Good Man Friday (18 page)

‘I won't, sir. I'm sorry. I did lay your things out for your Thursday morning before I left, and polished your boots last night—'

‘What the
hell
does that have to do with anything? By God you're the stupidest, orneriest nigger I ever— Get in that carriage!'

‘No, sir.'

Bray slapped him a third time, then strode off in the direction of his phaeton. January caught Mede by the elbow and steered him into the nearest group of spectators –
does he think Mede's going to stand and wait for him to come back with the whip?
– which congregated around them as if they'd been rehearsed. Someone pulled Mede's jacket off him; someone else handed him another one of a different color and cut. His cap was snatched from his head and replaced with a slouched and tatty beaver. Dominique – who'd come along with Clarice Perkins – put her arm through Mede's and smiled up into his face in a wifely fashion, and the Perkinses, Preston, and January fell in around them, to make up a family group as they walked off down Seventeenth Street.

Bray passed them in his phaeton, glaring furiously right and left with his whip in his hand, and didn't give them so much as a glance.

When they reached the boarding house Mede was still trembling.

‘You have your papers?' January guided the young man into a chair in the parlor. Mrs Perkins herded the children from the room; Dominique looked as if she might speak, but Preston gently put a hand on her back, steered her out into the hall.

When Mede nodded, January continued, ‘It might be you'll want to go North. Preston can recommend you to the manager of the Baltimore and Washington, and you can certainly get work on the trains.'

‘I can't—' Mede took a breath, trying to steady himself. ‘I don't want to do that right now, sir. Thank you,' he added.

‘He know you live here?'

‘I don't know. He could find out easy enough.' He raised his head as January drew breath to speak, went on, ‘I can't leave him, sir. He's in …' He stopped himself –
from saying what? That he's in trouble?

‘I had to get out of that house.' Mede picked his words carefully. ‘But I need to be where I'm close.'

‘So he can hit you again?'

Mede wiped the blood that trickled from his cut ear. ‘He's drunk this evenin'.'

In the silence that followed, January heard Minou's voice in the hall, low and troubled, and Preston saying something in reply.

‘—it would not have happened,' she said, and Frank answered, his own voice tired.

‘In Louisiana a man frees the children of his free plaçée. Does no man father children on his house women and pretend that they aren't his?' And when Minou did not reply, into her silence he went on, ‘Do you think even the French there aren't being drawn into the American way of doing things these days?'

Her voice was sad. ‘It is not as it was.'

Daylight faded from the windows. In the dining room, someone lit the lamps. China rattled softly as Octavia Trigg took it from its cupboards. When the door beyond opened, January could smell onions, biscuits, stew.

‘He's been very good to me,' Mede said after some time. ‘When I was little – three years old, four years old – and my mama died, he'd let me tag along after him. Would take me up on his horse when he'd go hunting. Got Old Marse Luke to have me taught my letters, and made his valet.'

January let his breath out in a tiny sigh. On Bayou St Cecile, just upriver from Bellefleur, he remembered M'am Gertzer had taken up a pretty little girl from the quarters as a pet: fed from her own plate at table, dressed in pretty calico, taught to fix hair and run about after her carrying her sewing box. And Michie Paul, thirteen-year-old son of the master of Lac Mort Plantation along Bayou St John, had done much the same with a boy out of the quarters:
Hell, P'tit Roux'll follow me anywhere
…

Another custom of the country.

‘He ever put you up in a poker game?' January remembered what had eventually happened to
P'tit
Roux, and to M'am Gertzer's pretty little maid-girl.

‘He paid two thousand dollars to get me back the next day.'

As if that made it all right.

‘And he was drunk.'

‘Like this evening.' Outside the window, Trigg and the Reverend came across the yard, bats on their shoulders, reliving each strike and run and throw.

‘That sounds stupid, doesn't it?' Mede raised his eyes to him. ‘For me to care about him? He's a good man, Mr J. You've seen him at his worst.'

Does he have a best?

How many years since YOU'VE seen it?

