January cursed. Leatherstocking never had this problem. But then, judging by what he’d read of Cooper’s continuing epic, Leatherstocking could evidently see in the dark as well. January wondered if Abishag Shaw had the same abilities.
“I think the best thing we can do,” he said, rising from the soft muck of shell and mud at the water’s brim, “is to start back to town. I told half a dozen people where I was going this morning. When all four of us fail to appear at rehearsal, they’ll send out a search party. With luck we’ll meet them on the way to Point Algiers, and we’ll be in a better position to look for Drusilla then. Agreed?”
Ponte nodded, but Cavallo strenuously resisted the idea of abandoning their friend in an unknown countryside and growing darkness—darkness that was considerably further advanced by the time January convinced him that the three of them would have far less hope of success if they simply started wandering the cipriere, looking for her. With Cavallo’s objections, Ponte reversed himself and refused to leave; and when they finally set off, it was nearly full night, and all three were ravenously hungry and thirsty. Both of the house’s great wooden cisterns had burned at the time of the original fire.
“According to my mother, the Doughertys and the Burtons are still fighting over the land in the courts,” said January, leading the way along the verge of the bayou. “Not that it’s worth a great deal—not like land along the river.” He glanced back at the blackened ruin disappearing between the trees. “If the families don’t get their differences settled soon, it won’t be worth the labor it’ll cost to bring the place back at all.”
“How came they to build it all in the first place,” asked Cavallo, “if it was not worth the labor?” He waved irritably at the cloud of gnats that rose around them, ample evidence that the modest levee along the bayou had crevassed in half a dozen places during the years of neglect. January breathed a silent prayer of thanks that it was winter and mosquitoes were few. In summer the place would be unendurable.
“This was all built in the nineties.” January skirted a soggy pot-hole, boots crunching on shell—an Indian mound, where once a campsite had stood. Oaks crowned it, and crumbling platforms of brick marked the tombs of the Dougherty family, eroding as this wet land eroded everything in time.
“You could still bring slaves in from Africa then. You could buy a man for three hundred dollars and you didn’t care if he died of overwork in two years. You can’t do that now.” As always, leaving New Orleans and going into the countryside brought him back to his childhood, to the smell of dew-soaked earth and the stink of the cabins, the wailing songs of the men in the fields and the moan of the conch-shell in the dusk. Pain and a deep, sad beauty beyond any words he’d ever known.
“There are men in my village,” said Bruno Ponte quietly, “who would sell themselves gladly for three hundred dollars, if they could but find a buyer. This is good land here.”
Thin as a nail-paring, the day-moon had slipped away below the trees; as if night had crouched waiting under the trees, the shadows crept forth across the bayou’s velvet green waters. A few early frogs peeped, then were still.
Hannibal would surely go to Shaw with word that none of them had been at rehearsal. Or, if Hannibal were unable to leave the battered mattress where he slept in the attic of Kentucky Williams’s place, Belaggio would. And Shaw had his note.
It would only be a matter of time.
But what had happened to Drusilla, wandering alone about this countryside in darkness. . . .
“Who-all’s that?”
Torchflame and lanterns. Cavallo strode forward, arms outflung, crying “Molte bene!” even as January yelled, “Wait . . . !”
“You hold still there!” rasped a nasal American voice, and, when Cavallo didn’t stop, added, “Hold up or I’ll shoot!” And above the jangle of bridle-bits, the creak of leather in the shadows, January heard the clack of a gun-lock.
“Alt!” he shouted, heart sinking like a stone. “Silvio, no!” And, in English, “Don’t shoot, sirs!” He had to brace himself, first against his impulse to plunge off the road and into the shelter of the swamp, and second against the overwhelming urge to slap Cavallo for pushing ahead so blithely. Please, God, not Captain Chamoflet and his slave-stealers . . . “We’ve had our horses stolen. . . .”
