by Frank Yerby
“I know the symptoms of starvation. I suffered from it enough in my youth.” He turned to Aurore. “Have the servants put her to bed. Give her brandy and milk and afterwards a little soup. But no solids. I’m riding out to Rosemont at once. Phillippe and I will have to have this out—and at once!”
It was very still at Harrow after he had gone. Ceclie lay abed sipping her hot, spiced brandy and milk. Her brown eyes rested upon Aurore with something very near to devotion shining out of them.
“I wish I could be like you,” she said. “Father tried to teach me to be a lady, but I wouldn’t learn. I never wanted to—before. Now I do. ‘Tienne is ashamed of me, that’s why he doesn’t visit me anymore. And father is too. He says I talk like a nigger. ‘Tienne talks French so that it sounds like singing. It’s beautiful, but I can’t understand a word he says. I’m so wild and ignorant. I know I’m not good enough for ‘Tienne, but I love him so . . .”
Aurore thought rapidly.
“How would you like to come over here every morning and have lessons with Julie?” she said, “I could teach you French and English grammar and needlework, and Julie could teach you what she knows about the piano—though the good God knows ‘that’s little enough . . .”
“Oh, Madame, could I?” Then Ceclie’s face fell, and all the eagerness went out of her voice. “But father would never permit it,” she said.
“That remains to be seen. Now try to sleep until your father comes for you. It won’t be long if I know Phillippe.”
Four hours later, when Phillippe Cloutier reached Harrow, Ceclie was sleeping soundly. The tall Creole stood beside the bed and looked down at the slight figure of his daughter. The lines in his hard face softened.
“Perhaps I have been harsh,” he said, “but ‘twas for her own good, I thought. She is very young, Stephen.”
“Aye, and in your concern with rebuilding Rosemont, ye’ve neglected her sadly. Ye should have married, Phillippe. A girl should not be without a mother.”
Phillippe smiled wryly.
“How could I? I am a man of taste. You would have me follow in your footsteps like a jackal and take what was left after you had taken the best?”
“There were many lovely girls in Louisiana in your day, Phillippe,” Aurore said.
“Yes, but none like the sisters Arceneaux. ‘Twas grossly unfair of Stephen to marry both of them!”
“Thank you, Phillippe, for the pleasantry. But I have a request to make of you . . .”
“Anything that you ask, Aurore. . . .”
“No, wait. I want you to let Ceclie come here daily, accompanied by her woman, and study with Julie. You’re not much of a teacher, Phillippe.”
“Ceclie will not learn! I’ve tried and tried . . .”
“To cram it down her throat. Now she wants to learn. I’ll see that she’s properly chaperoned. Etienne will see her only at your house, and with your permission.”
Phillippe frowned.
“Very well,” he said at last. “ ‘Tis not that I distrust the boy—anymore than I distrust any boy. I remember well how I was at that age. And you cut quite a swath yourself, Stephen.”
“Softly, Phillippe,” Stephen smiled. “My wife knows already too much of my past. Don’t remind her, please!”
Aurore looked down at Ceclie who was sleeping like a small child in the huge canopied bed.
“Don’t awaken her, Phillippe,” she said. “The poor little thing is all worn out. Let her rest the night. We’ll send her back to you in the morning.”
“No—I’ll come back after her, though ‘tis a hellish long ride.”
“Then stay yourself,” Stephen said. “The Creole Belle will pass here in the morning in a race with the Tom Moore. ‘Twill be a sight worth seeing.”
Phillippe grinned wickedly.
“For that I’d stay in Hades itself,” he said. “A thousand on the Thomas Moore—even odds, Stephen?”
“Done! In fact I’ll give ye two to your one. There is no packet on the river that can catch the Belle.”
“Now look what I’ve done!” Aurore wailed. “I asked Stephen to bring you over here, and you start him gambling again!”
“Forgive me, Aurore. But a chance to shake down Stephen Fox is too good to miss. Now if you’ll show me where I am to sleep . . .”
“Come with me,” Stephen said, “but have your purse handy!”
First in the morning, before it was light, Julie and Ceclie climbed the stairway to the belvédère atop the roof of Harrow. Far below, they could see the river gleaming even in the darkness. It was quite empty—not even a bateau marred its even surface.
