Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (10 page)

Amusement flickered like marsh light in her eyes, mocking the drums that had whispered in his dreams. “You're that free of enemies, Michie Janvier?” It was early enough that she had not put up her hair; it lay over her shoulders like the pelt of a bear, Indian-black, springy and astonishing. “No other piano player in this town wishes to take your place in all the best halls? No rival for the hand of Mademoiselle Vitrac?”

“Were it as simple a thing as a rival keeping her from me,” replied January, “I'd welcome him and give him tea.” He didn't ask how Mamzelle Marie knew about Rose Vitrac. In some ways it was a relief to talk to someone who knew everything anyway. “Show me a dragon and I'll slay it. But the rival I have to overcome is Mademoiselle Vitrac herself. Herself, and the ghosts of her past.”

“I'll tell you a secret, Michie Janvier.” She set aside the sticky balls of rice she was molding with her hands, glanced into the pot of oil that hung over the great clay hearth, gauging the bubbles around its edge, then turned back to him with her ironic half-smile. “With all women worth the winning it is so.”

She poured out coffee for him and gave instructions to her eldest daughter, a lithe tall damsel of seventeen with her same silent witch-dark eyes, about how long to leave the callas to fry in the oil, then went into the house. She emerged a few minutes later with her seven-pointed tignon tied and stout, sensible boots on her feet. Slaves went barefoot, January had been taught as a child, and poor freedmen working in the cotton presses and on the levee, and market-women and girls who took in laundry. He wondered whether Mamzelle Marie's mother had thrashed her as his own had thrashed him and Olympe. He couldn't imagine anyone with that much nerve.

“Mambo Oba did this,” she said, kneeling before his threshold to regard the scuffed cross. She snapped her fingers twice, crossed herself and touched the string of dried guinea peppers she wore about her neck, and stepped around the cross to enter his room. She put a red flannel over her hand, to pick up the chicken foot from the bed, and used another-she carried three or four of them stuck through her belt-when she squatted by the little plank desk to retrieve from behind it a ball of black wax stuck through with pins. On the gallery at January's side, Bella crossed herself several times and made a sign against Evil.

“It's bad, Michie Ben,” the old servant murmured. “You'd have slept in this room, that Mambo Oba would have come in the night and rode you to death. My brother, he had a fix put on him so, and snakes grew under his skin so he died.”

“Who's Mambo Oba?”

“She lives over on Rue Morales, near the paper mill.” Mamzelle Marie reemerged from the room with the two flannels held gathered by their corners, carefully, as if they contained filth. “I'll go there to her myself and find out who paid her to fix you and what else she might have done. Bella, would you scrub the floor of the room and the steps here with brick dust and put brick dust on the soles of Michie Ben's shoes?”

“I put the brick dust on his shoes last night,” said the servant, with a quick shy grin. “I knew he'd go out this morning.”

Mamzelle Marie gave her a wink, her sudden sweet smile like a doorway into a room unsuspected. “You're a wise woman, Bella.”

“Bella!”

All turned, to see Livia Levesque standing in the back door of the house. January had brought Marie Laveau down the passway at the side of the house to the yard, rather than risk an encounter between the voodooienne and his mother: he had heard his mother speak often enough about superstition and those who preyed on the ignorance of blacks. He saw recognition widen his mother's eyes and the way her lips folded tight, but she called out only, “Bella, you bring my coffee in here now.”

“ 'Scuse me,         M'am.”           Bella curtsied quickly to Mamzelle Marie. “I'll do as you say, M'am, first chance I get.” She nodded toward the house, into which her mis tress had vanished in a rustle of mull-muslin skirts. “Don't hold it against her, M'am, please.”

“I don't hold grudges, Bella.” Mamzelle smiled. “There's no greater waste of time in this world.”

She and January watched the old woman hasten down the steps and across the little yard; and January reflected that Bella, whom Livia had bought when first St.-Denis Janvier had given her her own freedom, was exactly what Livia herself might have been: exactly of the same extraction of white and black, no more educated or better reared. Under other circumstances, might his mother and this woman have been friends?

“Michie Janvier.”

Mamzelle Marie held out to him a little bag of red silk, hung on a cord of braided string, smelling vaguely of dried whisky and ashes.

