Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  Jeanette slipped around the corner and was gone.

  “I’m sorry.” Kiki went to the hearth, moving slowly and painfully still, and with a crane-hook brought forward a small pot that had been boiling over the flames. “I was about to bring you this out to the hospital when Baptiste came over and told me Dr. Laurette’s come from Baton Rouge on the boat that Michie Hannibal took to town. He’s that fond of meringues, Dr. Laurette, and Madame thought it’d be nice if we had some.”

  Her round face was gray with weariness, and, January thought, there remained at the back of her dark eyes some of the haunted look they’d worn in the firelight last night. He recalled Jeanette’s scornful words, She wouldn’t spit on the back of a field hand to wash it, and thought about the poultices laid not only on Vanille’s back, but on Quashie’s and Ti-Fred’s in the hospital from which he’d just come.

  She had spoken of children. Was it that loss which had touched her, finally? Or simply the understanding that what was happening could break into violence at any moment, and destroy them all? Her hands twitched—not quite a tremor—as she poured the tisane into a gourd.

  “Michie Fourchet going to be all right?” he asked.

  “Dr. Laurette thinks so.” Kiki handed him the gourd. “He bled him good. Laurette’s a great bleeder; I think he wants to be a soldier in his heart. Most of the time I look at these blankitte doctors that bleed everyone no matter what’s wrong with them and I think they’re crazy, but for Michie Fourchet, it makes him weak and keeps him quiet, and right now quiet is what he needs. Dr. Laurette gave him some bromide, all mixed with sassafras and sugar to kill the taste of it—it’s better than hartshorn, they say.”

  As Kiki talked she broke eggs into a white Germanware bowl, neatly separating the whites from the yolks, and scraped a little sugar from the loaf on the table. “How do you use it?” She nodded at the gourd. “Ground holly? I never heard of that.”

  “It’s an astringent, mostly,” said January. He sloshed the liquid—it was dark, the color of strong tea.” It keeps wounds clean better than brandy or rum. My sister learned of it from an old Natchez woman: My sister’s a voodoo. Olympia Snakebones. Watch it,” he added, as Kiki’s hand twitched again and the pinch of cream of tartar she was carrying to the meringue bowl scattered fluffily over the table.

  “I’m all right.” Kiki braced herself on the corner of the table, rosebud mouth caught together tight. “It just … takes me sometimes.”

  “You shouldn’t be up.”

  “I’ll be all right. You go out and take care of Vanille. I’ll get Minta to do the washing up tonight and lie down as soon as supper’s done.”

  Yesterday’s clear hard cold seemed to be breaking as January walked back to the hospital through the chill, slanting light. Rain coming. Clouds piled in the southern sky. He’d only sell it. And, I cooked dinner for twenty people … after giving birth to a child.…

  What had become of that child?

  When January emerged from the hospital again the shadows were long across the yard, and under the dark of the gallery candlelight showed in a window or two, like sleepy-lidded eyes. Had Marie-Noël Fourchet burned the letters Robert denied he’d written her? Or did she take them out of some compartment in her desk sometimes and read over words of tenderness that her husband never spoke?

  Did she believe them? A middle-aged whore in a dirty part of Paris. An odd choice, for a man as fastidious as Robert Fourchet.

  On the whole, he thought, it was likelier that she’d burned them. Marie-Noël didn’t look like a foolish woman. And she’d be a fool to think Madame Hélène wouldn’t search til she’d found them, in order to throw them in Simon Fourchet’s face.

  But sixteen is an age that treasures scraps of comfort.

  He worked through the night in the mill, hauling wood, stoking fires, thrusting cane into the grating iron teeth of the rollers and later piling cut stalks along the downstream outer wall of the mill, so that it could be carried in easily once the mill was running full-out again. Thierry went up to the house just after supper and returned in a savage mood, wielding his whip as if he suspected every man and woman present of destroying the wood stores in order to threaten his position as overseer. It was a relief when the overseer went off duty a few hours before midnight. Esteban stayed later. He worked without shouts or curses, frequently consulting the silent, ashen-faced Rodney about the appearance of the boiling sap, and when it should be skimmed, or struck, or moved from kettle to kettle.

