03 Graveyard Dust

TWELVE

Thanks to the chattiness of the Metoyer sisters, January had at least ten minutes after his arrival at the head of Florida Walk to loiter and catch his breath.

The whole suburb of Franklin, laid out on what had formerly been Marigny lands, was, like the neighborhood around Colonel Pritchard's house, thinly inhabited. But streets had been laid out-mucky cuttings through the trees-and houses built. Here and there stood handsome residences of two stories, with new gardens brave against the older, sullen growth of cypress and loblolly; more frequently, cottages like his mother's, neat, foursquare dwellings of stucco and brick. Good if you were a young couple just wed, reflected January, loafing along with hands in pockets and coat thrown casually over one arm. Good if you sought a quiet neighborhood in which to raise up your children, away from the noise of the old town and the swarming filth of the levees. Good if you wanted the hush of the swamps, the chirp and twitter of egrets and mockingbirds, the thrum of the cicadas in the hot thick summer midafternoon...

Good if you were a well-off gentleman seeking a quiet place, not to establish a permanent plaqee in the Creole fashion but to tup a parade of lady friends away from the prying American eyes of your business associates and people who took tea with your wife.

Not so good if you were looking for a place where a young man might have been held against his will for several days.

On the other hand, thought January, looking down the prospect of Florida Walk toward Constitution Place-evidently the "canal and basin" advertised by the sellers of these prime properties was the half-dug ditch down the middle of the street-this part of Franklin was far out enough from the river to be very quiet and very isolated. Sellers of fresh vegetables, of lamp chimneys, of milk strolled the weedy verges of the streets, calling their wares in wailing, singsong African-French: "Miiiilk sweet-fresh-miiiiilk just come up from the market miiiilk..." A gang of children fleeted past, white and colored together, voices like the thin jangling of chimes. Someone was chopping wood-or kindling, by the sharp thin clinking sound. The green smell of the swamps weighted the air.

It would be easy, thought January, for someone to take aim with a rifle from any one of those unbuilt lots, those raw straggling stands of magnolia and oak... He shivered, and kept moving.

In time Hubert Granville's green-and-yellow chaise appeared from the green shade of Elysian Fields Street, and January quickened his loafing pace. Even after the vehicle overtook and passed him it wasn't difficult to keep it in sight. Yesterday's rain had transformed the street to an ocean of muck, and the smart bay gelding had to lean heavily into the collar and drag. Hubert Granville was a good driver, though. He didn't use the whip but kept up a series of encouraging clucks and flips of the reins, letting the beast have its head. As they passed him January made sure to stoop and pick up some imagined coin from the weeds around his feet, so they wouldn't begin to wonder why every black man they saw was nearly six and a half feet tall... But standing and looking as they moved away, he saw that Granville wasn't alone in the chaise. And the woman beside the banker, veiled to her knees and crowned with a thoroughly illegal bonnet that did indeed look as if a regiment of dragoons had been sacking a flower shop, was unmistakably Genevi?ve Jumon.

They drew up before a cottage on the swamp side of Constitution Place. Granville was still nose-bagging the horse as January idled closer, then turned down one of the muddy, unnamed streets and disappeared into the trees of a still-virgin lot to observe.

There were four cottages in a row on that side of the square, identical to one another and to his mother's: four rooms, kitchen, and quarters in the rear. The windows were American-style sashes, not old-fashioned French windows: the yards a little bigger and not quite so close together. Close enough, he thought, that any kind of jiggery-pokery would not go unnoticed by neighbors.

A young woman in a calico dress emerged from one of the cottages, bid Granville a saucy "Griiss Gott, Herr Vilmers," as she proceeded down the street. The shutters of both of the other cottages stood open, the windows wide. A black kitten balanced on a sill, watching a dragonfly with lunatic golden eyes.

Granville helped Madame Genevi?ve from the chaise, and escorted her solicitously into the house. As he opened the door to let her in she flipped back her veils, with the gesture of one relieved unspeakably to be freed of uncomfortable nuisance, and yanked off bonnet, veils, and the tignon underneath. She shook out her dense black uncoiling hair as Granville placed a hand on the small of her back, guiding her inside.

