Dead Water (28 page)

Thu nodded, and briefly closed his eyes. “He was that,” he murmured “I only wish—” He stopped himself, and shook his head again. “What was it that Molloy was looking for in Weems's stateroom, when he found the paper?” he asked. “The gold that Weems was supposed to have stolen?”

“Not the gold exactly,” said January. “And that brings me, Mr. Lundy”—he turned to the old pilot—“to a great favor I would like to ask of you.”

The following day, while Rose remained with the still-groggy Hannibal, January and Lundy borrowed Sheriff Lear's shay and drove down the river road to Hitchins' Chute. Davis, Jim, and Thucydides went along as armed and mounted escorts in case Levi Christmas's surviving bravos still lurked in the woods, but they encountered no trouble. As they passed under the mottled shade of willows and sycamores, January would hear, now and then, the far-off drift of voices from some hoe-gang or wood-cutting detail, singing as they worked under an overseer's eye:

Ana-que, anobia,
Bia tail-la, Que-re-que,
Nal-le oua, Au-Monde,
Au-tap-o-te, Aupe-to-te,
Au-que-re-que,
Bo.

Or sometimes it was,

Run to the rock, rock will you hide me?
Run to the rock, rock will you hide me?

And he'd see Thu turn his head, listening, a look of calculation in his eyes.

As if he flew high above the land in a dream, January saw in his mind the cautious figures slipping from rock to rock, from brush-thicket to brush-thicket, working their way toward whatever point along the river they had heard was a meeting-place. And 'Rodus—and others—were out there somewhere, gathering them in, patiently, like the Good Shepherd going back into the stormy night when he realized one lamb was unaccounted for. . . .

Once Jim turned his head at the sound of the singing, and January thought the old valet caught Thucydides's eye. Knowledge passed between them; Jim shook his head slightly, and smiled.

And Colonel Davis of course, riding importantly ahead with a rifle on his arm, saw nothing.

January slipped his hand into his pocket to touch the rosary of blue beads, the cheap steel crucifix.
Holy Virgin, Mother of God, get them safe north. Cover them with your mantle of invisibility, your mantle as blue as the sky. Lead their feet, and guide them when they get there.

Guide me, too.

As they neared Hitchins' Chute, January, who was driving the shay, said quietly to the pilot, “The more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed to me that Weems—and Mrs. Fischer, no doubt the brains of the outfit—ever took the money out of New Orleans at all. Six hundred pounds of gold, and God knows how many cubic feet of banknotes and securities, would be both heavy enough and bulky enough to call attention to itself, even split up among many trunks and crates.

“But gold, even more than banknotes, is anonymous. Once they convinced their pursuers, by their rather ostentatious flight, that the gold had been taken
out
of New Orleans—once they'd scattered the pursuit—how much easier to leave the gold in New Orleans itself, in some safe place to which they could return in a year, or two, and slip it out of the country a little at a time.”

“Given that wildcat Fischer's nerve,” muttered Lundy, “I wouldn't put it past her to open her own bank in New Orleans.”

January laughed, “She might have, at that. By the places she and Weems were searching on the boat, it became fairly obvious to me that what they were looking for was not gold and banknotes, but a key—the key to wherever they'd hidden the gold. It was easy for Molloy to steal that key, but Molloy knew it was easy for someone else to take it back, either Fischer or Theodora Skippen. . . .”

“Who folded her tents and vanished during the night,” put in Lundy. “Without paying the landlady, I might add—and helped herself to the jewelry of Mrs. Roberson's daughters, whose room and bed she was sharing. I'm guessing Miss Skippen went south on the
Wild Heart
this morning. There's no other way out of town.”

“Minx,” said Davis, who had dropped back to ride beside the shay. The side of his face twitched convulsively.

“If she shows up in Natchez again,” said Lundy comfortably, “she'll get what she deserves.”

And just what did a girl deserve,
wondered January,
who was born poor and recognized at least that marrying a stevedore and bearing a child a year—the only options open to a poor girl—was not what she wanted?

What had Mrs. Fischer deserved? To end as no more than a streak of blood in the river's muddy stream?

“So you think Molloy disposed of the key the same way Weems disposed of the gold?” Thu, riding on the other side, glanced down at January. “Why not keep the key on his person? Around his neck, or in a pocket?”

“Because it was a big key, an old key, wrought-iron and heavy. . . .”

“How do you know that?” demanded Davis.

