03 Graveyard Dust

TWENTY-ONE

The village was smaller than the slave quarters of January's childhood. The huts, too, were smaller, built of a species of wattle-and-daub, thatched with brush and banana-leaves, windowless for the most part and raised on stilts above where the bayou would flood. Their gardens came right up to their walls, and extended to the green eaves of the woods; beans, squash, yams, and gourds ripened bright in the hot sun. Chickens scratched in the dooryards, the baskets where they were caged at night for fear of rats dangling from the house-corners. A sow and her litter lay in the shade of a roof overhanging their pen.

"I hear you been looking for us," said Cut-Arm.

The voice came to January as his blindfold was taken off. Lucius Lacrime had led him out of town as far as the stone bridge over Bayou St. John, then had turned off the shell road into the cipriere, as January himself had done yesterday in company with Mamzelle Marie. "I been told to cover your eyes," the old man had said, producing a big faded red bandanna, and January had put it on, and tied it tight. As he did so he heard the creepers behind him rustle, and men's hands had taken his arms, firmly but without roughness or anger, to lead him into the deeper woods.

He looked behind him now and saw little Dan Pritchard and the woman Kitta, beginning to show with child, and others, also runaways, whom he recognized from Congo Square. Then he turned back, where Cut-Arm stood before him in front of the largest hut. "Thank you for trusting me,"

January said. "I swear to you no one will learn of this place through me."

"They always swears." Cut-Arm had a way of standing with his weight on one hip, his whole arm folded across his chest and his big hand closed around the stump of the other. "And somehow, the white man's Guards always finds out."

January said nothing, because he knew what this man said was true. He knew, too, that this village was doomed, this little scrap of the free memory of Africa tucked away in the woods. On still mornings like this one they must be able to hear the groan of the steamboats on the river, and in the winter fogs, to smell the burnt-sweet sugar of grinding time. There were only a half-dozen huts here, men and women, he guessed, who had family and friends here in Orleans or Jefferson Parish, who couldn't bring themselves to flee utterly into the West. Maybe they realized how hopeless it was to think they could completely escape.

"My nephew says bullets bounce off you," he said. '"No white man ever going to catch Cut-Arm.'

And his eyes shine."

The maroon leader laughed, and some of the tension went out of his big shoulders. "I wish he could come out here," he replied, "and see the way we live, apart from the towns of the whites.

Your sister probably bringing him up to be a little white man."

"My sister and her husband are bringing him up to be a man," answered January. "Black or colored or even white, town or woodland, there's things that don't change."

Cut-Arm smiled. "Maybe." It was his voice January mostly remembered, deep as he had imagined the voice of Compair Lion to sound in tales he'd been told as a child. "Maybe. I hear you're looking for word of this Isaak Jumon."

"That I am." Cut-Arm's men had led January through the woods for what felt like hours. But, as when Antoine Jumon had taken a fiacre to see his brother, they could have spent the time going in circles. By the sun it was midmorning now, nearly noon. In any case it would be a difficult matter to get back to town by the time Olympe and Madame Celie had to appear in court. "Was he here?"

Cut-Arm nodded. "I heard tell about Isaak Jumon From Ti Jon," he said. "That his own mama had claimed him as her slave, to get her hands on a white man's money, and her lying like a harlot with a white man to get advice and help with these investments they put such store in-faugh!

There were advertisements in the newspapers, and men in the Swamp would have known him, and taken him in. I sent him a map where to meet me, and we brought him here."

"How long was he here?"

"Till St. John's Eve. He went with us to Dr. Yellowjack's. He'd heard Dr. Yellowjack knew men in the City Council, did favors for folks sometimes. Dr. Yellowjack, he knows about the law. He knows what white men got secrets that can be used. I'll promise him some of the money, when I get it, he said. Isaak Jumon wanted to talk to the doctor about getting a lawyer himself, about getting some kind of order to get his mama off him."

"What happened at the dancing?"

Cut-Arm grinned. "What always happens?" There was a wry malicious mockery in his eyes, like an older boy speaking double to a child. "There was gumbo and there was rum; there was Mamzelle Marie, dancing with her snake. There was the calinda and the pile congo, and there was girls ready to make jazz in the bushes, when the fire burned down low. You been to a dancing, Music-Master. You know what happens there."

"I thought I did," said January. "Now I'm not so sure. Did Isaak leave with you?"

