Part 17 (1/2)

Once the wind rattled the door and everyone-even January-had started with fear. Why fear? he'd wondered, furious with himself.

He had nothing to fear. He wasn't a slave.

But he had, he now realized, been afraid for a week. Everything he did and felt was tinged with it: fear, and defiance, and the sense that he existed outside the law. That anything he did was legitimate because he was in danger.

The day was moist and humid, smelling of more rain to come. A little before noon brought the rice cart to the fields, Nero came running, to let Thierry know that a flatboat had arrived from Gottfreid's wood-yard just south of Baton Rouge with a thousand cords of wood and a note from Michie Robert. Thierry yelled to Herc to make sure the women finished loading up the carts, then got them all down to the landing. The men were lined up, marched back to Thierry's house where he counted all the knives back in, then set to work hauling wood to the makes.h.i.+ft shelters near the mill.

As he handed off logs from the flatboat's deck to Black Austin, standing on the wharf, January glanced over his shoulder at the river. The Boonslick was working upstream over the bar at the foot of Catbird Island, close enough that those on sh.o.r.e could hear the clang of the pilot's bell and the shouting of the leadsman. On the upper promenade deck a fat little man in a black coat was having a furious argument with a tall thin boy; in the coffIe chained at the stern deck, a woman combed her friend's hair. The boat made no effort to approach the Mon Triomphe wharf and January cursed Hannibal, wherever he was. If he spent his ticket money on opium, so help me I will drown him.

”Rain cloud comin; carry on this day, Rain cloud comin; carry on this day, Rabbit in the cane-field, look at the sky and say, Rain cloud comin; lord. ”

Hooves at the top of the levee. Esteban ground-reined his lanky black mare and came down to take the note the flatboat's tobacco-chewing captain held out to him. Where there's a will, there's a relative, Hannibal had joked. Esteban was with Agamemnon when the sheds caught fire, January thought. I can see him wanting his father dead, but why would he damage his patrimony?

Why would Marie-Noel?

With his self-pitying smugness and whatever grievance he might nurse for his mother's sake, Robert Fourchet was a tempting candidate, but he had undeniably been out of the country when the trouble started, and as far as January could ascertain he'd had no contact with Marie-Noel since she was a child.

Who did that leave? Jeanette, a voodooienne's daughter? Who might or might not be lying about what her mother had taught her? Then why hadn't she poisoned Thierry?

Reuben's wife Trinette? Why go to Mambo Hera for a gris-gris, if she knew juju herself? Black wax and pins notwithstanding, it was no blind woman who'd drawn the veves on the walls of Thierry's house.

Cornwallis? The identical copying of the gris-gris, without variation, smacked more of a white man, or someone unfamiliar with the marks, than one who truly knew them-something you'd expect of an American and a Protestant, not raised shoulder-to-shoulder with the wors.h.i.+p of the loa.

Thierry himself, for reasons that couldn't be fathomed . . . ?

”b.a.s.t.a.r.d!” screamed a woman's voice. ”c.u.n.t f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I hope you die!”

All heads turned. Hair tangled on her shoulders, dress kilted to her thighs and slapping wet on her body, Jeanette stumbled down the levee at a run. Rage and tears transformed her face. Esteban dropped the note he was reading and grabbed her as she threw herself straight at Thierry, dragged her from him wriggling like a cat, clawing and screeching curses. ”d.a.m.n you! d.a.m.n you, may you rot! d.a.m.n the mother that bore you, b.a.s.t.a.r.d, b.a.s.t.a.r.d, b.a.s.t.a.r.d...!”

Thierry walked calmly to her, caught her by the throat and struck her, twice, with the flat of his open hand across the face. Jeanette's head snapped sideways with the violence of the blows.

Blood oozed from her split lip, mingling with her tears.

”Best you watch that mouth of yours, little lady,” said Thierry in his quiet voice. ”Seems to me I'm going to have to give you another lesson in manners. Better to nip these things in the bud,” he added, looking over at Esteban. Esteban's mouth pursed with distaste but he nodded, then looked away.

”G.o.d d.a.m.n it-” Gosport stepped forward, and Ajax was there, his enormous hand on the older man's scarred arm.

”Best stay out of it,” cautioned the driver softly, in field hand gombo so thick les blankittes could not understand.

Other men had moved when Gosport did, the circle of them tightening, springing down from the flatboat's deck toward Thierry and Jeanette. Thierry had stepped half a pace back in response, his hand close to the pistol at his side, those cold pale blue eyes watching. Picking out this man and that man-touching January, as if he guessed, from January's eyes and the way he stood, that here was a potential source of trouble-moving on to others, the brave ones, the angry ones. Figuring out who he'd have to kill.

”You can't G.o.ddam let him-”

”Stay out of it, ” repeated Ajax. And there was an echo in his soft voice of the creak of weighted gallows-ropes, and children crying as they were sold. The crash of army rifles fired in volleys, the thunder of cavalry hooves.

Don't start down that road.

We all know what lies at the end.

Jeanette moaned, and tried to pull free, but for all his gammy-handed clumsiness Esteban was strong. Beside her, Thierry relaxed a little, understanding what had taken place; seeing the flame that had sparked among the men die back. Seeing them think again, and leave their words unspoken.

He said, ”Dice?” and the third driver looked around. ”You help me here?”

