Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (36 page)

In the morning he returned to the Cabildo, to be told that Lieutenant Shaw had still not returned from Baton Rouge. “No, no message,” said Guardsman Boechter, a short dark Bavarian on duty in the watch room. “But Shaw's not much one for writing. He'll be back when he's found what he seeks.”

“M'sieu Janvier.” Vachel Corcet came through the big double-doors from the arcade outside, clutching his slender brief of notes. “Did you learn anything?”

January shook his head. “I was prevented from speaking to the men I sought,” he replied evenly. “But I did hear that Killdevil Ned is dead.”

The lawyer's shoulders slumped with relief. “You're sure?”

January hesitated. “I spoke with a man who saw his body.”

“Well, it's a small favor.” Corcet patted his forehead with an immaculate linen kerchief. His pomaded curls were already wilting to limp gray corkscrews in the heat. “I'm afraid there's nothing for it but to move for another continuance. It won't be difficult, given M'sieu Vilhardouin's death. I'd be very surprised if M'sieu Gerard was able to locate another lawyer in two days. Not with the fever spreading the way it is. But we can't wait too long. I heard that Judge Canonge is leaving at the end of the month, and if the courts go entirely into recess it will be September before your sister's case is heard.”

January glanced back at the closed wooden doors that now blocked all view into the courtyard of the jail. Smoke leaked through them, bearing on it the stench of burnt hooves and gunpowder. “I'll do what I can. If I can. . . .”

He looked past Corcet's shoulder and saw Fortune Gerard. The little man's face was grim and lined almost beyond recognition from the angry, blustering challenger of last week. Pale brown eyes, resentful, furious, scared, met his. Corcet felt the silence and turned.

“M'sieu Corcet.” Gerard inclined his head. “If I may have a word with you?”

January excused himself with a bow and made his way out of the room. He wasn't sure what to say about what he thought the money told him-after all, with coinage short, everyone used whatever came their way. Rix-dollars and sovereigns were rare, but they weren't unknown.

He passed through the shadows of the arcade, into the sunlight of the Cathedral steps where merchants and laborers-prospective jurors-stood smoking and spitting and buying ginger beer from market-women, and slipped through the crowd to the Cathedral's doors. His footfalls echoed in that cavern of dim silence redolent of burning wax and mildew, and he knelt before the bright-colored statue of the Virgin in her sky-colored robes.

“Thank you for delivering me last night.” A young girl who looked like a German shopkeeper's daughter knelt near him, whispering her own prayers; behind him a small group of nuns murmured softly, praying at the Stations of the Cross. “Please forgive me the death of the man Ned Nash, whom I killed in self-defense. Pray for his soul's salvation before God and His angels. Forgive me the danger I put Jim and his companions in last night. Send your healing to Pedro, spare him and his family from the danger in which I put them. Show me how to find the men I seek. Show me where I can find them, and get the answers I need. Help me deliver my sister from that pest hole, from the Valley of the Shadow where she's now imprisoned. I promise you when I have money again I'll buy a dozen Masses in Nash's name.”

He crossed himself and counted out decades on his blue glass rosary, the words calming him as they always did, bringing him peace. The Lord is with thee. . . . The Lord is with thee. . . . The Lord is with thee. Pray for us sinners. . . . Because most of us are sure in no shape to pray for ourselves and be heard.

And he knew, rising from his knees, that he would indeed be prayed for by one free of sin. He used the last three cents of his own money to buy candles for Killdevil Ned, for Pedro, and as always for Olympe, and when he turned he saw his brother-in-law kneeling among the worshipers behind him, rosary in hand. Together they walked to the Court without speaking.

Two jurors were missing, and only three girls, not four, came in to take their places near Greenaway's chair. Anxious and irritated, Greenaway seemed to be questioning the others. Judge Canonge's lean jaw set as he tallied the absences from the bench. Monsieur Doussan the notary was gone, too, and when Canonge leaned over and whispered something to the Bailiff January caught the words yellow jack.

