Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  “Stick with niggers,” advised Pritchard, and spit tobacco in the sandbox concealed behind the potted palms. “I sold that boy Dan of mine, the runty one. Stole every damn thing that wasn’t nailed down—Well, I couldn’t prove it, of course, but it threw a scare into the others, you bet! Fetched nine hundred dollars from a feller taking a coffle up to the Territories.…”

  “Do you imply, sir, that the climate of this city is unhealthy?” roared a voice from the parterre. Granville, Pritchard, and Judge Canonge—one of the few justices in the city who had not already decamped for the summer—sprang down to separate Councilman Bouille from Dr. Ker. “There is no yellow fever in this city and there never has been! I will have my friends call on you, sir!”

  January shook his head. Had it been only that morning that he and Paul had spoken to Olympe? That afternoon he had received a note from Ker, asking if he would be able to volunteer his time at the hospital to assist with the fever cases that had already begun to come in. Many of the wealthier inhabitants of the town had either already left for summer cottages along the lake, in Milneburgh or Mandeville or Spanish Fort, or for the North; those who remained spoke of nothing but their plans to depart in the near future. The faces of the two men, dead in the back room of the jail, had haunted his dreams last night, and he thought of Olympe tonight in her sweltering cell, the voices of the whores and the madwomen dinning in her ears.

  He could tell when the Blue Ribbon Ball ended, around two-thirty: there was a sudden flood of men back into the ballroom, and Monsieur Davis, owner of both the Salle and the Théâtre, emerged from between the Gothic stage flats to ask if extra dances could be added to the program when the agreed-upon twenty-one were finished. The violinist Cochon Gardinier, overflowing his tiny gilt chair, glanced at January, at the Valada brothers on flute and cornet, at Alcibiade Gargotier on the viol. January shifted his shoulders, which felt as if red-hot wedges had been hammered under them, and thought about the penniless months ahead. “Sounds fair to me.”

  It was only when the dancing was done, and the musicians paid—only when he descended the narrow rear stair in the wake of Cochon and the others—that it came home to January how absolutely deserted now the streets of the French town would be. It had rained again during the dancing, and the streetlamps over the intersections threw glistening patches of yellow on mingled water and mud. The coaches of the last guests were departing, and the little bands of torch-bearing slaves. It was three streets up to Rue Burgundy and several streets over to his mother’s house, and somewhere out there in the darkness, thought January, almost certainly, lurked Killdevil Nash.

  Heart thumping hard, he reascended the stairs, crossed through the Théâtre, where the last of the establishment’s slaves were stripping the tablecloths from the refreshment tables, passed into the empty lobby and through the curtained passageway, where no colored men went save those hired to clean the place. The Salle d’Orléans itself was deserted and silent, the ladies who danced there long since departed to their highly expensive beds.

  Logically, thought January, an assassin would be waiting where he could watch the service door of the Théâtre, on Rue St. Anne, and from there follow him up Rue St. Anne to Rue Burgundy. While this was going through his mind he was descending the service stairs of the Salle d’Orléans, following a narrow hallway among the offices to the Salle’s downstairs lobby, from which doors opened into the gambling rooms that fronted onto Rue d’Orléans. At this time of the morning—it was nearly four—they were still surprisingly active, though the men there, steamboat pilots and sugar buyers and one or two of the more nearly situated planters, had for the most part taken off their coats and settled into hard play. Little stacks of gold double-eagles, of silver cartwheels, of English and German and Spanish coins, glittered on the baize cloths under the gaslight: deeds to plantation land, papers for credit and slaves. Dealers laid the spreads of cards, red and black and gold—poker, faro, vingt-et-un, long and short whist. The air stank of tobacco, the blue haze of its smoke and the faint sweet squishiness where it smeared the floor underfoot stank of liquor, of hair oil, of men’s sweat.

