Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (29 page)

Wondered if he would one day be able to induce Rose to share them with him.

He had not lived alone in twelve years, he realized, save for those two nightmare weeks in Paris following his wife's death.

Arnaud, the Daubray cook, a trim little man with a dapper salt-and-pepper beard, received Harry's bundle with alacrity. “What people waste!” he cried disapprovingly. “My Katie can get herself a whole bodice out of these bits!” Ayasha had been a seamstress, so January could tell that though Harry had snipped and cut the shell-pink fabric to give the impression that it was scrap, it was not, in fact, waste-and what woman in her right mind would discard that much fabric that could so easily be made up into something else?

But Harry had been wise, for the cook promptly launched into a sincere diatribe about theft, while counting out small bits of lead from jar-seals and broken pipe-fittings-evidently his agreed-upon payment for the silk. “Now, it's one thing to trade with real leavings, like that silk or coffee beans that's been used, or tea leaves,” he said, clicking his tongue. “But those field hands will steal anything-anything.”

January, who'd been careful to dress in the wool trousers, blue calico shirt, and corduroy jacket of his earlier incarnation as a respectable house-servant, nodded gravely. “I can understand them stealing food, if their master's a harsh one,” he said, mirroring exactly the cook's more educated-though certainly not Parisian-French. “But stealing things to sell them to a river-trader like this M'sieu Jones I hear so much of...”

“Good Lord, False River Jones!” Arnaud raised his hands in an appeal to heaven. “There are times when I believe the man is employed by the Devil himself, to tempt field hands to theft and flight.”

“Flight?”
January thought of the pirogue waiting under the snags at Catbird Island.

The cook wrapped up all his little scraps of lead-a chunk nearly the size of a woman's fist-and handed it to January. “Half the runaways on this river,” he declared, with the air of one driving home a point, “start out with Jones bringing somebody word of their woman or their child or their mother up in Baton Rouge or down in the city. Now, you sell a young buck, or a likely girl, and they get over it, mostly. Field hands do.” With his clean clothes and shaved chin, as January had expected, Arnaud had assumed him to be a house-servant, in league with him against the coarser spirits of the cane-patch.

So he nodded a self-evident agreement and donned an expression of admiration for the man's philosophic wisdom.

“They do,” continued Arnaud, “until they're down at the levee in the middle of the night trading off a tablecloth or a china cup or half my store of tea for a gourd of liquor! And such liquor-my lord! And all it takes is Jones asking, `You wouldn't be Plautus from Four Corner plantation, would you? I have a letter from your girl there,' and the next day the boy's moping and thinking about how everything was wonderful back on Four Corner, and nobody made him work there, and they fed him chicken and biscuits there, and off he goes. And I ask you, what good does it do?”

“Not any,” said January, in the voice of one aggrieved by the misbehavior of inferiors. “Not any at all.”

“I mean, they have to know they're going to be caught and brought back. They have to know that that part of their life is over. They're never going back there. They're never going to see those people again. Why not just accept that fact and go on?”

January remembered the tears of one night in childhood, when a boy he'd been best friends with-Tano, his name had been-was sold away. He'd wept and wept, sick with the thought that he'd never see that friend again. That for all intents and purposes, Tano was dead. Gone.
Sold down the river.

“Why not?” he agreed.
“You'd think the decent people around here would do something about Jones, wouldn't you?”

“They've tried.” Arnaud shook his head, and with a few quick strokes sliced bread for them both, and cheese and apples. “Near to three weeks ago, Michie Hippolyte heard Jones was back, working his way down the river, and set out to trap him. I could have told him it was no use. Anyone could. It's my belief the field hands heard of it, though Michie Hippolyte kept quiet about his plans, and only took Michie Roger-that's our overseer-and Michie Evard his cousin with him. But the field hands, they eavesdrop and listen and spy. Would you believe it, just the other day...”

January listened patiently for another hour, contributing his mites of agreement and gossip, until he ascertained that Hippolyte Daubray, his overseer, and his cousin, had in fact been seen to depart for their hunt on the night of the Triomphe sugar-mill fire. By dint of careful questioning he learned also that the middle-aged dandy had been “out hunting” when he was supposed to have been supervising the harvest on the afternoon and evening of the seventh, when the mule barn had burned, but the rest of the timing was not so certain. Having seen him, January couldn't imagine that stout sybarite dressing himself in a field hand's rough garb and hat to sneak up and spook the mule team in the roundhouse in the middle of the morning, but, he was aware, appearances could be deceptive indeed.

