Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  When they reached the ciprière the wind was less, though the tops of the trees tossed and muttered, and even down below the air was achingly cold. A half-mile in, close by the place where the ring-shout had been, was a hut used sometimes by those Fourchet sent out to burn charcoal for use in the forge, and sometimes by the men who gathered Spanish moss. Its single window was shuttered, but most of the moss and mud that chinked the walls had fallen out. January could see the lantern’s light inside like a pile of gold needles in the dark. The one knot-hole big enough to see through didn’t give a very good view, but he saw a few rough bales of moss stacked along the opposite wall, and a black-skirted knee and foot.

  Kiki was sitting on the moss.

  Waiting.

  January knew, at this point, that the supper hour was well and truly over and he would be beaten by Ajax when he returned to the evening’s work at the mill. For Hannibal to protest would mean the loss of his position in the work-gang, and with it the loss of any chance for further information.

  Stealthily he backed into the shadows of a hackberry thicket and thought, This had better be worth it.

  And waited, while the moon sailed high over the heaving trees, and the ghosts whispered in the darkness. Waited, to see who would come.

  Frost on the way, January thought. His bones twinged with the reminder that he was no longer a young man. If not tonight, then soon. Maybe the attempts on Simon Fourchet were only anger, against his merciless drive to make the crop. Maybe the break January sought in the pattern was too small to see, a flaw in the mind of a man or woman pushed to personal extremity, like the hairline fracture in a steamboat’s boiler that one night will bear the pressure of the steam no more. It wasn’t as though the planter hadn’t pushed his slaves to murder and rebellion before.

  His land, Fourchet had said. All that he had to show for his life, and everything that was precious to him. Devotion to it had cost him the life of the woman whose portrait still hung on the parlor wall, and the life of the daughter she’d borne him. Had cost him the love of Madame Camille, fleeing to New Orleans in the wake of her babies’ deaths. Would they have lived, had they had the services of a doctor in town?

  He thought about the pirogue, waiting in the darkness of the snag-piles on Catbird Island, and of the butler lying dead in the storeroom, a glass in his hand.

  Voodoo marks on the walls …

  The smell of blood.

  January’s head came up as he scented it, sudden and raw as the wind momentarily slacked. Then he heard her moan.

  He strode to the hut and hurled open the rickety door. Kiki raised her head from the floor where she’d fallen when the convulsions overtook her. Her skirts were hiked around her waist. The thick pad of moss and rags over which she’d been squatting, now drenched with blood and fetal matter, made clear to him why she had come. Mute eyes, huge and terrified, met his, then she doubled over again. An animal sound was wrung from her, hoarse and dreadful.

  “What did you take?” Without waiting for a reply January plucked aside the towel that covered her basket, unstopped the half-empty gourd of brownish liquid inside, and sniffed it, not even needing to taste. Quinine. Of course she’d have access to the plantation medicine chest, and there was never any telling how strong the bark was, when you boiled it.

  There was a rain barrel behind the hut, at this season clear even of mosquitoes. The water was fairly fresh. Among the packets and boxes in her basket there was powdered tobacco, which he mixed—carefully—with gourdful after gourdful of water, forcing her to drink. She vomited twice, January holding her shoulders, the smell of the blood nauseating in his nostrils but familiar. How many times, during his six years at the hospital in Paris, had he dealt with women in similar case?

  He’d known women to take anything, any sort of poison, to purge unwanted pregnancies: foxglove, ipecac, arsenic. He was preparing a third dose of tobaccowater when Kiki raised her head—hair sweat-matted around her face, dark eyes huge and sunken in the candlelight—and gasped, “Paper. Herbs. The basket.” And vomited again, and again, as if all her guts and soul would come up as well.

  They were powdered up in a twist of paper and January wasn’t certain what they were—fragments of honeysuckle at least, and a smell of licorice. But he mixed them with a little water, and held the gourd for Kiki to drink.

  She retched, gagged, fingers digging into his biceps like iron vises. She had kneaded pounds of bread every day for years, and her grip was like a blacksmith’s. Then she lay back, gasping, in the crook of his arm, and began to weep.

