Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (39 page)

Once they got Tim Rankin's dogs, he reflected, he had better be able to lick all four feet and jump . . . and thereafter keep his feet off the telltale earth.

A rider bound for Tim Rankin's would take the cart path that turned into the little trail he and Harry had used, that ran along the edge of the slough.

The initial search would be downstream, in the direction of Refuge. If he swung upstream-if he obtained a horse long enough at least to lose the dogs-there was a good chance he could work his way to the river in the next parish. Thereafter he could hide out on Catbird Island and wait for Shaw.

If Shaw was coming.
January had been angry at Kiki for saying Hannibal might desert him, but now-on the run for his life-he wasn't so sure.

They would hang Mohammed, he thought, as he reached the shelter of the woods with barely three hours of daylight left and the riders close enough that he could hear their voices, sharp in the distance like bells. Jeanette, too, of course, and Parson and Pennydip.
Probably old Banjo as well. Anyone who'd been on Mon Triomphe thirty-six years ago, when Gowon and his friends had burned the house, murdered the overseer and his family and Fourchet's young wife and infant daughter. Duffy was looking no farther than that, seeing nothing but the specter of slave rebellion, without examining the pattern closely to see whether it fit or only appeared to fit.

Well, you can't tell about niggers. Settling himself in the long grass of the slough, January could almost hear the man saying it. Reason enough not to search for motive, or logic, or any coherent chain of likelihood. A white man had been murdered by his slaves. Every man of them who held slaves-or hoped to hold slaves in the future when he was richer-would be uneasy, too frightened by the recent events in Virginia to consider that January hadn't even been on the place when the trouble had started.

And by flight he had branded himself guilty. Reasonable or not, there was little likelihood he'd survive capture.

You can't tell about niggers.

Well, he thought, leveling his gun on the path that led toward Tim, Rankin's house, you can sure tell about this one.

He would have, he knew, only the one shot.

And the shot, if it failed, would give away his hiding place to the rider whose hoofbeats he could feel through the vibration of the ground.

Virgin Mary, help me get out of this. He was back in New Orleans, the mob of white men around him roaring with laughter as they razored his clothes off him with their knives. Help me get that horse.

There was an oak tree the rider would have to swing around, a low branch he'd have to duck, not twenty feet from where January lay. Smoke from the burning fields of Lescelles stung January's eyes and he blinked the tears away. His mind focused, narrowed, his whole being relaxed and waiting, concentrating on the single shot he'd have. He propped his arms on the elbows, leveled the barrel. Virgin Mary . . .

. . . help me kill this man?

As if someone had pulled the bung from a keg he felt the fire of concentration, the focus of his mind, leave him in a rush.

Virgin Mary, help me kill this man, who is your son as I am your son.

The hoofbeats were audible now.

He's a white man. He'll shoot me running, shoot to kill.

I need the horse. They'll have the dogs on me, hang me. This is my one chance. He tried for a split second to tell himself that he didn't really intend to kill the rider, but of course he did-he'd already figured out where to hide the body, in the long grass of the slough.

Anonymous rifle, anonymous bullet.
Shaw's not coming, and even if he guesses he'll understand. No one will know for sure.

Except you.
Will you speak of it to your son.

He wanted to yell at her, Shut UP! I don't have time for this! But you didn't talk that way to God's mother.

And she was right.

Trembling, he closed his eyes. Heard the hoofbeats check and slow as the man passed under and around that perfectly extended tree limb. Heard them pick up speed.

They're going to get the dogs. The afternoon air hung silent, even the singing in the fields hushed. Bumper and Nero must have come out with the news that Ben had run away and they were sayin' at the house as how it was him that poisoned Michie Fourchet. . . .

Here in the cipriere the smell of cooking sugar was less, the smoke of the burning fields at Lescelles stronger, like sand in his lungs and eyes. Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, he prayed helplessly, show me the way. If I'm not going to turn outlaw-if I'm not going to become the man who steals other men's food and liquor and salt just because I might need them to trade, who'd kill a man from ambush just to steal his horse please show me what I need to do.

