Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (23 page)

Her voice thinned again, and this time she sat longer, perfectly still, as if fearing that movement would set off unbearable inner pain. Only her hand closed around Rose's, tight, a grip upon a lifeline.

Then, quite steadily, she said, “I can't believe he's gone. I can't believe he's gone.”

January closed his eyes, the scent of his dead wife's hair clear as a nightmare in his nostrils again.

A very fanciful little boy, Mathurin Jumon had said. My uncle Mathurin is a consummately evil man.

The tall house standing aloof on Rue St. Louis, empty save for one old woman sleeping alone. A Palissyware teapot and a mattress of straw in an empty room.

He visited Olympe at the Cabildo the following morning, taking Gabriel and the two younger children with him. January wasn't easy in his mind about bringing Chouchou and Ti Paul to the jail; and at the sight of the four-year-old, Mad Solie began to shriek that the child must be taken away, taken away quickly or her father would come and murder him.

“Shut her up,” growled a hoarse voice from the same cell, “she's scarin' the little bastard.”

The shrieks abruptly stopped.

“It'll be all right.” Olympe pressed her face to her smallest son's plump hands through the bars. “It'll be all right.” Another woman might have been in tears; Olympe's face was like wood.

Behind her in the cell a voice asked in English, “Kin I kiss 'em, too? I sure do miss my little boy.”

“I still think we oughta get a real big gris-gris and lay it on that M'am Genevieve,” opined Gabriel, as January descended the gallery stairs afterward with Chouchou, silent as ever, by the hand. Gabriel carried Ti Paul, and January felt a weary anger all over again that he could not lift his niece and nephew in his arms, as he had been used to do. “We could take and split an ox tongue and write her name in it, with some silver money and peppers, and sew it up and leave it on a tomb in the graveyard, and call the spirit Onzoncaire-Onzoncaire'll do anything, if you remember to pay him off with a sheep's head and a bottle of whisky.”

As they reached the bottom of the stairs the sergeant at arms in charge of such things cracked his rawhide whip over the back of a slave triced to the post in the center of the yard. Gabriel flinched, but tried to loflk casual, as if it didn't have anything to do with him. “Onzoncaire's this hoodoo spirit with red eyes, and dog's teeth, and . . .”

“We've had enough gris-gris around here,” January told his nephew grimly. “And if I hear you doing any calling of any hoodoo spirits, I'll get your papa to wear you out.”

“Mama does,” pointed out Chouchou.

“Your mama knows good from evil,” said January, though he knew Pere Eugenius would have a quarrel with this statement. “I bet your mama never called on any hoodoo spirit with dog's teeth.” He wasn't at all sure this was the truth, but Gabriel, he noticed, looked thoughtful. In the big watch room he inquired after Lieutenant Shaw, and was told-as he expected-that the Lieutenant was out on his rounds. He handed Sergeant deMezieres at the desk a note detailing all he had observed after the funeral, and what he had learned from the Metoyer maid about Genevieve Jumon's actual or probable whereabouts on the evening of her son's death, and what Railspike and Kentucky Williams had had to say about Isaak's departure and Mr. Nash's employer.

Not, he thought uneasily, as he stepped out into the liquid warmth of the arcade's shadows, that it would do him a particle of good if Mr. Nash were waiting for him somewhere in the crowds of the Place d'Armes. On the way to the Cabildo that morning he had instructed Gabriel to run immediately in the event of trouble, taking the younger children with him. . . . He hoped the boy would actually do so.

“Would Onzoncaire take care of Uncle Ben,” asked Chouchou gravely, “if we paid him off?”

“Sure,” said Gabriel, then cast a worried glance up at his uncle. “I mean-well, I guess God could, too.” “Thank you,” said January, wondering why he tried. “And I'm sure God thanks you, too.”

For the rest of the day he worked at his translation of The Knights. But the absurdly involved efforts of Demosthenes and Nicias to find a tyrant for Athens were insuffi cient to distract him from the thought of that tall silent half-empty house, and the baroque gleam of sunlight on a Palissy-ware cup. Both Dominique and his mother had departed for Milneburgh Tuesday, and it would take Minou a day to settle in, before she could reasonably expect Therese to take a half-day off to make inquiries of the Jumon servants. And on Friday, the Fourth of July, he knew Henri would be coming in from the family plantation, and Minou would be picnicking with him along the shores of the lake, no doubt with her handmaiden in attendance. But a note, at least, he thought, as he brushed his black coat and pressed his good linen shirt preparatory to the long walk to the Soames's residence in Spanish Fort, would be appreciated.

