Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  “Boy never did have any sense,” remarked Old Jules Ney, who had come that morning to take Thierry’s place as overseer.

  “And I would have bet money he’d have seen Michie Fourchet in Hell before he’d take the job,” Mohammed remarked, helping January—as all men on the plantation had been drafted to help, save only the house-servants and those actually working in the mill—unload the wood onto every cane cart and wagon and haul it to the makeshift shelters. “Fourchet made it very clear that the son of a Jacobin sans-culotte who’d been deported from France for poaching was no fit associate for his own son, no matter how similar their interest in machines. When Robert would come here during the summers, young Michie Jacinthe used to study with him at the house. I don’t think old Michie Jules ever forgave Fourchet for putting an end to it.”

  “Michie Esteban asked him,” provided Gosport, wiping sweat from his face. “Who else would he ask? Every other man in the parish that don’t have cane of his own is out riding patrol after Quashie and Jeanette. And anyhow,” he added, glancing along the line at the stringy, gray-haired patriarch, an eerie elderly doppelgänger of the scarlet-coated master of the Belle Dame, “they’re mostly Americans.” Behind Old Ney’s head, against the damp gray roil of the sky, the red bandanna fluttered from the bare oak tree on the bluff like a streak of blood. “Michie Esteban offered two hundred dollars, for a month’s work to finish the roulaison. I should think Michie Ney would forget his pride for that much.”

  “Forget his pride?” Harry sniffed, and shifted the weight of the wood over his shoulder. “You watch his eyes. He’s countin’ every man and seein’ how the land lies, to sneak a man out of here to sell in the Territories. You mark my words, before roulaison’s done somebody’s gonna turn up missin’.”

  The afternoon brought Sheriff Duffy on the Bonnets o’ Blue, accompanied by an equally hairy cracker deputy. They were met at the bottom of the big-house steps by an exhausted-looking Madame Fourchet, but not admitted to the house. (“Michie Fourchet, he took an’ threw a water glass at Baptiste when he asked,” reported Bumper.) Whether the lawman considered the matter simple murder or the prelude to rebellion he didn’t mention to anyone who later spoke to January, but Duffy didn’t spend long in the overseer’s cottage. Passing the little building on the way back from changing the signal late last night, January had heard the scratch and scuffle of rats and foxes from its walls. In any house in the quarters, friends and family would have been sitting up with the dead, the men telling stories, the women sobbing and wailing in grief. Their shrieks and tears were a gift to the departed spirit, a token of respect. But even more than that, the presence of friends—by the light of whatever tallow candle-ends and pine-knots could be donated to illuminate the dark hours—was a guarantee that morning wouldn’t find the body missing nose or fingers or lips amid a welter of sticky little tracks.

  Whatever else Duffy found, January didn’t know. The fact that he’d brought a single deputy rather than a posse argued for a calmer outlook than was usual in the district, but then it was roulaison and difficult to muster a force. He and his deputy were offered ale and cornbread in the kitchen—much to Kiki’s annoyance, since both partook of the nearly universal American addiction to tobacco-chewing—and departed soon thereafter into the ciprière.

  Throughout the remainder of the day, Bumper and Nero brought scraps of news to the toiling men: Michie Duffy had told Michie Esteban there was six posses out lookin’ for Quashie an’ Jeanette; Michie Fourchet went just about crazy when Esteban told him how much Michie Robert paid for that wood. (January knew that, at least. The train of wood carts followed the carriage track around the side of the house close enough for him to hear the old man’s hoarse cursing and the crash of thrown objects.) Little Michie Jean-Luc got into the cottage and stole the dead man’s knife and had to have it taken from him. M’am Fourchet and M’am Hélène got into another squabble over whose fault it was that he got the key.

  Just after luncheon, Hippolyte Daubray put in an appearance, resplendent in royal blue superfine, and offered one of his many cousins as overseer for the rest of the roulaison—but mostly, January suspected, to poke around for information. Everyone in the wood-carting detail was then treated to the sight of Madame’s elegant cousin bolting down the steps like a hunted hare, with Fourchet clinging to the jamb of his bedroom door screaming, “You’re all in this together! Pigs! Filth!” after his retreating heels.