“An unpleasant situation all around, M'sieu,” Arnaud sighed. “That girl, that Marie-Noel . . .” Across the yard a knot of young ladies of the Daubray household were visible on the back gallery, bright chattering creatures like tropical birds. They were sewing-fancy stitchery, it looked like from here-and one of them sent a maid hurrying across the yard to the kitchen for lemonade. Once he heard their laughter.

“I understand her jealousy.” The cook counted out lemons with a grimace of regret. “Particularly of M'sieu Louis's daughters. They are so beautiful, and Mamzelle Marie-Noel is-well-not. Michie Louis, he did everything he could to prevent the match. He even sent her away to New Orleans to keep her from marrying that awful man, for it was clear as day all he wanted was claim to Michie Raymond's house and lands. But she schemed to get M'sieu Fourchet wound around her thumb, saying no and then saying yes, and he went nearly crazy trying to find out whether that wife of his was dead or not. A bad hat she was, gettin' drunk and actin' up and leavin' him and her children to go back to France as she did. And a good thing, too, that she did turn out to have died, for I would not have put it beyond him to have murdered the poor woman. A drunkard and a brute,” Arnaud added, in a tone rich with satisfaction, “and one day that girl'll find out her mistake, if she hasn't already.”

“Still,” said January thoughtfully, “if one wished to get a letter to someone on the river . . . Where would one find this Michie Jones?”

“Oh, he's due back any time.” The cook scowled his disapproval, and sent the maid off with her wickerwork tray of lemonade, cakes, and marrons glaces. “He generally camps on the far side of Catbird Island, or sometimes up Bayou Prideaux, that little bayou between the Prideaux lands and Lescelles.”

Before departing, January asked to be taken to Mambo Hera's cabin, and with visible distaste Arnaud pointed out a tiny annex on the back of one of the barns, just opposite the long shabby rows of the pighouses. “She asked for that place,” he apologized. “M'sieu Louis, and M'sieu Hippolyte, offered her a room above the kitchen where it was warm, but she wouldn't have anything but a place among her animals. It makes it most awkward to look after her. . . .”

“Thanks,” said January. “I'll find my way.”

As he crossed through the stable yards he could see her already, a little bundle of faded gaudy rags in the shadow of the annex's tiny gallery. Close by the kitchen he saw another old woman plucking chickens and telling stories to the littlest children, the toddlers too old to be carried to the fields with their mothers but too young to do any kind of work, but no one, apparently, had any idea of burdening Mambo Hera with such a task. She sat alone on her bench, staring out with eerie contentment in her cataract-blind eyes, as if she lived on air alone and the sounds and scent it brought her. And January shivered as she turned her face toward him-as she twisted her wry little neck to look up, for she was bent nearly double with arthritis. And he understood what Jeanette had meant, when she said this woman had Power.

Even had he not been told who she was, he thought, he would have known. She was a priestess. Not as Marie Laveau was in town, heiress of traditions adapted and mingled in this new world. Not like Laveau's disciple Olympe, who had studied with the old mambos and learned the ancient medicines and the ancient ways.

Mambo Hera was the ancient way.

She said, “Who this alejo come walk up my path?” and her voice was thin and high and mumbling over toothless gums. Her nostrils flared, scenting him; he saw thought pucker the wrinkled flesh on that little skull that seemed barely bigger than his own great fist. “Stranger come walking from Triomphe, where they're cooking the sugar. . . . Stranger come from town? Come on the boat?”

January realized he must have the smells of the steamboat's soot, of the town market's spices, imbued still in his clothing, along with the light sweat of a few hours' walk. He replied, “I've come down from Triomphe, yes, Mambo. A woman there asked me to give you this.” And he took the little bag of salt from his pocket, and held it out to her. The old woman extended a hand so balled and broken with arthritis that the palm was gouged with healed wounds from her own nails, but she pinched the bag between finger and thumb, and secreted it in her clothing. Her hair was thin, a myriad of white braids framing old country marks on her temples; under the creased and wrinkled lids the opal deadlights seemed indeed to see.

