Barbara Hambly - Dead water

His benefactor at the landing had instructed him to follow Chickasaw Bayou but hadn't mentioned what other bayous might intersect it in the marshy lands within the big river's loop. Trying to keep the bayou on his left, January encountered a wider body of water. . . . Another bayou? The Yazoo River? It seemed to have a current, but bayous frequently did. In the leafy summer woods it was difficult to determine the direction of the sun, which stood nearly straight overhead now. The windless air was suffocating. January crossed the river—or bayou—and followed it to his left, but it bent back on itself, and rapidly dried to a shallow pan of reeds and dead trees fringed with ants' nests the size of flour-sacks.

When he turned back to seek the original bayou, he found himself amid trees that looked totally unfamiliar, cypress and bright-green thickets of harshly-whispering palmetto, the ground a jungle of elephant-ear underfoot. He pushed through this until, ahead of him, he smelled the whiff of smoke, the ashy pungence of a fire newly damped. He stood to listen but heard nothing. No voices, no curses, no friendly bicker of men breaking camp.

Silently, January moved back into the palmetto thickets . . .

. . . and heard a rustling away to his right.

He moved away from it as silently as he could, but something—the birds too silent, perhaps? The cicadas hushed?—turned him back farther into the woods, and after a few moments he heard the unmistakable crack of a trodden stick to his left. Among the palmettos he was at least sheltered from sight, and he moved from clump to clump, listening to the rustle of the men hunting him. And they were hunting him, two of them at least, working through the thickets on either side. Somewhere close by he heard a dog bark, and made for the sound, his steps quickening as the slashing rustle neared.

They had to have heard him, he knew, and broke into a jog, then a run. The thresh of his legs through the tangles of honeysuckle and elephant-ear drowned all sound of pursuit, but he didn't dare look back. Only strode, struggled, ran upslope, then down to a marshy little trickle of puddles that might have once been a bayou. Someone behind him yelled, “You, boy, stop!” as he broke cover at the bottom, but he plunged into the woods on the far side and cut toward his right as soon as he thought he was out of sight. The heat dazed him, beat on him, suffocated him; he smelled smoke again and heard a cock crow, and the next minute he saw open sky through the trees ahead.

A small field lay before him, corn thick and nearly head-high under a sun like molten brass. January vaulted the split-rail fence and threw himself into the green shelter of the rows, ducking low and keeping still, like a rabbit, like Compair Lapin when Bouki the Hyena prowled around. The dust-smell filled his nose. Closer the dog barked again. A cornsnake blinked at him from the dappled shade, then slid away in a little whisper of red and gold.

Through the rustling of the long, leathery leaves he thought he heard voices at the edge of the field.

Let him walk through the swamps and the hills with men hunting behind him . . . .

He remained where he was for a long time, bars of sun scorching across his back.

Then he crept along the rows, endlessly, to the other side of the field. A swaybacked dogtrot cabin stood under two trees. A smokehouse, an outhouse, a barn, a couple of cabins for slaves. On the other side of the home-place a cotton field stretched, the young plants still too small and thin to have concealed him. Far down the rows, two men were chopping at the weeds around their roots with hoes, the endless work of early summer. Their voices buzzed in song:

Farewell the ol' plantation, o,

Farewell the ol' quarters, o,

I been sold away to Georgia, o, farewell. . . .

A woman came out of one half of the dogtrot and crossed to him, the dog he'd heard—a shaggy gray monster with a lolling tongue—shambling at her heels. January stood up as she approached. She carried a baby on her hip and moved like an old woman, but when she came near he saw she was young, under thirty. Her hair, under the head-rag of a slave, lay in fine, curly wisps around her forehead, more like a white woman's hair than a black's. She was darker than white men liked, but delicate-featured and pretty. “It's all right,” she said in heavily-French-accented English. “They are gone.”

She shaded her eyes with her hand to look up at him—she was barely five feet tall in her faded osnaberg dress—and asked, “Are you running away?”

“I'm running away from them, ” he replied in French, and produced his free papers from the inner pocket, where he'd kept them hidden. He didn't expect she'd be able to read them—it was against the law to teach slaves to read and write, mostly so they couldn't write up their own passes—but she took the paper and scanned it, and said, as she handed it back. “Those were not the patrols, then, M'sieu Janvier? You were right to run. There are slave-stealers all along the river. The men here stay indoors at night, and close to their work by day, for fear of them more than for any consideration of the patrols. Come into the kitchen—the master is hunting in the woods today and will not be back until night. I think one of the men here can help you get to where you are going.”

Her name was Mary. “Marie-Hélène, before my master re-baptized me as a Protestant—a ‘real Christian,' he calls them—and wed me to my current husband.” Her voice was dry. “My marriage to Jean-Claude in New Orleans was only a Catholic one, he said—he is a minister of his own Church, my master, called to the faith, he says, by God Himself.”

January glanced outside, to where Mary's husband, Amos, and Lafayette, the younger cotton-hand, were putting the mule to the wagon. Amos was a medium-sized man, impassive and heavy-muscled. Close to, in the shadows of the kitchen, January could see the dark mark of an old bruise on Mary's face, and a small fresh scar beneath her left eye. It was none of his business, he thought, and Amos was going to drive him across the river and down Steele's Bayou—neither of which was anywhere near this small bottomlands farm—almost certainly saving him from the Reverend Christmas and his boys.

Was it Amos's fault, January asked himself, that he had in him smoldering anger equal to January's own? Anger that would unleash itself on the nearest and weakest target?

He thought of Julie on the boat, rocking back and forth in Rose's arms. What'm I gonna do?

With a baby in arms and two more hanging on to her skirts, Mary was obviously not going to run anywhere.

How did you get here? he wanted to ask her as she laid before him a couple of ash-pones and a cup of milk, food her master might well want an accounting of at the end of the day. What are you doing here, with your good French and your beauty and your quick movements, so unlike those of the field-hand who knows that to conclude work swiftly will only earn another task?

But he already knew the answer to this, and the harrowing-up of details would be no joy to her. So instead he raised an eyebrow and asked, “And was this Divine communication via a burning bush, or the more modern whirlwind method?” And laughed as the young woman recounted her master's vision of the fiery letters “GPC,” which had appeared to him in a dream:

“He said they must surely mean Go Preach Christ, though the members of the local Methodist synod who rejected his application for the ministry suggested that Our Lord more probably meant Go Pick Cotton . . . .”

“You have no idea,” she said as she and Amos helped him into the back of the wagon and piled brush and kindling over him, “how good it is to hear good French spoken again, and to see—” She hesitated, sadness darkening her eyes. “Oh, anyone new. Anyone at all.”