Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (10 page)

And he chuckled, with a glint of the old pirate shining in his eyes.

“I ask him once, I say, `Gran'pere, why you go all the way up the bayou to town with the fruits, eh? Why don't you stay here and be comfortable, 'stead of squishing round the trembling lands and gonna get eat by an alligator.' An' he say, 'Jean, when I was a gentleman. ..' They all call themselves gentlemen, you know? Lafitte's boys that camped on Grand Terre. My Gran'mere just roll her eyes an' say, `Gentlemen my cat's left hind leg!' But Gran'pere say, `When I was a gentleman, I know everyone in town, and everything that go on there, same way as I know the marsh. I see one glance, I hear one whisper, and to me it's like I see whether the elephant-ear growin' thick or puny at the head of Little Barataria Bayou. It tell me is there water there this week or not, like M'sieu Blanque not sayin' Hello to M'sieu Dutillet in the market tell me whether steamship stocks are up or down. But to know this, to see this, you gotta go up check that bayou pretty often. And you gotta go up see the faces in the market, an' know who's in town an' whose servants are wearin' new shoes.”'

Jean Chighizola laughed. “My Gran'pere, he's an honest man now, but he don't forget.”

“Did your Grandpere bury treasure?” Artois was fascinated at this insight into the workings of the piratical mind.

“Pff!”
The young farmer was a few years older than Artois, his beard making him appear older still; short and stocky in a faded smock of blue-and-pink-striped home spun. “What the good buryin' treasure? my Gran'pere say. Everybody who come to the island, they always ask about buried treasure, and they always ask Gran'pere, 'cause he there. But the Boss-that what they call Lafitte in them days, the Boss of the Barataria-what the Boss steal, it's always stuff he could turn around and sell right away, and he put the money in a bank. Only an idiot bury his money in the ground.”

January stepped back as a well-dressed housewife came up, the sort of French Creole matron who bedizened herself “with four pins,” as the Creoles said, to go to the market, and who circulated among the stands as if she were doing the Stations of the Cross, haggling over every bean.

While Jean Chighizola and this lace-bonneted Madame engaged in war to the knife over the value of the onions, January selected a couple of eggplants and some tomatoes, explaining to Artois, who had never shopped for his own meals, how to tell if melons were ripe and what to look for in strawberries.

“You come back an' look for Gran'pere next week,” advised young Jean when the housewife's servant had stowed the contested vegetables in her basket and the two women departed in quest of tomatoes. “I tell him you asking for him, he make sure to be here. He know everything, Gran'pere.” And he wisely tapped the side of his nose, whose size and aquiline arch spoke volumes for the organ that his progenitor had lost.

January's inquiries about Hesione's customers, and the events of her last day on earth, were similarly inconclusive. A number of the market-women remembered her prowling among the bare stands Thursday night, reeking of cheap rum and ramblingly begging for either leftover vegetables or a few reales to buy bread. “Not that bread was what she woulda bought with it if I'd a' given her money,” added a vendor in a purple tignon. “But that ain't my business.” January gathered that toward evening, the market-women frequently saw Hesione trolling for customers, either in the market or on the levee beyond.

“She'd take 'em on sometimes two an' three at a time,” said another vendor, shaking her head sadly: an elderly former plaçee called La Violette, “Sailors, mostly, or men too poor to pay what the younger girls charges. Or those the younger girls wouldn't go near, the dirty ones or the mean ones or the ones drunk themselves on whiskey and laudanum, and dangerous. When she was sober Hessy'd just about kick 'em to pieces for speakin' to her, spittin' an' cussin'; but when she was drunk, or needed bad to get drunk, she'd pull up her dress in an alley for a glass of rum.”

“But she had no money that night?” Beside him, January was aware of Artois' expression of sickened pity. Studious and rather shy, the boy had lived in the shadow of his father's wealth for most of his life, and of his mother's finicking insistence that he was a gentleman and the son of a gentleman. Only since Rose had become his tutor-and since meeting January through her-had Artois begun, like Siddhartha Gautama before him, to encounter the class of persons who didn't leave New Orleans for the lakefront every summer.

La Violette shook her head. “Hessie said as how she'd been drinking at the Nantucket that afternoon. Some men there had promised to `lend' her some money, white men, keelboatmen, but they cheated her of it in the end, she said.”

