04 Sold Down the River bj-4

by Barbara Hambly

  She nodded. He saw where Thierry's slap had left a bruise on the side of her face, puffed up now. Saw also a half-healed split in her lip, and a small fresh scar on her chin, the kind a woman gets from her own teeth when a man belts her hard. She was still an extraordinarily pretty girl, slim-boned and strong, her closewrapped tignon making her head seem small, like a deer's. "Gilles used to trade candles from the house-not the fresh ones, but the ones that'd already been burned-and coffee grounds and tea leaves after they'd been used. Only somebody stole his stash and drank it up, way before False River Jones was due back." "He ever steal from Michie Fourchet's liquor before?"

  She nodded. "About two years ago." She settled herself on the rough plank floor by the cot-of course there were no chairs-and very gently touched Quashie's hand. "We thought Michie Fourchet was going to kill him. Kiki nursed him, though she was Reuben's wife then-and Reuben, he wasn't pleased. Gilles was laid up three days, ribs broke and everythin'. He should have known better. Should have known that liquor was like gold to Michie Fourchet. Everything he touches, everything he owns, is like gold to him, that other people can't touch."

  Her lips tightened. She'd been working in the fields, and her old dress was kilted up to show long, slim legs. The stink of dirt, of cane-juice and sweat on her was not unpleasant to January, only an accounting of who she was. "Gilles wasn't like most men, though. You know how most men, they get liquor and drink it all up and get silly and get sick and then they're fine. They wait til the next chance comes along, and if it don't come along, they say, 'Damn fuck I'd like a drink,' and it's gone from their minds the next second. But Gilles..." She shook her head.

  "He was the sweetest man in the world, Michie Ben. Kind and good and friendly. And funny-he could always make us laugh. Most of them house niggers, they don't care whether we live or die out here. But he'd sometimes sneak food to those women that was nursin' or about to give birth, or give the children worn-out stuff from the house, blankets and things. But if he couldn't get liquor, liquor was all he thought about until he could."

  January was silent, recalling some of the insanely stupid things Hannibal had done, in the course of their two years' acquaintance, when he couldn't get money for opium.

  "I was glad when he could finally marry Kiki," Jeanette went on. "She may be stuck up, but nobody deserved bein' married to Reuben."

  And January remembered what Mohammed had said, about Reuben's carelessness. About his wanting to win from Michie Fourchet a woman who'd been given to someone else.

  "Michie Ben, you better get on back or you'll get a whippin'. I'll stay take care of Quashie a little."

  As she spoke she touched Quashie's hand again, where it lay limp on the corn-shuck mattress.

  The tenderness on her face was free of any shame or fear. Confident, like a child, not in the world, but in the knowledge of love.

  Ayasha had been like that, thought January-the beautiful Berber woman who had been taken from him by the cholera. Like a summer tree, rooted in and watered by love. And Jeanette's eyes told him all he needed to know about Quashie's love for her.

  "You left Thierry's house to meet him last night?"

  She nodded. "I got out the parlor window. He keeps the door keys under his pillow. He has a couple drinks, and sleeps like a dead man. Quashie waits for me in the trees by the levee."

  To comfort you, thought January, knowing you come to him from another man's bed.

  Shakespeare, and Marvell, and all the other poets had missed that one, when they'd written about the nature of love.

  "You left the window open?"

  "Yes. I had to go back to him, you see. He likes to fuck in the mornin' as well as at night. That's how the hoodoo got in, isn't it?"

  "I think so, yes."

  Her eyes filled with fear and she swallowed hard. "Please don't tell him that. Don't tell anyone," she added, when he shook his head. "Michie Ben, you know how these things get around. That Leander, he's like a magpie squawking. Cornwallis, too."

  "It won't get past me," promised January. "How long were you at the levee?"

  She thought about it a moment. January remembered his silver watch, safe in Olympe's bureau drawer, and remembered too how long it had taken him to learn to think in terms of anything shorter than morning and afternoon. As a child, the first six months of his lessons he was always late.

  "The moon was just about straight up overhead when I got there," she said at last. "Maybe not halfway down to the trees on the other bank, when I left."

  About two hours, thought January. Plenty of time to load up an old blanket with as many knives as a man could carry in a single load, even if the hoodoo hadn't been watching for the exact moment of her departure. "You didn't see anyone as you were coming or going?"

  "If I had," said Jeanette, with a grim twist to her mouth, "you think I'd have left or come back?"

  "And you didn't go in that back room after you came back from the levee?"

  "No. There's no need for me to, and it's cold in there." She glanced at him under her lashes, still afraid to trust even a man who'd risked Thierry's wrath by cutting Quashie down.

  "Mohammed tells me your mother was a hoodoo. Did she teach you any, you or Parson?"

  He knew she'd deny it, and she did, shaking her head immediately and vigorously. "Oh, no. She died when we were only little, Parson and me."

  It might even have been the truth.

  "There anyone else on the place who'd know the hoodoo marks?"

  She hesitated a long time. "I think Hope knows some, Ajax's wife. And Emerald, and old Fayola.

