03 Graveyard Dust bj-3

by Barbara Hambly

  He waited for Mamzelle Marie to finish her dance, to step down and touch the hands of this woman and that, disciples as Olympe was a disciple, or friends as Olympe was a friend.

  And that, too, he thought, was Power.

  Her eyes glinted and she smiled, lazy and impudent and dangerous, like sunlight on the edge of a knife. "MichieBen."

  He removed his hat. "Mamzelle."

  "I went to the house of Mambo Oba." A woman handed her a horn cup of lemonade, and Marie Laveau drank thirstily. Sweat streaked her face, wet the edge of her seven-pointed tignon, and made dark blotches on the calico of her blouse. "She's gone. The house is closed up. Even her cats are gone; her clothing, her money, her calabash rattle and the shell she uses to speak to the loa, gone. The neighbors say she left Friday night."

  January was silent, chilled. Mamzelle Marie watched him, and with its flat spade-shaped head against her dark neck muscle the Damballah serpent watched him, too. "What can I do?"

  Her mouth tucked a little as she thought, maybe wondering what it was that he would be willing to hear. "Pray," she said at length. "Ask the Virgin Mary, or St. Antoine, or St. Peter to help you, to deliver you from harm. You go to the Chapel of St. Antoine, to the old statue of St. Peter that stands in the back. Put brick dust on your shoes, and carry in your mouth a split guinea pepper, with a paper in it on which you write your wish: Deliver me from Harm. Leave it there at his feet."

  St. Peter? wondered January. Or that other old man who guarded all doors who carried keys?

  "Then when all is over, and for the best," Mamzelle went on, "go back and thank him. Leave a piece of pound cake, or a couple of cigars, or a little rice, or silver, at his feet. It's good to give good things to those who help you," she added, a dark smile flickering across her face. "And it's good to tell others still in fear that prayers do get heard."

  "Well, look at you, pilgrim!" Cut-Arm came up out of the crowd, naked but for a loincloth of bandannas, and jingling bells on his feet. He held a laughing woman on his good arm and another had her hand closed around the loincloth at his other hip. "Didn't know I was coming to the aid of a toff. Doesn't a toff like you know better than to go hunt adventure in the Swamp?" January's rescuer leaned down from his great height to kiss Mamzelle Marie's cheek.

  "Sometimes you go hunting other things." January had seen the judgment in the big man's glance, a scorn opposite to his mother's scorn: scorn for the clothing he wore, for the culture that was his hard-earned guarantee of advancement in a world where the money that bought safety and peace was all in the hands of the whites.

  "In the Swamp you're going to find only one thing," said Cut-Arm. "Same thing you find in all of this whole town. Boys... Ladies..." He addressed the half dozen men and women who came up around him. The men were near-naked, as he was, slipping now into rough smocks and trousers, the clothing of the poorest of the poor slaves January saw, a little to his surprise, Colonel Pritchard's diminutive waiter Dan among them, and with him was the young woman Kitta who'd been with him in the kitchen that night, the woman who'd gone to the voodoos, the woman who was with child. Both touched Mamzelle Marie's hands, the ceremonial transmission of Power or blessing.

  "Will we see you when the moon comes full?" Cut-Arm asked of Mamzelle Marie, and she returned him her enigmatic smile.

  "It might so be."

  "Until then." He kissed her hand. To January he said, "And you, pilgrim, you beware of how you go. The white man's like a dog, once he gets on the hunting trail. He doesn't give up."

  "But why?" asked January, baffled. "That's what I don't understand."

  "That's what the deer doesn't understand, minding its own business in the woods." Cut-Arm laughed curtly. "But the deer ends up in the stewpot, all the same."

  Walking away from the Square down Rue d'Orl?ans through the dove-gray evening, January heard the voices behind him, the dark uneasy music pulling at his heart.

  St. Peter, St. Peter, open the door, I'm callin' you, come to me!

  St. Peter, St. Peter, open the door...

