‘If he’s anywhere it’ll be with the Ulloas at Charette.’
And the pot-bellied storekeeper – into whose slave jail January was consigned – opined that Verron would be out at Vieudedad with his grandmother.
Toco sent tall Dago to Charette, young Landry to Vieudedad, and handed over January’s ‘cumpus’, razor, slave badge and forged pass to the storekeeper, whose eyes hardened when they rested on him: he, too, had heard whatever foul story Verron had put about. ‘Verron said the buck what did it was big like this.’ He studied him narrowly in the smoky lantern-light. ‘Said he’d been beat pretty recent, too.’
It was a good bet, thought January, as they locked him into the shed out back, that nobody was going to bring him dinner.
The storekeeper tied January’s hands behind him, thrust him into the shed with the words, ‘If I find you tampered with any of the goods in here I’ll skin the hide right off your back, boy,’ and locked the door; January just had time to take in the fact that the shed was in fact a storage shed for the store, and to note where the bottles of something – horse medicine, by their shape – were lined on a shelf, before the lantern was taken away, leaving him in darkness.
He called despairingly, ‘No, sir! No, sir! Please, sir, you write my Marse, Marse Mayerling, on Rue Royale in New Orleans . . .’ and then listened until the crunch of the man’s feet on the gravel died away. The temptation was to sit down with his back to the sacks of flour for a few minutes and rest before beginning his escape, but he knew the danger he was in of falling asleep sheerly from exhaustion.
Without any idea how long it would be before Dago or Landry located Louis Verron, there was truly not a minute to linger.
Blue twilight outlined the bars of the window; the shed had clearly been used as an ad hoc slave jail before. They were outside the glass and looked too wide to be iron – by the shape, when he went over to see, they seemed to be stout wooden slats, nailed to the side of the shed. He turned back into the blackness, found the shelves and, with a little groping, located the bottles. When he dropped one on the brick floor, the smell told him it was definitely horse medicine, though it reminded him a good deal of the barrel in Kentucky Williams’s kitchen.
Scraping and cutting at the ropes – and his fingers – with the largest piece of the broken glass, he mentally reviewed the lie of the land around the store; he didn’t think the window was visible from its back gallery. The smell of horses nearby told him there was a stable as well.
Good.
His fingers, bloodied from the glass, slithered on the improvised cutting tool and he dropped it; patiently groped in the darkness of the floor.
Damn you, Hannibal . . .
Damn you, Blessinghurst, or whatever your name really is. How DARED you threaten that girl with what you threatened her . . . With what you must have threatened her . . .?
How had he found out?
January shook the thought away. Time enough to learn that . . .
He felt the ropes weaken and pulled his hands through, greased by the blood. He dried them carefully on his shirt, used the glass to cut the stitching on his trouser band, and drew out one of the packets of matches. He recalled seeing, lined up near the door, the big oil jars that came into Louisiana in such quantities from Spain: everyone used them, empty, for everything, from salting down pork to burying up to the neck in the ground as butter coolers, but these were still sealed. Another piece of glass, with his shirt tail wrapped around one side of it to protect his fingers, served him to scrape and chip the wax away. Step careful – the last thing you need now is an open cut on your foot.
Still no sound from the house. Had the storekeeper sons? A wife? This early in the evening, it was difficult to imagine that a family wouldn’t come peeking around the door at one end of the kitchen, open to show the stair to the upper reaches of the house.
One match helped January locate a box of paintbrushes. He used the handle of one to break the windowglass, the brush itself to dip and paint, dip and paint oil on to the stout slats outside. In case the storekeeper came running out he daubed more oil on to the flour sacks – ready to shout: ‘Oh lemme out, lemme out, somebody done throwed a fireball in through de winder!’ followed by a wallop over the head the minute the door was open – then lit the oil on the window bars.
Don’t let Verron come back now.
He had no idea how long it had taken him to slice through the ropes, how long it would take the hunters to locate Verron. January turned back to the greedy little rings of fire at top and bottom of each thick slat, as if staring at them would increase the rate of burn.
