Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (34 page)

“You find what you sought, brother?” asked Natchez Jim, when the dark trees of the batture were drifting past them again and the smoke of the city dirtied the brazen air ahead. The day was hot now, even down here near the water. Turtles lined the half-sunk logs, blinking in the sun, largest to smallest with yet smaller ones perched on their backs; here and there the brown-and-cream zigzag of wet scales marked the passage of a water moccasin among the cypress knees.

“I'm not sure.” January stroked the water with the oars a time or two, then both men slacked the left-hand sweeps, steering around a muddy point of land to hug the shore, seeking instinctively more sheltered water. His arms ached, but he found that by leaning his weight from his hips it was possible to put some strength behind the stroke, enough to be of use, which made him glad. On the other side of the point, only a little way into the river, a rusted smokestack reared green and dripping, where a steamboat had tried in the same place to avoid the big current. January hoped the wreck had taken place by day and not at too fearsome a speed.

“We can argue all we want, that Olympe was somewhere else on the night of Jumon's death, and Celie Jumon was in her room alone-though she can't prove it-but it won't matter to a jury. Especially now that the attorney defending Madame Celie is dead.”

“Aarh,” growled Jim, who had apparently been keeping up with the bones of the case through market gossip. “That wasn't that fool Vilhardouin that got himself shot in a duel? . . .”

“The very one.”

“Imbecile. Row straight on here; there's a snag closer in.”

“As you say,” said January. “But until we prove who did poison the Jumon boy, I think they're going to hang the wife for it-and if they hang Madame Celie, they'll hang my sister. I need to find out where Jumon was during the days he was missing, and where he went on the night of his death. And I think,” he went on, “the moon being full tonight, that the man who would know is going to be at the voodoo dancing.”

Though he had passed many times by Congo Square during the slave dances on Sunday afternoons, and had two or three times-as he had the previous Sunday-mingled in the crowds there to find someone he sought, January had not been to a true voodoo dance since the night twenty-two years ago in the brickyard on Rue Dumaine. Lying under a black weight of tarpaulins in Natchez Jim's pirogue, January felt the small cold clutch of some emotion he could not name tightening behind his sternum, as if he expected the voodoo gods to know about the fix that had been put on his room.

They didn't exist, he knew. Old Papa Legba with his keys and his crutch and his smoldering pipe; Ogu the warrior; the rainbow serpent Damballah. . . . They were no more real than Moloch or Apollo. Juju balls were nothing more than dirt and wax and the feathers that came off chickens, like any other chickens in the French town . . .

But still he felt fear.

January had taken the long way to meet Jim in his pirogue where the canal crossed Rue Claiborne, glancing behind him for sight of Killdevil Ned all the way. He didn't think he'd been followed. It was a little more than a mile and a half, through a morass of pondlets, long grass, and cypress knees, to where the canal joined the bayou. From there perhaps another mile through the dark monotony of cypress, oaks, marsh laurel, and standing water, to where the channel split to make two islands, tucked and curled one around the other. When January put back the canvas that covered him from sight he smelled smoke, and by the dim glow of Jim's lantern he saw a three-foot gator slip from the bank and vanish into the opaque ink of the water. Dimly he heard singing:

Papa Legba, open the gate for me, Papa Legba, open the gate,

Ona pass through, ona pass through. . . .

Into where? He remembered the darkness of his sister's eyes.

In a cleared space at the water's edge, guarded by a tangle of oaks drowned by the bayou's altered course, someone had kindled a bonfire. A pillar had been set up, and a sort of altar made from half a hogshead. Aromatic leaves covered it, tobacco and sassafras, and on top of them cut-paper doilies. Cigars and silver coins, dollops of rice and beans heaped on oak leaves or in gourds, pralines or pieces of pound cake on chipped earthenware plates. Beads and strange-shaped stones, a cat's skull, bunches of feathers, a bottle half-full of rum and another almost completely so, squat square English crystal. The man who'd sat on the big bamboula drum in Congo Square two Sundays ago was here tonight, thumping time with his heels; he'd shed his calico shirt and wore only a couple of bandannas tied around his loins. Someone brought him rum from the long pale shape of a dark house, barely visible on ground higher yet behind moss-curtained trees.

Dancers writhed and swayed around the fire. The chant of voices, weird and aching, lifted behind the slap of hands. Bach and Mozart, Beethoven and Rossini, Janu ary thought, were the flesh of his being, but this chanting, this rhythm-these were the bones they clothed.