  “Will you be all right?” January overheard him ask Rodney at one point during the evening, and the bereaved father nodded.

  “The work keeps me from thinkin’.”

  Esteban lifted a hand as if he would have touched his driver’s shoulder, then thought again, and turned away.

  The men on the night gang generally had three or four hours’ sleep before they were due back in the fields again. After slipping up to the levee to change the green bandanna for a purple, January had intended to take an extra hour before setting out for Daubray with his pass and his story about a letter that needed to go to New River, but instead was wakened at full daylight by Harry and Disappearing Willie bringing Quashie back in. “Thierry made him go out with the main gang cuttin’ this mornin’,” explained Will, gently laying the young man down on his cot. Quashie was unconscious, ashen and waxy-looking; his hands, when January pinched his fingernail, were icy cold.

  Harry silently disappeared, and returned a moment later with a gourd containing a little whiskey. January sniffed it but concluded that its quality was such that it couldn’t possibly have come from the big house, and held it to Quashie’s lips. “Thank you,” he said later, when Will had gone out to find Jeanette. Harry waved away the thanks.

  “I hear tell you’re headed for New River with a letter,” said Harry, following January down the cabin steps and around to the back, where the bachelors’ communal washing facilities—a trough—faced their weed-grown patch of yams, corn, and peas.

  “I wouldn’t be washin’ up extra fine to impress Ajax.” January dug his fingers into the little firkin of soft soap he’d brought out with him, and scrubbed the water over his face, hair, and naked chest.

  “You goin’ by way of Daubray?”

  “I might be.”

  “Arnaud, that cooks for Michie Louis, might give you something in the way of lunch, if so be you was to stop at the kitchen there and hand him this.” From under his shirt, he pulled a rough bundle wrapped in rags. He must have gotten it from his cabin at the same time he got the whiskey.

  “Be a pleasure,” said January.

  From his pocket, Harry produced a small sack of salt—the scrunch of it, and the smell, unmistakable—and said, “And if so be you’d just give this to old Mambo Hera, from Trinette, I’d be obliged.”

  The moment he was out of sight of the house January opened the bundle. It contained about two yards of the pink silk Madame Hélène had been so enraged about a few days before. He shook his head.

  The bag contained only salt. It was high quality and clean, presumably from the big house salt-box.

  Just what I need, thought January, shoving both parcels under his arm again. To get stopped by the patrollers with this on me.…

  Since he was supposed to be going to New River, January took the field roads through the cut cane-stubble, waving to the women loading the cane carts as he passed. But as soon as he was out of sight of the big house he veered south. Rats scurried unseen through the weed and maiden cane; buzzards wheeled lazily, watchful black dots against the hazy blue. The day was warmer and clouds stretched horizon to horizon now, with more to the south. Alone, January let the peace of the country fill him again, and wondered what Rose was doing, back in town, or Olympe, or his enterprising nephews and nieces. Flexed his aching hands and wondered how long it would take his fingers to regain their lightness on the keyboard, and whether his mother would let him take away the piano St.-Denis Janvier had bought for him, when he took his share of Fou
rchet’s money and got his own rooms elsewhere at last.

  Wondered if he would one day be able to induce Rose to share them with him.

  He had not lived alone in twelve years, he realized, save for those two nightmare weeks in Paris following his wife’s death.

  Arnaud, the Daubray cook, a trim little man with a dapper salt-and-pepper beard, received Harry’s bundle with alacrity. “What people waste!” he cried disapprovingly. “My Katie can get herself a whole bodice out of these bits!” Ayasha had been a seamstress, so January could tell that though Harry had snipped and cut the shell-pink fabric to give the impression that it was scrap, it was not, in fact, waste—and what woman in her right mind would discard that much fabric that could so easily be made up into something else?

  But Harry had been wise, for the cook promptly launched into a sincere diatribe about theft, while counting out small bits of lead from jar-seals and broken pipe-fittings—evidently his agreed-upon payment for the silk. “Now, it’s one thing to trade with real leavings, like that silk or coffee beans that’s been used, or tea leaves,” he said, clicking his tongue. “But those field hands will steal anything—anything.”

