Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  “Tell your men to stop,” ordered Louis pettishly again, and gestured around him. “Your master may claim that this is his land, but it is indubitably my cane.”

  “Sir, the fact is I don’t remember whether we planted this cane or you planted this cane, so you may very well be right.” Ajax bowed again as he spoke, hat in hands and voice carefully neutral. “But I can’t go against Michie Fourchet’s orders—”

  “You very well can, when his orders are in direct contravention of the law!”

  “He gets any more mad,” murmured Gosport, in the thick African patois that was barely French at all, “he’ll pop right up off that horse and spin around in the air,” and there was a silent ripple of laughter among the men.

  “Little bitch put him up to it,” muttered Louis Daubray, shading his eyes and gazing in the direction of the house. “Under that piety she always was a schemer.”

  “She’ll find her claims—if she wins them—come a little more expensive than she thought,” remarked Hippolyte. “If she hasn’t found so already. The first time he takes a knife to her dresses, or starts smashing things she treasures …” He shook with a sudden chuckle of reminiscent laughter. “Do you remember the night old Simon took a hammer to Camille’s pianoforte? And her staggering along the levee all done up in that ridiculous yellow ball dress, waving her opium bottle and screaming to all the boats to take her back to France?”

  “That sour little puritan wouldn’t care about her dresses, and if she ever fancied anything in her life other than the Bible I’d be surprised,” muttered Louis.” That’s the only reason Simon hasn’t driven her off yet. She treasures nothing: no novels to tear up, no pianoforte to take a sledge to, no glass birds and music boxes to stamp, no lace to rip … What, sir, is the meaning of this?”

  For Simon Fourchet had appeared at a hand-gallop across the stubble, hatless, gray hair jerking behind him in the breeze.

  “The meaning of this, you mangy weasel, is that it’s harvest …”

  All work in the cane-rows had ceased by this time, men and women both gathered around the cane carts, listening as unobviously as they could. Finding himself next to Jeanette, January touched her shoulder gently, asked, “Is there someone on Daubray who’d know how to make gris-gris?”

  “Mambo Hera,” the girl said promptly. “Even my mama was afraid of Mambo Hera.” Like most of the women, she’d stripped off her coarse woolen jacket and hiked up her skirt almost to the thigh. Sweat gummed her calico shift to her breasts and ran down her cheeks from beneath the tignon that bound up her hair, making cedar-red tracks in the mousy dust. “Before she got so crippled she was them boys’ mammy—Michie Louis and Michie Hippolyte. My mama said in her prime she had the Power, more than any other woman in this parish. I remember Mambo Hera when I was just little: She was a scary woman in those days.”

  “But not now?”

  “She’s near ninety,” put in Disappearing Willie, who stood just behind them. “And this past summer she had a palsy-stroke, and doesn’t get around much. She’s near blind, too.”

  “When she looks at you with those white eyes it still seems like she looks right through you, though.”

  Maybe, thought January. But somehow he couldn’t imagine a dim-sighted and crippled nonagenarian accomplishing even the modest scramble up to the timbers of the mill, or slipping through Thierry’s window to fetch a blanketful of knives to dump in the forge.

  “I think all of ’em was scared to death of her,” Jeanette went on. “M’am Enid’s daughters, and Michie Louis’s, and all of ’em over to Daubray. All except Mamzelle Marie-Noël—M’am Fourchet, I should say.”

  “It was the labor of my men who planted this cane here last season, and three years ago,” Louis Daubray was shouting, waving his quirt before Fourchet’s face. “My men who cleared the trashy wasteland that was all that was left here of the ruin our cousin had made of family land …”

  Gosport was right, thought January. If Daubray got any more riled he would fly off his horse like a badly made toy.

  “Mama would take me over there, and I’d see the girls, M’am Enid’s daughters Aimée and Rosine, that were always dressed so pretty, and Michie Louis’s daughter Loië. They were fifteen, sixteen then, and Michie Robert and all the other boys would ride over to court them, all but Michie Esteban, of course. The girls, they’d give Mambo Hera sugar and candy and sometimes they’d steal things like tobacco or earrings, when their mamas would get them from off the steamboats, to bribe her to make them gris-gris to get this boy or that boy they wanted.”

