03 Graveyard Dust

TWENTY-TWO

Once when he was twelve January had gone down to the Armory on Rue St. Peter with Olympe and Nicolas Gignac, on the day soldiers brought in a new shipment of gunpowder. Olympe, at ten, was already experimenting with spells, and she'd dared the boys to come with her. Nic and January faked a fight to draw the men away while Olympe slipped forth and helped herself to about a cupful from the open barrel. As payment she'd given each boy a generous spoonful, and Nic had used his to make a sort of bomb that he'd thrown into a hornet's nest-Nic had never been notable for his brains.

January still remembered the roaring cloud of insects, the split-second violence, the frenzy of terror and confusion and rage.

It all came to his mind now.

Corcet was on his feet, shouting "Madame Corbier! Madame Corbier!" while Monsieur Gerard lunged up, flung himself at that erect, manacled figure in the dock. Celie, too, was standing, crying "No! No, it isn't true! " and every juryman was giving tongue like six couple of hounds with a possum up a tree, gesturing and shouting with Mr. Shotwell's voice rising above all others:

"If you did it, why the tarnation didn't you have the courtesy to say so three weeks ago?"

Canonge slammed his gavel again and again, shouting for order and threatening to have the court cleared, while above all other sounds Olympe cried out, in a flat desperate voice, "I poisoned him. I poisoned him. Celie Jumon gave me fifty dollars and I poisoned him," without change of expression, as if she were some kind of horrible clockwork toy.

The Bailiff seized Gerard, dragged him back before he could reach Olympe. Other Guardsmen entered the courtroom, two of them pulling Olympe to her feet and another two closing in on Celie. The girl looked around her desperately, a deer ringed by hounds in a clearing; Gerard, seeing his daughter across the heads of the crowd, tried to force his way back to her but was held fast by the Guards, against whom he fought like a roped bull.

"I poisoned him," called out Olympe again, and someone in the jury box yelled, "Well, then, hang the bitch and let us out of here! "

"Order! Order or I'll have the court cleared! "

Rose and Basile Nogent were trying to struggle forward, swimmers in a heavy sea. Blodgett had leapt up on a bench, and from this vantage point was scribbling wildly; Genevi?ve Jumon clutched Hubert Granville's sleeve and poured out words unheard over the tempest. Mamzelle Marie had vanished.

"Olympe! " January waded through the press around the dock, thrusting men aside unheeding of the pain in his shoulders and arms, and for an instant caught his sister's arm.

She turned, dark eyes blank as a stranger's. "Don't meddle with it, brother," she said quietly.

"Papa!" Celie's scream drew January's attention, as the girl was pulled away through the door;

Fortune Gerard's fist crashed into the jaw of the nearest Guardsman and the little man went down under a storm of clubs and blows. When January turned back, Olympe was gone. It took him some minutes to battle his way to the door. When he ran down the steps to the arcade it was to see Olympe and Celie led into the Cabildo. Celie turned desperately back as if she could catch a glimpse of what was taking place in the courtroom, but Olympe stared resolutely ahead of her, in the flare of the oil lamps, willing herself not to feel, not to know.

January stood for a time, panting in the dark arcade. He felt numbed, blind, as if he'd been struck over the head-then he turned, and strode as fast as his long legs could carry him up Rue St. Pierre, and over to Rue Douane, to the yellow stucco house where his sister lived. The doors were closed, shuttered. The plank drawn up, which customarily led over the gutter from the banquette to the street. Traces of light burned in the jalousies of the front bedroom window. January pounded on the parlor shutters with his fist, and saw a shadow start and move behind the jalousies, but no one opened to him. He pounded again, harder, and called out "Paul! It's me, Ben!" to a silence like that of a house stricken by plague. "Paul, open up! Let me in!" He went over and hammered on the bedroom shutters. "Paul, it's Ben! " No sound. But the silence behind those shutters was pregnant with breath, furtive stirrings furtively stilled. January stood for a long time on the pavement. Hot black silence pressed the Rue Douane, darkness absolute but for the oil lamp on its chain above the intersection nearby. A dog barked. A few houses away, a baby wailed. What do I do now? What do I do? It was growing in his heart, why Olympe had lied. Why her husband had not appeared in court, why he would not now open the door. Cold knowledge and dread. No, he thought.

Gabriel leaving the house last night. Crossing the yard in the lamplight, waving a jaunty goodbye at the gate into the passway that led to the street. You watch how you go, now. No.

He closed his eyes. What do I do? "You got business out this late?"

A City Guardsman stood at his elbow: blue uniform, brass buttons, cockade of black leather in his hat. Expression of wary neutrality.