“Well, have you just?” Torches were raised. The silhouettes of slouch hats and horses’ ears changed into a gold-and-black mosaic of faces and beasts. The hot light winked on bridle-buckles, on round, shining equine eyes; made dull red slivers along rifle-barrels. The lead rider spit, and nudged his mount forward, the tobacco-stink sweetish-foul on the damp dirt. A tangle of black beard showed under a decrepit hat-brim, and a long, dirty coat hung down over the horse’s rump like a rude caparison. “Let’s just see some papers on you boys.”
January fished one set of his papers from his jacket pocket, watching as he did so the rider’s face in the inverted light. Patrol. There were a few fat, fair Celtic countenances in the band, which never belonged to swampmen. That didn’t mean some of the men weren’t smugglers on their nights off, he reminded himself, glancing inconspicuously at the trees and calculating his chances of headlong and immediate flight.
These weren’t promising. Three riders moved their horses around to circle them, rifles cradled with careless deftness in the crooks of their arms. The captain bent from the saddle to hand the papers back, and held out his hand to Cavallo.
“We are at Cornouiller,” explained Cavallo in his careful English. “My friends and I, and a young lady name Drusilla d’Isola—”
“I don’t care if you was picnickin’ on Andrew Jackson’s front lawn with the Queen of Spain,” said the captain. “Let’s see some papers, boy.”
January thought, Shit. “Sir,” he said, “please allow me to introduce Signor Silvio Cavallo of Milan, and Bruno Ponte of Naples. They are Italians, engaged to meet Mr. Burton at Cornouiller to—”
“Eye-talians, hunh?” The captain stepped down from his horse, flipping a pistol into his hand as he did so like a magician producing an egg from thin air, and reached to take the lantern from the rider beside him. He held the beam on Cavallo’s face, then shifted it to Ponte, who had sprung to his friend’s side at the first hint of danger. January saw the mud-streaked, soot-grimed clothing, the swart complexions and close-curled dark hair, and felt his heart plummet. “That’s one I ain’t heard before, anyways. And I do got to say, you boys sure look like high-yellas to me.”
“Ol’ Man Ulloa over to Bayou Go-to-Hell had a high-yella boy who’d do that, Mr. Pickney,” provided the beardless—and chinless—stripling who’d handed the captain his lantern. “Go on into town tellin’ ever’one he’s a Eye-talian, and not no nigger at all.”
“That so?” Captain Pickney cocked a speculative brown eye back at Cavallo.
“What is it?” demanded the tenor, disconcerted at the lack of response. He fell back a step to January. “What is happening? Who are these men?”
Ponte flung a quick glance toward the woods, and January guessed that had he been alone—or had he been only with January—he’d have run for it. As it was, he moved protectively to his friend’s side. Not understanding, maybe, what was going on, but knowing that something was.
“They think you’re a slave, an octoroon.” January berated himself for not having gone to the Swamp to look for Hannibal before leaving town. Annoyed as he’d been at Madame Montero’s rescue the night before last, he knew if an indisputably white man were with them now, they would not be having this trouble.
The custom of the country.
“Perché?” Cavallo turned back to Pickney, horrified bafflement on his face. “Do I look like a Negro? Look-a me . . . do I . . . uh . . .” He fished in his subjunctiveless English vocabulary.
“Silvio, leave it,” cautioned Ponte softly.
“Any you boys speak French?” Pickney turned to canvass the posse at large. Though most of the wealthy planters in any given parish were likely to be French
, or at least to have learned to speak the language enough to communicate with those who held the majority of wealth and land in the district, once you got away from the choice land on the river, it was a matter of chance who you’d be able to talk to. The men who rode patrol were largely drawn from the smaller farmers, the crackers who tilled—or had a slave or two till—the marshy and less-valuable acres of cotton and corn. Forty miles to the southwest, on the other side of the Bayou des Allemands, there would have been no question—in fact they’d have been hard-put to find a member of the posse who spoke English. But in this part of Jefferson Parish there were as many crackers descended from Welsh and Scots-Irish as there were from the old Acadian stock.