"They didn't even tell me he was being buried." C?lie Jumon pressed her small hands together, fist inside fist, and her mouth trembled with shock and grief and rage. "They didn't ask me. Not Papa. Not-not that woman who I suppose I have to call my mother-in-law. Not Mama..."

"Madame Jumon may not have told your parents," said Rose kindly, and glanced from January to Monsieur Nogent and the lawyer Corcet, sitting on the other side of the plain cypress-wood table in the Nogent gar?onni?re. "And if it helps any," said January, "and I don't know if it will, I truly don't think the man they buried was your husband. Your mother-in-law wanted to identify some body as her son's as quickly as possible, so that legal matters could be put in train without the complication of a missing body."

C?lie glanced up swiftly, wide brown eyes flaming with hope. "You don't think-there isn't a chance that?..."

January shook his head. "Antoine saw him die-though Antoine was almost certainly under the influence of opium at the time. In fact Antoine might have been fetched specifically so that there would be a witness to the death." In the back of his mind he heard Olympe's voice, They said he was alive. All three said he was alive.

Loa. A spider. Dark voices in a dream.

He would have given his blood, his freedom, his right loand, to have had someone come up to him as he stumbled blindly through the markets of Paris and say, I'm so sorry, it was all a mistake, Ayasha is alive after all...

Dreams of agony, of coming up the stairs, opening the door, to see her sitting in her chair by the window with a lapful of some rich woman's frock, stitching calmly in the paling winter light.

Open the door and she smiles-Open the door and she's dead on the bed with her hair hanging down, her hand reaching for the water pitcher...

"Madame Jumon." Corcet's soft tenor broke through the bleak and terrible reverie. "Forgive me for asking this, but the matter has been spoken of-mentioned-not by anyone here, you understand. ... It was brought up at one point that in the event of your husband's death, your father would control such monies as would come to you..."

If he expected the young woman to cry out, or bury her face in her kid-gloved hands, or spring to her feet and smite him across the face, the lawyer was disappointed.

Madame C?lie sighed, her soft mouth tightening, and she looked down at her folded fingers for a moment. "Did she say that?" she asked at length. "Madame Genevi?ve?"

Corcet hesitated, but January knew there was no point in inflaming enmities and said, "No. It was just a suggestion by a third party who has nothing to do with anyone."

She made a little sound that could have been mirth, and a tear crept from under her lashes, quickly caught. Mourning did not become her. The dress she wore, high waisted and worked high at the neck, had clearly been re?ut from a stouter woman's gown, probably her mother's. She'd turned back the veils she'd worn over her tignon, but the dark clouds of them surrounded her face and turned her delicate cafe-creme complexion gray.

"It's the kind of thing that she'd be likely to say, that's all." She drew a deep breath. "And anyone who didn't know Papa well-and he isn't an easy man to know-would probably believe it. But it isn't true."

She touched the handle of the coffee cup before her, white china, simple like the rest of the room. When old Nogent had shown them up the gar?onni?re steps, Madame C?lie had gone ahead, smiling, touching the doorframe and the table, the chairs of cypress and bent willow, like old and beloved friends. It was a plain room, barely better than a servant's, but January thought of what it would be, to live with P?re G?rard and his anxious wife. Madame C?lie had made coffee for them, a hostess in exile.

Now she said, "At the jail, you said-or maybe it was your brother-in-law, M'sieu Janvier-that you knew your sister would not do such a thing. Even though she is a voodoo and even though there was poison in her house. Just so I know that Papa wouldn't have harmed Isaak for money. "Papa... is very fond of money." She made again that swift single breath of a chuckle, and glanced up ruefully under long lashes. "Well, I don't think that's any secret from you. And he didn't want me to marry Genevi?ve Jumon's son. He didn't want to be connected with her in marriage, and quite frankly I have to say I agree with him.

