Dead water

fortune. Disaster falls, not only on his head alone, but on the heads of those he loves. Rose and I have the chance to be something, to have something, to make something, rather than scraping along on what I can earn playing the piano for quadroon balls and what she gets translating Greek texts for booksellers. You can't go on all your life that way. It does something to you, as time wears on.”

He stopped, looking around the seedy darkness of the room, with weeds growing up through the cracks in the board floor and roaches spotting the wall behind the candle flame. Looking at Hannibal's face, thin with a lifetime of illness and pain, and at the long, sensitive hands in the frayed cuffs.

The fiddler's grin was wry under his graying mustache. “To save you and Athene from the life I daily live, amicus meus, I will gladly play the despot and spend my days in the company of tobacco-spitting Americans in a steamboat saloon—particularly at the Bank of Louisiana's expense. I think I have a shirt in here somewhere that will not violate the personation of a man with enough money to own a slave.”

On the other side of the thin partition wall, January heard a man curse in English, followed by a woman's protesting drawl, “Just gimme a minute. . . .” Bedropes creaked mightily.

“The fight must be over,” January opined.

A huge and comprehensively drunk boatman loomed suddenly in the doorway. “Look out, beautiful, 'cause here comes the very child that coined the name of Thunder! Cock-a-doodle-do!” He let fall his trousers, at which Hannibal promptly began to applaud.

The boatman retreated in confusion.

“Happens every week,” sighed the fiddler, pulling his valise from under the bed. “I've tried chalking NO GIRLS HERE on the door, but that doesn't seem to work either . . . and it doesn't help that occasionally one of the girls will entertain a customer here while I'm playing up front. . . .”

Shouts of laughter outside. “You done already, Kyle? I got me a pet jack-rabbit takes more time than that!”

“A man can live in this fashion for a time.” Hannibal sighed, fishing in yet another goods-box for his few shirts of threadbare linen. “A long time, in my case. And a strong woman can endure it for a few years. But as the playwright says, Money is the sinews of love, as of war. Poverty can break a marriage, and I love you and Rose too much to want to see you turn on each other, as the poor so often do, and your happiness vanish for want of hope.”

He tossed in his shaving tackle and three half-empty bottles of opium and sherry. “So it remains only to arm myself, like Prince Achilles before the walls of Troy. The silver cuishes first his thighs infold; Then o'er his breast was braced the hollow gold. . . .”

Hannibal held up a much-frayed and slightly too large silk waistcoat, which must have been expensive when it was new, with a triple-notched collar some twenty years out of style. “The brazen sword a various baldric tied / That, starred with gems, hung glittering at his side. . . . Should I bring along a brazen sword, amicus meus?” He snapped shut his valise. “Or the great paternal spear the poet speaks of? How dangerous is Weems?”

“I have no idea.” January pinched out the candle, which Hannibal slipped into his pocket as the two men stood listening beside the door, waiting for the customers at the other cribs to go inside. “Nor who his accomplices are, if he has any, or how many of them there are.”

The flimsy walls shuddered with the slamming of a door. A woman's voice purred, “Well, hello, handsome,” from the next room, and January and Hannibal stepped out into the muggy heat of the June night.

Hannibal pulled shut the door behind him, and gestured extravagantly with his free hand.

“So let it be!

Portents and prodigies are lost on me.

I know my fate: to die, to see no more

My much-loved parents and my native shore—

Enough—when Heaven ordains, I sink in night:

“Now perish Troy!” he said, and rushed to fight.”

Even in summer's doldrums, the levee at New Orleans never really slept. In winter, when boats came down- river with their decks stacked so deep in cotton that it blacked out the windows of the engine-room on the main deck and the staterooms above, they'd be lined up three and four deep at the wharves, so that passengers would have to walk across the sterns of several other boats to get to shore, and the shifting of barrels, hogsheads, bales, and crates would go on all night. In summer, when the river sagged twenty feet below its high-water mark and the big side-wheelers lay in their berths, goods still arrived from Europe and New York. Planters up-river still demanded delivery on bolts of silk and crates of crystal goblets packed in straw, and passengers still journeyed in the smaller stern-wheelers, which could travel where and when the larger craft could not.

By the glare of armloads of wood burning aloft in iron cressets, January watched stevedores heave the last of the luggage on board, and stack cords of logs for the ever-hungry furnaces. Soot from the tall chimney stacks gushed into the sullen sky above the levee. Now and then showers of sparks would whirl upward, only the height of the stacks preventing them from igniting the boats themselves. On the deck of the Silver Moon a nervous little gentleman with a pot belly and octagonal spectacles fussily marshalled the deck-hands—the owner, January guessed. Beside him, a tall, slim young man in a steward's white coat read from a notebook and called out to the porters: “Leave that trunk on the deck, Mr. Purlie gettin' off at Donaldsonville. Those go in the hold, Colonel Davis goin' on with us to Memphis this time. . . .”

January shifted Hannibal's valise, and his own small satchel, in his hand.

“All the way through to Memphis,” requested Hannibal of the clerk at the steamboat office window. The man took the Bank of Louisiana notes without question. January had to admit he'd been holding his breath.

“Hell, don't you piss around sellin' your niggers here and there along the river,” boomed a voice near-by. “Niggers are sky-high in St. Louis, fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred for prime bucks. . . .”

January turned and saw the speaker, bow-legged and broad-shouldered, his shortness making him look like an animate barrel, with tobacco-stains in his yellow mustache and a mouth like the hack of an ax. He jabbed a finger at another man, then gestured back to the line behind him: five men, four women, linked together by hanks of chain.

Scared, some of them, looking around in the sickly yellow of the smoke-fouled dawn. In Virginia and Kentucky, January knew, sluggards and troublemakers were threatened by their masters with being “sold down the river” to the cane plantations—and, he reflected, remembering his own childhood, they were right to fear. Three of the men clutched little bundles of clothing done up in bandannas, all they'd been able to carry from Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, still seasick from the voyage and aching with grief for friends and family they'd never see again. One