Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  “You said these gals’d do whatever …”

  He turned away. Between the water and the fire the rhythm of the clapping had increased, drawing him to the bayou’s bank. As he came near there was a shrill wild cry, cut short in a smell of blood, and January saw a stone-faced man of perhaps sixty hold up a decapitated chicken above the blaze. The black-feathered body still jerked and flapped, spraying the post, the altar, the man’s naked chest with blood. When the chicken ceased to move, the priest—Dr. Brimstone—threw the carcass on the altar, then took a long swig of rum. This he spit at the post, and for good measure poured a stream of the liquor over the rice and candy and cigars. His handprints showed bloody on the crystal as he set the bottle down.

  The pulse of the dancing had grown swift, maddening, like the hammer of a machine or the beating of a wild heart. A woman groaned and stumbled into the firelight, her eyes rolling in her head. Spectators reached to catch her, steady her, straighten her skirts as she collapsed to the ground. The drumbeat panted, a crazed insistent heart, and most of the dancers didn’t even stop; January, watching, felt himself still moving as he watched. Someone picked her up, her long black brush of hair falling in a cloud around her shoulders, then she brought up her head and smiled, a flirt’s lascivious smile in a middle-aged market-woman’s face.

  “Hé, libelle fame, li belle fame,” Mamzelle Marie sang, and lifted up her arms. “Si Ezili!”

  And smiling, twirling, the market-woman swung her hips and laughed. Blowing a kiss at one man, holding out her hands to another, her very face seemed transformed. She spoke to someone, too low to hear, but there was a clapping of hands, and people called out “Hé, li belle Ezili!”

  “Lady Ezili to you, Michie Long-Feet,” the woman retorted to a man near her. “You stay home with your wife more and you don’t go chasin’ around the wife of you-know-who.…” And the man drew back, genuine shock and alarm in his face, raising his hands in a gesture of silence. Her eyes were roguish, understanding, and she bumped him with her hip. “Hey, you, pretty girl.…” She spoke to another woman, and in the crowd across the fire another man cried out.

  Romulus Valle, January saw, a man he had known for almost two years, the majordomo of the Orleans Ballroom. But when Valle rose from the ground, reeling and shaking his head, his face was no longer the face of the elderly and dignified servant. Its lines, its muscles—almost its very bones—shifted, until it resembled not only in expression but in its underpinnings the face half-remembered from nightmares: Olympe’s face as it had been at the brickyard dance.

  “Ogu!” voices cried out, and the name echoed back in January’s heart: Ogu was what they had cried out twenty-three years ago. “Maître Ogu drinks, but never gets drunk.…”

  Valle snarled something incoherent, foul soldier’s slang that never would have passed the old man’s dignified lips. “Give me to drink. My balls are cold.” He caught up a branch and slashed at those around him, clearing a space among the dancers. January shivered, remembering Olympe’s face, and the way Olympe had moved. It was as if Paris and the Hôtel-Dieu, as if the apartment on the Rue de l’Aube and the woman he had loved and married there, had never existed. As if all those forty-one years had been spent among these people, in these hot fever-stinking nights.

  Still Valle danced, leaped, and lunged to the music, and in the fire glare and the full moon’s light his movements were a young man’s, a warrior’s, full of rage and strength. Passionate, and no man’s slave. As Olympe had danced.

  Dr. Brimstone held out a bottle of rum and a torch. Ogu stretched out his hands—Valle’s hands—and Brimstone poured the rum from the bottle, touching the flame of the torch to it as he poured. Ogu caught the stream of fire in his hands, laved it from palm to palm, laughing. “Hey, you give me rum to warm my balls, not my hands,” he teased, and the old root doctor laughed, too.

  By the burning rum’s blue light January saw Dr. Yellowjack making his way toward him, a cup of lemonade in one hand and a plate of congris in the other. He caught January’s eye, nodded toward the edge of the crowd where they could talk.

  But as January moved to follow, a voice called out, “Yo, Benjamin Bones!”—a nasal voice, thin and shrill, like wind blowing through broken teeth.

  January whirled, for the voice spoke right behind him, and the one who spoke mimed playing the piano with thin hands spread like spiders, like fleshless ivory twigs. January felt the hair prickle on his nape.

