“I said sit down.”
He lowered his eyes respectfully and sat.
“And you keep your opinions to yourself, boy, if you don’t want to be took up for contempt.”
He bowed his head, the flush of fury-heat rising through him almost depriving him of breath. “Yes, sir.”
“Olympia Corbier, you are hereby remanded to custody of the city jail until the seventeenth of July of this year, when you will be tried by the Criminal Court of the State of Louisiana for your crime. Is there a Stefano DiSilva in this room? Stefano DiSilva, you’re accused of willfully causin’ a disturbance in Mr. Davis’s gamblin’ parlor on Bourbon Street.…”
January caught up with Shaw in the arcade outside. “That wasn’t a real wise thing of you to say, Maestro,” the Kentuckian remarked mildly. Whatever coolness had tempered the morning was now long gone, the sunlight molten in the Place d’Armes; the crowds around the covered market had thinned. Close by their feet a couple of Chickasaw Indians remained, still peddling powdered sassafras and clay pots from a blanket spread on the Cathedral steps.
“It was the truth.”
Shaw spit, and actually got the tobacco juice into the gutter, for a miracle. “I’d be mighty careful who you said that to. What with the hoo-rah concernin’ the Bank of the United States, and everybody in a panic about interest, and elections comin’ on, and summer business bein’ slow generally, there’s a lot of folk in this town who wouldn’t take kindly to talk of epizootic fevers scarin’ away investors.” He glanced sidelong as Councilman Bouille stalked out of the Presbytère doors and held his silence until he was some twenty feet farther down the arcade. His thin, rather light voice was gentle. “Truth may be a shinin’ sword in the hand of the righteous, Maestro, but unless you got one whale of a shield that sword may not do you no good.”
January drew in a deep breath, trying to let his rage dissolve. Bouille’s slaves trailed at his heels, back across the Cathedral steps and into the Cabildo again. January wondered what the men had done and how many silver bits the Councilman was going to pay over to the city for their “correction.” The custom of the country, he told himself, and wondered why he had come back here from Paris. Going insane from grief wouldn’t have been as bad as this, surely?
“I take it,” he said, “that Isaak Jumon’s body was never found?”
The Kentuckian shook his head. “Though I sorta wonder how your sister knowed that, right off as she did. That boy Antoine says he was sent away from this strange house in a carriage and let off someplace he doesn’t know where. He wandered around for hours in the pourin’ rain, he says, till he got hisself home again. But he did see his brother die. He was real clear on that. And there’s a lot of territory to cover, swamps and bayous and canals all around this city where a body coulda been dumped, and we’d never be the wiser. We didn’t just light on your sister out of arbitrary malice, you know, Maestro. When I asked her last night where she’d been Monday she wouldn’t give no good account of herself, nor could that gal Célie neither.… Yes, what is it?” A Guardsman came running from the Cabildo, calling Shaw’s name.
“Trouble over to the Queen of the Orient Saloon, sir.” The man saluted.
“It’s nine o’clock in the mornin’,” said Shaw wonderingly, and shoved his verminous hat back on his head. “Iff’n you’ll excuse me, Maestro …”
He set off at a long-legged run.
January stood for a time in the sunlight of the Cathedral steps, watching him go. By this time, he thought, Olympe would have been returned to her cell, and he had had enough, for the time being, of Fortune Gérard’s rage and Clément Vilhardouin’s oil-smooth suaveness. He pushed open the Cathedral door, stepped through into the cool still gloom.
All that remained of the morning Mass was the smell of smoke and wax, and a market-woman telling her beads. A woman got quickly up from one of the benches usually reserved for the less prosperous of the free colored, a white woman in a pale blue gown, cornsilk hair braided unfashionably under a cottage bonnet. She was very American, prim and bare of a Creole lady’s paint, and there was a hunted nervousness to her huge blue eyes as she retreated from him, drawing her child to her side.
More to it, thought January, than simply not seeing the person whom she clearly expected: a fear that was startled at shadows. He’d removed his hat already, so he dipped in a little bow and asked in his best English, “May I help you, Madame?”
