Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  More quietly still, and still in the half-African patois of the cane fields, he asked her, “How did you know they hadn’t found a body?”

  Her brows pulled together, as she turned the matter over in her mind. “When the men came to get me I kept my shell with me,” she said at last. “The shell that calls the loa. I kept it in my mouth. Later I asked the shell, and I asked the spider that spins a web in the corner of the cell, and I asked the rats in the walls: who it was that had killed Isaak Jumon. And they all three told me the same: that Isaak Jumon isn’t dead.”

  “His brother saw him die,” said January. “Why would his brother lie?”

  Olympe shook her head. “I don’t know, brother. I only know what they said, those voices out of the dark.”

  “You pig-faced whore!” screamed a voice in the cell.

  “Who you callin’ whore, bitch?” screeched another.

  A chorus of screams ensued, and the Guard thrust January and Paul aside to come up to the bars. This proved an ill-judged interference, for someone hurled the contents of the communal latrine in question over him, and the women continued to tear at one another’s hair and shriek.

  Cursing, the Guard shoved January and Paul back along the gallery, “You two get out of here, now! Damn stinking wenches.…”

  “He’s the one stinking,” giggled Gabriel, and his father shook him hard by the shoulder as they descended to the courtyard.

  “Damn them,” Paul whispered desperately. “Damn them for keeping her there.” They crossed swiftly through the watch room, quieter than it had been yesterday without the Guardsmen and clerks and prisoners on the way to the Recorder’s Court, though even on Saturdays, masters brought in their slaves to be whipped. The heat in the room was terrific, and flies swarmed and circled in the blue shadows of the ceiling.

  “Are you well?” asked January, as they came out onto the arcade. “Are you managing, with the children?”

  His brother-in-law nodded, and gave Gabriel a quick hug. “With my boy here to help me, yes. And Zizi-Marie is the best assistant in the shop a man could ask for. But Ben, listen. I’ve got an offer of work, a big order, from Drialhet at St. Michael Plantation. It’s nearly fifty miles up the river. Olympe says I should go, that you’ll—you’ll look after her here. I shouldn’t ask it of you, but …”

  “No,” said January immediately, “go.” He knew that in the slow summer season, it was Olympe’s earnings, from reading the cards and making gris-gris, that put food on the Corbier table. “Should I stay with the children? I’m supposed to be looking after my mother’s house when she leaves for the lake, but …”

  “I’ll be back every few days,” said Paul. “And Zizi-Marie is old enough to look after things. But—do what you can for Olympe. Please. Gabriel and Zizi-Marie will come to see her, bring her food and clean clothes. And she’ll need an attorney, a lawyer to plead her case …”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” January wondered if such a person could be induced to plead on credit, like a grocer, until Drialhet paid up or the winter season of balls brought money again.

  What am I thinking? he wondered then, as he watched his brother-in-law and his nephew make their way up Rue St. Pierre away from him. From above, dimly, he could still hear the madwoman screaming in her cell, the windows of which pierced the high wall three stories over his head. Could hear voices raised, cursing, weeping, quarreling.

  He remembered the dead man, bundled away in the storeroom under the stairs, like dust swept under a rug.

  Olympe would need all the luck she could get, he thought, to even make it to her trial.

  When Paul and his son had gone their way January drew from his pocket the copy of last Friday’s Courier that Basile Nogent had given him. The advertisement said:

  FIFTY DOLLARS REWARD will be given to any person apprehending and lodging in jail a quadroon boy called Isaak. He is very white and has a fine complexion and will try to pass himself as free. He is 19 years old, 5 feet, 6 inches tall, slenderly built but with great strength of chest and arms, has a narrow face and fine teeth, black hair curly rather than woolly, and a small mustache. He reads and writes, and speaks French, and English only brokenly. Apply to Mr. Hubert Granville of 1005 Prytane Street.

  Hubert Granville. January folded the paper up again thoughtfully. Perhaps it was only a coincidence, but Hubert Granville was the vice-president of the Bank of Louisiana, at which, if he remembered rightly, fine education or no fine education, Antoine Jumon was employed as a clerk.

