Dead Water (18 page)

And with an almost audible click, like the sound of a key in a lock, he heard Souter's voice again:
a nigger gal singin' to her pickaninny . . .

Every night, the voices of the male slaves had risen in song. Desultory, sometimes, or joyful; sometimes the familiar call and response of work songs. He'd heard them himself as he slid into sleep last night. . . .

So why not at midnight, when Souter had gone up to the pilot-house?

Why had the men on the starboard side fallen silent, while the women continued to sing?

But he only shook his head. “They know he was dead when he went in the water,” he replied, and saw the glance go back and forth among the men. “Somebody smashed him over the head.”

The men around were silent. In the to-and-fro of their eyes he could almost hear the words:
How'd they know? How much do they know? What's it gonna mean for us?

“He tell 'em?” asked 'Rodus mildly, but before January could answer, Mr. Lundy appeared at the bow end of the promenade and flourished his cane at the cluster of servants and deck-hands watching Molloy in the skiff.

“God damn the lot of you, trim the boat! What do you think you're looking at? Trim the damn boat before we get in more trouble—how do you expect a body to steer with all the weight on one side? Haven't you anything better to do than gape?”

“Oh, 'scuse me, sir,” murmured 'Rodus too low for the former pilot to hear. “I'll just move on upstairs into the Saloon for a few hands of ecarte.” And the men on either side of him, including January, snickered. The servants moved obediently on their way, some of them as usual pointedly ignoring the slaves chained along the wall—as if they themselves couldn't just as easily end up in the same situation next week—and others exchanging nods with them. January wondered how much the valets might have heard, or guessed, of what had happened on the other side of the piled cordwood, and whether he could ask questions without engendering suspicion.

“Man's an idiot.” Lundy tottered over to January's side. “Claims we can cut half a day off our time by going through Hitchins' Chute—high water be damned, you couldn't drown a cat in that chute!” The former pilot looked exhausted, hollow-eyed with strain as he glared out across the threshing water with its floating masses of downed trees, broken lumber, and torn-off branches.

Across the narrow stretch January could see Molloy standing in the skiff, dropping the lead-line overboard, then pulling it back. What he found must have satisfied him, for he rowed on a ways, almost invisible now between the rain and the intervening boughs.

“Looks deep enough to me, sir,” commented January, folding his arms. The thunder had ceased, save for ever more distant rumblings over the Mississippi bluffs. “Why's he in such a hurry all of a sudden?”

“Well, we lost most of a day yesterday.” Lundy's mouth twisted sourly. “More hurry, less speed, I say. River's gonna fall the minute the rain lets up and we'll be stuck in the chute waiting for Levi Christmas and his boys to show up. Molloy threatened to cane me when I told him what that girl of his had been up to in Natchez—like I couldn't have taken on that Gaelic drunkard with one hand behind me, before the palsy caught up with me! But the first thing he did when we got ourselves stuck good was to get every man-jack armed and on the deck, watching the shore. He knows.” Lundy shook his head, and unslung his spyglass from his side.

After a moment of silent scanning he offered it to January, who took it and followed the far-off figure in the skiff until it disappeared behind the trees. Down at the stern the paddle was turning slowly, more to keep water in the boilers than anything else. With the strength of the storm-fed current the
Silver Moon
was almost literally standing where she was in the water.

“How did the boat get hung up on Horsehead Bar to begin with, sir?” January folded up and returned the glass. “Souter seems to know his business better than that.”

“Souter?” Lundy sniffed. “If Molloy told Souter to stand on his head bare-naked in the Saloon, he'd do it. Mind you, anyone can run on a bar—in high water they build up fast. But it wasn't high water. The boy knew damn well there was a bar below Steele's Bayou, but Molloy told him to shave the bank close and shave it he did, and everyone on board got to rassle spars until nightfall because of it.”

“Is that what happened?”

“It's what Souter says. He was near in tears about it when I talked to him on the bow that afternoon and asked him what the hell he meant by shaving the bank that close. Molloy came down the stairs and slapped him on the shoulder and says,
‘You shouldn't go believin' everythin' you're told, boy
. . . .'” Despite the crippled soft monotone of his voice, Lundy captured the Irishman's speech with blistering scorn. “It's my opinion Molloy did it just to break the boy's spirit a little and keep him under his thumb.”

The white triangular sail of the skiff winked from among the trees, tacking before the brisk gusts back toward the
Silver Moon
. Molloy's oilskin coat and wide-brimmed hat were running with rain, but he looked cheerful and stood up in the skiff to shout, “Plenty of water in the chute, laddies!”

