Dead Water (27 page)

“No, we had to wait for Thu. And 'Rodus told me,
Be quiet or we're all of us dead,
and pushed me far back in the gang when Thu came down. Thu had Mr. Weems with him, tellin' him how he'd found somethin' strange hid in the hold. I didn't see much—it was plenty dark—but 'Rodus had a stick of firewood in his hand, big around as your arm. I don't think Mr. Weems ever saw what hit him. Oh!”

The matches had burned down to her fingers; she fumbled with the scratch-paper, and with a hiss everything fell into the water as the boat lurched again. January pulled the last trunk out of the way and felt for Julie's hands in the darkness, wondering in despair how they were ever going to find the open door. The deck was at an angle of over forty-five degrees underfoot and there was a constant slipping and scraping in the darkness as trunks slithered down.

The door at the stern end, thought January. It opened inward, padlocked on the outside—was there enough purchase to kick it open, with the deck tilted, always supposing he could find it in total darkness . . . ?

Light. A rectangle of daylight, above and behind as the stern door opened, and Rose's voice, “Ben! Ben, are you there?”

“Here!” He grabbed Julie's arm, half dragged the limping girl up the slippery slant of boards. Rose, Thu, and 'Rodus reached down, clinging to the slant of the steps; dragged Julie up, then January, as the
Silver Moon
's boards groaned and snapped with the weight of water in her head. January blinked in the daylight, half-blinded, seeing the water all around the vessel full of spars and planks, doors and shutters, each bit of wood bearing a paddling figure, heading toward the shore. Some, he saw, had already reached safety, and were wading out into the water to haul others in.

“Hannibal . . . ?”

“Is safe, Davis and Jim took him over.” Rose removed her spectacles and tucked them into her skirt pocket. “When the vessel started going down, I realized you couldn't get out of the hold the way you'd gone in. . . .”

The two Fulani brothers had rounded up several doors on the stern promenade. The
Silver Moon
lurched over sideways, dripping paddle still turning wildly in the air—“Better get out of here before the weight brings her over,” warned Thu as he helped Julie down onto a door, then dropped into the water to seize the end of the door and kick toward the shore. 'Rodus took a plank—January and Rose, another door, with January holding and kicking in the same fashion, and feeling like his cracked rib was going to work its way out of his body at every kick. Tomorrow, he knew, he'd pay for the surge of desperate energy that kept him going now.

Thucydides, he noticed, was letting the current carry him farther down, toward a point of land separated from the others, where Julie could get ashore without being noticed. Mindful of the number of outlaws still roving around the woods, January followed.

Water splashed in his mouth and his eyes, and under the surface nameless things—branches, rotting trees, what felt like tangles of submerged rope—tore and grabbed at his ankles. Even in low water the tug of the current was like a giant's hand. Rose pulled her skirts and petticoat up around her waist and slipped the lower part of her body into the water, kicking, too.

They were both breathless and numb when the door finally grated on sand.

Then all they could do was lie on the muddy bank among the dead trees and mats of leaves, feet in the water, gasping for breath and staring up at the cloud-puffed blue of the sky. It wasn't even noon.

That morning before dawn, Hannibal had been rowed over to the bank to shoot and be shot at by Kevin Molloy, now sunk, with Oliver Weems, and Levi Christmas, in the wood and iron coffin of the
Silver Moon
.

The duel seemed weeks ago. January tried to calculate when he'd last slept and realized it had been on the floor of Hannibal's stateroom the night before last, the night that Weems had been murdered by the conductors of the Underground Railway because he'd tried to blackmail the wrong man.

“I suppose all the sheriff of Issaquena County is going to have to do is bring a posse out here on the first moonlit night,” mused Rose, rolling painfully over. She'd lost her tignon in the river, and her long brown hair hung down soaked over her shoulders like seaweed. She fished her spectacles from her skirt pocket, put them on again, and looked back at the river, where smoke still poured from the tall stacks of the
Silver Moon,
still visible above the surface of the water. Mr. Souter would have to warn other pilots of it as they came bowling down the river to Brock's Wood-Yard.