‘I can't leave him. Not flat cold, get-out-of-town leave. He's in trouble—'

‘What kind of trouble?'

The young man shook his head.

‘Do you think you can get him out of it?'

‘No, sir. But even if I'm free, I'm still his Man Friday. I won't leave him in it alone.'

‘It have anything to do with why you had to get out of his house?'

Mede hesitated for so long before replying, as if weighing incidents and impressions, that January thought he wasn't going to answer. At length he said, ‘I can't say that, sir.'

Did Mrs Bray put her hand on your thigh some afternoon when the two of you were alone in the house?

Did Luke?

‘I don't—' Mede broke off, thought about his words. ‘I don't rightly know what to do, sir. I do need advice, but I don't … I don't know how to go about getting it, without someone getting hurt.'

Bright, soft voices in the dining room: little Olive Perkins, and Mandie Trigg. Mrs Trigg's deep alto: ‘No, honey, the blade of the knife got to turn toward the plate, 'cause you don't want to be pointin' the edge of a knife at your guest …' Trigg's voice and Perkins' in the hall, and a moment later the front door closing: ‘Evenin', Mr Poe, sir. Can my wife make you a cup of tea, 'fore dinner's ready?'

‘Thank you, sir, I would take that most kindly of her, if it won't be any trouble.'

January thought Poe's footfalls hesitated a moment before the big parlor door, before they crossed the hall to his small and privileged sanctum opposite. Because he'd seen that January was in conversation with a man of his own race? Or because it didn't behoove a white man to go ask a black one how the investigation was proceeding?

Mede seemed to hear none of it. Only sat looking into the neatly-swept fireplace, where logs and kindling stood ready to warm the chilly room.

Everyone Mede knew, January recalled, was back in Georgetown. Maids, cook, stableman … Or else back in Kentucky, where ‘Marse Luke' had been so kind. January well remembered his own sense of isolation, that first year in New Orleans. He had cried every night because he missed the other members of the hogmeat gang, desperately missed his father and his aunties and uncles, missed every dog and mule and kitchen cat on the place where he'd been beaten, starved, and lived every day of his life in terror that he'd lose his family and friends at a drunkard's whim.

And ashamed that he was so weak as to cry.

Trust has to be earned. It was years before he'd found anyone he could speak to.

‘It's all strange now.' He lightly touched the young man's back. ‘Took me years to get used to it, and I was just a kid – and a field hand at that.'

Mede glanced up at him, as if startled to find that someone else – someone free and who seemed to know his way around – had started the same road from the same place.

‘That was a good game you played this afternoon. Settle a bit, and get some sleep. But don't go back to him.'

‘No, sir. I won't do that.'

S
unday after Mass, January, Poe, and Henri met in the ‘white folks' parlor' and divided the surgeons in Washington up amongst them. More accurately, January, Poe, and Chloë each took a list of surgeons from the City Directory, but as it would be wildly improper for a lady – be she never so married – to go visiting the offices of medical gentlemen without a male escort, when they sallied forth on Monday, she went on Henri's arm, to observe the reactions of those gentlemen to her husband's carefully-conned questions.

The tale – invented by Poe in the face of the obvious fact that neither he nor Henri could convincingly pass himself off as a medical student – was that M'sieu Viellard (or ‘Mr Allan') was an aspiring artist, disbarred from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the American Academy of the Fine Arts, and the National Academy … ‘Out of jealousy! Sheer jealousy!' went the story, in tones which would, it was hoped, imply that overfondness for wine and women had more to do with his expulsion than his ability to out-paint the likes of John Trumbull. Mr Allan (or M'sieu Viellard) sought instruction in anatomy in order to paint in the muscular style of Michelangelo and was willing to pay
extremely handsomely
for lessons in the specific attachment of muscles, and the arrangement of tendons, organs, and veins.