  Livia Levesque's house was deserted when January returned to it at last. At a guess, his mother had gone to dinner at the home of one of her cronies, for a comfortable evening of cards, coffee, and the bloody slaughter of every reputation they could lay tongue to January would have given a good deal to be privy to what his mother had to say to her friends on the subject of Genevi?ve Jumon. The kitchen doors stood wide, the waxed-oak table scrubbed, and every bowl and pot and cup secure in its place in the cupboard. In the laundry, also open to the dense hot stillness of the evening, a huge tub of clothing soaked, the water faintly yellowed by dissolving slivers of soap. Washboards, irons, a box of starch were laid out ready for the following day. Bella, presumably, was with cronies of her own, sitting under the gallery of some other house in the French town-Bella didn't hold with going above Canal Street -"where all the Kaintuck riffraff lives"-where the family had gone out for Sunday dinner elsewhere.

  In the kitchen a red pottery bowl held jambalaya, protected from flies by a plate laid over the top. Coffee warmed on the back of the stove. January filled a cup, carried both vessels with him up the steps to the gar?onni?re, his mind already savoring the joy of an evening all to himself in the parlor with the shutters thrown wide to the street, playing on the piano all those pieces that brought him the greatest joy: Bach and Mozart, the overture from The Italian Girl in Algiers and strange old jigs and shanties Hannibal had taught him. His room was dark and the door was shut and he had no idea why he stopped on the threshold, his hair prickling on his head, knowing there was something wrong.

  He set down bowl and cup beside the door, and pushed the shutter wider. The evening was settling down fast, as it did in Louisiana, but enough blue light lingered that he could see all around the little room. It was barely eight feet by ten and contained nothing but the narrow bed he'd slept in as a boy, mosquito-bar tied neatly back; a small desk with its chair; a stand bearing slop jar, basin, and ewer in white German ware. The bed was as Bella had left it earlier in the day, smooth and flat as a tidal beach. The rag rug made a dark oval, exactly in the center of the pale floor.

  January took a lucifer-match from his pocket and lit the candle, then knelt and began to look in every corner and shadow of the room.

  In time he found what he sought, worked in between the sheet and the coverlet-even in the hottest days of summer Bella would not tolerate any bed dressed in sheets alone-at the foot of the mattress. Black flannel. Sniffing it cautiously, January identified at least red pepper and iron, and the rotting flesh of something that felt, through the flannel, like a snake or lizard head. An ouanga. He made a move to untie the stringy root that bound the bag shut, but didn't. Couldn't. He only stood with the thing in his hand for some time, not sure why he was trembling. Anger, he thought. Anger that his room had been thus casually violated again.

  Far-off voices still drifted to him from Congo Square. It wouldn't be long before the cannon in the Place d'Armes sounded curfew. A faint breeze from the door made the candle flicker, the shadows curtsy and loom. His eyes were drawn to the crucifix above the head of his bed. For a moment he thought he saw a dried snake there instead, with his own name written on the slip of paper in its jaws.

  He wondered if his confessor had ever come back to his cloistered room and found a chicken foot on his bed. He carried the ouanga downstairs to the kitchen and pitched the black flannel bag deep into the back of the hearth, poking it into the banked embers with a stick of kindling. It caught with a great blazing leap of blue fire-alcohol, or possibly gunpowder-and the stench of burnt feathers and hair.

  When it was consumed he climbed the stairs again, picked up bowl and cup and spoon. But a thought came to him as he was about to reenter his room, and he carried all three down to the yard again, and dumped the jambalaya into the privy. He went into the kitchen and poured the rest of the pot of coffee after it, and set the dishes next to the sink, for Bella to wash after breakfast. Then he let himself o
ut the gate of the yard, and walked down Rue Toulouse to the levee, where women sold gumbo and jambalaya from stands among the brick arcades of the market. Though he could ill afford it, he bought himself something to eat there.

  That night he dreamed that there was another little flannel juju somewhere in his room, and that every time he sought for it, it moved someplace else, rustling like a mouse in the dark.

  TEN

  "Ben, darling, I know you and Olympe were right and I was wrong about Madame Lalaurie last Spring, but don't you think you're letting what happened affect your judgment just a little?" Dominique judiciously spread two gowns on her bed and studied them: pale yellow mullmuslin frothed with layer upon layer of white lace and a clear lettuce-green tulle trimmed with plum-colored bows. "Do you think the waist on the green is a bit high, Ben? They're wearing them lower this year."

