In the hopes they’d forget the world they’d left behind?
January’s mind caught painfully at the wink of an image – gold thimble, silver needle, silk of blue and white – that surfaced for an instant and then vanished, as all around them torn-off branches, whole tree-trunks, chunks of earth held together by grass, bobbed and surfaced and vanished in the thick brown floodwater forever.
When they got close to the low white wooden buildings that marked the landing at Chalmette, some fifteen miles downriver, January pulled up the legs of his trousers and untied the silver candlesticks from his shins, then dragged up the money belt from beneath his shirt. ‘Well, my, my, my, what have we here?’ inquired Jim, and January shook his head.
‘It ain’t how it looks.’
‘Not going to contribute to the salvation of souls?’ Jim’s eyebrows quirked up ’til they almost vanished under his blue cotton bandanna. ‘Not going to assist the Reverend Promise in the great work of guiding toward the Light them that’s lost in the dark swamps of Popery? Ben, I’m surprised at you.’
‘Where’s Promise got his tent pitched?’
‘’Bout a dozen rods back of the levee, on the other side of the trees.’ Jim leaned on the steering oar, the heavy current fighting them every foot to the little wharf. ‘You go up the path, you’ll hear them singing, if you can call it singing . . .’
Further than a dozen rods back of the levee, reflected January, there wasn’t anything but swamp. As he climbed the path his eye sought the place on the rise above him where he and the other members of the free colored militia had crouched behind redoubts made of piled cotton-bales, waiting for the British soldiers to come out of the fog.
If Ayasha’s death seemed to him like something that had happened yesterday, that night march, that cold clammy waiting in the darkness, felt as if it had happened to someone else. To some other boy of twenty who’d clutched his musket in numb fingers and had wondered: Do I have what it takes, to play a man’s part . . . ?
Who WAS that? A boy who went to Paris, vowing never to return to the land where he’d been born a slave.
He came to the top of the rise and heard the singing.
My faith looks up to Thee,
Thou Lamb of Calvary,
Savior divine;
Now hear me when I pray,
Take all my sin away,
O let me from this day
Be wholly Thine!
Men and women milled around the big white tent pitched at the edge of the trees. Monday’s rain had left the ground a clayey soup; everything was smirched and spotted with red-gold muck. Others moved back and forth from the smaller marquee set nearby, where trestle tables had been put up. Nearly as many tables again stood in the open air. For slaves, presumably . . . There were at least as many blacks as whites in evidence. Was the seating going to be separated in Heaven as well?
As he came closer, a man’s voice boomed from within the tent, passionate and theatrical:
‘If it isn’t enough for your hearts to know that you have kindled the fire of salvation in nameless souls who but for you – but for your loving help! – would have been damned to the outer darkness, let me ask you this, then: of what use is that silver that you cling to with such desperation? Of what use is the gold that binds you like a chain and drags you down? Jesus said: My son asked you for bread, and you gave him a stone – no, not a stone, but a brick of solid gold! What father among you, what mother who sits there listening to me, if your child begged you for bread, would give him a brick?’
The voices rose behind him, not singing now but humming, a formless sweetness like wind flowing over empty country.
January stepped through the door of the tent – careful to choose the one around which the slaves clustered. At a guess, if he tried to enter by the other opening he’d be pushed out by a white salvation-seeker. After the clammy chill outside, the tent was warm, and every bench that formed a semicircle around the makeshift pulpit was packed, mostly with women. Whites and blacks sat crowded elbow-to-elbow, swaying and moaning as they listened. Behind the pulpit, more worshippers – white as well as black – were on their feet, eyes closed or half-closed, bodies rippling in a sort of snake-like, private dance.
‘Look at the people who hang on to their silver and their gold!’ Promise swept one powerful arm, as if to conjure such sinners before his listeners. When January had heard him speak on Tuesday evening, his voice had been soft and refined. Now it was pitched to carry, with the clear tenor power of a trumpet. ‘Look at the aristocrats, at the bankers, at the wealthy of the world, so blinded by the dazzle of gems that they cannot see the path that leads to the gate of Salvation!’
