Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (34 page)

Thin mist veiled the water in patches, but he could discern the dark line of trees that was the far bank. Above him the sky was clear, and the moon far enough to the west that the stars over the east bank were bright. From the tail of the Dipper he sited a line down the sky to two brilliant stars, identifying their positions and hoping he could do so again when in midriver and fighting the current's drag.

He tied his food, clothing, blanket, and boots to the tree trunk he'd freed, took two deep swigs of the rum, which was worse than anything he'd ever tasted in his life, laid his chained arm over the trunk to carry the weight of his body, and set out swimming.

I didn 't kill her,
Galen Peralta had said.

And January believed him.

He didn't want to, because the alternative it left would be even harder to prove . . . and hurt him with the anger of betrayal.

The Indian Princess at the foot of the stairs. The flash of buckskin, half-glimpsed through the crowd around the ballroom doors. I must see her . . . I MUST.

He'd offered to take the message. Had she assented only to be rid of him, to make him think that she'd left? The desperation in her eyes came back to him, when she'd spoken of her grandmother's jewels, cold desperation and anger. The way she'd set her shoulders, going in to talk to the broker who held her husband's debts. That trash McGinty, her husband's relatives had said ... A man who undoubtedly was using the debts to urge marriage on a widow. For an upriver American on the make, even a run-down plantation was better than nothing.

She was a woman, he thought, backed into a corner, and the way out of that corner was money enough to hang on to her property. Money that could have come dirough those jewels that had been her grandmother's, and then hers. Jewels she would still regard as hers by right, and the woman who took them a whore and a thief.

Mist moved between him and the bank. He kicked hard at the moving water beneath and around him, stroked hard with his left arm, and kept his eye on the clearer of the two guiding stars. The sheer size of the river, like a monstrous serpent, was terrifying, the power of it pulling at his body, as if he were no more than a flea on a dog. The willow trunk he held on to, bigger than his own waist, was a matchstick on the flood, and he wondered what he'd do if a riverboat, or a flatboat, came down at him from the north, without lights, emerging from the fog.

There was nothing he could do about that, he thought. Just keep swimming.

The problem was, in spite of all of the information he had he knew she hadn't done the murder.

He could probably have made a case against her— possibly one that would even stick, given that her family had half disowned her and her husband's relatives wanted clear title to Arnaud Trepagier's land and she was refusing to marry any of them.

But it might not save him, even at that.

And he knew she hadn't done it.

In all the trash on the parlor floor, there hadn't been a single black cock feather.

Yet she was lying and had been lying from the start. She knew something. Had she seen something, staying on as she did? Spoken to someone?

Sally.
Hannibal could find out from the girls in the Swamp, if he asked enough of them. Possibly even Shaw would be able to track her down, once January had told him.

Told him what?
he thought bitterly. That a white Creole lady might know something, when Angelique's father can see a perfectly good man of color to convict of the crime to satisfy Euphrasies vengeance on the world?

He supposed the gentlemanly thing to do was to keep silent about whatever his suspicions were, to help Madeleine Trepagier cover whatever her guilty secret was. But he knew he'd have to find it and twist her with it; he'd have to threaten to tell to force her to give him whatever answers she could.

He felt like a swine, a swine running squealing from the hammer and the rope.

He kicked hard against the drag of the water around him, struggling with waning human might against the King of Rivers. Weariness already burned in his muscles, weighted his bones.

He could flee he supposed. Ironic, that Xavier Peralta had offered him exactly what he'd been planning to save his money for. Pere Eugenius always xlid say, Be careful what you pray for.

Not that Uhrquahr would let the chance of $1,500 clear profit slip out of his hands so easily.

He was a surgeon, and there were surgical hospitals in London, Vienna, Rome ...

Cities where he knew no one, where there was no one. He wasn't sure exactly when his feeling had changed, or how. Perhaps it was Catherine Clisson's smile of welcome, an old friend glad to see him, or the voices of the workers singing in the fields. He understood that he had been lonely in Paris, until he'd met Ayasha. He had been a stranger on the face of the earth, in every place but New Orleans, where his family was and his home.

