"Did he love Zuzu?" January settled his back to the doorpost of the smithy.
Torchlight reflected through the mill windows etched the shift of lines and wrinkles on the smith's face as Mohammed sorted through the truths of that question. "They got on well," he replied at last. "As to how much they loved each other... When first she came, Zuzu walked out with Cicero, and Boaz, and Johnny, who was one of the footmen on Bellefleur in those days, and as I said she had a roving eye."
He rolled his prayer carpet neatly as he spoke and stowed it inside the door of his little room, built off the back of the smithy. With the path to the mill running a dozen feet from Mohammed's door, January didn't wonder that he hadn't heard someone enter the smithy from the other side and work the bellows; he must have long ago gotten used to noises, in the roulaison.
"But Lisbon was a driver, and a good one. He's slowed down some now after havin' the lung fever two years ago, he never quite got over that. Now, the way Michie Fourchet buys good service from men is to give them the women they want: as he gave Kiki to Reuben, and then later Trinette, after Gilles and M'am MarieNoel both asked him that Kiki and Gilles could be together. "
"And I suppose," remarked January dryly, recalling Kiki's words, and Jeanette looking up at Thierry from the dust of the whipping-ground, "that what the woman wants doesn't enter into it."
Sitting down easily beside January with his own supper, the blacksmith met his eyes, not answering for a time: You know as well as I do. Then he said, "Michie Fourchet has never been a man to admit he'd paired up the wrong couple." He offered January salt pork and rice, and water from the covered jar beside the door, sweetened with a little sugar, and January gave the smith one of his yams.
"Even his own son, who hates that wife of his and the children she bore him. Kiki and Gilles were clever, asking him to let her be with Gilles on the day he'd brought M'am Marie-Noel home after their wedding. Reuben had hit Kiki bad that day and marked her face, but even then Gilles had to put it right, saying, 'You know, sir, how Reuben has changed, how he used to be a better man than he was when you first gave Kiki to him.' "
And in the shifted note of the griot's voice, January heard another voice, lighter and more cultured, with the accent of town. Gilles's voice, speaking out of the past, from beyond his grave.
"Meaning Reuben had changed, not Michie Fourchet had made a mistake in the first place. He was clever, that Gilles."
Clever, thought January, except where liquor was concerned.
The path from the woodsheds was quiet now as the men ate their suppers. Up by the front of the mill a baby cried, and a woman's soft voice shushed it-Trinette, January identified the sweet soft lisp. Here's wife. Reuben's wife, after Gilles's "cleverness" had won Kiki from him, though the ten-month-old child she carried to the fields to work with her, and to the mill at night, was definitely the lighter-skinned Hercules's child.
"Well, whatever Zuzu thought of the matter, Michie Fourchet gave her to Lisbon because he wanted Lisbon's good work, and the pair of them got on well enough. Like I said, there was good reason to think Roux was Boaz's son rather than Lisbon's, and everybody knew for sure that Lisbon fathered girls on Quinette and Heloise. And now and then Zuzu and Lisbon would have it out, like all married couples. But the true thing is that both of them loved the children she bore, loved them dearly.
"She loved M'am Camille's children, too. For all her faults Zuzu was a woman of great love. Whatever Michie Robert says, this wasn't true of M'am Camille. She was a beautiful woman, and a brilliant one, but M'am Camille wasn't happy, especially not after Michie Fourchet sold his place Bellefleur. His sister died, who'd been running Triomphe ever since the uprising here in 'ninety-eight, and Michie Fourchet fought with her husband at the funeral and told him never to come back. And the town was growing. Men offered Michie Fourchet a lot of money for the Bellefleur lands. So he sold Bellefleur, and most of the slaves from it, and moved the rest of us up here to Mon Triomphe."
January was silent, remembering that place, that world of his birth. Remembering in his childhood how close the cipriere had lain, a wildness of marsh and silence, endless in all directions, save for just around the little walled town.
