Luggage? Good heavens, sir, we did have luggage! Let's send the slowest waiter onboard to look for it while we all stand here and talk.
Between Carrollton and Twelve-Mile Point lay about three miles of fickle shadows and dark water inhabited by every snag, bar, and submerged tree in Louisiana-sea serpents, too, belike, thought January gloomily, watching the matte, dark cutouts of the trees glide by.
Alligators, anyway.
Sixteen years ago, when he'd left Louisiana for France, nothing but cane and cipriere lay between Girod Street and Baton Rouge. Even then, the plantation of Bellefleur where he had been born had been sold and subdivided. He knew the names of the streets between which it had lain, but was not able to pick out where they were, behind the levee. In time Bellefleur and all who had dwelt there would be forgotten.
In his mind it still stood, and presumably in Olympe's, and his mother's: the whitewashed brick house, and the quarters; the cypress swamp through which his father was pursued, endlessly, by red-eyed hounds in dreams.
His elbows on the railing, January closed his eyes. The heavy churning of the water only a few feet below him, the throb of the engine, shuddered in his bones, but not enough to shake out those memories of innocence and love and pain.
You were born in the country, in thick hot rain and the smell of burnt sugar, the silence and the cicadas and the fiogs. You waited on the gallery in the dark for your father to come, and he never did. Where do you go now?
Ayasha. Rose. She'd flinched from his touch... Don't...
Did he think if he found Cora for her-rescued her friend from the men who'd taken her, cleared her name so that xhe could come back without being hanged for the muruer of the man who'd raped her every day for the past who knew how many years-always supposing that she was innocent-that Rose would fall into his arms?
But he didn't want her to fall into his arms.
We all need friends, he thought. Although it was not wholly friendship in his mind when he saw again the cocoa brown tendrils of Rose's hair lying soft over her cheeks, the thin angular shape of her shoulders in her blueand-yellow dress.
Ayasha rose to his mind, the way her hot black eyes flamed when he admired another woman, the desert-witch smile. Oh, a friend is what you want, is it, malik?
Yes, he whispered. Yes. I am lonely, and I want a friend. Under his feet he felt the engines change their note. From somewhere above a man yelled, "Back her! Back her! Bring her around!"
The twilight was still luminously clear, delicate as the heart of a blue topaz, like water through which all things seemed perfect, without shadow or light. He saw the clus ter of cypress on the batture, the floating wooden platform of the landing at Twelve-Mile Point.
When he climbed the levee, his grip in his hand, the world was an identical patchwork, long thin strips of newgrowing cane, rustling corn black in the twilight, trees like clouds sleeping on the ground where they guarded the houses of the whites.
The lacy ghost of the Philadelphia floated away into the gloom around Twelve-Mile Point, but he could see its lights twinkle for some time. Lights burned, too, in the houses among the trees, until from the top of the levee he saw a big white house in the circle of its gallery and its trees that showed no lights, and whose fields, when he walked down through them, were already rank with the quick-growing weeds of these tropical lands.
There was no smell of human habitation; not around the privies of the big house or around the cabins of the slaves. No cattle in the barns or horses in the stables. Janu ary wondered if the Reverend Dunk had convinced Madame Redfern to sell these, too, to him for half what they were worth. The woman seemed clever, sharp, and hard as a horseshoe nail. But January had seen her simper like a girl as the man of God kissed her hands.
People would be here Monday, to look over the house bcfore buying it. Maybe sooner.
Among the slave cabins he took candle and lucifers from his grip and made enough of a light to look into one or two, to make sure they weren't inhabited by anything or anyone else. The sight of them jabbed something inside him, as if he'd closed his hand on cloth