You 're condemning me to exile from everyone I know, thought January, as the door closed behind Galen, the labored squeak of the bolt echoed again. From the only home I have. And you expect me to pity you because you can't confess?
Have your own nightmares, boy. I'll shed a tear for you on my way back to New Orleans on foot.
He turned back, gritting his teeth hard as the steel arms of Christ's cross pressed, then grated, in the raw meat of his palm, and began to gouge at the clay once more.
"Boss-man say, Gonna sell that big black boy, Boss-man say, Gonna sell that big black boy.
Tell the Big Boss he run off in the night,
But take him out, take him on up to Natchez
town..."
January swung around, heart pounding hard at the sound of the thin, wailing song beneath the jailhouse
window. A woman singing, he thought, standing in the near-complete early darkness of the evening, her voice almost hidden by the singing of the hands as they came past on the pathway to the cabins.
Singing to him. There was no other reason for her to be there, close enough to the jail for him to touch, had he not been chained.
"Mama, take this food, hide it in the black oak tree, Mama, take this food, hide it in the black oak tree,
Where the bayou bends, My food, my boots, they wait for me..."
Something dark flashed between the bars of the windows; a moment later he heard the soft strike of metal on the packed dirt of the floor.
Uhrquahr, thought January, in a sudden flash of cold rage. So Uhrquahr had his own plans to benefit from the windfall his employer had too much honor to pick up.
The anger helped him. Exhausted, the agony in his hand sapping the rest of his strength, without that fury he wasn't sure he'd have been able to tear free the loosened chain from the wall.
The thought of Uhrquahr did it, though. He wrapped the chain twice around his arm and wrenched, half-blind with anger, and the staple popped free with a force that sent him staggering into the opposite wall. He stumbled, fell, gasping and in a pain he had never experienced in his life, aching in every muscle.
And knowing that he wasn't done yet, for he had to cut through the wooden bars.
He couldn't even stand up to cross the cell to the window. On hands and knees, in the pitch dark, he crawled, back muscles crying out with agony as he swept the invisible dirt before him with his left hand. His right was a useless root of pain. He literally had no idea how he'd manage to cut the bars.
He knew he'd have to manage. There was food and his boots waiting for him in the black oak where the bayou curved-a short distance from the path that led back to Ti Margaux's house, for he'd noticed the tree there. God knew how he'd get the spancel off his wrist or where he could get sufficient alcohol to keep his hand from mortifying-at a pinch, a willow-bark poultice would probably suffice, if he had time to make one. But once he ran, he'd better not get caught again.
His fingers touched metal, lumpy and heavy. It was the head of a mattock, razor-sharp on its edge and capable of chopping through the toughest roots.
Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, he thought, reaching down to touch the rosary in his trouser pocket, with its battered and twisted steel cross, I owe you as many Masses as you want to name.
And I owe you too. Papa Legba- the opener of doors.
NINETEEN
A waxing moon had risen midway through the afternoon, and pale silver flickered on the waters through a gauze of mist when January finally reached the black oak where the bayou curved. Heart pounding with fear of snakes, wildcats, and nests of sleeping hornets, he groped in the crotch of the brooding dark shape, wreathed with fog and Spanish moss, and almost at once his fingers touched cloth. It was a slave's blanket, not his own, wrapped around a good store of ash pone and dried apples, a holed and ragged linsey-woolsey shirt, a corked gourd, which even from the outside smelled of raw cheap rum, and his boots.
Thanking God with every breath he drew, January pulled on the boots first. His feet were bleeding from a dozen scratches and so swollen he could barely get the boots on, but even at this early season, he knew there was danger from snakes. His own shirt he'd torn to make a bandage to keep the dirt out of his raw and throbbing hand, and to tie up the chain to his right arm. He shed the remains and replaced them with the linsey-woolsey garment, which if old and ragged was at least whole.
He tore another strip from the old shirt, squatting in a broad fletch of moonlight on the edge of the field, and gritted his teeth as he pulled the crusted, sticky wrapping from his hand. The new strip he soaked in rum and wrapped tight, put another on top of it, the pain of the alcohol going right up his arm and into his belly and groin as if he'd been stabbed.
The river, he thought. They'll search the west bank first.
As the thought went through his head his heart sank. He was a strong man, and after Galen Peralta had left him, one of the children had brought him pone and pulse and greens on a cheap clay plate, probably what they all lived on in the quarters. But he'd been living soft. He could feel the exertions of yesterday in the muscles of his thighs and back and legs; his bones telling him in no uncertain terms that he was forty. Even with the logs and planks and uprooted trees that drifted down and caught in the snags of the river bars to float his weight, he wasn't sure he'd be able to swim the river at this point. The current was like a millrace below the city, powerful and treacherous.
But he didn't really have a choice. He knew that.
The stream was high, but by the weeds and mud on the banks the peak of the rise was past. There was no guarantee that another rise wouldn't come down while he was halfway across, and if that happened he could be carried halfway to the ocean and perhaps drowned. As he picked his way among the moonlit tangle of weed and scrub on the levee, one or perhaps two plantations up from Chien Mort, he understood why slaves became superstitious, praying to whatever saint or loa they thought might be listening and collecting cornmeal, salt, mouse bones and chicken feathers in the desperate hope that they might somehow avert catastrophes over which they had no control.
It was the alternative to a bleakness of despair he hadn't known since his childhood.
And in his childhood, he recalled-waist-deep in water, his boots hung around his neck as he struggled to clear a floating tree trunk from half-unseen obstructions, the chain weighing heavier and heavier on his right arm -he had been as avid a student of the rituals of luck and aversion as any on Bellefleur. If he'd thought it would do him any good in reaching the east bank in safety he wasn't sure he wouldn't have taken the time to snap his fingers, hop on one foot, and spit.
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.