Mohammed mopped the last of the beans with a fragment of corn-bread. "M'am Camille had been all right mostly," he said, "when she'd been able to go into town to the opera, and to buy books and see her French aunt and her friends. Out here I think she felt alone. Well, a lot of us did, that had friends, or abroadwives or husbands in town, and in the plantations round about town. M'am Camille, she'd always been hot and cold towards those three children of hers, holding onto them tight one minute then pushing them off the next because she had to get dressed for some party, or wanted to play her piano or read. She left Michie Robert in school with the Jesuits and came into town to see him whenever she could-to see him and to see her friends-but the little girls she mostly ignored, and it was Zuzu that raised them. All she wanted was to go back to France. It wasn't a good time."
"No." January thought of his own anger at being separated from the music he loved. At feeling his hands grow stiffer and more clumsy each day, and seeing the tide of days flow between himself and Rose, days that could be sweet and were instead bitter with hard work, isolation, and fear. No novels to rip up, Hippolyte Daubray had chuckled. No glass birds and music boxes to stamp...
As if he'd passed her ghost on the levee last night, January saw a woman in a yellow dress staggering beside the river with an opium bottle in her hand, screaming to the boats to take her back to France. And Camille had to come down from the levee sometime, he thought. And there was only the house to go back to when she did.
"Zuzu kept the girls away from their father as much as she could," went on Mohammed, "for he'd take out his hate of his wife on them. When Mamzelle Solange was two or three, M'am Camille bore another son." Glancing aside at him January saw the untold half of that tale in his eyes: how it must have come about that she conceived them, to a man she would never have willingly bedded.
"A year later she bore another, and the first one a stout boy by then, crawling all around the place with Zuzu after him, laughing. M'am Camille was jealous that little Toussaint would go to Zu rather than to his mother. She used to slap Zuzu, and once or twice thrashed her with a cane-stalk for being uppity, when she'd catch her playing with the children. She'd seldom play with them herself. Then one summer little Toussaint died, laid down on his bed in the nursery taking a nap. It was like Zuzu had lost one of her own sons. The boy'd had no fever, though there was some sickness in the quarters that summer, like there always is. And two weeks later the baby died, too, the same way: was alive when Zuzu laid him down, and when she came back into the room he was dead."
Down at the front of the mill Danny the night driver's scratchy tenor sang out, calling, "Time to pick it up again, boys," and from the direction of the quarters the men who'd gone to their cabins straggled back along the path by the mill wall, talking to one another and laughing. January heard Parson say, "... so fat they hired her out to schools for a globe..." and wondered where he'd picked up that fragment of Shakespearean insult.
It was time, he knew, to go back to work. "And that's when they sold Zuzu?"
Mohammed nodded. "M'am Camille took on somethin' desperate, of course, and Michie Fourchet was drunk for near on to two weeks. Michie Esteban and Michie Robert ran the plantation. Zuzu was sick with grief, swearin' she'd sooner have died herself than see those two babies come to harm, but for spite Michie Fourchet sold her off separate from her children. Sold her for a field hand, too. M'am Camille never got over it," he added, brushing the last of the cornmeal crumbs from his hands.
"Yet they only sold her down to Voussaire."
The blacksmith nodded. "Nan and Roux went to Lescelles, just upriver from here, but it's a little place. They was sold away from there this summer, to a dealer. But Sidonie's still on Daubray itself. Pretty, she is, and just married this spring-isn't she, Lisbon?" For the driver
himself had come walking along the path from the quarters, a stout spry man arm in arm with a young woman named Zarabelle, with whom January had seen him at the shout.
"Sidonie?" Lisbon smiled with gap-toothed pride. "She's so pretty the roses take shame and ask her pardon when she walks by."
"Prettier than Zarabelle?" teased Harry, ambling along the path just behind them, and Lisbon and Zarabelle laughed and nudged each other the way that lovers do. "You better watch out, or one day she'll go down to Voussaire and sit down with Zuzu for tea..."
"Now, whoa, how fair is that?" objected Lisbon. "How is it women can sit and talk about men, and they get all prickly and hot when they think men are talking about them? What if I went and had tea with Syphax, and talked to him about Zuzu?"
"Syphax is Zuzu's husband?" January fell into step with them as they headed along the trash piles toward the lights of the roundhouse windows.