  “Don’t think I’m not aware that you’d rejoice if my crop failed!” Fourchet stormed at the two Daubrays. “And don’t think I don’t know that it hasn’t stopped at rejoicing! I know perfectly well you were on my land the night my mill burned …!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Hippolyte, who’d been lounging in his saddle eyeing Eve and Jeanette and the petite sullen-faced Trinette, straightened with a jerk. “I was pursuing that pestilent thief of a goods-trader whom you permit to tie up and set up shop on your land!”

  “And who saw you, eh? I’ve heard all about how you followed Jones halfway down the river, but who was with you?”

  “Do you call my brother a liar, sir?”

  “But Mamzelle Marie-Noël,” Jeanette went on softly, “she’d go by in her old made-over gown that she’d turned herself, just holding her Bible and her beads in her hands, and she wouldn’t even so much as look at Mambo Hera. And Mambo Hera’d look after her and laugh.”

  “… making free with the goods that are stolen from the rest of us! Why, I shouldn’t be surprised if Jones gives you a cut of what he receives.”

  “Liar!” Fourchet lunged from his saddle, hands reaching for Hippolyte’s throat. “Pig of a liar!” Hippolyte’s horse, not surprisingly, threw up her head with a squeal of indignation and reared, blundering into Louis’s mount, and by the time Ajax, January, Gosport, and Hope had grabbed bridles and steadied would-be combatants from clambering down to take up the challenge on the ground, the immediate danger of assault was past. “I will send my friends to call on you, you perjuring filth, and in the meantime get your fat bottom and your scrawny brother off my wife’s land!”

  “Should you find any friends the length of this river willing to call on me or to perform any office whatsoever on your behalf, I will own myself to be astonished beyond speaking, and this is our family’s land, and no possession of any thieving bastard of our cousin’s Hibernian drab!”

  “I thought you was good at the dozens, Ben,” remarked Gosport, coming up beside January, after Hippolyte, Louis, and Fourchet had been separated once again. “But I would purely love to hear those two go at it!”

  “And you get back to work!” screamed Fourchet, lashing at Ajax and the field hands with his quirt. “Idle, stupid blocks …!”

  “Not on my land you’re not!”

  Fourchet lunged at les frères Daubray one more time and Ajax caught him back, expostulating with him to the extent that Louis and his brother were able to depart without the appearance of flight. The driver then had the task of respectfully talking his master out of pursuing the brothers through the cane and flogging them with Ajax’s whip (“If you want to take it, sir, of course, but it’ll leave me without anything to beat these lazy niggers here with.…”), by which time Louis and Hippolyte were out of range. Trembling, Simon Fourchet leaned against his driver’s shoulder, his red face suddenly white and his hand pressed to his chest, looking as he had following yesterday’s outburst of rage at the smithy. January had the impression of a horse that has been galloped too far and too hard, wind-broken, unable to run again.

  Hope broke away from the slow-moving cane cart, picked up one of the water bottles, and brought it silently to the old man. The water spilled as he took it. “Thank you,” Simon Fourchet said quietly, and drank. As the planter remounted and rode away January braced his knife on his shoe for two quick passes with the whetstone, and returned to cutting.r />
  Just before sunset three more riders appeared along the cart path, rough-clothed men on scrubby horses. “Lordy lordy,” murmured the gap-toothed Nathan, “it’s Sheriff Duffy.” He dropped the billets onto the cut row, scooped the trash over onto the trash row, and nodded back toward the ape-browed, sharp-eyed unshaven man in the lead. The men riding with Duffy were of the rough cracker class, spiritual brethren of the original owner of the hog that now hung in Disappearing Willie’s cave up Lost Bayou, though one of them, January recognized, had to be related to the Belle Dame’s cold-eyed master.

  “Got a restraining order here,” said Duffy in quite proper though thickly accented French, and extended a folded piece of paper. When Fourchet only crossed his arms and regarded the lawman with stubborn contempt, the man with the Ney eyes took it, handed it to the planter, and repeated the words. His French was, if anything, worse: the backwoods patois of French Acadia, but a native’s French.

