Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (34 page)

“How'd it happen?” January leaned on the handle of his shovel. “It's one thing killin' a man who's caught you tryin' to escape. But a risin'-turnin' on the whole family-they'd have to know the militia'd be on 'em.”

“I don't think they cared.” Mohammed gazed out into the dark trees. The light of the torches, stuck in a circle around the burying-ground, edged his cropped gray hair with gold. “You reach a point where you don't, you know. And in those days it was different. There wasn't the American Army, as there is now. Back then, there wasn't more than a dozen houses along this part of the river, and no soldiers closer than town. It didn't seem so dangerous then. We just figured-Gowon and his boys just figured-they'd disappear into the woods and never be found. But of course they was.”

It was the first time anyone had spoken the name of the only man January had ever learned of who'd refused to do what Simon Fourchet ordered.

The clouds had passed with last night's rain; the day had been windy and cold. The dark that pressed so hard on the fluttering spooky torchlight made it easy to believe tales of Platt-eye devils and uneasy souls that could find no rest.

“Was they hanged?” asked Nathan.

Mohammed shook his head. “That wasn't what the Spanish did, to slaves that killed their masters. They tied 'em to stakes and burned 'em alive.”

“Lord,” whispered Nathan, and January, who recalled those days, and the Spanish rule, crossed himself.

After a time Mohammed went on, “But I don't think Gowon and his boys even thought so much about it as that, or they'd have waited til Michie Fourchet came home. It was summertime, and the moon full, and Michie Fourchet, he'd been drinking a week, and was whippin' mad. He was a young man then and couldn't abide to be crossed, not by God, not by any man. He whipped Gowon twice, three times that week, and the others, too. But it was him beatin' Layla, that was Gowon's daughter, that set it off. She was twelve years old, and she died of it next day, after Michie Fourchet had ridden off down the river road. That's when Gowon and the others went and burned the house, and cut to pieces all those they met, that none should know which way they'd gone.”

And in a soft voice he sang,

"He went, he cut his daughter down,

He carried her to his hut,

He went, he cut his daughter down,

He carried her to his hut.

Papa, I'm afraid I'm dying,

Papa, I'm going to die."

"He said, He owe me a daughter,

I got no child no more.

He said,

He owe me a daughter,

I got no child no more.

'Papa, I'm afraid I'm dying,

Papa, I'm going to die. . . ."

The men took up the refrain-softly, very softly, as they cut the heavy soil with their shovels, for even so memorializing one man's rebellion would be, January knew, a whipping offense. But Gowon was owed it, he thought, for the daughter he had lost. For all the children that all of them had lost, Bo and Claire and that infant of Gilles and Kiki who would never be born. For Ajax, untying his own daughter from the whippingframe, to which he'd surrendered her rather than risk bringing the consequences of revolt down on all those under his care. For January's own father, who had watched his son and his daughter taken away.

"They carry them down to the river,

They throw them in the stream.

They carry them down to the river,

The river.

They throw them in the stream.

Papa, I'm afraid I'm dying . . ."

The thought clicked suddenly in January's tired mind. Thierry lying on the snags and deadfalls within feet of the river.

Someone gutted him and then cut his throat, and left him sitting up. . . .

Why didn't they just pitch him into the river?

He was left there on purpose. January had assumed that someone had later come and laid him down, but why was he left there at all?

He was LEFT THERE. Left THERE: Moved from somewhere else, to draw attention to Catbird Island and away from the site of the actual killing.

Moved by someone who had access to a boat.

“Near enough to six feet,” decided Nathan. “I ain't gonna waste more sweat on him.” The men walked back to Thierry's cottage and from there, while the others were loading the hastily made coffin onto a wood cart, January went to the back of the big house and told Baptiste they were ready to lay Michie Thierry down.

The butler went inside. Lamps burned in the dining room, and January could hear Fourchet's voice, hoarse and incoherent, from his bedroom. Still furious over something, by the sound of it. Then dim forms moved in the shadows under the gallery, and light from the windows caught Madame Fourchet's straight pale hair, and the sheen of Madame Helene's persimmon-colored silk. “Well, if you find it amusing to go out in the cold like that in your condition by all means do so, but it has never been the custom here, I assure you.” The night was not more icy than Helene's voice. “He was a coarse rude man and I'm sure he got what was coming to him for not controlling himself better around the negresses.”