  Nine o’clock was striking from the Cathedral. From the streets that led into the Place d’Armes, dilatory servants still made their way, baskets of split willow on their arms, bound for the markets along the levee downstream. To his right Rue Chartres stirred with activity, shopkeepers or their servants scrubbing the thresholds, the slaves of the wealthy washing down the flagged carriageways that led back into the secret courtyards that lay behind those shops. A pralinnère strolled past him with her sugared wares, brown and white, nearly brushing elbows with the journalist Blodgett, bustling half-drunk on some errand on the levee with his notebook in his hand.

  January smiled. Saturday was a half-holiday, and the day was early yet. The banks wouldn’t close until one.

  A singularly trusting boy, Rose had said of Antoine.

  Well, we’ll just see how trusting.

  Anyone unfamiliar with the crowds, the din, the frenzied hauling of cotton bales and hogsheads of sugar and rum from point to point along the levee during the winter months would have compared the long riverfront today with a hive of bees at swarming time. But to January’s eye the activity today was slow: too few crates, too many men standing idle. Eight steamboats loosed their columns of grimy smoke from tall stacks trimmed in crowns of gold, where in the winter there’d be three times that many lined up two deep along the wharves. Mates and supercargoes yelled directions at their gangs, while slaves unloaded trunks and portmanteaux from their masters’ carriages; captains strolled among the crowds with manifests in their hands; pilots in the dusky shade of the market arcades drank coffee and traded minutiae about the height of the water the other side of Red Church and whether the bar off some nameless island below Natchez had crumbled away yet or not. A respectable-looking little gentleman in a gray coat was showing a gold watch to an obvious Yankee businessman and talking up what was clearly an auction scam; a couple of men dressed as stevedores out of work—and there were enough of those around the docks these days—lolled suspiciously close to a pile of crates of English saws and chisels left on the dock beside the Philadelphia. January picked his way through the knots of men, unobtrusive in his rough clothes and blue calico shirt, and searched the faces for the one he knew.

  In time he saw the man he sought, in the midst of a gang of workmen unloading crates marked PORCELAINES FINES DE LIMOGES from a dray in whirlwinds of straw and packing. He waited until the foreman—distinguishable from the men he worked with only by the shaggy beaver hat he wore—was called to the deck of the Bonnets O’Blue by the mate, then ambled over.

  “Ti Jon.”

  Most of the men had slacked off the moment the foreman’s back was turned, wiping their brows or whistling for the young boys who sold ginger beer along the levee. January gestured to one of these, and offered Ti Jon a drink.

  “Ben.” Ti Jon brought up the kerchief he wore around his neck—the only thing he had on above the waist—and wiped his face.

  “World treating you well?”

  The stevedore shrugged. “My railway shares are down.” A few inches under January’s great height, Ti Jon was lean-bodied and, like January, African dark. He belonged to a man who lived on Rue Bourbon, to whom he paid seven dollars a week for the privilege of finding his own food, lodging, and work. Monsieur Dessalines didn’t care where Ti Jon acquired any of these things so long as he made his appearance Saturday nights with his week’s money, a situation that suited Ti Jon just fine. “This business with the Bank of the United States has caused me to put o
ff running for Congress until the next election, not this one.”

  “I think that’s wise,” said January gravely.

  “Yourself?”

  “Oh, I’ll run,” said January. “I have faith in President Jackson. And, I just got back from playing for the crowned heads of Europe, so I have a little time on my hands.”

  “I read about that. The Paris Daily Democrat said you were a veritable genius.”

  January pulled a modest face. “Well, I was. But I strained a muscle in my back lifting all the gold they threw on the stage.”

  “Well, my mama always said there’s no such thing as an unmixed blessing.” Ti Jon sipped his ginger beer and grinned at the make-believe. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for someone. Boy name of Isaak Jumon.”

  He saw Ti Jon’s eyes change. Wary.

  “I thought he might have gone to the Swamp.”

  “His mother send you?”