  From everything January could find out—he spoke to Kiki at noon, before the main gang went out into the fields again under Jules Ney’s cold watchful eye—Duffy had been asking after those few old slaves remaining on the place who’d been involved in the uprising of ’98. There weren’t many of those, for the work was killing and Fourchet wasn’t a man to keep a dependent who had outlived his or her usefulness. January hoped Fourchet had spoken to the sheriff about the pattern of the events being wrong for a planned revolt—the men agreed that Duffy was shrewd, and might understand. But after Daubray’s visit, it would be useless to try to see Fourchet. January judged by the quiet at noon that Madame had dosed him with bromide again, slowing the heart action and tipping him over into sleep.

  And still Hannibal did not return.

  When it grew too dark for further work in the field, Jules Ney grudgingly detailed four slaves to bury Thierry. Word had been sent to Thierry’s sister, his only relative, in New Orleans, informing her of her brother’s death and offering to disinter and ship the remains if so required. At a guess, thought January—as he and Gosport, Nathan, and Mohammed dug the grave—Thierry was going to be on Mon Triomphe til Judgment Day. He couldn’t imagine even a sibling wanting the man badly enough to pay for having him dug up and brought to town.

  Like the slaves’ burying-ground a dozen yards away among the trees, the white graveyard lay close to the river, where the land was higher. Behind the big house you would hit groundwater only a few feet down. The wind made the oak trees curtsey and mutter, and brought the stink of smoke from across the river, where one of the smaller plantations—already finished with harvest—was burning over the fields. This was done to clear away the cane-trash, and fertilize the soil with ash. Whatever bagasse was not dried for kindling would be piled and burned on the levee later. From the top of the levee, January had glimpsed far-off pale ribbons of flame.

  Weathered boards marked two other graves in that corner of the little family burying-ground, nearly hidden by weeds and as far from the graves of a former Fourchet sister-in-law, a cousin, and the sister-in-law’s three children as space would permit. “Them’s Michie Muñoz an’ Michie Gansel,” supplied Mohammed, nodding toward them. “Michie Gansel was overseer when M’am Juana and Miss Annie was killed. He died then, too, him and his wife and her baby, all buried in the same grave.”

  “How’d it happen?” January leaned on the handle of his shovel. “It’s one thing killin’ a man who’s caught you tryin’ to escape. But a risin’—turnin’ on the whole family—they’d have to know the militia’d be on ’em.”

  “I don’t think they cared.” Mohammed gazed out into the dark trees. The light of the torches, stuck in a circle around the burying-ground, edged his cropped gray hair with gold. “You reach a point where you don’t, you know. And in those days it was different. There wasn’t the American Army, as there is now. Back then, there wasn’t more than a dozen houses along this part of the river, and no soldiers closer than town. It didn’t seem so dangerous then. We just figured—Gowon and his boys just figured—they’d disappear into the woods and never be found. But of course they was.”

  It was the first time anyone had spoken the name of the only man January had ever learned of who’d refused to do what Simon Fourchet ordered.

  The clouds had passed with last night’s rain; the day had been windy and cold. The dark that pressed so hard on the fluttering spooky torchlight made it easy to believe tales of platt-eye devils and uneasy souls that could find no rest.

  “Was they hanged?” ask
ed Nathan.

  Mohammed shook his head. “That wasn’t what the Spanish did, to slaves that killed their masters. They tied ’em to stakes and burned ’em alive.”

  “Lord,” whispered Nathan, and January, who recalled those days, and the Spanish rule, crossed himself.

  After a time Mohammed went on, “But I don’t think Gowon and his boys even thought so much about it as that, or they’d have waited til Michie Fourchet came home. It was summertime, and the moon full, and Michie Fourchet, he’d been drinking a week, and was whippin’ mad. He was a young man then and couldn’t abide to be crossed, not by God, not by any man. He whipped Gowon twice, three times that week, and the others, too. But it was him beatin’ Layla, that was Gowon’s daughter, that set it off. She was twelve years old, and she died of it next day, after Michie Fourchet had ridden off down the river road. That’s when Gowon and the others went and burned the house, and cut to pieces all those they met, that none should know which way they’d gone.”