The long walk-over an hour along the shell road that rimmed Bayou St. John-was the result of lacking the twenty-five-cent fare for the steam-train. He and Hannibal made it together in the gluey heat of twilight, accompanied by those other musicians of the town likewise affected by the slow season: Philippe deCoudreau, Ramesses Ramilles, Casimir and Florimond Valada, Jacques Bichet, and others, all comparing notes about the contenders for French and American social prominence who had, as they frequently did, scheduled their entertainments for the same evening, as a way of forcing their acquaintances to publicly proclaim who they thought more critical to their social success.

“I hear there's a fix been put on you,” remarked deCoudreau. “We better watch out, or poor M'am Soames's piano strings gonna bust in the middle of the grand march, and we all get rained on like hell on the way home.”

“Where'd you hear that?” asked January, and from the corner of his eye saw the Valada brothers exchange a quick, worried look between them, and fall back a pace or two.

DeCoudreau shrugged. “Where does anybody hear anything, Ben? It's just around.”

“Around like that story last year that you were getting married?” inquired Hannibal, stopping, as he had stopped a dozen times, to rest. “And to Liliane Verret, of all people?”

The matter passed off in a laugh, but in fact Mrs. Soames's piano went massively out of tune halfway through the dancing later that evening and a total of ten gentlemen had to be forcibly restrained, at one time or another in the evening, from challenging one another to duels or entering combat outright. Two of these challenges were issued by Madame Redfern's jealous cicisbeo Greenaway, and only forcible restraint kept him from issuing a third to Clement Vilhardouin-one of the few Frenchmen in attendance-when the lawyer mentioned he had dined with the lady again that evening.

This was a high percentage even for an American entertainment. “Two's the average,” remarked Hannibal, surreptitiously dumping an ounce of opium tincture into the watered beer, which was all the hostess considered appropriate to offer musicians. “It must be the election coming up, or else somebody sneaked actual alcohol into her liquor.”

In addition to the gubernatorial supporters of Mr. White speaking ill of his rival General Dawson, Colonel Pritchard attempted unsuccessfully to call out the Rever end Micajah Dunk for implying that the female slave Kitta who had escaped from Pritchard's household had done so because Pritchard had sold her husband Dan-“I am not implying such a thing, sir, I am stating it outright,” responded Dunk-and two entrepreneurs who were attempting to raise capital in Philadelphia each separately challenged Burton Blodgett, once it was realized that the journalist had entered the parry, clad in sloppy evening dress, unnoticed by a back door. Evangeline Soames said her majordomo had undoubtedly been bribed and would be whipped.

It rained like hell on the way home, long after the final steam-train had departed. After Philippe deCoudreau's seventh jest on the subject of hexes and fixes, January had to pinch his own hand very hard between thumb and forefinger to remind himself not to throw the jolly clarionettist into the bayou.

So it was not until the following day-Saturdaythat January made the five-mile walk again to Milneburgh, to speak to his sister's maid on the subject of what the Jumon servants had seen on the night of June twentythird.

“But they're all packed up and gone, M'sieu Janvier.” Therese regarded him with some surprise, as if he should have known this and saved himself the walk. “The Jumons have a house in Mandeville.”

“Henri and I took the ferry across yesterday-to Mandeville, I mean,” put in Dominique, stirring the lemonade the maid had brought to them with a long silver spoon. The rear of the little white cottage Henri had bought for his plaçee stood on stilts over the water. Wavelets clucked and whispered among the pilings and the gray knobbled pillars of the cypress knees that studded the shallows in the shade. “It's ever so much nicer than Milneburgh. More exclusive, if you understand. Quieter. Sometimes I'm sorry they put the steam-train in between here and town; one gets all those-well, those uptown chaca girls and their beaux, and all the clerks and shopgirls on Sunday outings, bowling and shooting at the shooting galleries and eating ices in the taverns and making such a ruckus.”

She sighed, and fanned herself with a circle of stiffened china silk, for even on the narrow terrace above the water, the day was warm. Beside her in a white wicker cage, a half-dozen ornamental finches provided riveting entertainment for her plump white cat.