January drew a deep breath. The man's only doing his job. "I've just come from being a witness at a court case at the Cabildo, sir. A special session convened by Judge Canonge on account of the crowding of the docket," he added, as the man opened his mouth in disbelief that the courts would still be sitting at ten at night. "I was charged with a message for my brother-in-law here. I'm on my way home now, sir." "Mind if I see your papers?"

January produced them. The Guard held them up to the streetlamp's flare to study the signature, which happened to be one of Hannibal's better efforts.

"Best you get along home, Mr. January." The Guard handed them back with a mollified air. "It's after ten."

"Yes, sir." The man could arrest him, and that would be the doom of them all. "Thank you, sir." January walked away from the house, shivering all over with anger, panic, dread. What do I do? What do I do? The chicken foot on the bed-a warning.

Killdevil Ned Nash, paid off by a white man, a toff-who might not, January knew, even know why Lucinda Coughlin had said to him, "Go down to the Flesh and Blood and give Ned Nash two hundred dollars."

Never lets himself come into view... Always uses a cat's-paw... That's the way not to get caught...

Dr. Yellowjack, coming toward him through the swaying dancers with a plate of chickpeas in one hand, a cup of lemonade in the other. And the signet ring that appeared so mysteriously on Celie Jumon's windowsill. He'd been a fool, to study paper and handwriting, to say, This is a trap and not think, the juju ball, the graveyard dust, appeared in my room the same way this appeared in Celie's room.

And he saw in his mind, whole and clear and suddenly, the blond woman, the angelic child, in the Cathedral the morning after Olympe's arrest. It has to work, the woman had said, and January had thought then she'd spoken of a gris-gris. But she meant, he understood now, whatever leverage they were using to obtain money from Mathurin Jumon.

What Yellowjack had given her that day had in all probability been steamboat tickets out of town, which she could not be seen to purchase herself for fear of being traced.

The nuns won't get me, the lovely child had asked, will they?

Lucinda Coughlin was at Yellowjack's on St. John's Eve. The packed earth of the banquette along Rue des Ramparts thudded under his feet as his pace quickened. And Isaak saw her. Of course she'd told Yellowjack-of course Yellowjack would get rid of Isaak, lest the boy speak to his uncle. And, when, after consuming the poison, Isaak left the place-how? Why? of course she'd tell Yellowjack get rid of Celie, too.

The oily glare of the lamp above Rue Toulouse glimmered down the street as he passed over the sloppy intersection, the street close to his mother's house. He passed it by, prayed he wouldn't meet another Guard.

A cat's paw... Mambo Oba. Someone who could deliver a warning, and a curse when the warning wasn't heeded, and then drop out of sight, so that Mamzelle Marie wouldn't recognize the hand of Dr. Yellowjack. That's the way not to get caught.

Mathurin Jumon, almost certainly turned into a cat's-paw against himself.

Candles burned behind the jalousies on Rue St. Anne. Mamzelle Marie's daughter opened the door to him, tall already, beautiful already, with her mother's secret ophidian eyes. "Maman hasn't yet come home."

Damn it, thought January. Damn it, damn it. He thought about going to the Cabildo in search of her, but nearly an hour had passed. Mamzelle Marie would certainly be gone by this time, the cells all locked, Olympe beyond his reach. The Guards would only send him home, if the Guard he'd spoken to wasn't there. If he was, January stood a good chance of a night in the cells.

"When she comes back, would you tell her I have to see her? Whenever that is, whatever the time. Tell her it's urgent, desperate."

"I'll tell her, sir." No inquiry, no shift of expression, but a kind of calculation behind the cold dark eyes, adding things together. January had the strange sensation that this young woman already knew what had happened in the Court. He was, he realized, talking to the woman who would be the city's next Voodoo Queen.

He returned home, through sullen gluey darkness and smoke of burning. So far the sickness was not as bad as it had been last year, nowhere near what it had been the year before. His heart shrank up inside him nevertheless. There was Bronze John, and there was Monsieur le Cholera, and the memory returned to him as he made his way down the passway to his mother's yard, of climbing the stair in that tall narrow building in Paris, of opening the door...

The smell of sickness struck him like a blow. Hannibal...

He reached the second door along the gallery in three strides. It stood ajar. His friend had managed to get it open in his attempt to crawl out onto the gallery, but had collapsed just inside.

One thin white hand lay over the threshold, fingers reaching.

January touched it. It was deathly cold. The smell from the room was overpowering.

Cholera.

His heart seemed to stop within him.

Then Hannibal whispered, "Water," from within the room and began to retch. January rolled him over in the darkness and held him so that he didn't choke, his mind stalling, chasing: Is this when I catch it? If he didn't have it already. And, At least Bouille can't have me run out of town. And, That chicken foot seems to have finally come home to roost.

