Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (2 page)

The voices were getting louder. The Italian captain, Gambi, announced into a momentary hush, “Privateer this and privateer that, bah! Like there was any disgrace in be ing a pirate! Pirate is what I am and I don't care who knows it! Nobody tells me who I'll sink and who I'll spare!”

“I hear there's a new cargo come in down at Big Temple....” St. Geme's voice determinedly overrode Gambi's.

“Hardly pays to go down there anymore,” remarked de McCarty with a laugh, “now that Lafitte's got a shop on Royal Street as well,”

"Still, you get the best; going down there, or to Grand Terre. Used to be you'd have to deal with this smuggler or that smuggler, and run all over town trying to get the best deal. I will say for Lafitte, he organized them all under one leader. .....

“Like the American Washington?”

“A toast.”
Blanque got to his feet, wineglass lifted so that the topaz liquid caught the molten hundredfold amber of the candlelight. January ruffled a little fanfare borrowed from Rossini, then stilled his hands on the keys. Just as well, he thought. The piano was going out of tune anyway.

These little square ones did that in the damp of New Orleans. “To our guest of honor.”

In his big chair at the head table, General Humbert half-rose, creaking a little in his blue uniform, and inclined his graying head.

“A man whose victories in the field put such amateurs as this American Washington to shame.
A man who truly knows the face of war; who has carried the war against England onto their own conquered soil in blood-soaked Ireland; whose boldness in the attack at Landau is legendary; whose courage and intrepidity were key elements in the pacification of uprisings in the vendee. A true soldier, a true warrior, whose vocation has been the sword and whose duties he has always acquitted with honor and dignity....”

Perhaps because he was taller than any man presentor maybe only because some of the banqueters had shifted their chairs a little January could watch the General's face in the candlelight as Blanque spoke. And from a drunkard's fatuous smile, he watched the man's expression change. He's drunk himself sad, January thought. Or drunk himself philosophical, which is worse. . . .

“. . . carried the banner of the Republic against all odds, caring nothing for his own safety; caring nothing for the politics and the quibblings of politicians. . . .”

Slowly, Humbert surveyed the room, and with a flash of insight January guessed what he saw. In New Orleans, this was the top level of society. Perhaps not the highest born, but the wealthiest, the men who moved events in the town. But even as young as he was, he'd seen how the Frenchmen of France regarded their Creole French cousins, when they came to balls. He was familiar with that polite expression that said, This is all very well for the New World, but in PARIS.. .

He could almost see General Humbert asking himself, Who are these people? Is this what I have come down to? In Paris, thought January, this graying old lion would have been entertained by his brothers of the regiment, most of whom, despite the Revolution, had some trickle of noble blood in their veins. Not by bankers who financed shady deals in Indian land and smuggled slaves. Certainly not by a raffish gang of privateers who ran in goods for illicit sale.

“Let those who wish to, speak of armies and of supplylines!” Blanque, clearly a cognac or two beyond the frontier of careful thought, had fallen under the spell of his own or atory. “It is personal courage, personal command, which broke the rabble in the vendee. It was the sheer bravery, the audacity, of the commander, which delivered victory to the Republic's banners at Landau-”

“Enough!” With a crash the armchair at the head table was flung back. Humbert stood swaying on his feet, face crimson, eyes blazing in the candles' liquid glow. “Enough of this praise! Your words remind me of what I was-of what I am. And I will not remain here as an associate of outlaws and pirates!”

Captain Beluche, also an alumnus of Napoleon's army, lurched to his feet. “Pirates, is it?”

“Pirates!” bellowed Humbert, who had never liked Beluche. “Call yourselves what you will, and fly what flag you find it convenient to buy, what are you but thieves who take the goods of other men and sell them as your own? You, who only yesterday sent an American ship to the bottom without a thought, without a blink-yes, and paraded yourselves the next day in full view of the town, like whores, like dogs!” His hand smote the table with a noise like a gunshot, making all the tableware jump. “I spit upon such men as you!”

