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

“Then you'll just have to be careful,” said Olympe, “won't you?”

January visited a free attorney of color whom he knew, who drew up a variety of documents attesting to and reinforcing the already recorded and notarized fact of January's freedom. Copies were deposited with Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard, with January's mother and both sisters, and with John Davis, owner of the Theatre d'Orleans and various gambling parlors and public ballrooms about the city, who for two years had been one of January's principal employers. Two copies went to Simon Fourchet's lawyer.

“Not that it will do the slightest bit of good,” said January grimly, “should Fourchet's overseer, or his son, turn out to be a cheat and a slave-thief. Altruism is all very well, and I'm really sorry for those folks on Mon Triomphe, but I'd just as soon not try to convince some cracker cotton-farmer in the Missouri Territory to write to the New Orleans City Notary about whether or not I'm a free man.”

Lieutenant Shaw, slouched so deeply in a corner of the big stone watchroom of the town prison, the Cabildo, that he appeared to be lying in the chair on his shoulder blades with his boots on his desk, raised mild gray eyes from the documents, and scratched with businesslike thoroughness under his shabby collar. “Prob'ly wouldn't do you much good anyways, if'n they're like my uncle Zenas-Zenas and his family went to Missouri to grow cotton.” Shaw scratched again, and looped a long strand of his greasy ditchwater hair back around one ear.

“Zenas can plug a squirrel through the eye at two hundred and fifty yards and build a house from the ground up includin' the furniture usin' only an ax, but he can't write for sour owl-shit. You think you'll be in much more danger there than you'd be just walkin' around here?”

Shaw asked the question sincerely, and sincerely, January had to admit that in certain sections of New Orleans-the entrepot and hub of slave-trading for the entire region-he was probably in more peril of kidnapping than he'd be on Mon Triomphe.

“It's easy for you to say. Sir.” In his tone he heard his own defeat. The thought of what he was going to do made his stomach clench with dread, but he knew that Rose and Olympe were right. He understood that he could not feel anger that none would give justice to slaves, if he wasn't willing to work for that justice himself.

“I understand that,” said Shaw. “And I hope you understand I'd do it, if'n I didn't have certain physical limitations that'd make me middlin' unconvincin' as a cane-hand.”

January met his eyes with a bitter retort on his lips, but he knew Shaw. And he saw in the Kentuckian's quiet gaze that yes, this man would go out into the fields to trap the murderer . . .

If he didn't happen to be white.
And, as he'd said, a middling unconvincing cane-hand.

So he only said, “What? You don't think you could pass?” and Shaw relaxed and returned his unwilling grin. January reached into the pocket of his neat brown corduroy livery for his watch and tightened his lips when it wasn't there. The watch was silver, bought in Paris after he'd given up work as a surgeon and returned to being a musician. As a surgeon he'd never been able to afford such a thing, for even in France no one would choose a black surgeon over a white.

At least in France, he reflected dourly, he wouldn't have had to go searching through pawnshops for weeks to recover it, after it had been stolen by the same louts who'd cut his coat to ribbons and torn up his music.

Along with his other few valuables, the watch was safe at Olympe's house now. A slave would not possess such a thing.

“Yore pal Sefton'll be along,” said Shaw reassuringly. “What do you know about Fourchet's son?”

“Not much.” January drew a deep breath, tried to convince his muscles to relax. “He's a few years older than I. Esteban, his name is. I think his mother was the daughter of a Spanish wine-merchant here in town.”

“Juana Villardiga, accordin' to the records.” Shaw folded his hands over the papers, rumpling them as if they were yesterday's newspaper instead of the proofs that January would need, should his freedom be in jeopardy. The morning was chill, and through the arched doors at the inner side of the watchroom the Cabildo courtyard was dusky still. Two prisoners swabbed the flagstones under the watchful eye of a blue-uniformed City Guard.

January's eyes felt gritty. After spending most of the evening getting the documents drawn up and finding musician friends to replace him in his engagements to play at this or that party until after the sugar harvest-not an easy matter, given the perennial paucity of good musicians in the town-he'd gone late to bed, and in the few hours that he had slept, had dreamed of being a child again, and a slave.

“In 1802 Fourchet married, again, a woman name of Camille Bassancourt who came here with her aunt from Paris. They had three sons and two daughters-”

“After my time.”
January shook his head. “We left Bellefleur in 1801. I only remember Esteban.”