“Shouldn’t be long now,” Julie whispered. “They’re still sleeping, the lazy things! Maybe we’ll see it first.”
“I hope so,” Ceclie said. “Harrow is nice, Julie. You’re a lucky girl.”
“But you’re going to live here too—when you and ‘Tienne are married. I’m going to be so happy, having a sister. I never had anyone but ‘Tienne and he’s away most of the time.”
Ceclie’s lovely young face clouded.
“Perhaps that won’t ever happen,” she said. “Perhaps he doesn’t love me any more.”
“Oh, but he does! How could he help it, as pretty as you are?”
“Thank you, Julie—still I haven’t seen him in so long. But don’t let’s talk about that now. I hope the Creole Belle wins, even if father is betting against it—just because it belongs to you—and ‘Tienne.”
They waited very quietly in the darkness, staring upriver until their eyes were blurred with the strain.
“Oh, dear!” Julie wailed. “Won’t it ever come?”
As if in answer a slow belly-deep booming rolled downstream, and the fields threw back the echoes.
“What was that?” Ceclie demanded.
“A cannon! That was the signal, Ceclie! Papa! Mother!” Already she was bounding down the stairs. Before she had gone down half a flight, she met her parents and Phillippe Cloutier coming up toward the belvédère. She locked arms with her parents, and turned back again, half dragging them along.
“Hurry up, you slowpokes!” she said. “It’ll pass before you get there!”
“Softly, Julie,” Stephen laughed. “That gun is a good five miles upstream. We have plenty of time.”
“To see the Belle, perhaps,” Phillippe said, “but if you don’t hurry, you’ll miss the Tom Moore.”
“Another thousand!” Stephen roared.
“Done!” Phillippe declared.
“Stephen!” Aurore wailed, “you’ll impoverish us!”
As they reached the belvédère, there came a louder, nearer booming.
Philippe Cloutier’s lean, sardonic face twisted into a half smile.
“The second signal,” he said. “The Moore’s ahead, Stephen.”
“Aye, but the Belle will pass her before she rounds the bend. Ye watch, Phillippe.”
The morning sky was beginning to lighten a little now, but, as they watched, a tongue of flame rose up suddenly straight and tall, from beyond the curve in the river, and above it, the sooty smoke clouds billowed.
“What’s that?” Ceclie asked, turning to her father. Phillippe half turned toward Stephen.
“A bonfire,” Stephen said, “at the headwaters of my land. They are very near, Phillippe.”
The little group settled into silence, waiting.
Upriver, just around the bend above Harrow, the Creole Belle was laboring in the yellow white swell boiling back from the Thomas Moore’s paddle wheels. High in the glass enclosed pilot house, Mike Farrel peered through his lone squinting eye at the river.
“Damn it!” he bellowed, “what the hell’s the matter below! Are all them Nigras asleep or dead? And still, be Jesus, she pulls away from us! Here, yez,” he said to his pilot, “ride her in! I’m gonna squeeze her guts! I’ll git up speed, I will. Afore I’ll have Stevie watch me beaten I’ll bust her boilers!”
Then he was stamping down the stairs, as spry as a y
outh for all his seventy-odd years.
“Daft!” the pilot muttered, “completely daft! When they gits that old . . .” He leaned forward, watching anxiously for the sand bars.
“Juniper!” Mike roared. “What the hell ails yez, yez black bastard! Can’t yez git up so much as wan thin ounce o’ steam?”
The black fireman pointed a trembling finger at the pressure gauge. The needle was quivering nervously just on the brink of the red danger line.
“To hell with that! Git them Bumboes going!”
Juniper raised his voice above the whistling, thumping, pounding noise of the engines.
“Mo’ steam!” he bellowed. “Mas’ Mike want mo’ steam!”
The black gang turned frightened eyes toward the old captain. Then they started to heave the logs in, but at a snail-like pace. Instantly, Mike descended upon them, roaring. A few well-placed kicks, and a half dozen swings of Mike’s hamlike fists to the sides of black heads brought a noticeable acceleration.
“Yez burr-headed sonsofbitches!” Mike panted; “git yez all a move on and fast or ‘tis thinking I am of heavin’ wan of yez in to make grease!”