  Gently, January lifted her, carried her to the moss bales. He tucked her skirt up out of the way and laid more of the rags from her basket under her bottom to absorb the last of the blood. The mess of bloodied rags, moss, and aborted flesh he gathered together and carried outside, locating a charcoal-burner’s bucket and upending it over the sorry little heap to keep the foxes out of it until he could come back and bury or burn it. By lantern light, the fetus had looked to be about three months along. A dangerous time to abort.

  When he came back Kiki had pulled her skirt down over her legs. She lay breathing shallowly, eyes closed, tears running from them down her plump cheeks. January took off his coarse jacket and tucked it around her, then used his clasp-knife to cut the cords on one of the moss bales, piling the wiry gray masses around her like a rude blanket. Kiki groaned, and whispered, “Gilles.”

  “Was it Gilles’s child?”

  She opened her eyes, not surprised at the question. He gave her the gourd he’d filled from the barrel; she drank thirstily. Not the cleanest, he thought, but she’d lost blood and it was exactly what she’d have drunk back in the quarters.

  After a time she nodded, and wept again without a sound.

  January turned away, and sorted through the basket on the table. There was slippery elm there, and willow bark. It wasn’t part of a surgeon’s training, but he’d learned from Olympe and, long ago, from old Mambo Jeanne. He hunted through the little hut til he found a tin cup, which he filled with the last of the water in the gourd and set over the lantern’s candle, so that the bark could steep. As he worked he felt Kiki’s gaze on his back, and saw she had turned her head a little to watch him work.

  She whispered, “He’d have sold it. Michie Fourchet would have sold it.”

  January couldn’t argue.

  “Gilles was so good. And it made him so happy, when I told him I was carrying.” She shook her head. “ ’She gonna be a beautiful gal,’ he said. ‘She gonna look just like you.’ ” She closed her eyes, and laid her forearm over them, not sobbing, but with the tears still flowing down.

  Still January said nothing. He knew—they all knew—what generally happened to beautiful gals who were not free. The water hissed and bubbled in the cup. He wrapped a corner of his outer shirttail around his hand and brought the cup to her, helped her sit up to drink. “We’d better be getting back,” he told her. “You’re chilled, and you’ve lost blood. I’ll get you to your cabin and then come back here and bury the child. Should anyone find it, with you sick tomorrow, they’ll guess.” It meant a day in the fields with little more than an hour’s sleep, but he had no thought of not helping her. For a slave woman to induce abortion in herself or anyone else was punishable by whipping, an act of robbery from her master.

  Kiki sighed, and struggled to sit up. “I won’t be sick tomorrow,” she said. There was infinite weariness, an endless chain of days on which she had been strong, in her tired voice. “Nobody will know.”

  “They’ll know if you faint dead on the kitchen floor. Can you put these on yourself?” January handed her the long rags she’d folded as clouts to absorb the bleeding and, though he’d performed the most intimate care of her less than an hour ago when she was semiconscious, now turned his back on her, and let her tend to herself. “Tell ’em you broke a jar and cut your foot, and need to stay off it for a day, and let Minta do the cooking.”

  “I do that and the whole family’ll die of
poisoning, not just Michie Fourchet.”

  January laughed, and turned back in time to see her rising shakily to her feet. “No, you don’t.” Again, he picked her up, not easily, for she could not have weighed less than two hundred pounds, but without trouble. He had worked with the dying and the dead, both as a surgeon in Paris, and before and after those years during the fever summers in New Orleans. He had learned the knack of lifting bodies. “Which is the best way back to your cabin?”

  The candle in the lantern was flickering out, so he left it on the table with the basket. The gibbous moon stood high, shedding sufficient silvery light through the bare trees to find their way back to the fields. January hoped he’d be able to return as easily to the hut when he’d left Kiki at her quarters.

  It worried him, until they emerged from the woods, and saw the yellow fountain of upwelling fire from the direction of the quarters; heard the shouting, and smelled the smoke.

  TWELVE

  The fire had started in the woodsheds. By the time January reached Kiki’s small room attached to the rear of the kitchen, wind had carried burning fragments to the roofs of the cabins. “Dammit, get into line!” He heard Fourchet’s snarled bellow, and the crack of whips. “Get the goddam buckets—!”