"Grand-pere and Grand-mere were very poor when Papa was born, you see, and they all-Papa and his parents and all his brothers and sisters-had to put up with not only inconveniences, and hunger, but... but indignities. The way people treat you. There was not enough money for all of them to leave St. Domingue together, when the trouble started, so Papa came here first, to work and send money so that the others could come away before Christophe's men came out of the jungles and took Port-au-Prince... And the others did not get the money in time. They never came. Papa doesn't know to this day what happened to them. Papa says that money is the only thing that keeps us safe, the only thing that protects us, now against the Americans as well." She was silent, tracing the rim of the cup with her fingers, looking down at the black reflection within. Then she said, "But Papa would never have harmed anyone for money. Not for five thousand dollars or five hundred thousand dollars."

Still she did not look up. January thought about that plump little man, furious over his daughter's reputation, furious over his family's standing, hiring the best white French lawyer, blackmailing the Recorder's Clerk by bringing a reporter into the room... Thought about Olympe, that morning when he had gone to see her at the Cabildo. The stench of the cells and the creeping, endless trails of ants. The drone of the flies.

"Would his mother have done it? Genevi?ve Jumon?" Celie shook her head. "She is-a wicked woman, M'sieu. But I don't see how any woman could... could do that to her own son." Even if she were under the influence of a man who wanted more money for his own investments? "What about Uncle Mathurin?" he asked. "If it comes down to a renewal of the lawsuit, the money may very well come to him, and Antoine seems to think he's the devil in shoe leather." She laughed softly. "Antoine." And there was very real affection in her smile. "Antoine called me the Fata Morgana, and Messalina, and compared me to Jezebel sitting in her window-and later of course when we came to know one another he pretended he'd never said any such things. Antoine has never liked Uncle Mathurin, and he hated his father. In that, he's like his mother."

Her face clouded. There was a darkness in the back of her eyes, the memory of scenes that had passed between herself and her husband's mother.

"Why is that?" asked January.

She shook her head. "I never knew what the original quarrel was," she answered. "It must have been serious, for a woman like that-a plac?e, I mean-with two small children to abandon her protector. She has a-a foul temper, but she's also a woman who keeps an eye on the main chance, as they say. It wasn't M'sieu Laurence's marriage, at any rate. That came later.

"Isaak wouldn't speak of it," she added after a moment. "Only that he had a choice between taking on his mother's bitterness-poisoning himself and our children, he said-or putting aside the past in order to regain the father he had lost." She pressed her hand very suddenly to her mouth.

Rose put an arm around her shoulders, and after a moment Madame C?lie drew breath again, and seemed to relax.

"It's true Uncle Mathurin is a cynic and deist and doesn't attend church. But he has done a great deal of good. Secretly, the way Jesus said one should, with not even the left hand knowing that the right one is slipping money to those in need. Sometimes we'd meet them, Isaak and I, when we went to the house-we'd wait for him in the garden outside the gar?onni?re, and we'd see them coming out. I remember there was a young Russian man, Dobrov I think his name was, a sailor who'd jumped ship: Uncle Mathurin gave him money to live on while he learned French, and went to school to learn accounting so he could find a job. There was a young woman he supported after her husband passed away in the cholera-perfectly aboveboard, as I think they say. ... Isaak carved a horse for her little daughter, with tiny roses on its saddle and bridle. He loved children..."

Her voice thinned again, and this time she sat longer, perfectly still, as if fearing that movement would set off unbearable inner pain. Only her hand closed around Rose's, tight, a grip upon a lifeline.

Then, quite steadily, she said, "I can't believe he's gone. I can't believe he's gone."

January closed his eyes, the scent of his dead wife's hair clear as a nightmare in his nostrils again.

A very fanciful little boy, Mathurin Jumon had said. My uncle Mathurin is a consummately evil man.

The tall house standing aloof on Rue St. Louis, empty save for one old woman sleeping alone. A Palissyware teapot and a mattress of straw in an empty room.

