When first January had come to New Orleans as a child, the old town walls had still stood, and pastures had stretched beyond them toward the swamp and the lake. Upstream a few Americans had begun to build their houses and shops along Canal Street—named for a waterway that had never been dug—but for the most part everything beyond the walls was a wilderness of cypresses and cattails, silt and saltgrass, and ferns.
He had had no fear to walk there or anywhere else outside the walls.
The walls were gone now. But in his heart and his imagination they remained, a bastion against the upriver Americans, human garbage of the flatboat and keelboat trade, river rats, and filibusters whose numbers had doubled and tripled and then waxed ten- and twenty- and fifty-fold with the passing years. Foul-mouthed dirty men whose cold eyes saw no difference between slave blacks who could be bought and sold and the free colored man or woman whose ancestors had founded the town. Slick scheming men who would buy anything or sell anything or do anything to anyone as long as it could turn a profit, and the coarse whorish women who followed them for gain.
The Swamp had streets, but that was about all that could be said of the place. No one had bothered to pave them, or run the gutters essential to keeping the marshy town drained. The slots between the crude plank buildings, the tents and shanties that housed brothels and barrel houses and cheap lodging places, were themselves gutters, ankle-deep in reeking ooze that steamed faintly under the morning’s pounding heat. Untended privies competed with the stench of dead dogs, rotting garbage, expectorated tobacco, and fermenting alcohol in a putrid miasma that veiled the whole district; even at this hour of the morning January could see into the open sheds to games of poker and faro still in progress from the previous night or the previous week. Outside the Turkey-Buzzard a man lay in the muck. Flies swarmed around a gaping wound in his chest. Even from across the street January could see he wasn’t breathing.
He walked swiftly, his eyes on the ground, keeping to the sloppy runnel in the middle of the way lest he encounter any who considered it their right as white men to have the drier ground along the walls. There were a lot of runaway slaves living in the Swamp; slaves, too, like Ti Jon, who “slept out,” finding lodging in its back rooms, attics, and sheds. These, January knew, could be insulted, shoved in the mud, beaten, or killed with impunity. The City Guards did not come here. When whores called out to him from shanties barely wider than the beds they contained, he did not raise his eyes.
Hannibal lived above Kentucky Williams’s saloon in Perdido Street these days. He had only to make it that far.…
“Michie January?”
He halted, surprised. A child stood at his side, panting as from a run; one of those hundreds of ragged urchins who darted around the Swamp and Girod Street and the Basin District like flies above a gutter on a hot June day. The boy held out a folded sheet of paper. “Are you Michie Ben January?”
“I’m Ben January.”
“This for you, then.”
Puzzled, he handed the child a picayune, and the boy pelted away, trying to outrun the crowd of larger boys who emerged from nowhere to try to take the coin.
January unfolded the paper, his mind going back to the chicken foot on his bed.
The paper was blank.
He turned it over.
Blank.
The hair prickled on the nape of his neck as he realized what the paper was.
He looked around him, fast, but the man who’d paid the child to get him to identify himself in the open street had already stepped from under the awning of a rundown saloon, a knife in his hand. January had an impression of a sun-bleached mouse-brown beard and long braids wrapped in buckskin and red rags, a shirt sewn from the blue wool goods traded by the British posts to Indians in the Oregon Territories. A fur trapper, a mountain man, calm and businesslike as if he were going after a lamed deer.
January ran. Even if the law would permit him to raise a hand against a white man in his own defense—which it didn’t—he knew that every Kaintuck river rat and keelboat ruffian in the district would be on him like wolves if he did so. In any case he knew his arms, his back, his body were not up to a fight. He was taller than the trapper and probably fifty pounds heavier, and he ran like a jackrabbit: down Jackson Street, through empty ground rank with waist-high weeds and splashing with oozy water, around the side of a coarse-built barrel-house-cum-bordello where the whores shrieked “He’s gettin’ away from you, Ned!” and someone yelled “Two dollars on the nigger!” as he and his pursuer pounded past.
