Dead and Buried (28 page)

Toward noon he stopped long enough to eat the last fragments of bread and cheese that he’d brought from the
Parnassus
, and he re-shaved the stubble on his crown as well as he could in the stagnant water of a bayou. Since Verron would have described a clean-shaven man, he trimmed and shaped the beard that was beginning to come in, rather than remove it. Later, when he heard a dog bark distantly in the woods for the second time in an hour, he knew they were catching him up.

Climb a tree and wait until they passed? Or would delay only increase the chances of another searcher coming on his trail? Parnassus Sam’s friend in Baton Rouge had described Bayou Lente Plantation as lying ‘a piece’ on the upriver side of Cloutierville, and he wasn’t certain he could find it without knowing exactly where the town was. Moreover, he didn’t know if the man he wished to speak to there would admit him, or listen to what he had to say, unless he visited the church first. He moved on, changing his direction toward where he thought the river should lie, until he found his way blocked by the dilapidated fences and straggly cornfield of a small farm. He retreated south-westwardly into the woods to give it wide berth, and heard, in the woods’ stillness, shockingly close, the voice of a man.

Among the pines the underbrush wasn’t thick. Movement could be seen a good distance off. He tried to slip from tree to tree, keeping an eye out for a thicket of laurel or hackberry, or an oak with branches low enough to climb on to, but moving away from where he thought the voices came from, he saw the trees thinning toward an open field of some sort – another farm? – and tried to backtrack. The day was overcast, and even this late in the afternoon – it was getting toward evening by this time – it was impossible to tell direction, and before he felt safe enough to stop and take his bearings again he saw movement away to his right among the trees.

At the same moment the dogs started barking again, off to his left. Flight wouldn’t work, and he had only moments to prepare for the inevitable. Swiftly, he pulled his free papers from the dilapidated bindings around his ribs, along with the notes he’d made in St Francisville, rolled their oiled silk covering tight around them and thrust them deep under the roots of the most distinctively-shaped tree he could see, a stunted water-locust that branched so near the ground as to be shaped almost like a V. After a moment’s mental struggle he added his knife to the cache and walked away from it, in the direction of the men and the dogs, his hands raised up.

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, keep me safe
 . . .

‘There he is!’

‘You stay right there, boy!’

He froze, raised his hands higher, and called out, ‘Please don’t loose them dogs, Marse! I ain’t goin’ nowhere!’

Like Compair Lapin, do whatever you need to do to survive. Show yourself to be as much a man as they are and be killed. Show that you’re smarter than they and be killed. Show them
anything
except exactly what they want to see – an eye-rolling caricature of dim-witted subservience – and be killed, your death accomplishing nothing.

Like Compair Lapin, you could laugh when you were safe back in the briar patch.

His heart raced so hard that for a time he feared he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands from shaking.
Let them shake. You’re a poor lost nigger who’s scared of dogs
.

But he knew the first few minutes would be touch and go. ‘Don’ hurt me, sirs – don’ hurt ol’ Jim!’ He made his speech as rough and upriver as he could, and he used the name Hannibal had put on his faked slave pass. It took everything he could muster to simply cover his head when they surrounded him, struck him with rifle butts, knocked him to the ground. There were five of them: lean, bearded, dark men who smelled like animals. Swamp trappers, he guessed; men descended from the French and Spanish who’d first inhabited these areas and intermarried with Chickasaw girls. They knew the area and once they’d seen him, he knew he’d never have gotten away.

He tried to cover his cracked ribs and cried out in agony as a boot connected, his mind blurring as he huddled in the circle of barking dogs. Above him he heard one of the men say, ‘Get that rope, Jean-Jean. We show this black bastard what we do to bucks what tamper with white girls.’