“Is it possible,” asked January patiently, wondering why no one had ever strangled his youngest sister, “for Therese to go out there and speak to her cousin-Aveline, is it?-sometime soon?”

“Oh, but p'tit, we just have weeks and weeks of time.” Dominique regarded him with widened eyes and reached to put a hand on his knee. “And they're not going to let poor Olympe out of prison any the sooner because of what you'll find out from Cousine Aveline.”

“No,” said January. “But Cousine Aveline's information may be only an indication of something else we need to find out. And we have, in fact, eleven days to find out everything we need, whatever that might be.”

“P'tit, I'm so sorry!” Minou reached behind her and took Therese's hand. The maid, clothed in a sober but extremely stylish frock of green muslin in contrast to her mistress's fantasia of honeycomb smocking, lappets, and lace, looked rather put out that her efforts in the direction of locating evidence had not been properly appreciated. “Therese, dearest, you won't mind going out to Mandeville tomorrow-oh, no, the day after tomorrow, Iphegenie and Marie-Anne are coming for tea-oh, no, Tuesday, because Becky needs the help Monday with the laundry. . . . Tuesday definitely, p'tit. . . . You won't mind going to Mandeville Tuesday to speak with your cousin, will you, dear? Only you'll have to be back to serve at dinner, because Henri will be here. Would you believe it, p'tit?”

She reached out again and grasped January's hand. “Would you believe that dreadful Redfern cow has issued invitations to a Bastille Day party? Doesn't she know anything about France having a King again, even if it is only that awful Louis-Philippe? Even Henri knows that!”

As it happened, January knew all about Mrs. Redfern's Bastille Day gala because he'd been contracted to play at it. A thought had come to his mind concerning the absence of the Jumon household in Mandeville and the vacancy of the houses on Rue St. Louis. He accepted his sister's invitation to lunch-trying not to appear too grateful-and turned the thought over again in his mind while walking back along the shell road to town: walking quickly and staying as close as he could to the other strollers and riders and passengers in carriages, out taking the half-holiday air.

Hannibal was still asleep when January reached home-he'd been coughing blood the last hour of the ball, keeping himself to the back of the group and con cealing his illness with the skill of practice. Bella's room stank of opium, but January couldn't find it in his heart to be angry. In the kitchen January found half a pot of coffee warming at the back of the hearth. Though there

was no evidence that anything in the kitchen-or in the garçonniere, where January had scattered thin dust on the floor that would take any scuff or track-had been disturbed, he poured the coffee down the outhouse: with some regret, coffee being ten cents a pound. He drew water from the cistern to bathe, and afterward lay on his bed to get what sleep he could, and dreamed of his father.

“They help you out, but you got to pay them off,” his father said, touching the sheep skull nailed to an oak tree in the cipriere, the offering to whatever spirit it was who had granted someone a wish. The bark of the tree was blotched with brick dust and candle wax, and among the roots of the tree little handfuls of rice and chickpeas were carefully laid out on leaves. “Bosou, he guards those folk that run off into the cipriere. They live there in a village as we lived in Africa, away from the whites. But they don't just forget him, any more than they'd forget a man who helped them. They show respect, as you must show respect, and Bosou guards the way behind them. Maybe one day he'll guard the way behind you.”

In his dream it was as he remembered it, the trail of ants creeping up the bark of the tree, the hum of the flies and the wriggling of maggots in what was left of the sheep's flesh, the stink of blood and rum.

“You got to thank them,” his father said. “You got to thank them.”

Then he stood on one foot with his back to the skull and snapped his fingers, and watched while January-a tiny boy-child as he'd been then-did the same, and spoke words January didn't remember. In his dream he heard instead a quote from Lucretius: Augescunt alie gentes, alie minuuntur / Inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum / Et quasi cursores vitae lampada tradunt.

Some races grow, others diminish, and in a short span of time the living are changed; like runners they relay the torch of life.

Which he knew could not be right.

But as he and his father walked away he felt eyes in those empty sockets, watching them, and distantly he heard the tapping of African drums.

“I never thought I'd thank God the rich all leave town by the end of June.” January put his head out of the narrow passway between houses, scanned the still silence of Rue St. Louis. By the dim reflection of the oil lamp at the next intersection all was still; a heavy stillness rank of heat and stench and mosquito whine. A cat darted from an alley, bolted across the street, vanished.