Behind him he heard the man yell “Stop him!” in English. “You, boy, stop!” And he raised the knife, flashing in the clouded sunlight.
Men poured, whooping, out of the Ripsnorter Saloon—it was a slack hot morning in the slow season, and the fight promised diversion—and formed a barrier between the buildings, heading January off in a weed-ridden soggy field. There were two pistols and a rifle among them, and January tried to veer away. The mountain man swerved at his heels, lunged, and struck; January’s feet skidded in the muck beneath the weeds. He tried to catch the knife hand and twist it aside: it was like a child trying to avert the blow of a man. His arm crumpled like soaked pasteboard in a wash of breathless pain, and he ducked out of the way as the blade scored his flesh.
They fell, hard, the white man on top, January’s arm collapsing under him as he tried to catch himself. He rolled from under the knife and mud splashed on him with the force of it stabbing into the ground. Rolled again, trying to bring up his arm through a red haze of agony, sobbing with shock and despair and sheer terror, and then someone grabbed the trapper from behind and hauled him back like a housewife uprooting a carrot.
It was a black man, huge—January’s own formidable height and as heavily built, head shaved, scarred eyes, and a mouth like an ax cut in an ugly face. He whirled the trapper with astonishing neatness and head-butted him, hard: January saw his rescuer had only one arm, his right, the left a stub not quite down to the elbow. The trapper staggered and the cut-armed man let him go, and in a single move elbowed him across the face, then back-fisted him with a blow like a hammer’s.
The trapper staggered, lunged again with his knife, and a man from the crowd leapt out and tried to pull him back. January glimpsed Hannibal’s frayed black coat and long hair as the trapper whirled and walloped the fiddler aside with the back of his hand, with force sufficient to knock him down. The cut-armed man dragged January to his feet, the crowd churning into a melee, grabbing at January, grabbing at the cut-armed man. The trapper flung Hannibal off him a second time but never got a chance to make another lunge at January, for out of the confusion barreled three women, harpies, a six-foot Amazon named Kentucky Williams and her equally fearsome partners, Railspike and Kate the Gouger—all of whom, January knew, had a soft spot for Hannibal in what passed in them for hearts.
“Three dollars on Kentucky!” somebody yelled as the cut-armed man shoved January by main strength through the mob, and the sky split with a roar of thunder and rain sluiced down.
The downpour was short, but it effectively discouraged pursuit. When January and Cut-Arm ducked into a ramshackle shed behind a store on St. John Street—a store that seemed to sell nothing much besides liquor and some of the most slatternly women January had ever seen—most of their pursuit had already fallen aside. The few who ran on past seemed more interested in finding shelter themselves than picking up the trail. “You know him?” panted Cut-Arm, and January shook his head.
“He had a boy come out and give me a note, blank, so he could see me say I was Ben January. So he didn’t know who I was, either.”
Cut-Arm sniffed, and his dark eyes gleamed in the shadows as he listened for the sound of further pursuit. “You got someplace to go?”
January nodded, and touched the shirt-pocket where he kept one copy of his papers. “I’m free,” he said. His mother—and many others among the free colored—would have been careful to specify that they were free colored, dreading lest they be
taken for freedmen, freed blacks, emancipated by a white master out of generosity or in payment for faithful service. Though of course, he reflected, that was exactly what he was, and what his mother was, deny it though she certainly would. “I came over here to find my friend Hannibal the fiddler, the one who tried to help you in the fight.”
He felt a small pang of shame at having abandoned Hannibal to his own devices—the fiddler could never have survived an all-out attempt on his life—but knew Hannibal would be the first person to say “For God’s sake run for it!” At least Hannibal wouldn’t be clubbed to death merely for striking a white man. And with Kentucky Williams and her girls on the scene, Hannibal’s chances of getting clean away were good.
“No white man had to help me,” said Cut-Arm softly, his voice deep, the growl of a bear. “And you’d be best if you stop calling any white man friend. Not the one who freed you, not the one who mixed himself in the fight. None of ’em. When it comes to a choice they’ll all betray you. Where’s this white man of yours live?”
