The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,2
to the bridge of her nose, took a deep breath, looked up into his face again and said, 'We have two dollars and fifty cents in the house. And we're going to have a child.'
An hour later, with the street gone quiet in the dinner hour, they were still on the gallery talking. The two dollars and fifty cents was in hard coin, not the now-worthless notes from the Bank of Louisiana - or the various other banks in the town - in which January had been paid over the winter: 'They'll make good kindling,' said Rose in a comforting tone.
'That's not funny.'
'Nothing is,' replied Rose. 'Not today. Benjamin, I've spoken to your sister Olympe. If this—' She hesitated, then went on with some difficulty. 'If this isn't a good time for us to have a child—'
January cut her off firmly. 'It is.' Olympe was a voodooienne, versed in the termination of unaffordable pregnancies among the poorer blacks of the town. He added, 'My mother won't let her grandchild starve.'
Rose mimed exaggerated surprise. 'Whatever gives you that idea?'
'Hmmn.' Since January and Rose had refused his mother's advice about investing their little money in slaves - you can feed them dirt cheap and make a dollar a day renting them out to the logging companies - that astute businesswoman had repeatedly asserted that it was none of her business if her son and his wife starved together. January was fairly certain that this stricture would be expanded to include Baby Rose. Besides, the last he'd heard, his mother's money had been in the Bank of Louisiana, too.
'Something will turn up,' said Rose.
'Hmmn.'
He closed his eyes, wondering, as he had wondered all the way home, what the hell they were going to do. Holy Mary, Mother of God . . . Please have something turn up.
When he opened his eyes, Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guards was standing on the gallery.
'Lieutenant.' January got quickly to his feet, held out his hand, even as Shaw removed his greasy old excuse for a hat and bowed to Rose:
'M'am.'
As Shaw turned toward him, January thought that the man did not look well. It occurred to him to wonder if Shaw, too, had been among the unfortunates who'd discovered that morning that they'd lost everything they owned. Framed in his long, thin, light-brown hair, the Kentuckian's face had a strained tiredness to it, beyond what keeping the peace in New Orleans through Mardi Gras usually did to him. There was a slump to the raw-boned shoulders under the scarecrow coat and a distant look in his gray eyes, a reflection of bitterest pain. January had seen his friend take physical punishment that would have killed another man, but this was different, and he was moved to ask - as Crowdie Passebon had earlier asked him - 'Are you all right?' He remembered to add, 'Sir,' even though his mother wouldn't have permitted Shaw into her house.
Shaw nodded - as if he weren't quite sure of the affirmative - and said, 'Maestro, I have a proposition for you.'
'I'll take it.'
The long mouth dipped a little at one corner: 'Don't you want to hear what it is?'
'Doesn't matter,' said January. 'If it's money, I'm your man.'
Chapter 1
June 29, 1837
They crossed the ford mid-morning and came up out of the cottonwoods where the valley of the Green River spread out into a meadow of summer grass: it was their eighty-second day out from Independence. Abishag Shaw rode point on a hammer-headed gelding the color of old cheese, with a dozen half-breed French camp-setters in his wake. A line of mules laden with shot, trap springs, coffee, liquor, trade-vermillion and checked black-and-yellow cotton shirts from Lowell, Massachusetts at two thousand percent markup; fourteen remounts in various stages of homicidal orneriness; Hannibal Sefton sweating his way through his fifteenth case of the jitters since leaving the settlements; and January riding drag eating everyone's dust. Mountains rose west, east and north beyond a scumble of foothills: pinewoods, ravens, bare granite and a high, distant glimmer of snow. A few miles upriver the first camps could be glimpsed: makeshift mountaineers' shelters or handsome markees where the traders had set up shop. Westward from the river, Indian lodges grouped, hundreds of them gathered into a dozen little villages, and horse herds browsed the buffalo grass under the charge of brown, naked children. Dogs' barks, sharp as gunshots, sounded in thin air blue with campfire smoke.