03 Graveyard Dust bj-3

by Barbara Hambly

  He looked past Corcet's shoulder and saw Fortune Gerard. The little man's face was grim and lined almost beyond recognition from the angry, blustering challenger of last week. Pale brown eyes, resentful, furious, scared, met his. Corcet felt the silence and turned. "M'sieu Corcet." Gerard inclined his head. "If I may have a word with you?" January excused himself with a bow and made his way out of the room. He wasn't sure what to say about what he thought the money told him-after all, with coinage short, everyone used whatever came their way. Rix-dollars and sovereigns were rare, but they weren't unknown. He passed through the shadows of the arcade, into the sunlight of the Cathedral steps where merchants and laborers-prospective jurors-stood smoking and spitting and buying ginger beer from market-women, and slipped through the crowd to the Cathedral's doors. His footfalls echoed in that cavern of dim silence redolent of burning wax and mildew, and he knelt before the bright-colored statue of the Virgin in her sky-colored robes.

  "Thank you for delivering me last night." A young girl who looked like a German shopkeeper's daughter knelt near him, whispering her own prayers; behind him a small group of nuns murmured softly, praying at the Stations of the Cross. "Please forgive me the death of the man Ned Nash, whom I killed in self-defense. Pray for his soul's salvation before God and His angels. Forgive me the danger I put Jim and his companions in last night. Send your healing to Pedro, spare him and his family from the danger in which I put them. Show me how to find the men I seek. Show me where I can find them, and get the answers I need. Help me deliver my sister from that pest hole, from the Valley of the Shadow where she's now imprisoned. I promise you when I have money again I'll buy a dozen Masses in Nash's name."

  He crossed himself and counted out decades on his blue glass rosary, the words calming him as they always did, bringing him peace. The Lord is with thee... The Lord is with thee... The Lord is with thee. Pray for us sinners... Because most of us are sure in no shape to pray for ourselves and be heard.

  And he knew, rising from his knees, that he would indeed be prayed for by one free of sin. He used the last three cents of his own money to buy candles for Killdevil Ned, for Pedro, and as always for Olympe, and when he turned he saw his brother-in-law kneeling among the worshipers behind him, rosary in hand. Together they walked to the Court without speaking. Two jurors were missing, and only three girls, not four, came in to take their places near Greenaway's chair. Anxious and irritated, Greenaway seemed to be questioning the others. Judge Canonge's lean jaw set as he tallied the absences from the bench. Monsieur Doussan the notary was gone, too, and when Canonge leaned over and whispered something to the Bailiff January caught the words yellow jack.

  Canonge banged his gavel. "It appears," the judge said, "that due to the illnesses of Messires Templeton and Flugel, it will be necessary to reexamine some of the alter nate jurors before these proceedings begin." He repeated the words in English, for the benefit of Greenaway and the American jurors. "I hereby order a recess of-"

  "Your Honor." Vachel Corcet, who had entered quietly with Monsieur Gerard, rose to his feet. Beside them Celie sat, subdued, ill, and rigid with tension-as well she would be, thought January, with the matter of the signet ring unresolved. Corcet went on, "Due to the death of our esteemed colleague Clement Vilhardouin, we would like to request another continuance of this case until I can more fully marshal the defense of Madame Celie Jumon as well as that of Madame Corbier."

  There was a pause, during which Mr. Barnes offered Mr. Shotwell his hip flask and demanded,

  "What'd he say?" And then, Rothstein the printer having translated, "God damn it, they gonna keep us hangin' around this town with the fever spreadin' like wildfire... I got a wife and children."

  "As does the husband of the accused, Mr. Barnes," said Judge Canonge grimly, and rapped his gavel. He switched from English to French with barely a drawn breath. "I'm afraid the Court calendar is full until the thirty-first, Monsieur Corcet, after which, in the absence of Judge Danville and Judge Gravier due to the contagion, the Court will be in recess until the fifteenth of September."

  January's eyes cut to Olympe, where she sat at the other end of the table. Her jaw tightened and her eyes closed momentarily, but otherwise she gave no sign. Beside him, Paul lowered his forehead to his hand, a shiver going through his body. Corcet opened his mouth to speak, then closed it and made as if to sit down. Then he took a deep breath and straightened up again.

