Sold Down the River
Page 5
He glanced at January, sizing him up with that dark sardonic eye: his size, his clothing, the way he’d spoken, the way he held himself—awkward and a little shy, as if fully conscious of the superiority of the two house-servants and even the steamboat’s slovenly cook. Then he turned back to Baptiste. “You’d better get that up to him.”
“I will do that, M’sieu Cornwallis.”
The valet walked away.
“Thank you, sir,” said January, as Baptiste picked up his tray.
The butler took a deep breath, nodded, and went out to do his first service for his master.
The cook, looking through the door after Cornwallis’s erect figure, said, “Damn Protestant Kaintuck nigger,” and went back to the preparation of lunch.
Carrying his own tray back to the men’s cabin—a journey that involved sidestepping crated dry goods, barrels of blankets and calico, boxes of spermaceti candles, decanters packed in straw, a small pile of pigs of lead, and a dozen trunks stacked on the deck—January reflected on the fact that the cook, whom the valet obviously scorned for being of almost certainly pure African descent and menial employment, should look down on the valet for his Virginia accent and the religious preferences that accent implied.
During January’s childhood, Fourchet had never bothered to convert his slaves. Even the house-servants had only the thinnest veneer of Christianity. St.-Denis Janvier had seen to his religious instruction as well as his education, and January remembered clearly being cautioned about the evils and ignorance of Protestants, a rarity in those days. Since his return he’d been conscious of how many American slaves were coming into New Orleans now from Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and of how the French-speaking Catholic slaves—even the ones who followed up Mass by attendance at the voodoo dances in Congo Square—tended to shun them.
And vice versa, of course.
Even before he knocked on the door of the men’s cabin he heard Hannibal’s voice inside. “Of course I’m drunk,” the fiddler was saying. “But I’m not stupid, and I assure you I’ve imbibed enough opium in the course of a misspent life that I’ve learned to manage quite nicely. Benjamin, amicus meus … He propped himself a little on the pillows as January entered, and Fourchet stood back a half-pace from the bunk. “Tell this gentleman about the time I drove Monsieur Marigny’s carriage down Rue Bourbon after having quaffed a good four fingers of the finest Kendal Black Drop.”
“Drink your coffee.” January set the tray on Hannibal’s knees, which were so thin they barely lifted above the level of the bunk’s meager mattress. “Sir.”
He glanced around the men’s cabin, confirming his original observation that they were alone. To Fourchet he said, “As someone who’s known Monsieur Sefton for two years, I can assure you he’s usually less inebriated than he seems. I don’t think we need fear his giving away any secrets.”
Unless, he thought, he gets really neck-shot—something Hannibal did seldom, but did with fiendish timing for those few occasions on which it was most important that he be sober.
Fourchet regarded him with an arctic eye. “I don’t imagine you would have been stupid enough to propose an alliance with someone you believed to be as untrustworthy as most drunkards are,” he said. “But considering the pains we’ve taken to arrange a story, as you termed it last night, I’m at a loss to think of a convincing reason for me to offer the shelter of my roof to a sodden reprobate. No matter how desperately he counterfeits sickness.”
Hannibal coughed, with a violence and a gluey, glottal note to it that, January thought uneasily, were no counterfeit. The wasting effects of his consumption seemed to have abated with the cooler weather, but with his shirt open and his long hair trailing loose from its ribbon over his shoulders, he still looked like a ghost just back from a night on the tiles. When he regained his breath he said, “Easy. I will have done you a great service, which you feel obliged to repay by taking me in when I’m stricken ill.”
“What service? You can’t even do up your bootlaces,” Fourchet said.
“Then it’s fortunate you don’t need bootlaces done up. However, I will do you the service of telling you that the gentleman who arranged a half-hour or so ago to go halves with you in the purchase of Chickasaw lands has no more option to title on those lands than I have option to title on the Parthenon of Athens.”
Fourchet’s eyes widened in alarm. “How do you know what Monsieur LaBarre and I discussed? You haven’t been out of this room!”
“I saw you pass the door deep in conversation with him a few minutes ago, and I know there’s only one thing Slinky LaBarre holds deep conversations about with strangers, and that’s a tract of territory along the Arkansas River that the government is about to negotiate from the tribes. I hope you didn’t give him a draft.”
The planter said nothing for a time, only tightened his jaw as if chewing something tough and rancid-tasting. January was familiar with the tic. “And what do you know about it?” Fourchet demanded at length.
“Only what I’ve heard about Slinky from other gamblers, cheats, river pirates, and opium-sodden reprobates in the saloons.” Hannibal’s voice weakened and he leaned his back against the pillows; January could see the flecks of blood that tipped his mustache hairs. “I’ll think of some other service for me to do you if that doesn’t suit: the location of one of Lafitte’s caches of treasure, perhaps? Or it could be I have title to Chickasaw land myself.”
“My family knows how I feel about drunkards and opium-eaters.” The savage loathing in Fourchet’s voice was deeper than any disgust or contempt. “When we go ashore at Triomphe I’ll thank you to restrict your habits to something that can be accounted for by illness, not dissipation.”