The whites of the Negroes’ eyes rolled fearfully in the semidarkness. Streamers of orange red flame escaped the edges of the firebox door. Mike stood there, watching the gauge. Slowly the needle climbed upward toward the red line.
Mike pointed a hairy finger toward the safety valve.
“Tie it,” he said, “tie it down, Juniper!”
“But Mas’ Mike!” Juniper wailed.
“Tie it, I sez, or—be Jesus—I’ll flay yez inch by inch ‘til yez look like a skinned ape! Get going, now!”
Juniper approached the safety valve. But as he attempted to tie the release down, his hands trembled so that the length of stout cord fell to the floor. A moment later Juniper joined it, skidding forward on his face from the force of an expertly aimed kick from Mike’s hobnailed boots. Then calmly, Mike tied down the valve himself.
“Now, Gawdamnit,” he said, “break out them bunches of fat lightwood, an them six hogshead of tallow!”
“Please, Mas’ Mike!” Juniper quavered, “you kills us sho’. You blows us all to hell an’ back! Mas’ Mike, fo’ Gawd’s sake!”
“Then,” Mike said quietly, “ ‘twill be the fastest ride to hell that ever the devil seen! Cit moving, yez!”
Juniper moved off, driving the blacks before him, his heavy, African lips working in a silent prayer. A moment later they were back, rolling the hogsheads of tallow, and carrying the fat, resinous lightwood that would burn like tinder.
“In with it!” Mike said, “all of it!”
“All?” Juniper whispered.
“All!”
The firedoors came open and the yellow flame stood out through them for a full two yards. Then the sweating Negroes were hurling the hogsheads of tallow in, and the bunches of Lightwood. Mike stood back, quietly watching the pressure gauge. Steadily it crawled up past the red mark, up, up, up. Satisfied, Mike turned again toward the stairs.
Up in the pilot house, the pilot was clinging to the wheel and alternately cursing and praying. From the great paddle wheels the water boiled into instant spray, and towering waves rode backward over the river. The Creole Belle rocked and quivered like a wild thing, and inch by slow inch she overtook the Thomas Moore.
On the levee of Stephen’s plantation, the Negroes were screaming at the top of their lungs. Shotguns crashed into the air. Great oil- and grease-soaked bonfires flamed all along the mound of earth.
On the belvédère, Ceclie and Julie were hugging each other, thrilled into speechlessness. Stephen leaned forward, peering at the bend, his white brows bristling over his pale eyes, and the scar upon his temple glowing like a brand. Phillippe leaned back, his long, crooked segar smouldering.
Then the two boats were rounding the bend, blasting the towering plumes of thick black smoke up into the air, exactly abreast. At the same instant, they loosed their whistles, and the river was split with the deep, slow, lostlonesome bellows.
“Holy Mother of God!” Stephen whispered.
Even as they watched, the Creole Belle drew ahead—white water showed between the packets and widened steadily. Stephen turned triumphantly to Phillippe.
“Ye see!” he crowed.
But Philippe was leaning forward, his fingers bands of iron closing vise-like upon Stephen’s arm. His lips moved, but no sound came out of them, no sound at all. Frowning, Stephen turned again toward the river.
A long tongue of flame shot out of the bowels of the Creole Belle and rolled majestically across the face of the river. Then afterwards came the ear-shattering roar of the explosion. The flames mounted up into the morning air, roaring straight up for two hundred feet, carrying bits of hulkwood, and fittings of metal with them. They turned over slowly in the glare of the fire, then almost weightlessly they dropped toward the surface of the river. Up in the pilot house, wrapped in the flames, Stephen’s keen eyes could see even from that distance, the pilot, dead, hanging half out of one of the smashed windows; and the gigantic figure of old Mike hauling upon the wheel, swinging the Belle’s bow inward, angling for the landing.
“Oh, my God!” Aurore wept, “Oh, my God!”
Now the Belle was a sheet of living flame, blazing from stem to stem, but slowly, persistently, old Mike fought her in toward the landing. Up ahead, the Thomas Moore was reversing her engines, trying vainly to stop her headlong momentum in time to be of aid to her stricken rival.