She went on. “He'll be able to round up most of Christmas's men when they go diving to try to find the gold in the wreck. . . . Did you mean it when you said the gold wasn't even on the boat?”

“I think so.” January heaved himself shakily to his feet and took Rose's hand, led her up the muddy bank. All around them rats were scrambling up out of the water, shaking their brown coats and trotting purposefully off into the woods.
They probably have relatives in the neighborhood.

Forty or fifty yards upstream, he could see the door Thu and Julie had used for a life-preserver, lying near a tangle of beached snags. Movement caught his eye and he saw 'Rodus limping down the bank, then turning aside into the tangle.

Hand in hand with Rose, January made for the place, walking slowly and stumbling every now and then into potholes in the bank.

“Molloy stole
something
from Weems's stateroom,” he told her. “Something that could be easily pocketed, and could be taken all at once, not like six hundred pounds of gold or even a couple of valises of securities and Bank of Pennsylvania notes. Something that was hidden with the same copy of the
Liberator
that mentioned Judas Bredon's speeches and involvement with, not only Abolitionism, but with the Underground Railway. It was something that Weems thought he could retrieve easily, too—hence his searching the staterooms of everyone on board whom he thought might have had reason to steal it. It would have been easy enough for Thucydides to tell him that some member of the slave-gang had seen Molloy hide something somewhere, to get him to go down to the promenade deck at midnight.”

“It sounds like a key,” said Rose. “But Molloy didn't have a key on him when he was killed, and you didn't find any such thing in his stateroom, did you?”

January shook his head. “That's because he knew La Pécheresse would find some way to search,” he said, and crossed himself at her name, seeing again in his mind the red streak of her blood in the river. “Or maybe he guessed after Weems's murder that Davis would be asking more questions, and would probably search as well. Molloy was a canny bird—he got rid of it as soon as he could, got it off the boat entirely, so that nothing could be proven against him. But I have a good guess where.”

“Even if you do,” said Rose, “a key does us little good unless we know where the gold is actually hidden. If she and Weems left it behind in New Orleans, I'm not sure we'd ever find it.”

January nodded, a wave of weariness passing over him at the thought of the long search yet to come. And in the meantime, what? Payment was due on their house in two months—sixty days—and in summer there wasn't even work as a musician.

They reached the gray and twisted oak-trees, which formed a sort of crescent in whose center sat the two Fulani brothers and Julie. 'Rodus was holding Julie's hand and laughing, pointing out at the smoke-stacks. He'd taken off his shirt, and water glistened over the scars on his naked back, the marks of a lifetime of defiance. Thu, sitting beside them, wore a look of weariness as he gazed at the river, as if already calculating what to do next.

Julie, January saw now, had gotten rid of the plain gray dress she'd worn as Theodora Skippen's servant—probably because it could be easily described in an advertisement for a runaway. Instead she wore a dark green gown, rumpled and wet from her immersion in the river and grubby from the dirt of the hold, but visibly tabbied with clusters of white and rust-colored flowers.

A gown, January realized, that he had seen before.

By lantern-light, he thought.

In the cemetery of St. Louis.

Before a tomb.

“Was that the gown Sophie gave you?” he asked, and Julie, a little startled at the question, nodded.

“It was Mrs. Fischer's,” she said. “She gave it to Sophie, but Sophie's such a little slip of a thing, it didn't fit, so when I said I was going to run, Sophie passed it on to me. You like it?”

“Yes,” said January with a contented smile. “I like it very much.”

TWENTY-ONE

The sheriff of Issaquena County turned out to be an enormously fat Englishman named Lear, who arrived in a broken-down shay shortly after Roberson and Byrne set out along the river road for Mayersville. Lear immediately sent his single deputy back to town to organize men to search the river banks as far down as Hitchins' Point for castaways, and accompanied the main body of them—including January, Davis, and Rose, with Hannibal and Lundy riding in the shay—back to Mayersville's single boarding establishment, the Montague House.

