Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (3 page)

“At least here in Paris one is free,” Ayasha had said to him, Ayasha who had fled her father's harim in Algiers rather than be wed against her will. “And no one can take that from you.” Ayasha had worked in Paris as a seamstress since the age of fourteen. By the time January met her, she owned her own shop.

No one can take that from you.

Except, of course, January had discovered, Monsieur le Cholera.

It would be two years in August since he had returned home and found Ayasha dead.

Since then he had discovered that he had progressed not one step farther than that terrified slave boy on BelleAeur Plantation, in terms of what life could and could not take away.

It was June. A deadly time in New Orleans.

“That's absolute nonsense,” blustered a railway speculator in a dark gray coat. “Tom Jenkins says he's been down the river almost to the Belize and there hasn't been a sign of yellow jack, much less the cholera, anywhere in the countryside.”

“Not in the countryside, no.” Dr. Ker of the Charity Hospital took a glass of champagne from the little waiter's tray with a polite nod of thanks. “On the whole the cholera isn't a disease of the countryside. We've had two cases of yellow fever here in the city.”

“Two?” Granville snorted. “Well, there's a reason to turn tail and run, by gosh! Are you sure they were yellow fever, Doctor? Dr. Connaud-he's my physician, and a splendid fellow with a knife, just splendid!-says it isn't possible that there should be epidemics three summers in a row.”

“It's the newspapers,” declared Colonel Pritchard. “Damned journalists'll print anything that'll sell their filthy rags. They don't care about the local businesses, or what it does to a city's property values if word gets around there's fever. All they think about is getting a few more copies sold. As for you, Dr. Ker, I'm sure you'll find if you open those two so-called fever victims up that there's some kind of reason for the same symptoms. . . .”

Was that what young Gabriel had walked from Rue Douane in the old French town to tell him? January wondered. What he wouldn't tell the servants of this stranger's house? That Olympe was sick? Or her husband, Paul? One of the other children?

Yellow fever? Cholera?

Not cholera, he prayed desperately. Blessed Virgin, please, not that.

And while his arms trembled with fatigue, and his heart squeezed with dread, and he felt as if someone were trying to pry his shoulder blades loose with crowbars, he skipped through moulinets, brisés, cross-passes, and olivettes, as lightly as a happy child running in a meadow of flowers. A wave of faintness passed over him; he concentrated on ballottes and glissades, on the glittering protection of the music's beauty that could almost carry his mind away from the pain. Hannibal swung into a lilting solo air, embroidering effortlessly as January lowered his throbbing arms to his thighs to rest. Like a bird answering a slightly drunk muse, Jacques took up the thread of music on his cornet. Uncle Bichet came in third on the cello, the round lenses of his spectacles flashing in the gaslight, an odd contrast to the tribal scarring on his thin old face. At intervals in his harangue against those who conspired to ruin the local real estate market with rumors of plague, Pritchard watched them dourly; watched, too, the unobtrusive door to the back stairs. January wished the Colonel buried alive in graveyard dust.

“Lemonade only, you understand?” January heard him say to Aeneas, when after a purgatorial eternity of heat and tobacco stench and aching muscles the clock at last sounded two. “Mrs. Pritchard will be over in the kitchen to weigh up the leftover chicken and pastries. I don't want the lot of you gorging on them or passing them out to those musicians. And I won't have them wasted. Mrs. Pritchard . . .”

His voice lifted in a preemptory yap. His wife-who might have been presumed to have earned a little privilege on the night of her own birthday ball-turned with a sigh from the farewell embraces of her friends.

“He's quite right,” said the Widow Redfern, who had wormed her way-Mr. Greenaway doglike in tow-into the Creole group of ladies. “I find one always has to count the champagne bottles after a party, and measure the sugar. It's really quite prudent of your husband . . .”

“Américaines,” murmured Madame Jumon, flashing a humorous grimace as she kissed Mrs. Pritchard warmly on her unpowdered cheeks and took her departure on her son's black-banded arm. “What can one do?”

