Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (4 page)

“Isaak was nineteen.” Lightning flashed in the tarblack sky, then a long slow grumble of thunder. “He worked with Basile Nogent the marble carver, and had just married Célie Gérard, the coffee seller's daughter, back at the end of May. They lived behind Nogent's shop. Isaak hadn't had anything to do with his mother in many years.”

“Did they say why she killed him?” asked January. “I assume they're saying someone paid her to do it.”

“No one paid her.” Paul glanced swiftly at his son. “She wouldn't kill for pay, not a colored man, not a white man, nobody!”

There was silence.

Corbier turned to Mamzelle, his face working with concern and fear. “Can you help us?” he asked. “Do anything? Learn anything? Or you, Ben? You have friends in the Guards.” Paul was a man of deep goodness, but without Olympe's brilliance. Not a man, thought January, to know how to fight the law.

“I know one man in the Guards,” January corrected him quietly. “And if he was the one who came and arrested Olympe, it's because he thinks she's guilty. But I'll find out what I can.”

“I also.” Mamzelle Marie got to her feet, a movement both languid and filled with energy, like a cat's. Or a snake's. “But the ink bowl can only tell me so much. And I won't learn anything faster than morning, when you'll be able to go to the Cabildo and ask her things yourself.” Thunder sounded again, hard on the heels of the flash this time. January said, “If we're to get to our homes dry we'd best leave now. May I escort you to your door, Mamzelle?”

“There's nothing in the night that frightens me,” she replied. “If you'll bear me company as far along as your mother's house it will serve.”

From the packed-earth banquette of Rue Douane, January looked back and saw Paul close up the parlor shutters, then the doors behind them. The shutters were fast, but the doors still open, in the front bedroom on the other side of the house, and slits of muddy-gold candle glow shone through the jalousies. Zizi-Marie and the younger children would be huddled together still on their parents' bed. The light grew momentarily stronger, as Paul and Gabriel entered with another candle, then snuffed out in increments to darkness.

Paul Corbier would not sleep that night.

For a time January and the woman walked in silence, the fetid night clogged with the pungence of rotting garbage. The city contractors who cleaned the gutters were dilatory at best, even up on Rue Chartres and Rue Royale, where the rich had their dwellings. Here dead dogs floated, swollen, in water that whined with mosquitoes. Oily streetlamp glow shone yellow on the backs of the huge roaches that lumbered across their path, or on the frogs that hunted them. Once a City Guard in his blue coat passed on the other side of the street and glanced their way, but decided not to notice them. January wondered whether the man had simply counted the points of Mamzelle Marie's tignon and thought better of it.

As he walked he thought of a skinny little girl, like a coal-black spider, spitting on St.-Denis Janvier's polished calfskin shoes at that first meeting, then fleeing without a word. Don't hurt her, their mother's protector had said quickly. She's just a child, and afraid.

But Olympe, January knew, had never feared anything in her life.

It wasn't until they stopped at the throat of the passway that led back to the rear yard of his mother's pink stucco cottage on Rue Burgundy-the cottage St.-Denis Janvier had given her thirty-three years ago-that January asked softly, “Is there any reason you know of, that they'd think my sister poisoned this Jumon boy?”

It was not something he could have asked in the presence of the man who loved Olympe, or of her children.

Marie Laveau tilted her head, and regarded him with those mocking sibyl eyes. She knew everything, they said. She read your dreams. More to the point, January knew she listened to everything, watched everything; learned from the market-women who was buying what and meeting whom; from the rag pickers what they found in the garbage and the gutters outside the big town houses on Rue Chartres and behind the American mansions on Nyades Street; from the maids and laundresses of every wealthy family in town what stains they found on whose sheets. The slaves of bankers and brokers and planters from the Belize to Natchez sold her letters, or names whispered by night, or combings of their owners' hair; and as a hairdresser herself, to white and colored alike, she heard still more. She was queen of secrets, paid sometimes in money and sometimes in kind.

And this was, not all she was.

But she only answered, “There's a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man. Don't you know that, Michie Ben?”

Thunder shivered the night again, lightning limning the roofs around them, and the sudden cold breath of storm made the seven points of her tignon nod and flicker.

