Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  “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 nonexistent. There’s no proof he was poisoned, so they’ll have to set Olympe and Madame Célie 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 him 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 M’am 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.

  FIVE

  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.”

  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 mistress 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 ciprière, 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 ill-mannered 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.
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  “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. “If I 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.