Shortly after dinner Lear returned, and listened to the combined accounts of Davis, Lundy, and January with narrowed eyes, as if he detected such obvious lacunae as,
How could someone have thrown Weems overboard—much less overpowered and murdered the man—without the slaves chained on the starboard promenade having heard it,
and,
how could anyone have stolen and hidden close to six hundred pounds of gold quickly and secretly on a steamboat?

“The bleedin' thing is,” Lear said, mopping the wide brick-red moon of his face with a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth—for even with evening darkening the windows, the parlor of the Montague House was suffocatingly hot—“that the only ones truly on the spot at the time of the murder are hidin' in the woods. They're not like to be found.”

“Surely the patrols in this county . . .” protested Davis.

“The patrols in this county couldn't find their own arses with a survey map and a Chickasaw guide,” responded Lear mildly. “Every one of those darkies disappeared the minute they stepped ashore, and your friend Gleet's like to give birth over it, not that I blame him. . . . That poor chap Cain didn't really give Gleet title to his darkies, to sell 'em in Memphis and send the money on to Cain's family, did he?”

“Good Heavens, no!” said Davis, startled. “As far as I know, the two men couldn't abide one another.”

“Not to mention a man would have to be feeble in the head to give Gleet title to anything he ever wanted to see again,” added Lundy, sunk in the depths of the landlady's best blue plush armchair. “He tell you that?”

“He did indeed.”

“I understand Mr. Tredgold is going on to Memphis with his family with the next northbound boat,” said Lundy, and Lear leaned close and cupped his ear to hear him. The pilot looked like a dead man, draped over the chair like a pillow-case filled with broken stalks of cane, but his eyes burned sharp and green. “Not feeling so pert myself, I was fixed to stay on here a few days, so if you'd like, I'll take responsibility for any of the runaways that your patrols do find, until I can get in touch with Tredgold again and find out who Cain's heirs and assigns were.”

“That was neatly done,” murmured January as he helped the feeble old man up the stairs to the attic room he shared with Hannibal, January, and Thucydides. The Montague House generally had rooms enough for any steamboat's passengers to board ashore if they wished, but with another boat in port—the
Wild Heart,
down from St. Louis—and with all the
Silver Moon
's officers to put up as well, there was a certain amount of doubling up.

Lundy had announced himself quite willing to share quarters with Mr. Sefton and his “valet,” and the steward had offered his services to the pilot. Rose and Cissy shared a room in the basement, Sophie having elected to spend the night with Julie and the rest of the two slave-gangs in the woods. Most of the other white men were doubled up three and four to a bed in the other chambers.

“Hell,” said the pilot as they paused on the landing, “no county sheriff's got more than a man or two at his disposal at the best of times. Lear would have given that job to any white man who asked.” He clung to the bannister, panting, as January tapped at the door of the attic room, a chamber usually reserved for the servants of guests. “Thu an' that brother of his'll have their work cut out for 'em, gettin' those folks past Memphis and on up through Tennessee and Kentucky. 'Specially now, with Gleet's folks to be led, too.”

Thucydides opened the door. Past him, January could see Hannibal propped up in the room's solitary bed with Rose holding a cup of tisane for him. The fiddler looked like he was coming out of his stupor, but his hands were trembling badly—at a guess, out of need for opium as much as anything else.

Seeing the direction of January's glance, the steward said quietly, “He'll be well enough to travel in two or three days. I gather Julie must have told you that whenever my brother and I conduct cargoes north—and this was our fifth—I bring a little snakeroot, or Indian tobacco, in case someone starts getting suspicious and needs to be gotten out of the way. It removes their interference without permanent harm. Most people attribute the effects to sickness, and traveling in summertime. He was never in any danger, you know. We simply couldn't let the boat be held up—which the sheriff would not have done if the most likely suspect were too ill to be questioned anytime soon.”