"Her latest," said Harry, which made Lisbon laugh. "You wouldn't happen to know," asked January, in a softer voice, as Lisbon and his ladyfriend moved out ahead of them and left him and Harry in the dense shadows along the wall, "whether Zuzu knew any juju, would you?"
Harry paused, mobile eyebrows' flicking up. "You don't think Zuzu might be our hoodoo?"
"I don't know," said January. "I'm sort of curious."
He saw something alter in the young man's bright intelligent eyes. Something in the back of them, as if he were sorting out a hand of cards. "You curious enough to do another little favor for me tonight? Because it so happens," Harry added, with an ingenuous smile, "that I'm headed on down to voussaire myself tonight, as soon as I can bribe Here to let me slip away."
TEN
"Somebody told you I was a mambo?" Auntie Zu made a shooing gesture with one big bony hand. "Shush!"
January had already taken note of the stoppered bottle on the shelf in the corner of Zuzu's cabin, nearly invisible in the shadows thrown by the single tallow dip, before which sat a saucer filled with white sand and molasses, and of the sieve that hung beside the door. "They did tell me you might be the one to take the fix off me," he said apologetically, and shifted his aching shoulders. Carrying twenty-five pounds of pork five miles through the twisting paths of cipriere and canefield was no joke. "I don't know who put it on me, whether it was just Mamzelle Jeanette, or Mambo Hera on Daubray, or maybe somebody else..." "That Harry," sighed the woman, and shook her head. "What'd you find...?" "Ben," he supplied, to the questioning tilt in her voice. "I'm the one staying at Triomphe while my gentleman gets better enough to travel."
She nodded, evidently familiar with the story. There was enough coming and going between Triomphe and Daubray, and Daubray and Voussaire, to have spread that piece of information over half the parish.
"When I unrolled my blankets last night I found a chicken-foot in 'em," January went on. "I didn't tell nobody, because-well, you're in a new place... But I can see I could have got somebody angry at me. I did help trice up another man, Quashie, for the overseer to whip, but if I hadn't..." "Jeanette's man," sighed Zuzu. She shook her head. From what Lisbon had said of her, and Mohammed, January had expected a pert if aging strumpet, but Auntie Zuzu was tallish, thin as a slat, and plain-and none of it made the slightest difference when that big mouth smiled, and those bright black roving eyes sized him up with playful ravenous joy. She was in her midthirties and missing a few teeth, her black frizzy hair braided in dozens of strings, and like every other field hand on every plantation up and down the river during roulaison was ill-washed and worn-looking. The cabin bore signs of hasty and perfunctory cleaning, and when Harry had knocked, Zuzu had been in the process of bedding down three weary but relatively clean children. "If it's a chicken-foot I'd say it's just Jeanette." Aunt Zuzu went to the shelf where the bottle sat, and took a couple of jars, which she carried to the doorway. "And I can't blame her for being angry, for all you didn't have any choice about what you did. Get me a dipper of water, would you? Thanks." January followed her outside, carrying a dripping gourdful of water from the jar. The quarters on Voussaire were quiet. Dim splotches of orange light marked where the women had come back from the mill, whose fires still blazed at the far end of the muddy street, and January could hear a woman's voice from somewhere nearby: "And the bear say, 'Who is this High John the Conqueror, that everyone say is the King of the World?' And he laid in wait for him behind a bush..."
His father had told him that story, January remembered, smiling. And like this unknown woman he'd given Compair Bear a big gruff deep voice, and had rolled that line of it over on his tongue, how the bear lay in wait for High John the Conqueror... and came to some serious grief. "Here." Aunt Zuzu took his hand in hers: rough warm fingers, cramped and clumsy from a day's work with the cane. She sponged water over it, and January smelled in the flickering darkness the vague sweetness of crushed flowers. The light from the doorway limned her profile, and through the aperture he could see the children sitting up and watching their mother from the room's single bed. A boy of eight, a boy of six, and a little girl just big enough to walk, three pairs of great shining dark eyes. Zuzu took his other hand and washed it, too-honey suckle on the right, January guessed, and verbena on the left, just as Mambo Jeanne had taught Olympe when Olympe was barely bigger than that little dark-eyed girl.