  On the way through the lobby he took a waiter’s towel from the back of a chair and laid it over his arm, removed his hat, and shifted his grip on his music satchel, carrying it reverently in one hand and his hat in his other. Then he entered the gambling rooms, looking inquiringly to the right and the left as if seeking someone: “Are you Michie Preobazhensky, sir?” he asked one man, and then another. “Michie Preobazhensky?” Still with the air of one dutifully seeking the owner of the bag and the hat he stepped out onto the Rue d’Orléans banquette, and in this persona walked along it for a little distance.

  He looked around him. The street was deserted, though farther down Rue Bourbon he could see lamplight and gaslight from at least two other gambling establishments and hear music from one of them. He felt a pang of pity for whoever of his colleagues that was, playing still at this hour. I hope they’re getting paid decent.

  He put his hat back on, took his satchel by the handle again, and like the Three Wise Kings of the Bible, went home by another way. No one molested him en route. The sheets of his bed had been changed and by the light of his candle he saw that the pillow had been opened, probably searched by Bella for ouanga balls, and sewed back.

  It still made him uneasy to lie in the bed, remembering the cross on the threshold last night—it seemed years ago—and the severed chicken foot, not to mention Killdevil Nash’s cold eyes. He did not sleep well, and when he did, his dreams were dreams of fear.

  It had been a long and exhausting day.

  • • •

  Mist still drifted on the sunless river when January emerged next morning into the Place d’Armes and made his way along the stuccoed colonnade of the Cabildo to the Cathedral’s doors. His head buzzed and his eyes ached from little sleep, but the scent of incense was calming. A few Ursuline nuns knelt in vigil close to the altar; otherwise, the occupants of the church consisted mostly of shopkeepers’ wives, of servants in their soberest head-scarves. The wealthier of the town—white, black, and colored, including January’s mother—would attend the more fashionable Masses later. January wondered where the blond woman with the golden-haired child was now, and what it was she’d had from the voodoo-man.

  He slipped his rosary from his pocket, rested his forearms on the back of the pew ahead of him to take the weight from his aching shoulders, and fingered the blue glass beads. In his dreams last night he had found the chicken foot on his bed again, but when he’d tried to pick it up it had turned to a rotted thing, like decomposed meat, in his hand. On the wall over the head of his bed, where in the waking world a crucifix hung, he’d seen nailed the dried snake that was tacked to the wall in Olympe’s parlor, a rolled-up slip of paper in its mouth; he had known that that paper bore his name. At the shutters he’d heard the dead white thing from the ciprière pat and rattle the hinges and the latch, whispering to be let in.

  “Do you remember the First Commandment?” asked the priest softly, when January confessed to the sin of doubt. By his voice January knew it was Père Eugenius, a young Spaniard new to the parish, to whom he always confessed if he could. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me. You felt fear, you said.… Of course you felt fear, for you were taught to fear these things as a child. God understands what fear is. When a gun goes off near your head, you duck—of course, you duck. But a soldier then gets back up and goes on doing his duty.

  “Satan will use your fear, my son. He’ll use it to get you to do things that look harmless—and they may be harmless. But then he’ll ask you to do similar things, things that look the same, that are evil, and against the will of God. When you put your faith in something other than God, you damage your faith. Light a candle for yourself and pray to have your faith made stronger, that you may trust in the armor of God.”

  After hearing Mass and taking Communion, January lit a candle, not only for himself but for Olympe as well. Coming
out of the Cathedral he thought he saw Mamzelle Marie, kneeling before the statue of the Virgin, telling over the beads of her rosary, the halo of votive lights outlining the seven points of her tignon with gold.

  When January reached home his mother looked up from her pain perdu and coffee and said, “Remember that your month’s money is due Tuesday, Benjamin. These came for you.” She held out to him two folded sheets of paper, the grimier of them simply creased into quarters, the other sealed the old way with three neat chunks of crimson wax and addressed to “Benjamin January, fmc.”

  Unfolding it, he read,

  Mr. Janvier,

  It cheers me considerably to realize there are still men in the world who understand that more information widens the possibility of arriving at a correct conclusion, despite whatever distaste they may feel for some of that information, or some of the people who may impart it. Please consider my time at your disposal this afternoon between luncheon and dinner. I very much look forward to the opportunity to do whatever I can to assist my poor nephew’s widow, and your unfortunate sister, in clearing their characters and freeing themselves from this appalling difficulty.