She asked January then after his mother, and Dominique, and how was Dominique's health; after Artois' mother Coquelicot, although January would have been willing to bet Coquelicot St. Chinian would never have passed the time of day with an old market-woman who peddled coffee. The whole subject of Henri Viellard's marriage to Chloe St. Chinian was brought out, aired, shaken, and re-folded like clothes in a hamper. It was summer, after all, and no one was in any hurry to get anywhere or do anything, and in parting La Violette gave Artois a white praline fragrant of coconut, and a flirtatious smile.

“It's come back to me twice, since the night Rose was attacked,” said January, folding his hands between his knees and not meeting Olympe's eyes. “Thursday after I spoke to Shaw, and then again last night.” The parlor of his sister's cottage was dim, with the shutters still closed to guard the morning's vanishing cool. Through the dining-room the yard could be glimpsed, where Olympe's husband, Paul, worked fitting legs to a cradle for Dominique's baby. In the rear bedroom, young Zizi-Marie told her small sister Chouchou tales of magical princesses and talking dogs as they made the beds.

This front parlor was where Olympe met with those who came to her for gris-gris-for balls of black wax and pins to make an enemy go away, for jack honeysuckle and verbena to uncross the spell of a jealous neighbor or malicious rival in love. Shelves on one wall held the stock of her trade, bright-colored tins or stoppered gourds of willowbark or comfrey, pottery jars of gunpowder, a dish of mouse-bones, squares of red flannel or black. Bunches of herbs hung drying from a string. Banners of cut paper surrounded a bottle painted black and glued with beads. Cowrie shells strewed around a glass jar of ashes that contained fragments of bone.

“I try to pull him off her, and I can't.” January didn't look at Olympe as he spoke, staring down instead at his own hands, conscious of the gray cat watching him from the cold hearth and wondering why he'd come to his sister with these visions at all. But he knew of no one else he could take them to, and after the second time of dreaming, he knew he had to take them to someone.

“I stab him, over and over, and while I'm doing it she just gets up and leaves, crying. Then he gets up and follows her, and I can't kill him again because he's already dead.”

He looked up at her then, seeing her not as the skinny little sister of his plantation memories, or the furious, foulmouthed urchin whose silent hatred of their mother and their mother's protector had earned her so many beatings. Seeing rather the healer of bodies and minds, the priestess of an ancient faith: a servant of God by one of His alternate names.

“And what does Rose dream?” asked Olympe, and January was so taken aback by the unexpected question that for a minute he didn't answer.

“About me?
Or about Mathieu?”

“About herself,” said Olympe. “And about what she wants out of life.”

“I don't know.” And as the words came out of his mouth he felt, instead of anger at himself that he didn't know, or anger at Rose for not speaking to him of her dreams, an understanding: She does not speak of her dreams because she does not dare.

Maybe because it has never occurred to her that anyone would be interested in the secrets of that walled garden within her mind.

He was aware of Olympe's eyes on him then, speculative under lowered lids: velvety, like African night. Gauging him, putting together pieces of information and coming up with ... What? “What do you dream?” he asked, curious, and her smile widened and softened, and he came away from that conversation into the slamming heat of the forenoon a little wiser, a little bemused, and with an inexplicable sense of peace.

Was it Rose he dreamed of saving, he wondered, as he turned his steps toward the Swamp, or was it Hesione, with her gaudy dress and brilliant smile?

Or did it matter, to his dreams? They had both deserved rescue that, at the time, no one arrived to give.

And he, Benjamin, could only give them now what he had.

In going down to the Swamp, January had long ago learned to pick his time. By noon, the keelboatmen, filibusters, and roughnecks who inhabited its coarse boarding-houses and canvas-roofed taverns were awake and stirring but not yet drunk enough to make trouble. This may have been because at noon on an August day it was simply too hot to get into fights over nothing. Early evening was the danger time. The bearded and filthy river-rats who came down the Mississippi with cargoes of skins or corn or rawhides spent most of their days in New Orleans drinking, aware that they were despised by the regular inhabitants of the town and aware, too, that any money they were paid for their goods was almost immediately taken from them again by town gamblers and town whores and town tavern-keepers. By early evening, liquor had fueled their sense of grievance to the point of striking out at anyone who came to hand. Even each other, if they were in the mood for an all-out fight.