Cut-Arm shook his head. "We looked around for him, when it was time to go. He didn't know his way back here. It's a long piece, to Dr. Yellowjack's house. Yellowjack, he said Isaak was going to head on back to town, to see his young wife. He asked us-Isaak asked us-to find him again at the same place where we'd met before, at the crooked tree by the head of the canal, at sunrise."

"And did he come?"

"No. I wasn't best pleased and neither were my boys, for it was close to sunrise already. I had a good mind to leave the boy there, givin' us orders like we was servants. Those yellow boys, they're all the same. Stuck-up. But we went. It might have been Isaak was drunk, when he said that to Dr. Yellowjack. We was all a little drunk. But he never came."

Because he was dying in his uncle's house, thought January, in his brother's arms. Because he was poisoned.

A woman came out of one of the huts, a child on her hip. A little boy, following her, uncovered the big iron pot that hung above the coals of the fire before the door.

The mother stirred, and the strong smells of stewing meat, of rice and onions and peppers, billowed on the air. The boy, still holding the pot lid, looked up at his mother with laughter in his face and January recalled that it was legal to sell a child of that age-eight or ten-away from his mother. He knew, too, that even though it wasn't legal in Louisiana, children were sold away as young as five or six, and across the border, in Texas or in the new cotton lands of the Territories, where nobody cared anyway, and there was no such law.

"Would Isaak do that?" He pulled his gaze away. "Go see his wife, in spite of the danger?"

Cut-Arm shrugged. "Like I said, we was all drunk. You don't give yourself to the dancing, Music-Master. Try it some time, and you'll see. Crazy things look possible. Sometimes the loa give you the strength to do what you were afraid to do before. Isaak loved that girl."

The memory came back to January, sudden and agonizing, of Ayasha, combing her hair in the window of the single room above her dress shop, where she'd lived when he'd met her first.

Ayasha at eighteen, thin-faced and agile, her every movement like a dancer's movement...

Would he have risked his freedom, to seek her out then?

He would risk it now, he thought, if he could. If anything but the widest and blackest of waters separated them. There had been a time when he'd even considered crossing those waters, to be with her again.

Cut-Arm went on, "It might have been he thought some god was with him. It leads you to great good or great harm, the strength of the god."

January looked back at Cut-Arm, at the village around him. Someone at least was stealing from town, or buying from those who did. Over the other fire a coffee pot was set, and the smell of the brewing liquid was smoky and delicious in the noon heat. On the wall of one hut tools hung neatly, hafts of whittled oak and hickory, heads of new German steel, and there was a pistol in Dan Pritchard's belt.

"Did Isaak get any messages when he was here?" he asked. "From Celie, from his uncle, from anyone?"

The white teeth glinted in a sarcastic grin. "We don't got postal service, Music-Master. If anyone gets a message that my boys don't bring in, it's time to burn the huts and move on."

All we have to do, thought January, is prove that Olympe didn't poison Isaak Jumon. Prove that she couldn't have. But that was exactly what he wasn't able to do.

His heart beat hard at the thought that instead of clearing Olympe he had uncovered still greater peril. She was possessed by a Devil, Corcet had said. Had that woman who had seen Olympe here, seen Isaak Jumon as well? Olympe almost certainly hadn't seen him, not to remember anyway. It was easy to miss someone, January knew, in the crowd, the torchlight, the dancing.

But even had this market-woman Louche not actually seen Isaak, how easy it would be to say that she had, if someone offered her money to do so.

To put Isaak and Olympe together, at the same place, at the same time.

Times were hard. January had seen how Paul had fought, leaving his wife in peril to save the children he loved, at the lure of money and work to be had. If this Philomene Louche was a strict Catholic, how easy it would be to say, What's it matter? She worships Devils. If she didn't poison him she sure poisoned someone else, and my child is hungry.

A white could not hang on evidence given by a free colored. But another colored could.

I'll speak to them, Mamzelle Marie had said, with a world of implied chicken foot in her enigmatic eyes. Lucius Lacrime left him near the turning basin at close to six in the evening. He reached the house on Rue Burgundy with barely time to bolt down what was left of the beans and rice Gabriel had brought last night, and change into his respectable garb of biscuit-colored trousers, linen shirt, and black coat. "Give your sister my regards," whispered Hannibal, lying waxen as a corpse under the tent of mosquito-bar. He'd been violently sick. January could see the signs of it in the ill-cleaned slop jar-and January thought, Not the fever. Not now.

