Part 9 (1/2)

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 Quas.h.i.+e and Jeanette. North and east, and all along the dark sh.o.r.e, red dots of light marked other mills, other men who labored through the night, and between them tiny sprays of sparks traced the pa.s.sage 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 b.u.t.tonwood 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 s.p.a.ce 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 sh.e.l.l 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, a.s.signed 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 gla.s.s 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 ap.r.o.n against the black of her dress, her hands, her round decisive face. She carried her ap.r.o.n 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 ap.r.o.n-those oil jars that were bought in such numbers on plantations, not for the oil but for their ma.s.sive 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. ”G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 cared 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; brus.h.i.+ng 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,” he told Kiki. ”I know.”

As they came out of the trees the alto groan of a steamboat's whistle sounded from the landing, and January saw the carriage swing around from the side of the house. The lamps from the gallery twinkled on its bra.s.s and the emerald lacquer of its sides, as Musenda the coachman drove down to the landing to fetch Esteban, returned with a box of new cane-knives from New Orleans.

?EIGHT.

On his return from the graveyard January slept for an hour. Quas.h.i.+e still lay unconscious, though Jeanette had gone. Waking on his corn-shuck pallet, January listened for a time to the young man's breathing, and by the grimy light of a half-burned kitchen candle checked the dressing he'd put on the b.l.o.o.d.y welts. Then he went to work in the mill, hauling wood and stoking the fires in the vast roaring brick furnace under the kettles.

There was no singing in the mill. During the day the brick walls picked up the endless creaks of the iron grinders, the groan of the timbers that supported and turned them, and the wet sticky crunching of the cane as it was devoured. Even in the dead-night hours, when the grinders were still, the fires beneath the kettles roared with the thick greedy panting of a vast beast, and the smoke gripped and grated at the throat. The heat was dizzying; more than once January saw Simon Fourchet stop in his cursing, his pacing, his watchful gauging of the boiling juice, and lean against one of the rough wooden pillars that held up the high roof, pressing his hand to his side.

Watch and boil and skim; add lime and ash and tilt the heavy kettle to pour the rendered juice into a kettle smaller still. Rake away the wood-ash and charcoal from one door of the furnace and thrust in wood at another. Exhaustion and sweat, and stumbling out on blistered feet rubbed raw by ill-fitting shoes into the icy cold of the night to fetch more wood from the sheds, to feed the fires' greed.

By the flaring holocaust light the toothed wheels, the soot-blackened timber cage of the raised grinders seemed more than ever some Dantean vision of torment. He was an angry man, Kiki had said of the one who had been her husband. Stupid and mean. Yet the thought of those huge timbers snapping, the squeal of the mules already infuriated by the irritants rubbed into their harness . . .

Just how long, January wondered, would a cypress beam four inches thick have to burn, that it would snap when the mules spooked?