“He must have a Christian burial.” Ariadne was helping Madame on with her heavy cloak.

“Oh, honestly, my dear, I don't think the man had been in a church since he was baptized! I'm sure he wouldn't care.”

“All the more reason to give him one.”

Madame Helene let out a little titter, but when she got no response she burst out querulously, “If you must go, I wish you will tell me what I am to do if Monsieur Fourchet gets restless? He's going to need you. . . .” There was fear in her voice. It wasn't that she didn't think. Thierry needed a Christian burial, January realized. She simply didn't want to be left alone with her father-in-law.

The gentle wind lifted Madame Fourchet's cloak as she descended the steps and made the six lights of Lundy's candelabra jerk and dance. The women unloading the cane carts at the roaring orange hell-mouth of the mill, the men dragging wood and stoking the fires, crowded to the mill doors. January heard Old Ney's hoarse shouting and the crack of a whip within.

Madame read the service for the dead in her small, flat voice, and dropped a branch of Christmas roses-the only flowers available at that season in her predecessor's garden-into the grave. Then Lundy walked her back to the house, and the men worked by torchlight in the cold to fill in the hole. As they walked back past the slaves' graveyard, January looked out into the darkness under the trees there where the graves of Gilles and Reuben lay, remembering the fading names on the other graves, the rebels whose names would vanish once Mohammed died. . . .

And a dark scribble on one of the new headboards caught his eye.

“Let me take that,” he said, reaching for Mohammed's torch. “I'll follow you along soon.”

“Better not.” Nathan glanced around him worriedly. “It's not a good thing, to be walkin' in the graveyard on a moonless night. Not ever, come to that. There's witches that wait in the darkness.”

“We'll wait for you,” said Gosport.

“I'll be quick.” Torch in hand, January waded through the weeds to the twin graves. The china Kiki had placed around the new-turned earth glinted in the yellow light, like a black cat's teeth when it mews, tiny and vicious, and the bodies decomposing in the shallow earth filled the air with a musty nastiness. The names, REUBEN and GILLES, were already fading from the wooden headboards.

The new mark on Reuben's board seemed doubly clear.

It was a veve, surrounded by the crosses and stars of protection and care. The mark of Papa Legba, the guardian of all crossroads, guide of the dead.
A blessing-sign, to leave on a grave.

Papa Legba, open the gate, the women would sing in Congo Square, on the hot summer evenings when the slaves' produce market would be set up there, and men would gamble under the sycamore trees, and watch torchlight flicker over the faces of the dancers. Papa Legba, open the gate.

Only sometimes they'd sing instead, Open the gate, Saint Peter, open the gate--gonna pass through, Saint Peter,  gonna pass through.

January stared at the symbols for some time, trying to fit times and patterns together in his mind with the memory of a woman's face in the lantern-light of a moss-gatherer's blood-smelling hut. He was very thoughtful as he walked back toward the house.

“Can you get me in to see Michie Fourchet?” Baptiste, though clearly a little startled to find January in the kitchen yard at noon when he should have been eating lunch with the main gang in the field, at least didn't look down his nose at his filthy clothes. “I'll do what I can,” the butler said, though he sounded doubtful. “But you know Michie Fourchet isn't well.”

“Believe me, I wouldn't disturb him unless I felt it urgent,” said January. “But if he's thinking he's safe, and the place is safe, because Quashie and Jeanette have fled, he's mistaken. They didn't kill Thierry, and I don't think they were behind the hoodoo. Please tell him that.”

Baptiste frowned. In the ten days he'd been on Mon Triomphe, January had seen the little man recover his confidence and settle in as head of the servants, aided largely by the fact that nobody in the household liked his main competitor for the role, Cornwallis. As Baptiste studied him now, January could see he was thinking, not simply of the meaning of the words, but of what they implied in terms of the household---and the plantation-at large. “What do you know about the hoodoo, Ben?” he asked. “You aren't even from here.”

