04 Sold Down the River bj-4

by Barbara Hambly

  While sugar plantations lined the river from its mouth to Baton Rouge, January was aware that most of the whites of the river parishes were, in fact, not of the planter class. Along New River, and Bayou Conway, in the Achtafayala country and on the nameless little bayous of the cipriere, lived a scattered population of small farmers, Scots-Irish or Welsh or descended of the old Acadians of Canada, crackers who raised a haphazard selection of cotton, corn, and yams and lived largely on the increase of their herds of cattle and swine. Most kept a few slaves-Aniweta, one of Harry's girlfriends, was broad-wife to a man whose master lived over on New River-but on the whole they had as little to do as possible with tillage or agriculture. They were, January had found, a curious combination of autodidactism and ignorance, squalor and pride, and he mistrusted them wholeheartedly.

  "From what I hear," said January, "Tim Rankin's dogs are the best, too, and he won't take kindly to one of his hogs takin' a little walk out in the country."

  "Ben... No wonder Michie Hannibal's daddy-in-law put you nursemaidin' him. You worry more than any man I ever met. You worry so much it's a wonder you don't chop your hand off cuttin' cane."

  And Harry led the way off, through the cipriere. In January's childhood, when Louisiana had been Spanish land, the cipriere had stretched unbroken, mile after mile of marsh and pond and oak ridge, as far as you could walk in a day. Indian tribes, Natchez and Chickasaw and Houmas, had wandered it. Runaway slaves had established whole villages in it and had lived in peace for years, and so in places it remained. But after an hour on the winding trail, with the moon's thin dappling filtered by moss and cypress branches, January smelled the stinks of settlement, the sweetish revolting stench of hogs and the murkier pong of outhouses nobody had bothered to clean in decades, and among the oaks the milky light showed a straggly field of cotton, the stumps left in where the land had been cleared.

  Beyond that squatted the usual squalid cracker dwelling of boards and bousillage, sagging on its piers and possessed of not a single glass window, though by its size it was clearly the home of the master, not a slave.

  There were no barns. Crackers tended to let their stock live as untrammeled a life as they did themselves, though a kind of shed offered minimal shelter to a couple of mules. Near that, as he and Harry circled through the silent woods, January glimpsed a rough zigzag of split rails, and heard the mumbling grunts of swine.

  "Once we get goin'," said Harry, producing a caneknife and chopping down a sapling which he stripped and topped with the deftness of long practice, "we gotta go fast. I'll take care of the dogs."

  "You just do that." What the hell, January wondered, had he gotten himself into? But it was all a way of buying his way into the community, a way of listening...

  If he didn't get himself killed for the benefit of some benighted barter of Harry's.

  Had he been picked because he was a new boy and dumb enough to go along with one of Harry's schemes? Or simply because he was big enough to lug a dead hog at a run through the woods?

  Harry had slipped away into the ghostly silence of the woods. A few moments later January heard the dogs, first barking, then barking and crashing through the trees on the far side of the house.

  Keeping hold of the stripped pole with one hand and the sack of apples with the other, he darted from the cover of the trees, pulled open the crude gate of the hog pen, and tossed the first few apples out a couple of yards away. He poked and prodded the pigs in the pen until they were on their feet, snuffling and grunting as he fed one of them an apple. Then he retreated toward the woods again, breath coming fast, dropping apples which the pigs, with the gourmandise of their kind, trotted out to devour.

  The crash of a gun in the undergrowth nearly made January jump out of his skin. A hog squealed and dropped, kicking, in the tangle of laurel and hackberry, and Harry called out in a triumphant whisper, "Got him!" Distantly, the dogs still barked.

  "You could have got me!" January had been about four feet from the quarry, and having fought the British under Andrew Jackson he knew all about the accuracy of the average rifle.

  "I didn't, though." Harry bent down with his caneknife and slashed the hog's throat. "Not a bad shot for moonlight."

  January recognized the cane-knife as one of those he and Mohammed had repaired the previous day, and wondered how that one had been extracted from the "fixed" pile without Thierry's knowledge.

  "Let's get this boy out of here. They'll be along any minute."