“I’ll commence practicing my coughing immediately.” Hannibal gave him the ghost of a military salute.
Mouth almost square-cornered with distaste, the planter resumed his hat and made to go. January said,” If you could spare us a few more minutes of your time, sir?”
Fourchet glanced pointedly at the door, as if to remind him that anyone could enter at any time. This wasn’t, January knew, actually likely. No one in their right mind would linger in the passenger cabins of a small steamboat if they didn’t have to.
Like most stern-wheelers, the Belle Dame was a smallish boat of shallow draft, and what it lost in the smallness of its hold space was made up out of the cabins, galley, staterooms, and saloon. The men’s cabin was narrow and cramped, odorous from the proximity of the galley, and Spartan at best. Despite its distance from the boiler room, the walls shuddered with the regular thudding pulse of the engine. Trunks, valises, and portmanteaux that either wouldn’t fit in the hold or would be required before many hours had passed heaped the floor in front of and beside the bunks. Most passengers sought the distractions of cards in the saloon, or braved the chill on the hurricane deck above.
Fourchet turned back, nostrils flared with impatience as Hannibal set down his untasted coffee and went into a paroxysm of coughing. “For what?”
“A little information.” January knelt, and dug through the valise for the first laudanum bottle he could lay hands on. He had to hold it steady while his friend drank. “Who the members of your household are. Where they were on the night of the fire in the sugar-mill, and when the mule barn caught fire. Who besides Gilles had the keys to the cellaret the cognac was in, and the keys to the mill.”
The planter looked about to snap some stricture about the medicine, but drew a breath instead, as if forcibly reminding himself to keep his own affairs in focus. “You’ve seen Cornwallis,” he said at last. “He’s my valet, he’s been with me about six years. He came warranted honest and sober but I suspect they wanted to get rid of him for some reason, for in the end they let him go for seven-fifty. My son Esteban’s valet is Agamemnon—a creeping, sneaking, prissy catamite if you ask me—and Kiki’s the cook. The maids are Ariadne and Henna. My son Robert’s man and his wife’s maid they took with them to Paris, and they weren’t even
present when the trouble started. Doucette does the sewing. There’s Ti-Jeanne the washerwoman, but she wouldn’t have had access to the keys of the cellaret, let alone the—”
“I didn’t mean the servants,” said January quietly. “I mean your family. The people who stand to profit from your death.”
The planter’s face flamed. “By God, if I have to stand here and take this from a—”
“You don’t, sir,” said January steadily. “But if your wife was with child, and an accoucheur asked after her health, would you keep it from him if she’d had three miscarriages in the past three years?”
Fourchet, who had opened his mouth to shout him down, checked, and closed it again, listening in simmering silence.
“Would you keep silent about her passing blood, or fainting? I’m a doctor, M’sieu.” Well, a surgeon, anyway, he thought, but Fourchet didn’t have to know that. “I’ve seen men who do all this and more, and in so doing endanger the lives of those they love by their unwillingness to tell the complete truth.”
Footfalls clumped outside the door. January knelt at once and pretended to be rearranging something in Hannibal’s valise. Since the cabin did not go all the way through the width of the boat, but backed its inner end onto the wall of one of the staterooms, Fourchet left it entirely, passing in the doorway the man who entered, a stout fair gentleman who nodded a friendly greeting to him and was roundly snubbed.
Nothing discomposed, the newcomer nodded to Hannibal. He asked, “Is all well with the Herr?”
Hannibal lifted a hand in assent and replied in the German in which he’d been addressed. “I’m better now, thank you.”
The German gentleman went to his own bunk and fetched a greatcoat. “Might I ask where you are bound, sir? You seem in no fit case to travel.”
“St. Louis,” said Hannibal faintly. “If I make it so far.”
“T’cha, that is not good.” The stranger divided his worried glance between Hannibal and January. “Please let me know if I may be of any assistance.”
“Fool,” muttered Fourchet after the German left. “That’s the kind of man who ends up with parasites on his hands and in his house for months, sucking him dry.” He had kindled a cigar while on deck, chewing it now angrily as he stared down at the fiddler lying on his bunk. “And serve him right.”
Resentment in every craggy line of his face, he dragged up the room’s solitary chair and settled in it. “These are they who’d have access to the keys to the cellaret,” he said abruptly. “My son Esteban, and through him that sneaking valet of his, Agamemnon. My wife …” He could barely bring out the words.” And I presume either of the maids, who could have lifted them from her room if they’d had the wits to do it. My son Robert and his wife weren’t back yet from Paris when the mill burned, and they had, as I said, their servants with them: Leander and that good-for-nothing slut Vanille.”
“What about your overseer?”
“Thierry? He keeps his own liquor in his own house.” Disgust tinged Fourchet’s voice, as if he’d sniffed wormwood. “He has no call to have a key. But you know as well as I do the thievery that goes on among blacks. Any one of them could have taken the key.”
