Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (9 page)

“Guifford's watch was broke at nine-thirty: his wife, M'am Vivienne, his an' Bertrand's sister, Miss Annette, an' M'am Vivienne's daughter from her first marriage was all together in the parlor till after ten. Laurene, the girl's name is, pretty little thing, dark like her ma. Guifford was gonna adopt her but hadn't done nuthin' about it as of yet. The parlor clock was stopped too, later on in the night. The ground where Guifford was found was too wet to hold tracks an' the path from there to the mill was tracked up an scuffed by half the slaves on the place. The Barataria marsh comes right up behind the plantation, with smugglers an' slave-stealers an' trappers an' runaways an' who-all comin' an' goin'. . . .” He shook his head, and stepped easily across the wide gutter of Rue du Levee with his long legs.

“An' not a soul of 'em tellin' me the truth, 'ceptin' maybe the girl, Laurene.
An' her mama haulin' her away from me like she thought I'd scalp her an' cook her up for breakfast. An' to complete the picture, last night their overseer run off didn't take nuthin' but the horse he was ridin' the fields with.”

They had reached the market, a long, open shed whose brick pillars supported a tiled roof. Breezes blew through from the river, dispersing the mosquitoes, but the flagstoned floor reeked of soured vegetation, trampled fragments of spinach and tomatoes, the juice of broken pineapples and mangoes, all mulched together with the soapy stink of the sweepers' brooms. Geckos fleeted along the heavy beams overhead. Most of the market-women had packed and gone home, and except for the few coffeestands on the far side, closer to the river's cool, the enormous space was quiet.

Too late for flies, and too early-but only just-for the rats.

Two slaves with brooms were down at the far end, the scrape of coarse straw on wet paving-stones loud in the shadows. One of them was singing, the other joined wailing on the final line:

Chink, pink, honey, oh Lula, Chink, pink, honey, oh Lula, Chink, pink, honey, oh Lula, Wash that kerchief in the bayou.

“Will you come?” Shaw glanced sidelong at January under thin lashes the color of old tow. “Far as I can tell, between Bertrand an' Guifford cheatin' each other an' keepin' slave mistresses an' sellin' off the slaves they was payin' to spy on each other-an' I understand Raffin the overseer wasn't helpin' the situation none-I'm not gettin' a straight story out of anyone on the place, white or black. I don't even know if the overseer disappearin' had anythin' to do with Guifford's murder or if one of the field-hands just sort of took advantage of everythin' bein' at sixes an' sevens an' put him to bed with a shovel: it wouldn't surprise me none, from what I've heard. I would purely appreciate havin' a man at my back I could trust.”

Shaw's light, rather scratchy voice was noncommittal, but January heard in it the wariness of a man who knows himself to be going utterly alone into enemy territory: a Kaintuck, hated by French and Africans alike. It was clear too from what Shaw said that he did not believe Bertrand Avocet to be the killer-which meant that there was a good chance the true killer would be waiting to stick that thinbladed knife between Shaw's ribs as well.

His mother, January reflected, would be outraged if he did not take the opportunity to get a first-row seat on the Avocet melodrama of passion, money, and blood.

He said, “No.” And heard in his mind the leaden roar of the flies in the hot shadows of a shack on the edge of the swamp, smelled rain and blood and the turpentine laid down in a vain, belated effort to keep ants from the body of a woman that the City Guards hadn't even bothered to view.

Anger flared up in him briefly, like kindling. But like kindling it ignited a bigger log, an anger that did not leap and glare but that burned slow and deep and hot.

“I know you have better things to do in town than go chasing around Plaquemines Parish so that your Captain can look good to the City Council,” January said. “And I know that you're doing your duty, and going where you're sent. But the fact remains that nobody from the City Guards is going to make the slightest effort to find out who murdered Hesione LeGros. And I think she's as entitled to justice as a rich white man is. Or she should be, anyway.”

Shaw said nothing, only chewed his tobacco in silence, pale eyes catching the last glints of light between the pillars. The last of the market-women gathered their baskets and left. A couple of men over by the coffee-stand scraped their rush-bottomed chairs close together, so that the brims of their high-crowned beaver hats almost touched. “I can let you have it for three hundred,” murmured one of them, “plus the balance at five percent on the fifteenth....”

“She is as entitled, Maestro, yes,” replied Shaw. “If it's justice you're after, an' not revenge.”

