Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  As if he’d passed her ghost on the levee last night, January saw a woman in a yellow dress staggering beside the river with an opium bottle in her hand, screaming to the boats to take her back to France. And Camille had to come down from the levee sometime, he thought. And there was only the house to go back to when she did.

  “Zuzu kept the girls away from their father as much as she could,” went on Mohammed, “for he’d take out his hate of his wife on them. When Mamzelle Solange was two or three, M’am Camille bore another son.” Glancing aside at him January saw the untold half of that tale in his eyes: how it must have come about that she conceived them, to a man she would never have willingly bedded.

  “A year later she bore another, and the first one a stout boy by then, crawling all around the place with Zuzu after him, laughing. M’am Camille was jealous that little Toussaint would go to Zu rather than to his mother. She used to slap Zuzu, and once or twice thrashed her with a cane-stalk for being uppity, when she’d catch her playing with the children. She’d seldom play with them herself. Then one summer little Toussaint died, laid down on his bed in the nursery taking a nap. It was like Zuzu had lost one of her own sons. The boy’d had no fever, though there was some sickness in the quarters that summer, like there always is. And two weeks later the baby died, too, the same way: was alive when Zuzu laid him down, and when she came back into the room he was dead.”

  Down at the front of the mill Danny the night driver’s scratchy tenor sang out, calling, “Time to pick it up again, boys,” and from the direction of the quarters the men who’d gone to their cabins straggled back along the path by the mill wall, talking to one another and laughing: January heard Parson say, “… so fat they hired her out to schools for a globe …” and wondered where he’d picked up that fragment of Shakespearean insult.

  It was time, he knew, to go back to work.

  “And that’s when they sold Zuzu?”

  Mohammed nodded. “M’am Camille took on somethin’ desperate, of course, and Michie Fourchet was drunk for near on to two weeks. Michie Esteban and Michie Robert ran the plantation. Zuzu was sick with grief, swearin’ she’d sooner have died herself than see those two babies come to harm, but for spite Michie Fourchet sold her off separate from her children: Sold her for a field hand, too. M’am Camille never got over it,” he added, brushing the last of the cornmeal crumbs from his hands.

  “Yet they only sold her down to Voussaire.”

  The blacksmith nodded. “Nan and Roux went to Lescelles, just upriver from here, but it’s a little place. They was sold away from there this summer, to a dealer. But Sidonie’s still on Daubray itself. Pretty, she is, and just married this spring—isn’t she, Lisbon?” For the driver himself had come walking along the path from the quarters, a stout spry man arm in arm with a young woman named Zarabelle, with whom January had seen him at the shout.

  “Sidonie?” Lisbon smiled with gap-toothed pride.” She’s so pretty the roses take shame and ask her pardon when she walks by.”

  “Prettier than Zarabelle?” teased Harry, ambling along the path just behind them, and Lisbon and Zarabelle laughed and nudged each other the way that lovers do. “You better watch out, or one day she’ll go down to Voussaire and sit down with Zuzu for tea.…”

  “Now, whoa, how fair is that?” objected Lisbon.” How is it women can sit and talk about men, and they get all prickly and hot when they think men are talking about them? What if I went and had tea with Syphax, and talked to him about Zuzu?”

  “Syphax is Zuzu’s husband?” January fell into step with them as they headed along the trash piles toward the lights of the roundhouse windows.

  “Her latest,” said Harry, which made Lisbon laugh.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know,” asked January, in a softer voice, as Lisbon and his ladyfriend moved out ahead of them and left him and Harry in the dense shadows along the wall, “whether Zuzu knew any juju, would you?”

  Harry paused, mobile eyebrows flicking up. “You don’t think Zuzu might be our hoodoo?”

  “I don’t know,” said January. “I’m sort of curious.”

  He saw something alter in the young man’s bright intelligent eyes. Something in the back of them, as if he were sorting out a hand of cards. “You curious enough to do another little favor for me tonight? Because it so happens,” Harry added, with an ingenuous smile, “that I’m headed on down to Voussaire myself tonight, as soon as I can bribe Herc to let me slip away.”

  TEN

  “Somebody told you I was a mambo?” Auntie Zu made a shooing gesture with one big bony hand. “Shush!”

