Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  “Yes,” said January. “That was when he died.”

  As he worked his way back through the cane-fields of Refuge, examining the ground along as much as he could of the border between the two properties, January glimpsed Gauthier Daubray’s empty house from afar. Seen by daylight, it had originally been a gay pink, faded now but still somehow reminiscent of a single camellia among the monotony of the cane-fields.

  January had a good deal of sympathy for Marie-Noël Fourchet: for the young girl’s desire to escape Daubray at almost any cost, and for her present difficulties. Yet he had been reminded, in the past week, that there are worse fates than to live with your wealthy relatives under a roof that doesn’t leak, and to eat the bread of captivity accompanied by liberal helpings of the chicken of captivity, the ham of captivity, the gravy of captivity, and the marrons glacés of captivity while suffering no worse fate than to mend your beautiful cousins’ dresses and watch them catch husbands while you had none for yourself.

  Since the confrontation between the Daubray brothers and Simon Fourchet, no cane had been harvested in the Refuge lands. It would have been easy to make one’s way through it to the fields of Mon Triomphe, and so almost to the walls of the mill itself. However, January found no evidence that anyone wearing a white man’s boots had done so.

  He hadn’t Shaw’s abilities as a tracker, but in default of other evidence it was increasingly clear to him that the hoodoo was someone on Mon Triomphe, whoever else might be paying or urging that someone to mischief. The one exception to this hypothesis might just be False River Jones. And he would know more, or be able to guess more, after he’d seen the man himself.

  It had been three days since January’s last visit to Catbird Island, so he worked his way riverward through Refuge’s straggly fields til he came to the levee and the snag-tangled, tree-grown batture beyond. Far off he could hear men singing, maybe the gang from Mon Triomphe or maybe the Daubray gang, the rhythm punctuated by the chop of knives.

  “Wy-o, Madame Caba,

  Way-o, Madame Caba,

  Way-o, Madame Caba,

  Your tignon fell down,

  Your tignon fell down.”

  Blackbirds flitted and dove through the cane. A rabbit sat up and looked at him, soft gray-brown with its little white shirt-front, as if it were going to a ball in town. When the green wall before him lightened he waited, seeing the moving stacks of a downriver boat gliding by. From those slow-moving decks there was nothing to do but watch the banks, and someone would almost certainly point him out: “Hey, there goes some nigger just standin’ wastin’ time on the batture.…” From its tangled shelter he could see them, two Americans in tobacco-brown coats leaning on the rail, spitting into the churning water. A waiter hurrying along the deck with a tray of coffee things. He saw how the man stepped aside in contempt from one of the stevedores on the deck—because he wore rougher clothing, January wondered, or because he was Congo black, African black, and the waiter was fair of skin, quadroon or octoroon?

  All going south, to New Orleans.

  Why? January blinked sleepily at the sun-glitter where water rippled over a sunken bar. Who were these people, standing at the railings, looking at the banks? What were the patterns in their lives?

  When the boat had gone by (Oceana, said the red-and-blue letters on her wheelhouse) he made his way for a mile and a half along the batture, sheltered from view by cypresses and willow logs, thanking God that it was winter and there were few gators around. A corn-snake slipped across his path, sluggish with the cool season, and he remembered how Olympe would trace the vévé for Damballah-Wedo in the earth of Congo Square, to summon the Serpent King. Sometimes she’d draw two snakes framing a pillar, sometimes instead of a pillar an elaborate column of crosses and stylized flowers—other nights only a few stars. Shaw had asked him once about this: Like a white man, Shaw thought these things always had to be done the same way to be “right.” But the spirits changed, and their signs shifted, and it all depended on what mood Olympe was in and what she felt that spirit of water and wisdom required—January felt he had grown up understanding this.

  When he reached the old landing behind its silted-up bar, he examined it with particular care. You couldn’t get a big side-wheeler in behind the bar anymore, but there was ample room for a pirogue or a keelboat—probably even for a small stern-wheeler, if you had a pilot who knew the water. An ideal place to put in if you wanted to come up along the cane-rows and make mischief with the woodsheds.