“Sometimes it gets hard to tell the difference, if you haven't had a look at either one for a while.”

“Chink, pink, honey, oh Lula, ” sang the sweeper, his voice fading as he put his broom on his shoulder and walked away toward the levee.

“Chink, pink, honey, oh Lula.. . . ”

Shadow flowed out of the east in his wake. In the plane-trees of the square, the cicadas roared.

Shaw said, “You know I'll do what I can to help.”

“I know,” said January, and held out his hand. “Thank you.”

But as he watched the gangling shape depart, silhouetted against the orange flare of the cressets along the levee, January reflected that he himself was probably the only person in New Orleans actually interested in bringing either justice or vengeance to the shade of Hesione LeGros.

January dreamed that night about the man who'd raped Rose.

Rose's white sister-in-law Alice had told him once that this man had been a planter on Isle Derniere, a free man of color: Big like you, she'd said. Lighter, of course...

(Why “of course”? he'd wondered. Because people don't come much DARKER than me?)

No wonder Rose sometimes shied from his hand.

In his mind he'd constructed him, enormous and swaggering and arrogant-well-dressed like the quadroon boys who'd called him country and cane patch in his days at the St. Louis Academy for Young Gentlemen of Color. Grinning with big white teeth as he dragged Rose to the bed in her little room behind the grocery, though of course the rape had taken place years ago, most probably in the woods on Grand Isle.

Still he saw it taking place in her room. He saw this man-Mathieu was his name-strike her and throw her down on the bed, and January shouted, shocked and sickened; saw Mathieu tear her bodice open, drag at her skirts. Heard him laugh as she screamed, as she sobbed No, no, please...

And January, dizzy; confused, overwhelmed with a desperate disorientation, laid hold of this man, tried to drag him off her, tried to strike him. In the manner of dreams he could not, for his arms had been hurt trying to help Cora, and his hands had no more strength in them than a child's. He could only shout Stop it, stop it, and Rose thrashed her head back and forth, weeping, No, no. . . .

Never saying Ben.
Never calling on him for help. Why not?

She had a knife in her hand, the thin-bladed paperknife she used to slit the pages of her books, and she stabbed at Mathieu's back, unable to strike a genuine blow.

January wrenched the knife away from her and buried it between those wide, dark shoulders. Stabbed again and again, the knife releasing spraying fountains of blood, as if the heart itself had been punctured or the throat cut. Mathieu reared back and rolled onto the floor, and January fell on his knees over him, straddling him, burying the knife in his chest again and again-chest and face and belly, slashing and cutting, with blood everywhere and the smell of it choking, like the nights at the clinic of the Hotel Dieu in Paris, when there'd been a riot at some tavern in the Saint-Antoine district and they'd brought in corpses.

(Shouldn't I help Rose? But he kept on stabbing Mathieu, shaking with relief that his helplessness had been conquered, that he could save her.)

While he was stabbing Mathieu, Rose got up off the bed, blood on her clothing (Mathieu's? Her own?), her hair straggling over her shoulders, her face streaked with tears and gore. She got off the bed, weeping, and walked past January and out of the room.

Down the stairs.
Across the yard.
Away...

Rose? January got up, ran to the door. Rose!

He could hear her crying but she didn't turn her head. She left bloody footprints across the dirt of the yard.

He looked back and Mathieu was gone. Flies crawled on the splattered crimson on the sheets, the floorboards, the paper-knife. Down in the yard he saw Mathieu, bleeding, grinning, stride across the yard in pursuit of Rose.... Rose!!!

During the days that followed, January undertook as systematic a search as he could manage for information concerning the last days of Hesione LeGros. In those dog days of summer there was little else that required his attention. He had saved enough to live carefully till the frosts brought commerce and entertainment back to the town, and unlike the previous two summers, neither the yellow fever nor the cholera demanded skilled hands in the hospitals.

He was aware that his quest was a quixotic one. Even if he could learn who it was who had waited for the weary drunkard in her shack that night, he was almost certain the City Guards would be as lax in their prosecution as they were in their investigation. And if, as he suspected, her killer was an American, even an arrest would very likely be followed by an acquittal.

Yet he felt drawn to the search. Perhaps the sense of helplessness he'd felt in his dream drove him, the anger and the desperation to save Rose-to save Hesione-even though his gesture would be as futile as it was in the dream. He could not change the past; he could not bring back the dead.