He saw faces he remembered: a market-woman glimpsed at Mass only that morning; a young man who peddled paper and ink in the streets. The fat woman who'd danced close to Mamzelle Marie three weeks ago, all her flesh joyfully wobbling as she pirouetted, head rolling, lost in the joy of the movement; the thin-faced man who'd shoved the box of English tools off the quay. Firelight changed them, as did darkness and the gleam of sweat. Without their tignons most of the women seemed younger, wilder, shed of disguise. Mamzelle Marie swayed on top of Damballah's cage; the great king snake coiled and shifting as she raised him up, and her long hair was like a black waterfall of night. The force of her being-the radiance of Power-drew all eyes to her.

Beyond her, beyond the crowd, January glimpsed movement in the woods.

Men stepped cautiously, quietly out of the darkness, making their way toward the house. January couldn't be sure, but he thought one of them was very tall, and very black, and there were others, following behind. He edged his way through the dancers, back to where the trees grew thick, keeping himself half-hidden in the shadows. These were men who clearly did not wish to be seen.

Only when he drew close did he see these weren't the men he sought. Rather, he saw, they were those who'd shoved the boxes of tools from the quay the day he'd spoken to Ti Jon. And indeed, there was Dr. Yellowjack, as Hannibal had said, emerging from the dark house to meet them.

Works all the way up through Natchez. . . . Never lets himself come into view. . . .

At the wangateur's signal the black man-who was in fact only a porter-carried the bundle up onto the gallery that ran around three sides of the house, which was of the kind common in the marshes: three rooms, brick between posts, raised high against the rise of the river. Dr. Yellowjack took down one of the lanterns that hung on the gallery's overhang to examine the goods, the shiny buckle of his heron-hackle aigrette catching the light. During this conference two or three white men emerged from the woods, as silently as the thieves had and keeping even more to the shadows.

But Yellowjack saw them, and gestured them up onto the gallery. One of them gave him something-probably money-and a couple of young women appeared, briefly, in the dark doorways of the house. They were clothed the way many of the girls at the dancing dressed, in bandannas knotted around their breasts and forming complicated, swirling skirts, like those in the Square on Sunday. Taking the girls by the arms, the white men disappeared into the house.

Disgusted, January turned to go back to the dancing again. But it occurred to him that whatever else could be said of this man, Dr. Yellowjack would certainly be aware of anything that went on here, on St. John's Eve. So he stepped from the darkness as the thieves were departing, and said, “Dr. Yellowjack,” and the little man turned, regarding him with wet pebble eyes.

“I'm Ben Janvier.”

“I know who you are.” He had an astonishingly deep voice for so small a man, deeper than January's own. Like the echo of cold stones falling into the River Styx.

“Then you know my sister's in trouble, in prison.” Of course a root doctor would know who he was, January thought. Like Mamzelle Marie, such men relied on information about everyone and everything to read fortunes, cast spells, predict the future-to astound the ignorant and peddle gris-gris in the Cathedral's very shadows. And evidently, to know who was in the market for English chisels and handsaws. “She was here, wasn't she, on St. John's Eve?”

“That she was.” Yellowjack was like a coiled snake, or something carved out of polished black wood, watching and wary. A man who never let one sliver of advantage slip from his grip. A man, thought January, seeing the way he kept an instinctive distance, beyond arm-reach, who trusted no one.

“I'm looking for a maroon, a big man with one arm, nearly as big as me,” he said. “You know him?”

The cold eyes narrowed under the brim of the leather hat. “I know him.”

“Does he come here to the dancing? Will he be here tonight?”

“We never know about the future, do we?” said Yellowjack softly. “Why don't you-?”

From inside the house a woman shrieked, not in pain or in terror but in annoyance, and cried, “Let it be, pig! I told you . . .”

Above the little tuft of whiskers Yellowjack's lips pressed tight. “Excuse me.” Like a snake he whipped up the steps and into the house; a moment later January heard the white man's voice lifted in protest.

“You said these gals'd do whatever . . .”

He turned away. Between the water and the fire the rhythm of the clapping had increased, drawing him to the bayou's bank. As he came near there was a shrill wild cry, cut short in a smell of blood, and January saw a stonefaced man of perhaps sixty hold up a decapitated chicken above the blaze. The black-feathered body still jerked and flapped, spraying the post, the altar, the man's naked chest with blood. When the chicken ceased to move, the priest-Dr. Brimstone-threw the carcass on the altar, then took a long swig of rum. This he spit at the post, and for good measure poured a stream of the liquor over the rice and candy and cigars. His handprints showed bloody on the crystal as he set the bottle down.