  But as far as January could tell, examining the damp earth around the mossy and dilapidated wharf, nobody had done that within the past four or five days.

  He was close enough now to the house that he could hear the women singing as they unloaded the cane at the mill. He removed his coat and shirt, shivering a little in the cool afternoon, and rolled up his trousers to his knees, so that he wouldn’t return mud-spattered and scratched from what was allegedly a peaceful trip out to New River with a letter. Watching and listening all around him and expecting every moment to hear Thierry call down from the levee, “What the hell you doin’ here, boy?” (And what the hell would the overseer be doing on the levee at this time of the day?) January crawled and crouched and dodged from tree to tree, from snag to snag, up the half-mile or so of bank, past the new landing, through the older willows around the little headland where Michie Demosthenes the Oak stood gesticulating with his purple bandanna at the passing boats (Everything fine here, Michie Shaw), and around to the foot of the Catbird chute.

  Behind the shelter of the headland he stripped off his trousers and boots, and waded across to the island.

  There were tracks there. A white man’s boots, coarse and heavy and square-toed. He recognized them at once: Thierry’s. He’d seen such tracks now for days in the fields and around the muck of the burned sheds. Fresh, coming and going. That day, the mud not even dried. No older than lunchtime.

  He shuddered at the thought of how easily he could have run into the man.

  He followed them around to the little bay at the end of the island, knowing with heartsick certainty what he was going to find.

  The overseer’s tracks crossed and recrossed the margin of the concealing snags and brush, but January could see with a single glance at the ground that Thierry had found the boat. He saw where it had been dragged from its hiding place, saw the digs and gouges in the damp clay where the bottom had been stove in—probably, thought January, squatting to examine them in the slanting afternoon light, with an ax. There were long sharp gouges in the mud where the protruding shards had plowed, when the boat had been shoved back.

  A little ways into the clumps of snags January found the dented and useless pot, the smashed cups and gourds. The candles were in fragments; the blanket, bread, and cheese lay scattered, sodden and stinking of piss.

  For some reason he remembered the gang of keelboat toughs slicing his coat off him with their skinning-knives, shredding his music into the gutter.

  That same viciousness. That same easy demolition of what had taken such time and such heartbreaking effort to procure.

  The basket Kiki had given Jeanette had been torn from its tree branch. It had contained two loaves of bread, a quantity of salt meat and a small sack of cornmeal, another pot, three more apples from Madame Camille’s garden, and three tin cups.

  Three. January knelt by the damaged and mucky mess. The pillowcase that had wrapped the food was far too old to have come from the big house, but he recognized the neat yellow mending-stitches along its edge.

  He’ll only sell her.…

  He searched the rest of the island for signs of False River Jones and found none.

  The afternoon was drawing to a close. Keelboats and flatboats showed like chips of debris on the quicksilver river, coming down the big current, the dark squat shapes of the great paddle-wheelers working their way up close to the shore. Too soon by several hours for him to expect people to believe he’d been to New River and back. He took his rosary from the
pocket of his rolled-up jacket, set his back to a tree-bole in the midst of the island where none would easily see him either from the river or the levee, and gazed blinking into the warm blue-tinted distance. The clouds that had thickened all day formed a solid roof above, and the air was mild and heavy-feeling. Rain before morning, he thought. Maybe even before he could reasonably return to Mon Triomphe.

  The thought didn’t trouble him. He’d brought the black bandanna with him, that had to be tied onto the tree once it got dark.

  It was the first time in many days that he’d been alone, with peace and with God.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.…”

  Then, because he had worked as a slave and lived as a slave for long enough to recall the priorities of servitude, he stretched out on the ground with his head on his rolled-up clothing, and fell immediately and profoundly asleep.

  FIFTEEN

  Throughout the following day, as he lopped cane-tops, or carried stalks to the carts, or hauled wood, or played the dozens with the other main-gang men while they rested at noon—“You so smelly the buzzards follow you around thinkin’ you got a dead skunk in your pocket.” “Yeah, your brother so smelly he’s a free man, ’cause he run away and the hounds kept vomitin’ and couldn’t chase him.”—January listened for the arrival of the steamboat that would bring Hannibal back from New Orleans.