  Having come to manhood at a time when women wore clinging high-waisted gauze gowns with virtually nothing under them, January thought all women dressed like idiots these days, his dear friend Rose Vitrac not excepted. He knew better, however, than to say so. "The lower waist is more becoming."

  "I think so, too. And I never did like those silly aprons." His sister cast aside the green tulle and with it apparently all recollection of her ecstasies last year on the subject of the dress's ornamental, lace-trimmed apron. There was more in her of her mother than Dominique would care to admit. "I mean, why would Mathurin Jumon keep his nephew locked up in his attic for five days? Why not just poison him the night he got him into his evil clutches? Wouldn't Grand-mere Jumon have something to say about it? Or the servants?"

  "Grand-mere Jumon isn't well," said January. "And she's seventy years old-I doubt she's been up in those attics for years."

  He seated himself on the rocking chair of red cypress that stood near the open window. Beyond, in the cottage's yard, his sister's cook, Becky, emerged from the kitchen with a stack of white porcelain dishes balanced in her hands; set them down on the bench under the gallery; and commenced to wrap each in newspaper, laying them in a wooden crate at her side. Straw littered the flagstones all around her. Knowing what the kitchen at his mother's house was like on Mondays, with the washtub boiling all day and a cauldron of red beans set for good measure over the back of the long-burning fire, January completely understood the decision to risk getting rained on by doing the packing outside.

  Back at his mother's, Bella was doing her packing outdoors, too.

  Most of the wealthy brokers, landlords, and bankers who could afford to do so rented cottages on the lakefront during the summer season, in Milneburgh or Mandrville or Spanish Fort. Many, as Mathurin Jumon had said, were already gone. Though it was only a short train ride from Milneburgh to the city, many also rented cottages-or at least rooms or suites of rooms-for their colored plac?es, especially if there were children involved. With the steadily advancing summer heat, the stink rising from the gutters and the summer infestations of every insect from fleas to mosquitoes to roaches and palmetto bugs, to say nothing of the risk of fever, people had been leaving New Orleans since early June.

  Soon, January reflected, there would be "no one at all left in town," as the wealthy Parisians had lamented at the balls where he'd played. No one a wealthy person would know, anyway. Only the poor.

  No wonder the property owners of the town were having, as Shaw would call them, conniption fits. "And then again, Madame Cordelia may very well have been in on it," January went on, as Dominique began the endless process of selecting pelerines, stockings, tignons, reticules, fans, gloves, petticoats, and shoes to go with the yellow ensemble. "That would let Mathurin establish an alibi by going to Mandeville. And it would be easy to bring Isaak to the house in the first place: the men at the Widow Puy's all agree that Isaak received a note of some kind on Friday afternoon."

  "And so he arrived at the house and the woman who has just finished trying to wrest his inheritance from him in the courts hands him a cup of opium-laced coffee and says, Oh, cher, drink this." Dominique turned with her arms full of lace. "Which reminds me, have you tried the coffee they serve at the Cafe Venise on Rue du Levee? They put cocoa in it, I think, and hazelnut liqueur-really excellent, although Mama says they only do that because they buy inferior beans.

  Still, I'm going to get some hazelnut liqueur and experiment with it, for Henri. I'm told they sell a really excellent hazelnut liqueur at... Oh, thank you, Th?r?se," she added, as her maid entered and set on the marble top of the bureau a tray bearing two glasses of lemonade. Th?r?se looked at January, looked at the chamber's dishabille-Dominique had pulled two more frocks from the chifforobe and laid them out in a fluffy meringue of petticoats-and met her mistress's eye with a patient and disapproving sigh. Men, even brothers, had no place in a woman's bedroom, particularly not men of color.

  When the woman left, his sister Minou turned back to him. "Or maybe she struck him over the head with a slungshot?" She returned, rather disconcertingly, from her excursion into coffee and romance to the subject at hand. "And then what? Carried him up to the attic herself? Isn't that a little-a little Sir Walter Scott?"

  January breathed half a chuckle at the mental image. "Maybe," he replied. "But the fact remains that Isaak was under that roof on the night of the twenty-third and that he died there of poisoning with his wife's name on his lips. And I'm rather curious as to how he came there, and when."

