A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [118]
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