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 run away s 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 All?e d'Echange. 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 husbandsanyway 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 th
e sides of the undrained muck-hole streets, Hannibal wasn't the only one who'd be awake in the Swamp.
When first January had come to New Orleans as a child, the old town walls had still stood, and pastures had stretched beyond them toward the swamp and the lake. Upstream a few Americans had begun to build their houses and shops along Canal Street-named for a waterway that had never been dug-but for the most part everything beyond the walls was a wilderness of cypresses and cattails, silt and saltgrass, and ferns.
He had had no fear to walk there or anywhere else outside the walls.
The walls were gone now. But in his heart and his imagination they remained, a bastion against the upriver Americans, human garbage of the flatboat and keelboat trade, river rats, and filibusters whose numbers had doubled and tripled and then waxed ten- and twenty- and fifty-fold with the passing years. Foul-mouthed dirty men whose cold eyes saw no difference between slave blacks who could be bought and sold and the free colored man or woman whose ancestors had founded the town. Slick scheming men who would buy anything or sell anything or do anything to anyone as long as it could turn a profit, and the coarse whorish women who followed them for gain.
The Swamp had streets, but that was about all that could be said of the place. No one had bothered to pave them, or run the gutters essential to keeping the marshy town drained. The slots between the crude plank buildings, the tents and shanties that housed brothels and barrel houses and cheap lodging places, were themselves gutters, ankle-deep in reeking ooze that steamed faintly under the morning's pounding heat. Untended privies competed with the stench of dead dogs, rotting garbage, expectorated tobacco, and fermenting alcohol in a putrid tttiusma that veiled the whole district; even at this hour of the morning January could see into the open sheds to games of poker and faro still in progress from the previous night or the previous week. Outside the TurkeyBuzzard a man lay in the muck. Flies swarmed around a gaping wound in his chest.
Even from across the street luouary could see he wasn't breathing.
He walked swiftly, his eyes on the ground, keeping to tlvr sloppy runnel in the middle of the way lest he enmuunter any who considered it their right as white men to liuve the drier ground along the walls. There were a lot of runaway slaves living in the Swamp; slaves, too, like Ti Jon, who "slept out," finding lodging in its back rooms, it ttios, and sheds. These, January knew, could be insulted, shoved in the mud, beaten, or killed with impunity. The City Guards did not come here.
When whores called out to him from shanties barely wider than the beds they contained, he did not raise his eyes.
Hannibal lived above Kentucky Williams's saloon in Perdido Street these days. He had only to make it that far.
"Michie January?"
He halted, surprised. A child stood at his side, panting as from a run; one of those hundreds of ragged urchins who darted around the Swamp and Girod Street and the Basin District like flies above a gutter on a hot June day. The boy held out a folded sheet of paper. "Are you Mi chie Ben January?"
"I'm Ben January."
"This for you, then."
Puzzled, he handed the child a picayune, and the boy pelted away, trying to outrun the crowd of larger boys who emerged from nowhere to try to take the coin.
January unfolded the paper, his mind going back to the chicken foot on his bed.
The paper was blank. He turned it over. Blank.
The hair prickled on the nape of his neck as he realized what the paper was.
He looked around him, fast, but the man who'd paid the child to get him to identify himself in the open street had already stepped from under the awning of a run down saloon, a knife in his hand.
January had an impression of a sun-bleached mouse-brown beard and long braids wrapped in buckskin and red rags, a shirt sewn from the blue wool goods traded by the British posts to Indians in the Oregon Territories. A fur trapper, a mountain man, calm and businesslike as if he were going after a lamed deer.
January ran. Even if the law would permit him to raise a hand against a white man in his own defense-which it didn't-he knew that every Kaintuck river rat and keelboat ruffian in the district would be on him like wolves if he did so. In any case he knew his arms, his back, his body were not up to a fight. He was taller than the trapper and probably fifty pounds heavier, and he ran like a jackrabbit: down Jackson Street, through empty ground rank with waist-high weeds and splashing with oozy water, around the side of a coarse-built barrel-house-cum-bordello where the whores shrieked "He's gettin' away from you, Ned!" and someone yelled "Two dollars an the nigger! " as he and his pursuer pounded past, behind him he heard the man yell "Stop him! " in English. "You, boy, stop!" And he raised the knife, flashing in the clouded sunlight.
Men poured, whooping, out of the Ripsnorter Saloon; it was a slack hot morning in the slow season, and the light promised diversion-and formed a barrier between the buildings, heading January off in a weed-ridden soggy field, There were two pistols and a rifle among them, and January tried to veer away. The mountain man swerved at his heels, lunged, and struck; January's feet skidded in the muck beneath the weeds. He tried to catch the knife hand and twist it aside: it was like a child trying to avert the blow of a man. His arm crumpled like soaked panteboard in a wash of breathless pain, and he ducked out of the way as the blade scored his flesh.