Dice's jaw tightened hard but he came forward, taking Jeanette by the wrists. January thought about his own decision to help in beating Quas.h.i.+e, his own nauseated awareness that nothing he could do would alter the situation-would only make matters worse.

None of the men looked at each other as Thierry and Dice led Jeanette back up over the levee and out of sight.

Their eyes were on Esteban, the only man present who could have prevented what would now happen to the girl, and as if he sensed it, the planter's son said gruffly, ”Get 'em back to work,”

and strode back up the levee himself.

Ajax's voice was very quiet. ”Yes, sir.”

The river breeze stirred Robert's letter where it had fallen on the ground, tumbling it like some outsize yellow leaf toward the water's edge. January picked it up, shoved it in his pocket as he stepped back onto the flatboat; if nothing else it would serve him as an excuse to return to the house, should he later need one.

With a sharp kick to his mare, Esteban rode off, Ajax said, ”Let's get this s.h.i.+t ash.o.r.e and under a roof. Gonna rain tonight.”

The men did not sing as they returned to their work.

Thierry was back in half an hour, a bandage on the fleshy part of his hand. He looked pleased with himself, like a man who's once more demonstrated his manhood.

They got the wood in, piling as much of it as they could in the mill itself, along the walls and around the grinding-room, so that the women carrying the cane up to the rollers had to edge past it sideways, slowing everyone down. By dark the rain-smell was so strong that Thierry ordered the wood in the shelters to be brought up and burned first, so the supplies indoors could be saved for when the downpour came. As one of the biggest men in the crew January was on that detail, an ox's job. He hoped to h.e.l.l Hannibal had found out something really d.a.m.ning about Esteban, or Marie-Noel's part in the lawsuit, or about False River Jones. Too much to expect that on hearing the trader's name Shaw would smite his forehead and cry, False River Jones! My G.o.d, the man burned seventeen sugar-mills in Alabama without leaving a track and poisoned fifteen planters!

How COULD we have been so blind?

And he'd be able to get his money and go home. Jeanette joined the women again just after supper. Though she'd washed her face and wore a different dress-a bright green one-she walked stiffly, as if hurt somewhere deep inside, and met no one's eyes. Quas.h.i.+e, who mercifully had been in the mill all day, looked up from stoking the kettles but didn't go to her or speak. A particularly tough knot of cane-roostertailed trash that n.o.body had pulled around straight before loading or unloading-jammed the rollers for the fourth or fifth time that evening. Rodney yelled to stop the mules and hold on to the d.a.m.n things. January had seen him checking the harnesses regularly, every time they changed teams.

Rodney sprang up to the brick edge of the vat and leaned over to pull the matted cane free, sweating in the torchlight, with moths and bugs rattling noisily around the torches and falling into the kettles. The women on the narrowed stair, their arms laden with six-foot bundles of cane, s.h.i.+fted and muttered, and when everything got started again that bright green dress had vanished.

It was a while before January was sure. Since Jeanette was part of the gang carrying cane, and since he himself was in and out of the mill, he couldn't tell exactly at what point she disappeared.

But she was definitely gone. January saw Thierry look around for her once, then twice. Saw the overseer glance sharply at where Quas.h.i.+e still labored stoking the fire, moving stiffly and ashen with fatigue. The overseer spoke to Hope, who shrugged, shook her head, and pointed back into the darkness. January could almost hear her saying. No, she's out fetching cane, I saw her just a little while ago, though he guessed Jeanette had been gone for nearly forty-five minutes by that time. Thierry glared at Quas.h.i.+e again and went to speak to Ajax. The men were close enough to January that he heard the overseer this time: ”You keep an eye on that Quas.h.i.+e. And you make sure n.o.body slacks off, and keep those kettles boiling good, you hear? Michie Esteban'll be back from supper any time now and that sugar better not go off its heat.”

”No, sir,” said Ajax. ”Yes, sir.” Thierry strode out into the night.

Later on, January figured Quas.h.i.+e just waited until the big la grande had to be struck and skimmed and poured into leflambeau, and while Ajax was busy with that, went quietly out the back door.

Thierry didn't return to the mill. At the time January hoped against hope that this was because a boat had arrived at the landing late, bringing Hannibal and some kind of information from town.

It would be morning, he thought, before he'd find out. Rain started shortly before the main gang finished its work, hard steady drumming on the roof.

Stepping out the door when the night crew arrived, he could see the glimmer of the house windows through the black curtains of water: a night-light in the nursery, where Marthe would be dozing in a chair beside the children's cots with a stick across her lap, lest rats from the cane- fields creep in and disturb them while they slept. Another light shone in Fourchet's office, probably from the candles in his room. A third, dimmer, in the front chamber on the women's side of the house, marked where Marie-Noel slept since her husband's illness, when she slept at all. According to Kiki she spent most of her time sitting at her husband's bedside, only returning to her own room if more medicine was needed, or to fetch her Bible.

All else was stillness. Behind him the men greeted one another by the wall of heat that seemed to stand just within the doors; the women, headed back to half a night's housework, spoke with one another in soft weary voices asking after their children, or who had fixed a little food for whom.

Harness rattled in the roundhouse as the mule teams were taken off. Vast tiredness surged over January and he wondered for the first time whether Hannibal, who had seemed better when he left Mon Triomphe, had in fact suffered a return of his illness and was coughing blood in some wh.o.r.ehouse attic on Perdidio Street, unable to either see Shaw or locate Monsieur Molineaux.