  "If the Court please," he said, "I beg the Court to take into account the youth of the defendant's children, and the possibility that the delay of six weeks might well deprive them of their mother for good."

  "Oh, for Chrissake," said Barnes loudly, and took another swig from his flask. "She's a goddam voodoo."

  Canonge's dark eyes hardened, and he rapped his gavel again. "Very well," he said. "The Court will continue in special session the night after tomorrow, Wednesday the twenty-third of July, in order to accommodate the case, and members of this jury will present themselves at this courtroom at seven P.M. or will find themselves in contempt." He translated into English for the benefit of Mr. Barnes, who looked as if he might protest and then wisely thought better of it.

  Canonge looked back at Corcet. "Can you have your case in order by that time, Monsieur Corcet?"

  Corcet glanced over at January, then said, "I can, Your Honor. Thank you."

  "Goddam nigger pansy," said Barnes.

  As an armed constable helped Olympe to her feet January made his way over to her through the milling of clerks, bailiffs, and the witnesses for the next case: "Snakebones," he called to her, throwing the slurry African twist to the words, and she turned her head, braced against the tug on her wrist chains.

  "There a village in the woods, maroons, runaways?" January used the word some of the fieldhands had used back on Bellefleur for those who'd escaped to the woods, afeerees, and called the cipriere igbe.

  "En, " she said, an African word the old men had used.

  "Where? Do you know?"

  She glanced beside her at the Guards and said, "No. They don't tell no one. Not even the voodoos, brother..." She used the old word some of the slaves had used for the mambos and the wangateurs, as he and she had done as children, idans. "Too many idans be sellin' women to the white and buyin' stolen goods these days for Cut-Arm to trust. But they there."

  Paul caught her hands, had barely time to thrust into them the bundle of food and clothing he carried, barely time to kiss her lips, before they pulled her away. Canonge was already striking his gavel and calling for order; January and his brother-in-law moved into the corridor, where not a breeze stirred and the air reeked with gutter smell and tobacco and smoke.

  "Wednesday," said Paul. "I'll be back..."

  "Cut-Arm," said January quietly. "I knew it."

  "Cut-Arm?" Corcet bobbed from the stream of men like a cork, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief.

  "The one-armed man who saved me from Killdevil Ned. He has a village in the cipriere. A lot of maroons used to. That's where Isaak was those three days, I'll take oath."

  "Can you find it?"

  "I can try."

  It was twenty minutes' walk from his mother's house on Rue Burgundy-where he stopped to change his clothes-out of the French town and up Poydras Street to the near end of Gravier's drainage canal, and another three-quarters of a mile along its muddy banks to the little offshoot of Bayou St. John where Isaak Jumon had waited on Saturday night. Even so short a distance from the last houses of the town-broken-down shacks where Irish and German immigrants lived cheek by jowl with the cheapest of the taverns and bordellos in the New Cemetery's shadow-the trees grew thick. January picked his way along the root mounds of the oak trees to avoid the scummy standing pools, but nothing he did could keep the mosquitoes and gnats from him. Three times he saw the glistening brown-and-buff coils of water moccasins, sunning themselves on fallen logs. He followed the bayou back to where the sluggish stream divided around its two islands. From a distance across the standing
water he saw the clearing among the cypresses where the dancing had taken place less than eighteen hours before. The altar was gone, and the post that had stood before it. At this distance he couldn't even see evidence of where they had stood, but the ground was thick-covered by fallen oak leaves. He remembered then that Dr. Yellowjack had called him aside to talk to him, but when he crossed the bayou, and walked up to the house, it was shuttered tight.

  From the gallery he looked back again to where the pillar and the altar had been. The air still carried a faint reek of smoke, and on the planks of the gallery there were stains of what might have been blood. He remembered with a shiver the Baron Cemetery, laughing hysterically as he searched the pockets of his clothing. I ain'tgot the man you seek... Well, at least I gave you somebody for all the ones I kept out of your hands. Killdevil Ned might have been gathered to his fathers, but January knew that there was danger still. Whoever had hired the mountain man-be it Jumon or Granville or someone else-would know within a day or so that Ned was gone. There were many men in the Swamp who needed money and were good with knives and guns. Shifting his aching shoulders uneasily, January descended from the silent gallery, retreated into the green shadows of the cypresses, and crossed the island and the little channel of bayou beyond in silence.