“No, I understand,” said January. “And I understand your killing Weems. . . . You must have been watching Fischer like a hawk.”

“I was,” agreed Thu. “But I don't think Weems told her what hold he had over Bredon. He didn't entirely trust her.”

“No sane man would.” January recalled the hardness of those dark, intelligent eyes. “Would you have killed her? If you'd learned she knew?”

Thu hesitated, his face troubled. Then he let out his breath in a sigh. “I'd like to say something comfortable and respectable like ‘I don't know' or ‘I'd have found a way
not to. . . .' But in fact, yes, if she'd showed signs of knowing—or telling—I'd have killed her. They lynch conductors of the Railway, Mr. January. In Virginia they were trying to put through a law allowing black conductors to be burned alive, as fomenters of rebellion and discontent. We can afford to trust no one. We can afford no mistakes.”

The young man glanced back at Hannibal, who had sunk back on the bed and closed his eyes again, then returned his gaze to January. “I know you care a great deal about your master, and I know you trust
him . . . but I never met a slave-holder who could be completely trusted. Not even the ones who claim they ‘understand.' If they ‘understood' so well, why do they still own other men?”

January grinned wryly, and produced his much-battered freedom papers from the inner pocket of his jacket. “It's a question that's always bothered me,” he said. “As much as the question of why a slave can come and go on the upper deck—in service to his ‘master'—but a free man can't. But I've given up trying to figure out how
les blankittes
think. My friend could still have been killed in the duel, and that would have been no kindness, completely aside from landing me in a lot of trouble.”

Thucydides shook his head. “Believe me, my brother is too good a shot to have let your master—your friend,” he amended, handing the freedom papers back with his slight smile, “—be killed. Our father had a rifle that he hid in the rafters of our cabin. He taught us to hunt whenever our master was away from the farm. Later, after we escaped, we lived in the Wisconsin Territory, where it was only a short walk from our mother's house to the woods. We would shoot game to eat, and for Mama to sell to the loggers. It was how we survived. 'Rodus can take the head off a finch at a hundred yards, before it lifts off a branch. I promise you, your friend was never in any danger.”

“But you were,” said January, and after a moment, Thu nodded. “And two people falling over the side would have been a little . . . obvious.”

“Specially with
you
twitterin' around the boat askin' questions,” put in Lundy, and Thu smiled again, and began to help the old man off with his coat and cravat.

To January, the steward said, “Weems had the issue of the
Liberator
that contained, not only one of Bredon's speeches, but a description of him. That was before he began running cargoes for the Underground Railway. The article spoke of his eyes, which are—were,” he corrected himself, “—were an uncommon color, and of the pockmarks on his skin.”

He was silent a moment, the muscles of his jaw standing out in hard relief under the fine-grained skin. Then he shook his head and went on. “Weems used that article to get money out of Bredon, after your friend and Byrne cleaned him out at whist . . . and don't think some of us didn't see what was going on in that game. I searched Weems's stateroom as soon as 'Rodus and I pitched his body overboard, but Molloy had been there that afternoon, when all the men were on deck setting the spars. The paper was gone. I don't know how Molloy even knew it was there. . . .”

“He didn't,” said January. “He was looking for something else. Weems probably kept them in the same place.”

“How did you know?” Thu helped Lundy to sit on the bed, then went to the small china veilleuse on the dresser, where Rose had put on a small amount of tisane to keep warm. “'Rodus tells me you said to him, ‘Give me the key,' as if you knew Cain wasn't a dealer, and 'Rodus wasn't a slave. How did you figure it out? If you don't mind telling me,” he added, suddenly a little shy. “We do need to know where we went wrong, so it won't happen again.”