  January had already taken note of the stoppered bottle on the shelf in the corner of Zuzu’s cabin, nearly invisible in the shadows thrown by the single tallow dip, before which sat a saucer filled with white sand and molasses, and of the sieve that hung beside the door.

  “They did tell me you might be the one to take the fix off me,” he said apologetically, and shifted his aching shoulders. Carrying twenty-five pounds of pork five miles through the twisting paths of ciprière and cane-field was no joke. “I don’t know who put it on me, whether it was just Mamzelle Jeanette, or Mambo Hera on Daubray, or maybe somebody else.…”

  “That Harry,” sighed the woman, and shook her head. “What’d you find …?”

  “Ben,” he supplied, to the questioning tilt in her voice. “I’m the one staying at Triomphe while my gentleman gets better enough to travel.”

  She nodded, evidently familiar with the story. There was enough coming and going between Triomphe and Daubray, and Daubray and Voussaire, to have spread that piece of information over half the parish.

  “When I unrolled my blankets last night I found a chicken-foot in ’em,” January went on. “I didn’t tell nobody, because—well, you’re in a new place … But I can see I could have got somebody angry at me. I did help trice up another man, Quashie, for the overseer to whip, but if I hadn’t …”

  “Jeanette’s man,” sighed Zuzu. She shook her head. From what Lisbon had said of her, and Mohammed, January had expected a pert if aging strumpet, but Auntie Zuzu was tallish, thin as a slat, and plain—and none of it made the slightest difference when that big mouth smiled, and those bright black roving eyes sized him up with playful ravenous joy. She was in her mid-thirties and missing a few teeth, her black frizzy hair braided in dozens of strings, and like every other field hand on every plantation up and down the river during roulaison was ill-washed and worn-looking. The cabin bore signs of hasty and perfunctory cleaning, and when Harry had knocked, Zuzu had been in the process of bedding down three weary but relatively clean children.

  “If it’s a chicken-foot I’d say it’s just Jeanette.” Aunt Zuzu went to the shelf where the bottle sat, and took a couple of jars, which she carried to the doorway. “And I can’t blame her for being angry, for all you didn’t have any choice about what you did. Get me a dipper of water, would you? Thanks.” January followed her outside, carrying a dripping gourdful of water from the jar.

  The quarters on Voussaire were quiet. Dim splotches of orange light marked where the women had come back from the mill, whose fires still blazed at the far end of the muddy street, and January could hear a woman’s voice from somewhere nearby: “And the bear say, ‘Who is this High John the Conqueror, that everyone say is the King of the World?’ And he laid in wait for him behind a bush.…”

  His father had told him that story, January remembered, smiling. And like this unknown woman he’d given Compair Bear a big gruff deep voice, and had rolled that line of it over on his tongue, how the bear lay in wait for High John the Conqueror … and came to some serious grief.

  “Here.” Aunt Zuzu took his hand in hers: rough warm fingers, cramped and clumsy from a day’s work with the cane. She sponged water over it, and January smelled in the flickering darkness the vague sweetness of crushed flowers. The light from the doorway limned her profile, and through the aperture he could see the children sitting up and watching their mother
from the room’s single bed. A boy of eight, a boy of six, and a little girl just big enough to walk, three pairs of great shining dark eyes. Zuzu took his other hand and washed it, too—honeysuckle on the right, January guessed, and verbena on the left, just as Mambo Jeanne had taught Olympe when Olympe was barely bigger than that little dark-eyed girl.

  Here again, thought January, he walked in the world les blankittes didn’t know about and couldn’t know about, the nighttime world of the quarters and the pathways and the ciprière. The world of Compair Lapin and magic dogs and the platt-eye devil and tales about little boys and their wise grandmothers. The world beyond the big house. He sensed it all around him in the quarters, that secret life. Smelled sausage and rice cooking for tomorrow’s dinner beneath the gritty sweet of boiling sugar, and heard voices mutter over small barters and bits of gossip, the cluck of chickens hanging up in their baskets for the night and the slosh of water behind the next cabin as someone washed the field dirt from her hair. Through the black wriggly outlines of the oaks, he could glimpse the lights of the big house, where Monsieur Voussaire and his family consumed the cook’s roasts and tarts and sauces, before Monsieur and his son or sons returned to supervise the night-work at the mill.

