Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  And that way lay madness.

  Coming out onto the gallery again, with the sky glowing lapis behind a streaky battlefield of leftover clouds, of smudge smoke and steamboat soot, he saw, far down at the end of Rue Burgundy, the white moon stand above the town’s low roofs, a baroque pearl, only a day or two from full. And he remembered the big man with the cut-off stump of an arm, laughing with white teeth as he spoke to Mamzelle Marie in the heat and dust of Congo Square; the shine of sun and sweat on the bare ribs of the men in red loincloths, and the bare feet of the women beneath their short petticoats.

  He left the shutters open for as long as he could into the evening, working on his Greek under the mosquito-bar by the light of candles. When at last he barred and barricaded them, and slept, he dreamed of dark ships beneath hot gibbous moons, spirits clinging in the rigging and watching the low green coast of the New World grow before them with flaming eyes.

  In the morning Hannibal was still resting quietly. In gloom clear and still as blue topaz January dressed and went to Mass, where he encountered Mamzelle Marie just emerging from the confessional: He wondered what it was that she said to the priest. Coming out, January fell into step with a man named Natchez Jim, who had a wood boat on the levee and another, smaller craft in which he ferried people and goods back and forth across the lake.

  The two men had coffee and gingerbread together on a bench outside the market; and Jim said, to January’s request, “Whatever I can do that will help. Your sister’s gris-gris has saved my life from the river, many a time.”

  From a market-woman January bought a fancy box of estomac mulâtre, and went home to change his clothes. Hannibal still slept peacefully. January found a piece of gilt paper and some ribbon, to wrap the ginger cakes, in his mother’s storeroom and spent another ten minutes at his desk, with “Baron von Metzger’s” cold-pressed parchment stationery, composing a note to Miss Abigail Coughlin “from your very dear uncle Charles.” He made his way by circuitous detours to the line of oyster huts that fringed the levee where Jim waited with his boat; and though he never saw Killdevil Nash, he knew the man waited for him, watching in the half-deserted quiet of the streets. Only when he and Jim maneuvered Jim’s lugger out from among the flatboats and keelboats tied in a tangle around the giant river queens did he relax, as the current took them in the open water and swept them fast downstream.

  “It would be just about there, that General Jackson rode along to look at the upper line of his men,” January said, pointing to the trees just beyond the white house and carefully laid gardens of one of the many Macarty plantations. “He came out of the fog, like a ghost in a dream on his gray horse, leaning from the saddle to shake this man’s hand or that.”

  “It drove my papa wild, hearing about that fight,” remembered Jim with a reminiscent grin. The river breeze stirred all the tattered pickaninny braids of his long hair. “He was all for the British, of course, saying they’d keep the Americans out.” Gulls wheeled and yarked above the sunflash on the browned steel of the river; a line of pelicans swooped down low, precise as if they practiced the maneuver in their spare time. “Not that Papa had any use for Napoleon, either, you understand. ‘What’s that Italian ever done but make more curfews and more code noir and more taxes so that he can fight his boneheaded wars?’ ” He imitated an old man’s growling mo kiri mo vini French, and richly laughed; January laughed, too. “ ‘Pox on ’em all,’ he’d say.”

  Clear and distant the Cathedral bells chimed for noon Mass, answered from among the trees farther downriver. A steamboat’s whistle sounded, and the tiny chime of the Algiers ferry bell. The white bulk of steamboats had given way to the dark-hulled oceangoing vessels of the downstream quays and they in turn to scrubby trees and the wilderness of broken casks, boxes, and garbage along the batture. The levee crowds thinned. Only occasional carriages and horsemen could be seen passing on the shell road. Across the river dark poplars fringed the cane fields of the Verret and Marigny plantations, spotted by the red-and-blue flags on the mast of a keelboat, beating its way upstream close to the bank. Among the trees, buildings came into view, an open quadrangle fenced on the riverside with a wrought-iron gate. Natchez Jim put in at the little wharf there, where during the week flour and provisions, soap and gray cloth, ink and mail, and coffee were unloaded, and January thanked him, and walked up the shell path to the gate.