She added, “Mostly men don't understand.”

He saw the dark winds lift and ripple her dark skirts as she passed along the banquette in the direction of Rue St. Anne, and the swaying light of the next intersection splashed her briefly with color, blue and orange and red. Then she was gone.

There was a brickyard on Rue Dumaine, back in the days before the war with England, where the slaves of the town would meet at night. Sometimes it was only to talk or to sell things pilfered from their owners-a chicken, a shirt, a bundle of half-burned candles, a bottle of American whisky poured artfully off the tops of the master's supplies. But sometimes, after the whites were asleep, the drums would speak in the darkness.

As a young boy January had gone, although his teachers at the Academie St. Louis told him this was not a thing young gerrs de cauleur libre did, and his mother vowed she'd wear him out with a broom if she ever heard of him acting like a slave brat. . . . But he'd been a slave brat only a few years before. And he missed the music and the dancing and the dark lusciousness of forbidden excitement that fired the air at the dances. Later, old Père Antoine had told him that what went on in the brickyard was the worship of devils. Though January never quite believed that, he came to understand that he could not be a child of God and a friend of the loa as well.

Olympe had taunted him with cowardice-Olympe who was then slipping out of the house regularly to dance with the voodoos and to learn from a woman named Marie Saloppe the secrets of herbcraft and poisons and the names of the African gods. From the first his sister had turned from her mother, and all her mother's efforts to make her a proper fille de couleur. You think about how you're doing Ben and me a favor, every time you open your legs to that white man? he remembered Olympe saying to their mother, bitter and mocking and wild-Olympe had spent a great deal of her girlhood locked in her bedroom. But she would always slip out at night.

One night she had simply not come back.

Their mother had made no effort to inquire about where she might have gone. But three or four nights after that, when lying in the dark of the garçonnière January had heard the thick swift heartbeat of the drums, he had put on his clothes and made his way to Rue Dumaine, knowing that if she was in the city at all, that was where she would be.

The drumbeats drew him on. They'd built a fire behind the shelter of the brick kilns, but they kept the fire low. He saw only the yellow touch of it, outlining the square shouldering shapes of piles and pallets, of drays half-loaded, of sheds. The world was a stink of smoke and wet clay. But as he edged his way between those hard damp structures, like cemetery tombs in their closecrowded solidity, the blood stirred hot and unexpectedly behind his breastbone and in his loins at the tripping rattle of the hand drums, the tidal pull of the clapping hands.

He smelled blood.

They'd killed a chicken and a young pig and thrown them in the cauldron seething over the fire. Someone had brought tafia, the cheap liquor made from molasses squeezings; someone else had brought rum. Muted firelight mottled the veves scratched on the ground-circled crosses, spirals, and diamonds, like Mambo Jeanne had made on the plantation, and more complicated signs strung together, the secret signs of the gods. The dancing had begun.

The music tugged at January's heart.

Nothing here of the minuets and country dances that were the heart of the music lessons he had, at that time, been teaching for over a year. Nothing here of Mozart, or of Bach, of measure and beauty and passion contained. Like raw rum it hit him, and he felt his body move in time, unconscious as the movements of coupling. All around him men and women were moving, too, rocking, swaying, sometimes catching one another and turning under their arms, sometimes only standing, dancing with the body as the slaves did-hully-gully, they called it, the loosening into rhythm that makes work easier-and not tripping here and there like the restless whites.

Hands clapping, clapping. Voices wailing and dark, 'Eh, bomba, hen, hen, canga bafie te!" Candles stuck among the bricks, darts of yellow light on naked musolm gleaming with sweat, on breasts bound only with a couple of kerchiefs, on ankle-clappers ringing bare hard feet. On whip scars and old brands and the tattoo-work of Ibo and Ewe and Senegal. January felt the wild desire to do as he'd done as a child, to tear off his clothes the better to dance. Mbuki-mvuki, the old men had called it at Bellefleur, a word for what les blanquittes had no word for.

Then he saw Olympe.