  Auntie Zu knew, that was Lisbon's wife. Well, everyone knows a little, you know? Enough to keep witches away from the door anyway, and make juju bags an' that. But not the big stuff. Not like what was wrote on the wall. I saw Mama make signs like that, but she never taught me, nor anyone else as far as I know,"

  And that, too, might have been the truth.

  "He all right?" asked Ajax, when January returned to the fields. January nodded. "You want to watch yourself," cautioned the driver. "You think Thierry won't beat another man's boy, but you're wrong. He told me to lick you if you got behind."

  "Thanks for the warning," said January. "I'll remember."

  Ajax put him into the row behind Gosport again, topping the cane and trimming the trash, and piling the stalks in the stubble as the cutters advanced. They were still working ratooned fields upstream of the house. Rats darted and rustled among the sprawled stalks, and now and then a man would pull back with a cry and the brown-patterned buff sinuosity of a snake would flick out of sight.

  The sun grew hot, and moved in the sky, and the hawks overhead watched for rats.

  At noon, when the boys brought the rice cart out, Harry ambled over to January and said, "That working out well for you, the extra pants and shirt?"

  January nodded, grateful for the protection from the sharp leaves and also from some of the chafing annoyance of field-dirt creeping into his clothing. But he braced himself, hearing in the other man's voice that the next words out of his mouth would concern payment of some kind for the gift.

  "You like to give me a hand tonight with a little project I've got going?"

  January wanted to ask him when or if he ever slept. Instead he said, "It can't be tonight. I'm working night shift in the mill. Thank you," he added, as a little boy named Cato handed him a gourd bowl of dirty rice with sausage in it, and his water bottle that he'd brought down from the end of the row.

  "Tomorrow night, then? Old Banjo tells me it'll be clear for a couple nights and the moon's still full."

  "Tomorrow night," January agreed. Harry strolled jauntily away to flirt with one of the girls by the cane cart; January shook his head.

  Because he was to work in the mill through the night, when full dark fell January was allowed longer for supper than the men who'd be working for only a few hours. This was so that he could get a few hours of sleep, but after eating and washing, and shaving as well as he could in the
rain barrel behind the cabin, instead of immediately seeking his bed like a sensible person, he went to the levee to change the bandanna on the tree from white to red, knowing he'd be too exhausted to do so when released from work at dawn.

  As Harry had said, the night was clear. The full moon's milky light glittered on the river, as it had glittered last night for Quashie and Jeanette. North and east, and all along the dark shore, red dots of light marked other mills, other men who labored through the night, and between them tiny sprays of sparks traced the passage of the steamboats, hugging the ebony banks. Coming down from the levee January saw in the moonlight the narrow trail away into the thickets of buttonwood northeast along the river, where the trees divided it here from the cane. Earlier in the day, one of the men had spoken of the slaves' graveyard that lay by the river upstream of the house. Curious, January turned his steps in that direction. In time he came to the small cleared space between the levee and the trees, apposite the woods of what was now Catbird Island. Side by side, two dark mounds marked the newest graves. Rough-nailed white crosses at their heads bore painted inscriptions: REUBEN. GILLES. As if, thought January, in another five years anyone would care.

  No marble angels here, as there were in the great walled necropoli in New Orleans. No brick tombs to be whitewashed every November second, by families who picnicked between cleanings and hung up immortelles of beads and tin. If a slave knew his grandfather's name he was lucky. And yet there was peace here, a sleeping quiet, all anger and all pain laid to rest. January recalled what the Romans had said, that Death was Freedom for a slave.

  Gilles's grave had been decorated with broken bits of white china-the remains of two cups and a plate, it looked like-and with bottles driven neck-down into the soft earth. Broken horn forks and spoons, the bright-colored lids of tin boxes, stumps of red candles and sealing wax, broken strings of cheap beads, fiagments of lamp chimneys. Reuben's grave was bare. These fragments of pottery were the only markers many of the older graves had, like Lilliputian fences, or eroded teeth rising out of the sunken earth. The cheap paint on the few crosses left standing had long been rinsed away, leaving only phantoms of names in places-PUSEY, said one. Someone had cut the letters deeper with a shell fragment or a knife. LAVINNIA, said another. In most cases, there was now nothing at all.

  Forgotten. Twenty or thirty or maybe only fifteen years of living in hard work, loving where they could, crying not to hurt others or be hurt themselves, and for what?

  January wondered who they were, and what they'd died of; whether they had left children in the hogmeat gang to mourn them or whether those children had been sold away already; whether these women themselves had been sold away from children, and husbands, parents and friends whom they would never see again. When he was a child he'd often asked himself, Do les blankittes think a woman'll forget the husband she loved if she gets sold to another place, assigned a new husband? Do they REALLY think that bearing new children makes the memory of the lost ones fade?

