Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  A chorus from the other cells snarled out, like the cacophony of Hell: “I’ll smother you if you don’t shut up!” “Stuff her mouth, somebody!” “Can’t a body get a drink in this stinkin’ bug hole?” Beside him, January saw Olympe’s jaw harden, her only change in expression. When he himself had been locked in the Cabildo, the shouting of the mad, sharing the cells with the thieves and murderers and common drunks, had added an edge of horror to the crawling fetor of the nights.

  Vilhardouin, himself a highly dandified specimen of Shaw’s own race—though probably neither of them would willingly admit such a thing—went on in quiet French, “You must understand, Monsieur Gérard, that this man was only doing his duty in apprehending your daughter. It is the Magistrate of the Court who wrote out the warrant for her arrest, at the complaint of a citizen.”

  “What citizen?” Fortune Gérard was trembling, tears of fury glistening as he raised his head. “Show me that citizen! I swear that I will—”

  “The citizen what swore out that complaint,” interrupted Shaw, and squirted a long stream of tobacco juice in the direction of the sandbox again, a target he couldn’t possibly have achieved, “is the mother of the deceased, a M’am Geneviève Jumon; the woman this lady claims your daughter paid her to put a hex on.” Perhaps, as January’s mother had repeatedly asserted, tomcats spoke better French than Lieutenant Shaw, but January noticed that for an upriver backwoodsman he didn’t do at all badly with a conditional subjunctive.

  Gérard’s face seemed to shrink on itself with venom. Had he not been a respectable man of color, well bred and conscious of his position in New Orleans society, he would have spit. As it was he replied, his voice like twisted wire, “My daughter would never have sought the company or assistance of a voodoo Negress poisoner”—his gaze traveled over Olympe in distaste—“for that purpose, or for any other, and I will personally sue the man who says differently. And as for the assertion that my daughter poisoned, or had anything to do with the poisoning of, her husband, a young man of whom I never approved …”

  “Papa!” Iron clanked in the courtyard doors. The girl framed in its light took a hasty step toward the group in the corner, then hesitated, glancing for permission at the wiry little lamplighter who escorted her. Shaw beckoned, and the lamplighter, keeping a firm hold on the other end of the chain that manacled the girl’s wrists, followed her over. “Papa, is it true?” Célie Jumon looked frantically from her father to Lieutenant Shaw to Olympe, huge brown eyes swollen in the fragile oval of her face. “They told me—last night they told me … Isaak …”

  Shaw spit another line of tobacco juice, and said gently, “I’m afraid it is, M’am Jumon.”

  The girl pressed her hand to her mouth, but didn’t make a sound. Her sprig-muslin dress was soiled and rumpled from spending the night in filthy straw, but she’d scrubbed her face and hands in the courtyard fountain and rearranged her tignon. In its simple green-and-white-striped frame the childish youthfulness of her face made a dreadful contrast to the horror in her eyes. Rising quickly, January guided the girl to his chair. Her mother fell on her knees beside her, stroking and kissing the shackle bruises on her wrists and weeping in stifled, soundless gasps.

  The Lieutenant looked around him at the group that was rapidly outgrowing its corner of the watch room: Olympe, her husband, January, and Mamzelle Marie; Gérard, his wife, and Célie; and the two lamplighter Guards in charge of the prisoners. “Well, at least I won’t have to go through this more’n oncet.” He sighed philosophically, and scratched his hip. “M’am Jumon, I am sorry, because I know this’s gonna be painful for you, but they’re gonna want us all over to the Recorder’s Court in a minute, and you’d all best know what we’re goin’ on.

  “Last Monday night, which was the twenty-third, twenty-fourth June, Isaak Jumon’s brother, Antoine, was brought by a servant he didn’t recognize to a big house he’d never seed before, where his brother lay dyin’. Antoine says Isaak was far gone when Antoine got there, vomitin’ an’ clammy an’ achin’ all over an’ pretty much actin’ like someone that’s been dosed real good with arsenic. Antoine did what he could for his brother—who he hadn’t seen in a couple months owin’ to a quarrel in the family—with the help of a old mulatto woman who was there, but it warn’t no good. Isaak kept tryin’ to tell him somethin’ but was so sick Antoine couldn’t make out what. Once he managed to say, I have been poisoned. Then a little later he said, Célie, an’ died.”