  He didn’t know why or how he knew who it was who possessed the speaker, a man he’d never seen before and was never to see again after that night. In any case he doubted he’d have recognized him in a normal state.

  Face distorted in a rictus grin, teeth gleaming behind back-drawn lips—somewhere the speaker had gotten a pair of spectacles whose lenses caught the light, and January had the momentary sense that if he were to pull those off the nose where they rested, only empty sockets would lie behind. Someone had given the possessed one a top hat, the other symbol of the god that rode him.

  January didn’t know whether it was his imagination or some trick scent within the man’s clothing, but for a moment his nostrils were choked with the damp charnel smell of cemetery earth.

  “Bone fixer doctor man, you done cheated me many many times.” The Baron Cemetery tilted his head, grin never changing, a skull’s grin. His hand gestured. January could almost see the bones. “By all rights I should be mad at you, you take away this man and that man from me.” He reached out without glancing beside him and, taking a clay flask of tafia rum from a woman, drained it in a gulp, and threw it over his shoulder into the fire. “But you know, I just kind of like a man what got a way with bones.”

  And he mimed playing the piano again, this time down his own chest, as if his fingers danced down the empty ribs of the animate skeleton that was the Baron’s true form.

  “So I tell you a little secret. The fellow you look for—lookin’ here, lookin’ there, how’d he die, who killed him, who hid his body …” He mimed searching through his pockets, then pirouetted with a shriek of laughter, throwing out long arms. “You lookin’ all in the wrong place! I ain’t got him! I ain’t got him at all!”

  And he spun around, tripping Dr. Yellowjack in a splatter of lemonade and chickpeas, and whirled, laughing at the mess, away into the crowd. January followed him, shocked and shaken, but dancers came between them: men gripping bandannas in either hand, women spinning on the other ends of the colored cloth. Closer and closer they danced around the fire, laughing and calling out: “Calinda! Dance the calinda!” Women caught his arms, spattered his back and shoulders with water painted in the form of a cross; struggling free, January found himself face-to-face with a woman possessed, eyes slitted, staring blank. She opened her mouth and let out a thin rattling stutter, between a hiss and a shriek, and flicked her tongue like a snake. The smell of rum soaked the air, fighting odors of smoke and scalded blood.

  When at last he came on the man again, he was lying with his back against an oak trunk, sipping a little tafia out of a calabash held for him by a young girl. January was never really certain whether this was in fact the same man as had spoken to him, or someone else of similar height and build. The spectacles were gone, but the borrowed top hat lay in the weeds at the man’s side. The man’s thin ribs heaved with the drag of his breath, and when he looked up at January, standing between him and the firelight, his dark mild eyes held only a kind of exhausted inquiry.

  “What did you mean?” asked January quietly. “You said you didn’t have the man I was looking for. Who were you talking about?”

  The girl at the lying man’s side said, “He don’t remember nuthin’.”

  “The loa had him,” added the fat dancer, coming out of the crowd, sweat sticking her hair to her round cheeks. She’d lost most of her teeth to poor nutrition and childbirth. It aged her face, though there was no gray in her hair. “The Baron. He rid him and rid him, sayin’ all sorts of things, but you know nobody remembers, what the loa
make them say.”

  January looked down at him. Without the lunatic grin, with eyes instead of flaming circles of reflected firelight, he couldn’t even be sure it was the same man.

  “I’m sure sorry, brother,” said the man in a voice deep and gentle, nothing like the Baron’s shrill whistling tones. His clothing was soaked with rum. January wondered whether that had had anything to do with his possession, “and saw again the grinning death’s-head pouring the contents of the bottle into its mouth. I remember dancing, and feeling kind of light in my head. Did I say crazy things? I didn’t mean no harm.”

  “Let him be, Michie,” said the fat woman. She held a dripping branch of gladiolus, with which she’d blessed the other dancers. “What the god want to tell you, he told you. Don’t do no good to ask questions of the horse when the rider done got down and went into the house.”