And Stephen Fox was sprinting down the stairs calling as he ran:
“Georges! Inch! Jean-Jacques! Jean! Raoul! Henri! Pierre! Peter!”
The Negroes came racing toward the landing.
“Flour!” Stephen roared. “Every sack that ye can find!”
Phillippe and the girls were at his heels, and behind them came Aurore.
When they reached the landing, Mike had driven the Creole Belle’s bow into the soft mud, and was holding her there with all his remaining power. And now, the passengers, they that remained alive, were running over the bow onto the wooden pier, which was itself already smouldering. Like living torches they ran, hair and clothing aflame, to fall upon the muddy earth, and roll there, twisting and screaming.
Already the Negroes were busy, beating out the flaming garments, stripping them from men and women alike, and rolling the naked, pitifully burned scarecrows that had once been human beings in the flour that the racing wagons brought up. Some too far astern to reach the landing, plunged blazing over the side, to sizzle out in the boiling water at the Belle’s side and sink in the treacherous shoal currents.
Stephen and Phillippe worked like demons, burning their hands raw beating and tearing at the blazing clothing. Aurore and the two girls poured sips of water through the cracked and blackened lips of the dying. And up in the pilot house, Mike Farrel perished, as he had lived . . . grandly!
Of those who got ashore, only five were living at the end of an hour. These were borne up to Harrow and laid tenderly in the great beds. Julie walked along beside Inch and Jean-Jacques as they bore between them the slim figure of a lad of some seventeen years. By some odd chance, his face and hair were untouched, though the rest of his body was horribly burned. And the face was as handsome as a young god’s, with a fair almost girlish beauty. Heavy locks of blond hair curled damply over his forehead, and the ribbons of sweat ran down into his eyes. He made no sound, but bore his anguish silently, his great blue eyes fixed upon Julie.
A few yards away, Ceclie was lifting the feet of a young woman, while a slave girl struggled at her head. The black girl was sobbing aloud.
“Hush, nigger!” Ceclie snapped. “Crying won’t help now!”
Julie turned to Inch.
“Take him to my room,” she whispered. “I will care for him there.”
Inch nodded, and he and the fat old butler started up the stairs.
They laid him upon the bed, and Julie motioned for them to leave. Then slowly, carefully, she
cleansed away the flour and dirt from his blistered, blackened body. Then she washed him all over with sweet oil. As tenderly as she worked, from time to time the boy jerked violently, and a faint ghost of a moan escaped his lips.
Still Julie worked on, her young cheeks tear-wet, and her lips trembling. When she had finished, she stood up and, blushing furiously, drew up the sheet to cover his nakedness. Beneath the cloth, the boy writhed.
“No!” he whispered, “no covers! I can’t bear it!”
Julie drew the covers down from over his body and sat down beside him.
“You—you’re an angel,” he got out. “I’m not dead yet—am I?”
“No,” Julie wept, “and you won’t die! You can’t die! I won’t let you!”
The boy’s fair face twisted into a grimace oddly resembling a smile.
“You—live—here? This—is—your—home?”
“Yes,” Julie whispered. “Yes.”
The boy’s face was frowning.
“You’re so good,” he muttered. “I don’t understand—I don’t understand . . .”
“What is it you don’t understand?” Julie prompted.
“How—someone so beautiful—can live—upon wealth gained from the sweat of other men’s faces.” He drew himself half up, his voice growing stronger. “My father says . . .”
“Your father?”
“Thomas Meredith—the abolitionist—we’re from Boston. He says that nothing more wicked exists under the skies of heaven than a system that uses—” He sank back, his breath gone.
“Please be quiet,” Julie begged. “You mustn’t exert yourself, really you mustn’t!”
“Men like brutish beasts,” young Meredith went on as though he had not heard. He looked at her, his blue eyes peering owlishly under the lids from which all lashes had been singed away.
“What—is—your name?”
“Julie,” the girl sobbed.
“You—are—so lovely,” he whispered; “like an angel—Julie. I like—that—name—Julie. I want to—die—saying it. Tell my father—and my brother Tom that Dan said . . .” He fell back, unconscious upon the bed.
All through the day, Julie watched beside him. He talked frequently, wildly—often to people who were not there. At times he seemed to be making a speech.