  The key to the deadly riddle, he was certain now, did not lie on Mon Triomphe itself. Short of catching the hoodoo red-handed, he could see no way farther forward, with the information he had or could reasonably expect to get. That the culprit was a fellow slave he was almost certain. Yet the pattern of the crimes themselves felt wrong.

  There was something else going on. Something at once too methodical and too random for rebellion.

  When he’d returned last night in the rain, Kiki had made it her business to intercept him on the way back from the big house and let him know she’d found no oil-stained garment in the laundry.

  This hadn’t surprised him. If the hoodoo had been careful enough to conceal the cut-marks on the mill machinery with pitch, and retreat to the old kitchen at Refuge to boil up the poison from the oleanders, he or she wasn’t about to casually stuff an incriminating shirt or skirt or bodice waist into Ti-Jeanne’s willow baskets for all the world to see.

  Some piece of information lay elsewhere, that would unlock the riddle: Esteban’s lover perhaps, or Fourchet’s will. January knew the pattern now, the rhythm of these lives. But the breaks and rifts he’d found all pointed to people who had demonstrably been elsewhere when the sheds, or the mill, or the mule barns burned.

  There had been a shout last night for the dead children. Rain hammered the roof and dripped from the eaves, and the voices rose and fell against Old Banjo’s singing where he crouched in the center of the circle on the floor in Harry’s cabin. Standing among these people he was beginning to know and trust, January felt helpless, and angry—felt guilty, too, as if he were defrauding them somehow.

  “Good-bye, my voice be heard no more,

  Good-bye, my voice be heard no more.…”

  Juno and Ancilla, weeping for children who would have been lost to them in any case. Kiki holding the bereaved women in her plump arms, tears on her face as she spoke words of comfort. Baptiste handing around food.

  Once the wind rattled the door and everyone—even January—had started with fear. Why fear? he’d wondered, furious with himself.

  He had nothing to fear. He wasn’t a slave.

  But he had, he now realized, been afraid for a week. Everything he did and felt was tinged with it: fear, and defiance, and the sense that he existed outside the law. That anything he did was legitimate because he was in danger.

  The day was moist and humid, smelling of more rain to come. A little before noon brought the rice cart to the fields, Nero came running, to let Thierry know that a flatboat had arrived from Gottfreid’s wood-yard just south of Baton Rouge with a thousand cords of wood and a note from Michie Robert. Thierry yelled to Herc to make sure the women finished loading up the carts, then got them all down to the landing. The men were lined up, marched back to Thierry’s house where he counted all the knives back in, then set to work hauling wood to the makeshift shelters near the mill.

  As he handed off logs from the flatboat’s deck to Black Austin, standing on the wharf, January glanced over his shoulder at the river. The Boonslick was working upstream over the bar at the foot of Catbird Island, close enough that those on shore could hear the clang of the pilot’s bell and the shouting of the leadsman. On the upper promenade deck a fat little man in a black coat was having a furious argument with a tall thin boy; in the coffle chained at the stern deck, a woman combed her friend’s hair. The boat made no effort to approach the Mon Triomphe wharf and January cursed Hannibal, wherever he was. If he spent his ticket money on opium, so help me I will drown him.

  “Rain cloud comin’, carry on this day,

  Rain cloud comin’, carry on this day,

  Rabbit in the cane-field, look at the sky and say,

  Rain cloud comin’, lord.”

  Hooves at the top of the levee. Esteban ground-reined his lanky black mare and came down to take the note the flatboat’s tobacco-chewing captain held out to him. Where there’s a will, there’s a relative, Hannibal had joked. Esteban was with Agamemnon when the sheds caught fire, January thought. I can see him wanting his father dead, but why would he damage his patrimony?

  Why would Marie-Noël?