“Trinette?” she asked, and January said, “Yes.”

“That Reuben died?”

“He died.”

She nodded, satisfied. “How did he die? I made a ball of black wax and pins for her, and the ashes of a thrush's wing; told her bury it under the threshold of his house, where he'd walk. I burned a black wax candle for her in the dark of the moon, stuck all through with pins, and the last pin fell out when the moon was full. Was that when he died?”

“Yes,” said January. “That was when he died.”

As he worked his way back through the cane-fields of Refuge, examining the ground along as much as he could of the border between the two properties, January glimpsed Gauthier Daubray's empty house from afar. Seen by daylight, it had originally been a gay pink, faded now but still somehow reminiscent of a single camellia among the monotony of the cane-fields.

January had a good deal of sympathy for Marie-Noel Fourchet: for the young girl's desire to escape Daubray at almost any cost, and for her present difficulties. Yet he had been reminded, in the past week, that there are worse fates than to live with your wealthy relatives under a roof that doesn't leak, and to eat the bread of captivity accompanied by liberal helpings of the chicken of captivity, the ham of captivity, the gravy of captivity, and the marrons glaces of captivity while suffering no worse fate than to mend your beautiful cousins' dresses and watch them catch husbands while you had none for yourself.

Since the confrontation between the Daubray brothers and Simon Fourchet, no cane had been harvested in the Refuge lands. It would have been easy to make one's way through it to the fields of Mon Triomphe, and so almost to the walls of the mill itself. However, January found no evidence that anyone wearing a white man's boots had done so.

He hadn't Shaw's abilities as a tracker, but in default of other evidence it was increasingly clear to him that the hoodoo was someone on Mon Triomphe, whoever else might be paying or urging that someone to mischief. The one exception to this hypothesis might just be False River Jones. And he would know more, or be able to guess more, after he'd seen the man himself.

It had been three days since January's last visit to Catbird Island, so he worked his way river-ward through Refuge's straggly fields til he came to the levee and the snag-tangled, tree-grown batture beyond. Far off he could hear men singing, maybe the gang from Mon Triomphe or maybe the Daubray gang, the rhythm punctuated by the chop of knives.

"Way-o, Madame Caba,

Way-o, Madame Caba,

Way-o, Madame Caba,

Your tignon fell down,

Your tignon fell down."

Blackbirds flitted and dove through the cane. A rabbit sat up and looked at him, soft gray-brown with its little white shirt-front, as if it were going to a ball in town. When the green wall before him lightened he waited, seeing the moving stacks of a downriver boat gliding by. From those slow-moving decks there was nothing to do but watch the banks, and someone would almost certainly point him out: “Hey, there goes some nigger just standin' wastin' time on the batture. . . .” From its tangled shelter he could see them, two Americans in tobacco-brown coats leaning on the rail, spitting into the churning water. A waiter hurrying along the deck with a tray of coffee things. He saw how the man stepped aside in contempt from one of the stevedores on the deck-because he wore rougher clothing, January wondered, or because he was Congo black, African black, and the waiter was fair of skin, quadroon or octoroon?

All going south, to New Orleans.

Why? January blinked sleepily at the sun-glitter where water rippled over a sunken bar. Who were these people, standing at the railings, looking at the banks? What were the patterns in their lives?

When the boat had gone by (Oceana, said the red-and-blue letters on her wheelhouse) he made his way for a mile and a half along the batture, sheltered from view by cypresses and willow logs, thanking God that it was winter and there were few gators around. A cornsnake slipped across his path, sluggish with the cool season, and he remembered how Olympe would trace the veve for Damballah-Wedo in the earth of Congo Square, to summon the Serpent King. Sometimes she'd draw two snakes framing a pillar, sometimes instead of a pillar an elaborate column of crosses and stylized flowers-other nights only a few stars. Shaw had asked him once about this: Like a white man, Shaw thought these things always had to be done the same way to be “right.” But the spirits changed, and their signs shifted, and it all depended on what mood Olympe was in and what she felt that spirit of water and wisdom required January felt he had grown up understanding this.