  “Oh, I’m afraid Miss Abigail Coughlin did not come to us after all,” said the lay sister, her brow furrowed a little under the broad white band of her veil. She spoke with the accent of Normandy; January wondered what she made of these flat green monotonous coasts, the bougainvillea and Spanish jasmine, after the late cold springs and bare Februarys of that land of apples.

  January put on an expression of distress. “My master will be very sorry to hear that,” he said, slipping back into his pocket the note from “Uncle Charles.” “He understood that the child was to be placed here.”

  “And so she was.” The woman’s wide blue eyes smiled a little with tender reminiscence of what must have been a very pretty and well-spoken little girl. “We were so looking forward to having Abigail with us. But only three days before she was to have come to us we received a note from her sponsor—Monsieur Mathurin Jumon, a very respected gentleman in the city—saying that the health of the child’s mother obliged her to leave New Orleans, and take Abigail with her. I do hope it was nothing serious,” added the woman kindly. “Monsieur Mathurin has sponsored four of our pupils here in the past—in fact one of them, Danae Bonfils, is still among us, as a fourth-year, a most sweet and kindly girl. Monsieur Jumon is truly a guardian angel.”

  “My master will be most upset,” repeated January. “At one time he was quite fond of Mademoiselle Abigail’s mother, but lost track of her when he was called away to Paris. He hasn’t seen Mademoiselle Abigail herself since she learned to walk. You wouldn’t have a direction for Madame Coughlin herself, would you, M’am?”

  The sister shook her head. “Though I’m sure Monsieur Jumon would be able to direct you. His house is on Rue St. Louis in town, a tall blue house on the upstream side between Rue Bourbon and Rue Dauphine.”

  Across the courtyard behind her January saw two gray-robed sisters shepherd two neat lines of girls, arranged oldest to youngest, like stairsteps: dark Creole curls and fair French locks modestly bonneted in uniform blue, white linen aprons, making the children look like a flock of hurrying birds. The breeze from the river cooled the court a little, and rustled the trees. Better they were here, he thought, than in the smoky and fever-ridden heat of the town.

  From his pocket he took the box of cakes, and held it out. “Since I can’t locate Mademoiselle Coughlin,” he said, “perhaps the young ladies would like to divide these amongst themselves, Ma’m. They were fresh this morning, and they’ll be stale tomorrow.”

  Her smile brightened. She was really little more than a girl herself. “They’ll be very glad of it.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know the day Mademoiselle Abigail was supposed to come here, would you, M’am?” he asked, as she made to close the door. “Michie Charles is only in town for a day or two. We did ask at the house, but Michie Jumon is away in Mandeville, they said. Michie Charles may just ask at the steamboat offices for word of Madame Coughlin going upriver.”

  January wasn’t entirely certain what he hoped to learn from that piece of information, if anything. And in fact the date of Mathurin Jumon’s note to the Mother Superior, which the lay sister went and found out for him—the eighteenth of June—meant nothing to him. The day before Isaak Jumon’s distrainment and over a week before the young man had died in his uncle’s house.

  Still, thought January, as he walked back to the wharf, there was something going on. Not a shred of evidence linked Mathurin Jumon’s connection to the virtuous or not-so-virtuous Lucinda Coughlin, and the death of his nephew in his house.… Except that in each transaction a large sum of money was involved.

  “You find what you so
ught, brother?” asked Natchez Jim, when the dark trees of the batture were drifting past them again and the smoke of the city dirtied the brazen air ahead. The day was hot now, even down here near the water. Turtles lined the half-sunk logs, blinking in the sun, largest to smallest with yet smaller ones perched on their backs; here and there the brown-and-cream zigzag of wet scales marked the passage of a water moccasin among the cypress knees.