They fell, hard, the white man on top, January's arm collapsing under him as he tried to catch himself. He rolled from under the knife and mud splashed on him with the force of it stabbing into the ground. Rolled again, trying to bring up his arm through a red haze of pain, sobbing with shock and despair and sheer terror, and then someone grabbed the trapper from behind and hauled him back like a housewife uprooting a carrot.
It was a black man, huge January's own formidable height and as heavily built, head shaved, scarred eyes, and a mouth like an ax cut in an ugly face. He whirled the trapper with astonishing neatness and head-butted him, hard: January saw his rescuer had only one arm, his right, the left a stub not quite down to the elbow. The trapper staggered and the cut-armed man let him go, and in a single move elbowed him across the face, then back-fisted him with a blow like a hammer's. The trapper staggered, lunged again with his knife, and a man from the crowd leapt out and tried to pull him back. January glimpsed Hannibal's frayed black coat and long hair as the trapper whirled and walloped the fiddler aside with the back of his hand, with force sufficient to knock him down. The cut-armed man dragged January to his feet, the crowd churning into a melee, grabbing at January, grabbing at the cut-armed man. The trapper flung Hannibal off him a second time but never got a chance to make another lunge at January, for out of the confusion barreled three women, harpies, a six-foot Amazon named Kentucky Williams and her equally fearsome partners, Railspike and Kate the Gouger-all of whom, January knew, had a soft spot for Hannibal in what passed in them for hearts.
"Three dollars on Kentucky!" somebody yelled as the cut-armed man shoved January by main strength through the mob, and the sky split with a roar of thunder and rain sluiced down. The downpour was short, but it effectively discouraged pursuit. When January and Cut-Arm ducked into a ramshackle shed behind a store on St. John Street-a store that seemed to sell nothing much besides liquor and some of the most slatternly women January had ever seen-most of their pursuit had already fallen aside. The few who ran on past seemed more interested in finding shelter themselves than picking up the trail. "You know him?" panted Cut-Arm, and January shook his head.
"He had a boy come out and give me a note, blank, so he could see me say I was Ben January. So he didn't know who I was, either."
Cut Arm sniffed, and his dark eyes gleamed in the shadows as he listened for the sound of further pursuit. "You got someplace to go?"
January nodded, and touched the shirt-pocket where he kept one copy of his papers. "I'm free," he said. His mother-and many others among the free coloredwould have been careful to specify that they were free colored, dreading lest they be taken for freedmen, freed blacks, emancip
ated by a white master out of generosity or in payment for faithful service. Though of course, he reflected, that was exactly what he was, and what his mother was, deny it though she certainly would. "I came over here to find my friend Hannibal the fiddler, the one who tried to help you in the fight." He felt a small pang of shame at having abandoned Hannibal to his own devices-the fiddler could never have survived an all-out attempt on his life-but knew Hannibal would be the first person to say "For God's sake run for it!" At least Hannibal wouldn't be clubbed to death merely for striking a white man. And with Kentucky Williams and her girls on the scene, Hannibal's chances of getting clean away were good.
"No white man had to help me," said Cut-Arm softly, his voice deep, the growl of a bear. "And you'd be best if you stop calling any white man friend. Not the one who freed you, not the one who mixed himself in the fight. None of'em. When it comes to a choice they'll all betray you. Where's this white man of yours live?"
Cut-Arm went with him as far as the foot of the rattletrap ladder that ascended the back of Kentucky Williams's house. The two men moved quietly in the slanting rain through the weedy lots, the stands of cypress, and loblolly pine. In two of the saloons they passed, other fights had already started up, women shrieking and men cursing, furniture smashing against rickety plank walls. Few came out in the rain who might have seen them go by, but once, near the corner of an alley, January saw a dark shape signal Cut-Arm that all was clear.
Hannibal had already returned, and sat in the gray light of the doorway of his attic room, reading Topography of Thebes, when January climbed the ladder through the thinning drizzle. "So what was your quarrel with Mr. Nash?" the fiddler inquired, and coughed heavily. His long dark hair was soaked and he'd shed his wet coat in favor of a blanket around his thin shoulders. "Don't tell me you dared imply that the college he attended has a second-rate rowing-team?" "That was it." January glanced back down into the flooded yard. No trace of Cut-Arm was to be seen. "I should have known better than to say a thing like that to a Harvard man. Thank you." Hannibal had a small cut over one eye, but other than that he seemed little the worse for leaping into the fray, save for the drawn exhaustion of his face and the way he slumped against the doorframe.
03 Graveyard Dust bj-3 Page 9
