Dead Water (15 page)

They had to have heard him, he knew, and broke into a jog, then a run. The thresh of his legs through the tangles of honeysuckle and elephant-ear drowned all sound of pursuit, but he didn't dare look back. Only strode, struggled, ran upslope, then down to a marshy little trickle of puddles that might have once been a bayou. Someone behind him yelled, “You, boy, stop!” as he broke cover at the bottom, but he plunged into the woods on the far side and cut toward his right as soon as he thought he was out of sight. The heat dazed him, beat on him, suffocated him; he smelled smoke again and heard a cock crow, and the next minute he saw open sky through the trees ahead.

A small field lay before him, corn thick and nearly head-high under a sun like molten brass. January vaulted the split-rail fence and threw himself into the green shelter of the rows, ducking low and keeping still, like a rabbit, like Compair Lapin when Bouki the Hyena prowled around. The dust-smell filled his nose. Closer the dog barked again. A cornsnake blinked at him from the dappled shade, then slid away in a little whisper of red and gold.

Through the rustling of the long, leathery leaves he thought he heard voices at the edge of the field.

Let him walk through the swamps and the hills with men hunting behind him
. . . .

He remained where he was for a long time, bars of sun scorching across his back.

Then he crept along the rows, endlessly, to the other side of the field. A swaybacked dogtrot cabin stood under two trees. A smokehouse, an outhouse, a barn, a couple of cabins for slaves. On the other side of the home-place a cotton field stretched, the young plants still too small and thin to have concealed him. Far down the rows, two men were chopping at the weeds around their roots with hoes, the endless work of early summer. Their voices buzzed in song:

Farewell the ol' plantation, o,
Farewell the ol' quarters, o,
I been sold away to Georgia, o, farewell. . . .

A woman came out of one half of the dogtrot and crossed to him, the dog he'd heard—a shaggy gray monster with a lolling tongue—shambling at her heels. January stood up as she approached. She carried a baby on her hip and moved like an old woman, but when she came near he saw she was young, under thirty. Her hair, under the head-rag of a slave, lay in fine, curly wisps around her forehead, more like a white woman's hair than a black's. She was darker than white men liked, but delicate-featured and pretty. “It's all right,” she said in heavily-French-accented English. “They are gone.”

She shaded her eyes with her hand to look up at him—she was barely five feet tall in her faded osnaberg dress—and asked, “Are you running away?”

“I'm running away from
them,
” he replied in French, and produced his free papers from the inner pocket, where he'd kept them hidden. He didn't expect she'd be able to read them—it was against the law to teach slaves to read and write, mostly so they couldn't write up their own passes—but she took the paper and scanned it, and said, as she handed it back. “Those were not the patrols, then, M'sieu Janvier? You were right to run. There are slave-stealers all along the river. The men here stay indoors at night, and close to their work by day, for fear of them more than for any consideration of the patrols. Come into the kitchen—the master is hunting in the woods today and will not be back until night. I think one of the men here can help you get to where you are going.”

Her name was Mary. “Marie-Hélène, before my master re-baptized me as a Protestant—a ‘real Christian,' he calls them—and wed me to my current husband.” Her voice was dry. “My marriage to Jean-Claude in New Orleans was only a Catholic one, he said—he is a minister of his own Church, my master, called to the faith, he says, by God Himself.”

January glanced outside, to where Mary's husband, Amos, and Lafayette, the younger cotton-hand, were putting the mule to the wagon. Amos was a medium-sized man, impassive and heavy-muscled. Close to, in the shadows of the kitchen, January could see the dark mark of an old bruise on Mary's face, and a small fresh scar beneath her left eye. It was none of his business, he thought, and Amos was going to drive him across the river and down Steele's Bayou—neither of which was anywhere near this small bottomlands farm—almost certainly saving him from the Reverend Christmas and his boys.

Was it Amos's fault, January asked himself, that he had in him smoldering anger equal to January's own? Anger that would unleash itself on the nearest and weakest target?

He thought of Julie on the boat, rocking back and forth in Rose's arms.
What'm I gonna do?

With a baby in arms and two more hanging on to her skirts, Mary was obviously not going to run anywhere.

How did you get here?
he wanted to ask her as she laid before him a couple of ash-pones and a cup of milk, food her master might well want an accounting of at the end of the day.
What are you doing here, with your good French and your beauty and your quick movements, so unlike those of the field-hand who knows that to conclude work swiftly will only earn another task?