  January looked around him. The crowd was thinning out. A few still danced, or waited for one of the mambos to slop water on shoulders and back in blessing, but more and more they were pairing off, or departing in threes—a man and two women—into the darkness of the woods. The drum throbbed, but its note had changed: deeper and darker, the trip-hammer of pursuit changed to the rhythm of rut. In the woods somewhere close a man grunted and cried out with orgasm; elsewhere he heard a woman’s throaty triumphant howl.

  On the gallery of the shut dark house he saw Dr. Yellowjack watching still, a dark smudge against the pale stucco; then saw him turn and go inside.

  There was no sign anywhere of Mamzelle Marie, or Cut-Arm, or any of those he had come here to seek.

  NINETEEN

  “One thing about the powers of voodoo,” chuckled a youth named Pedro from the bow of the now-overloaded pirogue, “it sure fires up the ladies. Oh my, yes.”

  “Now you don’t go talkin’,” chided another voice out of the lapis darkness—Saul, January thought he’d introduced himself when Natchez Jim had agreed to take him and Pedro and their cousin Clovis back to town. They were all cousins, more or less, of Jim’s, all poor and all slightly drunk. January gathered that he himself was the only one leaving the island sober that night.

  “What?” protested Pedro, flinging out his hands in an exaggerated gesture of innocence. “I was just thinkin’ how fine a dancer that little gal of mine was.”

  “You see that tall gal with the gap in her teeth?” put in Clovis, and drew in a lungful of smoke from a forbidden cigar. “Now mmmm! That was some fine—dancin’.”

  Moonlight spangled the water, between the darknesses of clouds and cypress trees, blue ink and quicksilver. Frogs sang their chorus, bass to tiniest descant, and the water rippled where a fish bit at a firefly. January, weary to his bones and already heartily sick of the three cousins’ banter, wondered whether fish slept, and thought, Rose would know.

  The garçonnière that waited for him seemed an empty box of blackness. Rose, or Ayasha, or someone should be there, and he knew no one would be. He watched Pedro and Jim pole in silence from where he sat at the back of the pirogue, his mind moving this way and that, wishing only that he could be still and sleep.

  “There many maroons at the dancing?” he asked after a time. “When I was a little boy they’d always come in from hiding out in the ciprière, even when the dancing was in town.” None of them spoke of the loa, or of Romulus Valle bathing his hands in flaming rum. Had Olympe coupled with any of these men, nearly a month ago in that place on St. John’s Eve, under the influence of the rum and the dancing.… Then, or at any time in the past twenty-three years?

  Did that count as adultery? Did Paul know? Would he say anything if he did?

  January tried to put the distasteful thoughts from his mind. It was none of his business. He rubbed his shoulders, which ached from helping Jim row upstream from the convent that afternoon, and tried to work the hard fibers of pain out of his upper back.

  “Hell, maroons don’t need to hide in the ciprière.” Cousin Clovis blew a smoke ring and grinned with owlish pride. “Half the runaways I know just hide out in town. Rent theirselves a place in somebody’s attic or shed, there you are.” He was a fat man, balding, and older than his two companions, like a rotund gargoyle in the moonlight. “Who wants to hide in the woods and dig yams when you can get good money workin’ the cotton press or the levee? Who’s gonna ask, if you take a little less than the next man? Pedro …” he turned his head to look up at the gangly form of his young cousin, “you got runaways down the levee workin’ with you, don’t you?”

  “Hell, I got to,” said the big youth with a shy grin. “But I don’t ask. My mama say, ‘Mind your business.’ ”

  “Like your mama don’t mind everybody else’s business on—”

  A shot cracked the darkness. Pedro flung up his arms and fell.

  “Pedro!” Clovis heaved himself to the gunwale, grabbing at his cousin’s body in the black water. Instinctively January flung himself back against the opposite gunwale to keep the pirogue from going over; Saul had joined Clovis, grabbing Pedro’s arms, dragging his head up out of the water. January was aware of Jim beside him, leaning likewise on the gunwale but pressing a pistol into his hand.

  “I got one,” January told him softly and pulled it from the back of his waistband. The pirogue rocked desperately and there was a smell of blood as they pulled the wounded man from the bayou. “He’s after me.” How the hell had Killdevil known? Stupid to ask, the man was a tracker.… “When I dive, you kneel up and pole fast. Get Pedro to Charity Hospital, it’s right near the basin, there’ll be somebody who can care for him.”