“Oh, the hell there is!” Lundy limped over to the pilot as the deck-hands crowded forward to draw the skiff close to the bow and help Molloy spring aboard. January saw the older man gesture furiously, pointing toward the gap in the trees as the
Silver Moon
came slowly around and pointed her nose to the chute.

Because of the palsy, Lundy's buzzing, timbreless voice was inaudible over the rain and the paddle's splashing, but Molloy's reply boomed out arrogantly.

“What's the matter, man? You can't run a boat in ten feet of water? I thought you were the one with the hard-on to get to Lexington—in a manner of speaking,” he added, and strode on up the stair with a jeering laugh.

Lundy clung for a moment to the stanchion as if all strength had deserted him. But as January came forward to help him, the former pilot pushed himself away and moved, with surprising agility, up the stair as well.

“What causes it?” asked Rose's voice softly behind him. January turned to see her looking after the old pilot with compassionate eyes. “Palsy, I mean.”

“They don't know.” January went to take her in his arms, to press her to the thin boards of the wall through which the throb of the engines beat like a heart. To press his lips over hers, as the touch of her, the scent of her—even after a week unwashed in the heat on a steamboat's deck—aroused in him the desire to pull her behind the wood-piles and crates and have her on the bare deck like a savage, a Kaintuck, a rapist.

I feared I would never see you again.

He realized how often this was his fear when something separated them, when something went wrong.

“We wouldn't have left you, you know,” Rose said after that long, wordless time of silent rocking in one another's arms. Of silent thanks to God and the Virgin that in spite of Queen Régine's curse and every effort by the world in general to the contrary, the ultimate thing was still all right. She was still with him.

“I don't think I've ever felt so relieved in my life as when I saw you coming down the bank,” she went on. “Hannibal and I were watching for you, of course—Mr. Lundy told us Steele's Bayou was the likeliest place you'd make for.”

His lips brushed the feather-soft curls that emerged from beneath the edge of her tignon. “Don't tell me you were the one who actually got poor Souter to run the boat up on the bar.”

“Nonsense.” Her smile was a quick sunflash, quickly tucked away. “If we hadn't run aground on that bar, Hannibal was going to light a small fire in the cordwood near the engine-door just as we came within sight of Steele's Bayou so that I could slip in and dump the boilers in the confusion.”

January sighed. “It's good to know I have ingenious friends. Where was Lundy last night, by the way? I'll have to ask Hannibal what time he left the Saloon after dinner.”

“You don't suspect poor Mr. Lundy of heaving Weems overboard, do you? Why would he? I'd say it would be Mr. Molloy, if anybody. Or that cold savage, Cain.”

“Except that Molloy was in the pilot-house when it happened,” said January. “And Cain appears to have been continuously in the company of others—either the other card-players or Gleet—between nine-thirty and one. And I suppose,” he added thoughtfully, “if I were being suspicious, I'd find that in itself suspicious . . . because as far as I've seen, Cain can't stand Gleet. But it doesn't alter the fact that he couldn't have hit Weems over the head and dumped his body overboard at eleven-thirty—which is what seems to have happened.”

And he recounted to her, briefly, the results of his makeshift autopsy, and Hannibal's account of events in the Saloon the previous night. “Which makes nonsense of Mrs. Fischer's accusation, of Hannibal at least,” he concluded. “In fact with both Molloy and Cain accounted for, the murder could have been committed by anyone on board, including Mrs. Fischer herself. She's certainly tall enough and strong enough to have killed a man with a sharp blow over the head, especially one who had no reason to be wary of her. And in fact, we know almost nothing about anyone on board, including such ostensible innocents as Lundy and Quince.”

While he spoke, the
Silver Moon
had drawn closer to the fast-racing waters of Hitchins' Chute. Seven or eight deck-hands clambered down into the skiff, rowing across to the steep clay banks among the willows. Four sprang ashore on one side of the chute's mouth; the rest took the skiff across the fifty or sixty feet of water to the other. There they waited, with the long poles they'd brought with them in hand, for the steamboat to approach and be nudged into the narrow passageway.

Meantime the rain was lightening, till by the time the
Silver Moon
was fairly into the chute it was barely a patter. Though the current of the main river still surged with trees, limbs, scraps of sawn lumber or dead animals, the force of the stream was noticeably lessened. January could see where the wash-line on the banks already stood several feet above the surface.