  Dominique arched her eyebrows. "You said Th?r?se was related to one of Laurence Jumon's maids?" he asked.

  "Oh! " Her face broke into a sunny smile at the thought of an intrigue. "Of course! Cousine Aveline! The one who was having an affair with that awful groom of Monsieur Bouligny's. Do you know, that groom was stealing oats from Bouligny and selling them by the peck to-"

  "Could Th?r?se be persuaded to talk to her?"

  "P'tit, Th?r?se will talk to anyone about anything! I absolutely can't get a word in! Do these topazes go with the primrose silk, p'tit? There's going to be a ball at the H?tel Pontchartrain on Friday night-Henri's mother is holding one opposite that awful Mrs. Soames-but Henri promised to take me to supper, masked, at the Cafe d'Auberge in Spanish Fort that night, and sometimes candlelight isn't kind to a yellow this bright."

  After another hour of Minou's nonstop chatter, and a substantial breakfast of poached eggs, scallops, and grits ("Oh, Becky doesn't mind making it up, p'tit-and I'm absolutely enslaved to her cream sauces"), January made his way to the prison, where under the eye of a City Guard he was escorted once again up to the third-level gallery, to the narrow barred window of Olympe's cell.

  Behind her in the dim chamber he could hear women's voices arguing-harsh and foul-tongued English-and the sound of stifled weeping. The smell that breathed from that close hot twilight was unspeakable.

  "Gone?" Olympe frowned, reaching her hands through the bars to take January's. Her fingers felt thin, callused, and knotted; her face appeared more gaunt even than it had on Saturday under a tignon that, though clean, was already damp with sweat.

  "Cleared out and gone, Mamzelle Marie says. Calabash, seashell, cats, money... But I found a tricken bag in my room last night when I came home."

  "Hidden?" asked Olympe. "Or out where you could see it?"

  "Hidden in the bed."

  Her eyes narrowed, dark with uneasiness. "Voodoos sometimes have more than one house," she said after a time. "Especially if they've been around awhile. And a man may hire more than one voodoo to warn you away, or to put the death fix on. Have you checked under the steps? Or in the yard, for places where something may have been buried?"

  January shook his head.

  "There's fever here." She lowered her voice, leaning close to the bars. "Not in this cell, but in the one on the end of the gallery. The Guards will beat us, if word of it gets out. It's just jail fever, they say, not yellow jack. But last night I saw him. I saw the fever walking along the gallery, like a ghost made of smoke and sulfur. He's here, Bronze John. Mamzelle Marie, she's burning green candles for me every da
y, and bringing me fever herbs."

  January remembered the candle he had lit in the Cathedral only that morning, for Olympe's forgiveness in the eyes of God. "We'll get you out," he promised, squeezing her fingers again.

  "Did C?lie Jumon tell you anything about where Isaak might have gone in trouble? Or anything about his uncle Mathurin? Brother Antoine seems to think Uncle Mathurin might have been the one to do Isaak harm." Considering the neat columns of money ranged along the edge of the desk, Mathurin had certainly been able to afford to hire Killdevil Ned.

  "I know nothing of him." She removed her fingers from his, to scratch her arm. Though Gabriel brought her clean cloths every day, January could see the fleas on her bright tignon and the white sleeve of her blouse. "He has dealings with the voodoo doctors sometimes, I know, but then many white men have."

  January supposed that if a respectable young matron could hide herself in the Cathedral to meet Dr. Yellowjack, it was nothing for a Creole gentleman to make arrangements with him for the secrets of his business rivals, or for girls like those who'd passed him in the gate at Congo Square.

  From another cell on the gallery he heard the hoarse voice of Mad Solie panting, "M'sieu! M'sieu!

  Tell them! When you leave this place tell them that I didn't kill those children! It was my father and my hushand that killed them! They tried to force me to do it but I wouldn't listen, I wouldn't doit!"

  And another woman's weary voice, "Will somebody shut her up before she starts Screamin' Peg off again?"

  "They're trying to murder me in here! They come into the cell every night, and stand at my feet, and whisper to me, whisper to me, holding my children's little heads in their hands!"