Canonge banged his gavel. “It appears,” the judge said, “that due to the illnesses of Messires Templeton and Flugel, it will be necessary to reexamine some of the alter nate jurors before these proceedings begin.” He repeated the words in English, for the benefit of Greenaway and the American jurors. “I hereby order a recess of-”

“Your Honor.” Vachel Corcet, who had entered quietly with Monsieur Gerard, rose to his feet. Beside them Celie sat, subdued, ill, and rigid with tension-as well she would be, thought January, with the matter of the signet ring unresolved. Corcet went on, “Due to the death of our esteemed colleague Clement Vilhardouin, we would like to request another continuance of this case until I can more fully marshal the defense of Madame Celie Jumon as well as that of Madame Corbier.”

There was a pause, during which Mr. Barnes offered Mr. Shotwell his hip flask and demanded, “What'd he say?” And then, Rothstein the printer having translated, “God damn it, they gonna keep us hangin' around this town with the fever spreadin' like wildfire. . . . I got a wife and children.”

“As does the husband of the accused, Mr. Barnes,” said Judge Canonge grimly, and rapped his gavel. He switched from English to French with barely a drawn breath. “I'm afraid the Court calendar is full until the thirty-first, Monsieur Corcet, after which, in the absence of Judge Danville and Judge Gravier due to the contagion, the Court will be in recess until the fifteenth of September.”

January's eyes cut to Olympe, where she sat at the other end of the table. Her jaw tightened and her eyes closed momentarily, but otherwise she gave no sign. Beside him, Paul lowered his forehead to his hand, a shiver going through his body. Corcet opened his mouth to speak, then closed it and made as if to sit down. Then he took a deep breath and straightened up again.

“If the Court please,” he said, “I beg the Court to take into account the youth of the defendant's children, and the possibility that the delay of six weeks might well deprive them of their mother for good.”

“Oh, for Chrissake,” said Barnes loudly, and took another swig from his flask. “She's a goddam voodoo.”

Canonge's dark eyes hardened, and he rapped his gavel again. “Very well,” he said. “The Court will continue in special session the night after tomorrow, Wednesday the twenty-third of July, in order to accommodate the case, and members of this jury will present themselves at this courtroom at seven P.M. or will find themselves in contempt.” He translated into English for the benefit of Mr. Barnes, who looked as if he might protest and then wisely thought better of it. Canonge looked back at Corcet. “Can you have your case in order by that time, Monsieur Corcet?”

Corcet glanced over at January, then said, “I can, Your Honor. Thank you.”

“Goddam nigger pansy,” said Barnes.

As an armed constable helped Olympe to her feet January made his way over to her through the milling of clerks, bailiffs, and the witnesses for the next case: “Snakebones,” he called to her, throwing the slurry African twist to the words, and she turned her head, braced against the tug on her wrist chains.

“There a village in the woods, maroons, runaways?” January used the word some of the fieldhands had used back on Bellefleur for those who'd escaped to the woods, afeerees, and called the cipriere igbe.

“En, ” she said, an African word the old men had used.

“Where? Do you know?”

She glanced beside her at the Guards and said, “No. They don't tell no one. Not even the voodoos, brother. . . .” She used the old word some of the slaves had used for the mambos and the wangateurs, as he and she had done as children, idans. “Too many idans be sellin' women to the white and buyin' stolen goods these days for Cut-Arm to trust. But they there.”

Paul caught her hands, had barely time to thrust into them the bundle of food and clothing he carried, barely time to kiss her lips, before they pulled her away. Canonge was already striking his gavel and calling for order; January and his brother-in-law moved into the corridor, where not a breeze stirred and the air reeked with gutter smell and tobacco and smoke.

“Wednesday,” said Paul. “I'll be back. . . .”

“Cut-Arm,” said January quietly. “I knew it.”

“Cut-Arm?” Corcet bobbed from the stream of men like a cork, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief.

“The one-armed man who saved me from Killdevil Ned. He has a village in the cipriere. A lot of maroons used to. That's where Isaak was those three days, I'll take oath.”

“Can you find it?”

“I can try.”

It was twenty minutes' walk from his mother's house on Rue Burgundy-where he stopped to change his clothes-out of the French town and up Poydras Street to the near end of Gravier's drainage canal, and another three-quarters of a mile along its muddy banks to the little offshoot of Bayou St. John where Isaak Jumon had waited on Saturday night. Even so short a distance from the last houses of the town-broken-down shacks where Irish and German immigrants lived cheek by jowl with the cheapest of the taverns and bordellos in the New Cemetery's shadow-the trees grew thick. January picked his way along the root mounds of the oak trees to avoid the scummy standing pools, but nothing he did could keep the mosquitoes and gnats from him. Three times he saw the glistening brown-and-buff coils of water moccasins, sunning themselves on fallen logs.