January smiled. “Because I know now what it opens,” he said. “And yes, I think the first thing Molloy did, when he got the key, was to look for a way of getting it off the boat entirely, so that he could come back for it after he'd gotten rid of pursuit. Once Molloy had the key, I'm not sure that either Weems, or Fischer, would have finished the voyage”—his glance crossed Thu's—“no matter what else went on.”

There were at least three places behind Hitchins' Point where water would break through to form a chute on a high river. As January suspected, it took a pilot to recognize which of the low sloughs behind the tree-covered rise had been the chute through which Molloy had attempted to take the
Silver Moon
—January would never have believed that a steamboat, even a small stern-wheeler, could have maneuvered down that swampy aisle of mud and trees.

But Lundy found the place without trouble. Moreover, once January and Davis had helped him hobble along the bank from where they left Jim with the shay, Lundy guessed exactly which tree it was likeliest Molloy had concealed the key in. “Lord, everybody uses that big black oak that overhangs the chute in high water. It's got a box on it that pilots use to drop messages off to one another.” The old pilot pointed ahead of them, to the oak on the muddy rise of ground, far above the few nasty pools that were all that remained of the chute. The tree was the largest on the bank and shaped distinctively, bending forward like a beggar-woman, with two limbs that reached out like arms.

“So he wouldn't have used it to hide the key in,” remarked January. “But as a marker.”

Lundy winked at him. “You're getting good, son. So which tree would we find your key in?”

“That sweet gum next to it. It's a little lower down the bank. Molloy could have reached it easily without getting out of the skiff. The whole left side of it's dead; look at how the branches are leafless. It has to be hollow inside.”

Having learned painful details about hollow trees as a child, January threw a couple of rocks at the sweet gum from a safe distance, to satisfy himself that bees had not taken up residence in the hollow. Then he clambered up the mess of deadfalls and graying dry debris to the old tree's side.

The key was in a hollow in the tree's trunk, tucked in a tin candy-box only slightly larger than the one he'd found in Molloy's cabin. There were two keys, one of them small and modern, the other four or five inches long, and made of heavy wrought iron—too big to be hidden easily around the neck or in a pocket.

An old key.

The key, in fact, to the grillework that surrounded the crumbling tomb in the St. Louis Cemetery, where January had seen a small man whom he'd taken for an undertaker, and a tall woman in a green dress figured with rust and cream, bestowing what he had thought to be the coffin of a child by night.

The following day the
Gloria Zicree
put in at Mayersville, and January, Rose, and Hannibal took passage south for New Orleans. Hannibal slept for nearly twenty-four hours in his stateroom—with January again acting as “valet,” this time simply to make sure he was all right—before he was himself again.

Thu had calculated well, thought January. Mrs. Tredgold, manipulated by Mrs. Fischer, would never have consented to holding the
Silver Moon
in port long enough for the fiddler to recover sufficiently to be questioned. Sheriff Lear, though both intelligent and kind, was at heart a lazy man, and January had no doubt that he'd have yielded to pressure and let the boat go on, simply taking everyone's depositions and holding the most likely suspect.

And Rose would have been on her way to Memphis alone.

“You don't think I could have dealt with Mrs. Fischer on my own?” Rose teased as she and January sat on the lower promenade deck somewhere between Vicksburg and Natchez, listening to Hannibal and two of the several servants play an impromptu trio on Stradivarius and spoons.

“I think you could have,” said January, “had the playing-field been a level one. But it wasn't. I think the minute Hannibal and I were out of the way, Mrs. Fischer would have done something—forged papers, or sworn out an affidavit that she'd seen you owned by someone in some other town—that would have ended up with you being taken as a slave by Gleet. Then God knows where you would have ended up.”

Rose thought about it, her face growing still. Then she glanced at the promenades along both sides of the engine-room of the
Gloria
's main deck, where lines of slaves were chained, going to market in New Orleans. “I think you may be right, Ben. There are some things that we simply cannot fight.” She closed her hand around his as clouds of ash and paddle-spray drifted over them and, along the banks, vociferous bullfrogs croaked in the gathering darkness.

They reached New Orleans on the third of July, in hot darkness with palmetto bugs roaring around the cressets that illuminated the levee. January half expected, with all that had gone wrong on the river, to find their home reduced to a pile of ashes. But his sister Olympe's son, fourteen-year-old Gabriel, greeted him at the door with the news that he and his father had been trading off sleeping there at night—that Cosette Gardinier was just fine at her grandmère's out at the lake, and that no, there wasn't much sickness in town except a little bit of fever and no, the house was fine except for the fire in the kitchen and that hadn't burned up too much. . . .