Since the idea of a black man being either a professional artist, or wealthy enough to pay handsomely for anything, was almost as ludicrous as that of a well-bred white woman visiting surgeons' offices by herself, January worked in partnership with Poe. ‘You're a credit to your parents, sir,' he observed on the way down the rather grimy steps of the office of Mr Clunch, on D Street, after that gentleman had informed them in no uncertain terms that if
dissection
was what Mr Allan was hinting at, he, Bernard Clunch, had nothing further to discuss, not for a hundred dollars or a thousand.

‘My stepfather would suffer an apoplexy to hear you say so, sir.' Poe sounded pleased at that prospect as he straightened the lapels of his black greatcoat. Despite his preference for black, he had also – when Henri had given him the money for a new waistcoat in the interests of verisimilitude (‘You need to look as if you
could
hand them a hundred dollars to show you how to cut up a corpse') – chosen a dandyish jonquil-yellow garment to further his role. ‘God knows,' he went on with a grin, ‘I'm sufficiently familiar with the breed to do a creditable imitation of the would-be Michelangelos I've met … Actual working artists are in general very businesslike fellows, you know.'

‘That's my experience as well,' agreed January. ‘Mad as hatters, of course—'

‘Oh, God, yes!' He paused as they emerged on to the street, and January ticked Mr Clunch's name from the list.

‘And jealous as schoolgirls, some of them …'

‘Most artists are.' Poe considered the list, and then the sky, which was gray and threatening rain. They were in the heart of the town, near the city hall and Judiciary Square; the streets were a gumbo of mud, the air redolent with the cursing of Irish teamsters, the cracking of whips.

‘In our heart of hearts. I don't know if musicians are the same,' Poe said. They turned their steps along the plank sidewalk toward the neighborhood known as Reservation B – swampland on the so-called ‘Mall' that had been sold off for commercial development. ‘God knows I'm eaten with envy when I see another man's poem in print, when mine has been passed over: how
dare
they? Terrible when it's better than mine, because I wish
I'd
had the talent to write that well—'

‘
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope
,' January said, quoting the greatest of poets who'd ever gnashed his teeth over another's success, and Poe laughed.

‘Yes, at least I'm in good company.' He shoved his hands in his greatcoat pockets, against the sharp chill of the river breeze. ‘And it's ten times more maddening when it's some abominable effusion by a Gothic rodomontodian whose entire repertoire of human experience has been gleaned from other peoples' novels. At least that conceited puppy “Mr Allan” is trying to get himself cadaver drawing-lessons by inquiring for grave robbers. The infuriating ones are those who write execrably and refuse to listen to a breath of criticism: mightn't it be a trifle
unlikely
that the exchanged baby daughter of a French duke should be the
one
flower girl whose wares are bought by a disguised Prince seeking his long-lost father in the slums of New York?'

January pretended deep thought. ‘Could happen …'

Poe made a face, as if he'd bitten sour fruit. ‘The author's husband called me out.' They halted before the shabby line of clapboard shops given as the address of Mr Nicholas Wellesley, Surgeon; there was a note of weary bitterness in the poet's voice. ‘Well, not immediately. First he attempted to sue me. I believe his lawyer pointed out to him that the publication of a book – even if one's husband pays for it – places that book in the domain of a public document, open to criticism by those who are paid by the newspapers to read and criticize books.
Then
he called me out. When I refused to meet him – I
do
have a family to support, who unlike his would be left quite destitute by my martyrdom to the principle of literary verisimilitude – I was warned that he'd paid three of his employees – he is a building contractor – to teach me a less formal lesson in keeping my opinions to myself. I thought it best to leave Baltimore for a time.'

‘If you'll pardon the liberty, sir –' with whites, even friendly ones, it was always well to be careful – ‘I did wonder what you were doing in Washington.'

‘It isn't only that.' The young man stood for a moment in the mouth of the passway between that building and the next: a sign pointed down the mucky slot with the information that Mr Wellesley's office could be found further along. ‘The incident brought home to me the fact that it might, perhaps, be a trifle quixotic of me to attempt to make my living entirely by my pen. Quixotic, and detrimental to those who depend upon me for shelter and food.'