  Here was the true cipriere. Sheets of standing water alternated with knots of hickories, palmettos, and red oaks, and coarse gray triangles of moss formed continuous tapestries overhead on the oak limbs. This and white egrets lifted in flapping clouds at his approach; turtles basked on the curves of logs above water the hue of pureed peas. The day was baking hot and the trees closed in that heat, as if he were wrapped in blankets. The drum of the cicadas, the whine of mosquitoes, the constant low hum of gnats, were the only sounds. He was only a mile or so, he knew, from the shell road that led out along Bayou M?tairie, but beyond that bayou the cipriere resumed, a dark finger of swamp and woods between river and lake. Truly the igbe that the old men on Bellefleur had talked about, the forest that spoke to them of the greater forests of Africa. The alien realm of Ogu and Shango and Damballah-Wedo, where such as Apollo and Zeus-and even Christ and Mary-had never walked. It took him over half an hour to reach Bayou M?tairie, along the oak roots where the ground was firm. In the open ground along the road a little breeze drifted, but did nothing to cool the sweat that soaked his blue calico shirt. The sun glared in his eyes and the feverish heat was a nutcracker, clamped around his skull. He made a careful detour through the fallow cane fields, then plunged back into the cipriere on the bayou's other side. For the rest of the day he quartered the maze of swampland and cipriere west of Bayou St. John, searching for signs he wasn't sure he'd recognize. The woodcraft he'd learned as a child came back to him, but he wasn't entirely willing to trust it: He cut a staff, first thing, from a hickory sapling and with it saved himself from two snakebites and half a dozen duckings, prodding the cattails and oyster grass ahead of him. Time after time he saw things that made him wonder if he were close to the maroon village: catfish lines set in the marshes; cypress stumps that looked as if they'd been cut without proper tools; once a white chicken, far from anywhere... But then, it wasn't more than a few miles to the small plantations along the Bayou Sauvage. How far could a stray chicken travel?

  Slanting sunlight rimmed the hanging moss in blazing white. The green gloom behind creeper and palmetto seemed to clot and grow dark. Not now! he thought, des perately, straightening from examination of what might have been a foot-broken twig and realizing how close he'd had to bend to get clear sight of it. Like Gideon in the Bible, he wanted to pray that the sun hold its place in the heavens until he had accomplished what he needed to accomplish.

  Another night-after how many nights?-that Olympe would spend in the reeking hell of the jail, listening to the wailing of poor Mad Solie. Mopping with filthy water the bodies of the sick.

  Waiting for the sickness to touch her on the shoulder, for Bronze John to call her name. Dear God, how many nights had it already been?

  He called out, into the close-crowding green silence, "I know you're there! Cut-Arm-Danny Pritchard-anyone! You have to help me! All I need is help!"

  Like cushions the creepers absorbed his voice. The dark in the green aisles deepened. Somewhere close by, frogs began to croak.

  Guardians of the way to Hades, Aristophanes had made frogs. Pale fat-bellied souls of the dead.

  He found his way back to the Bayou M?tairie and followed it east to the stone bridge of the Bayou Road. The white shell of the roadbed crunched beneath his boots as he walked back through the crying darkness to town, as if he trod a carpet of shattered bones. Twice he turned to look into the dark of the trees, positive someone followed and watched.

  But there was no one there.

  TWENTY

  "Ah yes, they're out there." Marie Laveau turned a slice of yesterday's stale bread over in a yellow pottery bowl of batter, judging with an exact eye its state of saturation before she laid it in the frying pan. "Cut-Arm and his friends."

  Morning light touched the heavy black curls of her hair where she'd pinned it carelessly on the top of her head; warmed the painted earthenware bowls lined around the table where her children sat, spoons in hand, waiting with eager expectancy for their breakfast. Someone had put yellow hibiscus and late-blooming magenta crape myrtle in a blue jug on the table, a splash of gaudy color. A dragonfly paused for an instant in the open windows, then flicked away.

  "They've been out there for six months now, since he ran from General deBuys. I buy herbs now and then from them, and the snakes they trap and kill. I don't know where their village is." She dropped the bread into the pan, sizzling in the butter; the heat from the hearth where she sat was like a glowing yellow wall. "I haven't looked."

