Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  “Here’s keys!” yelled Nathan in triumph. At the same time, January heard dim pounding on the engine room door, voices calling:

  “Theo? Theo! Open up in there! Theo!”

  One of the shots through the wall, thought January, feeling very calm about the whole business. The man must have bolted himself in when the commotion started.

  Nathan, hands trembling, was trying key after key in the manacle locks, while men threw open the opposite door again and Quashie fired with every piece he possessed—quite a number, now. Harry, who’d been reloading for him, had tossed aside at least four pistols, and when Kadar grabbed for one said, “Won’t work. Flint’s busted.”

  “Get ’em out of here,” said January quietly, rolling gratefully to his feet as Nathan found the key to his ankle chains and let him, finally, scramble right side up. “Just get ’em out, over the rail. Risking a bullet’s better than getting blown up.”

  “I suspect you’re right, Maestro.” Shaw fired again at another sortie. “River’s rising and full of trash, floaters and logs and branches. Since we’re bound upstream we’re close to shore, too.”

  Outside men were shouting, arguing, and Jac Ney’s voice rose above the rest: “I’ll shoot the man who goes over-side!” There was a crashing, a thudding, from the door, and, January fancied, over the clank and lug and rattle of the engine another sound, the strangled desperate keening of steam escaping from too small a vent, trapped too long and too tightly.…

  “Now it may so be,” Shaw added placidly, blasting away as the far door jerked open yet again, “that I might get myself blowed up or knocked out or washed down the river a ways, and not be able to get all these folks back to the people that owns ’em. I’m leavin’ that up to you, Maestro.” His gray eyes met January’s, completely without expression. “If so be any survives.”

  “I doubt anyone will,” said January, warning him.

  Shaw nodded. “Well, we can only do our best. Was it Seneca that said Death is Freedom for a slave?” He pulled a packet of waxed silk from his shirt, and shoved it into the front of January’s—his freedom papers, January guessed. “You watch out for that wheel, when you go over-side.”

  Shaw and January slammed the door open, firing in both directions, clearing a path. Return fire was sporadic—January could see only about a dozen men still on deck, Ney and his father among them. Dark heads bobbed already in the quicksilver current of the river, clutching at the snags and branches that the rise was bringing down. The boat itself was farther from the shore than January had reckoned, swinging with the current already but plowing hard. Even as the first of the newly freed men and women plunged from the hold, threw themselves across the narrow space of deck to the rail and over, he felt the boat lurch and hitch, felt the rhythm of the engine jar, jolting as the wheel picked up a snag. The huge tree-trunk caught, jamming the already overburdened machinery.…

  Men’s voices yelling the dead engineer’s name outside the locked engine room door.

  Jacinthe Ney screaming at the Spanish mate as the man plunged over the rail, firing his pistol at his head and getting nothing but a broken spark from its damaged flint.

  Hope flinging herself over the rail with her infant tied to her back with her shawl, Bumper and Nero following, holding hands tightly.

  Jeanette and Quashie side by side, both firing rifles and pistols and everything else they could lay hands on to keep the white attackers at bay, Quashie like a filthy animal, bearded and bushy from five days’ hiding, five days’ watching. Five days, waiting his chance.

  Disappearing Willie, amazingly, sat a dozen yards off in the pirogue that had brought Shaw and Quashie, already fishing children and the weak from the flood. His eyes met January’s and he grinned, as if this were a game.

  The Belle Dame lurched, swung with the current, even its own crew springing over-side like rats now, dark and sleek and wet in the water. Jac Ney fired at them, and hurled the useless pistols at their heads when they misfired, cursing like Satan in Hell.

  January strode from the door of the empty cargo hold and swung up on the rail. He had a flashing glimpse of Ney’s wild eyes, the dark muzzle of a pistol brought to bear, flame bursting and a ball skimming his shoulder like a hornet’s hot kiss—

  —And then the entire world went up in a bellowing roar of earsplitting fire. The concussion drove him down into the river’s heart, drowning him, hammering his ears, the impact whirling him away. He felt the heat of it, struggled blindly upward, eternities without breath.