If they simply wanted the savage pleasure of beating up someone who was legally prevented from fighting back, anyone black would do.

Clouds were moving in from over the lake as January walked out past Charity Hospital and along Perdidio Street. His broken-down rawhide “quantier” shoes slurped in the mud: he'd clothed himself at a slop-shop, and walked with a slouch, like a man who's tried to find work on the levee in the morning cool but has given up for the day.

He wasn't the only such-black or white-loafing along here. Unceiled, unpainted, ramshackle buildings gradually replaced the brick or wood of the new American business section of town. The unpaved street narrowed to a track; taverns straggled among the trees, and rough-built whorehouses consisting of single lines of rooms, each room's long window opening straight onto the mud street to display an untidy bed and an untidier woman: “Fuck you, bitch, are you sayin' my perfume stinks?” screeched a voice from one of them, and January leaped aside as someone hurled a chamber-pot that barely missed his shoulder.

Sewage, stale liquor, and livery-stable muck-heaps freighted the air.

Legally, of course, men of color-slave or free-were forbidden to be sold alcohol, and even if it had been al-lowed, there wasn't a tavern or barroom in New Orleans that would permit a man of African descent to drink with whites. But many of the taverns and half the groceries in town routinely sold liquor out the back doors to all comers, and January knew the practice was nearly universal in the Swamp. He asked-cautiously-the whereabouts of the Nantucket, aware that if Hesione had been killed by a customer whom she'd injured or insulted, it wouldn't do to have word get around that a six-foot-three-inch Congoblack Negro had been making inquiries. The saloon in question was, in fact, one of the larger and newer ones of the district, boasting at the moment only canvas for a roof, a rather large stable, and four sheds that evidently served as whores' cribs.

Two men-one of whom wore the tin badge of a slave earning his own keep-loitered on the rude plank bench outside the saloon's back door, talking in the desultory fashion of those whose hopes for day-labor have already been crushed and who have a day of heat and idleness before them. A sort of abat-vent made a patch of shade, though the Americans clearly had no idea of the French Creole skill in manipulating shadow and breeze. The yard, with its steaming puddles and reeking mire around the outhouse, was hot as a bake-oven at an hour when any courtyard in the French town would still retain at least a little of the night's cool.

January made the obligatory queries about was it so that a man could get a drink here, and for half a reale received a gourd cup of liquor so mouth-wringingly vile, he wondered that the place had customers at all, ever. Another man-a runaway, he guessed-showed up, and one of the local whores in her sweaty gimcrack finery, and when rain started to fall at about one, everybody took whatever liquor they'd bought and retreated under the eaves of the stable, which did have a roof. It was a long, idle, unproductive day.

Hesione had been there, January learned, and had picked up a pair of beaver-hunters, brutes who skinned for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and boasted of the half-breed girls they'd raped in the villages north of Taos. She'd paid Franklin Mulm, the Nantucket's owner, fifty cents for the privilege of receiving her customers in one of the cribs-“The one back of that tree there, that he rents to girls who don't work for him regular,” explained the badged slave, whose name was Cuffee-and there'd been an altercation over the rest of the money owed her. “Talk about cussin'! Mr. Burke, that works for Mr. Mulm, couldn't shut Hessy up, an' ol' Mulm himself come out, madder'n piss 'cause he had a customer with him. . . .”

January shot his eyebrows up and asked, “What, they got white folks here who didn't know what Hessy could say when she got a head of steam?”

And the men laughed. Mr. Mulm checked his stride on the way across the yard to the privies, and cast a glance at them lounging in the shelter of the stable doors; the laughter ceased instantly and everyone gave the tavern owner smiling, easy greetings, which didn't appear to fool him in the least. A lean, tall Yankee with a jawline beard so thin and fair it reminded January of socks on a clothesline, Mulm dressed immaculately, his narrow black cutaway coat and dark waistcoat giving him the appearance of an undertaker rather than a publican. He carried an ivoryhandled English umbrella as he crossed the yard, to keep dry his clothing and his tall-crowned silk hat.