  January, who’d been careful to dress in the wool trousers, blue calico shirt, and corduroy jacket of his earlier incarnation as a respectable house-servant, nodded gravely. “I can understand them stealing food, if their master’s a harsh one,” he said, mirroring exactly the cook’s more educated—though certainly not Parisian—French. “But stealing things to sell them to a river-trader like this M’sieu Jones I hear so much of …”

  “Good Lord, False River Jones!” Arnaud raised his hands in an appeal to heaven. “There are times when I believe the man is employed by the Devil himself, to tempt field hands to theft and flight.”

  “Flight?” January thought of the pirogue waiting under the snags at Catbird Island.

  The cook wrapped up all his little scraps of lead—a chunk nearly the size of a woman’s fist—and handed it to January. “Half the runaways on this river,” he declared, with the air of one driving home a point, “start out with Jones bringing somebody word of their woman or their child or their mother up in Baton Rouge or down in the city. Now, you sell a young buck, or a likely girl, and they get over it, mostly. Field hands do.” With his clean clothes and shaved chin, as January had expected, Arnaud had assumed him to be a house-servant, in league with him against the coarser spirits of the cane-patch.

  So he nodded a self-evident agreement and donned an expression of admiration for the man’s philosophic wisdom.

  “They do,” continued Arnaud, “until they’re down at the levee in the middle of the night trading off a tablecloth or a china cup or half my store of tea for a gourd of liquor! And such liquor—my lord! And all it takes is Jones asking, ‘You wouldn’t be Plautus from Four Corner plantation, would you? I have a letter from your girl there,’ and the next day the boy’s moping and thinking about how everything was wonderful back on Four Corner, and nobody made him work there, and they fed him chicken and biscuits there, and off he goes. And I ask you, what good does it do?”

  “Not any,” said January, in the voice of one aggrieved by the misbehavior of inferiors. “Not any at all.”

  “I mean, they have to know they’re going to be caught and brought back. They have to know that that part of their life is over. They’re never going back there. They’re never going to see those people again. Why not just accept that fact and go on?”

  January remembered the tears of one night in childhood, when a boy he’d been best friends with—Tano, his name had been—was sold away. He’d wept and wept, sick with the thought that he’d never see that friend again. That for all intents and purposes, Tano was dead. Gone. Sold down the river.

  “Why not?” he agreed. “You’d think the decent people around here would do something about Jones, wouldn’t you?”

  “They’ve tried.” Arnaud shook his head, and with a few quick strokes sliced bread for them both, and cheese and apples. “Near to three weeks ago, Michie Hippolyte heard Jones was back, working his way down the river, and set out to trap him. I could have told him it was no use. Anyone could. It’s my belief the field hands heard of it, though Michie Hippolyte kept quiet about his plans, and only took Michie Roger—that’s our overseer—and Michie Evard his cousin with him. But the field hands, they eavesdrop and listen and spy. Would you believe it, just the other day …”

  January listened patiently for another hour, contributing his mites of agreement and gossip, until he ascertained that Hippolyte Daubray, his overseer, and his cousin, had in fact been seen to depart for their hunt on the night of the Triomphe sugar-mill fire. By dint of careful questioning he learned also that the middle-aged dandy had been “out hunting” when he was supposed to have been supervising the harvest on the afternoon and evening of the seventh, when the mule barn had burned, but the rest of the timing was not so certain. Having seen him, January couldn’t imagine that stout sybarite dressing himself in a field hand’s rough garb and hat to sneak up and spook the mule team in the roundhouse in the middle of the morning, but, he was aware, appearances could be deceptive indeed.

  “An unpleasant situation all around, M’sieu,” Arnaud sighed. “That girl, that Marie-Noël …” Across the yard a knot of young ladies of the Daubray household were visible on the back gallery, bright chattering creatures like tropical birds. They were sewing—fancy stitchery, it looked like from here—and one of them sent a maid hurrying across the yard to the kitchen for lemonade. Once he heard their laughter.