  Most sincerely,

  Mathurin Jumon

  The other was scrawled in Shaw’s erratic hand.

  Myst

  Maistr

  Mr. January—

  We found a body.

  “Nasty varmints, crawdads.” Abishag Shaw spit tobacco onto the floor of the smaller of Charity Hospital’s two surgical theaters, and produced a brass knuckle-duster from the pocket of his coat to prop open a copy of Orfilia’s Treatise on Poisons on a lectern dragged in from a classroom next door. “Had one for supper t’other night musta been five inches long.”

  “Do you think Madame Geneviève will be able to identify him?” January tied a vinegar-soaked rag around his mouth and nose, and blinked a little in the fumes of it as he considered the bloated, ghastly thing that Shaw’s men had fished up out of Bayou Sauvage early that morning.

  “I ain’t got the smallest doubt she will, and give us a good three-hanky weep for our trouble. Iff’n she don’t bury someone she won’t have no claim on the money, now, will she?” Shaw blew his entire chew into the sandbox and pulled up the rag that had been around his own neck—the corpse had been in the water five or six days. “You familiar with this German feller’s test for arsenic?”

  “I’ve heard of it.” January checked off with his eye the apparatus spread over the theater’s smaller table: carboys of acid and distilled water, a small alembic, and assorted other paraphernalia essential to the production of sulfuretted hydrogen gas. A brazier of coals contributed its heat to the already suffocating ambience of the room. Rose, he reflected, would be fascinated, as she was by anything chemical. “It sounds perfectly straightforward.”

  He picked up a scalpel and advanced on the corpse, already deeply regretting Bella’s pain perdu.

  “You know this isn’t going to tell us much,” he gasped, as he and Shaw retreated to the window from the rolling surge of gases when the gut was punctured. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day in the cemetery during the cholera? … “There are vegetable poisons that could have produced almost the same symptoms as arsenic but won’t show up on a test. Indian tobacco, or Christmas rose—Mamzelle Marie or any root doctor in town could tell you a dozen.”

  “Includin’ your sister.” Above the edge of the dripping rag, Shaw’s gray eyes had a lazy sharpness, not surprised, but interested in how much he knew. “And they could tell you, Maestro. All I or any of the Guards would get is just I don’t know nuthin’ about no poisons. And I did think of that. But if we do find arsenic in this poor jasper’s tripes it might tell us somethin’, too. That it?”

  “That’s it.” January laid the detached stomach on the table, and began to slice it into sections, trying hard not to breathe.

  “What do we do now?”

  January nodded at the vessel of distilled water. “Make soup.”

  “Frankly,” Shaw went on, as they began the tedious process of boiling and filtering, “I don’t think our little friend here is any more Isaak Jumon than you are. He seems to been in the bayou the right amount of time—five, six days—but his arms and hands is chewed so bad it’s hard to tell iff’n he was a sculptor; hell, it’s only his hair tells us for sure he was even a man of color. All he had on was them britches and they could be a wheelwright’s or a sculptor’s or a fieldhand’s. And even allowing for the way a body’s muscles stretch when they been soaked that long, I’d say he’s too tall. But we’ll see what Miz Jumon says.”

  What Geneviève Jumon said, dropping her reticule and fan and clasping her free hand to her face to join the one already holding a vinegar-soaked rag, was, “Oh, Isaak! Oh, my son!” She stood in the theater’s doorway, separated from the table by easily twenty feet of student benches. “Dear God, what has that vile woman done!” Then she swayed, and staggered back into the arms of Hubert Granville.

  Shaw, who was in the midst of adjusting a retort to pipe the sulfuretted hydrogen gas through the filtered solution, wiped a hand on his shirt and inquired mildly, “Do you identify this man as your son, Isaak Jumon?”

  Antoine, almost concealed behind Granville’s green-coated bulk, gulped and retreated into the corridor.