But he already knew the answer to this, and the harrowing-up of details would be no joy to her. So instead he raised an eyebrow and asked, “And was this Divine communication via a burning bush, or the more modern whirlwind method?” And laughed as the young woman recounted her master's vision of the fiery letters “GPC,” which had appeared to him in a dream:

“He said they must surely mean
Go Preach Christ,
though the members of the local Methodist synod who rejected his application for the ministry suggested that Our Lord more probably meant
Go Pick Cotton
. . . .”

“You have no idea,” she said as she and Amos helped him into the back of the wagon and piled brush and kindling over him, “how good it is to hear good French spoken again, and to see—” She hesitated, sadness darkening her eyes. “Oh, anyone new. Anyone at all.”

Her voice was wistful. The sun, already slanting over above the encircling woods of cottonwood and pine, made black squares on the bare earth around the house; the cawing of the crows seemed to emphasize rather than break the dense stillness of that solitary farm. “When you return to the city—if you return to the city—burn a candle for me to the Virgin, and tell her that I pray to her in secret every night. Yes, yes,
cher,
I am coming,” she added as the toddler in the passway between the two rooms of the cabin began to scream.

“You make sure you get them sheets washed after the bread's in,” grunted Amos, springing to the wagon-box and picking up the reins. “Marse gonna be sore enough when he come home, 'bout how little cotton we got hoed.”

“I will tell Marse that you were overcome by the heat, and lay down until the earth stopped spinning beneath your feet,” said Mary, and pulled down the last chunks of dried brush and palmetto-leaves over January's head. “Do not agitate yourself about Marse.”

“Yeah,” grumbled the man, “you good at lyin', woman.” And he lashed the mule hard with a cotton stalk.

The wagon lurched as it pulled away down the rutted track toward the bayou. The last January saw of the young woman Mary was of her walking back toward her master's cabin, her newest baby on her hip and her shoulders bent with exhaustion.

ELEVEN

Whether or not Amos and his wagon passed the Reverend Christmas on the road, January never knew. They passed someone who called out drunken jovialities at Amos
(“Hey, Sambo, bit early to be haulin' the cotton to market!”)
, but January kept under the brushwood. Even when he would have gotten out to help with the ferry, the field-hand snapped, “You stay put in there,” and dragged on the creaking winch himself to get the raft across the sluggish Yazoo. His mind relieved of most of his concerns about being enslaved—or murdered—himself, January had ample leisure to conjure visions, some of them completely illogical or impossible, of Rose or Hannibal being enslaved—or murdered—as one or the other of them attempted to rejoin him in the dark yard opposite the Majestic Hotel.

Now that he was no longer running, exhaustion overtook him, amplified by the stifling heat under the brushwood and the canvas stretched over it. He would have slept had the condition of either the road or the unsprung wagon-bed permitted it. As it was, his weary mind produced pictures of himself waiting on the riverbank by the mouth of Steele's Bayou for days for a boat that had gone past already, waiting until he was caught by Reverend Christmas. . . . How would he know whether the
Silver Moon
had passed or not? And how would he convince Kevin Molloy to land the boat and let him come aboard, particularly if Hannibal had been murdered (or enslaved) back in Vicksburg . . . ?

Then the jolt of a wagon-wheel in a pothole slammed him from his half-dreaming doze into painful contact with the side of the wagon, back into heat and thirst and the aching stiffness of enforced immobility.

How quickly would the
Silver Moon
negotiate the long bends of the river that lay between Vicksburg and Steele's Bayou? He felt he'd been traveling for days, but the heat beneath the kindling-wood seemed unaltered, and the wagon was jolting too badly for him to put his eye to any of the numerous cracks in the side. It was still daylight. Had God halted the sun in the Heavens, as He had for the Israelites in battle? They'd never reach the riverbank before the boat passed. . . .

“You in luck,” announced Amos as if he deeply regretted the fact.

January squirmed out from beneath the brushwood and sat up.

The
Silver Moon
was visible perhaps a half-mile downstream, hung up on one of the innumerable gravel bars that dotted the wide expanse of the river's loop. Men swarmed the decks in the slanted evening light, and January could see the long iron poles, like extra masts, wavering and wobbling above the hurricane deck as the men thrust them down into the mud of the bar. The boat must be firmly stuck, he reflected, for them to be sparring that way. He could see the piles of crates and trunks on the bank under a small guard of deck-hands, with the skiff beached beside them, where they'd been off-loaded to lighten the boat's draft.

He sprang down from the wagon, held out his hand to Amos. “Thank you,” he said, and handed the man one of the three dollars that remained to him. “More than I can ever say.”

The field-hand said, “Huh,” took the dollar, and pulled the mule's head savagely around. Whether the comment implied annoyance, envy, scorn, or shyness, January didn't know, for Amos lashed the beast's flanks with the cottonstalk whip, and drove back into the woods without another word.

