Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (14 page)

If everyone was telling the truth.

“Jasper and Scipio were out with the main gang,” provided Random, speaking of his fellow artisans, the plantation cooper and potter. “Besides, they're both married, they have children. . . . They had no call to do such a thing.”

Didn't they? thought January. What might be a catastrophe to one man, a hammer-blow to his pride, might to another be simply the way of the world. The custom of the country.

On the other side of the low rise of the levee a whistle shrilled. The black smokestacks of the steamboat Vermillion could be seen past the big house and the oak trees, bound south from St. Louis and pulling out of the big current at the sign of the white flag on the wharf. January wondered whether one of the strikers or the firemen would report to Shaw that that morning, Sunday, the bandanna on the tree branch was white.

Like that old Greek fella.

“I tried to find out some about the house-servants.” Mohammed wrapped a strip of rawhide, glued on one side, carefully and tightly around one of the new handles, set it aside on the table outside the smithy door. “You'd have thought I was Benedict Arnold out trying to sell the country to the British. Catch Michie Cornwallis talking to a yard-man: hmph!” He grinned.

“You need to have a try at Leander,” suggested Random, returning the blacksmith's grin, “now he's back from Paris-That's Michie Robert's man,” he explained to January. “My lord, that man gossips! You want to know the colors of M'am Helene's stockings, that's the man to ask.”

“Leander wasn't here at the time of the fire in the mill,” said Mohammed. “Nor when the breakfast pots were poisoned.”

“Couldn't you figure out who did it by who was around the rice cart? Who fixes that? You say Jeanette's mama was a voodoo.”

“So she was,” agreed Mohammed. “And lord, you'd have thought Michie Fourchet was going to give birth, the way he carried on! But you've seen yourself Jeanette doesn't leave Michie Thierry's house til all the men get their day's work, and she goes straight to the women's gang. The men have already eaten by then. Minta brings it out, but she's got to help Kiki with takin' breakfast up to the big house, so most mornin's the rice cart just sits out with a board over the top of the pots. Anybody could come and stir something in.”

“And Kiki?
. . . ”

“Has her own reasons to want to see this hoodoo caught,” said Mohammed quietly. “Gilles was her husband.”

“They fixed?”

Thierry's shadow blackened the smithy door.

“Fixed as I can make 'em, sir.”
Mohammed finished wrapping the handle he was working on and rose, drying his hands on a rag. Thierry took the first knife they'd worked on and whacked it savagely into the doorpost half a dozen times, so that January winced. But the blade held up. The overseer turned it in his hand a moment, then tossed it carelessly back among the others.

“Ten was all you could save?”

“I'll show you the others, sir: edges cracked, metal split. And these won't last long, beggin' your pardon.”

“Fuckin' hoodoo.”
Thierry tapped the handle of the most newly repaired, feeling the slight tacky give of the wrapping, then ambled into the smithy to look at the blades that were past use.

“It'll be a good hour, sir, 'fore the glue sets up on those we fixed.”

The overseer regarded the smith with narrowed eyes, as if, gauging how much truth was in the statement, then glanced past him at the confusion around the doors of the mill. Baron the mule-drover was leading new teams down the short slope into the roundhouse. Through the arched windows between the brick piers that held up the floor of the grinder, January made out dim comings and goings as Rodney checked the harness. Mohammed and Random had agreed that the first time the mule harness had been rubbed with red pepper and turpentine was the day of the poisoning, when the grinders broke as the poor beasts had bolted. After that the harness had been contaminated twice more-two nights after the fire in the mule barn, apparently during the night, and again on the night Gilles had died. On those same occasions other harness had been cut, and cart axles sawed.

Equipment was now guarded by Baron and his son Ulee, as their personal responsibility.

Through the low arched windows Fourchet's voice could be heard, savagely informing someone or other that those mules were a damn sight more valuable than he was, and smarter, too. Thierry's eyes squinted up a little, and the anger in him resonated with his employer's like the drone-string on a banjo.

“Ben, you get on back to the field and tell Ajax to put you to work.” Thierry tossed him the first of the knives, the one he'd struck at the doorpost with. “Stop at the mill and tell Rodney to send another nine here to pick up the knives as soon as they can be spared.”