The pulse of the dancing had grown swift, maddening, like the hammer of a machine or the beating of a wild heart. A woman groaned and stumbled into the fire light, her eyes rolling in her head. Spectators reached to catch her, steady her, straighten her skirts as she collapsed to the ground. The drumbeat panted, a crazed insistent heart, and most of the dancers didn't even stop; January, watching, felt himself still moving as he watched. Someone picked her up, her long black brush of hair falling in a cloud around her shoulders, then she brought up her head and smiled, a flirt's lascivious smile in a middle-aged market-woman's face.

“He, li belle fame, li belle fame,” Mamzelle Marie sang, and lifted up her arms. “Si Ezili!”

And smiling, twirling, the market-woman swung her hips and laughed. Blowing a kiss at one man, holding out her hands to another, her very face seemed transformed. She spoke to someone, too low to hear, but there was a clapping of hands, and people called out “He', li belle Ezili!”

“Lady Ezili to you, Michie Long-Feet,” the woman retorted to a man near her. “You stay home with your wife more-and you don't go chasin' around the wife of you-know-who. . . .” And the man drew back, genuine shock and alarm in his face, raising his hands in a gesture of silence. Her eyes were roguish, understanding, and she bumped him with her hip. “Hey, you, pretty girl. . . .” She spoke to another woman, and in the crowd across the fire another man cried out.

Romulus Valle, January saw, a man he had known for almost two years, the majordomo of the Orleans Ballroom. But when Valle rose from the ground, reeling and shaking his head, his face was no longer the face of the elderly and dignified servant. Its lines, its muscles-almost its very bones-shifted, until it resembled not only in expression but in its underpinnings the face half remembered from nightmares: Olympe's face as it had been at the brickyard dance.

“Ogu!” voices cried out, and the name echoed back in January's heart. Ogu was what they had cried out twenty-three years ago. “Maitre Ogu drinks, but never gets drunk . . . ”

Valle snarled something incoherent, foul soldier's slang that never would have passed the old man's dignified lips. “Give me to drink. My balls are cold.” He caught up a branch and slashed at those around him, clearing a space among the dancers. January shivered, remembering Olympe's face, and the way Olympe had moved. It was as if Paris and the Hotel-Dieu, as if the apartment on the Rue de l'Aube and the woman he had loved and married there, had never existed. As if all those forty-one years had been spent among these people, in these hot fever-stinking nights.

Still Valle danced, leaped, and lunged to the music, and in the fire glare and the full moon's light his movements were a young man's, a warrior's, full of rage and strength. Passionate, and no man's slave. As Olympe had danced.

Dr. Brimstone held out a bottle of rum and a torch. Ogu stretched out his hands-Valle's hands-and Brimstone poured the rum from the bottle, touching the flame of the torch to it as he poured. Ogu caught the stream of fire in his hands, laved it from palm to palm, laughing. “Hey, you give me rum to warm my balls, not my hands,” he teased, and the old root doctor laughed, too.

By the burning rum's blue light January saw Dr. Yellowjack making his way toward him, a cup of lemonade in one hand and a plate of congris in the other. He caught January's eye, nodded toward the edge of the crowd where they could talk.

But as January moved to follow, a voice called out, “Yo, Benjamin Bones!”-a nasal voice, thin and shrill, like wind blowing through broken teeth.

January whirled, for the voice spoke right behind him, and the one who spoke mimed playing the piano with thin hands spread like spiders, like fleshless ivory twigs. January felt the hair prickle on his nape.

He didn't know why or how he knew who it was who possessed the speaker, a man he'd never seen before and was never to see again after that night. In any case he doubted he'd have recognized him in a normal state. Face distorted in a rictus grin, teeth gleaming behind back-drawn lips-somewhere the speaker had gotten a pair of spectacles whose lenses caught the light, and January had the momentary sense that if he were to pull those off the nose where they rested, only empty sockets would lie behind. Someone had given the possessed one a top hat, the other symbol of the god that rode him. January didn't know whether it was his imagination or some trick scent within the man's clothing, but for a moment his nostrils were choked with the damp charnel smell of cemetery earth.