Overhanging boughs swept the arcades of the boiler-deck above, and slapped at the stanchions only feet from where January and Rose stood by the passway. The male slaves pointed and commented about the suddenly-close scenery—the boys Lam and Jeremiah moved out to the end of their chains to lean over, to catch at the dripping leaves that whipped in under the arcades, and overhead January heard Melissa Tredgold scream, “I want to see!
I want to see!
”

No doubt while she tried to drag the unwilling Cissy over to the edge to let her do the same.

“No, you're right.” Rose leaned against January's side, rested her head on his shoulder. With his palm on her back he felt the tension in her slender body ease. “We don't know a thing about anyone on board except what they've told us. My guess is that Lundy was in bed. Sufferers from his ailment don't have much stamina. He told me once he has to lie down every few hours. He was the
Silver Moon
's original pilot, the one Molloy undercut. He took on the job because he has to get to Lexington, Kentucky—Tredgold is a friend of his and agreed to let him work, since he desperately needs the money. Because Tredgold reneged and hired Molloy, he's letting Lundy ride for free—though to my mind it's a high price, to put up with Molloy's abuse. There's evidently a professor at the medical school there who can help nervous disorders of this kind.”

“Did he say what his name is?” January felt a twinge of chagrin, like a twist in the muscle beneath his breastbone, at the reflection that it had been months since he'd had time to read the issues of
The Lancet
so dutifully stacking up in the small study at the back of the new house. He'd been conscious, as he'd examined Weems's body, of how long it had been since he'd done any serious medical work at all. Though the circumstances had appalled him—and though he felt pity for that sly, weasely little man—he had also felt all his old delight and wonderment at the tiny structures of the human body, the sense of probing into some of God's more mysterious and beautiful secrets.

“Burnham? Barham?” Rose shook her head. “I can't recall exactly.”

“The name isn't familiar. I'll have to ask. But one thing I do know. Whoever did the murder, I'd be willing to bet—if I had any money of my own to bet with—that it took place either on the starboard promenade of the boiler-deck, or more probably on the starboard promenade of the main deck. And that dark as it was, at least some of the slaves saw it.”

FOURTEEN

“Herodotus.” Colonel Davis's sharp voice sounded calm and firm, and as January and Rose looked around the corner of the 'tween-decks, the young Fulani rose to meet the tall, black-clothed planter.

“Yes, sir.”

Behind Davis, Cain watched with folded arms and Gleet spat tobacco onto the deck. In the presence of the dealers the men chained along the wall moved together as much as they could.

One never knew, with
les blankittes,
thought January.

Even if one hadn't—almost certainly—witnessed murder last night.

“Tell me about last night.”

'Rodus sighed. “I wish I could, sir. Believe me, I asked among the boys here if they heard anything. That poor buckra's got to gone in the water someplace. But I swear to you last night was quiet. We tells stories some, like we always does—I thought I'd split laughin' over one old guy told 'bout the three mice in the barroom—an' sang some, just to keep our spirits up in the dark. Sound carries funny in the fog, as you'll know, sir. We heard voices now an' then from above, when folks went along to their cabins, but we didn't hear no shoutin' nor angry voices. Not like there'd been a fight or nuthin'.”

“You lyin' nigger.” Gleet's rawhide riding-crop lashed out like a lizard's tongue, striking 'Rodus on the muscle of his bare arm. The slave flinched, his dark eyes going to Cain for an instant, then back to the deck, where all good slaves' eyes belonged. “Colonel Davis talked to every man on the bow-deck an' to his own man that was sleepin' just aft of you lot, an' they saw nor heard shit. So it got to be one of you that did it—one of you, or one of the bitches over the other side of the boat. Now, you tell what you saw or I'll thrash the skin off every one of you.”

“You treat your own niggers as you please, Ned.” Cain removed his cigar from his mouth and blew a thread of smoke like an unspoken line of scorn. “Myself, I ain't fixin' to try and explain no hashed-up backs to buyers in Memphis. What the hell would Weems be doin' down here, anyway? He was your milk-and-water Abolitionist: he'd cry big tears about niggers bein' treated bad, but he didn't want to be around 'em.”

At the threat of beating, January had watched the faces of the men, especially the two boys Lam and Jeremiah. He saw not only the fear there, but the way they'd all, even the members of Gleet's coffle, turned toward 'Rodus, as if for some sign. As if last night—January could almost see it in his mind—'Rodus had said,
You all keep silent, and leave the talking to me.

Davis, of course, had looked back to Cain and Gleet during the altercation. As white men, they were the ones who had the power to do or change things. It was their words that mattered. Turning back to 'Rodus, he said, “As you say, 'Rodus, Mr. Weems has to have gone into the water somewhere. If he fell—or was thrown—from the promenade deck overhead, he would have made a considerable splash.”