The smoke and the scent of ashes grew stronger, a hot reek that stung and burned and drowned out all other scents.

January heard the dogs behind him as he strode north through the cipriere. He stuck to water where he could, wading knee-deep and thigh-deep and waist-deep in green stagnant ponds, the few turtles not sleeping in their burrows turning to regard him somnolently from the branches where they sat. Sometimes he could cut across the drier ground by making stepping-stones of cypress knees, or wading through hackberry brambles. Sometimes he was able to climb a tree and work his way through the branches monkey-wise.

But all this slowed him down. What he needed now was speed.

Sun slanted through the thinning western trees, sun blurred with smutty yellow veils of smoke.

January dropped from the trees and raced over the dry ground, the pack howling behind him. Through the trees he saw the air wavering as heat beat on his face, saw the quarter mile of ash-covered, smoking stubble-rows where the fire had already passed. The smoke nearly hid the men working far out to the sides with the water buckets, dim shapes, like demons in a nightmare. Smoke veiled the hot ruined carpet of earth and ash.

There was a ditch filled with last night's rainwater just beyond the edge of the trees, like a little moat delineating white man's land from the territory of runaways. January lay down in this and rolled, soaking his clothes; got up and shoved his stolen food and stolen salt into his shirt again, his little bundle of passes. He remembered Rose's experiments with alcohol, and regretfully left the liquor by the ditch after taking one big hard swig of it.

Then he picked up the gun again and ran.

His cheap brogans smote the hot ash and cinders of the field, kicked live embers, like High John the Conqueror striding through Hell. The buzzards ascended like cinders themselves on the columns of heat, grasshoppers bounced and buzzed around him, and the smoke wrapped him in scorching veils, rendering him unseen.

Virgin Mary, guard me, he thought, with the pounding rhythm of his flight. Hide me in your cloak and keep me safe. The wall of fire loomed ahead of him, heat growing, hammering. As you covered over Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, so cover me....

He could hear the dogs barking among the trees as he plunged into the flame.

Heat and smoke and suffocation all around him and then he was through, with the leaping wall of gold and crimson flame behind him now, following him, and panicked rats and squirrels skittering madly around his feet. He ran along the row through smoke thick as muslin curtains, watching the fire that raced and crept over the litter of leaves, weeds, trash, and maiden cane. The long lines of fire extended before him on either side. Through the smoke he could make out shapes moving in the gloom, women and children waiting with clubs for the small game to flee before him, men with water buckets, ready to douse down the fire if it looked to be growing too big to control. Through the licking flames on his left January could see them, a hundred feet or so ahead. On the right the fields had been burned that morning. Last night's rain set up a smolder and smoke. Night was drawing in.

Before he got close enough that anyone could say for certain what they saw through the smoke, January veered right, springing over the spear-points of the cut cane-rows, dodging through the oncoming stringers of the fire. On the sides of the field, the line of fire was a reef of heat and flame, scorching his skin and making the water steam in his clothing as he dodged through its channels and plunged into the smoky world of ash and burned earth beyond.

There he dropped immediately to the ground, stretching out in one of the ditches that had bordered the cane-rows, so close to the burning field that sparks fell on him. He could hear the hounds baying, frustrated, in the distance, nearly a mile behind him now at the borders of the cipri6re. Ash and burning buried his scent. Now and then a leaf of flame would gyre lazily above the retreating inferno, spin and loop as it was consumed and drift, still burning, to the ground. “Sovra tutto / sabbion, dun cader lento,” whispered January, the words of Dante coming back to him. “Pidvian di fuoco dilutate falde/ come di neve in Alpi senza vento. ”

Flakes of fire falling like snow in the Alps when no wind blows.

Like the damned beneath that endless snowfall of fire he lay on the burned earth, waiting for the darkness to thicken. Dante had written those words concerning the Hell of the Violent. Those who kill without thinking. Who feel that their fear or their rage entitles them, and do not ask the names of those they kill.