Her gloved hand went quickly to her lips. “I—That is—No.” She shook her head quickly, and looked around her at the shadowy dimness of the great church. “It is all right to sit here, is it not?”
“Of course it is,” said January. He’d encountered Protestants who seemed to believe Catholics sacrificed children on the altars of the saints.
The child peeked around her mother’s skirts, guineagold curls dressed severely up under a small brown hat, sensible—and suffocating—brown worsted buttoned and tailored over the hard lines of a small corset; tiny brown gloves on tiny hands. She at least showed no fear, either of him or of this echoing cavern of bright-hued images and flickering spots of light. “The nuns won’t come and get me,” she whispered conspiratorially, “will they?”
January smiled. “I promise you,” he told the child. “Nuns don’t come and get anyone.”
The mother tugged quickly on her daughter’s hand, to shush her or discourage conversation with a black man and a stranger. January bowed again, and went to the Virgin’s altar, and though money was tight and would be tighter—Pritchard had indeed, as Aeneas had warned, docked his pay last night—he paid a penny for a candle, which he lit and placed among all those others that marked prayers for mercy rather than justice. Holy Mother, forgive her, he prayed, his big fingers counting off the cheap blue glass beads of the much-battered rosary that never left him. Don’t hold it against Olympe’s soul, that she turned from you and your Son. Don’t punish her for making little magics as she does. For serving false gods.
The woman’s soft voice drew his attention. Looking back, he saw the person she had come here to meet. A small man, wiry and thin; a ferret face whose features spoke of the Ibo or Congo blood. He wore a shirt of yellow calico, and a leather top hat with a bunch of heron-hackle in it. A blue scarf circled his waist—a voodoo doctor’s mark, Olympe had said when she’d pointed the man out to January in the market one day, the same way the seven-pointed tignon was the sign of the reigning Queen.
January heard the woman say, “It has to work,” and the man replied, “It’ll work.” He handed her something that she swiftly slipped into her bag.
Sugar and salt and Black Devil Oil to bring a straying lover home? Black wax and pins, to send an unwanted mother-in-law away?
It has to work.
The howl of a steamboat’s whistle shrilled through the Cathedral as the woman opened the door. She disappeared with her beautiful golden-haired child into the square, the voodoo-man watching—Dr. Yellowjack, Olympe had said his name was—as she walked away. When time enough had elapsed that their departures would not be too close, he, too, took his leave. January stayed for a long time, praying for his sister’s soul while the candle he had lighted flickered before the Queen of Heaven’s feet.
FOUR
January’s mother and the younger of his two sisters were in the parlor of his mother’s pink stucco house on Rue Burgundy when he reached it again. The two women sat side by side on the sofa, a mountain of lettuce-green muslin cascading over their knees; the jalousies were closed against the full strength of the sunlight, which lay across them in jackstraws of blazing gold. Ten o’clock was just striking from the Cathedral, and the gutters outside steamed under the hammer of the morning heat. Entering through the back door, January shed his black wool coat—that agonizing badge of respectability—his gloves, and his high-crowned hat and bent to kiss first the slim straight elderly beauty, then the white man’s daughter who had from her conception been the favored child.
“What do you know about Genev
iève Jumon, Mama?” He brushed with the backs of his fingers the smooth green-and-pink cheek of her coffee cup where it sat on a table at her side. “May I warm this for you? Or yours, Minou?”
“Trashy cow,” said his mother, and bit off the end of her thread.
His sister Dominique gave him a brilliant smile. “If you would, thank you, p’tit.”
The coffee stood warming over a spirit lamp on the sideboard in the dining room. The French doors were open onto the yard, and he saw Bella, his mother’s servant, just coming out of the garçonnière above the kitchen, where January had slept since his return from Paris. On plantations, the garçonnières that traditionally housed the masters’ sons were separate buildings—the custom of a country, January remembered from his childhood at Bellefleur, that preferred to pretend that those young men weren’t making their first sexual experiments with the kitchen maids. Among the plaçées in the city the motivation was reversed: few white men wished to sleep under the same roof as a growing young man of color, even if that young man was that protector’s own flesh and blood. Since January’s return a year and a half ago, Bella had resumed her habit of sweeping the garçonnière and making his bed, in spite of the fact that January conscientiously kept his own floor swept and daily made his own bed.