“It's what I thought myself, sir,” agreed the slave. “But here with the engine-room so close, an' the paddle threshin' so loud, you don't hear much and that's a fact.”

“I thought I'd heard smooth customers teaching girls' school,” remarked Rose softly as Thu came past them from the stern stairway and made his way along to the three white men. “But I think he takes the biscuit for butter not melting in his mouth.”

Whatever Thu told them, in a voice too quiet to carry, Gleet, Cain, and Davis turned and headed for the bow. The steward lingered for a moment to exchange a word with 'Rodus before coming back along the promenade to the stairway at the stern, and January saw again, in the rainy grayness, the steward's narrow, almost girlish face settle into age and strength when relaxed from its habitual cheerful smile. Face-to-face there was no mistaking the resemblance.

January glanced down at Rose, and met her eyes, which had followed his gaze. She raised her eyebrows: “Is that my imagination?” she asked, and January shook his head. “Do you think Cain knows?”

“He'd have to be a fool not to notice how alike they look,” answered January. “And whatever else he is, Jubal Cain isn't a fool. Any other white man, it's even odds whether they'd see it or not—their color's so different, and it always shocks me how little
blankittes
notice. But it might explain why, on a dark and foggy night, Cain made sure he wasn't alone when he came down to see that his slaves were fed.”

“
Could
a slave kill a white man walking by?” asked Rose as they retreated through the passway to the port-side promenade. The rain had stopped entirely; the paddle was moving slowly as the banks closed in around the
Silver Moon,
overhanging boughs of oak and tupelo scraping hard on the sides. As January had feared, closed in by the trees the damp heat was ghastly, and away from the main channel of the river the air swarmed with mosquitoes and gnats. “Those chains aren't very long—they have to turn around and lean out to the extent of their arms to relieve their bowels over the river. And that iron must be extremely heavy.”

Rose, January realized, had never worn chains.

“You'd be surprised what you can do,” he said softly, “if you're really frightened, or really angry.”

“But would any of them have been that frightened of—or angry at—Weems? He was a thief, and a blackmailer, but not, as far as I've ever heard, a man of violence. I can't imagine anyone wasting his time trying to blackmail a slave. Not one who has no useful information about a current master, like these. Weems was an Abolitionist, too, at least a milk-and-water one. Why would any of the slaves have attacked him?”

January shook his head. “But they saw something. And two things happened last night: Weems's murder, and Julie's escape.”

“Julie.” Rose's mouth hardened into a thin line of anger.

“Did you see her go?”

“No,” From the bow January could hear the leadsman's shouts:
“Half one! Half one! Quarter less twain . . .”
And hoped that Levi Christmas and his boys had passed them in the night and were at present somewhere on the other side of Hitchins' Point. Looking up, he saw the planter Lockhart at the stern rail of the boiler-deck, rifle in the crook of his arm, silhouetted against the hot summer sky.

“It was dark as Egypt, as they say—you know how fog seems to drink up light, and there wasn't any too much from the deck lantern to begin with. Sophie and Julie came down to share supper with me, after they got their respective mistresses ready for dinner—Julie was just shaking over the prospect of being sold to Gleet.”

She ducked as a willow-branch swept over the deck, spattering her with leftover rain. Behind them the paddle slowed, water slithering from its bucket-boards, and the monotonous voice of the leadsman chanted,
“Quarter one . . . quarter one . . .”

The thick trees seemed to absorb the sound.

“Mark one.”

“I don't think she's stopped crying since we left Vicksburg,” Rose went on. “And that nasty little hussy Skippen boxed her ears for it. Julie spoke of running away, but was terrified—naturally—of being beaten if she were caught and brought back: she has no concept of where Canada is, or even Ohio, nor which states forbid slavery and which permit it. She wasn't even terribly clear which direction north was, only that slaves running away follow the river. She'd been born and raised within five miles of New Orleans: she knows only upstream and down, toward the river or toward the swamp. Not unlike,” she added with sudden asperity, “some of the damsels whose mothers bring them to my school. We're stopped.”

The paddle hung still. Gleet came down the stern stair, cursing, his whip in one hand and a rifle in the other. Without a glance at them he went through the passway to the starboard promenade where the men were chained. A few moments later deck-hands appeared, unfastening the long boat-poles from the sides of the 'tween-decks.

Mr. Lundy, reflected January, had evidently been right about the chute. “How late in the evening was the last time you saw her?”

