he would do so, he guessed, before they reached Independence. They'd begun to find the droppings of corn-fed horses, and to see the signs of white hunters, with their large fires and boot prints in the earth.
His journal to Rose - which he'd kept every evening of the return journey - was overflowing with these observations, and with the remembrances of the men who'd taught him. Please, Mother of God, let me put it into her living hand . . .
'They's no way of provin' it,' Shaw went on. 'An' no point doin' so. We can only know so much, Maestro. Then we got to let it go. Like that old play Manitou spoke of: it's why we got to get twelve strangers to sit down an' say, "This is how we settle it: it's done." It's got to be taken out of our hands. If it ain't, it eats us alive.'
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