Dead Water (14 page)

As at Natchez, it was no difficult matter to follow Weems's cab up the hill. Clay Street was nearly as steep as Natchez's bluff, and the hill, though set a little farther back from the river, was just as high, one of the long line of bluffs that rose like a wall on the east side of the river. Once away from the torchlight and clamor of the red-light district along the landing, Vicksburg, in its darkness and silence, seemed a much more American town than Natchez. Though the town was only twenty years old, it already had showy houses, pillared like Greek temples in the style favored by Americans: cotton-planters whose lands lay across the river on the flat, fertile, and smotheringly hot delta plain.

The Majestic Hotel was of this style, new and freshly-painted, with very young elm-trees planted on either side of its door. The night porter who opened for Weems and Mrs. Fischer had a gimcrack and brightly-painted air to him, too, fresh-faced and busy. From the darkness beneath the oak-trees across the street, January left Hannibal to watch the front door and followed the cab around to the rear yard. There Sophie got down, saw to it that the trunks were put in a locked shed, tipped the porter, and went inside, carrying her own modest bundle of clean apron and fresh petticoat.

There was no gate on the yard. January stepped back out of sight as the cab passed him—the single lantern above the hotel's rear door threw about as much light as a tallow candle—then slipped around back to Adams Street, where Hannibal waited under the oaks of the vacant lot.

“They've taken a room.” The fiddler pointed to a curtained window now glowing with the illumination of lamplight within. “Goodness knows what name they gave.
The merchant, to secure his treasure / Conveys it in a borrowed name. . . .
Though they may in fact just spend the night playing backgammon, as they cannot, as you pointed out, get back on the boat without drawing attention to themselves until morning. Are the trunks back there?”

“In a padlocked shed.”

“
Two massy keys he bore of metals twain / The golden opes, the iron shuts amain. I shall return 'ere the leviathan can swim a league.
. . . though I wonder now whether that's in low water or high.
For some must watch, while some must sleep / So runs the world away. . . .”
He darted across the street and vanished like a wayward elf into the darkness.

The lamp upstairs was still burning when Hannibal re-materialized at his side.

“
Stand, and unfold yourself,
” whispered his voice from the shadows, and quite properly January gave back the next line from the opening of Hamlet,

“Long live the king. You come most carefully upon your hour.”

“Wretched newfangled patent Yankee locks on the trunks.” Hannibal flexed his long fingers, and shivered, though the night was gluily warm. “But worth the effort. They're full of old books, Bible tracts and collections of sermons . . . perhaps we should reclaim them and make a present of them to Mr. Quince.”

“They'll be heading back to the boat as soon as they think they're unobserved, then,” said January. He glanced up at the moon, trying to gauge how many hours had passed. “Would you do me a favor? Go back to the boat and see what they've done with the engines? See whether they've let the steam down—which will mean the boat's here until noon at least—or just banked the furnaces so they can get up steam in a few minutes. You don't need to rush coming back,” he added, taking a second look, by the reflected glow of the single door-lantern across the street, at his friend's rather drawn face.

“
Will ye reach there by moonlight / If your horse be good and your spurs be bright,
” said Hannibal, saluting. “I will be
bloody, bold, and resolute
. You be bloody, bold, and resolute as well,
amicus meus,
and watch your back. We may be away from the waterfront, but personally, I wouldn't trust myself anywhere in this town—or anywhere around our precious friends up in that hotel-room.”

With that he departed, and January didn't begin to worry about him until cock-crow. The light burned steadily in the window until almost dawn; by four, first light began to flush the sky above the tangled morasses of cow-pastures, swamps, and willow-choked ravines that stretched out behind the town. Despite the high, breezy situation of the town and the oil of citrus January had smeared on his face and hands, mosquitoes whined around him. Hannibal, he guessed, had rested when he returned to the
Silver Moon
—it was a long walk up and down a steep hill, and though the fiddler had lost the hoarse, wet cough of consumption last year, one never really recovered from the disease.

