He ripped the page from the newspaper and stuffed it in his pocket, then walked out of the coolness of the building into the late afternoon heat and angrily swung up on his horse. Inside the bar the customers were talking omong themselves again, buying drinks for one another, their cigars glowing inside the dim bourbon-scented darkness of the Saturday afternoon haunt he had always taken for granted.
He rode to the cabin he owned on the bayou south of town, among a grove of cypress trees that stood on high ground above the floodline. He kept a pirogue there and fishnets and cane poles, a worktable where he carved duck decoys for his hunting blind, a pantry full of preserves and smoked fish and beef and corked bottles of wine and rum. Red and yellow four-o'clocks bloomed in the shade and bamboo and elephant ears grew along the water's edge. It was a place that had always made him happy and secure in his feelings about the world and himself when no other place did, but today, in spite of the gold-green evening light and the wind blowing through the trees, a pall like a black film seemed to descend on his soul.
He snicked away at a mallard duck he was carving from a block of cypress wood, then felt the knife slip with his inattention and slice across the edge of his finger.
He crimped his finger in the cone of his right hand and went outside to fill a bucket with rainwater from the cistern. Next door the slave girl named Flower, who worked at the laundry not far from his sister's brothel, was buying carp off a flat-bottomed boat piled with blue-point crabs and yellow catfish that looked like mud-slick logs.
"You hurt yourself, Mr. Jean?" she asked, setting down her basket and taking his hand.
"I passed my hand under the knife and it cut me," he said, dumbly, looking down from his height at the top of her head.
"Here, I'm gonna wash it out, then put some cobweb on it. You got some clean cloth we can tie it up with?" she said.
"No, I ain't got nothing like that," he said.
She went to the buggy she had driven to the bayou and removed a clean napkin from a basket of bread rolls and came back, shaking it out.
"Here, we're gonna get you fixed up. You gonna see," she said.
She went inside the cabin with him and washed and dressed his hand. It felt strange having a black woman care for him, touching and examining his skin, turning his wrist over in her fingers, when he had not asked help of her and when she was not ob
ligated to offer any.
"Why you came back from New Orleans, you?" he said.
"This is where I? live," she replied.
"You could have been free."
"My family ain't... it isn't free. They're still up at Angola."
She held his hand tightly and when she pulled the bandage knot tight with her teeth he felt a reaction in his loins that made him glance away from her face. She put his hand down and made ready to go.
"Why you look so sad, Mr. Jean?" she asked.
"I was in the saloon. People treated me like I done somet'ing wrong. Maybe I was drunk in there and I done somet'ing I don't remember."
"Sometime people are just that way, Mr. Jean. It don't mean... it doesn't mean you done anything wrong."
He was seated in a chair by the window. He looked out on the bayou at a white man in a pirogue raking moss from the tree limbs that the man would later sell for stuffing in mattresses. Jean-Jacques remembered the crumpled newspaper page from his pants pocket and smoothed it on the tabletop. His finger moved down a column of print and stopped.
"My name's right there. See? But I don't know why, me. Maybe they're writing in there about my ship getting shot up, huh?" he said.
She walked around behind him and peered over his shoulder. He could smell the red hibiscus she wore in her hair and a clean, crisp odor in her clothes. Her breastline rose and fell on the corner of his vision.
"You a good man, Mr. Jean. You always been good to people of color. You ain't got to... I mean, you don't have to pay attention to what somebody write in a paper about you," she said.
"You can read that?" he said, turning in his chair, his finger still spear-pointed in the middle of the article.
"I reckon," she said.
He stared at her stupidly. Then his eyes blinked.
"What it say?" he asked.
"'Unlike Colonel Jamison, who risked his life to escape from a prison hospital, a local gentleman by the name of Jean-Jacques LaRose tried to extract gold from our treasury in payment for rifles that should have been donated to our soldiers. This man's greed should sicken every patriot.'"
Jean-Jacques looked at the man harvesting moss from the trees limbs that extended the bayou. The man was white -haired and old, his clothes mended in many places, and he was struggling to free his rake from where it had become entangled in the branches over his head. If the man was lucky, he would make perhaps a half-dollar's wage for his day's work.