Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  With a kind of deliberate calm she smoothed the crushed paper out on the edge of the table, refolded it, and passed out onto the gallery as Esteban and Sheriff Duffy entered the room.

  January felt his nape prickle at the sight of the sheriff. In the moment it took for the two men to cross the corner of the dining room to the office door, January stepped back, opened the French door onto the gallery, and moved one of the room’s plain cypress-wood chairs about a foot, so that it could be seized and flung if, for instance, he had to make a bolt out the door.…

  “This him?” Duffy’s sharp little black eyes sized him up two seconds after January had returned to his respectful stance in the corner beside the desk. “Big bastard.”

  Esteban nodded. “Ben, what was it you—uh—told me yesterday, about my—uh—my—about Michie Fourchet being poisoned?”

  “Sir, I was all wrong about that, as you told me.” January bobbed his head, wishing for the thousandth time he wasn’t nearly six and a half feet tall and dangerous-looking. He stooped his shoulders and tried to appear oxlike and cowed. “I remembered as how Michie Hannibal’s cousin died of drinkin’ mercury, and how he puffed up like that, and went off his head, and how his gums bled. And when I seen Michie Fourchet bleedin’ from the gums, and him off his head, and I remembered how the folks ’round the quarters was sayin’ somebody tried to poison him, and poisoned poor Michie Gilles instead, I just got scared, I guess.”

  He glanced from Esteban to Duffy, who’d relaxed—the cringing must have worked—and taken his hand from the pistol at his belt.

  “But you’re right, when I thought about it, that calomel does make the gums bleed, too.…”

  “I thought you said it was the brother of your master’s father-in-law,” said Esteban, “who drank mercury.”

  January thought, Fuck. “It was, sir,” he said, racking his brains to remember whether he’d given this mythological individual a name. “Michie Jacques and Michie Georges both was Michie Hannibal’s cousins on his mother’s side—”

  “Lock him up with the others,” said Duffy. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  NINETEEN

  The sheriff was reaching for his pistol as he said the words, but he very clearly didn’t expect much resistance. January slung the chair at him and was out the door onto the gallery without seeing whether it struck its target or not. Three long strides took him to the gallery rail and he swung over it, dropping to the ground as Esteban yelled, “Get him! Stop him!” to no one in particular, and Duffy bellowed, “Doyle! Waller! Catch that nigger!”

  Because he spoke decent French and was reasonably clean, if shaggy, Duffy had been allowed in the house. But thanks to Esteban’s prejudices against Americans, the sheriff’s posse had been left on the front steps, chewing and spitting and playing mumblety-peg. If they’d simply run around the corner of the house the minute Duffy yelled, they’d have caught him.

  But they didn’t. January had bolted across the tree-dotted strip of land between the big house and the cane beyond Thierry’s cottage, when they at last emerged around the corner, riding hell-for-leather on the horses that they’d run to, caught, and mounted. It was a good hundred and fifty feet and January leaned into it, legs driving with all his strength, hoofbeats hammering behind him, and a small corner of his heart zinging with the knowledge that there was no way they could catch him before he reached the cane, and he was right.

  He plunged into the cane, slithering through the harsh dark green wall of it, praying he wouldn’t tread on a snake. They’d expect him to head for the river. That bought him time, for he veered leftward immediately, inward toward the swamp. Once in the ciprière, he thought, they’d have to separate—and then like High John the Conqueror in the tale, he’d be able to take on both the lion and the bear.

  He heard the riders behind him, still trying to drive their horses through the cane-rows. They were crackers, not planters, and had never had the occasion to learn that each row of mature cane was, in effect, a wall. He slithered through two or three, like a flea burrowing in a bale of cotton, then hit one of the narrow paths between ditches and ran, their curses fading behind him.

  They’d waste time at that, he thought, before turning inland.

  His heart was racing, after a week of slavery wild with freedom and with terror.

