03 Graveyard Dust

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.

Mother, he thought, I've done you an injustice-not that Livia would ever have admitted to making any sacrifice for anyone. His hand sought the rosary in his pocket: Virgin Mary, who understands women, forgive me.

"See there?" Mamzelle Marie pointed to a bag of red flannel, hanging nearly hidden by beards of moss in the branches of a cypress tree. "That's Ti Bossu, that guards the paths. They move him from place to place, Cut-Arm and his friends. They know we're here."

Throughout the day they sought, working their way upstream. Ponds and marshes and sloughs crisscrossed the land among the trees, cut-off loops of old waterways that once had absorbed a high rise in the lake or one of the greater bayous or the river itself. Cypress and willow hung gray-trunked over the still water, cypress knees poking from the green sheets of duckweed like an army of submarine monsters frozen in the act of rising to invade the land. Palmetto and oak backed them, and thickets of loblolly pine, false harbingers of hope that the going would get easier-then suddenly they were in wet ground again, trying to find their way along root lines and ridges without getting soaked.

How Mamzelle Marie determined their route January didn't know. He was glad of her guidance as they strove patiently through the woods, coming out now among the pines of the lakeshore, now above the fallow cane fields along the Bayou M?tairie. He was glad of her company, too, in the hot silences of the advancing day. Sometimes she would point out the faint prints of tortoises or snakes in the soft mud of the water verges, identifying water moccasin or garter snake or king snake by their traces; sometimes speak of the habits of the deer, or the possums, or this or that planter who lived along the River Road. She asked him about Paris, and his studies at the hospital there, and listened while he told of the balls given by members of Napoleon's lately come nobility to which members of the new King's diplomatic corps would not go. He found himself speaking to her of things he hadn't remembered for years, or had put deliberately from his mind, and with them all the memories of that time of his life: walking with Ayasha along the Seine on summer mornings when the hay boats would come in from the countryside, or sitting in the window of their rooms in the Rue de l'Aube late at night, a balcony barely wider than a windowsill, hearing the voices from the cafe on the ground floor and seeing its lights reflected on the sootblack brick walls on the other side of the street, but unable to see the cafe itself because of the height of the building and the narrowness of the street. All memory, it seemed to him, of Paris had been erased from his mind by those final, terrible months of the cholera, by Ayasha's death. Now Mamzelle Marie's quiet uninflected questions coaxed it forth again, gentle as if seen in candlelight. He understood then how she came to know everything, to fit all things together in a giant mosaic of intelligence. She listened, and she remembered, and she cared.

"Your sister, now," she said, as they stopped past noon and shared water from one of the bottles he carried slung over his shoulder. "She came to the voodoos first out of hatred, looking for the Power to fight those she believed turned her mother into a whore. All she saw was the hoodoo, the juju: Burn this candle and money will come to you and make you strong. Sprinkle graveyard dust on this man's floor and he will die. She made witch dolls against your stepfather for years, and buried bottles of beef gall and red pepper with St. Denis Janvier's name written on them in the cemetery. And, of course, he did die. I never met a human being who didn't, in time." "I remember when Mama found the makings of a hoodoo in Olympe's room." January unwrapped the packet of bread and cheese he'd brought along, handed the voodooienne some of each, and wondered a little that he'd be here, sitting on an oak root with this woman. Dangerous, they said. A poisoner or a procuress. Certainly, Granville would have added, an idolator. An enigma who danced with the serpent Damballah.

But then all women were enigmas, infinitely faceted. Rose like a many-petaled blossom of interleaved brilliance and pain, fear of men and love of gardening, knowledge of steam engines and chemical reactions and optics all woven together. Olympe, who spoke to spirits in bottles and then turned and played Juba-this and Juba-that with her children. You never knew them, thought January, and for some reason saw in his mind the pink-tinted portrait of a sixteen-year-old maid-in-waiting to a murdered French Queen.