Horsehead Bar—which January guessed this had to be—lay obliquely out into the channel, formed by the wash-off from a small point a half-mile or so below the bayou mouth. He couldn't imagine how even an inexperienced pilot like Mr. Souter could have missed it: trees and debris snagged on it showed clearly above the surface in four or five places. As he drew near the bar, the Mississippi planter Lockhart—who was in charge of the deck-hands around the luggage—exclaimed, “By God, just what we need, another pair of hands! You, boy . . . !”

And Colonel Davis came over from the skiff, rifle in hand, and said, “Why, it's Ben, isn't it?”

“Was last time I looked, Colonel Davis.” January scraped at the dried scum that still covered his clothing from his dip in Chickasaw Bayou, additionally speckled with straw from the wagon-bed and bits of brushwood. “Though I can't tell myself who I am, under all the mud.”

“There,” said Davis triumphantly to Lockhart, “I told you the boy hadn't run away.” Though he called him “boy,” Davis was probably January's junior by a dozen years. “You treat darkies decently and they are as loyal as any man.”

“Run away?” January scratched a shower of twigs from his hair. “You got to be joking, sir. Man'd have to be crazy to run away in this country.” And the men around him laughed. “I nearly got stole and sold to Texas twice, and that's the truth. . . .”

“Go on out to the boat,” chuckled Davis, and slapped him companionably on the shoulder. “They need every pair of hands out there. We're glad to have you back safe and sound.”

The water over the bar was so low, January could walk out along it most of the way to the boat, and it was seldom more than breast-deep thereafter. Where it was over his head, the bar broke the current so effectively that the water behind lay almost still. Rose and Hannibal emerged from the engine-room doorway and ran to the railing as January drew near: Hannibal held a rifle, one of the .45-caliber Lemans that were generally locked in the purser's office.

Simple caution on this relatively isolated stretch of the river? January wondered. Had someone—Mr. Lundy, perhaps?—convinced Mr. Tredgold that Levi Christmas might attack the boat?

Or had they armed all the white men on board because both coffles of slave men had been unchained and pressed into service in raising and planting the long sparring-poles? In the blue shadows of the starboard promenade the chains hung down empty against the wall, like a horrid still-life, and he heard 'Rodus's voice call out from the hurricane deck, “Slip her down!” followed by the splash of the pole-end in the shallow water at the stern.

“What the hell happened?” January asked softly as Rose threw herself into his arms regardless of his soaked and muddy clothing and the fact that they weren't supposed to have known each other before the voyage began.

“That is, as Hamlet said, the question,” replied Hannibal. He was in shirtsleeves, like all the other men on deck, and didn't look like he'd slept. Rose, too, looked haggard and ashy. “I was on my way back to join you, when I saw that wench Sophie. . . .”

“Well, I'm sure this is all very touching,” chuckled Mr. Souter, emerging from the engine-room rubbing his hands. “And I'm sure your boy has some remarkable tales to tell of his odyssey—” He flung out his arms like a barker at a raree-show, “Amazing feats by land and sea! But let's save the tears of joy for after we get this god-damned boat off this god-damned bar. . . .”

So January followed Souter to the bow, and spent until nightfall in the tedious occupation of sparring the steamboat over the Horsehead Bar. This well-known local landmark below the small Horsehead Point had apparently proved too high and too gravelly to be simply rammed through, and the
Silver Moon
had hit its outer end too hard to be poled off backwards. Once the long poles were sunk upright behind the boat, every male on board, white as well as black, with the exception of the three planters standing guard and the deck-hands wooding the engine, was drafted to turn the capstan-wheels to which the upper ends of the poles were chained. The ends were levered down, and the whole weight of the boat inched gradually forward across the shallow, with the paddlewheel turning slowly to push and a leadsman crying out soundings at the bow.

Then the poles were pulled loose, re-positioned, and the whole laborious process repeated again. The manufacturer Dodd fumed and refused to join the others at the capstans, and Ned Gleet attempted to charge rent for the use of his slaves and was shrieked into submission by Mrs. Tredgold, but on the whole the process went smoothly under Mr. Souter's shouted orders from the pilot-house.

The white women—cabin and deck-passengers alike—crowded the starboard rail to watch, and Molloy came charging along the boiler-deck promenade cursing them and shouting “Trim the goddam boat! D'you want to sink us?”

Muscles aching, arms smarting, body numb with fatigue as he leaned on the capstan-bars between Jim the valet and Hannibal, January scanned the beardless faces in the twilight. He picked out Mrs. Fischer, with her thick brunette chignon and her dark eyes narrow and hard, and Theodora Skippen, turned, not toward the men around the hatch but toward the bank. Saw Sophie and Julie clinging together on the lower deck, arms around one another's waists, the sylph-like daintiness of the one emphasizing the strength of the other.