As he clattered down the stairs a few minutes later to the kitchen a wave of nausea gripped him, an agony in his belly and the big muscles of his thighs, and he remembered his sickness at the courthouse. Dear God, no! Sweat came out all over him as he gripped the stair rail, trembling, retching himself now...

Please God!

The epidemic in Paris. Last summer's cases here in New Orleans. The explosive indecencies of the sickness, the dried pinched faces, the agonies of cramp and vomiting and purging. ... please God...

He stumbled into the kitchen, cracked his shins on a bench, groped in his pocket for lucifers and struck one on the scratch-paper. By its light he found a pitcher on the table by the wall, next to the emptied bowl Gabriel had brought last night. The match had burned down to his fingers and nearly out when he saw the rat.

He lit another lucifer, as a second spasm of nausea seized him. He fought it down, and looked again.

The rat lay close to the corner of the table, its back bent in a spasm of agony, its tail still thrashing in pain. The lucifer went out. January cursed and scratched another, and looked around this time for a candle. The smell of tallow acrid in his nostrils, he walked around for a closer look at the rat. It lay beside the blue pottery bowl that had contained the beans and rice. The spoon he'd used to wolf down the leftovers before going to the trial was licked clean nearby. Bella would wear him out with a broom handle for that kind of untidiness. Another wave of nausea hit him and he clutched at the edge of the table, dread and cold and enlightenment all exploding in his mind at once as he thought, Not cholera. Poison.

Dr. Yellowjack coming toward him through the dancers, congris and lemonade in his hands. He'd waited for a long time for January to slip up and eat something that had stood unwatched in the house. And in the end he had done so.

How long?

When he could stand again January filled one pocket with candles, the rest with whatever eggs Bella had left behind in the egg basket and staggered into the yard. Filling the largest bucket he could find from the cistern he hauled it up the stairs with an effort that made him weak. He stuck candles in every crack and on every level surface in Hannibal's room, then wobbled into his own for his medical bag and ipecac, iodine, medicinal salts, anything... In the midst of administering as much of a stomach lavage as he could to his friend he was sick twice more, but didn't dare stop. There was no telling how much earlier Hannibal had eaten the poisoned food, haw much of a margin he had.

Laboring in the heat, in growing pain and fear, racing to overtake a goal that was itself hidden, in darkness, he was conscious of how very silent the night was. How isolated the gar?onni?re, tucked away back from the Rue Burgundy behind his mother's house. How isolated he was himself. If he cried out, would anyone hear? If he shouted, "I am dying-there's a dying man here! " would anyone come down the dark passway from the street? Or would they say, as he had, Cholera? And flee?

He mixed water with egg whites-throwing the yolks and shells on the floor in his fumbling haste, his vision starting to play tricks on him in the wavering candle light-and gulped them down, heroic quantities. He gagged, then induced vomiting and purging, as he had done for Hannibal.

The fiddler lay stretched now on a blanket on the floor, like a drowned elf dredged from a gutter, wet with sweat and spilled water and slime. In the jittering dimness January thought for a moment that he saw, not the bones staring through the skin, but the man's skeleton itself, a nest of snakes creeping in the cage of the ribs...

He blinked, and jerked his head, and found himself lying on the floor with spilled saline solution and nastiness everywhere about him. Doggedly he prepared an other draught for himself, fighting the pains in his belly, his thighs, his arms where they'd been twisted nearly from their sockets last spring... Had old Mambo Jeanne at Bellefleur been right, all those years ago, about certain poisons making snakes and lizards grow under your skin? He looked down at his arms and found that the old woman had indeed spoken true: His skin was moving with them, bulging out or twisting in long tracks. He forgot the draught, stared fascinated, horrified... And then he was in Paris. It was late, past two, the dead slack leaden hour of exhaustion, and stars burned, opium-crazed diamonds in a sky black with the velvet abysses of infinity. Summer heat like boiling glue, and the stenches of Paris in the summer; and every light was quenched, in mansion, flat, attic, and hovel. Where he was coming from he didn't know-the Marais Quarter across the river, he thought. Someone's Christmas Ball. And he saw Death, skipping and dancing down the street. Death looking just like He should, with his black cloak draped over a raggedy mess of stained wool shroud, and bony feet clattering a little on the slippery cobbles. Death messier than engravings portrayed, Death the way January was familiar with him from years at the Hotel-Dieu, shreddy flesh dribbling gobbets of black fluid and maggots.