Gabriel was waiting in the kitchen. He was a tall boy, slim like his mother, January's sister Olympe, and handsome as his father, who was an upholsterer with a shop on Rue Douane. He had, too, his father Paul's sunny goodness of heart. As January crossed from the back gallery to the kitchen he could see his nephew, through the wideflung windows, helping Aeneas and the kitchen maid clean up endless regiments of crystal wineglasses, champagne glasses, water glasses; dessert forks, coffee spoons, teaspoons, dessert spoons; platters, salvers, pitchers, creamers, tureens; a hundred or more small plates of white German china painted with yellow roses, half again that many napkins of yellow linen.

Above the foulness of the privies on the hot night air, the dense stink of Camp Street's uncleaned gutters, from around the corner of the stables January could still catch the whiff of drying blood.

“Uncle Ben!”

“You look like you been pulled through the mangle and no mistake.” Aeneas set aside the mixing bowl he was drying and unstoppered a pottery jar of ginger water.

“Danny, bring Michie Janvier a cup.” The little waiter fetched it; Gabriel discreetly supported January's elbow while January raised it to his lips. “You ever want to hire this boy out as a cook, you come speak to me about it, hear?”

“I'll do that.” January returned the cook's grin, then studied the inside of the empty cup with mock gravity and measured with the fingers of his other hand the distance from the rim to the damp line the liquid had left. “Looks like a gill and a half I drank. You want to mark that down for the Colonel's records, in case he gets after you for where it went?”

Aeneas laughed. “Me, I'm just thanking God there's no way for him to measure the air in here, or he'd sure be after us about what your nephew breathed since eleven o'clock. Kitta, you got all the saucers in?”

They had to know, thought January, looking at the kitchen maid Kitta, the watchful-eyed little Dan bringing still more champagne glasses and yellow-flowered plates back from the house. He saw how they smiled at one another and how the little man relaxed when the woman touched his hand.

Which of them, he wondered, had sent for the voodoo-man?

Or woman.

January glanced down at Gabriel and saw the shaky relief in the boy's smile. Of course he wouldn't have told these people about sickness, if it was the cholera. That was a good way to get a thrashing from a man like the Colonel, freeborn or not. How dare you go around scaring my servants with your lies? Most Americans didn't understand the difference between free coloreds and black slaves.

“Thank you for looking after him,” January said. “We'll be bidding you good night.” He put a hand on Gabriel's shoulder and guided him from the kitchen and into the shadows of the yard.

Behind them Aeneas called out, "You mind how you go.

That'll be all we need, thought January. Some officious member of the City Guard demanding to see our papers. `Are you aware that it's two in the morning? That the cannon in the Place d'Armes fired off at ten to warn people like you“-meaning both blacks and colored-”to be off the street?"

He glanced back at the kitchen. The other musicians had already gone. By the grubby topaz glow of a dozen smoky tallow candles, the cook, the menservants, and the kitchen maid Kitta had recommenced the Augean task of washing every dish, fork, and sparkling bit of hollowware. Little Dan carried a yoke of pails to the cistern; firelight leapt over Aeneas's sweaty face as he fanned up the flames under the boiler to heat it. In the ballroom's four long windows the white beauty of the gaslight dimmed and disappeared. Carriage wheels creaked and slopped in the muddy street, and voices called a final good-bye: French. The Americans had left a full thirty minutes ago. A moment later Mrs. Pritchard emerged from the rear door of the house, carrying a candlestick; she murmured, “Soir” to January and Gabriel as they passed from the kitchen's lights into the dark side yard that led around to the stilldeeper darkness of the street.

There was no sound around them now save the gulping of the frogs, the incessant whine of mosquitoes, the drum of the cicadas in the trees. He asked softly, “What is it?”

Not the cholera. Please, Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin, not the cholera.

“It's Mama.” Gabriel's bright smile, the cheerfulness he'd shown in the presence of the servants, dissolved, showing the fear in his eyes. “The City Guards came and got her. They say she done murder-killed a man.”

January's first thought was, She was out there after all. Blood and rum and graveyard dust.

And then, Don't be silly. Even if curses had such power, that dust was laid down only three hours ago.

Olympia Snakebones, the voodoos called her.

“This has to be a mistake.” Paul Corbier poured coffee from the blue earthenware pot on the sideboard in the cottage's rear parlor, and carried cups to the table. Though it was near three in the morning the shutters stood wide to Rue Douane, and music from a ball still in progress-Creoles, without a doubt-down on Rue Bourbon mingled on the gluey darkness with the cicadas' eerie roar. “I know Olympe. She would not have done this.”