January sent a note via Gabriel that night, to Hubert Granville, and though it was past two in the morning, he, Rose, and Hannibal walked along Rue des Ramparts in the cicada-sounding darkness, to the cemetery of St. Louis. In the thick summer heat the town was silent, except for the far-off clamor of the gambling dens along Gallatin Street and the quieter din of the more respectable gaming parlors on Rue Orleans. Had the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ridden their steeds into those establishments, January didn't think the play there would even pause.

Somewhere in one of the dark houses, a man and a woman sang an aria from a popular opera to the light, tinny music of a piano. It was a lilt of joy against the leaden hum of mosquitoes above the gutters.

Congo Square was empty, whispering with the scent of ash and burned flesh. On one of the plane-trees there, January glimpsed the ant-creeping corpse of a snake, nailed to the wood with a rolled-up paper in its mouth. January helped Hannibal—and Rose, who was dressed in a pair of Hannibal's trousers and a calico shirt—to clamber over the wall, the resurrection fern that grew atop it flicking like ghost fingers at his flesh as he followed them over.

He found the DuFresne tomb, near which he'd waited for Queen Régine, and the statue of the sleeping child. Close to it, after a little search, he found the crumbling nameless tomb where he'd seen Mrs. Fischer in her green and cream-colored dress, with Weems pushing a barrow behind, a little coffin resting upon it.

It must have been the final load of several, January thought. The two of them couldn't have lifted any box containing all the gold at once. The big lock on the wrought-iron grille that surrounded the tomb gave silently, recently oiled.

Rose's eye met his with a glint of triumph as they grasped the iron ring and, with a shrill scraping of iron on marble, opened the door of the tomb itself.

There were five little coffins there, all crowded into the cramped brick space that whispered with insects and rats.

January unlocked the padlock of the top one's lid, and took the lantern from Hannibal to hold it close as he untied one of the sacks within.

“It's six hundred pounds of vegetarian tracts,” he said in a disappointed voice.

But both his friends saw the dancing light of triumph in his eyes, even before he gave himself the lie and held up the handful of glittering gold.

TWENTY-TWO

Hubert Granville expressed great doubt and disappointment when January withdrew all but two hundred dollars of his money to pay off the house free and clear. “You're leaving yourself nothing to live on,” the banker warned, which January knew was true. “It takes time for a school to establish itself. You'll be in debt head over ears before you know it.”

“We can deal with that,” January replied.

Rose added, “At least we'll be sure of a roof over our heads while we starve.”

Granville shook his head, and drew close the branch of candles to illuminate the draft to be paid to Rosario DeLaHaye. It was again evening, as hot as it had been a month before, when he'd sat there last at the big oak table in the dining-room, to tell January that the coffers of the Bank of Louisiana were empty, and his money gone.

“At least invest it in something worth your while,” snapped January's mother, the elegant Widow Levesque. She had joined the banker in visiting the Januarys that night, a week after Granville and several unobtrusively armed bank officials had transferred the five little coffins from the cemetery back to the bank itself. Granville, January thought, had visibly lost weight during the past month, and looked like a man who had not slept much or well. His red-gold hair and beard seemed faded, and there were smudges of weariness under his piggy hazel eyes. He shook January's hand over and over again, repeatedly assuring him that if there was anything he ever could do . . .

January wondered how well that assurance would hold in times of real financial distress.

“A school will get you nothing,” declared the Widow Levesque, folding her lace-gloved hands over the ivory handle of her parasol. His mother was slim and still beautiful, and there was something in the shape and setting of her eyes that reminded January, in the candle-light, of his sister Olympe. “Even the four best schools in the parish return no more than twenty percent, and I don't think there's a school in town that returns more than five percent its first five years . . . if you can keep it open at all. If you must invest, invest in slaves, as I told you before. If you feed them on rice and beans, and sausage only once a week, it costs you only . . .”

To hear her, January thought, one would never think she'd been a slave herself. He wondered if she'd ever been chained to the side of a steamboat, if she'd been fed from a bucket and had to hang out at the end of her chains to relieve herself over the side.

It was not something he could ask her. Not if he ever wanted her to speak to him again.

“Maman,” he said gently, “Rose and I have talked this over at length, and we think a school is best.”

One couldn't really say to one's mother,
We believe in educating the young, rather than putting chains on the innocent.