“Will you wear this?” she asked. “Give it a name, but don't tell anyone what that name is; wear it next to your skin, under your right armpit, and take it out every now and then and give it a drink of whisky. It'll keep you safe.”

January was silent. In those sibyl eyes he saw again the reflection of last night's dreams. Dreams of being lost in the cipriere, with mist rising from the low ground and night coming on. Dreams of seeing something whitish that scuttered among the trees, a slick sickly gleam of rotting flesh. Dreams of the smell of blood.

He had been a child in the dreams, with no strength to meet a capricious world. In those days the only thing you could do with an overseer who hated you was make a ball of red pepper and salt and the man's hair and throw it in a stream, so he would go away, or mix blood and graveyard dust and the burned-up ash of a whippoorwill's wing in a bottle, and bury the bottle where the man would walk over it, so that he would die. God and the Virgin Mary had brought him out of slavery, Père Antoine had told him. God would keep him safe. In times past he'd worn a gris-gris Olympe had made for him and had prayed, half in jest, to Papa Legba as he'd now and then addressed the classical gods, like Athene or Apollo. But lately he'd put the gris-gris away, unsure what it meant to wear such a thing. To seek the help of the loa was, at best, an act of mistrust in the goodness and the power of God.

Satan has no power, the old priest had said, over a good man whose heart is pure.

Of course, Père Antoine had never been any man's slave, either.

The full bronze lips quirked down at one corner when he did not put forth his hand to take the little red silk bag. “You think God didn't make jack honeysuckle and verbena, with the power to uncross any that's crossed?” she asked. But in her tone he heard no anger. Only exasperation, like a mother whose child refuses to wear a coat on a cold morning.

He shook his head. “I'm sorry, Mamzelle, and I thank you. But I can't.”

Paul Corbier and Gabriel were at the Cabildo when January got there. A grudging Guardsman led them all from the watch room through the yard and up the two flights of rickety steps to the gallery where the women's cells were. The madwoman whose children were dead still sobbed and muttered somewhere, pleading for someone to stop her father and her husband from entering the cell at night and sitting on her chest. More loudly, a drunken voice interminably sang “The Bastard King of England.” The day had already turned hot.

“Mambo Oba?” Olympe shook her head, leaning against the barred window in the cell door to look out at her brother, husband, and child. “She's no enemy of mine. When I was with Marie Saloppe, Mambo Oba set herself up against us, and we put fixes on one another; I think she sent a gator to live under the floor of Saloppe's house. But that was years ago. We see each other at the Square, now and then, or in the market.” She shrugged. “That's all in the past.”

“Hmn,” said January. The conflicts among the voodoos in town-breaking into one another's houses to steal bottles or idols or calabash rattles supposedly imbued with Power, placing crosses and fixes on one another's houses or followers-had given January a mistrust and a disgust for them, even before the final dance at the brickyard. It had seemed as childish and petty as the tales they told of the loa, how the goddess Ezili had had an affair with this god or that god, creating scandal; how the god Zaka would run away in fear from the Guédé, the dark lords of the Baron Cemetery's family; less like gods than like children, and illmannered ones at that. It had seemed to him greedy, too, for it was clear to him that money lay at the bottom of it, fear and influence over the minds of potential customers. He knew perfectly well that when white ladies, or colored, paid Olympe to tell their fortunes, Mamzelle Marie took her cut.

“Mamzelle Marie says somebody likely paid Mambo Oba,” said January, and his sister nodded.

“Likely. She always was the kind who'd put a fix on her next-door neighbor so the neighbor would pay her to come take it off.”

“I thought you all did that.”

“Only when the rent's due, brother.” The fine lines around her eyes deepened with a malicious smile. January glanced at the Guard who stood nearby, gauging the broad Germanic cheekbones, the fair hair, and the heavy chin. Leaning close to the window he asked, in the fieldhand African-French of their childhood, “Where were you on the night Isaak Jumon died?” And he saw her eyes change. Wondering if he'd pass that information along.

“Olympe, your life is at stake here. They arrested you because you wouldn't say.”

“They arrested me because I'm a servant of the loa,” she replied. “That journalist Blodgett, he's been here twice. Asking about pagan gods, and hoodoo, and demons, writing notes in his little book to make white folks gasp and whisper over their tea. What does it matter where I was, if I sold poison that could be used anytime?”