  “You need help?” asked Jim.

  “Not as much as Pedro does.” Guilt ground him, every whimper of the wounded man’s pain a knife blade in January’s heart. The stink of waste was strong, telling him an intestine had been perforated—there was agony to come. Damn you, he thought bitterly, damn you.…

  Every fiber of his heart told him to slip silently into the bayou unseen, but he knew that unless he was seen to leave the pirogue the others would be targets. So he lobbed his pistol to the blackest shadow he could see on the bank, then got to his feet in the moonlight (Please blessed Mary let him miss …) and flung himself off the end of the pirogue, thrashing fast for the place where the gun would be. Blessed Virgin Mary let there be no alligators, let there be no snakes …

  A second shot snapped as his boots sank in the ooze of the shallows. For a heart-sickening moment he stuck, thigh-deep among the cypress knees and sedges, feeling like a mountain-sized black target in the dappled moonlight. Another gun cracked almost immediately—two rifles and a pistol, he thought, and how many more can the man have on him? …

  He heaved himself free, flopped on the bank (Please, no snakes …) and rolled. Blessed Mary get me out of this.

  Or should he pray to Zombi-Damballah, lord of snakes?

  He thrust his hand into the sedges at the roots of the cypress tree. There was no snake there. Neither was there a pistol.

  Silence across the bayou, save for the silken gurgle of the pirogue heading away as fast as Jim could wield the pole. January’s mind followed the unseen hunter’s movements: measure powder and ball by touch, load, wad, ram …rifle, rifle, pistol.… He let out a groan and rolled, to cover moving his arm in the sedges, sweeping to find the pistol by touch.

  Then he lay still in the muck, his legs flung wide. No pistol. He made his breathing loud, whispering little moans as he’d all his life heard wounded men make, on the battlefield of Chalmette and later in the Parisian clinic when they brought in the night brawlers and the drunks. Is that what Saul and Clovis are hearing now in the bottom of the boat as life leaks out of their cousin?

  He lay in the dense shadows of the cypress. Killdevil would have to wade the bayou and come to him, to kill.

  Was that the whisper of water around a body? He couldn’t tell, didn’t dare move his head. He stilled his breath, drawing it thin and thready and silent into nearly motionless lungs. Absurdly he remembered a production of Romeo and Julie
t he and Ayasha had attended in Paris, in which the deceased hero continued to visibly inhale and exhale throughout Juliet’s suicidal paroxysms. Surely that was something they taught actors?

  A faint, the faintest, soggy squeak on the bank, and the tap of a belt buckle against a gunlock.

  Now. Now.

  A squelch, and the drip of soaked clothing, and through his eyelashes he saw the loom of the man against the pale backdrop of moonlight, pistol pointing down.

  With all his strength, January lunged and swept with both legs scissoring the trapper’s legs at ankles and knees. The pistol went off and Killdevil yelled “Fuck me!” fell and rolled, hauling free a second pistol as January sprang to his feet and stomped the man’s wrist, pinning hand and weapon in the muck. Killdevil made a left-handed grab at his belt and brought out a skinning-knife, came up on his elbow slashing at January’s groin, and January kicked him with all his might in the chin.

  It was a perfect blow. Killdevil’s head snapped back, his body arching impossibly from the fulcrum of his prisoned shoulder, and January smelled feces and piss and knew the man was dead even before the body flopped to earth. He’d hoped to stun him if he could, to tie him up and get from him who’d paid him to stalk him, all these weeks, But, he thought, standing trembling over the body, dead would do, too.

  Breathing hard, he knelt, and helped himself to the skinning-knife, the powder flask, and both pistols, which were strung on ribbons the way pirates used to carry them. Killdevil’s pockets contained a flask of rum—January helped himself to that, too, drinking a greedy pull that went through him like violent sunlight—and a wash-leather sack that jingled. January was about to thrust it back when he remembered the men in the boat chatting about Pedro living with his mother and sisters. He put it in his own pocket instead.

  Two hundred dollars, Hannibal had said. Given to Killdevil by a toff who didn’t even stay for a drink. If the young man died, his family would need this—if he lived he would be unable to work for months.