Dead water - Barbara Hambly [131]
“It's six hundred pounds of vegetarian tracts,” he said in a disappointed voice.
But both his friends saw the dancing light of triumph in his eyes, even before he gave himself the lie and held up the handful of glittering gold.
TWENTY-TWO
Hubert Granville expressed great doubt and disappointment when January withdrew all but two hundred dollars of his money to pay off the house free and clear. “You're leaving yourself nothing to live on,” the banker warned, which January knew was true. “It takes time for a school to establish itself. You'll be in debt head over ears before you know it.”
“We can deal with that,” January replied.
Rose added, “At least we'll be sure of a roof over our heads while we starve.”
Granville shook his head, and drew close the branch of candles to illuminate the draft to be paid to Rosario DeLaHaye. It was again evening, as hot as it had been a month before, when he'd sat there last at the big oak table in the dining-room, to tell January that the coffers of the Bank of Louisiana were empty, and his money gone.
“At least invest it in something worth your while,” snapped January's mother, the elegant Widow Levesque. She had joined the banker in visiting the Januarys that night, a week after Granville and several unobtrusively armed bank officials had transferred the five little coffins from the cemetery back to the bank itself. Granville, January thought, had visibly lost weight during the past month, and looked like a man who had not slept much or well. His red-gold hair and beard seemed faded, and there were smudges of weariness under his piggy hazel eyes. He shook January's hand over and over again, repeatedly assuring him that if there was anything he ever could do . . .
January wondered how well that assurance would hold in times of real financial distress.
“A school will get you nothing,” declared the Widow Levesque, folding her lace-gloved hands over the ivory handle of her parasol. His mother was slim and still beautiful, and there was something in the shape and setting of her eyes that reminded January, in the candle-light, of his sister Olympe. “Even the four best schools in the parish return no more than twenty percent, and I don't think there's a school in town that returns more than five percent its first five years . . . if you can keep it open at all. If you must invest, invest in slaves, as I told you before. If you feed them on rice and beans, and sausage only once a week, it costs you only . . .”
To hear her, January thought, one would never think she'd been a slave herself. He wondered if she'd ever been chained to the side of a steamboat, if she'd been fed from a bucket and had to hang out at the end of her chains to relieve herself over the side.
It was not something he could ask her. Not if he ever wanted her to speak to him again.
“Maman,” he said gently, “Rose and I have talked this over at length, and we think a school is best.”
One couldn't really say to one's mother, We believe in educating the young, rather than putting chains on the innocent.
“Besides,” said Rose, who had learned in the past six months a great deal about handling her mother-in-law, “who knows when the State Legislature might not forbid people of color to hold slaves? They could, you know.”
Livia Levesque stared at her in horror, the first time January had ever seen anyone break his mother's armor of self-satisfaction. “They most certainly could not! We pay our taxes . . . we support their businesses. . . .”
They will do to people of color, thought January, whatever they wish. And there is nothing we can do about it, except leave.
If there is anywhere for us to go. From what he'd heard from Dodd the manufacturer, and from some of the deck-hands who'd tried to make a living in Cincinnati and Alton, the North didn't sound like any paradise either.
“The least you could do is teach people who'll pay you decently,” the Widow Levesque went on as Rose refreshed her coffee-cup and offered her a plate of pralines.