Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (9 page)

He coughed again, and January knew that what he said was true. He wondered if, like the fiddler Hannibal, Nogent welcomed Morpheus with a spoonful of laudanum for the pain.

“It was threatening rain all evening, M'sieu. I cannot imagine Madame Célie would have ventured forth. Then, too, she had the habit of remaining indoors at night, in the hopes that Isaak would come, or send word.”

“So Célie was by herself in the garçonnière here?”

“Yes. But, of course, this animal would have a witness. And when she had none-and she a married lady whose husband was away!-he said, 'Ah, she is a murderess,' and placed her under arrest.”

January's eye traveled over the brick-paved yard, still puddled from the afternoon's downpour. The soft, pitted pavement would hold no track, of course, to show whether Célie Jumon had remained in place that night. And it had rained, not once but many times, as always in New Orleans in June.

“How long had Isaak Jumon been with you, M'sieu Nogent?” he asked.

“Two years,” replied the sculptor. “Nearly three. He was truly a son to me.”

“Do you know any who would want Isaak Jumon dead? Who would wish him ill?”

“Ah.” Nogent was silent, his head bowed, his hand on the scaffolding of the cistern, the subliminal movements of his fingers defining and redefining its shape and grain. Then, “Who would want Isaak dead, M'sieu? I don't know. His father's mother, Madame Cordelia Jumon-I think she would have rejoiced in his death. She did what she could to take his inheritance away from him in the courts. His mother-Well, I never thought that her claim of him as her slave would hold up in court.” Nogent shook his head. “But what mother would harm her son?”

What mother would try to have him declared her slave?

What mother would refuse to speak of, or to, her elder daughter who disobeyed, all those many years ago? “He was a good boy, M'sieu. Not what people say, `Oh, he was a good boy. . . .' But he had a great goodness in him, a goodness of soul. Did they speak of when he would be buried? Of who would carve the plaque on his tomb? That mother of his . . .”

“No,” said January quietly. “No body has yet been found. That's another thing I'm trying to track down. If he was in trouble, was there anyone Isaak would have gone to? He was missing for four days before his death.”

“It depends on the trouble,” Nogent said at last. “His uncle Mathurin, I would think. Perhaps his father-in-law. But they both loved Célie. If either of them knew a single thing of this crime, they would not suffer her to be accused. She is . . . a girl of great sweetness, M'sieu. And great forbearance. She is a girl who does not get angry; but that night, when she'd heard all that his mother had done with the warrant, and the Guards out looking for him, and an advertisement in the paper calling him a runaway slave . . . she came into the kitchen where I was sitting, and she kicked the side of the hearth, kicked it and kicked it and kicked it, not saying a word, because she was well-taught and well-bred, but with tears of anger running down her face. Whoever has said that she had anything, anything to do with his death is a fool.”

January was silent, thinking about the young man dying in the big house alone, the young man who whispered, I have been poisoned. And then, Célie. And died.

There's a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man.

But which woman? January walked along Rue Dumaine in the wet, gathering dusk. Who else could give “no good account of themselves” on the night of Isaak Jumon's death?

In the Place d'Armes, gulls squabbled with pelicans over the garbage of the fruit stands while the women closed up their shops. The brick arcades of the market were dark save for lanterns around the coffee stand, and the world smelled of wet sewage, coffee, and the slow black rivers of soot disgorged by the steamboats into the sullen sky. A snatch of song touched him, where a lateworking gang heaved cords of wood aboard the Missourian:

Kimbebo, nayro, dilldo, kiro,

Stimstam, formididdle, all-a-board-la rake . . .

African words, the wailing rhythm a thing of the bones and the heart rather than the mind.

Rose Vitrac was in her room above and behind a grocery on Rue de la Victoire, a slim gawky woman dressed neatly in contrast to the assortment of slatterns and market-women occupying the rest of the building. As January's shadow darkened the doorway, she raised her head from the pile of Latin examinations that had overflowed her small desk onto bed, spare chair, and floor.

“Ignorant little toads,” she remarked dispassionately and propped her gold-rimmed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose. Half a dozen candles burned in a cheap brass branch on the desk, different lengths and colors, bought half-consumed from the servants of the rich. “Why don't Creoles bother to educate their children? Or make certain they're actually studying what their tutors are paid to teach? Here's one who seems to think Cicero was merely something that was served at Roman banquets.”