“Besides,” said Rose, who had learned in the past six months a great deal about handling her mother-in-law, “who knows when the State Legislature might not forbid people of color to hold slaves? They could, you know.”

Livia Levesque stared at her in horror, the first time January had ever seen anyone break his mother's armor of self-satisfaction. “They most certainly could
not
! We pay our taxes . . . we support their businesses. . . .”

They will do to people of color,
thought January,
whatever they wish. And there is nothing we can do about it, except leave.

If there is anywhere for us to go.
From what he'd heard from Dodd the manufacturer, and from some of the deck-hands who'd tried to make a living in Cincinnati and Alton, the North didn't sound like any paradise either.

“The least you could do is teach people who'll pay you decently,” the Widow Levesque went on as Rose refreshed her coffee-cup and offered her a plate of pralines. “Nobody's going to pay more than fifty dollars a year to educate a colored girl . . . these are stale, by the way. Did you get them from that Vignée woman on Rue Royale? I thought so. . . . Hire a white teacher and make it into a boys' school; they pay the best. You could even get that worthless fiddler to teach Greek, if you can keep him sober. I don't expect
he'd
cost much. . . .”

“Dearest,” sighed Rose as January returned from seeing Granville and his mother out the door, “it breaks my heart to have to tell you this, but you're so good to me, you really ought to be warned about it: one of these days I am going to murder your mother.”

“Let me know when you're getting ready to do it so I can dig a grave for her under the house.” January slumped back into the chair and poured himself the remains of the coffee. “You shouldn't have to do everything around the school.” He added in a voice of mock horror, “Why, this coffee's
Mexican
rather than Ethiopian! And the plate the pralines was on isn't Sèvres.”

“The plate the pralines was on is going to be in pieces over your head, sir.” Rose settled herself comfortably on his thigh, and took the cup from his hand to take a sip herself. “I think the part I liked best was when she went around the room pinching out the candles,” she added thoughtfully, and January laughed—his mother was always lecturing them about the cost of candles, though she also expressed scorn that they burned tallow rather than beeswax. Only a single branch of them had been left burning on the table after the Widow Levesque's parting lecture on economy. It made mellow pools of light on the worn oak, leaving the corners of the dining-room and the simply-furnished cavern of the parlor in darkness.

It was after ten, and the street outside was quiet. The shutters were closed against the mosquitoes that hummed in the darkness.

But with the signing of the draft that Granville would deliver to DeLaHaye the following morning, the house was theirs.

“Mr. Granville is right, you know,” Rose added quietly. “It is going to be hard to make ends meet for a time. I'd hoped you wouldn't have to keep on with music lessons. That you'd have time to write music of your own . . .”

January shook his head. “I can teach them around the classes here,” he said. “And playing balls and the opera is really only from Christmas to Mardi Gras. And I do my best writing late at night anyway. We'll manage. . . . Now, who's that?” He looked up at the sound of knocking on the door.

It wasn't Hannibal's usual brisk long-short-short-long rap, more like the knock of a walking-stick.

January lit a candle on one of the extinguished sticks and carried it to the door.

It was Jubal Cain.

Judas Bredon.

For a moment all January could do was stand staring at him in shock. He was far too well-dressed to be a ghost, and as far as January had ever heard, ghosts walked around with their wounds still gaping and, when possible, dripping spectral blood. Bredon's left arm was in a sling, and there was a half-healed cut on his right temple as he removed his hat. The yellow glint of his eyes in the candlelight was unmistakable.

He said, “Mr. January?”

January stepped back. “Mr. Cain,” he said. And then, recollecting himself, “Mr. Bredon. Please come in. It's an honor to have you in our home, sir.”

Bredon smiled. It changed his whole face. “You've been talking to Thu,” he said. “I'm the one who's honored, Mr. January—considering the amount of money they pay for the recovery of runaway slaves.”

January nodded with mock consideration: “And thirty pieces of silver times twenty-five is how much?”

“Enough to set a man up in business,” replied Bredon. When he stepped across the threshold, January could see that he walked haltingly, limping on a stick. “Or to buy him property for his family. However you slice it, I'm in your debt.”

“Did they make it to the North all right?” asked Rose, rising from the table. “Will you have coffee, by the way, sir? It's no trouble.”

“It may bring you more trouble than you know, M'am—but yes, to answer your question, 'Rodus managed to locate every one of those two gangs, mine and Gleet's, along with those two girls, Julie and Sophie. And they picked up another runaway, too, a boy named Bobby who'd been following the river from Natchez. He said he knew you. . . .”