Death with his attendant skeletons-revolting in their stained shroudless nakedness. They knocked on doors, climbed through windows where no one would open, came out of alleyways, dragging men and women by the wrists or arms or hair. Fat butchers and slender milkmaids, a nightshirted child clutching a carved wooden horse, stockbrokers digging through their pockets looking for coin to pay off those grinning Guede... The coins fell through the bony fingers and clattered ringing on the stones. Some people came dancing, skipping. Ayasha tossing her scented hair. A woman leaned out a garret window and called her son's name, frantic with weeping. The boy didn't hear.

Carts rolled behind them, heaped with bones. Baron Cemetery was driving one of them, tipped his hat to January, and winked behind his spectacles. "Care to come?" His voice was creaky, shrill and hoarse. "Free ride. Good to see an old friend from home."

"I can't." January's words came out harsh and whispery as the skeleton god's. "I have to find Olympe." The boy who was dancing beside the cart turned, waved to January, and held out his hand. January saw it was Gabriel.

"Gabriel, come back!" He stepped off the curbstone, something he knew he should have known better than to do. His feet sank ankle-deep in the black mud of Paris. "Gabriel, don't go! " Gabriel only waved again, with one hand. The other gripped the hand of a young man, dancing, too, a slim light-skinned youth with a black trace of mustache, whom January knew was Isaak Jumon. January tried to follow but the ooze held him fast. "Gabriel..." "He'll be all right," said Mamzelle Marie. January shook his head. "The Baron," he tried to explain. He climbed the stairs in the Paris house, put his hand on the doorknob... "Who?" asked Hannibal's voice.

"The Baron," explained Mamzelle Marie. January opened the door, and saw Ayasha sitting on the bed, sharing a glass of wine with the Baron Cemetery, who had one bony arm around her waist. "Don't look at me," said the Baron. "I haven't got him in my pocket." And he dug in his pocket with one hand to prove it, coming up only with some shards of broken crockery, such as the slaves at Bellefleur had stuck around graves. Then he laughed and dragged Ayasha down onto the bed, lying on top of her while she giggled and squirmed, pulling up her skirts, her long hair trailing onto the floor.

"Baron Cemetery," explained Marie Laveau, unnecessarily, January thought. "The lord of the spirits of the dead." (You don't have to tell me that!) She touched January's hand.

He was lying in his own bed, he thought, and felt as if he were coming off a ten-month drunk.

Cholera?

The image returned to him, of a rat dying by candlelight on a table.

"I have snakes in my arms," he said.

He opened his eyes. The light in the room was gray. Mamzelle Marie sat on the edge of his bed, a damp sponge in her hand. Behind her stood Rose with a basin, and Hannibal, like a handful of fence pickets rolled in an undertaker's coat, slouched in the chair by the desk.

"I took them out," said Mamzelle Marie.

"Thank you." January drew in his breath, and let it out. His whole insides seemed to be raw and there was a curious quality to the room and to everything he saw. Mamzelle, Rose, Hannibal, the books piled on the desk. As if without warning they could mutate into other forms, or prophesy unknown events.

"Dr. Yellowjack kidnapped Gabriel," he said, as if he'd read it all in a book and needed only to relate it to these people for them to understand. "He got word to Olympe that unless she confessed the murder-and implicated Celie, I think-he'll kill him."

"If he hasn't done so already," said Rose. She still wore the neat dress of pink faille she'd had on in the courtroom, the sleeves rolled back over her arms and dark with wet.

"No," said Marie Laveau. "He wouldn't. Not unless he has to. Not until Olympe is hanged. She's a mother, and she has the Power. Olympe would know."

January sat up. The room darkened, then shivered with a kind of aerial fire, and it seemed for a moment that he saw two chicken feet gripping the end of his bed, as if an invisible chicken sat there. He rubbed his eyes, and they vanished.

"Where would they be?"

They looked at one another: Mamzelle, Hannibal, and Rose.

It was Mamzelle who replied. "The house by the bayou." She turned to Rose. "That policeman wasn't there yet?"

Rose shook her head. "He wasn't there two hours ago," she answered. "I'll go again."

"Two hours?" January blinked at the room around him. By the light it was only an hour or so after dawn. "It's close to six." Hannibal's voice was the whisper of scar tissue. And, when January's brows pulled together, trying to calculate sunrise and time, "Six in the evening. You've been off your head for most of the day."

"Moon won't rise till near midnight," said Mamzelle Marie. "There's a mist in the air. It'll be bad later, by the bayou. Best we go now while there's some light. Can you stand?"

"I think so."

Rose modestly turned away and stepped through the door onto the gallery while January got up;

Mamzelle merely handed him his shirt. As his mind cleared a little January realized it was indeed evening, but the equivocal light left him confused. He felt weak, and caught himself on the back of Hannibal's chair. On the narrow desk lay a newspaper, open to the second page. SENSATION IN THE COURT, announced the header at the top of the column. And, smaller, VOODOO