“I don't think it will happen again.” January pulled off Lundy's boots, settled the old man back on the pillows. “You were both very good. I don't think a white man would have suspected. But I was a slave once myself. Since Hannibal and I were doing the same thing—and had to watch out for the same things—it was clear to me that 'Rodus and Bredon were acting like partners, not like slave and master . . . and certainly not like slave and slave-dealer.”

Thu nodded. “They worked together well,” he agreed. “'Rodus had helped Bredon with five cargoes. They tried to keep up the act of hate and mistrust, but sometimes there simply wasn't time to go through the . . . the dialogue.”

“Make time,” advised January. “Trust and cooperation show. It was clear to me by the way the men's gang was acting that Weems had been murdered in their presence. The fact that they all denied seeing or hearing anything told me the culprit had to be someone they considered one of themselves. The fact that you and 'Rodus are clearly brothers pointed out a strong probability that you had something to do with it.”

The steward chuckled. “That's something whites just don't see, you know. Because 'Rodus is darker than me, not a single white man has ever asked if we're related. It's as if men of dark skin are all invisible to them—they don't look at our faces.”

“Which Bredon was counting on,” said January quietly, “when he took that big a gang across in the skiff to pick up Molloy's body after the duel. I take it 'Rodus swam across sometime during the night, and stationed himself on the high ground?”

Thu nodded. “He had one of the rifles from the purser's office wrapped in oilskin, and pushed it in front of him on a plank.”

“That's what the final clue was, you know. After Molloy was shot, I came across in the skiff with Bredon and the slave-gang, and I didn't think 'Rodus was among them. If I hadn't been so worried about Hannibal, I'd have thought more about it. When the group of them came back from the trees on the knoll, and there was 'Rodus with the others, I simply thought I'd been mistaken. I don't think a single soul on the boat gave the matter an instant's thought. ‘There goes Cain with a gang
of slaves. . . . Here comes Cain with a gang of slaves.' As if that ‘gang of slaves' was one single entity, and not six—or seven—individuals, each with his own face, his own fears, his own heart.”

“If any whites thought like that,” said Rose, looking up from the bed where she had sat in silence, “they couldn't hold slaves, could they?”

“Don't you believe it, Madame.” Thu's mouth twisted as if he'd bitten into something spoiled. “Trust me, I've dealt with white men who went on for
hours
about what is best to be done with ‘poor Negroes' but who wouldn't share a tin cup with me, let alone a hotel room. I underestimated your friend,” he added, looking down at Hannibal. “I owe him an apology.”

“For many things, I think,” said Rose.

Thu glanced over at January with a lift of one eyebrow. “I wondered if anyone had noticed that 'Rodus was missing that morning until the detail came back from the shore. Bredon kept the men busy about the boat, so no one would comment that he was gone—they would assume he was simply somewhere else.”

“It worked well,” agreed January. “Except that it was one thing too many. Any single one of those circumstances: Bredon making sure that Gleet was with him on the night of the murder; Bredon keeping the slaves busy on the morning of the duel so no one would know quite where 'Rodus was; 'Rodus re-appearing with the gang . . . any of those might have been co-incidence by itself. Taken together, it was clear to me, at least, that Cain—Bredon—was using 'Rodus as his agent. And that, therefore, the relationship between them was not what it seemed. And given the social position of the average slave-dealer,” added January wryly, “just about the only thing worse that one
could
accuse him of being was . . . an Abolitionist.”

“Oddly enough,” said Rose, “I never quite accepted Cain as a slave-dealer. And I realize now what troubled me about him. On the first day he came on board at Donaldsonville, he came onto the promenade to look at the women, and he encountered me there. And he stepped back out of my way, to let me pass. The way any gentleman would, for any lady. Any white lady.” Her green eyes were wry behind her spectacles. “And he looked at me, for one instant, politely, as if I were indeed any common lady in the street, and not something to be raped or worked to death with indifference. Mr. Bredon was,” she concluded softly, “an exceptional man.”