But when the shapes of trees and houses began to emerge from the blackness of night—when, as Ayasha quoted the blessed Koran, “a white thread could be told from a black one”—January began to wonder whether his friend had made it through the noisome alleys of the district Under-The-Hill in safety. They'd passed through a little after midnight coming here, but they'd been two men together, Hannibal's whiteness protecting January from molestation and January's size protecting Hannibal. Though Hannibal wasn't visibly wealthy, January was well aware that the men who haunted such dockside establishments would kill a man for his watch and boots.

Even worse, the thought crossed his mind that Rose might have come on Hannibal resting on deck and said, “I'll go instead. . . .”

The thought brought him out in a cold sweat. Had she tried to come up here sometime during the small hours? Tried to pass through those filthy alleyways that were darker than the inside of a black cow?

He looked back at the nearest house. Servants were waking up. At certain times of the day a black man could idle unremarked, but early dawn wasn't one of them, not across the street from the best hotel in town. He moved off to loiter behind the corner of a closed-up wine-merchant's store halfway down the block.

A porter came out of the hotel and began sweeping the steps. A cab drew up, depositing the stumpy black forms of Mr. Rosenfeld and Mr. Goldblatt from the
Silver Moon,
with more luggage than January could have imagined possible. He wondered how much of their money Byrne the gambler had managed to lift.

All over town, cocks shrilled the coming morning, above a rising, insistent twitter of lesser birds. Wagons passed on the street, heading to the wharves. A burly-bearded gentleman emerged from the hotel, nearly dragging his dainty wife into the waiting cab.

The grass went from indistinct gray to clearest emerald, and a cart rattled up the street with cans of morning milk for the patrons of the hotel. Smells wafted from the hotel kitchen and that of the house across the way, first smoke, then bacon. A dog barked.

Do I go back to the boat and risk losing them?
January wondered. If by some chance they weren't returning—if they'd had other trunks delivered to another location in Vicksburg, for instance . . .

Chambermaids threw open the hotel windows and hung bedding out to air.

When one did so in the room where Weems and/or Fischer had passed the night, January realized, with sinking heart, that the burning lamp had been no guarantee that the room was occupied.

He scrawled a quick penciled note in his memorandum-book—
I shall be at the American Hotel in Memphis on the 7th
, but it didn't really matter what the message was—and hastened across the street with it, entering the side door of the lobby and hurrying to the desk with the air of one who has strode fast and far. The clerk was just polishing the smooth oak counter, black instead of white and an older man than had admitted Weems and Fischer last night but just as smart-looking.

“May I help you?”

“I have a message here for Mr. Weems, that come in last night.” January held up the note. “Weems may not be the name he signed under,” he added as the clerk frowned over the register. “He travelin' with a lady, taller'n him. . . .”

“Must be Mr. and Mrs. Gordon,” said the clerk. “They're the only ones signed in last night. Charlie, the night man, signed 'em in, and there's a note here that they have to be out early, so they paid up right then.”

And slipped out the back when nobody was looking?

Damn, damn, damn. . . .

“Thank you. You didn't happen to see 'em leave?”

The clerk shook his head. “That may have been the couple that left an hour ago. I didn't recognize them, so they might have come in last night. But she wasn't taller than him.”

January frowned as if puzzled, though a rush of suspicion washed over him. “That's funny, I thought that's what my master said . . . I ain't never seen 'em, myself. He said for sure they'd be carryin' green-and-black-striped portmanteaux. . . .”

“That's them,” agreed the clerk promptly. “They sent the boy for a cab around four-thirty, said they had to catch an early boat.”

“Thank you,” said January again, cursing himself for not having looked more closely at the luggage borne behind the bearded gentleman who had emerged from the hotel, and his fluttery, veiled wife. “I reckon I'll catch 'em down by the landing.”

He left through the yard and the alley, loitering a little, though he couldn't imagine that if Hannibal had returned—or if Rose had taken his place—one or the other of them wouldn't have come seeking him. In any case, neither accosted him as he circled back to Adams Street. Deeply worried now, he made his way through the quiet neighborhoods and up and down the rolling slopes of the hill, back toward Clay Street and the levee.