  Two weeks on Mon Triomphe had given him back his old sense of bearings about distances, too. When he worked his way back through the rows toward what he thought would be about the end of the line of cabins, he found he wasn’t far off; just opposite Nancy and Boaz’s house, two or three only from the end of the row. At this time of the afternoon, the quarters were empty; everyone in the field, except for the sick and the tiniest children under Pennydip’s charge. It was an easy matter to spring over the fence in the last garden in the row, to dart to the well-stocked pig-house, slip his hand under the rafters, and find Harry’s rifle.

  He threw himself under the house, groped in the long weeds there for the boards that covered holes. He was looking for powder and ball, and found none, although he did find a bullet mold and seven or eight small bags of lead scraps such as he’d collected from Arnaud on Daubray. Also three gourds of liquor, a bag of salt, a woman’s blue silk dress, and two cane-knives. He took one gourd of liquor and the salt, in case he needed something to trade, but didn’t dare stay to hunt more thoroughly. He was thinking very fast, like a hunted animal—aware that they would indeed hunt him like an animal. What he meant to do had to be done swiftly, in the hunt’s first rush, before men came in from all over the parish. Already he could hear the voices of the pursuers, far distant and still near the river. But with rumor and fear of rebellion capping three years of accounts of Nat Turner’s depredations, it wouldn’t be long, he thought, before more men joined them.

  He paused only long enough to help himself to the ash-pone and yams Cynthia had laid out under a pot, then slipped back into the cane, and started to run along the rows—Harry’s liquor gourd bouncing and knocking against the small of his back. Once the men turned their horses toward the ciprière, they could travel faster than he.

  Once they got Tim Rankin’s dogs, he reflected, he had better be able to lick all four feet and JUMP … and thereafter keep his feet off the telltale earth.

  A rider bound for Tim Rankin’s would take the cart path that turned into the little trail he and Harry had used, that ran along the edge of the slough.

  The initial search would be downstream, in the direction of Refuge. If he swung upstream—if he obtained a horse long enough at least to lose the dogs—there was a good chance he could work his way to the river in the next parish. Thereafter he could hide out on Catbird Island and wait for Shaw.

  If Shaw was coming. January had been angry at Kiki for saying Hannibal might desert him, but now—on the run for his life—he wasn’t so sure.

  They would hang Mohammed, he thought, as he reached the shelter of the woods with barely three hours of daylight left and the riders close enough that he could hear their voices, sharp in the distance like bells. Jeanette, too, of course, and Parson and Pennydip. Probably old Banjo as well. Anyone who’d been on Mon Triomphe thirty-six years ago, when Gowon and his friends had burned the house, murdered the overseer and his family and Fourchet’s young wife and infant daughter. Duffy was looking no farther than that, seeing nothing but the specter of slave rebellion, without examining the pattern closely to see whether it fit or only appeared to fit.

  Well, you can’t tell about niggers. Settling himself in the long grass of the slough, January could almost hear the man saying it. Reason enough not to search for motive, or logic, or any coherent chain of likelihood. A white man had been murdered by his slaves. Every man of them who held slaves—or hoped to hold slaves in the future when he was richer—would be uneasy, too frightened by the recent events in Virginia to consider that January hadn’t even been on the place when the trouble had started.

  And by flight he had branded himself guilty. Reasonable o
r not, there was little likelihood he’d survive capture.

  You can’t tell about niggers.

  Well, he thought, leveling his gun on the path that led toward Tim Rankin’s house, you can sure tell about this one.

  He would have, he knew, only the one shot.

  And the shot, if it failed, would give away his hiding place to the rider whose hoofbeats he could feel through the vibration of the ground.

  Virgin Mary, help me get out of this. He was back in New Orleans, the mob of white men around him roaring with laughter as they razored his clothes off him with their knives. Help me get that horse.

  There was an oak tree the rider would have to swing around, a low branch he’d have to duck, not twenty feet from where January lay. Smoke from the burning fields of Lescelles stung January’s eyes and he blinked the tears away. His mind focused, narrowed, his whole being relaxed and waiting, concentrating on the single shot he’d have. He propped his arms on the elbows, leveled the barrel. Virgin Mary …

  … help me kill this man?