‘Dear God, save me!’ wailed a voice from the ‘anxious bench’, down in front, the bench where a dozen women sat quivering and writhing as if in pain.
And most notably, January observed, the plump black-clothed figure of the Widow Redfern.
‘God, save me!’ She jerked to her feet as if dragged, flung out her arms. ‘I have sinned—!’
‘Do you truly want to be saved?’ Promise sprang down from the pulpit, graceful as a dark-robed angel, and seized her by the hands, drew her to his breast like a lover. His long, dark curls hung into his eyes, dripping with sweat. One dancer behind him burst into tears; two others began to spin, their arms held out and their huge, bell-shaped skirts swirling like enormous flowers.
‘Your lips say one thing, but what is in your heart? Oh, my dearest sister, what does your aching heart say? Will you be saved? Or are you like the Rich Young Man of the Bible, who came to Jesus wanting to be saved, but then could not let go of his wealth?’
‘I want to be saved—!’
For some reason January remembered the girl in the Convent of St Theresa, radiant with self-sacrifice and the exultation of being the absolute center of attention.
‘The rich care not if a man is a Papist or an Infidel, even,’ shouted Promise to the congregation, ‘so long as he’s rich and they think they can get some of his money! They’re perfectly happy to welcome into their houses bankers who’ve cheated every man in this city out of the wherewithal to feed his family! Murderers who start each morning by spitting on the blessed name of Christ—’
January whispered, ‘Damn it,’ and made his way across to Abishag Shaw, who stood, arms folded, at the back of the tent. The Kentuckian was always ridiculously easy to find in a crowd because, other than January himself, he was the tallest man in the room.
Shaw raised his eyebrows at the sight of him. Before he could speak a word January took the Lieutenant’s hand, slapped the bag of English coins into it, then shoved a silver candlestick into each of the Kentuckian’s coat pockets.
‘You looking for those?’
‘Well,’ remarked Shaw, and he spat into the trampled grass along the edge of the tent, ‘somebody sure is. An’ they did say as how you’d be the man who had ’em.’
‘I thought so. Someone tried to break into my house at three o’clock this morning. My nephew and I managed to repel them before they got inside, but we found these on the back gallery, dropped in the scuffle. I think I blacked the eye of one of our visitors . . .’
‘Oh, that you did.’ Shaw emptied a few coins into his palm, turned them with his dirty thumb, and nodded. Presumably, thought January, the reason that English coins had been selected for the booty: fairly uncommon, but easily identifiable. ‘He come into the Cabildo this mornin’ with the story of how you’d broke into his house, robbed him an’ struck him, an’ him a white man . . .’
‘Was it Breche?’
‘The apothecary?’ Shaw raised his brows. ‘Not hardly. Feller name of Tremmel. Owns a cotton press an’ a couple boats.’
‘Who?’ January stared, taken aback. ‘I’ve never heard of the man in my life.’
‘Well, he’s heard of you. He didn’t just say a great big tall black feller broke into his house, neither. He said he knowed you, from seein’ you at the house of a friend a year ago, teachin
’ that friend’s daughter piano.’
‘Who was the friend?’
‘Franklin Culver.’
January was silent. He had indeed taught Charis Culver piano for three years.
‘So less’n you can produce two white men who’ll swear they was with you at three o’clock this mornin’,’ Shaw went on gently, ‘it is my duty to place you under arrest.’
TWENTY-THREE
January said – a little uncertainly – ‘That’s ridiculous.’ But his heart beat faster and he felt disoriented, as if, standing on some high place, he had felt the floor beneath him crack. From childhood he had known, and feared, the power of white men before the law.
It was assumed by the courts – as it was assumed by nearly every white man January had ever met – that a black man would lie.