By the discussion of his captors with the storekeeper, this part of the country was the home territory of the Verrons – probably not only the white French side of the family that had intermarried over four generations with the Spanish both here and from Mexico, but also of the sang mêlée children of Verron placées. Where the great gentlemen of the town send the members of the family whom they don’t want to have anything to do with, white or colored, his mother had said. Like sons who murder their brothers over women, or women whom one wishes one never married . . .
Or the ‘vulture eggs’: the children ‘from the shady side of the street’. Sang mêlée sons were often given plantations out here, far from the legitimate families in town. Daughters – if their fathers shied from leaving them to become placées themselves – were frequently married to someone else’s colored planter sons. January had always found it strange that men whose mothers or grandmothers had been slaves would think nothing of buying men and women in the markets of Baronne Street, shipping them up here, and keeping plantation discipline with the whip and the threat of sale – an opinion which always elicited from his mother a disbelieving stare. ‘Good Lord, Benjamin, you can turn a sixty percent profit on a good field-hand! More, if you keep him and rent him out to build levees or work a cotton press.’
This from a woman who had known the whip and the market herself.
Would Compair Lapin, that ultimate survivor, be proud of HER?
She’s free, respected, and a property owner. He probably would.
Would that wood never burn through? Dago and Landry could have walked to New Orleans and back in the time since he’d been locked in the shed . . .
At last the wood seemed eaten through – he could only assume that, with the amount of supper-cooking going on at this hour in the village, his jailer had scented nothing abnormal, especially with the breeze off the river – and he gripped each bar by the middle in turn, wrenched the mid-sections free. The window was narrow, and it was a hard scramble to writhe through – he felt like his cracked ribs were going to eviscerate his lungs and heart when he fell through on the outside – and he moved off swiftly through the darkness to the stable. The storekeeper’s horse was stout and elderly and in no mood to leave her nice warm barn: January had to tie a short length of cannon fuse by a string to her rear hock, and light the fizzing, sputtering, stinking thing, in order to get her to run madly away through the trees. As well as the cannon fuse, he’d found in his jail some candles and a small firkin of raisins, a couple of handfuls of which made him feel considerably better.
With any luck at all, when Louis Verron and his cousins arrived, they’d set off looking for a horse across the fields.
January suspected that none of them would even think of checking the church.
TWENTY-TWO
And there it was.
‘12 March, 1800. To Cadmus Rablé and his wife Noisette, gens du couleur libres, of Plantation Bayou Lente, a girl, Celestine.’
A brief check of previous parish registers turned up at least three other Rablé children – and the information that Noisette Dubesc of New Orleans, born in San Domingue in 1775, had married her husband after being first sold to him in 1794 by Louis-Florizel Verron, and then freed.
Three days later – 15 March, 1800 – was recorded the baptism of Celestine Verron, daughter of Eliane and Louis-Florizel Verron, of the Plantati
on Beaux Herbes in this Parish.
A faded map of the parish, tacked on the wall of the little vestry of St John’s chapel, showed January that Bayou Lente lay about eight miles from Beaux Herbes plantation. An easy enough journey to carry a newborn baby girl.
With great care, January tore the page from the register and replaced the rather moldy leather-bound volume where he had found it in the shelf near the map. Soundless as a great cat, he pinched out his candle and let himself out as he had come in, through the French doors looking on to the alleyway beside the church, hoping no one would remark that the catch on the shutters had been forced with a hoof pick, abstracted from the storekeeper’s stables.
A newborn baby girl.
To a woman who had lost three infants; a woman whose husband had taken her only child from her. A woman abandoned on a backwater plantation with nobody but the slaves – maybe not even a white overseer . . . A woman desperate for the comfort of a child.
‘You’ll never tell me she didn’t play him false,’ his mother had sniffed.
January wondered if Louis-Florizel Verron, haughty and self-righteous with his fragile son, ever knew how false his wife had played him.