He visited Olympe at the Cabildo the following morning, taking Gabriel and the two younger children with him. January wasn't easy in his mind about bringing Chouchou and Ti Paul to the jail; and at the sight of the four-year-old, Mad Solie began to shriek that the child must be taken away, taken away quickly or her father would come and murder him.

"Shut her up," growled a hoarse voice from the same cell, "she's scarin' the little bastard."

The shrieks abruptly stopped.

"It'll be all right." Olympe pressed her face to her smallest son's plump hands through the bars.

"It'll be all right." Another woman might have been in tears; Olympe's face was like wood.

Behind her in the cell a voice asked in English, "Kin I kiss 'em, too? I sure do miss my little boy."

"I still think we oughta get a real big gris-gris and lay it on that M'am Genevi?ve," opined Gabriel, as January descended the gallery stairs afterward with Chouchou, silent as ever, by the hand. Gabriel carried Ti Paul, and January felt a weary anger all over again that he could not lift his niece and nephew in his arms, as he had been used to do. "We could take and split an ox tongue and write her name in it, with some silver money and peppers, and sew it up and leave it on a tomb in the graveyard, and call the spirit Onzoncaire-Onzoncaire'll do anything, if you remember to pay him off with a sheep's head and a bottle of whisky."

As they reached the bottom of the stairs the sergeant at arms in charge of such things cracked his rawhide whip over the back of a slave triced to the post in the center of the yard. Gabriel flinched, but tried to loflk casual, as if it didn't have anything to do with him. "Onzoncaire's this hoodoo spirit with red eyes, and dog's teeth, and..."

"We've had enough gris-gris around here," January told his nephew grimly. "And if I hear you doing any calling of any hoodoo spirits, I'll get your papa to wear you out." "Mama does," pointed out Chouchou.

"Your mama knows good from evil," said January, though he knew Pere Eugenius would have a quarrel with this statement. "I bet your mama never called on any hoodoo spirit with dog's teeth." He wasn't at all sure this was the truth, but Gabriel, he noticed, looked thoughtful. In the big watch room he inquired after Lieutenant Shaw, and was told-as he expected-that the Lieutenant was out on his rounds. He handed Sergeant deMezieres at the desk a note detailing all he had observed after the funeral, and what he had learned from the Metoyer maid about Genevi?ve Jumon's actual or probable whereabouts on the evening of her son's death, and what Railspike and Kentucky Williams had had to say about Isaak's departure and Mr. Nash's employer. Not, he thought uneasily, as he stepped out into the liquid warmth of the arcade's shadows, that it would do him a particle of good if Mr. Nash were waiting for him somewhere in the crowds of the Place d'Armes. On the way to the Cabildo that morning he had instructed Gabriel to run immediately in the event of trouble, taking the younger children with him... He hoped the boy would actually do so.

"Would Onzoncaire take care of Uncle Ben," asked Chouchou gravely, "if we paid him off?" "Sure," said Gabriel, then cast a worried glance up at his uncle. "I mean-well, I guess God could, too." "Thank you," said January, wondering why he tried. "And I'm sure God thanks you, too." For the rest of the day he worked at his translation of The Knights. But the absurdly involved efforts of Demosthenes and Nicias to find a tyrant for Athens were insuffi cient to distract him from the thought of that tall silent half-empty house, and the baroque gleam of sunlight on a Palissy-ware cup. Both Dominique and his mother had departed for Milneburgh Tuesday, and it would take Minou a day to settle in, before she could reasonably expect Th?r?se to take a half-day off to make inquiries of the Jumon servants. And on Friday, the Fourth of July, he knew Henri would be coming in from the family plantation, and Minou would be picnicking with him along the shores of the lake, no doubt with her handmaiden in attendance. But a note, at least, he thought, as he brushed his black coat and pressed his good linen shirt preparatory to the long walk to the Soames's residence in Spanish Fort, would be appreciated.