“I'm sure if Mark Antony could have arranged it he would have been.”

“You have a point. I hope you've come to seduce me into dinner at a gumbo stand somewhere along the levee. I think if I read many more of these I shall go out into the street and start killing young boys at random, and such things give one a terrible reputation, even in this part of town.”

Rose Vitrac had owned and taught at her own school for young ladies of color, before a combination of financial ill luck, yellow fever, and the determined enmity of one of her investors over her assistance to a runaway slave had conspired to ruin her. She now eked a kind of living from translating Latin and Greek for a small bookshop on Rue d'Esplanade, and correcting examination papers for two of the boys' schools in town. “Not much of a living,” she admitted ruefully, as she and January descended the gallery stairs, “but decidedly superior to prostitution or sewing.”

Or marriage, she didn't add-and she would have, once, January reflected, walking beside her along Rue Marigny. She was a woman who had been hurt badly by men, once upon a time, and deep in her heart still mistrusted them, sometimes in spite of herself.

There is time. January moved his aching shoulders. And given my own possibility of earning anything like a living in the near future, maybe it's just as well. Next month it would be two years since Ayasha's death. Seeing that shadow in Basile Nogent's tired eyes, the darkness of that empty house, had uncorked inside him once again that blood-colored river of pain, and he felt obscurely guilty, walking along the levee in contentment with Rose.

Ayasha, I haven't forgotten.

The time would come for them, he knew. Fate and God and Monsieur le Cholera permitting. But when he wcrkr in the night with the memory of a woman beside him, it was Ayasha's body he sought; it was Ayasha's hair he sometimes imagined he could smell in the moonlight. But love for Rose had not made the pain grow less.

Over seven cents' worth of jambalaya from a market stand, Rose listened to January's account of the past eighteen hours: what he'd learned from his mother and sister, what he'd seen at the jail, and all Nogent had said. “Here's the advertisement Geneviève Jumon put in the Courier Friday,” he said, spreading it out where the lantern glare fell on the tabletop. “Considering my mother's attitude about money maybe it's just as well I was in Paris when St.-Denis Janvier died, and that he didn't have much to leave me. Is there a chance you can get close to Célie Jumon? Talk to her? My sister says her father won't Iet someone of Dominique's stamp near her.”

“And I have a more respectable appearance?” Rose peered at him over the tops of her spectacles, amused. “Well, I'll certainly try. But the one I think we need to talk to at once is Monsieur Antoine Jumon. That little scene in 'a house where he'd never been before' and mysterious servants smacks a little too much of penny dreadfuls for my taste.”

“Shaw seems to have accepted it,” said January thoughtfully. “Or at least his superiors did.”

“Once the complaint was brought I can't see how they can have done otherwise. The boy is gone-and there's a good deal of money involved. And a witness.”

“How very providential for Geneviève.”

“Would you climb into a coach-and-four with masked bravos, or however it was he went there? Antoine seems a singularly trusting boy.”

“Maybe he's too young to remember being a slave.” January sipped his coffee and watched the line of municipal gutter cleaners being escorted back along Rue du Levee toward the Cabildo for the night. “Witness or no witness, I want to know what happened to Isaak's body. Obviously it wasn't chucked out into the road. Even the gutter cleaners would have noticed that.”

“Well . . .” Rose looked doubtfully after the retreating coffle. “If you say so.”

“Unless they find it, the state's case is practically non-existent. There's no proof he was poisoned, so they'll have to set Olympe and Madame Celie free.”

Behind the small thick ovals of glass, the gray-green eyes flicked to his, then away. Eloquent silence as she stirred her coffee, laid down the spoon with a tiny clink. “You don't think so?”

The eyes touched his again, then again dodged away. “Your sister is a voodoo,” said Rose, after a long silence.

January opened his mouth to say, What does that have to do with anything? And closed it again.