In New Orleans he was a man of color, an uneasy sojourner in a world increasingly American, hostile, and white. But he was what he was. At twenty-four he'd been strong enough, whole enough, to seek a new life. At forty, he didn't know.

He'd spoken to Angelique in order to help Mme. Trepagier, Madeleine, his student of other years, trying to play the part of the honorable man. Trying to reestablish his links with that old life. And this was his reward.

The water rolled against him, a wave like a solid wall, his leaden limbs fighting, driving him across the currents toward the shore. His two cold stars watched him, disinterested, as the moon dipped away toward the tangled west.

There was nothing of this in Bach, he thought, his mind striving to throw off the creeping weight of exhaustion, the growing insistence that even on the breast of the river, what was best for him now was sleep. Skirls of music flitted through his mind, Herr Kovald's light touch on the piano keys, Mozart, Haydn, the Water Music ...

Swimming against the river's might, struggling with exhaustion and the heavy smells of the mud and the night—fleeing injustice and servitude toward a town where those things passed under other names—the only songs that came to his mind were those of his childhood, the dark wailing music of the African lands. Those spoke in his muscles and his bones, as he pulled against the current and kept his eye on his guardian stars.

He reached the far bank aching but knew he dared not stop. Plantations stretched in an almost uniform forty arpents inland—two or three miles—before petering out in a wilderness of bayou, cypress swamp, and pine wood. He climbed the levee on his hands and knees, like an animal, and lay on the top, panting, staring at the dark water, all sparkling with the silver of the sinking moon. It was early spring, the world very silent but for the lap of the river below. Inland all creation breathed one damp cold breath of turned earth, where a new crop of sugar was being prepared for, trenches chopped like bridal beds in the long dirt hills. He knew it wouldn't be many hours before the slaves would be out again.

He ate some bread, which was wet in his pack, and drank as much of the rum as he dared spare, knowing he'd need it for his hand, and got to his feet again. His legs felt like rubber.

Daddy, wherever you are,
he thought, for no particular reason, your son s thinking of you.

He traveled like this for two days, and a little more.

He struck the chain off his arm as soon as he was far enough from habitation that the hard clang of the mattock head on the shackle wouldn't be heard—or he hoped it wouldn't be heard—and carried the iron half of Friday before he decided the drain on his strength wasn't worth the possibility that he might need it. He buried it under a hollow log.

He kept close enough to the rear of the plantations to follow the line they made, the line of the river that would lead him eventually back to town, but it terrified him. He guessed Peralta would be offering a large reward for his capture—Big black buck, it would say. Runaway. And there were always patrols. In older times there'd always been coming and going between the plantations and little colonies of runaways—marrons—in the woods, but heavier settlement and the death of the rebel leader Saint-Malo had put a stop to that. Sometimes he heard riders in the woods and hid himself in the thickets of hackberry and elder, wondering if he'd been sufficiently careful about keeping to hard ground, wondering if he'd left some sign. He was surprised how much of his childhood woodcraft came back to him, but he knew himself incapable of navigating, once he got out of sight of the thinning in the trees that marked the fields to his left.

In the afternoons the singing of the work-gangs in the fields came to him, and as it had on the breast of the river the music took him by the bones. Lying in the thickets with the gnats dense around his head, drawn by the scent of the rum on his hand as he bandaged it, and of his sweat, he listened to those voices and thought, This is the music of my home.

"Ana-qut, an'o'bia,

Bia'tail-la, Que-re-qut,

Nal-le oua, Au-Monctt,

Au-tap-o-tf, Au-tap-o-tt,

Au-qut-rt-que, Bo."

African words, not even understandable by those who sang them anymore, but the rhythm of them warmed his tired blood. He wondered if Madeleine Trepagier's girl Sally had felt anything like this, running from her mistress—running to New Orleans.

Probably not,
he thought. She'd fled with a man and had had his promises to reassure her: his gifts and his sex to keep her from thinking too much about whether he'd keep his word, from wondering why a white man would suddenly get so enamored of a slave.

If she hadn't been in the Swamp three days ago, he thought—with the tired anger that seemed to have become a part of his flesh—she would be soon.