As he came around the corner onto Washington Street and looked down at the waterfront, he froze.

It was barely six in the morning—activity was only just beginning to stir among the boats, wood-piles, heaps of cargo along the mushy fringes of the river; the time when boats were just beginning to take on their cargoes and work up the final heads of steam.

But the
Silver Moon
was gone.

TEN

He ran down to the landing as if, contrary to reason and all evidence of his senses, the steamboat were still in view and he could overtake her.

Brown water lapped sullenly on the clayey slope where the landing-stage had rested. Gouged and trampled mud marked the coming and going of feet. His friend Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guards might have been able to pick Hannibal's tracks, or Rose's, from the mess, but to January it was only a muck of slop and puddles.

Shit,
he thought, and his mind wouldn't work further than that.
Shit, shit, shit.

“When did she leave?” he asked one of the stevedores heaving wood onto the
Concord,
another stern-wheeler that had—to judge by the activity on her deck—just come in.

“'Bout a hour ago.” The man paused in his course toward the wood-piles on the landing, wiped the sweat from his face with the green bandanna that was all he wore above the waist. “They drawed out the fires and damped 'em but never let the steam go all the way down. Musta cost 'em heavy, waitin' like that most of the night, burnin' up wood. Then this couple come in a cab from town, get on board, an' away they go.”

Shit.

January was, he reflected furiously, exactly where he'd spent most of the past three years trying not to be: in the middle of cotton territory, without five dollars in his pockets. Hannibal had carried money—in a fit of worry about Rose's safety, he had left his cash with her.

Shit!

None of the other vessels at the landing looked capable of overtaking the
Silver Moon
. Not upstream on a low river, among the snags and shallows around Vicksburg. If worse came to worst, he supposed he could heave wood to get himself back to New Orleans, and pick up a few dollars extra playing for passengers at night, always supposing he could find a boat where someone had a guitar. . . .

And then what? Wait for Rose and Hannibal to return?
If
they returned? When would that be?

Twenty-five hundred dollars was due to Rosario DeLaHaye for the house on Rue Esplanade on the first of September, just over sixty days away. If that wasn't paid, January would be back living in the garçonnière behind his mother's house—if she were willing to evict the boarder currently occupying the room where January had grown up. Knowing his mother, he wasn't entirely certain she would be. She'd been of the strongly-voiced opinion that he and Rose should have used their money to open a construction business, or to buy slaves to rent out to others.

The prospect of relying on his mother for the cost of a bowl of beans, much less a place for himself and Rose to live, turned his stomach.

And after that?

He took a deep breath and raised his eyes to the willow-gray line of DeSoto Point, where the river made a hairpin bend west. “Where could I catch that boat, goin' overland?” he asked.

The stevedore grinned. He was a man of about January's age, squat and ape-like with smiling eyes. “Whoever on board, you must want her pretty bad,” he said.

January thought of Rose. Of the school that was her dream, and the scrabbling life that he wanted to save them both from. “I do,” he said.

“Then you head on straight north up Chickasaw Bayou.” He pointed along the waterfront, along the outer edge of the bend around DeSoto Point. “You cross the Yazoo River, follow it along left through the swamps till you find Steele's Bayou. That'll put you out above Miliken's Bend. It's ten, twelve miles as the crow fly, an' I guarantee you, that boat'll take so long proddin' through them bars around the islands in the bend there, you should catch 'em with time in your hand to spare. You got food? Water?”

And when January shook his head, the man only sighed, as if at a child who'd set out to run away from home with no more than a biscuit in his pocket. He wore, January saw, pinned to his belt-loop the tin badge of a slave who was rented out—who would come home every evening to his master and hand over his wages, the way January's mother wanted her son to do. Leading January to the pile of cordwood that sheltered the lunches of the dock-workers, he handed him a stoppered gourd and a bandanna bundle that smelled of cheese and fresh-baked bread.