"Sometimes you need to hate, until the hate's all gone," said Mamzelle Marie. "Until you see for yourself what a waste of time it is. The loa understand that, the way the saints sometimes don't." She plucked a purple blossom of marsh verbena, and turned it in the fawnspotted light. "Your sister could have gone Dr. Yellowjack's way, all cleverness and skill and Power, with no more heart to him than a shrike. Or been like Mambo Oba, selling gris-gris and telling fortunes and reading the bones, seeing nothing but the money in the pot on the kitchen shelf. There's good and there's bad, in people and in the loa alike-saints and devils, light and dark, and sometimes the dark ain't so dark as you think."

January was silent, remembering Olympe in the King's arms.

"What was it your friend likes to say, about what the maggot said to the King of France? He told me once."

"(Text unavailable)" said January. "It's Greek, from the playwright Menander. 'We live not how we wish to, but how we can.' "

"So," she said. "The loa help us do that, Michie Ben. Same way the saints help us do that.

Sometimes God seems a long way off. I've seen you watch the voodoo dancing, and I've seen you light candles and pray for your sister's soul to be safe from Hell."

The day's heat and the constant movement had told on her, as it had on him; a line had settled between the corners of her nostrils and the side of her mouth, and another pinched, very slightly, the dark clear arch of her brows. "But so many are in Hell now. The loa come here-here to Hell, to us, to be with us as we dance. And they say, We didn't get left behind in Africa. We're here with you, on the ships on the ocean, in this land. We remember your names and what you care about, you and your parents and your children. You judge your sister harshly."

January worked the cork back into their water bottle, and did not meet the woman's eyes. " 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me,' God said."

"Is that what you think they are? Ogu and Ezili and Bosou? Some other god other than the one that's in the Cathedral?" Her eyebrows lifted, gently mocking. "Ben, when you go see a white man, you put on your best black coat and your best high hat and you talk your best French that you learned in school, and he listens to you because of what you look like, as much as for what you say. If you could paint your face white you'd do that, too. But when you go see Ti Jon, or Natchez Jim, or the Widow Puy, you put on a calico shirt and talk gombo like the rest of them"her voice slurred articles and pronouns in the Creole way-"so they'll listen to you and won't say, Hah, there goes somebody who's like the whites.

"You think you're smarter than God, Ben? You think God hasn't figured that one out, too? If a man's been beat, and his woman's been raped, by any man, white or black or purple, you think that man's going to see God's face the way the man who wronged him tells him it is? God finds all sorts of ways to speak to those that need Him, Ben. He's a man with a sword, to those that need a rod and staff to comfort them, whether that man's called Ogu or St. James. He's the man with the keys in his hand, to those that're in chains, and seeking a way through the door to Heaven. You're like your friend Granville, that only sees God's face like his own in the mirror."

Still January said nothing. But he remembered the leap of flame against the brickyard walls, and how it felt to surrender to the drums, to couple as gods couple, or animals, without grief or disappointment, laying all in the hand of God.

"It's not my way," he said at last. "And I don't see..." He shook his head. "I see men like Dr.

Yellowback, selling girls to whites; I see Mambo Oba peddling hexes to whoever will pay her...

Dead chickens and fortune-telling..." He broke off, remembering the tales of how this woman herself had stolen a powerful idol-or some said a gris-gris in a bottle-from the house of the Voodoo Queen who reigned before her.

"No one's asking you to follow it." The dark eyes flicked to him, smiling as Olympe sometimes smiled. "I never yet heard of voodoos burning a Christian at the stake for not following their gods. And you know, Ben, if a whore leans on the church door talking to men, that doesn't mean that Christ isn't still there on the altar."

She got to her feet, and shook out her blue calico skirts. "Come," she said. "There's a lot of ground yet to walk."