  “I understand her jealousy.” The cook counted out lemons with a grimace of regret. “Particularly of M’sieu Louis’s daughters. They are so beautiful, and Mamzelle Marie-Noël is—well—not. Michie Louis, he did everything he could to prevent the match. He even sent her away to New Orleans to keep her from marrying that awful man, for it was clear as day all he wanted was claim to Michie Raymond’s house and lands. But she schemed to get M’sieu Fourchet wound around her thumb, saying no and then saying yes, and he went nearly crazy trying to find out whether that wife of his was dead or not. A bad hat she was, gettin’ drunk and actin’ up and leavin’ him and her children to go back to France as she did. And a good thing, too, that she did turn out to have died, for I would not have put it beyond him to have murdered the poor woman. A drunkard and a brute,” Arnaud added, in a tone rich with satisfaction, “and one day that girl’ll find out her mistake, if she hasn’t already.”

  “Still,” said January thoughtfully, “if one wished to get a letter to someone on the river … Where would one find this Michie Jones?”

  “Oh, he’s due back any time.” The cook scowled his disapproval, and sent the maid off with her wickerwork tray of lemonade, cakes, and marrons glacés. “He generally camps on the far side of Catbird Island, or sometimes up Bayou Prideaux, that little bayou between the Prideaux lands and Lescelles.”

  Before departing, January asked to be taken to Mambo Hera’s cabin, and with visible distaste Arnaud pointed out a tiny annex on the back of one of the barns, just opposite the long shabby rows of the pig-houses. “She asked for that place,” he apologized. “M’sieu Louis, and M’sieu Hippolyte, offered her a room above the kitchen where it was warm, but she wouldn’t have anything but a place among her animals. It makes it most awkward to look after her.…”

  “Thanks,” said January. “I’ll find my way.”

  As he crossed through the stable yards he could see her already, a little bundle of faded gaudy rags in the shadow of the annex’s tiny gallery. Close by the kitchen he saw another old woman plucking chickens and telling stories to the littlest children, the toddlers too old to be carried to the fields with their mothers but too young to do any kind of work, but no one, apparently, had any idea of burdening Mambo Hera with such a task. She sat alone on her bench, staring out with eerie contentment in her cataract-blind eyes, as if she lived on air alone and the sounds and scent it brought her.

  And January sh
ivered as she turned her face toward him—as she twisted her wry little neck to look up, for she was bent nearly double with arthritis. And he understood what Jeanette had meant, when she said this woman had Power.

  Even had he not been told who she was, he thought, he would have known. She was a priestess. Not as Marie Laveau was in town, heiress of traditions adapted and mingled in this new world. Not like Laveau’s disciple Olympe, who had studied with the old mambos and learned the ancient medicines and the ancient ways.

  Mambo Hera was the ancient way.

  She said, “Who this alejo come walk up my path?” and her voice was thin and high and mumbling over toothless gums. Her nostrils flared, scenting him; he saw thought pucker the wrinkled flesh on that little skull that seemed barely bigger than his own great fist. “Stranger come walking from Triomphe, where they’re cooking the sugar.… Stranger come from town? Come on the boat?”

  January realized he must have the smells of the steamboat’s soot, of the town market’s spices, imbued still in his clothing, along with the light sweat of a few hours’ walk. He replied, “I’ve come down from Triomphe, yes, Mambo. A woman there asked me to give you this.” And he took the little bag of salt from his pocket, and held it out to her. The old woman extended a hand so balled and broken with arthritis that the palm was gouged with healed wounds from her own nails, but she pinched the bag between finger and thumb, and secreted it in her clothing. Her hair was thin, a myriad of white braids framing old country marks on her temples; under the creased and wrinkled lids the opal deadlights seemed indeed to see.

  “Trinette?” she asked, and January said, “Yes.

  “That Reuben died?

  “He died.”

  She nodded, satisfied. “How did he die? I made a ball of black wax and pins for her, and the ashes of a thrush’s wing; told her bury it under the threshold of his house, where he’d walk. I burned a black wax candle for her in the dark of the moon, stuck all through with pins, and the last pin fell out when the moon was full. Was that when he died?”