He knew exactly what that had to do with it. “Who's going to be on that jury, Ben?” she went on. “Slaves, who don't automatically cry Devil-worshipers when they walk past Congo Square on a Sunday afternoon? Freedmen, who've been to the voodoo dances themselves and-and presumably have seen enough of what goes on there not to be blinded by just the name and the rumor? I assume there are good voodoos and bad voodoos, the same way there are good Christians and bad Christians. But do you think any white jury is going to think of that?”

January was silent, remembering the candle he'd lit that morning, the prayer he'd prayed for his sister's soul. Framed in her spotless white tignon, Rose's long, oval face had a bitter weariness to it, a kind of tired anger. “Maybe I'm wrong,” she said. "Maybe whites-and colored, too-don't automatically believe calumny. But I was driven out of my business by rumors and lies, Ben. I'm a-a pauper now, at least in part because people don't ask questions about what they hear.

“Down in the Barataria country where I grew up, there are miles of what we call the trembling lands: miles of sawgrass and alligator grass and cattails, miles where plants have matted together like blankets spread upon the waters-but it's still water underneath. Sometimes you can get out of it just filthy and embarrassed and looking for a dry place to scrape yourself clean. Sometimes you don't get out of it at all.”

She stood. “Forgive me, Ben. Maybe those giants I see all around me are really only windmills after all. But be careful.” She clasped his hand, and walked away into the dwindling crowds of the market arcade, as nine o'clock struck from the Cathedral.

Candles glowed in his mother's parlor, shutters and French doors open onto the street to reveal a small cluster of her cronies drinking coffee. The musical babble of their voices reached him on the banquette: “Of course, Prosper Livaudais was paying her husband's valet to let her know the minute the husband was out of town . . .” “They say the baby's a miniature of the Marçand boy . . .” “And where she got the money for that new tilbury is anybody's guess . . .”

January made his way down the passway between her house and the next, ducking through the narrow gate at the end and into the little yard. The kitchen, too, had all its shutters thrown wide, illuminated from within like a stage to display Bella washing up the supper pans. “Could you leave the stove hot long enough for me to boil some water for a bath?” he asked, and Bella pursed her wrinkled lips and nodded.

“If you hurry,” she said. “I'm heatin' water already for Warn Livia's bath, but you know how she gets about extra wood burned.”

January knew how his mother got. “I'll be down to haul the water in two shakes of a lamb's tail.”

He climbed the steps at a lope, working his way gingerly out of the black woolen coat; for weeks after his injury he hadn't even been able to put it on without assistance, or to get himself into a shirt. He still needed help sometimes if he had to dress in a hurry. A fencing master he knew had given him exercises, to be performed faithfully every evening, to strengthen the weakened muscles, and although the thought of lifting and rotating two ten-pound scale weights made him flinch he knew he'd better do it while the water heated. It would, he reflected, make the bath afterward more than ever a joy.

The garçonnière was dark, doors and shutters left open to the cool of the night. As he crossed the threshold something gritted underfoot, as if gravel or sand had spilled there.

What on earth? Bella kept the place so clean the threshold cursed your foot.

In his small desk he found lucifers and scratched one by touch in the dark. As he put flame to candlewick he saw that Bella had been in to remake the bed to her own satisfaction after he'd made it up that morning.

In the middle of the blanket lay a severed chicken foot, claws curled like a withered demon hand.

He looked back at the threshold. His foot had scuffed it out of shape, but he saw that a cross had been drawn there, in salt mixed with crumbling dark earth that he knew instinctively was graveyard dust.

If asked, Benjamin January would have denied all and any belief in magic. To his childhood catechism had been added the writings of Pascal, Newton, Leibniz, and Descartes, and the severed foot of a chicken was to his rational mind nothing more than so much leathery skin and bone.

He slept in the storeroom over the kitchen that night, and told himself this was because he did not want to disturb any sign in the room that, by daylight, might have told him who had entered to lay the fix. He did not, however, sleep particularly well. In the morning, before the day grew hot, he made his way to Rue St. Anne, to the house of Marie Laveau.

The voodooienne was making breakfast for her children in the tiny kitchen behind the pink stucco cottage: copper-colored dragonflies floated weightless and sinister above the puddles in the overgrown yard. “I wouldn't have disturbed you this early, except that I know it has to have something to do with Olympe.”