‘I know it is.’ Shaw spat again. ‘But that ain’t my business. An’ that ain’t my decision. They’s white men all over this town who’ll testify to your character—’
A man entering the tent behind January thrust him aside with a violence that almost rocketed him into Shaw’s arms, and a voice like thundering Jove boomed, ‘Whoremaster!’
Down at the front of the tent, the Reverend Promise – with one arm locked like an iron band around the Widow Redfern’s ample waist and one hand gripping her wrist as he wrestled with (presumably) the Devil inside her – looked up in shock.
His face changed as he recognized, in the tent doorway, the Reverend Micajah Dunk.
‘Antichrist!’ he shouted, and he shoved the widow behind him for protection.
Dunk stormed down the aisle flanked by a flying squad of his own beefy parishioners, his dark brow contracted into a storm of righteous wrath. ‘Beelzebub!’
‘Spawn of Mammon!’
‘Micajah!’ sobbed Mrs Redfern, and she held out her arms. Her black-veiled bonnet had fallen from her head in her struggles with her inner sinfulness, her blondish-gray hair tumbled in thin ribbons over her shoulders, like that of an elderly princess welcoming St George. The Revered Promise seized her as she tried to step forward and again interposed his body between her and her former mentor.
‘I charge you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, to release the hold thou hast upon this woman—!’
‘Behold how Satan will quote the Scripture unto his own ends!’
Promise turned to the congregation, swept his arm like Moses commanding the sea to part. ‘Wilt thou stand by and suffer the Servant of the Lord to be mocked?’
A dozen men leaped to their feet and charged like warriors at the Reverend Dunk and his disciples, tripping over the feet of others on the benches on their way.
Shaw said, ‘Well, I will be dipped,’ and plunged down the aisle into the fray.
Though he knew that Rose would never forgive him for leaving before he learned the outcome of the battle, January turned promptly and left the tent.
Natchez Jim and his cousins looked up from their domino game as January strode quickly down the path from the levee. ‘You find your man?’
‘I did indeed.’ January got into the boat. ‘And returned to him the goods to be taken back to their rightful owner. Now I’d appreciate it if you and your boys would forget you ever saw me.’
‘We ever saw who?’ Jim grinned and put a long, stout pole into January’s hands. ‘We’ll just say it was a little bird, helped us get this bull-bitch boat back up to town.’
It was, as January had feared, many hours of poling and bushwhacking – literally pulling the boat along by means of overhanging branches and half-submerged tree-trunks – before the Black Goose returned to New Orleans. Sometimes there was enough wind to put up the wood boat’s sail, but even so, only by steering in close along the banks could they make headway against the ferocious currents of the river’s winter rise. He was exhausted and famished by the time they reached the levee by the French Market again, and chilled by the sweat drying into his clothes. Jim and his crew joked with him and laughed that they’d make a river man of him yet (‘My wife will kill you if you do . . .’), but January noticed they walked with him along the levee as far as the bottom of Rue Dumaine through the gathering dusk, looking in all directions about them for the City Guards.
And among the dark hulls of the ships drawn up to the deep-water wharves there, a red flash of flag caught January’s eye as the river breeze lifted it . . .
The star and crescent banner of the Sultan.
January whispered, ‘Shit.’
He said the word again when he came within a hundred feet of the house of Hüseyin Pasha. In spite of the renewed vèvès that Olympe written over the doors and shutters last night, men and women loitered on the corner across the street. The men were of the stevedore type, mostly white but with one or two blacks among them, whose clothes and bearing, as much as their more pronouncedly African features, made him think they might well be American-born. The women weren’t the dockside drabs he’d seen Tuesday night, but working women in shabby calico, the kind of women who took in washing or sewing in order to feed their families while their men worked on the docks.
He felt their eyes on him as he crossed the street to the house door, pounded on it with his fist.
After a long time – someone must have looked down from one of the upstairs windows – an eye he recognized as Hannibal’s appeared in the judas, and he heard the clank of the lock, the scrape of bolts drawn back.