  Célie, looked away. Her mother, numbly stroking the ruin of her frock, tears flowing down her face, seemed barely to have heard.

  “It’s a long way,” pointed out January quietly, “from I have been poisoned and Célie, to I have been poisoned BY Célie. If you don’t mind my mentioning it, sir.” He made a genuine effort to keep the anger from his voice, anger over the fear in his brother-in-law’s face, over Madame Gérard’s tears. He knew it wasn’t the Kentuckian’s fault.

  “I don’t mind you mentionin’ the matter, Maestro,” said the policeman evenly. “Fact remains the boy is dead, and M’am Jumon did go buy somethin’ from your sister.” Vilhardouin’s hand shut restrainingly on Monsieur Gérard’s sleeve. “And the fact remains your sister does so happen to have had a big pot of arsenic on a shelf in her parlor, not to speak of makin’ a livin’ sellin’ strange things to people wrapped up in little bits of black paper. No offense meant, M’am. M’am.” He nodded respectfully for good measure in Marie Laveau’s direction.

  The sergeants had begun whipping the errant slaves in the courtyard outside. Célie flinched at the crack of leather on flesh, hid her face when someone—a woman, by the sound of it—cried out, a strangled sound grimly silenced. Men came through the watch room, in the wellcut clothing and beaver hats of professionals, leading after them other men, or sometimes a woman or two, shabbily dressed in castoffs, usually barefoot, the women with their heads modestly covered in tignons. Twenty-five cents a stroke, January remembered—trying to force deafness and ignorance upon a rage that would otherwise have overwhelmed him—for a master to have his property whipped by the City Guards, if he didn’t want to do it himself. The sergeant at the desk paused in talk with the Police Chief, to write out a receipt. In the courtyard beyond them two men in the blue uniforms of Guards emerged from a cell on the second gallery, bearing between them a shutter on which a body lay, covered with a blanket. The Guards hustled furtively along the gallery and down the stairs. As they turned a corner the shutter knocked against the newel post and an arm dropped out, limp, yellow as cheese.

  Shaw was still explaining something to Monsieur Gérard—probably why a young man’s word for a crime had to be accepted over the assertions of a respectable coffee merchant—as January made his way back to the courtyard doors. He intercepted the Guards and their burden as they reached the foot of the stair. “I beg your pardon, Messieurs, but would you mind telling me what this man died of?”

  Knowing he’d be coming to the Cabildo that morning he had been careful to don his most respectable clothing: linen shirt, black wool coat, white gloves, gray trousers, and high-crowned beaver hat, the costume of a professional that he wore on those occasions when he volunteered his services to the Hospital and when he played at a ball. The men looked at him and then at one another. “Stabbed,” said one in English at the same moment the other said, “Hung himself, poor bastard,” in French. January looked down at the blanket, which was ancient and ragged and moving with lice. There was no sign of blood. The man who spoke English added, “We got to be gettin’ on.”

  He watched them move around under the gallery to the little storeroom at the back of the court; watched them close and latch the door. His heart seemed to have turned to ice inside him. He knew, having seen the color of that arm, why they lied.

  Glancing behind him, he saw that the Corbiers, Jumons, and officers of the law had left the watch room. Someone took back the chairs in which Olympe and Célie Jumon had sat; a lamplighter came in from the arcade with a couple of bottles
, beer or ale, which he handed to the sergeant at the desk. In the courtyard, a man who was being triced to the pillory suddenly began to thrash and heave like a landed fish, screaming curses at his master, at the men who bound him, at whatever god had ordered the world to be so constituted that this could be done to him. While everyone in the yard—except the man’s master—ran to help, January made his way under the galleries to the storeroom, unlatched the door, and stepped noiselessly inside.

  Most of the time, January knew from past dealings with Lieutenant Shaw, the room was used as a storage place for records and for the shovels and buckets in use by those who cleaned up the gutters of the Place d’Armes. There was a cot in one corner where Guardsmen who sustained injuries in the line of duty could lie down—a situation not uncommon when a steamboat crew or a gang of keelboat ruffians were in town on a spree.