He felt his friend's hands and face, and they were cool. But all the way through the streets to the Cabildo he remembered Ayasha, lying dead in their rooms on the Itue de l'Aube. Remembered the smell of the sickness as he climbed the stair. Remembered opening the door and seeing her.

Some part of him, he thought, would never recover from that. Some part of him would always be trapped in i hat moment, like a ghost returning to repeat endlessly one single action in the same corner of the same house forever: opening the door and finding her. Opening the door and finding her.

"Where've you been?" Corcet was waiting in the shadows of the Presbyt?re arcade, with Monsieur Gerard and Madame Celie. Shadows lengthened over the Place l'Armes. The fruit vendors had packed up their stands Hours ago; the tables outside Bernadette Metoyer's chocolate shop stood half-deserted, moths dancing around the candles scattered on their tops. A few colored children played marbles.in the dirt under the sycamore trees, and someone in the market cafe near the levee yelled obscenities at a woman who walked away from him. A little farther along the arcade January could see Hubert Granville, chubby and red-faced and sweating in his coat of gray superfine wool, deep in conversation with Genevi?ve Jumon. Antoine, nearby, fidgeted.

January wondered if he'd had his opium for the day.

"Monsieur Corbier hasn't arrived," Corcet went on. "He's in town, I met him at the levee this afternoon... Perhaps when this is over we'd better go there and see if they're all right. The fever takes one so suddenly."

January thought of Hannibal, lying still and spent in the darkening quarters above the kitchen, and shivered again. "If someone had been taken sick there, one of the children would have left me a note," he said. But he spoke without much conviction. He'd been too many times in the hospital when whole families had been brought in, parents, children, grandparents, and maiden aunts together, dead or dying.

Cholera, he thought, a whisper at the back of his mind. Cholera.

Please, God, no. Not again. Not them. "Let's get through this first."

Two of the jurymen were absent. "God bless it, I never signed on for this!" roared Mr. Shotwell, and Judge Canonge snapped back from the bench.

"You signed on for whatever takes place in the Court, Mr. Shotwell, during the term of your duties. Bailiff, call in replacements from the jury room."

"It's enough to make you catch the fever yourself," the saloonkeeper grumbled, and uncorked his flask.

"I spoke to the men with whom Isaak Jumon stayed between the twenty-first and the twenty-third of June," whispered January, while the newjurymen were filing in and a city lamplighter kindled the oil sconces around the courtroom's walls. "Maroons, runaways, hiding in the cipriere, no one who could testify in court. They say Jumon went to a voodoo dance the night of the twentythird, at Dr. Yellowjack's. Is it possible to subpoena him?"

"Yellowjack?" breathed Corcet back. "And get what? Anything resembling the truth? Anything that would rlcar your sister of poisoning Isaak Jumon, or selling Celie ilic poison to do so?

Yellowjack has his finger in so much crime his testimony would be likelier to hang Olympe than get her released." ... said he was going to head on back to town, to see his wife.

Ceilie, Isaak had whispered. And died.

January glanced at the slender girl sitting by her father, chin raised, face a porcelain mask. He started to speak but a wave of nausea gripped him. Damn it, he thought, as he rose and stumbled from the courtroom, Damn it!

No one noticed him as he fell to his knees and vomited in the gutter outside. Sweating, shaking, he leaned against the brick pillar of the arcade, cold terror gripping his heart. Not the cholera.

After all this, not the cholera...

He'd been gone all day, all yesterday and the day before. If Ker had sent him a message asking for his help at the hospital he might not have received it. Certainly if there were cholera cases being brought in, the Englishman wouldn't have said so in a note. But surely he'd have sent one saying, Come in?

And what if Ker had? he thought. Would he have seen it? How often had he been in the kitchen in the past three days? Or in the house? He hadn't entered his room in daylight in forty-eight hours, except to pelt in, change his clothes, dash out again. The whole town could be vomiting and purging its heart out and he wouldn't know.

Shakily, he climbed to his feet again and made his way back to the courtroom. He felt better for being sick-it might, he thought, merely be bad food of some kind, though as a rule a sausage or a bit of chicken that had gone off didn't affect him. As a slave child he'd learned to eat anything. Olympe looked up as he came into the courtroom. She'd been brought in while he was out, and sat with her manacled hands in her lap. Her face was expressionless, but he could tell, by the way she turned her head, that she'd been hoping when the door opened to see Paul. A glance told him that Corbier was still not in the room. Not them. Not them.