Shaw used the corner of the top document to pick his teeth, brown with tobacco like a row of discolored tombstones. He was a lanky man who looked as if he'd been put together from random lengths of cane, close to January's height and homely as a mongrel dog. “The girls an' one boy are still livin' . . .” He grubbed in a pocket and consulted a much-scribbled fragment of paper. “Solange is at school with the Ursulines here in town. Robert-that's the boy-an' his wife just got back on the sixth from takin' Elvire, the older girl, to a boardin' school in Poitiers.”

Given the man's raspy, flatboat drawl, it always surprised January that Shaw pronounced the names of French cities and individuals correctly.

“Accordin' to Fourchet's lawyer, Camille died in '28.” Shaw extracted a plug of tobacco from his trouser pocket, picked a knot of lint off it, and bit off a hunk the size of a Spanish dollar. “Fourchet remarried this past April to a girl name of Marie-Noel Daubray-”

“Daubray?” interrupted January. “Isn't that the name-”

“Of the fellas he thinks might be behind the mill fire an' all? It is.” He gestured with the fragment of paper-a bill from Berylmann, a gunsmith on Canal Street, January saw-and concentrated for a moment on reducing the brown chunk in the corner of his jaws to a manageable consistency. “Their first cousin once removed, in fact. Granddaughter of their oldest brother, which is what the lawsuit's about. What's our boy Esteban like?”

“Stiff,” said January, the first description that came to his mind. “I haven't seen him since he was twelve, remember, and I was only eight.” He leaned back in the chair beside Shaw's cluttered desk with half-closed eyes, summoning back the silent boy who'd stare with such repelled fascination at the naked breasts of the women in the fields. “But he was stiff. He walked around with his shoulders up-” He demonstrated, bracing his whole body in imitation of that tight, silent, awkward boy, and was aware of Shaw's cool eyes flickering over him, reading what that imitation had to say.

"He didn't speak much to anyone. He was clumsy.

You expected him to fall over any minute. You know how there are people that it makes you uncomfortable to talk to? They stand wrong, or they stand too close; it takes them forever to say anything and when they do it's never quite what they mean. That's Esteban. Or it was,“ he amended, ”a quarter century ago."

“Well, Maestro-” Shaw uncoiled his slow height from his chair, dumped the papers on the desk, and glanced across at the wall clock someone had affixed behind the sergeant's high desk. “People don't change that much, boy to man. Oh, you might not recognize who they are, exactly, but unless he works to do somethin' about it, a awkward boy's gonna grow to a awkward man. Same as a girl who's cruel to her pets ain't anyone I'd want to be the mother of my children later on down the road. I don't know how much use any of this'll be to you. . . .”

“All of it's of use.” January followed him across the big dim stone-flagged room to the outer door. “Any of it's of use. You have to understand what the pattern is, before you can see where it breaks.”

From the Cabildo's front doors they looked out past the cobalt shadows of the arcade and across the gutter to the bustling Place d'Armes. Mid-morning in autumn, and all the world was out enjoying the mild sunshine. The carriages of the wealthy jostled axles with carts of cabbages. A tall old man walked past with a basket of pink roses on his head, and a beggar-woman at her ease on the cathedral steps, her hair a white aurora of chaos, slowly devoured an orange and spit the seeds in great joyful leaping arcs into the gutter. January remembered the rainy gray of Paris in the winter and wanted to fling out his arms and laugh.

Whatever else could be said about it, New Orleans was New Orleans. There was no place like it in the world.

“If it had been clear who's doing the actual poisoning-making the actual voodoo-marks, cutting harnesses and sawing axles-Fourchet wouldn't have come to you. This isn't like coming into a tavern and seeing a weeping woman and a dead lover and a husband with a smoking pistol in his hand. With a hundred and fifty people involved it's not even likely that I'm going to find just one, or two, unaccounted for at any given time.”

Shaw's eyebrows lifted. “I figured with slaves in the field you'd at least be able to keep track of where they was.”

“That's because you've never tried to do it.” There was wry pride in January's voice. "That's what scares the hell out of the whites, you know. Especially out on the plantations. You've got sixty, seventy, eighty grown men, fifty or sixty women-What are you going to do? Keep them in chains all the time? The drivers keep an eye on things and the overseer keeps an eye on things and you know damn well that if somebody wants to sneak away badly enough-if they don't care about getting a beating if they get caught-they'll sneak away. That's what makes them crazy.