This was the point at which January went behind the piano. Even Captain Gambi, who generally didn't care who called him a pirate, was on his feet with a table-knife in his hand, screaming “Pig of a Frenchman!” and Beluche started straight over the table that separated him from Humbert, cutlass drawn-God knew where he'd had it during dinner-and nearly foaming at the mouth with rage and alcohol. Men yelled something about the Independence; women screamed. Hesione LeGros, quicker thinking than most, plunged behind the piano, all her black-and-gold plumes askew, cursing at whichever of the several captains was her protector at the moment, and pulling from her tignon a very long and very businesslike stiletto. Her face was calm, her rosebud mouth almost smiling January noticed she had a small mole in one corner, like a beauty-patch. The other Grand Terre girls clumped like scared sheep in the corner and shrieked like parrots in a storm, and January's mother, a chunk of sugar halfway to her coffee-cup, regarded the whole eruption with an expression of disapproval and disgust and didn't stir from her chair.

As it happened, Livia was the only person in the room who had an accurate estimate of Jean Lafitte's presence of mind and power over his men. The smuggler-boss was on his feet-without toppling his chair-and across the dining-room in three long strides, outstripping even Captain Beluche, who had a few yards' lead on him. Reaching Humbert's side, Lafitte held up his hand-with no appearance of hurry, or of fear. It was how January remembered him best, in later years: a tall, black-haired man in a black long-tailed coat, hand upraised, the other hand resting gently on the furious old general's shoulder. As if to say to both Humbert and the enraged and thoroughly inebriated corsairs, Let's all be quiet and think for a moment before this goes too far.

Humbert turned to him and burst into tears, laying his head on Lafitte's shoulder.

And as gently as if he had been the old man's son, Jean Lafitte led General Humbert from the room.

Slightly more than two years later, when the British attempted to seize and hold New Orleans as part of their long struggle against Napoleon, Jean Lafitte-rather to everyone's surprise-turned down a cash offer from the British General Pakenham and volunteered his services to the American forces under General Jackson instead. Benjamin January, twenty-one by then and as well trained a surgeon as was possible for a young man of color to be in New Orleans, fought in the free colored militia in the ensuing battle. Though the Americans won-and the British ceased boarding and seizing the crews of American vessels-it was still several years before either he or St.-Denis Janvier deemed it safe for him to risk a sea journey to France to continue his medical studies.

He was in France for sixteen years. For the first six of those years he studied medicine, and worked as a junior surgeon, at the Hotel Dieu. St.-Denis Janvier died in 1822, but the little money he left his plaçee's son would not stretch to cover the expenses of buying a practice. Moreover, it was quite clear to January by then that even in the land of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite, no white man was going to hire a black surgeon to cut him open if he could find a man of his own color to do it instead. January tried not to be troubled by this, accepting it as he'd accepted the fact that in his former home he'd had to step off the banquette to let white men pass....

And then he'd met Ayasha. And understood that if he wanted to marry this very young and very competent Berber dressmaker-at eighteen she had her own shop, her own small clientele, and looked like a desert witch inexplicably trying to pass herself off as a Parisian artisan-he'd need money.

That was when, and why, he went back to music.

For ten years he played for the Opera, for the balls and parties of the restored nobility who'd returned to Paris in the wake of Louis XVIII and of the wealthy who'd founded their fortunes on the wreck of Napoleon's empire. For ten years he and Ayasha lived in happiness in a little flat on the Rue de fAube near the river. In the newspapers he followed the careers of Lafitte, and Humbert, and those privateer captains who'd once had their fortified camp on Grand Terre. His account of General Humbert's birthday dinner became an after-dinner tale for his musician friends, when Humbert became Commodore of the Navy of Mexico, or when word got out concerning Dominic Youx's participation in the plot to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena and spirit him away to live out his days in a comfortable town house in New Orleans.

The American Navy ran Jean Lafitte out of his new headquarters on the Texas coast in 1821. Rumors swirled about what became of him, but no one knew for sure. Rene Beluche became the Commodore of the new nation of Venezuela. Vincente Gambi, and Antonino Angelo, and Lafitte's captains met their fates variously at the hands of the American Navy or the British campaign against pirates and slave-smugglers. Some simply encountered those deaths that awaited so many white men in Louisiana: yellow fever, malaria, typhus.