  The form on the cot now was not a Guardsman. From beneath the tattered blanket the hand still projected, dangling to the floor, fingers purpling. Another body lay on the floor. Flies roared in every corner of the low ceiling, gathering already in the fluids that trickled slowly into the cracks of the brick floor.

  The judas hole in the door let through just enough light to see. January pulled the blankets first from one man, then the other, and looked down into the bloated faces. An ugly orange flush mottled their skin and black vomit crusted their teeth and beards. One had clearly been a British sailor, with bare feet and a tarred pigtail; the other a trapper from the trackless mountains of northern Mexico, buckskin shirt stiff with sweat and filth. Both men already stank in the early summer heat. There was no question what had caused their deaths.

  He laid the blankets back over their faces, and silently left the room.

  • • •

  January feared he would be too late to hear any of the proceedings of the arraignment—which in any case he knew would be short—but when he hurried into the Presbytère building and through the door of the Recorder’s Court, the Clerk was still engaged in an angry convocation with Lieutenant Shaw: “… just a minute ago,” Shaw was saying mildly.

  “The case has been called …”

  “It is an outrage!” Gérard put in, fists clenched furiously. “An outrage! There is no truth …”

  “I reckon Mr. Vilhardouin”—Shaw pronounced the French name properly, something that always surprised January about the Kentuckian—“just sorta made a stop at the jakes, and he’ll be along.… There he is.”

  At the same moment a voice behind January said coldly, “I beg Monsieur’s pardon.…” An American voice added, “Get outa that door, boy.”

  January stepped quickly aside. Vilhardouin jostled brusquely past him, followed closely by a lithe, powerful man whose lower two shirt buttons strained over the slop of his belly beneath a food-stained yellow waistcoat’s inadequate hem. As the two men proceeded up the aisle, the sloppy man paused here and there to nod greetings to this man or that: keelboat rousters in slouch hats and heavy boots, spitting tobacco on the floor; filibusters from the saloons along the levee; a gentleman sitting stiff and disapproving beside a shackled slave. The Clerk of the Court glared ferociously and demanded, “What brings you here, Blodgett?” and the man returned a stubbled and rather oily smile.

  “It’s an open court, Mr. Hardee.” Blodgett’s voice was gold and gravel, with a drunkard’s slurry drawl. “Surely a man can come sit in an open court if he wants to.”

  As January slid onto the end of the bench beside Paul and Mamzelle Marie, Hardee knocked his gavel on the desk and said, “Are you Célie, Jumon, née Gérard, wife of Isaak Jumon of this parish?”

  She stood, small and pretty in her filthy dress. “I am.”

  “I object to these proceedings!” Monsieur Vilhardouin sprang to his feet. “Madame Jumon does not understand English and it is a violation of her rights to—”

  “Monsieur Vilhardouin,” protested the girl, “I understand—”

  “Be silent!” ordered her father.

  Vilhardouin turned back to the Clerk of the Court. “Madame Jumon does not sufficiently understand English to the degree that she can comprehend the charges brought against her.”

  Two louse-ridden and bewhiskered denizens of the Swamp and Girod Street applauded; a blowsy uncorseted woman hollered “You stand up for your rights, gal!” and Madame Gérard shrank against her husband in revulsion and terror.

  A harried-looking notary was called in to translate, and asked in French if Célie, Jumon was in fact Célie, Jumon, then informed her that she was charged with feloniously conspiring to kill and slay Isaak Jumon, her husband, a free man of color of this city, on or about the night of the twenty-third to -fourth of June, and how did she plead?

  “Not guilty,” she said, forcing her voice steady.

  “Hell, honey, no shame about it,” yelled the blowsy woman, “I killed four myself!”

  “Silence in the court.” The Clerk spit tobacco into the sandbox beside him, a surprising display of fastidiousness given the wholesale expectoration going on all around him. “You are hereby remanded to custody until … Where’d that calendar go?” He shuffled the pages of the ledger handed to him. “Good Lord, who are all these folks? Damn Judge Gravier for leavin’ town like this. Puts everybody back. Now Judge Danforth talkin’ about goin’, too.…”

  “May it please the court.” Vilhardouin stood again, somberly handsome in his exquisitely tailored black. “Given that the accused is below legal age, we request that she be released into the custody of her father.”