“Right away, sir.”
January put from his mind the seductive image of his own fist smashing into the man's dark lean face as the overseer strode away toward the path that led to the fields.

As he limped along the wood-haulers' path-cursing the poor fit of his shoes-January pieced the days together in his mind. Trying to see a pattern in them, of who could have gotten to the harness, and the mill, and the barn, and the rice cart; who could have gotten into the house and when. Who knew enough about poisons to kill the drinker of the cognac but only make the main gang sick.
Where the oleander had been cooked.
Where the turpentine and pepper mixed.

Off the place entirely?

How visible would a stranger have been, slipping up through the cane-fields from the old landing in the dark? But how could a stranger have known that everyone would be away and busy, that foggy afternoon at the dark of the moon?

In the blazing heat of the sugar-mill Fourchet was yelling, “Get the hell out of the way, you black fool!” at one of the men who skimmed the black foam from the boiling cane-juice in la grande. The man leaped aside to make way for the barrel in which the foam would be settled and dried to add to cattle-feed. “You think we got all goddam day? All goddam week? Stupid bastard apes . . . What in hell you want?”

He glared at January, his furious eyes blank black pits of rage, and January knew very clearly that Fourchet would think no more of striking him than he'd think before striking one of his slaves. January waited a moment, eyes downcast, before saying, “Michie Thierry sent me to let the men from the main gang know the cane-knives are fixed, sir, and they can get back to the cuttin' if you have no more need of 'em here.”

“Need 'em?” bellowed Fourchet. He flung his cigar end to the ground. “We need 'em everywhere, you brainless bozal! I'll send 'em back when we've got the next run cooking properly! Fucking niggers don't know the difference between-”

“I'll tell Michie Thierry that, then, sir.” January bowed. He flinched at the thought, but added, “And if you're free just for a moment, sir, there's somethin' regardin' the knives gettin' broke.” And, ready to duck, watched Fourchet's hands and body. He saw the planter's hand tighten on the sugar-paddle, but Fourchet stopped himself, glanced around the mill with those bloodshot, bestial eyes. “Come outside. Rodney!” The dapper little driver bounded over from la lessive, which men were just filling from the second after another round of boiling and skimming. “You know how much ash and lime goes in when this mess is skimmed? Good. When I come back in every man jack here better be working or there'll be sore backs.”

He shoved the paddle into Rodney's hand and stalked from the mill, January at his heels. They pushed through the women unloading cane and rounded the downstream end of the mill where the brick walls of the jail sheltered them from view of the confusion at the mill doors. Only a few yards away, the dark cane rose in a knotty wall.

“What is it?” Fourchet bit the end of another cigar as if it were personally responsible for all the woes that had beset Mon Triomphe. “What have you found?”

“First, sir, that I think you're right-I don't think it's a revolt being planned. They're giving themselves away, giving too much warning.”

“Hmph,” muttered Fourchet. “I told you as much.” But in the slight relaxation of his shoulders January saw the portrait of the dead woman, the dead child, on the parlor wall, and thought, He was afraid for her. Afraid for Marie-Noel.

“Secondly, I don't think Quashie was the one who damaged the knives.” And he related what Mohammed-and he himself-had already observed about the height of the voodoo marks on the walls. “It automatically rules out a number of people.”

“It does, does it?” Anger flooded back into those bitter eyes, a rage at the world so deep it had forgotten its origins, had it ever known them. His shirt beneath his black wool coat was sweat-sodden and his grizzled hair hung in lank and dripping strings. “Then you'd better automatically rule him back in, because Robert's man Leander saw him around the front side of Thierry's cottage. After midnight, which is when those other niggers swear he was tucked up like an angel in his bed! So how about that?”

January shut his teeth hard and took two deep breaths before replying. No wonder Esteban couldn't get a sentence out of his mouth. Already after two days he'd found himself less and less willing to go anywhere near Fourchet if he didn't have to, an attitude, he knew, that wouldn't help his inquiries. “Did Leander see Quashie take the knives, then, sir?”