  As if someone had pulled the bung from a keg he felt the fire of concentration, the focus of his mind, leave him in a rush.

  Virgin Mary, help me kill this man, who is your son as I am your son.

  The hoofbeats were audible now.

  He’s a white man. He’ll shoot me running, shoot to kill.

  I need the horse. They’ll have the dogs on me, hang me. This is my one chance. He tried for a split second to tell himself that he didn’t really intend to kill the rider, but of course he did—he’d already figured out where to hide the body, in the long grass of the slough.

  Anonymous rifle, anonymous bullet. Shaw’s not coming, and even if he guesses he’ll understand. No one will know for sure.

  Except you. Will you speak of it to your son?

  He wanted to yell at her, Shut up! I don’t have time for this! But you didn’t talk that way to God’s mother.

  And she was right.

  Trembling, he closed his eyes. Heard the hoofbeats check and slow as the man passed under and around that perfectly extended tree limb. Heard them pick up speed.

  They’re going to get the dogs. The afternoon air hung silent, even the singing in the fields hushed. Bumper and Nero must have come out with the news that Ben had run away and they were sayin’ at the house as how it was him that poisoned Michie Fourchet.…

  Here in the ciprière the smell of cooking sugar was less, the smoke of the burning fields at Lescelles stronger, like sand in his lungs and eyes. Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, he prayed helplessly, show me the way. If I’m not going to turn outlaw—if I’m not going to become the man who steals other men’s food and liquor and salt just because I might need them to trade, who’d kill a man from ambush just to steal his horse—please show me what I need to do.

  The smoke and the scent of ashes grew stronger, a hot reek that stung and burned and drowned out all other scents.

  January heard the dogs behind him as he strode north through the ciprière. He stuck to water where he could, wading knee-deep and thigh-deep and waist-deep in green stagnant ponds, the few turtles not sleeping in their burrows turning to regard him somnolently from the branches where they sat. Sometimes he could cut across the drier ground by making stepping-stones of cypress knees, or wading through hackberry brambles. Sometimes he was able to climb a tree and work his way through the branches monkey-wise.

  But all this slowed him down. What he needed now was speed.

  Sun slanted through the thinning western trees, sun blurred with smutty yellow veils of smoke.

  January dropped from the trees and raced over the dry ground, the pack howling behind him. Through the trees he saw the air wavering as heat beat on his face, saw the quarter mile of ash-covered, smoking stubble-rows where the fire had already passed. The smoke nearly hid the men working far out to the sides with the water buckets, dim shapes, like demons in a nightmare. Smoke veiled the hot ruined carpet of earth and ash.

  There was a ditch filled with last night’s rainwater just beyond the edge of the trees, like a little moat delineating white man’s land from the territory of runaways. January lay down in this and rolled, soaking his clothes; got up and shoved his stolen food and stolen salt into his shirt again, his little bundle of passes. He remembered Rose’s experiments with alcohol, and regretfully left the liquor by the ditch after taking one big hard swig of it.

  Then he picked up the gun again and ran.

  His cheap brogans smote the hot ash and cinders of the field, kicked live embers, like High John the Conqueror striding through Hell. The buzzards ascended like cinders themselves on the columns of heat, grasshoppers bounced and buzzed around him, and the smoke wrapped him in scorching veils, rendering him unseen.

  Virgin Mary, guard me, he thought, with the pounding rhythm of his flight. Hide me in your cloak and keep me safe. The wall of fire loomed ahead of him, heat growing, hammering. As you covered over Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, so cover me.…

  He could hear the dogs barking among the trees as he plunged into the flame.