His efforts in that direction, he understood, could never meet Bella’s standards. Presumably, should St. Martha, holy patroness of floor sweepers and bed makers, descend from Heaven and perform these tasks, Bella would still detect dust kittens and wrinkled corners.
“I hope you’re not going to mix yourself up in that scandal of your sister’s,” said his mother, when he returned with three cups of coffee balanced lightly in his enormous hand.
It was the first time in eighteen months that he’d heard his mother refer to the existence of any sister other than Dominique. The first time, in fact, since before Louisiana had been a state. She raised plum-dark eyes to meet his, bleakly daring him to say, She’s your daughter, too. Child, as I am a child, by that husband who was a slave on Bellefleur Plantation—the man whose name you’ve never spoken.
It was astonishing, the pain his mother could still inflict on him, if he let her.
Instead he said, casually, “Olympe has asked my help, Mama, yes. And I knew you’d never forgive me if I didn’t at least go down to the Cabildo this morning to try to find out why Geneviève Jumon’s daughter-in-law would hate her enough to put a gris-gris on her.”
His mother’s eyes flared with avid curiosity, but she caught herself up stiffly and said, “Really, Benjamin, I’m surprised at you. Of all the vulgar trash. And Dominique, that isn’t yarn you’re sewing with, I can see that buttonhole across the room.”
Livia Levesque was a widow nearing sixty and still beautiful, slim and straight as a corset-stay in her gown of white-and-rose foulard. She had worn mourning for exactly the prescribed year for the sake of St.-Denis Janvier, who had died while January was a student at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris; later had worn it not a day longer for her husband Christophe Levesque, a cabinetmaker of color whom January recalled only as one of her many male acquaintances during her days of plaçage. Black, she had declared on several occasions, did not suit her complexion.
Her father had been white, though she had to January’s recollection never even speculated as to who he might have been. Her daughter by St.-Denis Janvier had added to her mother’s exotic beauty the lightness of skin and silky hair so admired by white men and by many of the free colored as well. Dominique glanced worriedly sidelong at her mother, apprehensive of a scene, and then said “Poor Paul! And the children—are they all right? Shall I send over Thérèse to help?”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” snapped her mother. “That girl of yours doesn’t do her own work for you, let alone looking after some laborer’s children, not that she’d have the faintest idea how to go about it. As for Geneviève Jumon, I’m not surprised her daughter-in-law wanted to do her ill—I’m astonished the girl didn’t poison her instead of her son. A more grasping, mealy-mouthed harpy you’d never have the misfortune to meet. She’s been above herself for years, for all that she started out as one of Antoine Allard’s cane hands.”
She shrugged, exactly as if she herself hadn’t worked in the fields before St.-Denis Janvier bought her. “She’s had nothing but ill to say about Fortune Gérard since he rented the shop floor of Jeanne-Françoise Langostine’s house for his business—he sells coffee and tea, and charges two pennies the pound more than Belasco over on Rue Chartres—that she wanted, not that she’s ever made a hat that didn’t look as if a squadron of dragoons had been sacking a florist’s.”
She opened the top of a heavy-pleated sleeve and produced a white paper sack of what turned out to be goose down, which she carefully shook into the space between the outer sleeve and its thin gauze lining, so that the sleeve rapidly assumed the appearance of a gigantic pillow. After ten years of marriage to a dressmaker, January was familiar with the style, and he still marveled at the sheer ugliness of it.
“I daresay she was good-looking enough that Laurence Jumon bought her of Allard, back during the war, for four hundred and seventy-five dollars,” his mother went on, “but that’s nothing to give herself airs about. Allard’s asking price was six hundred and fifty and Jumon bargained him down. Jumon always did drive a warm bargain.” No thought seemed to enter her head that St.-Denis Janvier must have bargained with her former master in just such a fashion. All January could do was shake his head over the detail and comprehensiveness of her knowledge of everybody’s business in town. He wondered if Marie Laveau bought information from her. If not, she should.