“Vigaud’s daughter gettin’ married,” provided another rider, a heavy-featured man with a dirty red waistcoat under his trailing surtout coat. “That’s where him and Clopard and the Nain brothers went. Prob’ly most of the rest of the Frenchies around here, too.”
“Well, shit.” Pickney chewed for a moment in silence. “And Marsan’s up in town.”
“His wife might still be at Roseaux.” The fat man pronounced it “Rose-oh.” “He got a li’l gal up in town, so he don’t take her nor Miss Jocelyn up more’n he has to.”
Pickney sniffed. “You’d think those gals’d have more sense, given what he done to the last one. Well, if’n they ain’t there, somebody’ll have to ride on up to town, find out what’s happenin’. Meantime”—he turned back to January, hefted the pistol that had never at any time been pointed anywhere but at his heart—“looks like the three of you is gonna spend the night in my barn.”
THIRTEEN
“This is an outrage!” Cavallo stormed as No Chin and Red Waistcoat thrust him and his companions at gun-point into the farthest stall of Mr. Pickney’s barn. “A barbarity!”
“So it is,” said January. He wondered if the young man meant the fact that he, a white man, had been mistaken for and treated like a black one, or that anyone had the legal right to treat anyone like this at all.
“This is the United States!” the Milanese went on passionately, falling into French, since none of the Americans was listening anyway. “The land of Washington, of Jefferson! The land that showed all the world the upward road to freedom!”
“Get your boots off, boys.” Pickney tossed a length of chain up over one of the low rafters and held out the stout curved shackles attached to either end.
At least, thought January, the stall they were being put into had been mucked out after its last tenancy. That was something. And if the barn was ramshackle in the extreme, like most buildings erected by that semi-indigent, semi-barbaric class of small farmers known as crackers, at least there was a barn. Many crackers let their horses and mules make do with rude pens and, at most, unwalled shelters, like the cattle and swine that lived at large in the woods. Pickney’s house, dimly glimpsed across the gloom of a dung-littered dooryard, differed from the average slave-cabin only in size, and that not by much. The whole place reeked of woodsmoke and pigs.
Under cover of Cavallo’s indignation (“. . . inspiration for the world of free men, debased by such as you. . . .”) January promptly sat on the dirt floor with his back to the single lantern’s dim light, slipped the skinning-knife from his boot, and thrust it under the stacks of dirty hay stored in the stall. His skin prickled at the thought of surrendering his last possibility of flight, but to resist, he knew, would have gotten him anything from a beating to a bullet in the back.
Patience, Don Quixote had said, and shuffle the cards.
“Rufe!” Pickney shoved the cross-bar of the shackle into place and locked it, thrust a finger in the space behind January’s tendon to make sure there was no way he could slip his foot clear. At his call, a small, middle-aged man in the worn osnaburg clothing of a slave appeared from the shadows. “Get these boys a couple blankets and some pone. You.” He looked back at Cavallo. “Boots off.”
“You go to hell!”
The pistol came up. Ponte moved to throw himself between them and January said in Italian, “Do it, Silvio.”
“I will not be chained like a dog. . . .”
“Do it!”
Red Waistcoat started forward and Pickney got to his feet, flipping his pistol around in his hand, club-wise. Neither seemed angry, only resigned to a tedious annoyance.
“What are they going to do?” demanded Cavallo, falling back a step. “Shoot me? Eh?”
“They’re going to beat the tar out of you for being uppity,” January told him. “Now get your boots off.”
Cavallo sat. “This place stinks,” he said, pulling his boots off. “You tell this farmer that his barn stinks like a sewer.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell him that.” January watched as Cavallo’s ankles were chained. “Mr. Pickney, sir,” he said as the farmer stood again. When he spoke, January could see his breath in the lantern-light. “Would you be riding out on patrol again after you leave us here? I ask because there was another member of our party, a young Italian woman, who became separated from us, and who is almost certainly lost in the woods.” He spoke his best English—far better than Pickney’s, in fact—well aware that for both the French and the Americans, educated speech often proved more telling than freedom papers in establishing one as a free man.