  Heat and smoke and suffocation all around him and then he was through, with the leaping wall of gold and crimson flame behind him now, following him, and panicked rats and squirrels skittering madly around his feet. He ran along the row through smoke thick as muslin curtains, watching the fire that raced and crept over the litter of leaves, weeds, trash, and maiden cane. The long lines of fire extended before him on either side. Through the smoke he could make out shapes moving in the gloom, women and children waiting with clubs for the small game to flee before him, men with water buckets, ready to douse down the fire if it looked to be growing too big to control. Through the licking flames on his left January could see them, a hundred feet or so ahead. On the right the fields had been burned that morning. Last night’s rain set up a smolder and smoke. Night was drawing in.

  Before he got close enough that anyone could say for certain what they saw through the smoke, January veered right, springing over the spear-points of the cut cane-rows, dodging through the oncoming stringers of the fire. On the sides of the field, the line of fire was a reef of heat and flame, scorching his skin and making the water steam in his clothing as he dodged through its channels and plunged into the smoky world of ash and burned earth beyond.

  There he dropped immediately to the ground, stretching out in one of the ditches that had bordered the cane-rows, so close to the burning field that sparks fell on him. He could hear the hounds baying, frustrated, in the distance, nearly a mile behind him now at the borders of the ciprière. Ash and burning buried his scent. Now and then a leaf of flame would gyre lazily above the retreating inferno, spin and loop as it was consumed and drift, still burning, to the ground.

  “Sovra tutto ‘l sabbion, d’un cader lènto,” whispered January, the words of Dante coming back to him. “Piòvian di fuoco dilatate faldel cóme di néve in Alpi sènza vènto.”

  Flakes of fire falling like snow in the Alps when no wind blows.

  Like the damned beneath that endless snowfall of fire he lay on the burned earth, waiting for the darkness to thicken. Dante had written those words concerning the Hell of the Violent. Those who kill without thinking. Who feel that their fear or their rage entitles them, and do not ask the names of those they kill.

  The baying of the dogs faded. The voices of the women and children disappeared as their frightened game took shelter, like January, under night’s protecting veil. Only the voices of the men remained, those few who stayed out in the night with the water cart, making sure the fires didn’t get out of hand.

  But he’d accomplished one thing, he thought, the red-hot goad of panic subsiding in his gut. Two, if you counted saving his own neck from the noose.

  He’d laid a trail that definitely led north. Any escaping slave in his senses would keep on heading in that direction, instead of doubling back. The waning moon wouldn’t rise til late, and in any case the sky was still densely overcast, with th
e promise of fog by morning.

  Despite the darkness he had little problem in following the cane-rows riverward. The Lescelles hands were burning the bagasse from the mill in great heaps all along the levee, as was the custom at the end of roulaison. The yellow glare of the flame led him on, through thickening mists that held and condensed the smoke, until he seemed to be passing through another of Dante’s landscapes, night sulfurous with distant fires.

  Through the darkness came voices, singing, incongruously gay. Hands clapping time, and January’s own heart involuntarily lifted. For these people, the worst was over. The backbreaking part of the job was done. Michie Sugarcane had been carried to the mill, defeated, as his father had carried that last captive enemy in the dream. They’d made it through again. They’d survived another year.

  “Jump, frog, your tail gonna burn,

  Jump, frog, your tail gonna burn,

  Jump, frog, your tail gonna burn,

  Be brave, it’ll grow again.…”

  Men and women called out, laughing, their breath gold clouds in the raw night. A woman danced between two blazes on the levee, waving her red tignon like a flag, and the mists glowed around with the fires. Everyone would get more sleep. Someone at least from every family would be able to get the overgrown garden-patches cleared, get the yams dug, spend a little more time cooking so there’d be the comfort of eating good food on your own doorstep again. There’d be time—January remembered, standing in the darkness beyond the range of that hot woolly light—for his mother to sing him and Olympe songs again, before they fell asleep. Time to wash clothes and air bedding, and keep the cabin clean. He heard the voices of children, darting and running around the fires and in and out of the darkness, and an ache came back to his heart for them, remembering his own joy at such times.

  Joy more precious than gold, he thought, because there was so little of it, and it was so hard won.