January said nothing. Neither did the woman who sat opposite him, a tall woman whose serpent eyes accorded strangely with the skirt and blouse of blue calico, such as the market-women wore. Like all women of color she kept her hair covered, as the law required; but like all free women of color she turned the simple headscarf demanded by a white man's law into a fantasia of folds and pleats whose hue and complexity rivaled the flowers of the field. Alone among the women of color she had worked her tignon into seven points, like a halo of brightcolored flame points around her strong-boned Indian face. By this she was known, the crown of the city's reigning Voodoo Queen.

“I know it sounds foolish,” Corbier went on. “She has the knowledge, and she has-had-the things in the house.” He nodded through the archway that separated the dining room from the front half of the parlor. The candles on the table, and the squiggling fragments of reflected glare from the streetlamps hanging over the intersection of Rue Douane and Rue Burgundy, showed up dimly the shelves that filled the parlor's inner wall, planks and packing boxes neatly arranged, lined with intricately cut paper and aromatic leaves.

Bottles glinted, painted and decorated, between dark fat-bellied pots of cheap terra-cotta bought from Chickasaw and Choctaw on the Cathedral steps. Gimcrack gilding winked on small bright-colored tins such as candies and tea that were shipped in from England, and beads caught the light, woven in strings around calabashes stoppered with wax. A dish of beads, and another of animal bones; a third of brown glistening lump sugar set before a crooked stick in a sealed bottle. Strings of dried guinea peppers. Swags of lace. Clusters of feathers, tied with thread, hung from the shelves above, and clumps of drying herbs or bundles of hair. Strange-shaped sticks and roots; candles red, black, white, and green. The skin of a ground puppy that had been dried in the sun. Squares of red flannel. A ball of string. A snakeskin nailed to the wall, with a slip of paper rolled up in its mouth. A name written on that paper. Silver coins, and a few cigars. Salt, brick dust, graveyard dust.

Three spaces gapped in the confusion, like teeth knocked out in a fight.

“It's got to been some other voodoo,” said Gabriel reasonably. “He poisoned this oku and made the Guards think Mama did it. That's all.”

“Has to have been,” corrected his father, with an uneasy glance at the woman, perhaps worried that his son had so casually spoken the word voodoo in the presence of Mamzelle Marie. “And we don't know that.”

But the Voodoo Queen said only, “Olympe is a good woman.” Marie Laveau's voice was deep, rich as fine coffee, and her French without the slurred patois of slaves and the poor. She was a woman who had only to sit in a room to be the focus of attention. Like a fire she seemed to radiate both heat and light. “Whatever she might do, she would not do a thing that she saw to be evil.”

January noticed that Marie Laveau did not say, That's impossible. Nor did Paul Corbier.

“They must have been watching the house, waiting for her to come home,” Corbier went on after a moment. “She hadn't even taken off her coat when two men came across the street, white men. She saw them and tried to run out the back door, but your friend Lieutenant Shaw”-he glanced at January apologetically-“was in the yard already, waiting for her.”

“She bit him,” said Gabriel. That certainly sounded like Olympe. “I hope it turns poison and he dies.”

“What did they say?” January tried to put from him the memory of the two times he himself had been in the Cabildo, but he saw the fear of that prison in his brother in-law's helpless eyes. “Who do, they say she killed? A white man?”

Olympe's big gray cat, Mistigris, flowed into the parlor from the street and jumped into Mamzelle Marie's lap. Iujke silence January heard Gabriel's older sister Zizi-Marie in the rear bedroom, whispering to the younger children tales of Compair Lapin and Bouki the Hyena. One of them began to cry, instantly hushed by the older girl's voice.

“They claim she killed a young man named Isaak Jumon,” said Mamzelle Marie, her long hand stroking the gray cat's head. There was no emotion in her voice, as if the woman of whom she spoke were not someone she would rise from her bed at two in the morning to help. “He was the son of Laurence Jumon, that died this summer past of the fever. His mother was Geneviève, that was Jumon's slave and then his plagee. Geneviève has a house on Rue des Ramparts these days, and a hat shop there. Does well, I am told.”

She scratched Mistigris's chin, and the big tom, evidently forgetting his usual custom of biting anyone who touched him, closed ecstatic eyes.