  He was tying up the pig's feet as he spoke and sliding the pole between them. January groaned inwardly, guessing what kind of evasion procedures would follow. He was right. They set off along the path, the pig borne between them on the pole with its blood dripping copiously; crossed a small bayou and continued through the woods with the ground getting lower and marshier around their feet. In summer the night would have been alive with frogs and crickets, the air a humming torture of mosquitoes. Winter had stilled the land, and January breathed a prayer of thanks for small favors. Distantly he heard the baying of dogs in the woods-more than before, he thought.

  "I swear I never met a man who worries as much as you! " Harry shook his head. "It'll just be Rankin and his brothers and the Neys. Old Jules Ney and his boys live just on the other side of Lost Bayou. They're the ones you have to watch out for, not Rankin. Watch it here." They had stepped into water again, one of the wide sodden sloughs that dotted the cipriere. The water was freezing: January could only be grateful that snakes and gators would be asleep at this season. "Are these Neys any relation to that charming gentleman who owns the Belle Dame?" "That's them." They waded among the sedges and cypress knees. Then, at the point where a dirt road passed the slough beneath a low-limbed oak, they turned on their tracks and worked their way back, emerging from the marsh at the same place they'd gone in and following the blood-trail back to the bayou, with the baying of the dogs growing louder all the time. "We'll leave our friend here in the back of Disappearing Willie's cave. It'll be safe there and it's cold enough in that cave to freeze water, nearly. The Neys are a bad bunch. If you get caught by them out without a pass, you tell them you belong to Michie Fourchet and not to a guest of his. They'll pass you along to Captain Jacinthe on the Dame if you're not careful, and you'll end up for sale in someplace you don't want to be."

  "Here is where I don't want to be," said January through his teeth. "That's just what you think now."

  The watercourse grew narrower and more winding and the darkness more dense as the cypresses crowded in close and the moon sank. It was, January guessed, only a few hours until first light, with the prospects of a full day in the cane-fields to come. This had better be worth it. In time they reached the oak-hummock in the midst of the waters that housed Disappearing Willie's shack. Disappearing Willie, the friendly little Ibo who had long ago lost his position of assistant gardener to M'am Camille, had, in addition to the brand on his face, more whip scars on his back than any man on Mon Triomphe. He wasn't surly or quarrelsome or disobedient or a thief. Simply, he could not be broken of the habit of running away. He'd never be gone long-two days or three days or four days. Willie had any number of hideouts in the cipriere, and seemed to consider a whipping the reasonable price to pay for a few days' liberty in the woods. "He's crazy if he thinks Fourchet isn't going to kill him one day," January remarked, as he helped Harry suspend the hog in the damp-floored hollow cut in the bank beneath the shack. Harry was right-it was icily cold there, and at this season there was little danger the meat would spoil before the entrepreneur could dispose of it. "I've seen how crazy it makes Fourchet if anyone-a slave or one of his sons or whoever-goes against him. One day Willie's going to come back from hiding out and Fourchet's going to beat him to death."

  "I think he knows that," said Harry. The cave was guarded by a couple of boards propped over its low opening to keep foxes and gators out. He took a couple of tallow candles from his pocket and lit them-he had lucifer matches, not flint-his breath glittery smoke in the light. Januar
y's wet clothes clung to his body and he shivered as he worked. "I sure wouldn't do it. But I think Willie figures, So what? Where else is he going?" Harry finished tying the hog's feet to the rough beam driven from wall to wall, and regarded January in the candle-gleam. Without his habitual engaging smile his face seemed older-he was barely twenty-and tired. "What else is he going to do with his life, 'cept enjoy a couple days here and there, and put up with what it costs him? Isn't that what everybody does?"

  Was it? Stepping out of the wet dampness of the cellar, January looked across the cobalt glimmer of the bayou, of black lumpy cypress knees and gray moss like chalk smears on the velvet gloom. He thought of the men who'd knocked him down in the street, slit his clothing with their big Green River knives and tore up his music, who would have happily beaten him or killed him... The white oafs in the taverns, whom he had to call "sir."

  It was the price he paid to sit at the dinner table with Olympe's children and listen to his brother-in-law tell them stories about High John the Conqueror by mellow candlelight. What he paid to have coffee with Rose in the arcades of the market by the levee, or to walk across the Place d'Armes in the multicolored delight of autumn mornings when everyone was out with their market baskets in the freshness of the air.

