Part 7 (1/2)

”Michie Fourchet, sir, they found the knives!”

January un.o.btrusively followed the little group-Fourchet, Thierry, Esteban, and the boys-to the plantation blacksmith shop, un.o.btrusively because he was joined by most of the other men who'd been ordered to search. By the time they reached the low building that stood at the end of the row of plantation shops, there was a sizable gaggle of withesses. The cane-knives had been thrust into the forge, coals piled in, and the bellows plied to heat the fire red-hot. The wooden handles had been reduced to crumbling charcoal. ”By G.o.d I'll string them up for this!” Fourchet's flushed face looked almost black in the rose- colored glare of the furnace. ”The man who did this is going to suffer, and see his family suffer as well, and that I swear to you. ...”

He swung around, his eye snagging January among the other men at the smithy door. For a moment January feared the planter was so furious he'd start berating him for not doing his job, so he cried in his most gombo French, ”My Lordy, could one man carry all them knives in one trip without cuttin' himself? I couldn't hardly manage one and I'm all cut to bits.”

The reminder of who he was and who he was supposed to be caught Fourchet up and made him close his mouth again, and Mohammed, who'd stepped back from the forge to make way for the white men, said, ”He wrapped 'em in an old blanket. Look.” He held up a ragged piece of cloth that had been thrown in the corner. Thierry s.n.a.t.c.hed it from his hands, then threw it down in disgust. It was one of his own.

Stepping close to the forge again, Mohammed remarked, ”He sure wasn't a blacksmith, I'll say that. He's lucky he didn't kill the fire, piling coal on like that every which way.”

”Can they be fixed?” Fourchet's voice was quiet now, anger eased as quickly as it had flared.

Turning to the door of the smithy, where half a dozen men and women had joined the original witnesses, he yelled, ”Out of here! If the lot of you don't have enough to do...!”

They scattered. January remained.

Mohammed tonged a blade from the cooling heap that had been carried to the table near the door.

Laying the metal over the anvil he gave it a smart rap with one of the smaller hammers: The sharp edge fractured like flint.

”Now, wait a minute, you gonna start breakin' these, too-”

”He's testing the temper, you imbecile,” snapped Fourchet at the protesting overseer. ”That one was ruined before he touched it.”

”I'll check and fix as many as I can, sir.” Mohammed turned the blade doubtfully back and forth under the weak yellow glow of the smithy lamp. ”We'll need handles for all of 'em, though.”

January caught Fourchet's eye and the planter said, ”Ben, you're no good in the field, we'll leave you here for that. I'll send Random over with wood and a knife and he'll show you what to do.

Thierry, get the rest of the men started with whatever knives are left. The others can haul wood til we have those ready to go.” He jerked his head back toward the long sheds of cordwood, looming in the dawn gloom. ”You men who made the search, get yourself some food if you haven't.

”Boy-” This was to b.u.mper. ”You go to the kitchen and tell Kiki to start cooking up some glue.

Get Ti-Jeanne to give you rags to wrap the handles. And put out the flag on the landing. Esteban, go to town and get fifteen knives. We'll make do til you get back. Understand?”

”Yes, Father.”

”And I mean you get back today. No lollygagging in town, or stopping for a cup of coffee with your-”

”I'll be back today, Father.” Esteban's jaw muscles jumped in the firelight and he spoke the words between his teeth without meeting his father's eye.

”See you are.”

Though the warm radiance of the forge still colored his face January saw how pale the old planter had turned, once the flush of anger ebbed. Pale and a little shrunken. His hand trembled as it rested on the brick sill of the forge and it remained there, almost as if supporting him, for some moments.

Then Fourchet turned, and walked into the misty white of dawn.

”So who is this hoodoo?” January measured the length of the charred and crumbling handle of one of the damaged knives against a billet of the wood that Random, the plantation carpenter, had brought from his shop, and settled himself on a bench just inside the smithy door to shape it.

After a few minutes' wary observation, Random apparently concluded that January was competent to wield tools. He went back to his shop to cut more lengths for the handles. ”You spoke of a hoodoo at the dark of the moon. What's going on here?”

”Don't think we're not nearly crazy tryin' to figure that out for ourselves.” Mohammed blew out his breath in a sigh. Outside, a driver cursed at one of the wood-haulers, whose path from sheds to the mill doors ran along the wall of the mill just opposite the smithy's entrance. ”It's somebody crazy. It's somebody who don't care what happens to him, it's got to be. Not care what happens to him, not care what happens to anyone else. Which makes me think it's somebody not on the place.”

”Who, 'not on the place'?” January marked where the rivets would affix the handle to the shank, and carried the wood to the drill bench. ”How is that?”

”You don't think with the hoodoo, and them tools broken-you don't think with what happened to Michie Fourchet's first wife and their child-they wouldn't come after everyone on the place if he was to die?” The blacksmith shook his head, and then grinned a little, as if against his own will.

”The sorry thing is, you could go up and down this river and ask every solitary person you meet, white or black, if they'd like to murder Simon Fourchet and I bet the answer you'd get is 'yes.'