The long walk-over an hour along the shell road that rimmed Bayou St. John-was the result of lacking the twenty-five-cent fare for the steam-train. He and Hannibal made it together in the gluey heat of twilight, accompanied by those other musicians of the town likewise affected by the slow season: Philippe deCoudreau, Ramesses Ramilles, Casimir and Florimond Valada, Jacques Bichet, and others, all comparing notes about the contenders for French and American social prominence who had, as they frequently did, scheduled their entertainments for the same evening, as a way of forcing their acquaintances to publicly proclaim who they thought more critical to their social success.

"I hear there's a fix been put on you," remarked deCoudreau. "We better watch out, or poor M'am Soames's piano strings gonna bust in the middle of the grand march, and we all get rained on like hell on the way home."

"Where'd you hear that?" asked January, and from the corner of his eye saw the Valada brothers exchange a quick, worried look between them, and fall back a pace or two. DeCoudreau shrugged. "Where does anybody hear anything, Ben? It's just around."

"Around like that story last year that you were getting married?" inquired Hannibal, stopping, as he had stopped a dozen times, to rest. "And to Liliane Verret, of all people?"

The matter passed off in a laugh, but in fact Mrs. Soames's piano went massively out of tune halfway through the dancing later that evening and a total often gentlemen had to be forcibly restrained, at one time or another in the evening, from challenging one another to duels or entering combat outright. Two of these challenges were issued by Madame Redfern's jealous cicisbeo Greenaway, and only forcible restraint kept him from issuing a third to Clement Vilhardouin-one of the few Frenchmen in attendance-when the lawyer mentioned he had dined with the lady again that evening.

This was a high percentage even for an American entertainment. "Two's the average," remarked Hannibal, surreptitiously dumping an ounce of opium tincture into the watered beer, which was all the hostess considered appropriate to offer musicians. "It must be the election coming up, or else somebody sneaked actual alcohol into her liquor."

In addition to the gubernatorial supporters of Mr. White speaking ill of his rival General Dawson, Colonel Pritchard attempted unsuccessfully to call out the Rever end Micajah Dunk for implying that the female slave Kitta who had escaped from Pritchard's household had done so because Pritchard had sold her husband Dan-'T am not implying such a thing, sir, I am stating it outright," responded Dunk-and two entrepreneurs who were attempting to raise capital in Philadelphia each separately challenged Burton Blodgett, once it was realized that the journalist had entered the parry, clad in sloppy evening dress, unnoticed by a back door. Evangeline Soames said her majordomo had undoubtedly been bribed and would be whipped.

It rained like hell on the way home, long after the final steam-train had departed. After Philippe deCoudreau's seventh jest on the subject of hexes and fixes, January had to pinch his own hand very hard between thumb and forefinger to remind himself not to throw the jolly clarionettist into the bayou.

So it was not until the following day-Saturday that January made the five-mile walk again to Milneburgh, to speak to his sister's maid on the subject of what the Jumon servants had seen on the night of June twentythird.

"But they're all packed up and gone, M'sieu Janvier." Th?r?se regarded him with some surprise, as if he should have known this and saved himself the walk. "The Jumons have a house in Mandeville."

"Henri and I took the ferry across yesterday-to Mandeville, I mean," put in Dominique, stirring the lemonade the maid had brought to them with a long silver spoon. The rear of the little white cottage Henri had bought for his plac?e stood on stilts over the water. Wavelets clucked and whispered among the pilings and the gray knobbled pillars of the cypress knees that studded the shallows in the shade. "It's ever so much nicer than Milneburgh. More exclusive, if you understand. Quieter. Sometimes I'm sorry they put the steam-train in between here and town; one gets all those-well, those uptown chaca girls and their beaux, and all the clerks and shopgirls on Sunday outings, bowling and shooting at the shooting galleries and eating ices in the taverns and making such a ruckus."

She sighed, and fanned herself with a circle of stiffened china silk, for even on the narrow terrace above the water, the day was warm. Beside her in a white wicker cage, a half-dozen ornamental finches provided riveting entertainment for her plump white cat.