  “Dear God.” Kiki’s eyes were wide with shock. When he set her down to open the door she clung to the doorpost, staring back at the flames in horror.

  “What do you have for burns?” January scooped her up again, carried her into the little chamber and over to the bed she had shared first with Reuben, then with Gilles. Though none of the field hands had spoken of it, the presence of the healing herbs in the basket told him she did at least some doctoring. “I’ll need bandages, beeswax …”

  “There’s wax in the kitchen.” She started up from the bed and he pressed her back by her shoulder, met her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, Ben, I’ve cooked dinner for twenty people five hours after I birthed a child.”

  “Well, somebody else got the fire going tonight. You have sassafras? More willow bark?” He’d already gone to the hearth, thrust a stick of kindling into the banked embers, and breathed on it gently, adding more kindling as the yellow flame licked up. The brighter light showed him her medicine box beside the bed. “May I?”

  She nodded, and he flipped back the lid, sniffed the tiny bundles wrapped in worn clean sheeting. “Make yourself a tea of these and take it,” he ordered, setting willow bark and briory on the bed beside her. “Then lie down and stay down. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Bandages and herbs in his pockets, he set out for the quarters at a run.

  Ajax’s house, first in the line and nearest the mill, was a torch—even as January arrived the driver flung himself out of the flames, naked and gasping, with his two-year-old daughter Milly clasped to his chest. Rodney’s little son Bo lay screaming on a blanket near the cane, his mother Ancilla crouched above him, frantically pouring water over him from a gourd. The child’s shrieks made a keening, hideous background to the greedy din of the fire.

  Rodney’s cabin was ablaze and Dan and Minerva’s just beyond. It was just past midnight and most of the inhabitants of the quarters had sunk into the first depths of heavy sleep—Giselle and Emerald were running along the dirt street, pounding on doors, thrusting into dark cabins to drag their friends out of paralyzing slumber and shove them to safety. Someone had gotten to the plantation bell: It was clanging furiously, the iron racket penetrating the dreams of the unfree as no other sound could.

  “Get the buckets and make a line for the river!” Fourchet was yelling. “Get the trash away from the walls!”

  January slung his coat into a safe corner near the mule barn, caught up a rake, and joined the gang of women frantically clawing the piles of loose trash—cane—tops and leaves and fragments of dropped wood—away from the walls of the first woodshed, the one nearest the mill, which had not yet caught. The second and third, stocked and ready with enough wood to complete the sugar-boiling, lay downwind. If the wind didn’t shift, the first shed and the mill would be safe. He saw Thierry, in shirt and boots and no trousers, thrusting and shoving men toward the burning sheds: “Pull the walls out! Save the wood!” Looked beside him and saw Madame Marie-Noël, dressed with a shawl around her shoulders, wielding a rake beside the nightgowned housemaid Ariadne. Saw Esteban and Robert, both in their nightshirts, running from the direction of the house.

  Men were already forming up a line past the smithy and the mill, across the open square and Thierry’s house, through the oaks and over the levee to the river. Nearly two hundred yards, buckets being passed from hand to hand, while Herc, stumbling and naked, shouted a second gang into order to clear the trash from the walls of the mill. Frenzied mules brayed and kicked in their barn, the horses in the stable, maddened by the scent of the smoke. Another woman shrieked “Claire! Claire!”—Juno, January identified her: He’d seen the baby Claire only that morning, one of the swaddled infants along the edge of the field.…

  Through the battlefield scud he glimpsed Hannibal in night-gear and Agamemnon trouserless in a ruffled linen shirt, running past with hooks and axes to join the women in the quarters. In the milling mass, the blinding smoke, they doused Random and Charity’s house, Rachel and Chevalier’s, with the contents of every rain barrel they could find, desperately trying to keep the fire from spreading along the line. Water flashed in the red glare as January ran to join the gang pulling at the rickety wooden walls of the third shed, the one nearest the quarters, dragging the burning wood out and dousing it.