It was a secret that any white man – let alone the scion of an old French Creole family who had sisters of his own to marry off into other old French Creole families – would kill to keep hidden. It had probably never occurred to Louis Verron that proof of what his Great-Aunt Eliane had done lay in the vestry of St John’s church, and not simply in the dimming recollections of those who had been in the remote Red River country years before Napoleon had sold the territory to the Americans for money to finance his English wars.
As he closed up the vestry shutters, January heard a commotion of men shouting, of horses stamping and jingling their bridles, at the other end of the short village street: Louis Verron and his cousins. He guessed he would be perfectly safe if he simply retreated into the church to wait, but he didn’t want to take the chance on being wrong. He crossed the church-side alley to the nearest house, dislodged a section of lattice, and crawled beneath the front porch, holding the lattice in place behind him as he listened to the tumult around the general store. A few minutes later men galloped past horseback, torch flame streaming. The assumption that January had taken the storekeeper’s horse kept them from turning out dogs, and also from looking around Cloutierville itself. In truth, he was more worried about snakes under the porch than about the men riding out to hunt him.
Don’t fall asleep . . .
He knew any man who had not been as tired as he now was would have debated whether anyone whose ribs, and crudely-bandaged fingers, and back, and face hurt as much as they did could fall asleep, but he knew he was inches from it.
It would take him two hours at least to reach Bayou Lente on foot. He’d have to follow the river, so as not to get lost without the compass. And Rose would never speak to him again if he didn’t get it back.
Beaux Herbes – where Eliane Dubesc Verron had lived, sometimes with, and more often without, her aloof and guilt-riddled husband – lay in the opposite direction. That was the direction in which Verron and his men had ridden.
‘Not even capable of bearing a living child,’ his mother had said of Eliane. The boy nothing but a bundle of bones . . . A textbook of illnesses . . . The other three children had died at once . . .
Had she hungered for a girl, a child who would be her own to love? A healthy, beautiful child, such as her former maidservant bore with such ease?
What did she offer Noisette, the girl who had come from Sainte Domingue with her, the girl she must have grown up with, before the revolution drove Eliane’s father – who was probably Noisette’s father as well – to New Orleans? Possibly money. But what woman of color could pass up the chance to know that her daughter would become the daughter of a well-connected white family, with all that such a birth meant opening up before her?
Celestine.
You’ll never tell me she didn’t play him false.
January made himself wait, telling over in his mind the first book of Pope’s Iliad, until – when ‘Jove on his couch reclined his awful head’ – the last of the village’s lights disappeared from upper windows, and the town lay silent beneath the white, full moon.
The plantation bell at what January earnestly hoped was in fact Bayou Lente woke him with a start. For a moment of panic, terror, nightmare, he was still back in the store shed at Cloutierville, and Louis Verron and Toco and the storekeeper and the ‘boys’ were coming to hang him, after first beating him to death. His body was so stiff with exhaustion, bruises, and the scrapes and gouges left by the broken stumps of the window bars, that for a time he could only lie in the far corner of the mule barn where he’d crawled an hour before moonset.
When the door opened he debated for a moment about speaking to the mule boss, then pushed himself deeper into the hay. There’d be an overseer outside.
Nobody who’d grown up on a plantation dealt with overseers any more than they had to.
Lantern light made gold mirrors of the mules’ eyes as the mule boss and his boy buckled their harnesses in place, led them out. Through the open door, January could hear the work gangs getting breakfast, and his whole body transformed into a single, silent shriek of hunger. Cotton harvest would have both gangs in the field today, and everybody else from the home place that could be spared. Bearded and caked with blood and river mud, his shirt torn to rags to bandage his fingers, January knew he’d make the worst possible impression, but he knew also that there might be very little time to speak to Cadmus Rablé and, if he was lucky, Isobel Deschamps. He’d circled the home place through the cotton fields, the fallow corn, twice last night, watching, listening for any sign that Louis Verron and his men were waiting for him here after all.