The baying of the dogs faded. The voices of the women and children disappeared as their frightened game took shelter, like January, under night's protecting veil. Only the voices of the men remained, those few who stayed out in the night with the water cart, making sure the fires didn't get out of hand.

But he'd accomplished one thing, he thought, the red-hot goad of panic subsiding in his gut. Two, if you counted saving his own neck from the noose.

He'd laid a trail that definitely led north. Any escaping slave in his senses would keep on heading in that direction, instead of doubling back. The waning moon wouldn't rise til late, and in any case the sky was still densely overcast, with the promise of fog by morning.

Despite the darkness he had little problem in following the cane-rows riverward. The Lescelles hands were burning the bagasse from the mill in great heaps all along the levee, as was the custom at the end of roulaison. The yellow glare of the flame led him on, through thickening mists that held and condensed the smoke, until he seemed to be passing through another of Dante's landscapes, night sulfurous with distant fires.

Through the darkness came voices, singing, incongruously gay. Hands clapping time, and January's own heart involuntarily lifted. For these people, the worst was over. The backbreaking part of the job was done. Michie Sugarcane had been carried to the mill, defeated, as his father had carried that last captive enemy in the dream. They'd made it through again. They'd survived another year.

"Jump, frog, your tail gonna burn,

Jump, frog, your tail gonna burn,

Jump, frog, your tail gonna burn,

Be brave, it'll grow again. . . ."

Men and women called out, laughing, their breath gold clouds in the raw night. A woman danced between two blazes on the levee, waving her red tignon like a flag, and the mists glowed around with the fires. Everyone would get more sleep. Someone at least from every family would be able to get the overgrown garden-patches cleared, get the yams dug, spend a little more time cooking so there'd be the comfort of eating good food on your own doorstep again. There'd be time January remembered, standing in the darkness beyond the range of that hot woolly light-for his mother to sing him and Olympe songs again, before they fell asleep. Time to wash clothes and air bedding, and keep the cabin clean. He heard the voices of children, darting and running around the fires and in and out of the darkness, and an ache came back to his heart for them, remembering his own joy at such times.

Joy more precious than gold, he thought, because there was so little of it, and it was so hard won. Careful to stay beyond the range of the fire, cloaked in the darkness and the mist, he climbed the levee's shallow breast, to, where the river's curve deposited a huge tangle of snags, grown up with brush during low water. The fog lay thick, and with luck would hide him, though the firelight from above let him pick his way among them, the voices on the levee a comfort. Keeping just outside the range of the fires' smudgy light, he settled himself among the snags.

He'd have to wash out his clothing, he thought-it was black as any Miltonian devil with soot and burned dirt. That meant a fire, probably on the far side of Catbird Island and sheltered from sight of the river, to keep him warm through the night while it dried. With any luck Shaw would arrive tomorrow, possibly with Hannibal in tow. . . .

If Hannibal was capable of travel.

January's jaw tightened. In some ways, he admitted, Simon Fourchet had had a point about trusting those who used opium. Still . . .

He dug from his trouser pocket the wallet containing the passes Hannibal had written. As he took them out he toyed with ideas of how to slip onto the levee come morning and mix up soot and tree-gum into something resembling ink. It would take a clever line of talk, however, to convince a posse he wasn't the man they were looking for, if he happened to be cornered. There weren't a lot of six-foot, three-inch coal-black Negroes wandering free about the countryside. From the island he could keep an eye on the landing, always provided Duffy and his stalwarts didn't decide that the island was a good place to look for a fugitive.

In that case . . .

A flash of virulent green among the packet of papers caught his attention. January frowned, the color half familiar, and flipped back among the tight-folded sheets. He'd thought the packet was a little thick.

Between the two undated passes a crumpled sheet was wedged, whose handwriting didn't match the fiddler's graceful Italianate script.

French handwriting.
The sort of script, in fact, that had been beaten into him at the St. Louis Academy for Young Gentlemen on Rue St.-Philippe, and nothing like Hannibal's very English hand.

January held the paper up, so that the light from the bonfire showed up the writing more clearly.