  “I’m not sure.” January stroked the water with the oars a time or two, then both men slacked the left-hand sweeps, steering around a muddy point of land to hug the shore, seeking instinctively more sheltered water. His arms ached, but he found that by leaning his weight from his hips it was possible to put some strength behind the stroke, enough to be of use, which made him glad. On the other side of the point, only a little way into the river, a rusted smokestack reared green and dripping, where a steamboat had tried in the same place to avoid the big current. January hoped the wreck had taken place by day and not at too fearsome a speed.

  “We can argue all we want, that Olympe was somewhere else on the night of Jumon’s death, and Célie Jumon was in her room alone—though she can’t prove it—but it won’t matter to a jury. Especially now that the attorney defending Madame Célie is dead.”

  “Aarh,” growled Jim, who had apparently been keeping up with the bones of the case through market gossip. “That wasn’t that fool Vilhardouin that got himself shot in a duel? …”

  “The very one.”

  “Imbecile. Row straight on here; there’s a snag closer in.”

  “As you say,” said January. “But until we prove who did poison the Jumon boy, I think they’re going to hang the wife for it—and if they hang Madame Célie, they’ll hang my sister. I need to find out where Jumon was during the days he was missing, and where he went on the night of his death. And I think,” he went on, “the moon being full tonight, that the man who would know is going to be at the voodoo dancing.”

  Though he had passed many times by Congo Square during the slave dances on Sunday afternoons, and had two or three times—as he had the previous Sunday—mingled in the crowds there to find someone he sought, January had not been to a true voodoo dance since the night twenty-two years ago in the brickyard on Rue Dumaine. Lying under a black weight of tarpaulins in Natchez Jim’s pirogue, January felt the small cold clutch of some emotion he could not name tightening behind his sternum, as if he expected the voodoo gods to know about the fix that had been put on his room.

  They didn’t exist, he knew. Old Papa Legba with his keys and his crutch and his smoldering pipe; Ogu the warrior; the rainbow serpent Damballah.… They were no more real than Moloch or Apollo. Juju balls were nothing more than dirt and wax and the feathers that came off chickens, like any other chickens in the French town …

  But still he felt fear.

  January had taken the long way to meet Jim in his pirogue where the canal crossed Rue Claiborne, glancing behind him for sight of Killdevil Ned all the way. He didn’t think he’d been followed. It was a little more than a mile and a half, through a morass of pondlets, long grass, and cypress knees, to where the canal joined the bayou. From there perhaps another mile through the dark monotony of cypress, oaks, marsh laurel, and standing water, to where the channel split to make two islands, tucked and curled one around the other. When January put back the canvas that covered him from sight he smelled smoke, and by the dim glow of Jim’s lantern he saw a three-foot gator slip from the bank and vanish into the opaque ink of the water. Dimly he heard singing:

  Papa Legba, open the gate for me,

  Papa Legba, open the gate,

  Ona pass through, ona pass through.…

  Into where? He remembered the darkness of his sister’s eyes.

  In a cleared space at the water’s edge, guarded by a tangle of oaks drowned by the bayou’s altered course, someone had kindled a bonfire. A pillar had been set up, and a sort of altar made from half a hogshead. Aromatic leaves covered it, tobacco and sassafras, and on top of them cut-paper doilies. Cigars and silver coins, dollops of rice and beans heaped on oak leaves or in gourds, pralines or pieces of pound cake on chipped earthenware plates. Beads and strange-shaped stones, a cat’s skull, bunches of feathers, a bottle half-full of rum and another almost completely so, squat square English crystal. The man who’d sat on the big bamboula drum in Congo Square two Sundays ago was here tonight, thumping time with his heels; he’d shed his calico shirt and wore only a couple of bandannas tied around his loins. Someone brought him rum from the long pale shape of a dark house, barely visible on ground higher yet behind moss-curtained trees.

  Dancers writhed and swayed around the fire. The chant of voices, weird and aching, lifted behind the slap of hands. Bach and Mozart, Beethoven and Rossini, January thought, were the flesh of his being, but this chanting, this rhythm—these were the bones they clothed.