Saw Rose a little apart, the last of the daylight flashing in her spectacles, and knew that she was watching him.

Where was Queen Régine? he wondered, bending his back again to 'Rodus's rhythmical shout. How had she been able to slip out of the hold as they started unloading the luggage—if that was, indeed, her hideaway down there in the darkness? Could she be simply concealing herself by sitting among the women slaves on the portside promenade in the gathering shadows?

“If she did, I've seen no sign of her,” said Hannibal when January asked, under cover of the slaves' chant as they labored. “And they've kept the luggage under guard from the moment they started moving it out, drat them.”

'Rodus's voice rose in the work-chant, and the slaves took it up as they threw their weight on the capstan-bars:

Mama brought me coffee-uhn!
Mama brought me tea—uhn!
Mama brought me evvythin'
'Ceptin' the jail-house key—uhn!

On the capstan-bar before them January picked out the bent back of Jubal Cain, heavy shoulders standing out like pink-stained marble between the black and whip-scarred backs on either side. He took up the song; a moment later Mr. Byrne the gambler, heaving the bar between Quince and Weems, added his.

Turn me over easy——uhn!
Turn me over slow——uhn!
Turn me over easy, lord,
'Cause de bullets hurt me so——uhn!

Every man of Cain's coffle, January saw, was whip-scarred—most of the scars fairly fresh. 'Rodus's naked back told January everything he could have asked about a short life-time of defiance. Yet the dealer worked among them, sweating in silence, and neither the man to his left nor to his right offered challenge.

“As I said, I was halfway back to you with the news that the boat hadn't let steam down, when I recognized Sophie,” said Hannibal, panting as he leaned his weight on the bar to the timing of the chant. “I followed her back to the boat, and she went straight to their stateroom. I watched to see if I could get in—they clearly hadn't abandoned it—and just as it began to get light, who should appear but the guilty pair themselves, La Pécheresse with a false beard and enough padding to hide her Junoesque curves, and Weems in a very fetching French-blue gown and veils. I was looking around the boat to see if you'd followed them back when we put out. They must have bribed Molloy to keep steam up—Tredgold was furious when he woke up about an hour later.”

“The more fools they,” murmured January. “Since Molloy was one of the Bank's depositors. He must have laughed when they handed him the money—probably the remainder of what Weems got from Cain. Molloy's too good a pilot for this to have been an accident—with the luggage in a shambles you couldn't get to it, but he could. I saw Weems and Fischer leave the hotel but didn't recognize them.”

With solemn mischief, 'Rodus led the chant:

Massa, he an ugly man——uhn!
Missus, she a sinner——uhn!
Skin a flea for tallow an' hide
An' gimme the bones for dinner——uhn!

It was dark by the time the skiff was loaded up, and the two coffles of slaves were put to work helping the deck-hands replace the cargo in the holds under Thucydides's sharp eye. Iron cressets loaded with firewood burned on the deck and on the bank to light the work, and all the white men were given rifles and set to guarding the bank, with the exception of Mr. Quince, who declared that violence of any kind was repellent to his nature. “Milksop,” said Cain impersonally, pulling on his coat and taking up a
rifle—his own, a .50-caliber Henry, not one of the Lemans from the ship's store.

A belated dinner was served in the Grand Saloon, and January retired to Hannibal's stateroom, where the fiddler tipped Thu to send in a copper tub and hot water for a bath. “It's one thing there's never a shortage of on a steamboat, thank God,” said Hannibal as January stripped off his mud-crusted clothing and settled in the round towel-draped tin vessel. “Rose was going to dump the boilers if you didn't show up by the time the cargo was re-loaded. With everyone on deck it wouldn't have been difficult.”

January smiled. “That's my Rose.”

“According to Tredgold, we should be under way by the time dinner is finished, and Mrs. Tredgold ventures to hope you and I will play after dinner, though I don't expect there will be much in the way of dancing.” Hannibal knelt on the bunk—there was almost no floor-room left with the bath—and dug through his portmanteau for clean shirts for them both. “I think we can safely venture to say that neither Weems nor Fischer will abandon the boat tonight. With the luggage jumbled as it is, they probably couldn't find their own trunks, even if they had some means of transporting them elsewhere, and there's a fog rising. I doubt Molloy could see the flag on the landing of any plantation we pass, and the next town is Mayersville, fifty miles up-river. It's small. I suspect we're safe until we get to Greenville, sixty miles beyond that.”