  He'd lived in Louisiana for twenty-four years, before leaving for Paris. When he thought-when he knew-that remaining in Paris in the wake of Ayasha's death would destroy him with grief, he'd known also what it would cost him, to come back to the only family he had. What had his mother paid, he wondered, for the freedom she'd bought for herself and her children? Had she loved the tall black man with the country marks on his face? Was that why she never spoke his name? Or had she had any choice?

  Velvet silence. Bitter cold. The far-off smell of smoke from every mill along the river and the green musky scent of the water, only inches from the entrance of the cave. And then, suddenly, much nearer now, the baying of the dogs.

  "Shit," said Harry, not much discomposed. "We better split up. I'll see you back at the quarters." "Wait a-!"

  But Harry was gone.

  And the clamor was far too close, now, for him to dare shout, I don't know the way back, dammit! Somebody yelled, "There he is!"

  NINE

  January bolted straight into the water, plunged and floundered for the opposite bank. The bobbing lanterns were some distance off, where the trees thinned into a muddle of cypress knees, muck, and reeds, and his pursuers wasted time seeking dry ground before they realized there wasn't any; this gave January time to reach the woods. He cursed himself for having followed Harry blindly, without asking the way, and cursed Harry even more. In the lowering moonlight every oak, every hickory, every swamp-maple and thicket of hackberry looked just alike, and as unfamiliar as the landscape of China or the surface of the moon.

  Even following the bayou didn't help, for there was no way of telling which way a bayou "ran."

  They didn't "run" at all, most of the time, or sometimes seemed to flow in one direction, sometimes in another, depending on the river's rise. In any case it was too dark to tell. The voices called to one another in French, beyond the barking of the dogs: It was the Neys and not the Irish Rankins. "They'll sell you where you don't want to be," Harry had warned.

  But running through the moonlit woods, memories came back to January, of childhood stories told by old Uncle Zacky about Compair Lapin and how he'd outwit Bouki the Hyena and Michie Lion by running along fence-rails, or doubling on his trail, or wading through water... All he'd have to do was lick his four paws and jump up in the air... He could still see the agile old man's delighted, ridiculous imitation of the act.

  And he smiled, understanding that Uncle Zacky hadn't been telling them about a rabbit at all.

  He'd been telling them about this. How to avoid dogs. How to get to safety, and leave the whites behind scratching their heads. And as he doubled on his own trail, and JUMPED up in the air to grab the branch of an oak-as he scrambled along the limbs of the tree to the limbs of the next, watching below for water to land in January felt in his heart the exhilaration of knowing he was going to get away.

  Of knowing he'd outwitted les blankittes.

  Striding through the woods in the last of the moonlight, hearing the voices, the furious barking fading behind him, he wanted to sing. Nonsense words, alien words, slave-song African words he remembered his father singing:

  " Jinga bunga bungala bunga, Jinga bunga baby..."

  His old piano master, the ramrod-spined Herr Kovald, who'd worked so hard to make him master of the beauty of Mozart and Bach and the floating wonderfulness of Pachelbel, would die of offended indignation.

  "Jinga bunga bungala bunga, Jinga bunga baby."

  There were songs for singing when you set forth on Quests for Enlightenment to the Temple of the Queen of the Night, January thought, and there were songs for singing when you'd just outrun a bunch of white Men with dogs who'd sell you down the river if they caught you.

  He followed the sinking moon til he carne into the cane-rows, then worked his way along the ranks of silent rustling spears toward the river. The cane was thin, snarled and matted underfoot, cane ratooned so many times it was practically indistinguishable from wild grass, and this told him where he was: in the back fields of what had been the Refuge lands, fields the Daubrays hadn't yet brought back into productivity even after all these years. After a narrow belt of this he came into replanted acres, and worked his way riverward, til he came out of the cane nearly on top of what had been the big house, Gauthier Daubray's Refuge.