Cut-Arm went with him as far as the foot of the rattletrap ladder that ascended the back of Kentucky Williams’s house. The two men moved quietly in the slanting rain through the weedy lots, the stands of cypress, and loblolly pine. In two of the saloons they passed, other fights had already started up, women shrieking and men cursing, furniture smashing against rickety plank walls. Few came out in the rain who might have seen them go by, but once, near the corner of an alley, January saw a dark shape signal Cut-Arm that all was clear.
Hannibal had already returned, and sat in the gray light of the doorway of his attic room, reading Topography of Thebes, when January climbed the ladder through the thinning drizzle. “So what was your quarrel with Mr. Nash?” the fiddler inquired, and coughed heavily. His long dark hair was soaked and he’d shed his wet coat in favor of a blanket around his thin shoulders. “Don’t tell me you dared imply that the college he attended has a second-rate rowing-team?”
“That was it.” January glanced back down into the flooded yard. No trace of Cut-Arm was to be seen. “I should have known better than to say a thing like that to a Harvard man. Thank you.” Hannibal had a small cut over one eye, but other than that he seemed little the worse for leaping into the fray, save for the drawn exhaustion of his face and the way he slumped against the doorframe.
Behind him the roof leaked noisily. Peering through into the attic’s sepia gloom, January saw a mattress and a drapery of frayed mosquito-bar. A dozen stacks of books were all arranged on planks laid down between the rafters above the thin ceiling of the room below, placed so that the leaks dripped between them.
“You know the man?”
Hannibal coughed again and withdrew a bottle of opium from under the blanket’s folds. “Edward Nash, hight Killdevil among the mountain men for his affection for that particular tipple: If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I should teach them would be, to forswear thin potations. Damn,” he added, taking a swig, and held the bottle up to the light. “Speaking of thin potations … They swear to me they don’t steal it, but they do. They think I don’t notice when they water it.” He coughed again, the deep racking shudder of tuberculosis, and leaned against the frame of the door, jaw tight with sudden pain.
“God knows what those girls want with opium,” he went on after a moment in his hoarse, light voice, “considering the poison they peddle by the gallon downstairs. I don’t know what I’d have done if they hadn’t shown up. I left the lovely Kentucky in charge of the situation. Ungallant, but I thought it best.” His eyes slipped closed; in the rainy light, his face looked deathly.
“Still …” And the dark eyes flicked open again. “ ‘’ as the maggot said to the King of France. Our Mr. Nash came to town in May with four years’ worth of fox and beaver pelts, his own and those of his partners back in Mexico. He sold the lot for close to three thousand dollars and started drinking. And gambling. He did some of both here, but mostly over at the Flesh and Blood on Tchoupitoulas Street. I’ve never seen one man get so drunk so quickly and stay sitting up so long after he should charitably have been put to bed. Charitably at least for the local Paphians, who would have access to the inner pockets that the gamblers missed. Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders’ books.… In any case he’s been hanging around town ever since, trying to raise sufficient funds to get back to Santa Fe and face his associates with some semblance of honor.”
January was silent. He saw again the chicken foot, the graveyard dust. The child holding out to him the folded note in the street. “I gather,” he said at last in a mild voice, “that someone suggested to Mr. Nash a means by which he could redeem himself.” And he related the incident of the boy and the blank note. “Olympe’s husband is leaving town today—he has to feed his family and go when work is offered. Anyone would have known that. And seen me stand up in the court yesterday morning.”
“That’s crazy.” Hannibal took another sip of opium and worked the cork back into the bottle. “Who’d want to have your sister hanged? I mean, if you’re going to go after a voodooienne, why not tackle Mamzelle Marie? Who’d want to see the death of what appears to be a perfectly innocent sixteen-year-old girl?”
“I don’t know,” said January grimly. “But somebody does. Do you suppose the lovely Miss Williams and her equally lovely friends might be able to ascertain more details of Mr. Nash’s current employment?”