  With his self-pitying smugness and whatever grievance he might nurse for his mother’s sake, Robert Fourchet was a tempting candidate, but he had undeniably been out of the country when the trouble started, and as far as January could ascertain he’d had no contact with Marie-Noël since she was a child.

  Who did that leave? Jeanette, a voodooienne’s daughter? Who might or might not be lying about what her mother had taught her? Then why hadn’t she poisoned Thierry?

  Reuben’s wife Trinette? Why go to Mambo Hera for a gris-gris, if she knew juju herself? Black wax and pins notwithstanding, it was no blind woman who’d drawn the vévés on the walls of Thierry’s house.

  Cornwallis? The identical copying of the gris-gris, without variation, smacked more of a white man, or someone unfamiliar with the marks, than one who truly knew them—something you’d expect of an American and a Protestant, not raised shoulder-to-shoulder with the worship of the loa.

  Thierry himself, for reasons that couldn’t be fathomed …?

  “Bastard!” screamed a woman’s voice. “Cunt fucking bastard, I hope you die!”

  All heads turned. Hair tangled on her shoulders, dress kilted to her thighs and slapping wet on her body, Jeanette stumbled down the levee at a run. Rage and tears transformed her face. Esteban dropped the note he was reading and grabbed her as she threw herself straight at Thierry, dragged her from him wriggling like a cat, clawing and screeching curses. “Damn you! Damn you, may you rot! Damn the mother that bore you, bastard, bastard, bastard …!”

  Thierry walked calmly to her, caught her by the throat and struck her, twice, with the flat of his open hand across the face. Jeanette’s head snapped sideways with the violence of the blows. Blood oozed from her split lip, mingling with her tears.

  “Best you watch that mouth of yours, little lady,” said Thierry in his quiet voice. “Seems to me I’m going to have to give you another lesson in manners. Better to nip these things in the bud,” he added, looking over at Esteban.

  Esteban’s mouth pursed with distaste but he nodded, then looked away.

  “God damn it—” Gosport stepped forward, and Ajax was there, his enormous hand on the older man’s scarred arm.

  “Best stay out of it,” cautioned the driver softly, in field hand gombo so thick les blankittes could not understand.

  Other men had moved when Gosport did, the circle of them tightening, springing down from the flatboat’s deck toward Thierry and Jeanette. Thierry had stepped half a pace b
ack in response, his hand close to the pistol at his side, those cold pale blue eyes watching. Picking out this man and that man—touching January, as if he guessed, from January’s eyes and the way he stood, that here was a potential source of trouble—moving on to others, the brave ones, the angry ones. Figuring out who he’d have to kill.

  “You can’t goddam let him—

  “Stay out of it,” repeated Ajax. And there was an echo in his soft voice of the creak of weighted gallows-ropes, and children crying as they were sold. The crash of army rifles fired in volleys, the thunder of cavalry hooves.

  Don’t start down that road.

  We all know what lies at the end.

  Jeanette moaned, and tried to pull free, but for all his gammy-handed clumsiness Esteban was strong. Beside her, Thierry relaxed a little, understanding what had taken place; seeing the flame that had sparked among the men die back. Seeing them think again, and leave their words unspoken.

  He said, “Dice?” and the third driver looked around. “You help me here?”

  Dice’s jaw tightened hard but he came forward, taking Jeanette by the wrists. January thought about his own decision to help in beating Quashie, his own nauseated awareness that nothing he could do would alter the situation—would only make matters worse.

  None of the men looked at each other as Thierry and Dice led Jeanette back up over the levee and out of sight.

  Their eyes were on Esteban, the only man present who could have prevented what would now happen to the girl, and as if he sensed it, the planter’s son said gruffly, “Get ’em back to work,” and strode back up the levee himself.

  Ajax’s voice was very quiet. “Yes, sir.”

  The river breeze stirred Robert’s letter where it had fallen on the ground, tumbling it like some outsize yellow leaf toward the water’s edge. January picked it up, shoved it in his pocket as he stepped back onto the flatboat; if nothing else it would serve him as an excuse to return to the house, should he later need one.