You ever worked a drill? Just like that, yes.

”Michie Fourchet is on bad terms with nearly everyone in the parish,” the blacksmith went on.

”It's nearly come to shooting with Rankin, that cracker farmer lives over toward New River.

Michie Fourchet killed Judge Rauche's eldest son in a duel not two years ago, in an argument over the location of the bar that silted up near the old landing, of all the boneheaded things. That trader that comes by here, False River Jones, Fourchet chained him in the jail here last September, and threatened to horsewhip him if he ever saw him on his land again-though every planter on the river's threatened to horsewhip Jones one time or another.”

While he spoke the smith carried each blackened steel to the anvil and struck it lightly, testingly, with one of the smaller hammers, then held it to the milky daylight that trickled in now through the smithy doors.

”And if every slave with a killing grievance against his master did as he wished, after that master had sold him off down the river, or beat him for what he didn't do, or sold away his wife or his child . . .” His jaw stiffened with old wounds, old memories, and he shook his head.

”But that slave would know, wouldn't he,” said January, pausing in his stroke at the old-fas.h.i.+oned bow-drill, ”that coming back to get revenge on the man that sold him, would mean hurting every other person on the place.”

”That's why I say,” said Mohammed, ”whoever's doin' this is crazy.”

”And are there any?” asked January. ”That he sold off, who might come back? That had their families sold?”

Mohammed thought about it, tapping and striking, testing the metal, shaking his head with a look of pain-as he himself did, thought January, when he'd enter a home and find that the children were suffered to bang on and mistreat the piano, until its hammers were broken and its keys out of tune.

”Well, ten years back he sold off Zuzu, that was Lisbon's wife, and their children.” The smith fished, casually and accurately, back into his griot's memory for details like the verses of a song.

”There was some to-do over that, but they're only down on Voussaire plantation, and Lisbon sees them when he can. Michie Fourchet sold off Tabby, that was Yellow Austin's wife, about a year ago, to a guest that came through, a broker from New Orleans who took a fancy to her.” As St.-Denis Janvier did, thought January, to my mother. ”That man's gonna buy your mama.” He still remembered hearing the other children whispering, around the cabin door that night. Gonna buy your mama, and sell you off in New Orleans.

He tried to remember if his father had been there then, and couldn't. ”He take her children as well?” Mohammed shook his head. ”They're still here-Tanisha and Marbro; that's Marbro.” He nodded toward the first of the woodsheds, where the hogmeat gang was picking up chips and bark. ”The little one there playin' with that piece of cane.” As January watched, an older child showed the boy-who looked about three-how to blow pebbles through the slender stalk; b.u.mper came up and hustled them back to their duties. Already Ajax's son seemed to have grasped the concept of how much work had to be done. He seemed also to have learned from Ajax how to go about it with a laugh.

”M'am Fourchet's taken Tanisha into the house, teach her to sew like her mama,” Mohammed added thoughtfully. ”They do set a store on the light-skinned ones. I think the dark frightens them, dark like you, and dark like me. But Yellow Austin, he moved in with his sister Emerald and her husband, and they do well, and besides”-he rested the hammer gently on the anvil's horn- ”the night the mill burned, Austin was working out in the cipriere, and I've talked to three men who was standing beside him when b.u.mper came running with news of the fire.”

January brought the drilled handle back, and worked the bellows while Mohammed heated rivets.

From the forge door the damage to the mill didn't appear to be much. Smoke-blackening in areas under the eaves of the steeply slanted roof, and around the small windows high in the walls.

Fortunate, he thought, that the fire had been checked early, for along this side of the mill was piled all the sc.r.a.p lumber and broken packing boxes cleared out from the carpenter's and cooper's shops, mixed in with worn-out baskets and shards of oil jars or damaged clay cones such as the sugar was cured in. Hashed in with all that was an almost unbelievable quant.i.ty of cane-trash: leaves, cut ends, bits of maiden cane, weeds, dirt.

He frowned, and with the air of a man speaking a sudden revelation asked, ”Well, couldn't you- couldn't you figure out who's doing this by asking, I mean, who was where when the mill burned?

You say Austin was with these three other men, I guess in the second gang? Since Austin's in the second gang? So if the second gang was out in the cipriere . . .”

”You do got a head on your shoulders,” said Mohammed, and January looked fl.u.s.tered, as if he'd never been told this in his life.

”Aw, my mama always said I was the dumb one.”

”Well, maybe your mama wasn't payin' attention.” The smith's eyes twinkled. ”You don't do bad on a drill. You have the rhythm of it, like music.” He tonged a rivet into place and upset it with a few neat hammer-taps, so that it held the handle tight. ”I tell you this,” he added, picking up another blade and cutting the old rivets free, ”I've been asking, and I've tried to get as many people as I could trust to ask, and it's like trying to catch fish in your hands. It was near dark, and foggy, and yes, the second gang was in the cipriere cutting wood, two miles from the mill when the fire broke out. But I think, who can watch who in the dark and the fog?”