  All those people he saw on their galleries from the deck of the Belle Dame, thought January, the women in their bright dresses and the children playing with dolls and toy guns. Women who were lonely, maybe, whose husbands treated them like dogs and who had no family they could turn to for protection. Men who drank to ease an anger they could not bear. He felt as if the whole night sang to him and he understood its mingling song, about time and lives and change, but his heart and his body were too sore and too weary to take it in.

  “There,” said Aunt Zuzu. “If you find anything else, you bring it on here to me and I’ll take a look at it, but I think you won’t. And don’t blame Jeanette for being mad. You see someone you love get hurt like that, you hit out at whoever you can. It does no good.…” She shook her head, her face grave and sad and her eyes, as Rose’s sometimes were, gently amused. “But sometimes it’s all you can do. And you,” she added, her tone changing to playful annoyance as Harry appeared once more in the dark of the street, “you don’t go around tellin’ half the parish I’m a witch, you hear me? I have enough trouble gettin’ people to respect me as it is.”

  Harry was with a big bearded balding man whose sooty clothing and leather apron identified him as the plantation blacksmith; the smith stepped over to Aunt Zuzu and gave her a mighty hug around the waist, and the two of them kissed. “Got that pork ready to salt away?” the smith asked, and Aunt Zuzu nodded.

  “I’ll get it cookin’ ’fore we go to bed. Tom!” she added, furious, as a child squealed in the house and the oldest boy attempted to hide something in the blankets. “You let your brother alone! I swear …” She sprang up the step and into the cabin, and there was a great flurrying of bedclothes and protesting denials.

  “Gettin’ late, said the smith. “This boy here and his keys!” And he poked Harry, who tried to look innocent.

  “Keys?” Zuzu came out of the cabin again, a tube of maiden cane in her hand and an expression of indignation on her face. “One day somebody’s going to dig up under that house of yours, Harry, and they’ll find copies of all those keys to this smokehouse and that brewery and the other place all over the parish—

  “Never!” protested Harry. “Never! Besides, if I didn’t keep up with getting new keys every time Michie Fourchet got a new cellaret or a new lock on his salt-box, how’d you get rum or cinnamon or whatever when you need it?

  “I can buy whatever I need from False River Jones,” Zuzu replied haughtily. “I don’t need the likes of you spreading stories around about me.” She held up the maiden cane, evidently the forbidden toy, and dropped a long thin thorn into it, which she then blew, like a dart, at the door of the cabin across the way.

  “You as bad as they are,” grinned the smith, whom January deduced to be her husband Syphax.

  “Worse,” said Zuzu. “I can’t hit the broad side of a barn with one of these, and Tom pegged one of Michie Randall’s carriage horses in the hock with it the other day and nearly started a runaway. I thought I’d die laughing. And just as well Harry did lose the key to that cellaret when he did,” she added, glancing over at January, bringing him back into the little group, as if he were a longtime friend. She gestured with the confiscated blowpipe. “I asked him for a little whiskey about three weeks ago, when I needed some for a conjure and it was before the trader comes. He said he’d lost the key to the cellaret—”

  “I did lose that key!” protested Harry, with a nervous glance at January.

  “Oh, like Harry ever loses anything!” joshed Syphax.

  “And what do you think?” said Zuzu. “Just a little while later it turns out the liquor in that box was all poisoned, and a man there, a friend of ours”—and her face grew suddenly sad-“died of it.”

  January was very thoughtful as he and Harry walked the five miles back through the ciprière to Mon Triomphe.

  Mon Triomphe

  Ascension Parish

  19 Novembre 1834

  My beloved,

  I am well. Monsieur Simon Fourchet, whose man I now am, is a stern man with a reputation for harshness, though I have myself seen him act with kindness and generosity towards those in need. His young wife is gentle and just, and I am treated well, and am making friends among the other servants here. Please do not feel concerned for me.

  Every day and every night I think of you, I pray for you, and hope that somehow we can be united again, even for a short while. I miss you more than I can say and hope that you are well and are happy.

