Probably not, he thought. She'd fled with a man and had had his promises to reassure her: his gifts and his sex to keep her from thinking too much about whether he'd keep his word, from wondering why a white man would suddenly get so enamored of a slave.
If she hadn't been in the Swamp three days ago, he thought-with the tired anger that seemed to have become a part of his flesh-she would be soon.
On the Saturday he met Lucius Lacrtme.
He heard the tut of hooves, the rustle and creak of saddle leather, at some distance, but the woods were thin. He turned and headed inland, not fast but as fast as he dared, seeking any kind of cover that he could.
Thin with pines on the weak soil, the woods here seemed as bare of cover as the ballroom of the Salle d'Orleans.
The hooves were near and he knew they'd see him for sure if he kept moving. He crouched behind the roots of the biggest tree he could find, wadding his big body down flat and small to the earth and tucking the dwindling bundle of blanket and food between belly and knees. He'd feel a fool if they saw him, hiding like a child behind a tree.
As if, he thought, feeling a fool was the worst thing that would happen then.
"... Wench over to the Boyle place." American voices, quiet. "Cooks a treat, but ugly as a pig."
"Put a bag over her head, then. Christ, what you want for a- You there! You, nigger!"
Every muscle galvanized as if touched with a scientist's electrical spark, but he forced stillness. A trick, a trap...
Then another voice said in bad English skewed by worse French, "You talkin' to me, Michie?"
"Yeah, I'm talkin' to you. You see any other niggers hereabouts? Lemme see your pass."
"That ain't him, Theo, that's just old Lucius Lacrime. Got a place hereabouts." The hooves were still. January heard the chink of bridle hardware as one of the horses tossed its head. "You seen a big black buck, Looch? Headin' toward the city, maybe?"
"Not headin' toward the city, no, sir." Lucius Lacrime had an old man's voice, thin and slow and almost sing-song, a broken glass scritching on a rock. "Big man? My nephew he say there somebody holed up someplace along Bayou Desole. Big man by his track, and black my nephew say, but wearin' boots like a white man. That be him?"
The woods were so still January could hear the far-off boom of the steamboats on the river, four miles away, and the ringing of an ax. Bridle hardware jingled again, this time sharply, and a horse blew.
"That'll be him," said the man who was fastidious about the appearance of cooks. "You know Bayou Desol6, Furman?"
"I know where it lies. Bad country, peters out in a swamp. Just the place a runaway'd hole up, I guess."
The hooves retreated. The voices faded into the mottled buffs and blacks of the early spring woods. January didn't raise his head, knowing in his bones that Lucius Lacrime still stood where he'd been.
In time the old voice said in English, "You can come out, son. They gone." There was a stillness, January not moving. Then, in French, "You're safe, my son. I won't harm you." He barely heard a rustle, until the old man got almost on top of his hiding place. Then he stood up.
"Thank you, grandfather." He nodded to the flattened weeds behind the cypress knees. "There's not much cover here."
"They're searching, all around the woods." Dark eyes like clear coffee considered him from within an eon of wrinkles, like the eyes of a tortoise on a log. He was a middle-size man who looked as if he'd been knotted out of grass a thousand years ago, dry and frail and clean. Tribal scars like Uncle Bichet's made shiny bumps in the ashy stubble of his beard.
"They say they look for a runaway field hand, but no field hand wears boots or needs them." He held out an arthritic claw and took January's left hand, turned and touched the powerful fingers, the raw welt that the rope had left when they'd bound him. "What they think you pick for them, flowers?"
January closed his hand. "No dealer in Natchez is gonna ask about why a field hand's got no calluses, if the price is cheap. Thank you for sending them on." He reached down for his bundle, but the old man caught his right hand with its crusted wad of wrappings, and turned it over in his bony fingers.
"And what's this, p'tit? Do they know you hurt? They'll spot you by it."
January shook his head. "I don't think they know."
The old man brought the bandage up to his nose and sniffed, then pushed at the edges, where the shackle had chafed raw the skin of his wrist. He nodded a few times, and said, "You a lucky child, p'tit. Old Limba, he look out for you. But headin' on back to town, that the first place they look. Stay in the bayous, down the southwest across the river, or back in the swamps. You can trap, fish, hunt... They never find you." His grin was bright, like sun flecking off dark water. "They never found me."
"They'll never look" January settled his weight against the tug of Lacrtme's hand. "Not so long as I'm out of their way. Not so long as I don't come back to the city. So long as I don't come forward as a free man, claiming what's mine, they don't care if I'm dead or a slave or on a ship heading back to Europe. Just so long as I don't bother them. And I'm not going to give them that."
It was the first time he'd said it; the first time he'd expressed to himself exactly what it was that had carried him against the current of the river, that had kept him moving through the long exhaustion of the previous days and nights.
The songs in the field. The blue bead on his ankle. The twisted steel cross in his pocket. They were verses in a bigger song, and suddenly he was aware of what the song was about. And it wasn't just about his family, his friends, and his own sore heart.
Lacrime peered up at him with those tortoise eyes. "They who, p'tit?"
An old man who figured an innocent black man's life was worth less to him than the life of the son whom he believed to be a murderer. The boy who hadn't the guts to go against his father's will.
The woman he'd taught to play Beethoven, all those years ago.
And whoever it was that she would lead him to.
"White men," he said. "I'm going on to town. Is there a path you can point me out to get there?"
Lacrime took him by way of the swamp tracks, the game trails, the twisty ways through the marsh country that lay back of the river, toward the tangled shores of Lake Pont-chartrain. They were old tracks, from the days when networks of marron settlements had laced the boscages. The old man looked fragile, crabbed up with arthritis and age, but like a cypress root he was tough as iron. He scrambled with bobcat agility through thickets, bogs, and low-lying mud that sucked and dragged at January's boots and seemed to pull the strength out of him.
"T'cha, you get soft in this country," the old man chided, when January stopped to lean against a tree to rest. "Soft and tame. The boss men all ask for a man bred in this country, a criolo, instead of one who came across the sea. They all uppity, they say, princes and kings and warriors. When we fought the Dahomies, we'd run this much and more, through the bottomlands by the river, and woe on any man who let the enemy hear him. He'd be lucky if he lived to be brought to the beach and the white man's ships."
"Were you?" asked January. They stood knee-deep in water, skimmed over in an emerald velvet whisper of duckweed, the woods around them gray-silent, hung with silver moss, dark leaves, and stillness. More rain had fallen earlier and the world smelled of it, and of wood-smoke from some distant squatter's shack. Maybe bandits, and maybe others like Lacrime.
"Ah." The old man spat and turned to lead him once again along the silent traces in the woods. "They took our village, filthy Dahomies. We twelve, we young men, came back from hunting to find it all gone.
Big stuff, the stuff of great tales. We followed them through the jungle, along the rivers, through the heat and the black night. And they left what traces they could, our parents, our sisters, our little brothers, and the girls we were courting. It would have been a great tale if we'd taken them back. A great song, sung all down the years."