On the Saturday he met Lucius Lacrtme.

He heard the tut of hooves, the rustle and creak of saddle leather, at some distance, but the woods were thin. He turned and headed inland, not fast but as fast as he dared, seeking any kind of cover that he could.

Thin with pines on the weak soil, the woods here seemed as bare of cover as the ballroom of the Salle d'Orleans.

The hooves were near and he knew they'd see him for sure if he kept moving. He crouched behind the roots of the biggest tree he could find, wadding his big body down flat and small to the earth and tucking the dwindling bundle of blanket and food between belly and knees. He'd feel a fool if they saw him, hiding like a child behind a tree.

As if, he thought, feeling a fool was the worst thing that would happen then.

“. . . Wench over to the Boyle place.” American voices, quiet. “Cooks a treat, but ugly as a pig.”

“Put a bag over her head, then. Christ, what you want for a— You there! You, nigger!”

Every muscle galvanized as if touched with a scientist's electrical spark, but he forced stillness. A trick, a trap . . .

Then another voice said in bad English skewed by worse French, “You talkin' to me, Michie?”

“Yeah, I'm talkin' to you. You see any other niggers hereabouts? Lemme see your pass.”

“That ain't him, Theo, that's just old Lucius Lacrime. Got a place hereabouts.” The hooves were still. January heard the chink of bridle hardware as one of the horses tossed its head. “You seen a big black buck, Looch? Headin' toward the city, maybe?”

“Not headin' toward the city, no, sir.” Lucius Lacrime had an old man's voice, thin and slow and almost sing-song, a broken glass scritching on a rock. “Big man? My nephew he say there somebody holed up someplace along Bayou Desole. Big man by his track, and black my nephew say, but wearin' boots like a white man. That be him?”

The woods were so still January could hear the far-off boom of the steamboats on the river, four miles away, and the ringing of an ax. Bridle hardware jingled again, this time sharply, and a horse blew.

“That'll be him,” said the man who was fastidious about the appearance of cooks. “You know Bayou Desol6, Furman?”

“I know where it lies. Bad country, peters out in a swamp. Just the place a runaway'd hole up, I guess.”

The hooves retreated. The voices faded into the mottled buffs and blacks of the early spring woods. January didn't raise his head, knowing in his bones that Lucius Lacrime still stood where he'd been.

In time the old voice said in English, “You can come out, son. They gone.” There was a stillness, January not moving. Then, in French, “You're safe, my son. I won't harm you.” He barely heard a rustle, until the old man got almost on top of his hiding place. Then he stood up.

“Thank you, grandfather.” He nodded to the flattened weeds behind the cypress knees. “There's not much cover here.”

“They're searching, all around the woods.” Dark eyes like clear coffee considered him from within an eon of wrinkles, like the eyes of a tortoise on a log. He was a middle-size man who looked as if he'd been knotted out of grass a thousand years ago, dry and frail and clean. Tribal scars like Uncle Bichet's made shiny bumps in the ashy stubble of his beard.

“They say they look for a runaway field hand, but no field hand wears boots or needs them.” He held out an arthritic claw and took January's left hand, turned and touched the powerful fingers, the raw welt that the rope had left when they'd bound him. “What they think you pick for them, flowers?”

January closed his hand. “No dealer in Natchez is gonna ask about why a field hand's got no calluses, if the price is cheap. Thank you for sending them on.” He reached down for his bundle, but the old man caught his right hand with its crusted wad of wrappings, and turned it over in his bony fingers.

“And what's this, p'tit? Do they know you hurt? They'll spot you by it.”

January shook his head. “I don't think they know.”

The old man brought the bandage up to his nose and sniffed, then pushed at the edges, where the shackle had chafed raw the skin of his wrist. He nodded a few times, and said, “You a lucky child, p'tit. Old Limba, he look out for you. But headin' on back to town, that the first place they look. Stay in the bayous, down the southwest across the river, or back in the swamps. You can trap, fish, hunt. . . . They never find you.” His grin was bright, like sun flecking off dark water. “They never found me.”