  Living in the country is strange and very different from town but I am learning how to go on here. Most unsettling is the absence of Mass, though every night Madame Fourchet leads the house-servants in prayers, which is a great comfort to me. Many of the field hands do not seem to be Christian at all.

  There is great trouble here because one of the field hands, or maybe more, has been burning and breaking things mysteriously at night, and all here are in a state of fear. I pray that all matters will work out well.

  Take care of yourself and tell Aurette and Leon that their papa loves them. And know too that I love you.

  Your husband,

  Baptiste.

  “Can you get that to her?” Hannibal was handing the stiff sheet of cream-colored paper back to the butler as January came up to the garçonnière door. In the morning’s brittle sunlight the fiddler looked greatly restored by four days of bed rest, though he was still in his nightshirt and the green silk dressing gown he’d borrowed from Robert, his long hair tied back in a neat queue.

  “I think so, sir.” The butler glanced at the doorway to make sure who was standing there, and lowered his voice anyway. “One of the field hands let me know there was a—a chance he could get a letter to a trader, who’d take it to town.” He folded the page and tucked it into the pocket of his dark livery. “Thank you, sir. If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.”

  “Poor old duffer,” remarked Hannibal, when the butler had gone. “I wrote as he asked me, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that if his master sold him off he’d almost certainly have sold off his wife as well. I wonder what he traded to Harry to get him to take the letter to False River Jones?”

  He returned to the bed, where a tray lay in a glint of silver and china in the bars of brightness from the door. “Help yourself,” he said. “The lovely Kiki has clearly made it her mission in life to fatten me up.” And indeed, there were enough muffins, grits, butter, eggs, ham, and coffee on the tray to breakfast half the Achaean host before the walls of Troy.

  “At a guess,” said January, sitting on the floor by the bed and taking the fullest possible advantage of the offer, “he lent him the keys to the new cellaret—at any rate that’s what Harry had the blacksmith at Voussaire copy for him last night. And apparently that
wasn’t the first time.”

  Hannibal whistled through his teeth. “So much for the notion that the field hands couldn’t have had access to the liquor.”

  “I always knew there was the possibility,” said January. “Harry isn’t doing a thing that hasn’t been done before, and by smarter men than he. But unless there’s something else going on—something I haven’t heard about between Harry and Fourchet—I doubt Harry would have done it. Harry’s whole position depends on things remaining in statu quo … for everyone except Harry. He might poison Fourchet if he felt threatened, but burning the barn and the mill, damaging the knives, calling all kinds of attention to the activities of the slaves—this has him terrified, and rightly so. I’m more interested, myself, in the fact that this False River Jones seems to be back in the area, if Harry’s bargained to take a letter to him.”

  He fell silent as footfalls creaked along the gallery—the maid Henna’s, by their light quick decisiveness—and faded as they turned the corner and passed into the dining room. The sharp, cold wind that had sprung up last night whispered and rustled in the oak trees and made a constant roaring in the cane just downstream of the house, a warning of cold to come. After changing the bandanna on the oak from yellow to blue, he’d slipped up to the garçonnière in the dead of last night and slid a note under Hannibal’s door, asking that he be sent for that morning.

  “If you’d like to sleep for a few hours on the floor I think I can contrive to keep Robert out of here,” offered Hannibal, pouring him out a cup of coffee. “Keep your voice down, by the way-Leander sometimes listens on the gallery.”

  “Thank you. I might take you up on that later.” January cradled the porcelain in his huge hands, grateful for the warmth of it, for the rich scent, for the stillness and rest. After four days his back and arms had quit aching every single minute and he could sleep through even the nibbling of the bedbugs in the unaired corn-shuck pallet, but the pain had settled into his wrists and hands. His fingers were stiff and raw with blisters—it would take weeks, he reflected bitterly, before he’d be able to play the piano again—and his bones hurt for sleep. In the few moments over the past four days when he wasn’t sound asleep or wishing he could be, he missed Rose desperately, and, though he felt childish for doing so, missed his piano nearly as much. Missed the godlike logic of Bach, and Vivaldi’s wry grace. Missed the peace they brought to his mind and his heart.