“You think my son lets his man stand around the gallery half the night staring into nothing? The boy's a self-conceited pup and his man is worse, but at least he knows how to keep a servant at his work.”

“Then Quashie might have been there for another purpose? Waiting for someone, maybe?”

Fourchet's eyes slitted.
After a long time he said in a quieter voice, “I told that bitch she was too good for him. And Thierry's worth more to me than the brats that field hand would sire on her. He'll sire 'em on someone else, they all do.”

“Perhaps Quashie was waiting for someone else, then, sir.”

Fourchet opened his mouth to snap something at him, then let his breath out, and came down off his toes exactly as a fighting cock settles back when its opponent is taken from the ring. Some of the fury receded from his face, and his mouth untwisted from a grimace to a bleak and weary line.

He looked at the cigar in his hand, then looked around for a light. January reminded himself that Fourchet didn't know he, January, carried lucifers in his pocket-and cursed himself for that impulse to appease the man by producing one.

What the hell is wrong with me? But he knew the answer to that.

“God knows I've done ill enough in my life,” Fourchet said. “I've tried to make amends where I can.” Turning abruptly, he strode back to the mill doors, as Thierry came around the other corner, whip coiled beneath his arm. Herc was behind him, his round baby face wooden, and they were clearly headed for the low brown brick box of the plantation jail; Fourchet said, “Thierry,” and they stopped. “Doesn't look as though Quashie had anything to do with them knives.”

The overseer stared at him,    then past him at January, bleak blue eyes like glass. “You don't mean you believe anything this-”

“It's none of your lookout what I believe or don't believe, or why,” Fourchet snarled. “For now I don't think Quashie did it, and let it go at that. So you just give him a couple of licks for wandering around outside at night, you hear? Now I've got to get back to the mill. God knows what that imbecile Rodney's been dumping into the boiling while we've been out here wasting time in talk.”

He shoved the unlit cigar into his mouth and stalked back into the mill, a rigid bristling figure: January could hear him shouting at Esteban for not skimming la lessive quickly enough, and did he want the sugar to sour on him?

Thierry said, “Cunt fool,” in his soft mild voice and slapped his whip on his boot. Then he glanced up at January. “So.
With me, Cotton-Patch. Let's get that nigger triced and laced so's the both of you can get back to your work.”

January hesitated, helpless and angry that, accepting his story as truth, the planter had decided to have the man whipped anyway, simply to prove to everyone that he could. . . .

“Step along, boy. I said give me a hand, unless you want a dose of the same.”

Fourchet had already vanished into the darkness of the mill. In any case January knew that no white man would countermand his overseer's orders in front ofand certainly not regarding-a slave. He said, “Yes, sir,” and followed Thierry and Herc to the jail, hating himself and Fourchet more completely at every step.

It was one of the most savage beatings January had seen administered in his life. Quashie fought like a devil, screaming curses at him, at Thierry and Hercules from the moment they entered the jailhouse, kicking, biting, ramming with his head and trying to catch and strangle one or the other of them in the short slack of his chains.

“Hold him,” Thierry panted. “Hold him, God damn you!” and Herc stepped in to obey, so January had to follow-follow or destroy whatever chances he might have of finding the true killer before Fourchet's inevitable murder triggered wholesale retaliation against everyone on the plantation.

A laudable end, he reflected angrily-more praiseworthy than simply the desire to be spared whipping himself-but the result for Quashie was the same.

He did the best he could not to think about what he was doing, while he held the young man's arm in an iron grip. Tried not to hear the leathery thump of balled fists hammering into belly, groin, face.

“Strip him,” said Thierry, when he finally stepped back. Sweat rolled down his jaws but he spoke as if to a baker about an order of bread. “Trice him up.” Quashie was still trying to fight as January and Herc manhandled him outside, though his knees were water and they had to carry him. The whipping frame stood in front of the jail, about thirty feet from the doors of the mill. The women unloading the cane carts, the men hauling wood stopped work, clustering uneasily, and a voice from within the mill shouted at them to Move on, damn it!

With a cry, Jeanette dropped the bundle of cane she carried, ran across the open ground. Thierry caught her by the arm, slapped her face, shoved her away so hard she fell. “Get back to work.”