At other times he wondered whether he acted purely from self-interest. As a child he'd been taught to love justice for its own sake, and with each person who abandoned the ideal of justice, he sensed that the cold night of absolute cash-down callousness drew nearer. His life had touched Hesione's, long ago. He had seen her as she had been, and had seen, too, what time had made of her. She was owed some little justice for that lost beauty, for that abandoned life.

Or maybe, he reflected, he just didn't want the jeer in Olympe's eyes to reflect the truth.

“Do you think your landlady might know something about her?” asked Artois St. Chinian as he followed January into the market on the morning after January's talk with Shaw.

The difference from last night's stillness and shadow was striking. Plank tables glowed with the fruits of summer: tomatoes, eggplants, squashes brilliant as jewels. Frilly bushels of lettuces, spinach, kale, like green and purple petticoats. Piles of beans, thin as thread or thick as a man's finger; aureate-bearded corn.
Fuzzy peaches and dark-shining plums. Early sun splashed the gutters like a blinding scatter of coins. A beggar played the same eight bars of the overture from The Barber of Seville-badly-on the cornet, and against it the charcoal-man's wailing song lifted to the rafters; “My horse she white, my charcoal black/Get your charcoal, five-cents sack/Chaaaaaaar-cooooooal.. . .”

The levees might be still and the town half-sunk in feverish summer doldrums, but at this sunrise hour of the morning, there was always something going on at the market.

“She might,” January agreed. “But I'm not sure how much of what Madame Bontemps knew would be true.”

Artois laughed, and gazed around him eagerly, like a schoolboy despite the dandyish adult costume of nipwaisted blue jacket and silk vest. Rose had told January recently that prior to his father's death the boy had led a sheltered life.

Thinking of her words-thinking of Rose at all-brought last night's dream back to him, and with it a sense of panic and guilt, as if it had really been true.

And it was true, he remembered: Rose really had been raped, and had tried to kill herself as a result.

And he, Benjamin January, love her though he did, could do nothing....

“But your landlady was a plaçee, wasn't she?” Artois' clear voice called back his thoughts from the smell of blood, the red-daubed tracks of Rose's bare feet across the yard....

“She was. But I don't think she was even out, the year Hesione was coming to the Blue Ribbon Balls. And then, Marie-Claire Bontemps was one of the town ladies. She'd no more have spoken to a Grand Terre pirate's woman than your mother would have.”

“Well, that's true.” Artois smiled ruefully. “But my mother will barely even speak to your mother, because she was the plaçee of a businessman and not a planter.”

Having been snubbed at his mother's house in the past by the beautiful Coquelicot St. Chinian, January knew this was true. In the wake of her protector's death, Raymond St. Chinian's mistress had immediately converted the house and the lakeside cottage he'd given her to cash and had removed to Boston, where she was reputedly passing herself off as a Spanish countess, which, being fair-skinned and fine of feature, she was easily able to do. Artois, just as light-complected but unmistakably of African descent, had been put in the boarding-school for young free gentlemen of color from which his great-uncle Veryl had rescued him: sometimes January shook his head wonderingly that after such treatment the boy was as happy and peaceful-hearted as he seemed to be.

Cut-Nose Chighizola wasn't at his stand in the market: “Gran'pere, he only come here one, maybe two times in five.” The swarthy young man behind the mountain of velvet-green haricots shrugged with a resigned grin. “Used to be he'd come up here every other load, from the farm on the island; come up, and work the table, him, the biggest farmer in the Barataria. Come up through the bayous in the pirogue, sell here in the market till it was gone, then head back down for another load while Papa brought up his load. And fast!”

He shook his head wonderingly, and glanced past January to give a grin and a wave to a bandy-legged Greek lugging a rush-basket dripping with salt-water and shrimp. “It takes my Papa two, sometime three days to get up here, across the Bay and up through the trembling lands. Sometime up Bayou des Families or Bayou St. Roche or the Little Barataria, depending on where the water is. But Gran'pere ... he leave Grand Isle before the wasps wake up, as they say, and I swear he be setting out his tomatoes here in the market next morning! That's what it is to be a pirate, eh? He can run his pirogue on dew, an' I swear he gets the birds in the trees to tell him how much water's in Bayou Segnette, or whether he needs to come through Lake Catahouache this time, and which way's the fastest today. I tell you, Governor Claiborne couldn't beat my Gran'pere, an' the American Army couldn't beat my Gran'pere, an' the British couldn't beat my Gran'pere. Not on the marshes.”