  "I thought you knew everything," said January.

  She glanced up at him, lazy eyes fathomless. "I know there have been free colored who've sold information to the police about Cut-Arm and his friends, for money to buy themselves a shop, or their children an education," Mamzelle Marie went on. "I know how some among the voodoos spy and creep and gather information, not knowing how to keep their mouths shut about what they learn. I know there are things that it's better for all I don't know." She forked slices and laid them on the plate. At the back of the hearth a small pot bubbled, its smell rank and gamy and tiny bones floating among the roiling scum of fat. On the hearth's edge seven or eight mouse pelts lay spread to dry on a folded piece of newspaper. The heads, tails, and feet, neatly severed, lay on another piece on the windowsill, surrounded by a ring of powdered red pepper to keep off ants.

  "Will you eat with us?"

  January shook his head. "I'll have some coffee, though." He'd cooked up grits and molasses for Hannibal and himself before leaving the gar?onni?re that morning, all they could afford. Rose, who'd spent most of yesterday doing her translating in Hannibal's room to keep him company, had promised to return today, that the fiddler not be left by himself.

  "Could you find out where the village is?" He drew a chair to the end of the table nearest the hearth. Mamzelle Marie continued to work as they talked, first finishing the lost bread, then checking the boiling mice, dipping a holed spoon into the broth and lifting clear tiny lumps of flesh, from which she picked the bones with her fingernails.

  "I could, in time. But they trust me more, knowing I don't know and have not sought." She laid a tiny femur on a cheap pottery plate. "I meet them Sundays, as you saw, or sometimes if I need something special or if they're not at the dancing I'll leave a drawing of it-a snake or a ground puppy or a deer's foot-in the crook of a certain tree. Like as not two days later it'll be here on the step."

  "Would Isaak have gone to Cut-Arm?"

  "He might. Cut-Arm-Squire he was called back in those days-never had much use for the free colored. Ti Jon would have told him Isaak was a runaway, which of course was true. Cut-Arm's always willing to help those who'd be free."

  "Will you come with me?" he asked. "Help me? We can make a
case of some kind, Corcet and I, out of the fact that the body they buried as Isaak's had no arsenic in it, but Greenaway can argue around that in five minutes. Greenaway's thick as thieves with Genevi?ve Jumon's lover. Maybe the man truly believes Madame Celie actually did the murder. Maybe it's just what he wants to believe."

  "They all believe," said Mamzelle Marie quietly, "that one who worships the loa will do murder.

  It's all one to them, Protestant or Catholic. You read that jour nalist's story. They hear the drums at night, they see the people dancing in the Square, and they get afraid. This lover of Madame Genevi?ve, this banker who uses her money at interest, he loves the Protestant God, and sees God only with one face, and that face white."

  January remembered suddenly the woman in the Cathedral, looking around her nervously at the unfamiliar images and Stations of the Cross; the golden-haired child who supposed that nuns routinely kidnapped little girls. "Granville mistrusts even Catholics, and won't promote them past a certain level in his bank."

  She set down the last of the mouse-bones, rose and signed January to remain where he was. "I promised Dr. Ker I'd help him at the hospital today, but I'll send Marie with a note, that there's something else I must do." She nodded to her daughter, who was clearing off the dishes, silent as the Zombi serpent. "Maybe when Cut-Arm sees me with you he'll know you're to be trusted, for all you're a policeman's friend."

  They walked out the Bayou Road, and along the path that skirted the Bayou M?tairie on the lakeside, with the morning sun strong on their heads. After an hour's walk they left the path and plunged north into the cipriere.

  Ahead of him, January watched Mamzelle Marie's straight slim shoulders, half-bared by her blouse of red-and-blue calico, sunlight filtering through the oak leaves to dapple the coppery skin. Her mother, he thought, or her mother's mother, had paid the price of freedom, as his own mother had, taking a white man into her bed and using whatever she had to use to buy that freedom for her child. Fortune Gerard's mother had beyond doubt done exactly the same thing, and why not? Who among the free colored wouldn't betray Cut-Arm to the whites for money to buy themselves a shop, and buy schooling for their children? If you're knee-deep in water on a sinking boat, you get your child and your child's children yet unborn onto shore-or at least onto a sounder vessel-at whatever price you and those in the doomed craft with you have to pay.