  Fourchet yelled something, plunged in with a small gang of men to drag at the woodshed walls. His hat was gone but he was fully dressed—when had the man last slept?—and his gray hair framed a face twisted with fury and desperation. January was beside him, shrinking back from the hammering heat of the flames, when someone yelled, “It’s coming down!”

  Looking up, January saw the wall of burning logs above them crumple. It seemed to take forever, as time does in a dream, the light growing brighter and brighter as the flames poured down onto their heads. Thinking about it later he realized how easy it would have been to dodge out himself and leave Fourchet standing. The old man had certainly earned that kind of death.

  But whether because he’d spent his adult life tending burns and trauma, or because the Virgin Mary had, in fact, put in his heart the forgiveness he had grudgingly asked for—or simply because he could not let another man die three strides from him if he could help it—he hooked one massive arm around the planter’s chest and shoulders as he plunged back, dragging him bodily from under the collapsing logs.

  “Father!” Robert was shouting, clutching at Fourchet from the other side as they stood panting in the maelstrom of men. “Father!”

  Fourchet started to speak, then doubled over, choking, face flushed dark in the firelight.

  “Get him out of the heat.” January scooped the old man effortlessly up in his arms—after Kiki he was nothing—and carried him back toward the barns. “Sit him up. Let him breathe. Keep him still.” Confusion swirled around them, the fire’s roar blending with the sinister, breathing rattle of the wind in the canes. The scattered wood and slumped walls of the third shed were little more than a shapeless bonfire now, pouring rivers of flame at the hard bright watching stars. In the quarters Ajax’s house collapsed, then Rodney’s, like shacks built of cards to which some malicious child had applied a match.

  The child Bo’s screaming was silenced. January heard a woman crying, howling her grief. For the first few moments he thought Fourchet too would die, and cursed that he had no medicines, no preparations of any kind. He could only grip the broad flat shoulders in his hands, and feel the old man’s desperate spasms as he fought for breath.

  “His heart?” Robert knelt beside him, pressed a silver brandy flask into his hand.

  January nodded. Esteban yelled, “Save the wood! Save the wood!” and Herc staggered past carrying a young man from the second gang—Marquis was his name—wh
o’d been burned in the collapse of the third shed.

  “Get him a blanket,” said January. “Anything, keep him warm—”

  “Get that devil’s piss away from me!” Fourchet spat out the mouthful January had given him and sat up, eyes crazed in the flaring light. “You’re trying to ruin me! Thrust me back into hell …”

  “Get him hartshorn,” said January. “Baptiste, run back to the house and get hartshorn and a blanket, fast!” The butler, his coat awry and his white shirt smutched everywhere with soot, bolted for the house like a dog coursing hares.

  “Here.” Someone pressed a medicine bottle into January’s hand; he looked up and saw Kiki, who shouldn’t have been on her feet.

  “Water.” The ammoniac reek of the hartshorn was far too strong to drink. Everyone looked around, but the rain barrels and cisterns and jars of drinking water had mostly been dumped on the barn walls, and the mill. January settled for holding the bottle under Fourchet’s nose. The planter coughed violently, but opened his eyes, and his breathing seemed to be more steady. He tried at once to sit up and January forced him back against the barn wall. “It’s being taken care of, sir.”

  “The wood …”

  “It’s being taken care of. Can you breathe?”

  Someone put a blanket into his hand and he wrapped his former master in it: a slave’s quilt, strange gaudy colors, unfamiliar shapes. Other voices behind him, lost children calling for their mamas, women crying their children’s names. Juno calling “Claire! Claire!” over and over like a machine.

  For the first time January looked around him and saw Kiki, and Robert, and Cornwallis, and Harry. Trust Harry to find a way of looking like he was doing something without putting himself in any position of risk. To Cornwallis, January said, “Who’s the nearest doctor?” Then he remembered to glance at Robert, as if seeking white advice.

  “Dr. Laurette, in Baton Rouge.” January guessed there were American doctors in Donaldsonville across the river, but guessed too that Fourchet would no more submit himself to an American doctor than he’d trust an American steamboat master—and no wonder. Robert continued, “I understand that the most modern medical thinking these days is that a patient should be given brandy immediately, to stimulate the system, followed by mild electrical massage of the hands and feet. There’s a doctor in New Orleans—”