The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 29



They reached New Orleans on the eighth of October, on a low river, well ahead of the winter rise. They traveled deck-passage from Independence, Shaw and Hannibal sleeping forward among the white ruffians and river rats surrounded by an assorted cargo of St Louis furs, travelers' trunks and sacks of corn from the Missouri farms. January bedded down among the few slaves and such free blacks as were on the river at that time of the year, on the narrow stern- deck near the paddle wheel. Every few hours he would wake and warily touch the money belt strapped around his waist beneath his clothes: Gil Wallach's payment of the final two hundred dollars in silver, which would be, January guessed, the salvation not only of himself and Rose, but also of his sister Olympe's family too. As the Deborah T. began to pass familiar landmarks - the sharp bend at Bonnet Carre Point, the marshy pastures above the hamlet of Kennerville, the old oak on the levee at Twelve-Mile Point - January's frantic restlessness redoubled, the longing to hold Rose in his arms again battered by the conviction that he would return to find Rose dead of summer fever - of the smallpox - of the cholera. Three letters from her had waited for him at General Delivery in Independence, the most recent dated mid-August: she had said that there was fever in the city.

'Benjamin, there's always fever in the city in August,' Hannibal pointed out.

January took little comfort in the words.

Shaw said nothing, his elbows on the rail, his eyes on the low white American houses of Carrollton and the dark-green fields of sugar cane just visible beyond the levee. He had been nearly as silent on the return journey as he had been outbound, though his quiet had a different quality to it: weariness beyond speech. But as they'd come into the sticky green monotony of sugar country, the endless fields of cane readying for the harvest, the matte walls of cypress bearded with Spanish moss, he had begun to speak again about the city that had been his home for eight years: were the French Creoles and the Americans blaming one another for the panic? {Probably). Had any of its gambling parlors been put out of business by the bank crash? (/ wouldn't bet on it, January had replied). The gluey heat of the summer still smothered the lowlands, and as the small sternwheeler came in sight of the pastel houses of the French town, the gray gravely slope below the levee where other small steamboats were pulled up at the wharves, January found himself remembering that before leaving the town in April, Shaw had given up his boarding-house room on Girod Street, and so had nowhere to go when he stepped ashore.

With his long hair lank on his shoulders and his two rifles slung on his back, he must look very like he had in 1829, when he'd come downriver with his two brothers and a load of hogs, fleeing the hills that were called by all the Dark and Bloody Ground. Seeking justice and a different life.

The Deborah T. was poled and hauled to the docks, which would have seemed fairly lively to any who didn't know the city as January did. As they came down the gangway in the hot twilight that whined with mosquitoes, January said, 'Come for supper,' something he had never offered to the policeman before. Hannibal, though undoubtedly welcome at Kentucky Williams's saloon and bawdy house in the Swamp, would - January reflected - probably do better not to try to cadge sleeping room in its attic at this time of the evening. So the three of them walked up Rue Esplanade together, January's heart pounding faster and harder as he calculated and recalculated how close to her time Rose was, and the dangers a woman faced bearing children.

How could I have left her? How could I have done this to her—?

The money belt around his waist felt like a penitential cincture of spikes. Pictures flashed through his mind as if he hadn't seen them, dreamed them, for months: the house shut up and dark, the horrible race to Olympe's house for news of her . . . if Olympe was even alive, after the fever seasons of the summer . . . (She had been in August, Rose had written, and her daughter Zizi-Marie was being courted by a tailor . . .)

In the worst of his dreams, Olympe's house, too, was closed up, or already sold to strangers . . .