“Wasn’t it Laurence Jumon who bought those matched white horses last fall?” Dominique fit a gold thimble onto the end of her middle finger. “With the black-and-yellow carriage?”
“They looked like fried eggs on a plate,” replied her mother. “And they’d been bishopped. In any case grays are a stupid thing to get in a town that’s hip deep in mud ten months of the year. That’s all the good they did him; forty days after he laid out the money they were pulling his hearse.” She began to set the sleeve into place with neat, tiny stitches, and January marveled again at the linguistic convention that termed white horses “grays.” Typical, too, that his mother had adopted it: most slaves just called them white.
“So why did Célie Jumon buy a gris-gris from Olympe?” asked Dominique, eager as a child. “And why do they think the gris-gris ended up poisoning Isaak instead of Geneviève?”
“Olympe says the gris-gris had nothing to do with Isaak’s death, that it wasn’t poison at all,” said January. “What I’m trying to learn now is, where was Isaak Jumon between Thursday, when Geneviève swore out a warrant distraining him as her slave—”
“Oh, shame!” cried Dominique.
“Sounds like her,” remarked Livia Levesque.
“—and his death on Monday night. Not to mention such things as why Jumon didn’t leave a sou to Geneviève, which he didn’t.”
“She’d have poisoned the boy herself, I wager, out of spite.”
“Mama, surely not!”
“Could she have? Isaak would be staying as far away from Geneviève as he could. He didn’t take refuge with Célie’s parents.…”
“He wouldn’t have anyway,” said Minou, gathering a length of mist-fine point d’esprit over the head of the other sleeve. “Monsieur Gérard never liked Madame Jumon, even before the shop rental incident, because of her ‘former way of life.’ He was mortified nearly to death when his precious daughter Célie married her son. Although after thirteen years you’d think Monsieur Gérard would forget about Geneviève being a plaçée. I mean, everyone else has, and he’s always polite to Iphgénie and Phlosine and me when we come into his shop. Although just the other day he said to Phlosine—”
“Thirteen years?” January set down his cup. “Thirteen years? I thought … I mean, I know Jumon never married, so there was no reason for him to put his plaçée aside �
�”
“No reason? That hypocritical moneybox, no reason? And it wasn’t he that left her,” Livia added, returning her attention to the sleeve. “She left him, or rather bade him leave, for she kept the house and the furniture and all he’d given her. And Jumon did marry, two years after that, to get control of his mother’s plantation I daresay, which she wasn’t going to turn loose to any man who hadn’t done his duty by the family and given her a grandson. Not that it did him the slightest bit of good, or her, either. She went to Paris. The wife, I mean.”
“Wait a minute—What?” It was unheard of for a plaçée to leave her protector. “Geneviève left Jumon? Why?”
“Jealous,” snapped his mother. “She heard there was marriage in the wind.”
“Oh, don’t be silly, Mama, you don’t know that!” protested Minou. “And no one—I mean, we all know …” She hesitated, looking suddenly down at her sewing, and a dark flush rose under the matte fawn of her skin.
“We all know men marry?” finished her mother.
Dominique drew a steadying breath, and when she raised her head again, wore a cheerful smile. As if, thought January, it mattered little to her that the fat bespectacled young planter who had bought her house for her, and fathered the child who had died last year, would not one day marry, too. “Well, if she’s as grasping as you say, she wouldn’t have let him go for a little thing like that.” She made her voice languid and light.
“Hmph,” said Livia, unable to have it both ways. “At any rate, that whining nigaude Noëmie—his wife—went back to Paris, and Laurence’s maman sold up the plantations, and the brother’s never had a regular mistress at all, so far as anyone knows.” She shrugged. “Laurence Jumon never breathed a peep. When he was sick back in twenty-four he gave Geneviève money to buy both their sons from him, in case he died, and they’d still be part of his estate. That mother of his would have sold off her white grandchildren, if she’d ever had any, never mind her colored ones. Jumon and Geneviève had parted company by that time, but he paid every penny to educate those boys, not that anything ever came of that. For all the airs Antoine and his mother give themselves Antoine’s just a clerk at the Bank of Louisiana. And Isaak …”
Graveyard Dust Page 6