The sunlight turned, yellowed to saffron. The heat became unbearable and then quite suddenly eased, filling the green world with slanted bars of molten glass and the melancholy gentleness of change. Birds cried their territories before settling for the night. But the only person they met in all that wilderness was old Lucius Lacrime, who had a shack somewhere in the cipriere. The wrinkled old Ewe-freedman or maroon January did not know-was out setting a fish line in Bayou M?tairie. He had not, he said, seen anyone all day.

"Where are they?" January gazed around him at the twilight woods in despair. "They should have seen us by now."

"They've seen us." Mamzelle Marie leaned against the gray bole of a cypress, and mopped her face and neck with a kerchief pulled from her bosom. "You've been seen with a policeman too many times for Cut-Arm to come up to you and speak. He killed a white policeman that went looking for him in March, and another one in May. Not so very long ago there were laws on the books that said a black man who did such a thing would be burned alive."

January was silent, remembering the big laughing man who had not been afraid to save his life.

"Her trial is tomorrow," he said softly.

"They know that. You think there's much that goes on, between the black folks and the white of the town, that Cut-Arm doesn't make it his business to know?"

She hitched her skirts, where they were girdled high around her knees like a fieldworker's, and started down the path. "I'll do what I can do, tonight. These girls of Greenaway's, that are in court to say that Olympe sold them poisons... Them I will speak to, and conjure them dreams. For three nights now I've prayed to Papa Legba, and left pound cake and cigars at the feet of his statue at the back of the Chapel of St. Antoine. Judge Canonge, he's an upright man." January wondered if that meant Canonge wouldn't be influenced by the loa in his dreams, or whether Mamzelle Marie spoke of other influences-money, threats of exposure of some past peccadillo, a chicken foot on his bed. "Beyond that, all we can do is trust God."

Gabriel was sitting on the gallery outside the gar?onni?re when January returned to the house on Rue Burgundy, sharing out rice and beans from a pail with Rose and Hannibal. "It ain't much," said the boy, over January's protests. "Papa said he'll bring money when he comes back tomorrow. "

January felt a pang of guilt at taking the food from his brother-in-law's family again but couldn't afford to refuse. Instead he grinned widely and said, "Gabriel, to show your papa how grateful I am for this, tell him I'll give every one of you children"-he pretended deep thought, then said, as if joyfully presenting a treasure-"two hours of piano lessons every single day!"

Gabriel hastily tried not to look aghast. "Oh, you don't have to do that, Uncle Ben. Really."

"I really want to," insisted January with somber eagerness, but the sight of the boy's darting eyes as he sought for some way of escape was too much for him, and he laughed out loud. Rose had brought bread, and lemons to make lemonade, and had rigged up smudges all along the gallery rail to keep the mosquitoes at bay; the smoky light glinted off her spectacles as she handed January a plate.

"You offer that sort of payment again," she warned, "and I expect it will be a hungry summer.

Did you find anything?"

January shook his head.

"Cut-Arm and his men, they got Power," said Gabriel, settling down cross-legged beside the kitchen chair where Hannibal was propped with a blanket over his knees. "Bullets bounce off him-these Kaintucks, they went after him, and shot at him, and the musket balls bounced right off his chest and came back and whizzed close to the Kaintucks' heads, so they ran away, they were so scared! " He looked up at January, his dark eyes shining.

"If that's so, how did he lose his arm?" inquired Rose, in a tone of scientific interest.

"That was before he ran away. When he ran away, he found these herbs in the cipriere, Indian herbs, that made him invulnerable. When the patrols went after him, they disappeared in a cloud of mist, and were never seen again." He swallowed hard. "You just probably weren't looking in the right places, Uncle Ben. He's probably way away on the other side of the lake, and doesn't even know about Mama."

January, who had settled down on the gallery planking at Rose's side, looked across at his nephew's eager face, at the glow of pride as he spoke of a black man who could thumb his nose at the white police with their dogs and their bullets and the prison that held his mother, and said, "I think you're maybe right, Gabriel." He glanced at Rose. "We should probably get Corcet here."