In 1832 the Indian cholera reached Paris. Ayasha died.

January returned to New Orleans-to the town he had hoped never to live in again. To the only family he knew. To a city he had left while it was still an outpost of France in the New World. But he found, on his return, that the city had been inundated in his absence with Americans intent on making a profit from slavery, from sugar, from cotton, and from everything else they could lay their hands on. Much of the city was now the province of upriver Kentuckians whose rapaciousness made Lafitte and his cronies look modest and whose manners made even such hard-bitten souls as Cut-Nose Chighizola appear refined.

For a few years January lived in the garçonniere behind his mother's house, the small separate chamber traditionally given to the growing son of the household. His mother had married a free carpenter of color upon St.-Denis Janvier's death, and was now a respectable widow. January made new friends, and renewed his ties with old. He played at quadroon balls and at the Opera, and at the parties of Americans, free colored, and Creole French alike; he found refuge in the familiar joys of music from the almost unbearable pain of loss in his heart.

He met a young schoolmistress named Rose Vitrac, Ayashas opposite in nearly every way: erudite, gawky, bespectacled, and so heart-scarred and frightened of men that it was nearly a year before she could endure the touch of his hand without pulling away.

He learned, a little to his surprise, that it was possible to love passionately without lessening for a moment the ache of the love that had gone before.

And in all those years since 1812 he never so much as remembered Hesione LeGros' face, until one day in the summer of 1835, when he walked into a shack near the back of town and saw her dead body, with her head in a puddle of blood.

“When you a woman and black-not to mention dirt poor, God forbid”-the mocking sparkle in Olympe Corbier's dark eyes was like the flash of dragonflies over a bitter lake-“there ain't a man in this town'll smirch his boots crossin' the street to save your life. What makes you think anybody'd come out here after she's already dead?”

Kneeling on the floor beside the body, January looked up at his sister, who had knocked at the door of his lodgings an hour after sun-up, asking him to come with her here. He knew she was right.

Olympe was his full sister, by that African field-hand his mother never spoke about. When at sixteen she'd run away to join the voodoos, her mother hadn't even troubled to look for her. Her work as healer and midwife among the poorer artisans, laborers, and freedmen of the town had given her scant respect for the whites who made the city's laws.

Still it angered him that the City Guards hadn't troubled to send an officer out to this straggle of shanties, shelters, and one- and two-room cottages huddled on the fringe of the still-more-unsavory district of town universally known as the Swamp. It wasn't more than half a mile from the turning-basin of the canal that connected New Orleans with the lake, and probably less than a mile from the river itself. Although one of the liveliest and wealthiest cities in the United States lay so close, oaks and cypress still grew among the wretched dwellings here; reeds and marshgrass stood thick just outside the door.

It wasn't nine in the morning and the heat was like a hammer. Flies crept thick over every splash and puddle of the blood-trail that started by the shack's upstream wall and ended under the body. The cloud of insects overhead, up under the shack's low roof, made a dull droning, inescapable as the stink of sewage or the sticky creep of sweat behind January's shirt-collar.

Heat, stink, flies.
Summer in New Orleans.

“I heard how you not supposed to move somebody who been killed,” said one of the neighbors, peering in around Olympe's slim, tall form. A square young man, he wore the numbered tin badge of a slave whose master let him “sleep out”-find his own room and board in exchange for a percentage of what he could earn as a laborer. At this time of year, there was little work to be had, even on the levee or the docks. “How you supposed to not touch nuthin' till the Guards had a look.” His ungrammatical French was the fluidly sloppy get-along speech of an Anglophone who has made his home among French-speakers for a few months, not the half-African patois of the slave quarters. Born in the eastern states, January guessed automatically, and sold down the river ...

“I sent Suzie right away downtown to the Cabildo.” The young man nodded back at a girl of sixteen or so who crowded up behind him. “I did look around, see if I could find some kerosene or pepper or somethin' to keep the ants from comin' in. But they's all over the place already. Hessy been dead awhile. Else I wouldn't a left her just lay on the floor.”