  Cane was planted almost up to its walls. The oaks that had stood between it and the river had been felled. The house itself was a "house of twenty," as the Senegalese builders would have called it, meaning twenty cypress timbers had been hewn to support its floors on the brick piers that raised it above the ground. The dense shadows that cloaked its silent gallery hid every detail of its swampward side, but January saw that the tiny gar?onni?re was shuttered fast, the pigeon coop boarded up. The cistern still stood beside the kitchen, however, and January ran a little water from its rusted tap, catching the icy flow in his hands. This wasn't particularly satisfactory, and he closed the tap and went to the kitchen to see what had been left by way of gourds or cups.

  The kitchen door was closed but unshuttered. January took from his pocket the candle stub he, like Harry, habitually carried, and the little tin box of lucifers. By the new-sparked light he made out vacant shelves, bins emptied of their contents, dough troughs and an old rice cart...

  And the mark of the gu?d?, written in red chalk and lampblack upon the wall.

  The sight of it shocked him so that he nearly dropped the candle. A triangle topped with a cross, and stylized serpents. The skull and coffin of Baron Cemetery. Trailing lines scrawled over the floor, creeping like serpents toward the hearth. January fished automatically in his pocket and touched the blue beads of his rosary, whispered the first few words of the Ave, as a child would have ducked for shelter into the folds of the Queen of Heaven's blue robe.

  Then, candle held high, he walked to the hearth, and examined the ashes there.

  There were a lot of them. The fire had been kept going a long time. Its ashes were white and sunkenlooking, but clearly not anything like ten years old. A few weeks, he thought, no more.

  The dark of the moon.

  The moon's dark is the time when ill will lies strongest on the land.

  The table had been used, too, though it had afterward been cleared and cleaned. He knelt to search underneath and found an assortment of fragmented leaves and stems, which told him this had been done at night, in bad lighting. He wrapped these in the cleanest rag he could find and tucked them in the pocket of his shirt. In the midden outside, behind the kitchen, he found buried a pot, a knife, a cutting board, and a thick wad of mushed and boiled leaves.

  Oleander. He picked the leaves up gingerly, bandanna wrapped around his fingers. She-or he-had made the poison here.

  Reuben's n
ew wife Trinette? he wondered. Who had not left so much as a broken teacup at his grave? Jeanette, who'd been Mambo Jeanne's daughter? But surely she'd have poisoned Thierry first of all. Zuzu, who'd been sold away when the children in her care died? Her husband Lisbon?

  Or was all this the work of the Daubray uncles, concealed from the wagging tongues in their own overcrowded family house?

  But no white, he thought, would have invoked the gu?d?'s blessing on their act. Would they?

  Coming back to the kitchen he looked around again, and saw, beside the door, a dozen tiny holes in the wood of the jamb. When he held the candle close they looked fresh, as if someone had stabbed the wood with an awl. Some were enlarged, as nail holes are enlarged when a nail is pried or twisted out; one contained a broken-off point of what looked like wood.

  There had been a couple of long splinters, he recalled, on the kitchen floor among the leaf fragments. He unwrapped the rag from his pocket to make sure. A little more search near the door showed him a three-inch splinter of cane-stalk, sharpened to a point with a knife.

  This too he wrapped up in his rag.

  He'd hoped to find something salvageable in the kitchen, something he could trade to Harry for information or goodwill, but there was nothing. Whoever had come here to make poisons had brought his or her own pot, knife, and cutting board; chalk and lampblack. The small door at the back opened only into a cabinet, a shedlike back room stocked with wood for the kitchen hearth so the cook wouldn't have to fetch it from the main sheds by the mill. There wasn't even a kindling hatchet left.

  By the wavering candle-glow the veves seemed to watch him as he came back into the main kitchen. The wriggling snake-trails reached out after him when he turned his back. Field rats had taken residence here: They skittered along the shelves, waiting him out with scant patience, like parry hosts whose guests have lingered overlong.

  Half numb with fatigue, January made his way through the thickets of cane that, with a kind of spite, the Daubray cousins had planted where Gauthier's lawns had once stretched to the river. He reached the levee, and from that shallow ridge looked at the moon, round and bright as an alabaster dish just above the trees of the western bank. The Refuge landing was a black tongue among black cypresses, jackstaff still pointing bravely at the sky, and beside it a crumbling boathouse crouched, a velvet shadow-beast lapping at the luminous water's verge.