"He sent a note saying he'd be over this evening," she replied. "Though what-" She broke off as the yard gate creaked, and by the filtered glare of the smudges January saw Vachel Corcet enter the yard, followed by two other forms: the short, stocky shape of Fortune Gerard, in his neat blue coat and beaver hat, and beside him his daughter, veiled and wrapped in a cloak that must have been like being rolled in a blanket.

"Monsieur Gerard!" January descended the gallery steps, holding out his hand in greeting and trying to keep his voice from sounding as if the next words were going to be I never thought you'd deign to associate with us. When a man surrenders his pride and admits he's wrong he generally doesn't want the fact underlined. "And Madame Jumon." He bowed. "My mother keeps the house locked up in her absence, but I have the key. We can..."

Fortune Gerard looked for a moment as though he'd insist on proper lighting and comfortable chairs as his right and his daughter's right, then shook his head wearily. "No, thank you. Unless..

." He looked inquiringly at Madame Celie, who was gratefully putting back her veil now that they were out of the public view.

She shook her head. "Papa, I've seen the inside of a gar?onni?re before this." And a little smile lightened her face.

He sighed. "So have we all." Biting his lip, he turned back to January. "If you might just bring a chair for my daughter."

January fetched two from his mother's storeroom and handed them up to Corcet on the gallery, then climbed the stairs to join the little group. "Don't, Please," Celie was saying as Hannibal made to rise. "Mademoiselle Nogent"-she glanced quickly from her father to Rose-"tells me you've had lung-fever. "

"Good Lord, no," added Gerard. "When I had pneumonia it was six weeks before I could walk from my bed to my desk." He made as if to take the second chair which was why January had brought it-then stepped back, and offered it to Rose. Only when she'd shaken her head did he sit, folding his hands on his knees. "Monsieur Janvier, I owe you an apology for-for things I have said in anger. And when your sister is freed I shall tender her one as well. I have been..."

January held up his hand. "Least said is best," he said.

"Thank you." He seated himself again on the planks, between Rose and the rather uncomfortable Vachel Corcet. "We think we may know where Isaak spent at least part of the three days prior to his death," he told them, and Celie's hand went quickly to her lips, hiding her quick indrawn breath at his words. "Tell me, Madame Jumon. How well did your husband know a woman named Lucinda Coughlin? You said you saw her at Monsieur Jumon's, but did Isaak ever speak with her?"

Madame Celie frowned, then shook her head. "Well, she thanked him for carving that little horse for Mademoiselle Abigail; the little mademoiselle thanked him very prettily, too. Uncle Mathurin introduced Isaak to her then. But, of course, beyond that they never spoke."

"Then a message from her would not have brought him out of hiding?"

"I don't think so." She shifted the cloak from her shoulders and dabbed her face with a handkerchief. "Not unless she was in some terrible danger."

"If it's the Lucinda Coughlin I know," said Hannibal, "she could easily have forged Mathurin Jumon's handwriting-helped herself to his signet ring, for that matter. And the keys to the house. I don't suppose there's any word from Shaw about Zoe?" He glanced at Corcet.

"I asked at the Cabildo this afternoon. Of course, the woman Zoe might have been resold, for all we know, and the Lieutenant followed the trail farther than Baton Rouge. In a way," the lawyer added, wiping the beads of sweat from his brow with a handkerchief scarcely less delicate than that held by Madame Celie, "the mere fact that Isaak was missing for five days can work in our favor. We don't have to prove who poisoned him-only that neither Madame Corbier nor Madame Jumon could have done so. You don't happen to know, M'sieu Gerard, anything about what M'sieu Greenaway's case is for the State? I understand that M'sieu Vilhardouin will have had information to which I have no access."