Quiet as the town was, in the brazen heat, it felt strange to see so many people. Crowded. The houses seemed close together after the wind-combed distances of the Plains. They seemed small, too, as if like Gulliver he could knock them over accidentally with a careless elbow. After the mountains, all the world seemed achingly flat, and the reek of mildew, sewage and smoke felt new and harsh in his nostrils. Lights glowed in French windows through the blue twilight. Behind shut jalousies, shadows moved, and he heard friends' laughter and someone playing the piano, music he had not heard in half a year. He was aware of Shaw and Hannibal talking behind him, and it was as if they spoke Chinese; not a word they said penetrated his mind through the pain of anxiety, of hope, of fear.

Lights in the big Spanish house, golden striped rectangles in the indigo dark.

To hell with them, January thought and broke into a run.

'I'm sorry,' said Olympe, who was standing on the porch to catch the night breeze, 'Rose decided you weren't coming back and has married a plumber.'

'Olympe—!' Dominique - January's youngest sister, beautiful as ever in lacy white - tapped Olympe's arm sharply with her fan.

The world remade itself, fell back into place with a sense of almost physical jolt. Then from inside the house, January heard the cry of a child. And his heart turned to light within him, like the exploding of a star.

He thrust his way past his sisters, through the French doors into Rose's bedroom. She was propped on the bed in the lamplight with her silky walnut-brown braids spread around her and the most perfect, the most beautiful, the strongest and rosiest and most magical baby ever born at her breast.

January's mother sat in the chair at her bedside. Dominique's maid Therese was preparing a little bed in a basket. The room still held the faint echoes of birth smells, of blood and sweat, and as January dropped to his knees beside the bed Rose smiled at him, with a kind of sleepy acceptance that of course he would walk through the door at this hour. His mother said, 'Hmnph. It's about time you showed up, Benjamin.'

January put his arms around Rose and the infant and laid his face beside hers on the pillow. Thank you, God; thank you God thank you God thankyouthankyouGodthankyouGod . . . He felt both as if he couldn't breathe, and as if all he could do was breathe the scent of them, the peace of this room, forever. I didn 't die and they didn 't die and I have two hundred dollars here around my waist . . .

He felt her stroke his hair. 'Journeys end in lover's meetings,' she said and kissed his forehead. And then, as her fingers touched the new-healing scar above his hairline, 'Benjamin, did you get scalped?'

'Yes,' he said. 'Well, almost.'

'Show-off. You came back just in time.' She smiled at him as he brought his head up to kiss her hand, her lips, the baby's downy head. 'I was going to name him Polycrates Ishbosheth, but now you're here, you can think of something.'

'You were going to call him nothing of the kind!' protested Dominique, coming through the French door. The room was suddenly filled with people: Hannibal and Therese and Rose's friend Cora and Olympe - astounding to see Olympe in the same room with their mother - and Olympe's husband Paul, all beaming, as if the world had been suddenly healed and made well. Even Shaw, standing with one bony shoulder leaned on the French door out on to the gallery, seemed for the first time in half a year to relax, looking on this gathering of family and friends not his own, this quiet place of lamplight and new life and love. Rose drew her shawl over her breast and the baby's tiny face. January had seen, and had in fact delivered, hundreds of babies, but this child was different.

My child. Rose's child.

My son.

He wanted to shout or laugh or burst into tears. The world would be different from now on.

'I thought Tiberius sounded strong,' went on Dominique, 'but Olympe says it's too fancy; Maman says it should be Denis, for M'sieu Janvier—' Dominique's father, who for many years had been their mother's protector.

'Of course it should be Denis,' snapped their mother, as if the matter were self-evident.

Olympe rolled her eyes. Unusually for Olympe, she didn't make her usual sarcastic comment. So great was the joy of the hour that it would mellow even her.

'What's wrong with calling him Benjamin?' asked Olympe's husband Paul.

'If you don't mind -' through the gathering of friends and family, of the people who'd made it possible for him to live again after Ayasha's death, January looked across at Shaw, alone between lamplight and darkness - 'and with your permission, sir, I'd like to name him John.'

'Maestro,' said Shaw, after a moment's startled silence, 'thank you. I - an' my brother - would be most honored.'