“Then,” said Rose. “Just before, and during dinner. Cissy came down, too, with the leftover tea-leaves from the children's tea; she got Eli to give us some hot water for a second run. All three of the girls went up together when the waiters came down the stairs from clearing away supper. That meant Mesdames Fischer and Roberson, and Miss Skippen, would be coming out soon, and might need someone to re-pin their hair before they spent the evening listening to music and dancing in the Saloon.”

There was a dry note in Rose's voice that made January flinch, though he knew she wasn't angry at him. And he felt again the slow, hot fury, that Mrs. Fischer's scheme should oblige Rose—a woman born in freedom, the daughter of a planter on Grand Isle—to sleep on the bare deck, live on the scraps of white folks' meals, and relieve herself over the side in full view of any stranger passing on the river road or sailing downstream in a flatboat.

No,
he thought.
No, we are not free. Having money will help—having a house will help. But it will not make us free.

She went on. “By then it was foggy and pitch black. Julie usually sleeps with me, and Sophie, when Mrs. Fischer is entertaining Weems—Julie generally comes down at eleven, after getting Miss Skippen ready for bed, but if either of those so-called ladies comes back from the dancing early, she wants her maid waiting right there when she comes in. I heard the leadsmen start calling out as we were coming up on the bar, and Mr. Molloy cursing them from the pilot-house. Just after we crossed over the bar Sophie came down with a blanket, and lay down beside me. I asked,
Is Julie all right?
And she said,
I don't know. I'll tell you in the morning.
I heard her crying a little before she went to sleep.”

“And in the morning, of course, the first thing anyone saw was Weems's body. So I take it you haven't had a chance to talk to her?”

Rose shook her head. “Jim saw the body first, and called out,
Dear God, it's a man caught up there!
Sophie was the one who recognized him, and screamed. Simon—he's the head engineer—was sleeping on deck and ran at once into the engine-room to have the engines stopped, and Sophie clutched on to the wood-pile, sobbing. She got herself in hand quickly, though, and said,
Madame! Oh my poor Madame!
and went running up the steps. That's the last I saw of her.”

“Julie had better be moving fast,” January said. “If the patrols catch her, they'll take her straight to Mayersville. She may, of course, have actually killed Weems—if he caught her going over the rail, for instance, and tried to stop her, though I can't imagine why he would have or what he'd have been doing down on the lower deck at that hour.”

“I can't either,” agreed Rose. “And I'll still take oath she got off the boat as we were going over the bar. The starboard promenade would be the logical place for her to go into the water unobserved. Her escape may be all they're hiding, you know.”

“It may,” agreed January. “I can understand Gleet's gang being terrified, but it's harder to believe Cain's gang would be that scared over the accusation of not reporting a runaway.”

“If I know Mrs. Fischer, I'll have the perfect opportunity to question Sophie, but at such appalling cost to myself that I hesitate—”

“Benjamin.”

January turned, to see Colonel Davis coming down the stern steps. The young planter wore a look of rather grim puzzlement, and the glint in his pale eyes told January instantly that there was trouble.

“Would you mind coming back with me to the Saloon? There are a few questions I need to ask you about where you were last night.”

The Saloon was hot and dim, and nearly empty, now that the rain had stopped and there was activity on shore worth staring at. As he followed Davis up the steps, January saw the deck-hands, and both coffles of male slaves, spreading out along the soaked muddy banks of the chute, shoving with their poles at the sides of the boat in an attempt to back her out before the water sank too far. In the engine-room they'd be drawing the fires out of the furnaces yet again.

Why no one had ever thought to disconnect the water-pumps from the engines and arrange for them to operate independently, January couldn't imagine. He'd suggested it to Rose, and she'd said, “My guess is the owners won't pay for a second engine. You have no idea how cheaply steamboats are built.”

Which, to January, sounded exactly like the sort of logic the
blankittes
lived by.

Whatever the reason, Mr. Molloy was pacing the Saloon like a caged tiger, a whiskey-glass in hand and face crimson with anger and impatience. “Where was he?” he demanded as Davis and January came out of the hallway into the Saloon. “Down with his yellow bitch? Any money she'll tell you he was with
her
last night.”

January opened his mouth to say,
My wife isn't in the habit of lying,
then closed it again, and made himself look at the floor.

There was something about,
she'll tell you he was with her last night
that brought the hair up on his nape.

As opposed to where?

He glanced across at Hannibal, still sitting at the card-table, and he saw the fiddler was both angry and scared.