He took his seat. Olympe closed her eyes, breathing hard. Her face was a mask; and it came to him that if there was cholera in the city, it might have begun in the jail as well. He hadn't seen her, spoken to her, in three days. In the flare and smut of the oil lamps she seemed to have aged years.

Hubert Granville was up at the front of the court, speaking quietly to Greenaway. His gesture took in the two women seated in the front row, Irish or German by the look of them. Corcet whispered, "Two of his witnesses haven't shown up. Marie-Noel Sauvignon and the Louche woman."

January glanced across at the door, where Mamzelle Marie stood framed. Clothed in a dress of plain black wool made high to her throat, her seven-pointed tignon white as a death-lily against the gloom behind her, she scanned the courtroom, dark eyes seeking out the remaining witnesses. One of them, sandy-haired and freckled, met her gaze with cold defiance. The prettier one flushed, and looked hastily away. Greenaway walked to them protectively, but Mamzelle Marie had already moved to take a seat, her face the face of a woman who has never seen a chicken foot in her life.

In the back of his mind January heard Greenaway's voice: Gentlemen of the jury, this woman Corbier is a voodoo, and accustomed to making threats against those who cross her... He wondered if, like Dr. Yellowjack, Mamzelle Marie might have done her friend more harm than good. Abishag Shaw was still absent. Constable LaBranche, trying hard not to meet Mamzelle Marie's gaze, had two clay pots and a candy tin on the table before him and didn't look happy. The poisons, guessed January, they'd found in Olympe's house.

No sign yet of Paul. Rose entered with Basile Nogent, and caught January's eye. Fortune Gerard took a seat beside January, almost as haggard as Olympe. The heat of the lamps was unbearable. January brought out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, sweating though he felt strange and cold.

There was a protracted argument, in English and in French, over the selection of jurors, while the jurymen passed around hip flasks and looked at their watches, and darkness slowly overtook the windows of the room.

"It's the damned aristocracy running this country, that's what it is," declaimed Shotwell in English, and passed his flask to Barnes. "And them Creoles are in with 'em, tryin' to keep good men down."

"Seventy-six votes in Plaquemines Parish..."

In the front row, Burton Blodgett scribbled away on his notepad, soulful dark eyes darting from Olympe's face to Mamzelle Marie's. He rose and staggered toward Miss McLeary and her companion, and Canonge rapped hard with his gavel and switched from French jury instructions to English: "Leave that till after the trial, Mr. Blodgett." "The Constitution of the United States declares..."

January's attention shifted, as if beyond his own volition: "It'll cost me ten dollars just to get the wagon painted up with my shop name," juryman Quigley was saying, "plus the repairs to the harness..."

Juryman Seignoret looked at his watch. The Cathedral clock could be heard, striking nine.

And wretches hang, that jurymen may dine, thought January, and wondered how many of those in the box today would disappear tomorrow: Leaving town on business, or coming down "sick" in order to abandon New Orleans with its threat of coming plague. Only Olympe would be left, he thought, immured in the jail for the rest of the summer...

"Are you Celie Jumon?" The Bailiff rapped his staff.

"I am." She looked like St. Agnes, facing the wheel and the knife.

"Celie Jumon, you stand accused of causing the death of your husband, Isaak Jumon, by poisoning... All right, all right," the Bailiff added impatiently, and translated into English.

"Having paid one Madame Olympe Corbier to either administer or cause to be administered, or sell to you the wherewithal to administer, poison to your husband. How do you plead?"

She lifted her chin, delicate and beautiful in her black gown and veil. "I am not guilty, sir." And she remained haughtily silent while the man translated again.

"Olympe Corbier, you stand accused of causing the death of one Isaak Jumon of this city by poisoning..." He paused, then translated for the benefit of jurors Shotwell, Barnes, and Brennert. "Having been paid by one Madame Celie Jumon to administer or cause to be administered, or sell to her the wherewithal to administer, poison to the said Monsieur Jumon.

How do you plead." Olympe sighed, and stood up. There was defeat, and exhaustion, and an iron stillness in her face. "I plead guilty," she replied, in a clear, carrying voice. "Celie Jumnon paid me fifty dollars to put arsenic into her huskind's drink, when he came to see her that night. And this I did."