  The Clerk straightened up, and glared at him in annoyance.

  “Her father, a householder and taxpayer of this city, stands ready and willing to put up whatever security is required,” went on the lawyer. “To be denied this by a Clerk of the Recorder’s Court—not even the Recorder himself, who is apparently elsewhere today—What did you say the Recorder’s name is, Monsieur Blodgett?”

  Blodgett looked up from the notebook in which he was busily scribbling. “Leblanc,” he said, in English, and more loudly than was necessary if Vilhardouin was the only one intended to hear. “Clerk’s name is Hardee.” He made another note.

  Vilhardouin turned back to the bench. “Should Mr.—er—Hardee see fit to deny this mercy to both parent and child in Mr. Leblanc’s absence, I fear that even the best efforts of Mr. Blodgett here will not suffice to make the story even remotely favorable when it appears tomorrow in the New Orleans Abeille. Mayor Prieur reads the Abeille—the Bee—does he not, Mr. Blodgett?”

  Blodgett helped himself to his hip flask, and wiped his stubbled underlip. “So he does, Mr. Vilhardouin. So he does.”

  The Clerk’s face blotched an ugly red. He tapped his gavel sharply: “Prisoner is released to the recognizance of her father, Fortune Gérard, a free man of color of this city, on a bail of a thousand dollars, in respect for her tender years. You want me to have that translated into Frenchy, Mr. Vilardwan?”

  “Yes,” said Vilhardouin, unruffled. “Please.”

  “Monsieur Gérard.…” January half-turned on the bench as Gérard, Vilhardouin, Blodgett, Madame Gérard, and the trembling Célie Jumon moved past them toward the court’s outer doors. “If we could pool our information and resources …”

  “Get your hands off me, M’sieu.” The little man pulled his arm away, although January’s fingers had not actually come in contact with his sleeve. His face was cold and set. “I wish nothing to do with you, or your sister; and I tell you that should she attempt to spread calumny against my daughter or imply that she would do so vile a thing as to consult with her on any matter whatsoever, it will go the worse for her and for you all.”

  “Papa …”

  “Be silent, girl!”

  “Are you Olympia Corbier,” cut in the Clerk’s angry voice, “also known as Olympia Snakebones? You are accused of conspiring to feloniously kill and slay one Isaak Jumon, a free man of color of this city, how the hell you plead?”

  “Not guilty.” When their mother beat her, January
remembered, she had stood so.

  “You’re hereby remanded to custody …”

  “Sir.” January got to his feet. “Sir, my name is Benjamin January, a free man of color, brother to Madame Corbier.” He was careful to speak his best and most educated English. “Sir, is there any possibility of releasing my sister into the custody of her husband? She is the mother of small children, and conditions in the Cabildo are such that to remain there would endanger her life. There were two deaths from yellow fever in the jail last night, goodness knows how many others are infected—”

  “That’s a lie!” One of the well-dressed gentlemen at the back of the court jerked to his feet. January recognized Jean Bouille, a member of the City Council, with a couple of chastened slaves in tow. “There is no yellow fever in New Orleans!”

  “Who says there is?” The Clerk spit furiously. “There’s been no such thing! That reporter gone? Good. Cuthbert—” He turned to address the Constable of the Court. “This nigger’s saying there’s people dyin’ of yellow jack in the jail, and that isn’t true.” He turned back, not to January, but glaring out across the other men and women in the courtroom. “It isn’t true,” he repeated in a loud, harsh voice. “And I better not hear you nor nobody else goin’ around sayin’ such a lie or you’re gonna be in some trouble yourself.”

  January felt them behind him, glancing at one another, looking at the Constable, thinking about the cells they would return to after leaving this room. The silence was crushing.

  “If your sister thinks the jail’s so goddam unfit she shouldn’t have killed a man. Sit down.”

  January stood for a moment more, caught between his rage and that silence. He had been a slave and had lived in the quarters until he was eight, old enough to know what all slaves and prisoners know about keeping their mouths shut.