03 Graveyard Dust

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 gar?onni?re 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 cipriere, 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 cipriere." 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 move ments: 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 Juliet 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 skinningknife, 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.

There were matches in Killdevil's pocket, too, wrapped in waxed linen and stuffed in a tin box.

January lit them, one after another, and searched the sedges painstakingly, prodding and parting the long weeds with a stick-until he found his own pistol. Something slithered away, fast and angry. He caught only a glimpse of a thick tail, a zigzag of buff and brown. A water moccasin, close to four feet long. He'd have put his hand on it, finding the weapon.

He followed the bayou, picked up the canal and walked on the shell towpath, a mile and a quarter to where the grimy shacks began on the edge of the trees. Ahead of him lights still burned.

Ramshackle saloons and warehouses clustered around the turning basin, and he heard drunken voices raised in altercation: "I don't take that kind of talk no way! Cut dirt or I'll bark you clean from the tip of your nose to the end of your tail! " Turning aside, he followed the sodden line of Rue Claiborne over a few streets, then down and into the French town.

In his room he lit the candle and counted the money: a hundred and fifty dollars, some of it in Mexican silver. The rest was a mingle of Dutch rix-dollars, American eagles, and English gold sovereigns, such as he had seen stacked so neatly on the edge of Mathurin Jumon's desk. For the first time in many nights he slept soundly.

In the morning he returned to the Cabildo, to be told that Lieutenant Shaw had still not returned from Baton Rouge. "No, no message," said Guardsman Boechter, a short dark Bavarian on duty in the watch room. "But Shaw's not much one for writing. He'll be back when he's found what he seeks."

"M'sieu Janvier." Vachel Corcet came through the big double-doors from the arcade outside, clutching his slender brief of notes. "Did you learn anything?"

January shook his head. "I was prevented from speaking to the men I sought," he replied evenly.

"But I did hear that Killdevil Ned is dead."

The lawyer's shoulders slumped with relief. "You're sure?"

January hesitated. "I spoke with a man who saw his body."

"Well, it's a small favor." Corcet patted his forehead with an immaculate linen kerchief. His pomaded curls were already wilting to limp gray corkscrews in the heat. "I'm afraid there's nothing for it but to move for another continuance. It won't be difficult, given M'sieu Vilhardouin's death. I'd be very surprised if M'sieu Gerard was able to locate another lawyer in two days. Not with the fever spreading the way it is. But we can't wait too long. I heard that Judge Canonge is leaving at the end of the month, and if the courts go entirely into recess it will be September before your sister's case is heard."

January glanced back at the closed wooden doors that now blocked all view into the courtyard of the jail. Smoke leaked through them, bearing on it the stench of burnt hooves and gunpowder. "I'll do what I can. If I can..."

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.