Barbara Hambly: 04 Sold Down the River

But the incident had cost him the clothes he wore, clothes a musician needed if he expected to be hired to play at the balls of the wealthy: long-tailed black wool coat, gray trousers, cream-colored silk waistcoat, linen shirt. And it had cost him all the music in his satchel-torn up, pissed on, dunked in the overflowing gutters of Rue Bienville-difficult and costly to replace. The season of entertainments was just beginning, after the summer's brutal heat. He could not afford delay in repurchasing the tools and apparel of his trade.

But he knew, even as he'd asked her for the money, that his mother would not let him forget.

And it was in her eyes now: that avid glitter. Envy, too, that he'd been offered the money, and the task, instead of she.

"I'm sorry, Monsieur Fourchet," he said again, and marveled to hear his own calm voice. "It isn't a matter of money. I-"

"Don't be a fool! " Fourchet's voice cracked into a full-out shout, as January remembered it. The child in him flinched at the recollection of the man's capricious rages, the sudden transitions from reasonableness to violent fury. "Too proud to get your black hands dirty? Think you're too good these days to live with the niggers you were born among?"

"I think-" began January, and Fourchet raged. "Don't you back-talk me, you black whelp, I don't give a tinker's reverence what you think! " He flung the cigar to the spotless cypresswood floor. "I could get a dozen like you just walking down Baronne Street who'd leap on a dollar to suck my arse, let alone do as I'm asking you to do!"

"Then I suggest you betake yourself to Baronne Street, sir," said January quietly. "I'm sorry to have wasted your time."

"I'll make you goddam sorry...!" Fourchet thundered, but January simply raised his new beaver hat to the man, bowed deeply, picked up his music satchel, and walked through the rear parlor and out the back door. He could hear the man's enraged bray behind him as he crossed the yard and mounted the stairs to his room in the gar?onni?re, and only when he had shut the door behind him did he start to shake.

He was forty-one years old, he reminded himself-forty-two, he added, as of three weeks ago.

Simon Fourchet had no power to hurt him, beyond the crass physical violence such as the scum of the keelboats had practiced. The man was seventy years old and probably couldn't hurt him much. This is the child who is frightened, he thought, taking three tries to get his new kid gloves off. This is the child in the dreams, who is unable to walk away.

He found himself listening, heart racing, to the old man's shouted obscenities as he pulled off the coat and shirt his mother had lent him the money to buy, the armor of respectability that, more even than the papers in his pocket, said: This is a free man.

To Fourchet, January realized, he would never be free.

Only jumped-up.

To the Americans who saw him walking well-dressed about the streets, the Americans whose growing numbers were slowly swamping the older population of Creole French and Spanish, it was the same.

He fought down the impulse to change clothes fast and run. With his habitual neatness he made himself fold the coat and trousers into the armoire, and set the shoes neatly under the bed.

Clothed in rougher trousers, a calico shirt, and the short corduroy jacket he'd bought while a student in Paris, he descended the stairs and deposited the white shirt in the tiny laundry room next to the kitchen. It was there that his mother caught him, before he could be across the yard again, through the passway to Rue Burgundy and gone.

"Benjamin, I have never been so mortified in my life."

If the statement had been true he would have heard it in her voice, but it wasn't. She wasn't mortified. She was angry. Thwarted and angry.

"Neither have I, Maman, that he'd even think I'd do such a thing as he asks."

"Don't be silly." Her hands were clasped tight, like a little sculpture of seashell and bronze, at her belt buckle. Her mouth was hard as sculptor's work. "I assumed you'd welcome the first chance that came to you, to pay back what you owe me. The quarter-interest in that property the Widow Delachaise is selling is still open for fifteen hundred, and I don't think I need to remind you that because of those new clothes of yours, and all that music, not to mention getting the piano retuned last month, I'm in no position to-"

"No, Maman." January forced his voice level, as he had with Fourchet. "You don't need to remind me."

"Don't interrupt me, Benjamin."

Their eyes met: old wanting, old needing, a thousand griefs never comforted, a thousand things never said. January remembered her-one of his earliest memories-being beaten for stealing eggs for him and for Olympe, when a fox had killed the three chickens that constituted the only livestock they possessed. Remembered her silence under the lash.

"We need that money," Livia said, in a voice that took into account nothing of the other property she owned, or the funds in three separate banks. "You can't possibly think Monsieur Fourchet would use this opportunity to take advantage of your position and kidnap you to sell to dealers, for heaven's sake. If he told that animal Shaw about hiring you, he can't intend-"

"No, Maman," said January. "That's not what I think."

"Then what? It's not as if you know any of those people. And it's not as if you're going to make a sou more this season than last season, teaching piano and playing at balls. Really, Benjamin, I don't know what to make of your attitude."

She looked up at him, her expression and the set of her head waiting for an explanation, and those great brown eyes like dark agate forbidding him to make her wrong by giving one.

Anything he said, he knew, he would still be wrong.

"I'm going for a walk," he said. "Can we talk about this when I get back?"

"I think it's something we need to settle now." She followed him across the hard-packed earth of the yard. "I told Monsieur Fourchet I'd talk to you. You can't judge the man by his speech. You remember how rough-spoken he always was, it's his way. Financial opportunities like the Widow Delachaise selling up don't remain available for long. Monsieur Granville at the bank said he'd hold the negotiations open as long as he could, but they won't last forever."

"I'm sorry, Maman," said January. The cool sun of early afternoon flashed on yesterday's rain puddles, on the leaves of the banana plants that clustered around the gate and along the wall.

From the street came the clatter of some light vehicle, a gig or a fiacre, and a woman's voice lifted in a wailing minor key the slurry, half-African gombo patois:

"Beautiful callas! Beautiful callas, hot!" the melismatic notes elongated, embellished like a Muslim call to prayer, as if the words were only an excuse, a vehicle for what lay in her heart.

"I need a little time to think. We can talk about this when I get back."

"And when will that be?" Livia stepped beside him into the open gate. Always wanting the last word. To have his retreat, even, on her terms.

"At sunset," said January, and walked away, not knowing if he'd be back by sunset or not.

"Rough-spoken, she said." January turned the coffee cup in his hand, and gazed out past the square brick pillars that held up the market's vast, tiled roof. Beyond the shadows, slanting autumn light crystallized the chaos along the levee into the brilliant confusion of a Brueghel painting: steamboats like floating barns, with their black smokestacks and bright paint on their wheel-housings and superstructures; low brown oystercraft and bum-boats creeping among them like palmetto bugs among the cakes and loaves on a table. Keelboats, snub-nosed and crude, being hauled by main force to the wharves. The blue coats of captains and pilots; the occasional red flash of some keelboatman's shirt; gold heaps of oranges or lemons; a whore's gay dress. Piles of corn in the husk, tomatoes, bales of green-gray wiry moss, or tobacco from the American territories to the north. Boxes without number, pianos, silk, fine steel tools from Germany and England. A cacophony of French and Spanish, English and half-African gombo patois and the mingling scents of coffee, sewage, smoke.