‘That wasn’t me, sir! That wasn’t ol’ Jim!’ January gasped the words out and couldn’t stifle another cry as the tallest of the men kicked him again. ‘Please sir, please—’ Not far from him on the ground was the broken remain of a deadfall hickory, half crumbled-away with age and rot. He made a move to rise, ducked another blow and threw himself as if stumbling by accident on to the harsh mess of splintery wood and bark, grinding into it the injured side of his face. When they pulled him to his feet – the wounds from Verron’s beating masked with fresh blood and fresh swelling – he saw one of them did in fact have a rope, and he let his voice break with the terror he felt.

‘They talkin’ about that girl, an’ I swear t’wasn’t me! I’m Jim Blanc that belong to Marse Mayerling in New Orleans, an’ I swear I’m sorry, I’m sorry I runned away!’

Virgin Mother of God, let them believe – let them believe. I’m going to God-damn kill Hannibal when I get back to New Orleans
 . . .

‘You lyin’, nigger.’

‘I swear! I swear!’

The tallest hunter put the muzzle of his rifle to January’s head, but the oldest – gray and small with one wry shoulder – reached down and pulled him to his feet. January immediately raised his hands again as the hunter searched him, whispering thanks that the light was beginning to go.

‘What’s this?’

‘That a cumpus, sir.’ January ventured a timid little smile, like a child, disgusted with himself but telling himself he had to make Compair Lapin proud. ‘Marse Mayerling, he say it tell him which way to go an’ how to find your way aroun’, but I can’t make heads nor tails of it an’ that’s the truth. I got a pass, sir. That piece of paper, that from Marse Mayerling. I swear I meant to go home when I was s’posed to, an’ I would have, ’cept for gettin’ lost—’

‘Shut up.’ The man slapped him, open-handed, across the face, turned Hannibal’s carefully-forged document over in his hands, then looked at the tin slave badge.

The tall man said again, ‘He’s lyin’, Toco. Buck that’s bulled a white girl, he’ll say anythin’, keep his neck out of a noose.’ And the little man with the rope grinned and shook the noose in his hands, clearly enjoying the prospect of causing that much fear.

‘Anyhow, he stole that cumpus thing,’ The tall man mispronounced the word exactly as January had.

January shook his head desperately. ‘I just borrowed the cumpus, sir, to find my way with! I sure was gonna give it back.’

‘Where’s your master?’

January didn’t dare let the relief that washed over him show on his face. The longer you kept them talking, the likelier you were to come out safe. ‘I think he musta gone on downriver by this time. He stop at Alexandria, an’ wrote me a pass to see my mama, that’s at Indian Pipe plantation—’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Mammy Sally.’ January gave one of the commonest names of black women. ‘Please, sir, please, you write my Marse Mayering, on Rue Royale in New Orleans, an’ he send me up money for me to come home. An’ I swear I never run away no more.’

As he stumbled among his captors toward the bells of Cloutierville – suddenly loud in the softening Sabbath twilight – January remembered Celestine Deschamps, as he’d seen her last: a woman of striking beauty, her face alight with joy as she’d stood with her hands on Isobel’s shoulders, saying, ‘Her Aunt has said that she might take a season in Paris . . .’

And Isobel, almost as beautiful, lips parted and turquoise eyes bright as if she already saw the towers of that gray old city.
Tell me about Paris, M’sieu Janvier
 . . .

Paris is the place where this kind of thing doesn’t happen to those with African blood in their veins, Mamzelle
.

Paris is the place where white young ladies of fifteen are not taught that it is perfectly appropriate to call a man their father’s age ‘tu’ as if he were a child or a dog
.

Where white boys
– like the one who walked beside Toco with his rifle trained on January –
aren’t told that hanging a black man on no evidence but rumor is something that white men can do without a second thought . . . Without a single consequence, either legal or moral, for taking another man’s life
.

Coming into Cloutierville – a store, a church, a cotton press, a couple of warehouses, and a handful of houses ringed by dusty trees – in the last of the daylight, January breathed a prayer of thanks that they hadn’t met Louis Verron and his cousins on the way. There was a certain amount of discussion among his captors about where Verron might be staying:

‘Beaux Herbes?’