He stepped inside quickly, conscious of two men and a woman crossing the street after him as Hannibal slammed the door behind him and shot the bolts. Someone pounded on the door as January followed the fiddler down the passageway to the courtyard. ‘The Watch have been by twice,’ reported Hannibal as they ascended the stairs to the gallery above. Looking down into the shadowy courtyard January saw Nehemiah briefly appear in the kitchen doorway, carrying what looked like the handle of an ax or shovel. Perkin the groom came out of the stable to see who was in the court, then disappeared again. January wondered if the hasp on the side door of the stable, so many times unscrewed and reattached, would hold against a determined attack.
‘Breche was on the corner earlier,’ Hannibal went on, ‘talking like he was running for office. I think the Watch told him he was in danger of arrest, because he hasn’t returned, but everyone’s been back and forth to the shop.’
January cursed in Arabic. Ghulaam, standing guard outside the door of the parlor, said, ‘mîn, hâbib,’ as they passed through into the parlor.
Jamilla, properly dressed and veiled, sat on the Western-style sofa, but the visible hand-breadth of her face was pallid and beaded with sweat. The boy Nasir stood beside her, a look of agony on his round, snub-nosed face. As Hannibal and January entered, the boy asked in French, ‘When it gets dark they’ll come, won’t they, sirs?’ He cast a quick glance at the swift twilight already gathered in the windows. ‘When the Watch are all down at the taverns?’
‘I think so, yes. Night’s black agents to their preys do rouse . . . and I’m sure they won’t make a move until the house is actually broken into. Can’t arrest people for standing on the street corner, can you? Not whites, anyway. You haven’t seen Shaw by any chance, Benjamin?’
‘He’s still down in Chalmette,’ said January grimly, ‘as far as I know. At least, no steamboat passed us from that direction. But I suspect he’ll have his hands full. My Lady, with your permission—’ He took Jamilla’s hand, felt the pulse of her wrist. ‘How have you fared?’
‘Mr Sefton warned me that it would be difficult.’ He could see the attempt at a smile in her eyes. ‘All these years I have taken care to keep away from afyûn – my mother, and my father’s concubine, were much given to it, you understand – and now to be caught that way by a Christian. I’m sorry,’ she said at once. ‘I am weary. I should not have spoken ill of your faith.’
‘Having come from a Christian gathering this afternoon,’ sighed January as he brought the candle close to look at her eyes, ‘I have no words with which to refute you, La
dy.’ And he recounted, briefly, the events of the day, which had started in the small hours, and was glad that the account of the riot in the revival tent drew a whispered laugh from her.
‘Who is this Tremmel?’ asked the Lady, when January had finished. ‘And why does he accuse you? Might he be this Smith, that came to see my husband—?’
‘I thought of that,’ said January. ‘Because it’s clear to me that Mr Smith – as Smith – doesn’t really exist. Like some other people I could mention –’ he glanced trenchantly at Hannibal’s bleached and recolored hairline – ‘he was invented . . .’
He stopped as a thought struck him.
He looked back at Jamilla, and at the boy beside her.
‘He was invented to get something from my father?’ asked Nasir. ‘Like a spirit, called into being from smoke to accomplish a task?’
January was silent. He felt as if he should be shocked, but he felt no shock. Only a kind of irritation at himself, such as he felt sometimes when he’d been searching all over the house for his hat or his gloves or a piece of music, only to find it in the obvious place.
‘No,’ he said at length, aware that Jamilla and the boy were both looking at him, troubled by his silence. ‘No, I don’t think Tremmel is Smith. In fact, I’ve just realized who Smith might be. It doesn’t help us tonight, and I’m not sure how much it will help your husband—’
‘It will not help him,’ demanded Suleiman, from a chair beside the fire, ‘if a man can be made to testify that he was with my master at the moment that Noura and Karida were thrown – were seen to be thrown – from the window?’
Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 24