  “Yes!” Madame Jumon pressed a hand—carefully, as her black kid glove was now soaked with vinegar—to her forehead, leaving a long nigrous smear. “Oh, God, my son!”

  “You’re sure?” Shaw left the solution to bubble odoriferously and picked his way toward them. “You might want to come a little closer for a better squint.…”

  “You leave her alone!” gasped Granville, as Madame Jumon shrank from the policeman’s sticky grasp.

  “I would know my son anywhere, M’sieu,” she retorted in a strangled voice. “There is no need to go closer.”

  January, who had been measuring every limb and surface of the corpse and making notes, slipped past them into the corridor; with his face covered, in his rough trousers and calico shirt, they gave him barely a glance. Assuming him, probably, to be one of the hospital servants.

  Granville, he thought. Granville offering Madame Jumon his arm, to escort her up Rue Royale. Granville’s address on the advertisement …

  Granville saying something at the St. Margaret Society Ball about trying to raise money …

  Antoine was seated, trembling, on a bench in the hall. On a Sunday morning this part of the building was relatively deserted, save for a couple of orderlies ominously making up one of the classrooms into an emergency ward. Light through an open doorway, and from the window at the end of the hall, twinkled on the boy’s cut-jet coat buttons and shone dimly through the long scarf of mourning crêpe hanging from the back of his high-crowned hat.

  He was weeping.

  January sat beside him, very quietly, kneading some of the tension from those thin shoulders. “It’s all right, son,” he said. “It’s all right. No, keep your head down a spell, till you feel better.” He spoke in the roughest bastard Creole that he could, the language of the slaves, and didn’t lower the rag mask from his face. In any case Antoine didn’t look up.

  Behind them in the operating theater he could dimly hear the run of Shaw’s voice, and Geneviève Jumon’s—“Yes, of course, he had a signet ring, gold, given him by his father when he turned seventeen.…”

  And worthless as an identifying mark, reflected January. If the ring hadn’t slipped off after prolonged immersion it could be said to have been taken off before the body went into the water.

  “It sure good of Michie Granville to look after your mama that way,” he said to Antoine after a time. “Must be a terrible shock for her.”

  Antoine sighed, and January saw again the look in Madame Geneviève’s scornful, suspicious eyes. “I’m sorry,” whispered the boy wretchedly. “Yes, I’m glad he’s there for her. I wish I could …” His voice trailed off, and the small black-gloved hands trembled.

  “He a famil
y friend I guess?”

  “He looks after Mama’s investments.” There was a wistful note in Antoine’s voice. “He’s clever with investments.”

  And at seventeen, thought January, Antoine Jumon knew already that he would never be anything but what he was: clerk, failed artist, addict. Forever a disappointment to the mother who regarded him with such contempt. He wondered suddenly if that was what had set Hannibal’s feet on the road that had brought him up penniless in New Orleans, alone and ill, an Oxford-educated opium addict with a hundred-guinea violin: the desire not to have those who expected better of him see him as he knew he was.

  “Antoine.” Madame Geneviève was standing in the theater door.

  Antoine got quickly to his feet and staggered. January caught his elbow without rising—the stab of pain through his back as he raised his arm above shoulder level was like being knifed, but he didn’t dare let her notice his height. The mask still covered his face and the hall was dim; he said, “He still a li’l woozy, M’am. I’d a gone put cold water on the back of his neck but I di’n’t want to leave him.”

  “Thank you.” She made her face smile like a woman operating a puppet made from a folded napkin, and at once turned her attention to trying to see, in the gloom, if the pupils of her son’s eyes looked as they should.

  “Antoine, I expect you to be of support to your mother through the funeral.” Hubert Granville emerged from the theater behind her, and January remained seated as the three of them walked away along the corridor, silhouetted against the wan glare from the doorways along the route: the man’s heavy square solidity, the rich curves of the woman, and the boy trailing behind, weedy and defeated in his tight-waisted coat and extravagant, veiled hat.

  Redolent of old blood, tobacco, vinegar, rotten eggs, and sweat, Lieutenant Shaw stepped into the hall to watch them go.