  “You may inform your master, M’sieu Ney,” retorted Fourchet, ignoring Sheriff Duffy completely,” that by tomorrow I will have Justice Rauche issue another such order against that thief Daubray and his whoremaster brother, forbidding them to set foot upon my wife’s land.”

  “That’s as may be, sir,” replied Duffy stolidly. “But for the moment you’re to remove your men—and leave the cane.”

  “So Daubray may send his slaves to pick it up and grind it?” Fourchet spat the words, turning for the first time to stare at the sheriff with cold, half-mad eyes. He shifted his gaze to Ney. “Inform this American that I charge him to leave a guard here, lest my cane be stolen in the night by the same thieves who have poisoned my slaves and attempted to torch my mill and my barn.”

  “Simon, don’t be a fool! That cane will be worthless in a day—”

  “Tell him, Guy!”

  Guy Ney sighed, and obeyed, evidently well aware who was going to get landed with the job of standing guard over nine acres of rotting cane—and he was correct. When Ajax and Hercules had organized the men and dumped the loaded cane back onto the ground, and both gangs walked back between tall green rows followed by the empty carts, January looked over his shoulder and saw the fair-haired Acadian sitting his horse, rifle propped on his thigh, among the stubble and cut rows and trash.

  It being only an hour short of dark, January had hoped that the men would be released back to the quarters. This was an optimistic hope at best. Fourchet marched the men to another section of the fields just downstream of the mill, and started them to work, though in the daylight remaining they’d barely fill the carts one time. Exhaustion, hunger, and lack of sleep made January feel like his body was being raked through with steel harrows, but he made it through the twilight, and helped load the last of the carts by the flare of torches the suckling gang—the women pregnant, or too old for heavy work—brought down.

  Knowing he’d be working until the moon was high hauling wood, he took the ash-pone and beans Gosport had put together that morning for tonight’s supper, and carried it to the smithy. Mohammed was just concluding his prayers for the night, kneeling on the dirty little square of faded carpet facing east. January recalled seeing the blacksmith so thirty-five years before, and asking him about it—it was the first time he had heard the name of Allah.

  “Tell me about Lisbon,” said January, “and about how Zuzu happened to be sold.”

  The griot nodded, as if the question did not surprise him. “They was married ten, twelve years, Lisbon and Auntie Zuzu,” he said. “Lisbon was born on Bellefleur,”—January carefully made his face blank, with a little knit of his brows as if he had never heard of the place before—“the plantation Michie Fourchet used to own just outside New Orleans, just a year or two before the uprisin’ here. Zuzu was brought in when she was sixteen, from the Locoul place down in St. John Parish. She was a flighty girl, always givin’ this man and that man the eye, but she was good with children. She’d had a child herself by that time, and M’am Nanette Locoul saw how she watched over that baby, and the babies of the other women on the place. Zuzu was put in charge of the nursery down at Bellefleur, when Mamzelle Elvire was born, and just before Mamzelle Solange came along two years later, Zuzu and Lisbon married. She had four children by Lisbon: Nan, Roux, Sidonie, and Beau, Beau dyin’ of pneumonia before he was two—it was a bad winter, that year. They did say as how Roux wasn’t Lisbon’s child but Boaz’s, for he was mighty light, like Boaz, and both Zuzu and Lisbon are dark, but Lisbon loved Roux like his own.”

  “Did he love Zuzu?” January settled his back to the doorpost of the smithy.

  Torchlight reflected through the mill windows etched the shift of lines and wrinkles on the smith’s face as Mohammed sorted through the truths of that question. “They got on well,” he replied at last. “As to how much they loved each other.… When first she came, Zuzu walked out with Cicero, and Boaz, and Johnny, who was one of the footmen on Bellefleur in those days, and as I said she had a roving eye.”

  He rolled his prayer carpet neatly as he spoke and stowed it inside the door of his little room, built off the back of the smithy. With the path to the mill running a dozen feet from Mohammed’s door, January didn’t wonder that he hadn’t heard someone enter the smithy from the other side and work the bellows; he must have long ago gotten used to noises, in the roulaison.