  January shook his head. “I’ve never met his mother. From all I’ve heard of her I don’t think I want to.”

  “You don’t.” The dark Congo eyes glanced at him sidelong, tallying information that he didn’t want to reveal. Asking himself how much he could or wanted to say.

  “The police say my sister poisoned him. That she was paid to do it by his wife.”

  “Now that’s a lie.” Ti Jon glanced at the foreman, still deep in conference with the mate over where the crates of PORCELAINES FINES should be stowed. “Whoever’s saying it. Isaak spoke of nothing but that girl. How he loved her, how he felt bad for running away like he did, leaving her no place to go but back to her father. He kept saying he’d go back to her, he’d find a way to go back.” He was silent then, a muscle standing out for a moment in his jaw. Then, “He’s dead?”

  January nodded.

  “What a damn shame. He was a good boy, steady. It right, that the girl’s gone back to her daddy?”

  “For now. But she’ll go to trial for it next month, and hang, along with my sister, unless we find the truth of what happened.”

  “Filz putain.” Ti Jon was silent for a time, arms folded, gazing unseeing into the confusion of the levee. Then he sighed. “A week ago Thursday, he came into Widow Puy’s grocery asking after a place to stay.”

  January had spent a night in the attic over the Widow Puy’s, on the occasion of having had a white man tear up the papers that proved him free. It had cost him fifty cents for sleeping room with a dozen other men, men who’d mostly reached the same arrangement with their masters that Ti Jon had, though a couple of them, January guessed, had been runaways. He’d had to leave his boots as collateral while he got the fifty cents from his sister Dominique. It was the last time he’d ventured out of the French town with fewer than three copies of his papers hidden on his person.

  “I figured him for a runaway and found him a job sweeping up at the Turkey-Buzzard. Later on he told me—That true, what he said about his mother claiming him as her slave? Damn.” He shook his head in wondering anger. “Some people shouldn’t be let to have children or should have ’em taken away and given to those who’ll treat ’em well. When did he die?”

  “When did you see him last?”

  Ti Jon’s glance flicked aside. “Saturday,” he replied. “Saturday morning. A week ago. This advertisement came out in the papers Friday, and Isaak said when he read it Friday afternoon he couldn’t hardly work at the saloon, feeling every man who came in was looking at him and would be waiting for him in the alley out back when he came out. You know what it’s like down the Swamp.”

  January knew what it was like down the Swamp. “You know where he went?”

  Ti Jon shook his head. “Just he was leaving town. I got to go.”

  The foreman was still deep in colloquy with the mate. In any case it was inconceivable that Ti Jon wouldn’t know everything that went on among the runaways and sleepers-out of the slaves in New Orleans. January’s eyes met Ti Jon’s for a moment, seeing the lie in them. Seeing also the opaque look that said, I know you know, but what you know isn’t going to do you any good.

  Why?

  A man passing close by the dray cried out in anger, his hand going to his pocket; a boy went darting away into the crowd. Foreman, mate, and half the loading-gang turned to watch as others joined the hue and cry, turning the Place d’Armes almost instantly into a shoving seethe, but January guessed what was actually going on, and turned his head in time to see the three loiterers by the Philadelphia casually shove three boxes of the carpentry tools off the edge of the wharf. Then they walked away quickly, in different directions, hands in pockets, without looking back. There’d be men in a rowboat under the dock, to hook the crates aboard.

  But all that was none of his lookout. He’d seen such things before. The foreman yelled from the deck of the Bonnets O’Blue, “You men! We ain’t got all day!” and Ti Jon nodded to January.

  “Thanks for the drink.”

  “Thank you,” said January. “If you hear anything else of where Jumon might have been, please let me know. There’s lives at stake.”

  Ti Jon hesitated. “I’ll let you know.”