  And in a soft voice he sang,

  “He went, he cut his daughter down,

  He carried her to his hut,

  He went, he cut his daughter down,

  He carried her to his hut.

  ‘Papa, I’m afraid I’m dying,

  Papa, I’m going to die.’

  “He said, He owe me a daughter,

  I got no child no more.

  He said, He owe me a daughter,

  I got no child no more.

  ‘Papa, I’m afraid I’m dying,

  Papa, I’m going to die.…’ ”

  The men took up the refrain—softly, very softly, as they cut the heavy soil with their shovels, for even so memorializing one man’s rebellion would be, January knew, a whipping offense. But Gowon was owed it, he thought, for the daughter he had lost. For all the children that all of them had lost, Bo and Claire and that infant of Gilles and Kiki who would never be born. For Ajax, untying his own daughter from the whipping-frame, to which he’d surrendered her rather than risk bringing the consequences of revolt down on all those under his care. For January’s own father, who had watched his son and his daughter taken away.

  “They carry them down to the river,

  They throw them in the stream.

  They carry them down to the river,

  They throw them in the stream.

  ‘Papa, I’m afraid I’m dying …’ ”

  The river. The thought clicked suddenly in January’s tired mind. Thierry lying on the snags and deadfalls within feet of the river. Someone gutted him and then cut his throat, and left him sitting up.…

  Why didn’t they just pitch him into the river?

  He was left there on purpose. January had assumed that someone had later come and laid him down, but why was he left there at all?

  He was LEFT THERE. Left THERE. Moved from somewhere else, to draw attention to Catbird Island and away from the site of the actual killing.

  Moved by someone who had access to a boat.

  “Near enough to six feet,” decided Nathan. “I ain’t gonna waste more sweat on him.” The men walked back to Thierry’s cottage and from there, while the others were loading the hastily made coffin onto a wood cart, January went to the back of the big house and told Baptiste they were ready to lay Michie Thierry down.

  The butler went inside. Lamps burned in the dining room, and January could hear Fourchet’s voice, hoarse and incoherent, from his bedroom. Still furious over something, by the sound of it. Then dim forms moved in the shadows under the gallery, and light from the windows caught Madame Fourchet’s straight pale hair, and the sheen of Madame Hélène’s persimmon-colored silk. “Well, if you find it amusing to go out in the cold like that in your condition by all means do so, but it has never been the custom here, I assure you.” The night was not more icy than Hélène’s voice. “He was a coarse rude man and I’m sure he got what was coming to him for not controlling himself better around the negresses.”

  “He must have a Christian burial.” Ariadne was helping Madame on with her heavy cloak.

  “Oh, honestly, my dear, I don’t think the man had been in a church since he was baptized! I’m sure he wouldn’t care.”

  “All the more reason to give him one.”

  Madame Hélène let out a little titter, but when she got no response she burst out querulously, “If you must go, I wish you will tell me what I am to do if Monsieur Fourchet gets restless? He’s going to need you.…” There was fear in her voice. It wasn’t that she didn’t think Thierry needed a Christian burial, January realized. She simply didn’t want to be left alone with her father-in-law.

  The gentle wind lifted Madame Fourchet’s cloak as she descended the steps and made the six lights of Lundy’s candelabra jerk and dance. The women unloading the cane carts at the roaring orange hell-mouth of the mill, the men dragging wood and stoking the fires, crowded to the mill doors: January heard Old Ney’s hoarse shouting and the crack of a whip within.

  Madame read the service for the dead in her small, flat voice, and dropped a branch of Christmas roses—the only flowers available at that season in her predecessor’s garden—into the grave. Then Lundy walked her back to the house, and the men worked by torchlight in the cold to fill in the hole. As they walked back past the slaves’ graveyard, January looked out into the darkness under the trees there where the graves of Gilles and Reuben lay, remembering the fading names on the other graves, the rebels whose names would vanish once Mohammed died.…

  And a dark scribble on one of the new headboards caught his eye.

  “Let me take that,” he said, reaching for Mohammed’s torch. “I’ll follow you along soon.”