January grinned, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, delighted that Bobby had made it that far. “He does,” he said. “He does indeed.”

“Gleet's keeping a lookout along the river,” said Bredon, “so they're moving inland through Tennessee and Kentucky. It'll be a slow trek for such a large group, and they'll have to split up to cross the Ohio in ones and twos. But I think they'll make it.” He nodded consideringly, and repeated, as if to himself, “I think they'll make it.”

January brought him a chair. Bredon hesitated, then shook his head. “Not just yet. You did us all a great service, for which, as I said, I—and all of us—are in your debt. And though I realize it's the worst kind of bad manners to impose on a man who has helped you, I'm going to.”

“Anyone on the
Silver Moon,
” replied Rose with a smile, “would tell us that that's exactly what one could expect of an Abolitionist, sir.”

And Bredon smiled back, relaxing as he understood the acceptance behind her jest.

“Will you help us?” he asked as simply as a starving man asks for bread. “Oh, not tonight,” he added as January's eyes widened in alarm. “Nor this week, or this month. But we need help. There's a lot of runners crossing along the borders, where the slave states lie alongside the free. Slaves in Kentucky and Tennessee, or in Virginia and Maryland—it isn't so far for them to travel, and there are enough people from New England and Pennsylvania and New York who've moved down into those states and who don't like what they see there, who're willing to let runaways sleep in their cellars, or who will put out food. In Kentucky and Missouri things aren't the same as they are deeper south. I know a lot of slaves, instead of trying to get north, will come to New Orleans and make their living as free men. . . .”

“As men who're free to be paid pennies because they don't dare ask for dollars,” said January. “Free to live in shacks on the outskirts of town because nobody will pay them much attention there. But yes, I guess it is easier than trying to make it all the way to Ohio.”

“More and more are trying it,” said Bredon. “As more and more laws are passed to control freedmen, to limit what free people of color can do. More and more rich men who make their living from slaves are getting scared. They keep pretending that once they get everything nailed down and set, things will go on as they have, with slaves in the slave states doing the heavy work and living like animals, and ignorant as animals, kept that way by men who don't dare let them learn to read.” His deep voice was level and quiet, but anger burned in the yellow wolf eyes.

“But things won't stay the way they are, no matter how hard the slave-holders try to make them. Thu tells me you were once a slave, sir.”

“As a child, yes,” said January. “My mother was bought by a wealthy sugar-broker who made her his mistress—that is the custom here. And as the custom is here, he freed me and my sister.”

“Then you don't remember slavery clearly?”

January said, “I remember it.”

There was silence then, in the deep shadows, silence like the hush of a Mississippi farm on a hot afternoon, like the dark stinking shadows of a slave-jail in Natchez.

“We need hideouts,” said Bredon at last. “We need places where runaways can come, until they can be taken north. We need places where they can sleep for a night, or two, or three. We need men—and women—who are willing to guide runaways on to the next stage; who are willing to take food to a hiding-place, or give clothing to help an escape.

“I watched you on the boat, Mr. January. I know you were pretending to be Sefton's valet, but it was clear to me who was doing the thinking. I watched you trailing that scoundrel Weems and Mrs. Fischer, and I watched you searching for the money Weems was supposed to have stolen. . . . Did you ever recover it? Thu tells me you found a key.”

“We recovered it,” said January. “And returned it to the Bank from which it had been stolen.”

Bredon nodded. “Good,” he said. “I'm glad you retrieved what was your own. I'm asking you to put your lives in danger. They hang white men for assisting runaways—slave-stealing, they call it—and for men of your own race it's worse. I'm asking you to put in danger the futures that you're trying to build for yourselves—the school Thu tells me you're opening for girls, the music that made for just about the only pleasure I had on that truly god-forsaken boat.

“But we need people with brains. We need people who are honest. . . . And we need people with houses.”

He gestured at the deep velvety dimness of the parlor, the gentle shadows thick in all the rooms where next winter—please God, thought January—a few more soft-eyed young ladies would study Latin and mathematics and history, would learn that there were other dreams in life than being beautiful and submissive so that they could become white men's mistresses.

“I won't ask for your answer right away,” said Bredon quietly. “I'm staying at the Verandah Hotel on St. Louis Street. There are others in the city I'll try and speak to as well. But think about it. You're some of the lucky ones, the ones who were given your freedom. One day, God willing, we will be able to strike down slavery root and branch, and eliminate it from this country. Until that time, we're trying to save those we can, one by one, soul by soul.”