“You watch out,” said the stevedore. “They's slave-stealers in them swamps. Don't you go speak to no white man, and you look twice at the colored ones.”

“I know that much,” January said. “Thank you.” And he gave him fifty cents he couldn't well afford, knowing the man would now have to find a lunch of his own.

“Mind how you go now. And give your pretty lady a kiss from me.”

“I'll do that.”
And any number of candles to the Virgin Mary,
added January silently,
if I catch up with that boat
. . . .

A mounted deputy stopped him just beyond the last few shacks up-river of the town, but seemed satisfied when January showed him the pass Hannibal had written. After that January quickened his steps along the river road. In New Orleans—and in cities on the borderline of slave states and free—there were organized rings of slave-stealers who'd keep their captives half-stupefied with opium until they were deep in the South, too far to strike out easily for their homes.

It was one thing to say
Follow the river north
. It was another to think of how many miles there were to cover between some plantation deep in Louisiana or Alabama, and the Ohio River that divided Kentucky from states where white men didn't ride nightly patrols. He remembered, too, the six-foot post in the jail-yard at Natchez, and the crack of the deputy's whip.

In New Orleans, January felt more or less safe, at least in the old French Town. But even that area of safety was steadily shrinking. He didn't go above Canal Street into the American suburbs if he could help it. Even in the French Town, he was careful to dress well and speak well, the marks of a man of wealth and position. The marks of a man who had family, people who would miss him and call in the law if he should disappear.

As he walked along the river road in the blazing Mississippi sun, he felt anger rise again in him, anger and fear. Fear that he had to push aside, daily, if he was to function at all. Anger that could scorch and wither his soul out of all possibility of love and joy, if for one instant he let it get the upper hand.

But how, he sometimes wondered, could a sane man not be angry?

How could a sane man not be afraid?

The anger and fear were a pain in him, like the pain in Hannibal's joints and lungs, a pain that never eased. He understood how men with that constant grinding ache of soul would seek out opium or alcohol, not for pleasure, but simply for relief from the knowledge that there was nothing that he could do.

A lizard eyed him from a gray deadfall tree a little ways down the slope of the batture, fixing him with a sharp black gaze before it flicked away like an eyeblink. In the brush beneath the willows of the bank something moved, a rabbit or a fox, but January's breath jerked hard in his lungs for a moment.

Somewhere behind him, and probably not very far away, the Reverend Levi Christmas would be trailing the
Silver Moon
.

Unless of course he simply got on her at Vicksburg this morning, all decked out in his black coat and pastoral collar.

That will be all I need.

But at least if that were the case it would mean that Christmas wasn't somewhere behind him, waiting to kidnap him and sell him to some cotton planter in Texas.

The mouth of Chickasaw Bayou lay three miles up-river of Vicksburg, part of the murky bottomlands that lay between the meandering Mississippi and the bluffs along the Yazoo. The air was thick with gnats there, the sunlight greenish through the motionless leaves of cypress and willow. Turtles basked on dessicated logs that rose through the glassy brown surface of the water, arranged, as usual, largest to smallest, with an occasional tiny turtle perched on its larger cousin's back.

January cut a sapling with his pen-knife—the only knife a slave might carry—and prodded the long weeds and honeysuckle that overgrew the faint trace of cow-path, twice startling sinewy rustlings in the undergrowth that spoke of copperheads or water-moccasins lying just out of sight. Once he saw an alligator in the bayou, masquerading as a floating log. Its gold eyes reminded him of Jubal Cain's, glittering just above the line of the silent water.

He was far from New Orleans, and far from the
Silver Moon,
but Queen Régine's curse seemed to be working just fine.

He moved as quietly as he could, stopping repeatedly to listen. The woods were so still that the drumming of the cicadas seemed to roar in the trees, and the squeaky mew of a catbird cut the stillness like a violin note. He wasn't sure what made him first realize he was being pursued.