  SIX

  Since the Widow Puy would in all probability not appreciate being waked to answer questions about a boarder whom she barely remembered, January repaired for an hour to number 8 Allée d’Échange. There under the ruthless tutelage of Augustus Mayerling he worked his injured arms and back against scale weights and beams of various sizes until he felt the limbs in question were about to fall off and he’d have to carry them home in a basket in his teeth. “Good.” The Prussian fencing master handed him a towel to wipe his face. The long upstairs room, despite its row of windows thrown open to the narrow gallery, was stiflingly hot. “It means the muscles are healing satisfactorily.”

  Trembling with fatigue, January reflected that it was good to know someone was satisfied with the progress of the day so far.

  The Widow Puy told him little that Ti Jon had not already related. Yes, a young man of Isaak Jumon’s description had stayed there last week. She didn’t remember when he’d first arrived. It could have been Thursday. January had the impression that it could also have been Monday or Saturday or last Easter for all she knew or cared.

  She shrugged, a heavyset woman in a sweat-stained green calico dress and a tignon to match. She sat behind the plank counter of her grocery like a snapping turtle in a hole in a bank; on the shelf behind her, jammed in between bottles of opium and papers of pins, he saw a green glass bottle stoppered with red wax, which contained a root or bundle of some kind, surrounded by a few silver and copper bits, cigars, and fancy-cut paper. “Long as they pays me my money I don’t care who they are or where they from.”

  Past bins of flour and rice, barrels of onions, kegs of molasses, and stacks of yellowing newspaper on every level surface in the big dim room, doors opened into the yard, harsh squares of light. Men’s voices came beyond, dimly, the rhythm of those with nothing much to do.

  “You remember anyone coming to see him here?” January asked her. “Or him getting any messages from anyone?”

  She shook her head. She probably didn’t recall that many details about her last four husbands—anyway the man measuring out half a penny’s worth of crowder peas for a little girl with a market basket certainly wasn’t the man who’d been here eighteen months ago.

  “You remember when he left?”

  “Saturday.”

  “You sure?”

  Her eyes went flat. “No,” she said, in the voice of one who has all her life used contrariness to punish those who questioned her veracity.

  “Thank you, M’am,” said January, telling himself never again to antagonize a potential source of later information. “You’ve been very helpful.” He bought three linen handkerchiefs for more than they were worth and took his departure, circling the building to join the group in the back.

  It was late enough in the morning that the men who hadn’t found work had returned, to while the
remainder of the day away in talk of women or of work yet to be found. One man had the deep, wet cough of the later stages of consumption; another, big and young with a slave’s tin badge on his faded shirt, moved and breathed like a man who has strained his heart. January shivered, rubbed his own aching shoulders, and wondered how long it would be before the owners of these men sold them off for what they could get. There were worse things, he realized, than torn and dislocated muscles that would eventually heal.

  The men remembered Isaak, but he had told none of them more than he had told Ti Jon, and most of them less. They’d guessed him for a runaway, but it was none of their business. Several of them were, January guessed, runaways themselves, making a fair living at casual labor and having no intention of leaving New Orleans. All said Isaak’d left Saturday morning. All referred him to Ti Jon.

  “He had this note when he came back here Friday night,” said the man with the bad heart. “I saw it, but I can’t read. I wisht I could, or figure.”

  “Do you know who it was from?”

  The man shook his head. “Maybe his wife. Or his sweetheart. He said he had a wife.”

  “He didn’t touch it like it was from his wife,” said a man with the sores of scrofula on his face. “A man with a paper from his wife, he’ll hold it between his hands like this, even when he’s not reading it, or lay it up by his face, or keep it in his breast pocket near his heart. This he read, two, three times, by the moonlight sittin’ out on the steps”—he nodded up at the shallow platform outside the door that let into the attic where the men slept, at the top of a rickety flight of steps—“but he just shove it in his pants pocket and sat lookin’ up at the moon.”

  It was after ten in the morning when January left Puy’s, and clouding up, the dense heat smelling of rain. If the banks closed at one, ten was the proper time to see if Hannibal was awake. It might take an hour or so to sober him up. But at this hour, thought January, wading through the weeds that grew thick along the sides of the undrained muck-hole streets, Hannibal wasn’t the only one who’d be awake in the Swamp.