“Olympe . . .” said Paul desperately, and Gabriel bit his lip.

And January understood. “The twenty-third,” he said. “St. John's Eve. Were you at a dance?”

Behind her in the cell a free colored woman got into a shoving-match with a slave over who would next use the communal latrine bucket, and Olympe glanced quickly back over her shoulder like a cat when another cat enters the room. There was a bruise on her face, and the lower edge of her tignon bore a line of crusted blood.

A bitter smile creased the corner of his sister's mouth. “lf l were,” she said, “you think I'd say? If a hundred men and women saw me there, do you think any of them would be able to testify in court? Do you think any of them could testify without getting a beating for it, for being out past curfew, for slipping away from their masters, to be with one another and the loa?”

“There must have been freedmen there,” said January. “Or free colored.”

“Oh, I'll buy a ticket to that,” Olympe returned sardonically. “Let's see: a man gets up and says to that churchgoing jury, Oh yes yes that voodoo witch who lays spells of ill luck on those who cross her, oh yes I saw her there I saw her there clear? You are a fool,”

Rose was right, thought January. The woman in the Cathedral came to mind, making her furtive purchase-if it was a purchase-from Dr. Yellowjack while looking around as if she expected the Protestant God to strike the building for idolatry. It would take more than absence of proof to free Olympe.

More quietly still, and still in the half-African patois of the cane fields, he asked her, “How did you know they hadn't found a body?”

Her brows pulled together, as she turned the matter over in her mind. “When the men came to get me I kept my shell with me,” she said at last. “The shell that calls the loa. I kept it in my mouth. Later I asked the shell, and I asked the spider that spins a web in the corner of the cell, and I asked the rats in the walls: who it was that had killed Isaak Jumon. And they all three told me the same: that Isaak Jumon isn't dead.”

“His brother saw him die,” said January. “Why would his brother lie?”

Olympe shook her head. “I don't know, brother. I only know what they said, those voices out of the dark.”

“You pig-faced whore!” screamed a voice in the cell. “Who you callin' whore, bitch?” screeched another. A chorus of screams ensued, and the Guard thrust January and Paul aside to come up to the bars. This proved an ill-judged interference, for someone hurled the contents of the communal latrine in question over him, and the women continued to tear at one another's hair and shriek.

Cursing, the Guard shoved January and Paul back along the gallery, “You two get out of here, now! Damn stinking wenches. . . .”

“He's the one stinking,” giggled Gabriel, and his father shook him hard by the shoulder as they descended to the courtyard.

“Damn them,” Paul whispered desperately. “Damn them for keeping her there.” They crossed swiftly through the watch room, quieter than it had been yester day without the Guardsmen and clerks and prisoners on the way to the Recorder's Court, though even on Saturdays, masters brought in their slaves to be whipped. The hear in the room was terrific, and flies swarmed and circled in the blue shadows of the ceiling.

“Are you well?” asked January, as they came out onto the arcade. “Are you managing, with the children?”

His brother-in-law nodded, and gave Gabriel a quick hug. “With my boy here to help me, yes. And Zizi-Marie is the best assistant in the shop a man could ask for. But Ben, listen. I've got an offer of work, a big order, from Orialhet at St. Michael Plantation. It's nearly fifty miles up the river. Olympe says I should go, that you'll-you'll look after her here. I shouldn't ask it of you, but...”

“No,” said January immediately, “go.” He knew that in the slow summer season, it was Olympe's earnings, from reading the cards and making gris-gris, that put food on the Corbier table. “Should I stay with the children? I'm supposed to be looking after my mother's house when she leaves for the lake, but . . .”

“I'll be back every few days,” said Paul. “And Zizi-Marie is old enough to look after things. But-do what you can for Olympe. Please. Gabriel and Zizi-Marie will come to see her, bring her food and clean clothes. And she'll need an attorney, a lawyer to plead her case . . .”

“I'll see what I can do.” January wondered if such a person could be induced to plead on credit, like a grocer, until Drialhet paid up or the winter season of balls brought money again.

What am I thinking? he wondered then, as he watched his brother-in-law and his nephew make their way up Rue St. Pierre away from him. From above, dimly, he could still hear the madwoman screaming in her cell, the windows of which pierced the high wall three stories over his head. Could hear voices raised, cursing, weeping, quarreling.