Well, it would be harder for a field hand to get it, January thought, unless of course he worked out trade or blackmail with one of the house-servants, who generally held the field hands in complete contempt. At that point a copy could be made, if the plantation blacksmith was clever enough. But he said nothing. These were the secrets of the quarters, not to be shared with les blankittes, for you never knew against whom information might be used.
Instead he said, “Tell me about the day the mill burned.”
“Evening.” Fourchet bit savagely on the cigar with one side of his mouth and leaked smoke from the other. “Just at sunset. The men were still in the ciprière. Reuben, my sugar-boss, saw the mill door open and fire inside. He ran in and started beating at the flames, and only fortune saved him, for the mill door blew shut behind him and jammed. We had to open it with an ax, and by that time smoke had overcome him, and the fire spread. We found trash—cane leaves and hay, and last year’s dried bagasse—jammed up under the rafter joints, and in the timbers that supported the grinders.”
“Who is ‘we’?” asked January. “If Reuben was alone and ran in and the door blew shut behind him, how was he saved?”
“One of the pickaninnies. Boy claimed he was gathering kindling—playing in the mule barn more likely, where he’d no business to be—and saw the smoke, and heard Reuben shouting. He and his brother ran to the ciprière and got the men.”
January sat silent, gazing at the narrow glaring rectangle of the half-open door and the brown river beyond. It was low water, and gray snags reached up like demon hands, clutching for the hulls and the wheels of the boats. More dangerous still would be those just beneath the surface, mere scratches or ruffles on the glassy flow. Sandbars made slanting riffles, or accrued enough flotsam to build up into islands—the larger side-wheelers veered into the heavy current of the main channel to avoid them, but the Belle Dame skimmed” inside” these obstructions, between them and the tree-grown bank. Above the engine’s jarring heartbeat, January heard the leadsmen calling the depth: “Quarter twain. Quarter twain. Mark twain.”
“There were no men nearer?”
“We were behind the harvest, I tell you,” snapped Fourchet. “We’d had rain for three days. I had both gangs out cutting wood, Sunday or no Sunday, and most of the yard-men as well. Even the gardener. There was no one about the place except the house-servants.”
“And Reuben, evidently.”
“He’d been working in the mill on and off all day, making it ready for the grinding.”
During the roulaison, the near-universal rule of Sunday as a day of “rest”—which for a slave meant labor on one’s own provision grounds instead of for the master’s cash crop—was suspended in the interests of the cane. January remembered how the field dust gummed in the cut-cane-juice on his hands, his clothes, his face; how everything was sticky with it. Suddenly and clearly he had a vision of his father rising in freezing darkness and going outside to wash before joining the men for work, a tall shadow in the banked sulfurous dimness of the hearth.
Where had that memory come from? he wondered. As a rule he had few memories of his father.
“And how long was the grinding delayed?”
“Over a week. Too long—cane’ll rot within two days. The sugar goes sour.” He blew a vile-smelling cloud. “Reuben spent the day after the fire going over every inch of that mill. That’s when he found the hoodoo-marks. The axle-beams of the grinders were charred black, but he said they hadn’t been damaged, so he got the grinders running by the Tuesday. Two days later the main gang was down sick, puking and purging. More hoodoo work. I put as many as I could spare from the second gang in the fields with the women, and the women were more use than they at the work. The cane came in full of trash and stones, jamming up the grinders every five minutes. Reuben tried to pull a knot or something free and the mules spooked. The whole business broke and the grinding-rollers came down on him, and what with Esteban having to go to town and get new, and the delay of having a man set them up, we lost another week.”
January was silent, trying to piece the images together in his mind. Sick at the thought of those huge toothed iron cylinders, monster jaws drooling the green sticky sap of the cane …
Came down on him … dear Jesus!
And all Fourchet saw was the delay. The planter pulled on his chewed cigar and brooded about the injustice of it all. On his bunk Hannibal lay with shut eyes, thin hands folded around the empty coffee cup. Above the thwack-jerk of the engine, the voices of the slaves on the deck outside could be heard:
“Suzette my beautiful friend,
Suzette my beautiful friend,
Pray to God for me.
I will wait for her,
I will work for her,
I’ll carry cane for her upon my shoulder.
“You were with the men in the ciprière on the night of the fire?”
“Of course! Where else would I be? Damn blacks won’t do a thing unless you’re standing over them with a whip.”
January opened his mouth to reply and then closed it. At the time—in the days of his childhood, his slavery—the endless, intricate dance of slave and master, of work and avoidance of work, had seemed to him the only manner in which life could be conducted. Looking back on it, he was still amazed that grown men and women should be astonished by their slaves’ efforts to evade tasks that they themselves found too hard or too nasty, tasks demanded with no recompense but the simplest of food and the cheapest of shelter and clothing, with the constant threat of losing their friends and families thrown in.
He should, he reflected, never have gone to Paris. Or else he should have stayed there, no matter how desperate the agony of his grief at his wife’s death. He was no longer capable of accepting the custom of the country that at one time had been second nature to him.