It wasn't a sound—he didn't hear the strike of hooves until afterwards, nor the rustle of a man flanking the road through the underbrush. Whatever it was that lifted the hair on his nape, January didn't hesitate. He waded silently into the bayou (
Virgin Mary, please don't let there be gators
) and made for the nearest half-sunk tree, sliding almost completely under the water on its far side and keeping the slime-draped trunk between his head and the waterside path.

Still silence.
Did I really just hop in the bathtub with every gator and cottonmouth in Warren County out of sheer bad nerves?

He stayed where he was.

And stayed.

“Where the fuck'd he go?”

Shit, was the ground dry or muddy on the edge where I went in?
He couldn't recall.

Hooves, and the faint jangle of a bit-chain. The creak of saddle-leather.

“Got to gone in the woods.”

“The fuck he did, Reverend, I was comin' round through the woods. He can't have gone up a tree.”

The Reverend Christmas laughed, a hoarse braying. “I'd like to see a nigger that big hangin' in a tree like an old coon. We'll get him, Turk. If he's headin' for the river, we'll catch him.”

“What if he ain't?”

“Where else he gonna go? They all head for the river when they run. I hear there's a regular leg of the Underground Railway runnin' up the river these days. That's where he's headed, sure.”

“You think he got that boy Bobby with him?”

“I didn't see him. He coulda been waitin' for him outside town. One way or the other, if that big bastard is indeed our loyal friend, I got a score to settle with him on that boy Bobby's
account. . . .”

The voices faded, swallowed up in the soughing of the trees.

So Bobby decided to run after all. Christmas and his bravos had probably counted on the
Silver Moon
laying by for a few more hours, and had been caught on the hop by her sudden departure. They had almost certainly seen him on the waterfront. At least the Reverend wasn't on board with Rose.

“. . . figure we can catch 'em at Horsehead Bar.”

January had just begun to reach down for footing on the murky bottom, when other voices sounded on the path. He ducked down again, praying the movement hadn't caught anyone's attention.

“That's twenty miles!”

“You ever know a boat to get off Horsehead Bar in less'n two days at low water?”

Something brushed January's leg underwater, and he fought not to flinch. By force of will he remained where he was for another ten minutes, listening. When the frogs began to croak again, eerie in the stillness, he cautiously raised his head. The path and the woods were empty. Trembling, he waded, not back to the path, but across the rest of the bayou, and plunged into the tangled undergrowth of the woods.

His benefactor at the landing had instructed him to follow Chickasaw Bayou but hadn't mentioned what other bayous might intersect it in the marshy lands within the big river's loop. Trying to keep the bayou on his left, January encountered a wider body of water. . . . Another bayou? The Yazoo River? It seemed to have a current, but bayous frequently did. In the leafy summer woods it was difficult to determine the direction of the sun, which stood nearly straight overhead now. The windless air was suffocating. January crossed the river—or bayou—and followed it to his left, but it bent back on itself, and rapidly dried to a shallow pan of reeds and dead trees fringed with ants' nests the size of flour-sacks.

When he turned back to seek the original bayou, he found himself amid trees that looked totally unfamiliar, cypress and bright-green thickets of harshly-whispering palmetto, the ground a jungle of elephant-ear underfoot. He pushed through this until, ahead of him, he smelled the whiff of smoke, the ashy pungence of a fire newly damped. He stood to listen but heard nothing. No voices, no curses, no friendly bicker of men breaking camp.

Silently, January moved back into the palmetto thickets . . .

. . . and heard a rustling away to his right.

He moved away from it as silently as he could, but something—the birds too silent, perhaps? The cicadas hushed?—turned him back farther into the woods, and after a few moments he heard the unmistakable crack of a trodden stick to his left. Among the palmettos he was at least sheltered from sight, and he moved from clump to clump, listening to the rustle of the men hunting him. And they were hunting him, two of them at least, working through the thickets on either side. Somewhere close by he heard a dog bark, and made for the sound, his steps quickening as the slashing rustle neared.