"Is it possible," asked January patiently, wondering why no one had ever strangled his youngest sister, "for Th?r?se to go out there and speak to her cousin-Aveline, is it?-sometime soon?"

"Oh, but p'tit, we just have weeks and weeks of time." Dominique regarded him with widened eyes and reached to put a hand on his knee. "And they're not going to let poor Olympe out of prison any the sooner because of what you'll find out from Cousine Aveline." "No," said January. "But Cousine Aveline's information may be only an indication of something else we need to find out. And we have, in fact, eleven days to find out everything we need, whatever that might be."

"P'tit, I'm so sorry! " Minou reached behind her and took Therese's hand. The maid, clothed in a sober but extremely stylish frock of green muslin in contrast to her mistress's fantasia of honeycomb smocking, lappets, and lace, looked rather put out that her efforts in the direction of locating evidence had not been properly appreciated. "Th?r?se, dearest, you won't mind going out to Mandeville tomorrow-oh, no, the day after tomorrow, Iphegenie and Marie-Anne are coming for tea-oh, no, Tuesday, because Becky needs the help Monday with the laundry... Tuesday definitely, p'tit... You won't mind going to Mandeville Tuesday to speak with your cousin, will you, dear? Only you'll have to be back to serve at dinner, because Henri will be here. Would you believe it, p'tit?"

She reached out again and grasped January's hand. "Would you believe that dreadful Redfern cow has issued invitations to a Bastille Day party? Doesn't she know anything about France having a King again, even if it is only that awful Louis-Philippe? Even Henri knows that!" As it happened, January knew all about Mrs. Redfern's Bastille Day gala because he'd been contracted to play at it. A thought had come to his mind concerning the absence of the Jumon household in Mandeville and the vacancy of the houses on Rue St. Louis. He accepted his sister's invitation to lunch-trying not to appear too grateful-and turned the thought over again in his mind while walking back along the shell road to town: walking quickly and staying as close as he could to the other strollers and riders and passengers in carriages, out taking the half-holiday air. Hannibal was still asleep when January reached home-he'd been coughing blood the last hour of the ball, keeping himself to the back of the group and con cealing his illness with the skill of practice. Bella's room stank of opium, but January couldn't find it in his heart to be angry. In the kitchen January found half a pot of coffee warming at the back of the hearth. Though there was no evidence that anything in the kitchen-or in the gar?onni?re, where January had scattered thin dust on the floor that would take any scuff or track-had been disturbed, he poured the coffee down the outhouse: with some regret, coffee being ten cents a pound. He drew water from the cistern to bathe, and afterward lay on his bed to get what sleep he could, and dreamed of his father.

"They help you out, but you got to pay them off," his father said, touching the sheep skull nailed to an oak tree in the cipriere, the offering to whatever spirit it was who had granted someone a wish. The bark of the tree was blotched with brick dust and candle wax, and among the roots of the tree little handfuls of rice and chickpeas were carefully laid out on leaves. "Bosou, he guards those folk that run off into the cipriere. They live there in a village as we lived in Africa, away from the whites. But they don't just forget him, any more than they'd forget a man who helped them. They show respect, as you must show respect, and Bosou guards the way behind them. Maybe one day he'll guard the way behind you."

In his dream it was as he remembered it, the trail of ants creeping up the bark of the tree, the hum of the flies and the wriggling of maggots in what was left of the sheep's flesh, the stink of blood and rum.

"You got to thank them," his father said. "You got to thank them."

Then he stood on one foot with his back to the skull and snapped his fingers, and watched while January-a tiny boy-child as he'd been then-did the same, and spoke words January didn't remember. In his dream he heard instead a quote from Lucretius: Augescunt alie gentes, alie minuuntur Inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum Et quasi cursores vitae lampada tradunt.

Some races grow, others diminish, and in a short span of time the living are changed; like runners they relay the torch of life.

Which he knew could not be right.

But as he and his father walked away he felt eyes in those empty sockets, watching them, and distantly he heard the tapping of African drums.