  Sickened eons later, his head broke water. Burning hunks of wood, slobbering bubbles, floating shutters and benches and doors strewed the surface. He grabbed a door, for the current was strong, turned a little in the water and saw the hulk of the Belle Dame riding the stream like a floating bonfire. Heat pounded his face. Weak with shock and hunger and sheer fatigue, for a long time all he could do was cling to his isolate planet of flotsam, the sole life in a universe of wet gray.

  In time the river sent him a plank, and he used this to paddle slowly to shore.

  TWENTY-TWO

  January fully expected that he’d have to haul himself out of the river, limp somehow to the nearest house, convince its inhabitants of his freedom and his bona fides, and make his way into Baton Rouge and hence back to New Orleans—staying one step ahead of Sheriff Duffy’s posses all the while—entirely on his own. But as he paddled, trembling with exhaustion, in to shore, two figures waded out to meet him, Gosport and one of the second-gang women, Giselle. They dragged his makeshift raft in among the tangle of the flooded batture, and helped him up to the dry ground of the levee: “We must be ten, twelve miles down from where that boat blowed up,” said Gosport. “We’re clear round the other side of Duncan Point.”

  On the other side of the levee, dark fields of cane disappeared into the fog. Somewhere voices sang:

  “Day zab, day zab, day koo-noo wi wi.…”

  The darkening air stank of burned sugar.

  Thank you, Mary, Mother of God. His fingers touched the rosary in his soaked pocket. Thank you God, for bringing me alive out of the fire and the flood.

  He wondered if in fact Shaw had survived.

  “You all right, Ben?” Giselle had her baby girl with her, tied to her back with a shawl when she’d gone into the river. The child blinked over her shoulder at January with huge liquid unsurprised brown eyes.

  January sighed, and touched his forehead with one hand, wincing at the mingled pain of bruises and blisters. “I feel like I did twenty rounds with an iron stove and lost.”

  Gosport asked, “Will you be all right?”

  January reached into his shirt, and smiled. The waxed silk was intact. “I’ll be all right.”

  “You know,” said Gosport, “I never did believe all them songs Mohammed used to sing about High John the Conqueror, beatin’ all the white men and gettin’ his people to safety. I’ll believe ’em now. I know they’re true.”

  They walked January to the oyster-shell road that ran along the top of the levee, and made sure he was well enough to stand on his own, before they faded like ghosts into the mist. January never saw either of them again.

  Monsieur Conrad, of Le Chenière plantation, had already gotten word that a boat had blown up on the other side of Duncan Point. He ordered his butler to make up a bed for January at once in one of the several cottages shared by the house-servants; only when January offered to show him his freedom papers did the planter say, “Janvier? Benjamin Janvier? Your wife is here. It was she whom my people first brought from the river with the news.…”

  January just stopped himself from gaping and said instead, Kiki?” with what he hoped was a blossoming smile.

  Monsieur Conrad’s face broadened into a grin. He was a gray-haired, pleasant man of German Creole extraction and quite clearly reveled in being the reuniter of lost families. “Even she.”

  January crossed himself. “Thank God,” he said simply. He wasn’t quite sure what else to say, not knowing what
the cook had told this man; he felt annoyance that she’d manipulate him in this fashion. “I didn’t dare hope.…”

  Kiki was sitting on the edge of the bed in one of the house-servants’ cottages. She was wrapped in a quilt, and one of the maids was combing out her mahogany-black hair. She looked up as January came in, and made her eyes melting as she held out her arms. “Oh, Ben!”

  “Thank you,” she said, after they’d been served with food and left alone. A small fire burned in the cabin’s little hearth, making the borrowed refuge warm and pleasant. The servant had helped her braid her hair into strings, and Kiki finished tying them as she spoke. “I was almost unconscious when Monsieur Conrad’s people found me. I was gambling that you’d get ashore all right, too. You might have gone anywhere, but at least you wouldn’t be hiding like the others. And if you did come here.…”

  “How did you know my name?”

