Good Man Friday by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online

heart, that once his mother was gone she’d never bother to walk the short distance from New Orleans out to Bellefleur. She was like a cat, which in her leggy disinterested grace she resembled. Give her her dinner, and she wouldn’t pine long if you drowned her kittens.
    When she’d emerged from the office – one of the line of
cabinets
that extended from the back of the main house to form a U that funneled the river-breeze – he’d had enough sense of self-preservation not to run to her there. Instead he’d gone roundabout to the two-room cabin they shared with three other families and found her lugging water up from the bayou to wash.
    She’d said, ‘Ben, fetch your sister,’ as she dumped the water into the trough outside the cabin.
    â€˜Did he buy you?’ Ben had fought to keep the agony from his voice.
    She’d pulled off her tignon, regarded him with those enormous brown eyes, like a sibyl’s. Dense brown hair, the hue of the hulls of hazelnuts, braided around her face. Her father had been white – presumably a sailor on the ship that had brought her mother from Africa – and she was proud as Lucifer of the sharper features, the higher cheekbones he’d bequeathed her. She worked in the laundry, having displeased Michie Fourchet in some fashion, but Ben knew Fourchet still bulled her and lent her freely to his guests. She was the most beautiful woman on the place.
    â€˜Don’t be a baby,’ she said. ‘’Course he bought me. Go get your sister.’
    Ben thought the command merely meant that she was going to say goodby to them – Bandy Joe was saddling up the visitor’s horse in the yard outside the stables – and considered simply running away into the
ciprière
and hiding, to weep until she was gone. But by all accounts New Orleans was a big place, with lots of streets and houses, and he didn’t know where in it she’d be or how he’d find her. So he ran as fast as he could to Granny Ya’s, where the children too small even to clean chicken coops were kept, and found Olympe, who had already tried to run away and had been retrieved, covered with bayou mud and thrashing like a pissed-off alligator. By the time he and Granny got her to the cabin, his mother had washed and gone on up to the house. Ben had to wash Olympe himself – no small chore – and drag her up to the house, he thought, to see his mother one last time.
    Two horses waited in the yard, Michie Janvier’s thick-boned gray gelding (whom Ben later learned was named Gustav) and the Bellefleur overseer’s scrubby piebald. In the plantation office, his mother waited, with the white man Ben had seen around the house for the past two days: she standing, he sitting in one of the bent-willow chairs. He was a chubby little man, dark hair already thinning and cut short in the latest fashion instead of braided back in a queue. He had a kindly serious face.
    â€˜Ben, Olympe—’ She dropped the words almost carelessly. ‘Make your reverence to Michie Janvier. He was kind enough to buy you, as well as me. We’re all going to go live in New Orleans now, and be free.’
    She spoke as if she had always known that it was her due to no longer be a slave. But Ben stared up at that lumpy, sallow face, those pleasant dark eyes, dazzled. He wouldn’t lose her. That was what ‘free’ meant. And he wouldn’t lose Olympe, ever …
    But it came to him then that he would lose everyone else he knew.
    Even at seven and a half, he knew freedom was worth it. But looking out at the saddled horses – knowing that they were leaving
now
, without even going back to gather up their belongings from the cabin (‘
What the hell you think we’ll need, of that trash?
’ He could almost hear his mother saying it) or say goodby to his father or Auntie Jeanne or Granny Ya or his friends Quash and Rufe – he felt the