  “Better not.” Nathan glanced around him worriedly. “It’s not a good thing, to be walkin’ in the graveyard on a moonless night. Not ever, come to that. There’s witches that wait in the darkness.”

  “We’ll wait for you,” said Gosport.

  “I’ll be quick.” Torch in hand, January waded through the weeds to the twin graves. The china Kiki had placed around the new-turned earth glinted in the yellow light, like a black cat’s teeth when it mews, tiny and vicious, and the bodies decomposing in the shallow earth filled the air with a musty nastiness. The names, REUBEN and GILLES, were already fading from the wooden headboards.

  The new mark on Reuben’s board seemed doubly clear.

  It was a vévé, surrounded by the crosses and stars of protection and care. The mark of Papa Legba, the guardian of all crossroads, guide of the dead. A blessing-sign, to leave on a grave.

  Papa Legba, open the gate, the women would sing in Congo Square, on the hot summer evenings when the slaves’ produce market would be set up there, and men would gamble under the sycamore trees, and watch torchlight flicker over the faces of the dancers. Papa Legba, open the gate.

  Only sometimes they’d sing instead, Saint Peter, open the gate, Saint Peter, open the gate—gonna pass through, gonna pass through.

  January stared at the symbols for some time, trying to fit times and patterns together in his mind with the memory of a woman’s face in the lantern-light of a moss-gatherer’s blood-smelling hut. He was very thoughtful as he walked back toward the house.

  SEVENTEEN

  “Can you get me in to see Michie Fourchet?”

  Baptiste, though clearly a little startled to find January in the kitchen yard at noon when he should have been eating lunch with the main gang in the field, at least didn’t look down his nose at his filthy clothes.

  “I’ll do what I can,” the butler said, though he sounded doubtful. “But you know Michie Fourchet isn’t well.”

  “Believe me, I wouldn’t disturb him unless I felt it urgent,” said January. “But if he’s thinking he’s safe, and the place is safe, because Quashie and Jeanette have fled, he’s mistaken. They didn’t kill Thierry, and I don’t think they were behind the hoodoo. Please tell him that.”

  Baptiste frowned. In the ten days he’d been on Mon Triomphe, January had seen the little man recover h
is confidence and settle in as head of the servants, aided largely by the fact that nobody in the household liked his main competitor for the role, Cornwallis. As Baptiste studied him now, January could see he was thinking, not simply of the meaning of the words, but of what they implied in terms of the household—and the plantation—at large. “What do you know about the hoodoo, Ben?” he asked. “You aren’t even from here.”

  “I know what I’ve heard,” answered January. “And I know what I saw, out on Catbird Island and down by the levee on Saturday, when that first lot of wood arrived. And I think if Michie Fourchet thinks he’s safe now he’s in more danger than ever. And so is every person on this place.”

  Baptiste bit his lip, and his dark eyes shifted in the direction of the mill. January understood what he was thinking. It was up to the butler to act as gatekeeper of who entered or did not enter the house. Should Esteban return from the mill while January was in his father’s room, or Madame Hélène happen to encounter him on the gallery, it would be up to Baptiste to explain the presence of a dirty and stinking field hand in the white folks’ sacred purlieus.

  He gave January another quick look-over, then appeared to decide there wasn’t much that could be done. “All right. I’ll take you in through Michie Fourchet’s office. But you got to be quick.”

  “I’ll be quick.”

  They climbed the steps to the back gallery, with Baptiste keeping a watchful eye out toward the mill. He stopped, put his head through the dining room French doors to make sure Lundy was setting the table properly (“Turn those knives over so the blades point in toward the plate, would you? Thanks.”), then escorted January through Fourchet’s small office, and into the bedroom with its drawn curtains and pale-blue-washed walls. There too was a portrait of the first Madame Fourchet, stiff and odd against a background of banana plants and flowers, leading January to deduce that Juana Villardega had been either born in New Orleans or brought there as a young girl—she looked about sixteen. On the other side of the chimney-breast hung a much-better-executed pastel of the current Madame, its size and the twin houses of Refuge and Mon Triomphe in the background testifying that it had been paid for by her husband, not her relatives.