Dead water - Barbara Hambly [63]
“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.”
Her voice was wistful. The sun, already slanting over above the encircling woods of cottonwood and pine, made black squares on the bare earth around the house; the cawing of the crows seemed to emphasize rather than break the dense stillness of that solitary farm. “When you return to the city—if you return to the city—burn a candle for me to the Virgin, and tell her that I pray to her in secret every night. Yes, yes, cher, I am coming,” she added as the toddler in the passway between the two rooms of the cabin began to scream.
“You make sure you get them sheets washed after the bread's in,” grunted Amos, springing to the wagon-box and picking up the reins. “Marse gonna be sore enough when he come home, 'bout how little cotton we got hoed.”
“I will tell Marse that you were overcome by the heat, and lay down until the earth stopped spinning beneath your feet,” said Mary, and pulled down the last chunks of dried brush and palmetto-leaves over January's head. “Do not agitate yourself about Marse.”
“Yeah,” grumbled the man, “you good at lyin', woman.” And he lashed the mule hard with a cotton stalk.
The wagon lurched as it pulled away down the rutted track toward the bayou. The last January saw of the young woman Mary was of her walking back toward her master's cabin, her newest baby on her hip and her shoulders bent with exhaustion.
ELEVEN
Whether or not Amos and his wagon passed the Reverend Christmas on the road, January never knew. They passed someone who called out drunken jovialities at Amos (“Hey, Sambo, bit early to be haulin' the cotton to market!”), but January kept under the brushwood. Even when he would have gotten out to help with the ferry, the field-hand snapped, “You stay put in there,” and dragged on the creaking winch himself to get the raft across the sluggish Yazoo. His mind relieved of most of his concerns about being enslaved—or murdered—himself, January had ample leisure to conjure visions, some of them completely illogical or impossible, of Rose or Hannibal being enslaved—or murdered—as one or the other of them attempted to rejoin him in the dark yard opposite the Majestic Hotel.
Now that he was no longer running, exhaustion overtook him, amplified by the stifling heat under the brushwood and the canvas stretched over it. He would have slept had the condition of either the road or the unsprung wagon-bed permitted it. As it was, his weary mind produced pictures of himself waiting on the riverbank by the mouth of Steele's Bayou for days for a boat that had gone past already, waiting until he was caught by Reverend Christmas. . . . How would he know whether the Silver Moon had passed or not? And how would he convince Kevin Molloy to land the boat and let him come aboard, particularly if Hannibal had been murdered (or enslaved) back in Vicksburg . . . ?
Then the jolt of a wagon-wheel in a pothole slammed him from his half-dreaming doze into painful contact with the side of the wagon, back into heat and thirst and the aching stiffness of enforced immobility.
How quickly would the Silver Moon negotiate the long bends of the river that lay between Vicksburg and Steele's Bayou? He felt he'd been traveling for days, but the heat beneath the kindling-wood seemed unaltered, and the wagon was jolting too badly for him to put his eye to any of the numerous cracks in the side. It was still daylight. Had God halted the sun in the Heavens, as He had for the Israelites in