  And her dark eyes twinkled. “If you were a free man,” she replied, “I knew you had to have your papers hidden somewhere. And since Michie Hannibal was like your white kid glove, the place to hide them would have been in his room.”

  January sniffed. “You’re lucky you’re here in this room with me instead of Harry. Or whoever Harry sold the other set of my papers to. Now I’ll have to deal with having a duplicate Benjamin January at large, stealing pigs and trading guns.…”

  “Don’t be silly, Ben, in a year his credit will be better than yours.”

  January sighed, and leaned his back against the pillows she’d heaped between the wall and his shoulders. He ached all over and wanted only to sleep. Outside, the fog was losing the light that had filled it all day.

  Where would Marie-Noël Fourchet spend the night? They’re all right, Shaw had said, meaning he’d gotten to Mon Triomphe in time. If he knew Shaw, the man had come up on a boat to another landing, and checked the lay of the land before going in. Disappearing Willie had probably gone to ground the same time Duffy had imprisoned Mohammed and Pennydip, and Quashie had been waiting, all that time, watching for his chance to rescue Jeanette.…

  And a good thing, January thought. Otherwise, preoccupied with their own harvests, the other planters wouldn’t have seen the burning house until too late. Would have attributed the smoke to the burning of the cane-fields.

  He had a mental image of Hippolyte Daubray riding up on the heels of the disaster, offering hospitality with one hand and three dollars and thirty-five cents for Mon Triomphe and everything on it with the other.

  In the stillness he was aware of Kiki watching him.

  “False River Jones told me about your husband,” he said. “And your sons.”

  Kiki turned her face away, and tied up the last of her many braids with string. Her plump face looked haggard in the warm hues of the fire, as if she understood that from those deaths—deaths she’d learned of at the trader’s last visit in the dark of the moon—he had guessed all the rest.

  “I should say I’m sorry,” she said at last. “But I’m not. About Gilles, yes. He was a kind man, a good man. Even when he was drunk he hadn’t an ounce of harm in him. I should have realized, after Michie Fourchet beat him for stealing liquor. But I didn’t.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Everyone thought I should have,” she said simply, “so I said I did. And then, M’am Fourchet wouldn’t have put in her word for me, if I hadn’t said it was love. It wasn’t enough that Reuben was a wild pig in his soul. It was the love story that fetched her heart. Well, she’s only a girl. But Hector was the only man I ever loved.”

  January was silent, thinking about how a man dies, who drinks the boiled roots of Italian oleander. Thinking about the stripped leaves beneath M’am Camille’s dark hedges, and the mashed bolus of boiled vegetable matter on the midden at Refuge; the vévé of hatred drawn above the stove. The dead rats beneath the house.

  “I am sorry,” Kiki said.

  His eyes met hers again, and he read in them her regret, and her understanding that he would have to take her in to the law if he could. Yet he understood, too, that having told Conrad they were husband and wife, there was no way that he could now announce that this woman was a murderess and his prisoner. It would mean a contest of lies, and Conrad might believe her, or call January’s freedom papers into question.

  All he wanted to do now was ascertain that Hannibal and the others had indeed survived the fire, and then go home.

  “It sounds silly,” Kiki said at length. “I am sorry. I didn’t think of what it would mean—that others would be blamed, and maybe punished, for that horrid old man’s death. And at the time I didn’t care. I was so—so angry. So crazy with grief.”

  January said nothing. He remembered the madness of his own sorrow at Ayasha’s death. Remembered too the sick helpless fury he’d felt, his whole time at Mon Triomphe, as if everything beneath his skin were being consumed by slow fire.

  “Reuben was easy,” Kiki went on, her voice matter-of-fact. “We all of us, as children, played with blowpipes. There was an old mambo in the quarters where I grew up who made them out of maiden cane or straws, and my brothers and I could hit near anything with thorns or slivers as well as peas. Hector and I used to have contests—I was a better shot than he. Even though I marked the walls for Shango and the other spirits of the fire to help me, I didn’t really think I could trap Reuben long enough in the mill for him to smother or burn, but nobody would question, then, if the machinery broke.”