He followed the bayou back to where the sluggish stream divided around its two islands. From a distance across the standing water he saw the clearing among the cypresses where the dancing had taken place less than eighteen hours before. The altar was gone, and the post that had stood before it. At this distance he couldn't even see evidence of where they had stood, but the ground was thick-covered by fallen oak leaves. He remembered then that Dr. Yellowjack had called him aside to talk to him, but when he crossed the bayou, and walked up to the house, it was shuttered tight.

From the gallery he looked back again to where the pillar and the altar had been. The air still carried a faint reek of smoke, and on the planks of the gallery there were stains of what might have been blood. He remembered with a shiver the Baron Cemetery, laughing hysterically as he searched the pockets of his clothing. I ain'tgot the man you seek. . . .

Well, at least I gave you somebody for all the ones I kept out of your hands.

Killdevil Ned might have been gathered to his fathers, but January knew that there was danger still. Whoever had hired the mountain man-be it Jumon or Granville or someone else-would know within a day or so that Ned was gone. There were many men in the Swamp who needed money and were good with knives and guns. Shifting his aching shoulders uneasily, January descended from the silent gallery, retreated into the green shadows of the cypresses, and crossed the island and the little channel of bayou beyond in silence.

Here was the true cipriere. Sheets of standing water alternated with knots of hickories, palmettos, and red oaks, and coarse gray triangles of moss formed continuous tapestries overhead on the oak limbs. This and white egrets lifted in flapping clouds at his approach; turtles basked on the curves of logs above water the hue of pureed peas. The day was baking hot and the trees closed in that heat, as if he were wrapped in blankets. The drum of the cicadas, the whine of mosquitoes, the constant low hum of gnats, were the only sounds. He was only a mile or so, he knew, from the shell road that led out along Bayou Metairie, but beyond that bayou the cipriere resumed, a dark finger of swamp and woods between river and lake. Truly the igbe that the old men on Bellefleur had talked about, the forest that spoke to them of the greater forests of Africa. The alien realm of Ogu and Shango and Damballah-Wedo, where such as Apollo and Zeus-and even Christ and Mary-had never walked. It took him over half an hour to reach Bayou Metairie, along the oak roots where the ground was firm. In the open ground along the road a little breeze drifted, but did nothing to cool the sweat that soaked his blue calico shirt. The sun glared in his eyes and the feverish heat was a nutcracker, clamped around his skull. He made a careful detour through the fallow cane fields, then plunged back into the cipriere on the bayou's other side. For the rest of the day he quartered the maze of swampland and cipriere west of Bayou St. John, searching for signs he wasn't sure he'd recognize. The woodcraft he'd learned as a child came back to him, but he wasn't entirely willing to trust it: He cut a staff, first thing, from a hickory sapling and with it saved himself from two snakebites and half a dozen duckings, prodding the cattails and oyster grass ahead of him. Time after time he saw things that made him wonder if he were close to the maroon village: catfish lines set in the marshes; cypress stumps that looked as if they'd been cut without proper tools; once a white chicken, far from anywhere. . . . But then, it wasn't more than a few miles to the small plantations along the Bayou Sauvage. How far could a stray chicken travel?

Slanting sunlight rimmed the hanging moss in blazing white. The green gloom behind creeper and palmetto seemed to clot and grow dark. Not now! he thought, des perately, straightening from examination of what might have been a foot-broken twig and realizing how close he'd had to bend to get clear sight of it. Like Gideon in the Bible, he wanted to pray that the sun hold its place in the heavens until he had accomplished what he needed to accomplish.

Another night-after how many nights?-that Olympe would spend in the reeking hell of the jail, listening to the wailing of poor Mad Solie. Mopping with filthy water the bodies of the sick. Waiting for the sickness to touch her on the shoulder, for Bronze John to call her name. Dear God, how many nights had it already been?

He called out, into the close-crowding green silence, “I know you're there! Cut-Arm-Danny Pritchard-anyone! You have to help me! All I need is help!”