‘No, ain’t nobody there but the overseer, an’ that wife of his can’t cook for sour owl shit . . .’

‘If he’s anywhere it’ll be with the Ulloas at Charette.’

And the pot-bellied storekeeper – into whose slave jail January was consigned – opined that Verron would be out at Vieudedad with his grandmother.

Toco sent tall Dago to Charette, young Landry to Vieudedad, and handed over January’s ‘cumpus’, razor, slave badge and forged pass to the storekeeper, whose eyes hardened when they rested on him: he, too, had heard whatever foul story Verron had put about. ‘Verron said the buck what did it was big like this.’ He studied him narrowly in the smoky lantern-light. ‘Said he’d been beat pretty recent, too.’

It was a good bet, thought January, as they locked him into the shed out back, that nobody was going to bring him dinner.

The storekeeper tied January’s hands behind him, thrust him into the shed with the words, ‘If I find you tampered with any of the goods in here I’ll skin the hide right off your back, boy,’ and locked the door; January just had time to take in the fact that the shed was in fact a storage shed for the store, and to note where the bottles of something – horse medicine, by their shape – were lined on a shelf, before the lantern was taken away, leaving him in darkness.

He called despairingly, ‘No, sir! No, sir! Please, sir, you write my Marse, Marse Mayerling, on Rue Royale in New Orleans . . .’ and then listened until the crunch of the man’s feet on the gravel died away. The temptation was to sit down with his back to the sacks of flour for a few minutes and rest before beginning his escape, but he knew the danger he was in of falling asleep sheerly from exhaustion.

Without any idea how long it would be before Dago or Landry located Louis Verron, there was truly not a minute to linger.

Blue twilight outlined the bars of the window; the shed had clearly been used as an
ad hoc
slave jail before. They were outside the glass and looked too wide to be iron – by the shape, when he went over to see, they seemed to be stout wooden slats, nailed to the side of the shed. He turned back into the blackness, found the shelves and, with a little groping, located the bottles. When he dropped one on the brick floor, the smell told him it was definitely horse medicine, though it reminded him a good deal of the barrel in Kentucky Williams’s kitchen.

Scraping and cutting at the ropes – and his fingers – with the largest piece of the broken glass, he mentally reviewed the lie of the land around the store; he didn’t think the window was visible from its back gallery. The smell of horses nearby told him there was a stable as well.

Good
.

His fingers, bloodied from the glass, slithered on the improvised cutting tool and he dropped it; patiently groped in the darkness of the floor.

Damn you, Hannibal
 . . .

Damn you, Blessinghurst, or whatever your name really is. How DARED you threaten that girl with what you threatened her . . . With what you must have threatened her
 . . .
?

How had he found out?

January shook the thought away.
Time enough to learn that
 . . .

He felt the ropes weaken and pulled his hands through, greased by the blood. He dried them carefully on his shirt, used the glass to cut the stitching on his trouser band, and drew out one of the packets of matches. He recalled seeing, lined up near the door, the big oil jars that came into Louisiana in such quantities from Spain: everyone used them, empty, for everything, from salting down pork to burying up to the neck in the ground as butter coolers, but these were still sealed. Another piece of glass, with his shirt tail wrapped around one side of it to protect his fingers, served him to scrape and chip the wax away.
Step careful – the last thing you need now is an open cut on your foot
.

Still no sound from the house. Had the storekeeper sons? A wife? This early in the evening, it was difficult to imagine that a family wouldn’t come peeking around the door at one end of the kitchen, open to show the stair to the upper reaches of the house.

One match helped January locate a box of paintbrushes. He used the handle of one to break the windowglass, the brush itself to dip and paint, dip and paint oil on to the stout slats outside. In case the storekeeper came running out he daubed more oil on to the flour sacks – ready to shout: ‘Oh lemme out, lemme out, somebody done throwed a fireball in through de winder!’ followed by a wallop over the head the minute the door was open – then lit the oil on the window bars.