“She speaks no English,” he went on, “and very little French. Like Signor Cavallo, she might very easily be taken for a woman of color.”
Pickney regarded him steadily for a moment, almost visibly checking behind the words themselves for a plan or ploy, as he would have checked behind a curtain at the sight of a suspicious movement. Then he nodded. “I’ll keep a eye out.” And spit into the hay. Bruno, whom the chinless youth had chained to the upright at the end of the stall, had said hardly a word through the whole encounter, only watched the guns, and the faces of the men, with the same animal readiness in his dark eyes as he’d had when he watched Shaw.
A peasant, when all was said and done, thought January, taking the word as a definition rather than an insult. A paysan. Raised in a world that was far closer to the twelfth century than to the nineteenth. And ready to die, with casual ferocity, for the sake of his friend.
Yellow light lurched drunkenly over the rafters as Red Waistcoat picked up the lantern, shadows bellying forward to swallow all in blackness. The barn door shut. Cold mist flowed between the warped and shrunken boards of the walls.
“Why the hell did you tell him that?” Cavallo’s comprehension of English wasn’t good, but he evidently understood “a young Italian woman,” and “woods.” Hay scrunched and the chain between January’s feet jerked as the tenor shifted his seat. “Now they’ll be looking for her as well.”
“She’ll be safer, believe me, if the men think there’s a chance she’s a European lady instead of a runaway octoroon girl.” A mule stamped and snuffled in the darkness. Near-by a savage rustle sounded in the straw, and a rat squeaked in pain. “I only hope if she runs into someone, it will be the patrols and not smugglers from the Barataria.”
“And this—this barbarity! To mistake us for Negroes— to treat us in this fashion! Is this a commonplace in this fine country of yours?”
“For black men it is.”
“And do you think,” said Bruno’s soft voice, “that the treatment a contadino receives in Sicily at the hands of the padroni is any different? There is a great deal of injustice in the world, Signor Janvier. My father was killed when I was fifteen, for striking the man who raped my sister— not just shaming her once, but upon a dozen occasions, whenever he would meet her in the fields or the woods. He was the son of the local lord. His father had my father shot by one of his shepherds. There were no charges brought.”
Metal clinked in the raw blackness. “One day I will go back to Sicily and kill Don Remigio, and his son, but then I will die as well. The law lies in the hands of such as they. This is what the risorgimento is, Signor. This is what Young Italy is. Not just to cast out the stupid German-heads. Not just to avenge ours
elves on the rich. When Italy is one country, and not a dozen little lands, then the lords of those little lands will have someone big who can say to them, These things you will not do. Until that time, the wretched of the earth will wear chains as surely as you and I and Silvio wear them tonight.”
Slits of yellow light bobbed in the darkness. January heard a man whistling an old song his father used to sing, about the rabbit in the brier, and then the stable-door creaked. “Hello the shop!” called out a husky voice, marred with the telltale roughness of the early stages of consumption, and the slave Rufe appeared around the end of the stall. He had a couple of ragged blankets thrown over one shoulder and a basket in his hand.
“Mr. Pickney really going to get M’am Marsan to come over in the morning?” asked January as the slave hung his lantern on a nail and dropped the blankets to the hay.
“Oh, sure. Don’t you worry about that.” Actually, a certain number of January’s apprehensions had abated with just a look at Rufe in better light. Though a little thin, the man had clearly not been starved or beaten. Nor did he have the hangdog look of one who lives in fear, something that told January at least a few reassuring things about his captor’s honesty and intentions. “Last month the patrol catched a woman said she was bound south to meet her husband in New Iberia; said a man up by Big Temple Mound took her freedom papers. Mr. Pickney, he rode all the way up to town, made sure she was who she said she was and that she was free. Though she had to get new papers in town, of course. But he honest, Mr. Pickney.”
He set down the basket in front of Cavallo, and with it a big gourd of water. January noticed the man never got within arm-reach of any of the three prisoners. It wasn’t the first time by a long chalk, January reflected, that Pickney’s Rufe had played jailer.
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