  But now he knew the answer. And the answer was: Yes, they do. Most of them. And the others-he'd overheard them, at the parties he played for in town, at the quadroon balls and receptions-would only say, "Oh, she's still sad 'cause she misses her husband back in Virginia, I bet," in the same tones, exactly the same tones, in which they'd say, "Poor puss! She's still looking all over the house for her kittens that I had to have the coachman drown. Just breaks my heart."

  The soft clink of glass somewhere nearby. January whirled and called out "Who dat?" doing his best to sound like a man nervous in the dark.

  "Just me." It was the cook Kiki's voice, a light sweet soprano, like Rhineland wine. "You want to be careful, here alone in the dark, Ben. The witches'll ride you." She stepped from the velvet abyss beneath the trees, a white blur of tignon and apron against the black of her dress, her hands, her round decisive face. She carried her apron gathered up, and the clinking came from it.

  "I got a blue bead and mouse bones tied round my ankle, and some pepper in my pocket. I should be safe."

  "No one is safe." She moved past him, and knelt beside Reuben's bare grave. "Not with the anger of the dead."

  "Is that why you're here?" He nodded at Reuben's cross. "To keep him quiet?"

  "I'm here because I owe him." She took fragments of a broken oil jar from her apron-those oil jars that were bought in such numbers on plantations, not for the oil but for their massive usefulness as containers-two smashed plates, and five or six medicine bottles, caked and crusted with dirt.

  "Everybody had something to put on Gilles's grave, look. Even the field hands." She shook her head. "Reuben... Not even Trinette, who was his woman, put so much as a broken teacup here, to show where he lies once the headboard falls over and the name washes out. It may be only what he earned in life," she went on, methodically working the bottles mouth-down into the soil around the edge of the mound. "But it isn't right."

  "Jeanette tells me he was your husband."

  "Four years." The moonlight showed the little pinch of the mouth that women sometimes get, speaking of bad times survived when the distance from those times widens a little. "God forgive me, I could have treated him better than I did, for all he was a hard man."

  "Michie Fourchet gave you to him?"

  "Isn't it Michie Fourchet who gives every woman to every man here?" She didn't raise her head, but he felt her glance at him under her long lashes.

  He took up another bottle, to stick into the earth on the other side of the grave, and chipped away a little of the dirt sticking to it with his nail. The label had faded, but he recognized the shape of the bottle: Finch's Paregoric Restorative Draught, a staggeringly powerful opiate much favored by Hannibal, who was a discerning connuisseur of such things. Glancing down he saw that the other bottles were the same.

  "Where'd these come from?"

  She glanced up at him again, and he saw his own awareness of what they were reflected in the irony of her eye.

  "Look around you at these graves here," she said. "Every bottle you see is one of these." White lady medicine, the field hands call it. "There's a mound of them higher than your knee, behind the shed in the old garden."

  The women's side of the house, thought January. Easily reached if you went down the back stairs and passed under the brick piers that supported the nursery wing, keeping to the oleander hedge so that you wouldn't be seen from the house. The empty bottle hid in the folds of your skirt.

  I'm at a loss to determine why anyone would think I'd offer the shelter of my roof to a sodden reprobate... The boy is a fool like his mother.

  "Did you know her?" he asked, holding up the bottle. "Ma'am Camille?"

  Kiki's mouth twitched a little at his deduction, and she only said, "No. I came here five years ago.

  She was dead by then." She worked a brown curved shard of oil jar into the ground, adding, "By the number of those bottles out there, I wouldn't be surprised if those children of hers that died, the ones that poor nurse Zuzu was sold away for not looking after, didn't die of something else." She got to her feet, and shook out her skirts, standing back to admire the look of the grave. January stood, too, and he had to admit he felt better, seeing the bare turned mound properly decorated, the points of the broken china like a protective hedge against the angry ghost. "Was he so bad?" he asked, as they walked together along the trace back toward the house. "Reuben?" She glanced at him again, and her mouth made that same little pinch, as if tasting the memory of her own blood.

  She said, "He was an angry man, like Michie Fourchet. Maybe that's why he understood Michie Fourchet as well as he did." In the moonlight she looked tired, and there was a haunted expression in her eyes, as if she listened behind her for a heavy step and muttered curses. "Once, after Michie Fourchet broke up the marriage, and let Gilles and me be together, Reuben found Gilles when Gilles was drunk and beat him, as if he thought that would make me turn against Gilles and return to him. Reuben was stupid that way. Stupid and mean, and dangerous." "But you care
d for Reuben after he was hurt."

  She averted her face. "He was my husband," she said. "A man who's been your husband once, in a way he always is. Like your child is always your child, living or in death. Surely you know that."

  Ayasha. The way she used to sit in the window of their rooms in Paris, listening to the workmen's voices down in the estaminet, seven flights below at the bottom of the canyon of the street; brushing out her long black hair. One day, January hoped, he would marry Rose, when the broken trust in her healed, that shrank from any man's touch. The thought of her was tender in him, like the scent of flowers, the wry glint of her eyes behind her spectacle lenses and the astringent beauty of her voice as they walked along the levee together. But Ayasha would always be his wife.

  "Yes,"hetoldKiki. "I know."