“I don’t see why not. I doubt he’ll be in much of a mood to talk to the Fair Maid of Lexington herself—when last I saw them together Kentucky had bitten a sizable chunk from his left ear and was hammering him over the head with a slungshot—but the thing about the Swamp is, that everyone knows someone who knows someone. Rather like Oxford University in that sense.…But that can’t have been the reason you came here, surely?”
“No.” January rubbed his short-cropped hair to shake some of the rainwater out of it. “Though I was on my way to see you. Which brings me to the favor,” he went on, “that I wanted to ask of you.”
The Bank of Louisiana stood on Rue Royale, a massive structure of Doric pillars and imposing facade set back from the street, within a few steps of the Merchants’ Bank, the United States Bank, and the Louisiana State Bank. Grouchet’s, a small eating house that catered to the better-off among the free colored, stood next to the Merchants’ Bank across the street. Slightly more expensive than could be afforded by junior clerks at any of the banks, at a quarter to one on a Saturday afternoon it was not crowded. From its front windows, January had a splendid view of the front doors of the Bank of Louisiana and of Hannibal Sefton, loitering before the windows of The Sign of the Magnolia pretending to admire boots.
Hubert Granville emerged from the bank’s bronze doors. His corpulent bulk was surprisingly natty in a coat of snuff brown superfine, his red-blond hair carefully pomaded and combed. He extended a thick hand from beneath the shelter of the porch and, finding that the rain had ceased, stepped out, but did not don his hat, for a woman followed immediately behind him. She would have been tall even without the pattens that protected her shoes from the mud, and though January couldn’t see her face clearly at the distance, she carried herself like a woman of beauty. Her gown of black mourning crêpe showed off a ripe, matronly figure; her tignon matched the dress in hue and trimmings and even at that distance seemed to him one of the most elaborately decorated he’d ever seen on a woman of color.
No veil. Full crêpe, no veil usually meant a child or a parent recently deceased, not a husband—no widow in her senses would swelter in the crêpe of first mourning past the moment when she could dispense with veils.…
The woman glanced back at the bank, asking a question. Whatever Granville replied, it was reassuring. The banker held out his arm, the woman took it, and together they proceeded down Rue Royale in the direction of the Magasin de Commerce.
Shortly thereafter, as the Cathedral clock sounded one, the clerks of the bank emerged. Young men with f
lourishing side-whiskers and elderly gentlemen in steel-rimmed spectacles, dressed—as January had taken care to dress upon his return from the Swamp—in the tailed coats, embroidered waistcoats, and high-crowned chimney-pot hats that were as wildly inappropriate for New Orleans in the summertime as crêpe mourning. January counted them off with his eye: several white men of assorted ages, a free colored far too dark to share parents with the fair-skinned Isaak Jumon, a much-lighter-skinned man of thirty at least.…
And there he was. The youngest clerk, looking every day of seventeen and every Caucasian atom of a quadroon, arrayed in a nip-waisted black frock coat of the boldest cut and three black silk waistcoats, one over the other, jet buttons gleaming at a hundred feet away.…
And there was Hannibal, strolling over to him, casual and polite, coat brushed, long hair braided in an old-fashioned queue, and new gloves of black kid on his hands. January could see when the fiddler handed Antoine the card of one Quentin Rafferty—Hannibal had a collection of cards, neatly separated into those that specified an occupation and those that did not—and the most recent copy of the New York Herald he’d had in his attic, pointing out two or three articles he claimed to have written under various pseudonyms. And he could see, by the boy’s tilted head and the angle of his shoulders, that Antoine Jumon was buying every ounce of that particular load of goods.
Hannibal could be astonishingly convincing when he tried.
“… wouldn’t be printed in New Orleans, so there’s no worry about that,” the fiddler was saying a few moments later, as he and Antoine Jumon entered Grouchet’s. “In fact it’s standard policy for our paper to change all the names of a story of this kind. It’s the story itself that’s the thing, my friend, the … the piquancy, the bizarrerie that characterizes the streets of any city, that particularly Gothic strangeness that makes true human experience so much more curious than the borrowed effusions of mere art. Don’t you agree?”
Graveyard Dust Page 10