  He saw faces he remembered: a market-woman glimpsed at Mass only that morning; a young man who peddled paper and ink in the streets. The fat woman who’d danced close to Mamzelle Marie three weeks ago, all her flesh joyfully wobbling as she pirouetted, head rolling, lost in the joy of the movement; the thin-faced man who’d shoved the box of English tools off the quay. Firelight changed them, as did darkness and the gleam of sweat. Without their tignons most of the women seemed younger, wilder, shed of disguise. Mamzelle Marie swayed on top of Damballah’s cage; the great king snake coiled and shifting as she raised him up, and her long hair was like a black waterfall of night. The force of her being—the radiance of Power—drew all eyes to her.

  Beyond her, beyond the crowd, January glimpsed movement in the woods.

  Men stepped cautiously, quietly out of the darkness, making their way toward the house. January couldn’t be sure, but he thought one of them was very tall, and very black, and there were others, following behind. He edged his way through the dancers, back to where the trees grew thick, keeping himself half-hidden in the shadows. These were men who clearly did not wish to be seen.

  Only when he drew close did he see these weren’t the men he sought. Rather, he saw, they were those who’d shoved the boxes of tools from the quay the day he’d spoken to Ti Jon. And indeed, there was Dr. Yellowjack, as Hannibal had said, emerging from the dark house to meet them.

  Works all the way up through Natchez.… Never lets himself come into view.…

  At the wangateur’s signal the black man—who was in fact only a porter—carried the bundle up onto the gallery that ran around three sides of the house, which was of the kind common in the marshes: three rooms, brick between posts, raised high against the rise of the river. Dr. Yellowjack took down one of the lanterns that hung on the gallery’s overhang to examine the goods, the shiny buckle of his heron-hackle aigrette catching the light. During this conference two or three white men emerged from the woods, as silently as the thieves had and keeping even more to the shadows.

  But Yellowjack saw them, and gestured them up onto the gallery. One of them gave him something—probably money—and a couple of young women appeared, briefly, in the dark doorways of the house. They were clothed the way many of the girls at the dancing dressed, in bandannas knotted around their breasts and forming complicated, swirling skirts, like those in the Square on Sunday. Taking the girls by the arms, the white men disappeared into the house.

  Disgusted, January turned to go back to the dancing again. But it occurred to him that whatever else could be said of this man, Dr. Yellowjack would certainly be aware of anything that went on here, on St. John’s Eve. So he stepped from the darkness as the thieves were departing, and said, “Dr. Yellowjack,” and the little man turned, regarding him with wet pebble eyes.

  “I’m Ben Janvier.”

  “I know who you are.” He had an astonishingly deep voice for so small a man, deeper than January’s own. Like the echo of cold stones falling into the River Styx.

  “Then you know my sister’s in trouble, in prison.” Of course a root doctor would know who he was, January th
ought. Like Mamzelle Marie, such men relied on information about everyone and everything to read fortunes, cast spells, predict the future—to astound the ignorant and peddle gris-gris in the Cathedral’s very shadows. And evidently, to know who was in the market for English chisels and handsaws. “She was here, wasn’t she, on St. John’s Eve?”

  “That she was.” Yellowjack was like a coiled snake, or something carved out of polished black wood, watching and wary. A man who never let one sliver of advantage slip from his grip. A man, thought January, seeing the way he kept an instinctive distance, beyond arm-reach, who trusted no one.

  “I’m looking for a maroon, a big man with one arm, nearly as big as me,” he said. “You know him?”

  The cold eyes narrowed under the brim of the leather hat. “I know him.”

  “Does he come here to the dancing? Will he be here tonight?”

  “We never know about the future, do we?” said Yellowjack softly. “Why don’t you—?”

  From inside the house a woman shrieked, not in pain or in terror but in annoyance, and cried, “Let it be, pig! I told you …”

  Above the little tuft of whiskers Yellowjack’s lips pressed tight. “Excuse me.” Like a snake he whipped up the steps and into the house; a moment later January heard the white man’s voice lifted in protest.