Here again, thought January, he walked in the world les blankittes didn't know about and couldn't know about, the nighttime world of the quarters and the pathways and the cipriere. The world of Compair Lapin and magic dogs and the platt-eye devil and tales about little boys and their wise grandmothers. The world beyond the big house. He sensed it all around him in the quarters, that secret life. Smelled sausage and rice cooking for tomorrow's dinner beneath the gritty sweet of boiling sugar, and heard voices mutter over small barters and bits of gossip, the cluck of chickens hanging up in their baskets for the night and the slosh of water behind the next cabin as someone washed the field dirt from her hair. Through the black wriggly outlines of the oaks, he could glimpse the lights of the big house, where Monsieur Voussaire and his family consumed the cook's roasts and tarts and sauces, before Monsieur and his son or sons returned to supervise the night-work at the mill.
All those people he saw on their galleries from the deck of the Belle Dame, thought January, the women in their bright dresses and the children playing with dolls and toy guns. Women who were lonely, maybe, whose husbands treated them like dogs and who had no family they could turn to for protection. Men who drank to ease an anger they could not bear. He felt as if the whole night sang to him and he understood its mingling song, about time and lives and change, but his heart and his body were too sore and too weary to take it in.
"There," said Aunt Zuzu. "If you find anything else, you bring it on here to me and I'll take a look at it, but I think you won't. And don't blame Jeanette for being mad. You see someone you love get hurt like that, you hit out at whoever you can. It does no good..." She shook her head, her face grave and sad and her eyes, as Rose's sometimes were, gently amused. "But sometimes it's all you can do. And you," she added, her tone changing to playful annoyance as Harry appeared once more in the dark of the street, "you don't go around tellin' half the parish I'm a witch, you hear me? I have enough trouble gettin' people to respect me as it is."
Harry was with a big bearded balding man whose sooty clothing and leather apron identified him as the plantation blacksmith; the smith stepped over to Aunt Zuzu and gave her a mighty hug around the waist, and the two of them kissed. "Got that pork ready to salt away?" the smith asked, and Aunt Zuzu nodded.
"I'll get it cookin' 'fore we go to bed. Tom!" she added, furious, as a child squealed in the house and the oldest boy attempted to hide something in the blankets. "You let your brother alone! I swear..." She sprang up the step and into the cabin, and there was a great flurrying of bedclothes and protesting denials.
"Gettin' late," said the smith. "This boy here and his keys!" And he poked Harry, who tried to look innocent.
"Keys?"
Zuzu came out of the cabin again, a tube of maiden cane in her hand and an expression of indignation on her face, "One day somebody's going to dig up under that house of yours, Harry, and they'll find copies of all those keys to this smokehouse and that brewery and the other place all over the parish-"
"Never!" protested Harry. "Never! Besides, if I didn't keep up with getting new keys every time Michie Fourchet got a new cellaret or a new lock on his salt-box, how'd you get rum or cinnamon or whatever when you need it?"
"I can buy whatever I need from False River Jones,' Zuztz replied haughtily. "I don't need the likes of you spreading stories around about me." She held up the maiden cane, evidently the forbidden toy, and dropped a long thin thorn into it, which she then blew, like a dart, at the door of the cabin across the way.
"You as bad as they are," grinned the smith, whom January deduced to be her husband Syphax. '"Worse," said Zuzu. "I can't hit the broad side of a barn with one of these, and Tom pegged one of Michie Randall's carriage horses in the hock with it the other day and nearly started a runaway. I thought I'd die laughing. And just as well Harry did lose the key to that cellaret when he did," she added, glancing over at January, bringing him back into the little group, as if he were a longtime friend. She gestured with the confiscated blowpipe. "I asked him for a little whiskey about three weeks ago, when I needed some for a conjure and it was before the trader comes. He said he'd lost the key to the cellaret-"
"I did lose that key! " protested Harry, with a nervous glance at January. "Oh, like Harry ever loses anything! " joshed Syphax.
"And what do you think?" said Zuzu. "Just a little while later it turns out the liquor in that box was all poisoned, and a man there, a friend of ours"-and her face grew suddenly sad-"died of it." January was very thoughtful as he and Harry walked the five miles back through the cipriere to Mon Triomphe.
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