She was up near the end of the yard, half-glimpsed through the dancers; up where the Queen danced on top of a cage in whose darkness a snake's coils moved and shifted, up by the King, a squat scarred man wearing only a couple of red kerchiefs knotted around his groin and a belt of blue cord. Like many of the dancers Olympe had stripped, and wore only a thin shift, plastered to her body with sweat; her tignon cast away, her hair a black thick brush exploding around her face; her eyes shut in solitary communion with the music and the dance and the liberty to be utterly herself.

Men danced closer, touched the King's hands or the Queen's. They whirled to fill their mouths with rum and spit it across the blood-spattered signs on the ground, the smell of it a sweet sickish backtaste against smoke and sweat. “Zombi!” cried someone. “Zombi-Damballah!” and touched the serpent's cage. A gold eye like a sequin flashed within. The bodies swayed faster to the rattle of the drums. The music of darkness. Music like that which would pour from an open grave, from the door into the world beyond.

A man cried out and fell shaking to the ground a yard from January's feet. Two women propped him up, and he rolled his head and arched his back, gasped and babbled out words that made no sense. January had seen this before, too; but now it troubled him as it had not before he'd learned the ways of the Christian God. The man's eyes opened and his face changed: aged, shrank, fell in on itself, and when he got to his feet he staggered as if lame. “Legba!” cried someone, “Papa Legba, hi!” The man staggered and limped, reaching out to touch this person or that, crying out in a hoarse croaking voice, his eyes the eyes of something other than human.

Ridden, old Mambo Jeanne would have said. Ridden by Papa Legba, the god who guards the crossroads. “Agassu, Agassu has her!” cried someone else as a woman fell moaning, and began to kiss the earth; another man roared like a bull, shook his head, tossing and charging at Papa Legba, who whirled haltingly away. “I am Ezili!” shrieked a man in a woman's thin voice, rolling and lolling his head and hips, “Ezili Dahomey! Ezili of a thousand lovers!” And among the crowding chaos, among the writhing dancers, the shadows and darkness, January saw Olympe's eyes snap open, her mouth gape wide with a sudden bellow of rage.

Saw her face change.

“Ogu am I!” The voice that rolled from her throat was nothing like Olympe's, nothing like the voice of any human he had ever heard. “Ogu am I, Ogu of the sword, Ogu of the fire!” Turning, Olympe snatched a stick from beside the snake cage, whirled it around her head. People cried, “Ogu!” and tried to steady her, but she lashed at them with her weapon and, striding to the King, pulled the rum bottle from his hand.

“Give me that,” she boomed, in that terrible alien voice, “my balls are cold.”

Hands clapping, voices calling; heat and rhythm and darkness rolled over January in a wave. He watched in eerie horror as his sister swaggered around the brickyard, pushed through the crowd, called out in hoarse soldier slang to Papa Legba or Ezili, leaping and spinning around the fire. There was something in it of Italian comedy, January thought, those ridden by the gods improvising lines to one another, acting as the gods would act. . . . And something beyond that. Something Other, and frightening.

Olympe swayed, and a man caught her-the half-naked King, his manhood lifting under the thin guise of his red kerchiefs. The fire burned low, and the dancing redoubled in its speed and intensity; men and women caught at one another, clutching and moaning. Some disappeared behind the brick stacks, or into the dense pockets of shadow beyond the fire's glare; some fell as simply as animals to the ground. Olympe was panting, soaked with sweat, the King's arms dark bands across the stained wetness of her shift. Her head fell back; January saw the glint of the dying fire on the bones of her chest, the points where her ribs and pelvis and small shallow breasts stabbed out through the thin cloth. She was sixteen, thin and wiry, her face now not the face of a god but of a woman blind with ecstasy; and she twisted her head around, seizing the King's face between her hands, dragging his lips to hers.

At the sight of her a hot stab of lust went through January's flesh, disconcerting and urgent. A woman caught his arm, a young girl barely older than Olympe, panting, sweating, smiling, and pulling at him. “Dance with me,” the girl gasped. “Dance: . . .”

January thrust her from him. He was eighteen, and unmarried; and if not precisely pure, he was as chaste as he could stand to be, knowing that he could afford to take no wife if he got a girl with child. But it's all right, something said in his mind-the loa, maybe, or the Devil, or his own lustful needing. In the morning neither of you will know the other's name. It's all in our hands, not yours.