Or maybe it was just that someone was getting a talking-to. That would be enough to stop the singing, for as long as it lasted. He strained his ears, but the singing did not resume.
He moved on, quicker now, trying to remember the landmarks. They'd looked different in last night's gathering darkness from the way they had in the afternoon, and far different now, coming back the other way. He found one of his own trail markers near a red oak veiled in Spanish moss like a mourning widow, and had no recollection whatsoever of the place. He knocked the sticks flying as he moved on. How soon would it be, he wondered, before they organized to follow?
At Bellefleur when he was six one of the field hands had run away. He remembered how the overseer had called for men to hunt, and the men had gathered. There had been more white men in the posse from neighboring plantations, since Bellefleur, close to New Orleans, had not been nearly as isolated as Chien Mort, but it was planting time and few could be spared. Most of the hunting had been done-and done willingly-by the runaway's fellow slaves.
He'd as much as told them he was a runaway. And he was no kin nor friend of theirs. For a break from the monotony of clearing the fields, of course they'd follow.
Rain started, thin and steady. It would cover his scent if they were using dogs but made tracks likelier in soft ground, and it further obscured the landmarks. A respectable music master in Paris, he'd worn boots for sixteen years, and Livia had seen to it in the years before that that he'd gone shod like a respectable colored, not barefoot like a black. Though his boots would leave a sharper track he didn't dare take them off and try to flee barefoot.
Around him the woods grew thicker and the ground boggy, cypresses rising ghostly among the oaks. It was farther than he had thought to the small tributary bayou he'd followed to old Ti Margaux's shack. His clothes grew leaden on his back and dragged at his limbs. His mind, always too active, conjured the picture of that exhausted, hag-ridden young man coming back to the whitewashed plantation house to meet his father standing on the threshold, newly returned from the steamboat landing.
Who brought you those gloves?
A b-big n-nigger from town.
And you let him see you? You let anyone from town see your face?
He thought about the girl Sally, simply walking away from Les Saules. As the cook Claire had remarked, it was only an hour to the American streetcar line. Out here he'd have a long way to run before he came to safety.
He came through trees and found himself facing water he'd never seen before, jewel green with duckweed and scaled over with the expanding rings of water drops in the rain. Cypress like old gray gods in rags crowded along its edge, pale against the bright green of the pines behind them. In the water itself their knobby knees rose up like wading children sent ahead to scout the shallows. A turtle blinked at him from a log.
Thank God the alligators are still sleeping this time of year, he thought, turning back on his own tracks, casting around for the blaze he'd left-he thought he'd left- hereabouts. The water in front of him might be the bayou along which Ti Margaux had his broken-down house, or might be a tributary of it, or might lead somewhere else altogether. The rain came harder, rustling in the leaves of the live oaks, the needles of the pines. By the water the air was cool, but in the trees again, even the rain didn't seem to affect the damp heat, only keep him from hearing the sounds of pursuit. He stumbled in a tangle of wild azalea, and very suddenly, found himself face-to-face with a young black man in the coarse trousers of a field hand, a club in his hand.
"Here he is!" shouted the man. "Here he-"
January covered the distance between them in two long strides, wrested the club from the hunter-who was too surprised at being attacked, instead of fled, to use it -and cracked him a hard blow across the side of the head. The young man went sprawling, stunned, and January sprinted in the direction he thought he'd been going immediately before the encounter. The rain pelted harder around him, blurring the green-on-green-on-green of water and vegetation into a confusing monochrome.
He turned toward the thicker growth along the water, but voices were calling out from the high ground, so he knew he couldn't go to earth. Instead he veered for the high ground himself, where the water ash and cypress and palmetto gave place to loblolly pine that killed most undergrowth with its needles. His long legs pumped, his body settling into its stride. He was tall, but he hadn't run in years, and his boots were heavy on his feet. Too many years, he thought, as his breath burned suddenly in his lungs. Those boys back there would be young, and fit.
He skidded, wove, plunged back toward the water again. Something gray caught his eye, and he saw that it was the old house of the deceased Ti Margaux, impossibly on the other side of the water. He had no idea how he'd gotten himself turned around, but the place was unmistakable. For a moment he considered lying low and letting them run past, but they'd see the house as well, know he'd head there. The snakes would be sleeping in winter, like the gators-Please God, let the snakes be still sleeping! Then he pulled off his coat and plunged into the bayou.
It wasn't wide-twelve or fifteen feet-nor particularly deep. He only had to strike out and swim for a stroke or two, holding the coat and his papers aloft, then his boots were slushing thickly in unspeakable mud and a tangle of alligator weed that dragged at him like steel nets. Underwater leaves slit at his thighs and sides as he dragged himself ashore, stumbled up the slope, dragged open the door of the old barn and caught up the bridle, remembering to work evenly and without haste as he coaxed the bit into the horse's mouth, buckled chin strap and band. He flung himself, dripping, onto the horse's back without benefit of saddle and kicked the animal forward out the barn door at a gallop.
Outside there was only a tangle of cypress and red oak, buckler fern and butterweed and creeper slowing the horse's stride. January ducked, keeping his head down under the low-hanging branches, wet moss trailing over his back as he tried to find the narrow trace that had led him here.
Then men were on him, springing out of the jungles of verdure, black, half-naked, armed with clubs and yelling with the hunt. January drove his heels into his mount's sides but hands were already dragging at the bridle, at his legs, pulling the panicking horse down and dragging him off. He swung with his club and felt it connect, but blows rained on his shoulders, stunning him. He felt his own makeshift weapon ripped from his hands, then he was pinned, still struggling, to the ground.
A white man's voice said, "Let him up."
They did, still holding his arms, crowding close around him, the rain not quite washing the rank smell of his own sweat or theirs or the swamp from him.
Three white men stood on the slightly higher ground before him. Evidently none had tried to ride through the swamp, following, like the blacks, on foot. One was a square-built, fair-haired man of thirty or so with a bristling mustache and whiskers, a blacksnake whip hanging coiled at his belt-Uhrquahr the overseer. The second, still in the tweed coat and hunting breeches he'd worn to walk to the cornfield that morning, the rain dripping from the broad brim of his palmetto hat, was Galen Pe-ralta.
The third, white hair bare to the rain and eyes cold and hard as blue glass, was Xavier Peralta.
Peralta turned to one of the field hands holding January's arms. "Is this the man who came to the cabins last night and asked about Michie Galen?"
"Yes sir, it is."
He turned back at January. He, too, looked exhausted, as if the nights that had passed in obligatory family revelry had been harrowed by sleeplessness. It wasn't yet noon, which meant he'd taken the earliest boat he could that morning.
"You told my son that you'd been sent by Madame Dreuze with a keepsake-a gesture I find not in the slightest like the woman, for all her protests of sentimentality-and you told my servants that you were a runaway bound for Grand Isle. I think that you were lying both times. Tell the truth to me now. Who are you?"