“It's a war,” he added softly. “Whether or not some of them plan organized rebellion, it's war. And you have to fight for every inch, a hundred times a day. That's why you have to look for a pattern.”

“Waffle man, waffle man, ” sang a strolling vendor. “Wash his face in the fryin' pan . . . ”

January felt for his watch again. “I can work with the men, live among them enough to hear rumors, at least so that I can find out who was where when. If there is a conspiracy, a revolt being planned, I think it'll be pretty clear. But if it's just one man, I'm not sure I'll find our killer-almost certainly not before he kills Fourchet. So I need to know the pattern. Why is this happening now? Why not last month or last year? What made the bearable unbearable? That's why you told Fourchet to speak to me, wasn't it?”

Shaw spit in the general direction of the gutter. His aim, as usual, was abysmal. “That's why.”

Beyond the levee, the smokestacks of the steamboats poured sullen columns of soot into the dirty sky. At this season they lined the wharves three and four deep, and more tacked around out in the open river, keeping up their head of steam and their boiler-pumps working while waiting for a berth. January felt for his watch yet again, muttered an oath, and looked back over his shoulder at the watchroom clock, then turned back to scan the faces of the crowd.

“Boat ain't due to leave til ten,” Shaw remarked, as if he weren't following January's thoughts. “And you know as well as I do they never do.”

“Wherever he is,” January responded gloomily, “I'm going to strangle Hannibal Sefton.”

Fourchet's voice, braying out curses, caught his attention. Looking across the crowd to the levee, January saw the man on the deck of the small stern-wheeler on which January himself and his friend Hannibal Sefton had purchased tickets last night. One of the porters had dropped his valise; the boat's master lashed out with the whip he still held and caught the man a cut across the back. After the brutality he'd witnessed yesterday January had raised an objection to traveling on the Belle Dame, but Fourchet would have nothing to do with American boats, and Captain Ney was the only Creole master in town at the moment.

Fourchet's two servants hastily took up the luggage and carried it to the cargo hold. The taller servant took the bags inside. The shorter, given a moment's leisure, turned at the deck railing and gazed back across the square at the cathedral, like a man drinking in the sight.

Something in the way he stood made January remember the field hands yesterday evening on the Bonnets o' Blue.

Of course, he thought. Fourchet's butler had just been poisoned. In addition to finding a spy, Fourchet had come into town to look for a new butler.

Fourchet yelled, “Baptiste, damn you!” His voice carried like a crow's caw through the din. The new servant fled after his companion.

January's hand curled into a fist.

“You familiar with Mon Triomphe, Maestro?”
Shaw asked. “Ever been there?”

January shook his head. “I was only seven when St.Denis Janvier bought my mother. I'd never been off Bellefleur. Mon Triomphe was very isolated in those days, but of course now the whole of the riverbank on both sides is in sugar as far as Baton Rouge.”

“Well, I got to jawin' some last night with this an' that pilot, after Mr. Fourchet told me as how you'd agreed to go.” Shaw spit again toward the cypress-lined gutter that divided the arcade from the open Place; the brown wad of expectorant missed its target by feet. “It did kinda float through my mind as how we's askin' a lot of you, to go up there pretendin' as how you're a slave, and the only ones knowin' you're not is your pal Sefton and Fourchet himself. Now, we know somebody's out to kill Fourchet. And much as I like Sefton you do got to admit reliable ain't the word that springs most skeedaciously to mind when his name is mentioned. So I tell you what.”

He pointed across the square, to a woman selling bandannas among the fruit stands that clustered be neath the trees. The bright-colored wares were tacked to a crosspole and fluttered like some kind of exotic tree themselves.

“You go buy yourself seven bandannas: red, yellow, blue, green, purple, black, an' white. Accordin' to the pilots, see, the riverbank at the north end of the plantation caved in 'bout three years ago, openin' a chute between it an' Catbird Point. Catbird Island, they calls it now. That changed the current, an' built up a bar just above the plantation landin'-blamed if that river ain't like a housewife with new furniture, always movin' things around. When Fourchet cleared an' cut for a new landin' they left an oak tree on the bank above it, that's big enough that the pilots all sight by it comin' down that stretch of the river.”