"Only that Greenaway had witnesses against Madame Corbier." Gerard's heavy face creased with anger. "Nothing to the point. Silly girls who'll swear she sold them spells, poisons. Against rats, belike. They'll swear she went to the voodoo dances, too, and..." He glanced at January, not wanting to deride the woman whose safety was so closely tied to that of his daughter. "And participated in them," he finished awkwardly.

"These girls claim," Vachel Corcet spoke carefully, producing a notebook from his pocket, "that your sister was sometimes possessed by Devils during these dances." He licked his finger, flipped the pages, peering in the dimness. "Marie-Noel Sauvignon, marchande... Alice McLeary, laundress... a woman named Philom?ne Louche apparently saw your sister on St. John's Eve itself, in the crowd at a voodoo dance on Bayou St. John."

January's eyes met Rose's, understanding as none of the others did the deadly workings of rumor.

"Now, this is ridiculous on the face of it." Corcet slapped the little leather folder shut. "We can contest this on the grounds that-"

"We may not be able to," interposed January evenly. "It is-part of the rite. Part of the dancing."

He saw Corcet's eyes flinch aside, as his own had for so many years, and realized that this was the first time he'd spoken of that secret, that center of the voodoo rites, to anyone. And then, he could only say, "It isn't as it seems."

After a long moment Hannibal said, "Unfortunately, no good Protestant or Catholic juryman is going to make a decision on how things are. Only how they seem. Monsieur Corcet, maybe you'd better ask just what exactly this Mademoiselle Louche was doing at Bayou St. John herself."

It was close to ten when January helped Hannibal back to his bed in Bella's room. "Nobody looks out for the curfew," protested Gabriel, carrying the remains of the rice and beans down to the kitchen and covering it with a plate. "I go out at night lots of times, and I've never met the City Guards."

"All your father needs now is for you to get in trouble." January sighed, holding aloft his single tallow candle as his nephew led the way out of the kitchen again. Corcet and Rose stood together, lantern in hand-Rose lived near enough the wharves that no street lighting was provided; Gerard was shaking the lawyer's hand. Tomorrow night, thought January. A curious long shiver passed through him as he watched them depart. Tomorrow night.

He turned wearily and climbed the gar?onni?re stair. The heat was such that he left the doors of his little chamber open, but even the memory of Killdevil Ned, lying dead in the hackberry thickets along the bayou, was not enough to let him sleep. Whoever had hired one assassin-rix-dollars and sovereigns, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight along the edge of a desk-could hire another. So he lay awake, listening to the roar of the cicadas, and the crickets' cries; to Hannibal's breathing on the other side of the wall, the whining of mosquitoes outside the veiling of the bar, and to the scratch and scurry of geckos and mice across the floor. His legs ached from two days' tramping through the swampy ground of the cipriere, and when he did sleep he found himself there again, his heart in his throat, watching the white leprous shape of the dead thing flit from tree to tree.

He had just drifted off to sleep a third time when the soft creak of a foot on the stair brought him broad awake. His hand slid under the pillow for his pistol even as he was rolling out of bed, down under the mosquito-bar; his injured shoulders gave one great blaze of protesting pain as he half-crawled, half-slithered across the floor to the door. The outside air showed gray with the barest watering of dawn. Silently he rose to his feet, pistol in hand, waiting, and heard another stealthy creak of weight on the gallery. This time, he thought, I'll have a live man to ask.

A dark shape poked its head around the jamb like a terrapin emerging from its shell. "Michie Janvier?" The dark eyes, barely visible in the gloom, blinked at him from pockets of wrinkles stitched across and across with old tribal scars; a hand was extended to him like a dry bundle of sticks. "Nuthing to be afraid of, hiding there by the door like a rabbit in the brush." January recognized the voice as old Lucius Lacrime's. He lowered the pistol. "Somebody comes calling at this hour of the morning," he said, "I'd sure rather be behind the door than in the bed." The old swamp dweller chuckled creakily. "You may be right at that, Compair Lapin. Cut-Arm send me. He say he want to see you, out in the cipriere."