“I know what I've heard,” answered January. “And I know what I saw, out on Catbird Island and down by the levee on Saturday, when that first lot of wood arrived. And I think if Michie Fourchet thinks he's safe now he's in more danger than ever. And so is every person on this place.”

Baptiste bit his lip, and his dark eyes shifted in the direction of the mill. January understood what he was thinking. It was up to the butler to act as gatekeeper of who entered or did not enter the house. Should Esteban return from the mill while January was in his father's room, or Madame Helene happen to encounter him on the gallery, it would be up to Baptiste to explain the presence of a dirty and stinking field hand in the white folks' sacred purlieus.

He gave January another quick look-over, then appeared to decide there wasn't much that could be done. “All right. I'll take you in through Michie Fourchet's office. But you got to be quick.”

“I'll be quick.”

They climbed the steps to the back gallery, with Baptiste keeping a watchful eye out toward the mill. He stopped, put his head through the dining room French doors to make sure Lundy was setting the table properly (“Turn those knives over so the blades point in toward the plate, would you? Thanks.”), then escorted January through Fourchet's small office, and into the bedroom with its drawn curtains and pale blue-washed walls. There too was a portrait of the first Madame Fourchet, stiff and odd against a background of banana plants and flowers, leading January to deduce that Juana Villardega had been either born in New Orleans or brought there as a young girl-she looked about sixteen. On the other side of the chimney-breast hung a much-better-executed pastel of the current Madame, its size and the twin houses of Refuge and Mon Triomphe in the background testifying that it had been paid for by her husband, not her relatives.

These January noticed only in passing, for his attention was riveted instantly by the man in the bed, and the smell of vomit and voided blood that choked the close air of the room.

“Michie Fourchet!” He stepped closer, shocked. Fourchet raised his head like a cornered dog. In the dimness his eyes had a slick silvery gleam. “What do you want?”

January glanced back at Baptiste, standing in the doorway. The table next to the bed was thick with bottles and glasses, a water pitcher and spoons, two or three towels neatly folded. The man has a heart condition, thought January. What are they giving him? That doctor from Baton Rouge isn't puking a man with a strained heart, surely? But the only bottles on the bedside table among the chewed cigar stubs were bromide-at least three empties-hartshorn, and the pitcher of water, the ammoniac smell cutting the sinuses like a silvery knife.

“I'd like to ask your permission to search the boundaries of the plantation for signs of Thierry's murderer. If you look at where the body was found, sir, and the fact that-”

“Thierry wouldn't murder anyone.” January blinked.

Fourchet rolled his head a little on the pillow. He looked as if someone had siphoned flesh from some areas of his face and pumped water into others, and his hands wavered across the coverlet. “Anyway that was years ago. A man can do what he likes with his own slaves.” The words came out in short bursts, as a baby will dribble food. He tilted his head.

“Bitch lied to me,” he added. “Too sodden with opium to even turn them over. Thought she was too good for the place. Paris was all she ever thought about.”

“Michie Fourchet?” January stepped forward, and Fourchet pulled back his lips in a snarl.

“Get out of my room. What the hell you doing letting a field hand in my room, Gilles?”

Baptiste caught January's arm. “You'd better go.” January pulled free, still staring at the face that was at once sunken and bloated, the puffy pale yellowish bulges beneath the eyes, the line of scarlet along the gums. “How long has he been like this?”

“Get him out of here!” Fourchet snatched up an empty bottle from the table beside him and flung it, subsiding at once with a gasp of pain, hand pressed, not to his side, but to the small of his back. “Esteban!
Esteban!”

Baptiste thrust January before him through the office, and the two of them nearly ran into Esteban in the door that led out onto the shade of the gallery.

“What the hell is going on?” demanded the planter's son, as more crashes resounded from Fourchet's room. It sounded like the old man had swept the entire contents of the bedside table to the floor. “What the hell is this man doing in here? Didn't I say my father wasn't to be disturbed? Go in there,” he added savagely to Baptiste, as the sounds of violent retching followed from the sickroom, and Madame Fourchet, her fair hair hanging disordered about her shoulders, darted along the gallery and into the dining room, and through to her husband's side.