood and slumped walls of the third shed were little more than a shapeless bonfire now, pouring rivers of flame at the hard bright watching stars. In the quarters Ajax's house collapsed, then Rodney's, like shacks built of cards to which some malicious child had applied a match.

The child Bo's screaming was silenced. January heard a woman crying, howling her grief. For the first few moments he thought Fourchet too would die, and cursed that he had no medicines, no preparations of any kind. He could only grip the broad flat shoulders in his hands, and feel the old man's desperate spasms as he fought for breath.

“His heart?”
Robert knelt beside him, pressed a silver brandy flask into his hand.

January nodded. Esteban yelled, “Save the wood! Save the wood!” and Herc staggered past carrying a young man from the second gang-Marquis was his name-who'd been burned in the collapse of the third shed.

“Get him a blanket,” said January. “Anything, keep him warm-”

“Get that devil's piss away from me!” Fourchet spat out the mouthful January had given him and sat up, eyes crazed in the flaring light. “You're trying to ruin me! Thrust me back into hell . . .”

“Get him hartshorn,” said January. “Baptiste, run back to the house and get hartshorn and a blanket, fast!” The butler, his coat awry and his white shirt smutched everywhere with soot, bolted for the house like a dog coursing hares.

“Here.” Someone pressed a medicine bottle into January's hand; he looked up and saw Kiki, who shouldn't have been on her feet.

“Water.”
The ammoniac reek of the hartshorn was far too strong to drink. Everyone looked around, but the rain barrels and cisterns and jars of drinking water had mostly been dumped on the barn walls, and the mill. January settled for holding the bottle under Fourchet's nose. The planter coughed violently, but opened his eyes, and his breathing seemed to be more steady. He tried at once to sit up and January forced him back against the barn wall. “It's being taken care of, sir.”

“The wood . . .”

“It's being taken care of. Can you breathe?”

Someone put a blanket into his hand and he wrapped his former master in it: a slave's quilt, strange gaudy colors, unfamiliar shapes. Other voices behind him, lost children calling for their mamas, women crying their children's names.
Juno calling “Claire!
Claire!” over and over like a machine.

For the first time January looked around him and saw Kiki, and Robert, and Cornwallis, and Harry. Trust Harry to find a way of looking like he was doing something without putting himself in any position of risk. To Cornwallis, January said, “Who's the nearest doctor?” Then he remembered to glance at Robert, as if seeking white advice.

“Dr. Laurette, in Baton Rouge.”
January guessed there were American doctors in Donaldsonville across the river, but guessed too that Fourchet would no more submit himself to an American doctor than he'd trust an American steamboat master-and no wonder. Robert continued, “I understand that the most modern medical thinking these days is that a patient should be given brandy immediately, to stimulate the system, followed by mild electrical massage of the hands and feet. There's a doctor in New Orleans-”

“You're not going to give me brandy and that's final,” snarled Fourchet, silencing his son. “Or stinking opium, like your mother. Marie-Noel . . . Marie-Noel . . .” He sank back against the wall again as Baptiste came dashing back from the house with blankets and-thank God for the man's good sense-a glass of bromide diluted in water. January applied this to Fourchet's lips.

“Michie Georges-Michie Hannibal's father-in-law, sir” January dipped a nervous little bow to Robert and reminded himself to say li instead of il--“he gets took like this. I'm sorry if I done give myself big dewlaps over it, sir, and spoke as I didn't ought to, but the doctor back in town, he tell me what-all to do and he say, `Don't you take no back-chat from nobody or your master a dead fish.' ”

“No, it's quite all right.” Still looking put out at having his advice refused, Robert screwed shut his brandy flask and pocketed it. He'd pulled on trousers under his nightshirt and was barefoot, his hair rumpled and his face now blackened with smoke and soot. Madame Fourchet came up, flaxen hair hanging in confusion down her back and her arm wrapped around her swollen belly as if in pain; January got quickly to his feet and offered her his arm, and she shook her head and waved both him and Robert away.

“I'm well,” she said. “Thank you.” In the firelight, she looked alarmingly white about the mouth. “What about the children in the quarters? Was anyone badly hurt?” She'd lost her shawl in the confusion and January saw that she wore no corset under her dress, not even the shaped stays of maternity. Only a thin shift, and the dress itself had been merely caught together at the waist and nape with its buttons, the laces pulled any old how, as if she'd dragged them tight herself.

“I want to see, I want to see!” Jean-Luc came dashing from the direction of the house in his nightshirt, pursued by Madame Helene's maid Vanille. Now that things were a little quieter, January could hear Fantine screaming like a steam whistle from the gallery outside the nursery. “Is Grandpere going to die? Did all the slaves get roasted? I want to see!”

The blaze was dying down as the wood was scattered and doused. The reek of burned cane was thick among the gritty stink of smoke. In the confusion the bagasse shed nearby had taken fire, too, and being too far away to further ignite anything was blazing unchecked and unregarded. Women and children drifted through the mirk from the direction of the levee, buckets in hand, like the damned stumbling out of Hell. From among them Rodney ran to his wife, stood like a man stunned above the silent body of their son. Ajax and Hope clung together, Hope weeping as she held their many children close. Thierry cursed and struck a man.

Ajax took a deep breath, and called out, “Let's take a count,” as January and Harry between them lifted Fourchet to carry him back to the house. “Make sure there's no one missin'. Soon as it gets light let's get cuttin' saplings, make a shed for what's left of the wood so it won't get wet next time it rains. . . .”

It occurred to January that he'd just saved the life of one of the few men whom he had actually ever dreamed about killing.

When he'd seen Fourchet safely put to bed, with Robert and Madame and Cornwallis in attendance, January returned to the plantation hospital. Kiki-duly limping on a bandaged foot-was there already, mixing poultices and applying dressings to burns.

Rodney's Bo and Juno's Claire were dead. The young man Marquis had some bad burns but was already talking sensibly and trying to make a joke or two with his friends through the pain; Emerald had broken her wrist getting Chevalier's daughter Princesse out through the cabin window after the door caught fire behind her. Dumaka, sick with pneumonia in his cabin, had been overcome with smoke and dragged out by his wife Fayola.

In all, ten men and two women had suffered various degrees of blisters, burns, and scorches. After making sure all were cared for and sending Kiki to bed, January collected a shovel from the storeroom beneath the house, and walked out through the cane-rows to the moss-gatherers' hut, where he buried all evidence that a woman had aborted her child there. Then he climbed the levee and changed the blue bandanna to green. By that time it was dawn.

“When we catch the nigger that did this,” Thierry was saying, as he and Esteban surveyed the wet heaps of cordwood, the charred ruin of the sheds, “I'm personally going to skin him-or her-and make a tobacco pouch out of the pelt.”

An acre of cane, ground and boiled, consumed nearly twenty cords of wood. Throughout the year, once the cane was in the ground and the corn planted, cutting wood in the cipriere was a constant, getting ready for the next roulaison.

Approximately four hundred of the plantation's six hundred acres of cane still stood uncut, and at a guess-surveying the long wet row of scorched logs, half-charred salvage, debris collected from the ruinsJanuary estimated there were about a thousand cords of usable wood. Or would be, once they dried out.