It got light. A couple of cats who’d been chasing lizards in the straw evidently heard the sounds of white folks’ breakfast being carried across from the kitchen to the house, because they slipped out through cracks in the walls, and a few minutes later the two youngest mule boys came in to muck the stalls.
Feeling a little like Odysseus introducing himself to Nausicaa, January rose from the hay, and asked, ‘This here Bayou Lente?’
The smaller boy flinched toward the door, but the slightly larger one grabbed him by the shirt. ‘Yeah.’
‘I need to speak to Michie Rablé.’ January made a futile effort to knock some of the hay off what was left of his sleeves. ‘And to Mademoiselle Isobel, if she’s here.’
The boy nodded again. ‘She here, yeah.’
Thank you, blessed Mary Ever-Virgin.
‘Would you tell her, please, that M’sieu Janvier is here from New Orleans, with a message for her from Pierrette. Tell her, her mama sold Pierrette, two days after she left town.’
Both boys stared at him, shocked. The slightly larger boy protested, ‘She wouldn’t!’
‘She did,’ said January. ‘And I need to speak with Mademoiselle Isobel, just as soon as it’s convenient for her.’
‘Tell her, Den,’ ordered the larger boy, and gave the smaller a shove toward the door. And, to January, ‘What the hell happen to you?’
January had not even finished washing his face in the mule trough when Cadmus Rablé crossed from the big house.
He was a big man of sixty or so, square-built, with the combination of African features and near-European coloring common in that part of the country. In his close-cropped gray hair lingered traces of the honey hue of Isobel’s, but his eyes were the blue of the Gulf on a summer day. January wondered whether Celestine – and Isobel – had gotten their gray-green eyes from Noisette.
Rablé looked him up and down. ‘You’re never a piano teacher.’
January sighed. ‘I clean up some ’fore I give lessons, M’sieu.’
Clean or dirty, the planter had used the polite address ‘vous’.
January knew libres – his mother among them – who judged that the darker a person was, the closer they
were to the despised slaves, and indeed he saw this way of looking at the world pass like the reflection of some earlier training across Cadmus Rablé’s blue eyes. Then he saw, too, the man’s expression shift: looking past the color, to manner and voice and the likelihood of his story. ‘Come in the house.’
January looked down at his filthy clothing, his bare feet smeared with mule dung and bayou mud. ‘You got to be joking, sir.’
‘On the gallery, then. Den,’ Rablé called to the smaller mule boy, ‘you run tell Zellie to heat up a bath in the laundry – you hungry, sir?’
‘Only reason I didn’t eat those two boys was ’cause I was too tired to catch ’em.’
‘Where’d you hear this about Pierrette?’ asked Rablé, as they climbed the steps to the rear gallery of the house. Like most Creole houses it faced the river, sturdily built of timber and bousillage, like January’s own in New Orleans but smaller. The rear gallery was arranged as a summer dining room, overlooking the kitchen buildings and the quarters beyond. A servant came out of the pantry with coffee and favored January’s tattered clothing and bare feet with a glance of resentful contempt as he poured – what’s the likes of HIM doin’ havin’ coffee with Michie Rablé? – and another crossed from the kitchen with callas and sausage.
‘I spoke with her, at the offices of Irvin and Frye.’ Gingerly, January washed his hands and face in the tin basin at the corner of the gallery, pulling off the filthy bandages around his fingers and hoping the scabs would hold until he finished breakfast. He suspected he made a poor enough impression without bleeding all over his host’s second-best breakfast dishes. ‘She begged me to come here to you, said you would buy her. Said it was inconceivable that Mademoiselle Deschamps would have known what her mother had done.’
‘Of course she didn’t know!’ Rablé waved impatiently. ‘They are like a pair of sisters. Did Pierrette say that Mademoiselle Deschamps would be here?’ Wariness flickered in the cornflower eyes. ‘Mademoiselle is like a granddaughter to me, you know; she and her mother both come to stay with us for a few days every time they’re in—’
Dead and Buried Page 21