  “But Lisbon was a driver, and a good one. He’s slowed down some now after havin’ the lung fever two years ago, he never quite got over that. Now, the way Michie Fourchet buys good service from men is to give them the women they want: as he gave Kiki to Reuben, and then later Trinette, after Gilles and M’am Marie-Noël both asked him that Kiki and Gilles could be together.”

  “And I suppose,” remarked January dryly, recalling Kiki’s words, and Jeanette looking up at Thierry from the dust of the whipping-ground, “that what the woman wants doesn’t enter into it.”

  Sitting down easily beside January with his own supper, the blacksmith met his eyes, not answering for a time: You know as well as I do. Then he said, “Michie Fourchet has never been a man to admit he’d paired up the wrong couple.” He offered January salt pork and rice, and water from the covered jar beside the door, sweetened with a little sugar, and January gave the smith one of his yams.

  “Even his own son, who hates that wife of his and the children she bore him. Kiki and Gilles were clever, asking him to let her be with Gilles on the day he’d brought M’am Marie-Noël home after their wedding. Reuben had hit Kiki bad that day and marked her face, but even then Gilles had to put it right, saying, ‘You know, sir, how Reuben has changed, how he used to be a better man than he was when you first gave Kiki to him.’ ”

  And in the shifted note of the griot’s voice, January heard another voice, lighter and more cultured, with the accent of town. Gilles’s voice, speaking out of the past, from beyond his grave.

  “Meaning Reuben had changed, not Michie Fourchet had made a mistake in the first place. He was clever, that Gilles.”

  Clever, thought January, except where liquor was concerned.

  The path from the woodsheds was quiet now as the men ate their suppers. Up by the front of the mill a baby cried, and a woman’s soft voice shushed it—Trinette, January identified the sweet soft lisp. Herc’s wife. Reuben’s wife, after Gilles’s “cleverness” had won Kiki from him, though the ten-month-old child she carried to the fields to work with her, and to the mill at night, was definitely the lighter-skinned Hercules’s child.

  “Well, whatever Zuzu thought of the matter, Michie Fourchet gave her to Lisbon because he wanted Lisbon’s good work, and the pair of them got on well enough. Like I said, there was good reason to think Roux was Boaz’s son rather than Lisbon’s, and everybody knew for sure that Lisbon fathered girls on Quinette and Heloise. And now and then Zuzu and Lisbon would have it out, like all married couples. But the true thing is that both of them loved the children she bore, loved them dearly.

  “She loved M’am Camille’s children, too. For all her faults Zuzu wa
s a woman of great love. Whatever Michie Robert says, this wasn’t true of M’am Camille. She was a beautiful woman, and a brilliant one, but M’am Camille wasn’t happy, especially not after Michie Fourchet sold his place Bellefleur. His sister died, who’d been running Triomphe ever since the uprising here in ‘ninety-eight, and Michie Fourchet fought with her husband at the funeral and told him never to come back. And the town was growing. Men offered Michie Fourchet a lot of money for the Bellefleur lands. So he sold Bellefleur, and most of the slaves from it, and moved the rest of us up here to Mon Triomphe.”

  January was silent, remembering that place, that world of his birth. Remembering in his childhood how close the ciprière had lain, a wildness of marsh and silence, endless in all directions, save for just around the little walled town.

  Mohammed mopped the last of the beans with a fragment of corn-bread. “M’am Camille had been all right mostly,” he said, “when she’d been able to go into town to the opera, and to buy books and see her French aunt and her friends. Out here I think she felt alone. Well, a lot of us did, that had friends, or abroad-wives or husbands in town, and in the plantations round about town. M’am Camille, she’d always been hot and cold towards those three children of hers, holding onto them tight one minute then pushing them off the next because she had to get dressed for some party, or wanted to play her piano or read. She left Michie Robert in school with the Jesuits and came into town to see him whenever she could—to see him and to see her friends—but the little girls she mostly ignored, and it was Zuzu that raised them. All she wanted was to go back to France. It wasn’t a good time.”

  “No.” January thought of his own anger at being separated from the music he loved. At feeling his hands grow stiffer and more clumsy each day, and seeing the tide of days flow between himself and Rose, days that could be sweet and were instead bitter with hard work, isolation, and fear. No novels to rip up, Hippolyte Daubray had chuckled. No glass birds and music boxes to stamp.…