  She drew the blanket more closely around herself. One of the Conrad servants had lent her clothes, a faded yellow calico gown sewn for a woman even more amply built than she, and the bright color warmed her face more than the blacks of mourning that she had worn. Proud, January remembered Mohammed calling her. Proud and strong.

  Of course a man like Reuben would take it as a challenge, to break her.

  Someone—Mohammed?—had told him how Kiki had nursed her former husband in his injury, when Trinette would not. Looking at her calm somber face he understood now why she’d volunteered. What the rollers, and shock, and loss of blood hadn’t accomplished, she would have made sure of, one way or another.

  “When the mule barn caught fire I thought it was an accident,” she went on. “Baron was always a little careless with his lantern. But then the vévés showed up in the house, and the other things started to happen—the axles sawn, and the harnesses rubbed with pepper again and again, and I knew someone else was doing it. But I never thought it was Michie Robert.”

  Her round, powerful hands toyed with a frayed place in the blanket, her dark beautiful eyes downcast. “I thought I’d best stay quiet and wait. I wanted to kill Michie Fourchet and I knew when I did I’d have to run, and I couldn’t do that carrying a child. I’d already got rid of the baby Reuben put in me, a few years ago.… And then the sheds burned. And so many people hurt, and those poor babies killed, and it was as if I woke up after a bad, bad dream. Maybe what you said to me, about how a man will burn down a house just to cook eggs, made me think. And I understood I just couldn’t do it. After that, all I wanted was to be away.”

  “And that’s when you offered to help Quashie and Jeanette escape, if they’d take you with them?”

  She nodded. “I was scared. I can’t tell you how scared I was. I wouldn’t have done it, if I’d known someone would come along after me, masking his footsteps in my own.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  Their eyes locked. For a moment it seemed to January that a man’s body lay between them, a man who she knew was likely to drink his master’s liquor, if he couldn’t get his own.

  It was her gaze that fell.

  She said, very softly, “I don’t know. That’s the honest truth, Ben. I don’t know. I know for five years I got by on hearing those little notes Hector would send me by False River Jones. I know I have them memorized, every word, about what Daniel and Adam looked like, and what they loved, and all the things they did in those five years. I have a hole in my heart a thousand miles deep that it doe
sn’t feel like anything is ever going to fill. And that’s all I know.”

  When January woke—with a splitting headache—Kiki was gone.

  “She said you’d know where to catch her up,” said Monsieur Conrad’s butler, who knocked while January was still lying in his borrowed bed wondering where the woman had managed to secrete a bottle of opium on her person. “She said you’d talked about it last night.” He regarded January doubtfully, as if rethinking the whole tale of freedom papers and matrimony, and January put a hand to his head and said, “Of course we did. I have such a headache this morning I can’t rightly think.”

  The butler smiled. He was young and businesslike and had the air of a man who ran the entire household with neat efficiency. Like Esteban, not imaginative, but greatly desirous to have all books balance at day’s end. “I understand that. Your wife said you was one of the last ones off the boat, and those blisters look like you was burned bad. Why don’t you rest here for another day? She said she’d stay with your brother in town til you came.”

  January was very tempted to avail himself of the offer, for he ached all over and the lassitude of shock pressed on him, physically and mentally. If Shaw had survived—and January prayed that he had, and not simply because Shaw could vouch for his identity—the policeman could keep Duffy and his posses at bay. If he hadn’t, if he’d been badly hurt, January was still a fugitive. In any case it would take weeks for the garbled tales of slave revolt, house-burning, poisoning, and kidnapping to sort themselves out, if they ever did.

  It was best, he thought, that he exit the whole situation through the first door that opened, and not ask questions that would cause delay.

  Though frantically busy with his own harvest and boiling, Monsieur Conrad lent January money to take a boat south that afternoon, as, he said, he had lent money to Kiki. The river’s rise brought several boats a day past La Chenière. The butler recalled that Kiki had taken the Achtafayala. January was willing to bet she wouldn’t be aboard it when it docked in New Orleans.