03 Graveyard Dust

FIVE

If asked, Benjamin January would have denied all and any belief in magic. To his childhood catechism had been added the writings of Pascal, Newton, Leibniz, and Descartes, and the severed foot of a chicken was to his rational mind nothing more than so much leathery skin and bone.

He slept in the storeroom over the kitchen that night, and told himself this was because he did not want to disturb any sign in the room that, by daylight, might have told him who had entered to lay the fix. He did not, however, sleep particularly well. In the morning, before the day grew hot, he made his way to Rue St. Anne, to the house of Marie Laveau.

The voodooienne was making breakfast for her children in the tiny kitchen behind the pink stucco cottage: copper-colored dragonflies floated weightless and sinister above the puddles in the overgrown yard. "I wouldn't have disturbed you this early, except that I know it has to have something to do with Olympe."

Amusement flickered like marsh light in her eyes, mocking the drums that had whispered in his dreams. "You're that free of enemies, Michie Janvier?" It was early enough that she had not put up her hair; it lay over her shoulders like the pelt of a bear, Indian-black, springy and astonishing. "No other piano player in this town wishes to take your place in all the best halls? No rival for the hand of Mademoiselle Vitrac?"

"Were it as simple a thing as a rival keeping her from me," replied January, "I'd welcome him and give him tea." He didn't ask how Mamzelle Marie knew about Rose Vitrac. In some ways it was a relief to talk to someone who knew everything anyway. "Show me a dragon and I'll slay it. But the rival I have to overcome is Mademoiselle Vitrac herself. Herself, and the ghosts of her past." "I'll tell you a secret, Michie Janvier." She set aside the sticky balls of rice she was molding with her hands, glanced into the pot of oil that hung over the great clay hearth, gauging the bubbles around its edge, then turned back to him with her ironic half-smile. "With all women worth the winning it is so."

She poured out coffee for him and gave instructions to her eldest daughter, a lithe tall damsel of seventeen with her same silent witch-dark eyes, about how long to leave the callas to fry in the oil, then went into the house. She emerged a few minutes later with her seven-pointed tignon tied and stout, sensible boots on her feet. Slaves went barefoot, January had been taught as a child, and poor freedmen working in the cotton presses and on the levee, and market-women and girls who took in laundry. He wondered whether Mamzelle Marie's mother had thrashed her as his own had thrashed him and Olympe. He couldn't imagine anyone with that much nerve. "Mambo Oba did this," she said, kneeling before his threshold to regard the scuffed cross. She snapped her fingers twice, crossed herself and touched the string of dried guinea peppers she wore about her neck, and stepped around the cross to enter his room. She put a red flannel over her hand, to pick up the chicken foot from the bed, and used another-she carried three or four of them stuck through her belt-when she squatted by the little plank desk to retrieve from behind it a ball of black wax stuck through with pins. On the gallery at January's side, Bella crossed herself several times and made a sign against Evil.

"It's bad, Michie Ben," the old servant murmured. "You'd have slept in this room, that Mambo Oba would have come in the night and rode you to death. My brother, he had a fix put on him so, and snakes grew under his skin so he died." "Who's Mambo Oba?"

"She lives over on Rue Morales, near the paper mill." Mamzelle Marie reemerged from the room with the two flannels held gathered by their corners, carefully, as if they contained filth. "I'll go there to her myself and find out who paid her to fix you and what else she might have done.

Bella, would you scrub the floor of the room and the steps here with brick dust and put brick dust on the soles of Michie Ben's shoes?"

"I put the brick dust on his shoes last night," said the servant, with a quick shy grin. "I knew he'd go out this morning."

Mamzelle Marie gave her a wink, her sudden sweet smile like a doorway into a room unsuspected. "You're a wise woman, Bella."

"Bella!"

All turned, to see Livia Levesque standing in the back door of the house. January had brought Marie Laveau down the passway at the side of the house to the yard, rather than risk an encounter between the voodooienne and his mother: he had heard his mother speak often enough about superstition and those who preyed on the ignorance of blacks. He saw recognition widen his mother's eyes and the way her lips folded tight, but she called out only, "Bella, you bring my coffee in here now."

" 'Scuse me, M'am."Bella curtsied quickly to Mamzelle Marie. "I'll do as you say, M'am, first chance I get." She nodded toward the house, into which her mis tress had vanished in a rustle of mull-muslin skirts. "Don't hold it against her, M'am, please."

"I don't hold grudges, Bella." Mamzelle smiled. "There's no greater waste of time in this world."

She and January watched the old woman hasten down the steps and across the little yard; and January reflected that Bella, whom Livia had bought when first St.-Denis Janvier had given her her own freedom, was exactly what Livia herself might have been: exactly of the same extraction of white and black, no more educated or better reared. Under other circumstances, might his mother and this woman have been friends?

"Michie Janvier."

Mamzelle Marie held out to him a little bag of red silk, hung on a cord of braided string, smelling vaguely of dried whisky and ashes.

"Will you wear this?" she asked. "Give it a name, but don't tell anyone what that name is; wear it next to your skin, under your right armpit, and take it out every now and then and give it a drink of whisky. It'll keep you safe."

January was silent. In those sibyl eyes he saw again the reflection of last night's dreams. Dreams of being lost in the cipriere, with mist rising from the low ground and night coming on. Dreams of seeing something whitish that scuttered among the trees, a slick sickly gleam of rotting flesh.

Dreams of the smell of blood.

He had been a child in the dreams, with no strength to meet a capricious world. In those days the only thing you could do with an overseer who hated you was make a ball of red pepper and salt and the man's hair and throw it in a stream, so he would go away, or mix blood and graveyard dust and the burned-up ash of a whippoorwill's wing in a bottle, and bury the bottle where the man would walk over it, so that he would die. God and the Virgin Mary had brought him out of slavery, P?re Antoine had told him. God would keep him safe. In times past he'd worn a gris-gris Olympe had made for him and had prayed, half in jest, to Papa Legba as he'd now and then addressed the classical gods, like Athene or Apollo. But lately he'd put the gris-gris away, unsure what it meant to wear such a thing. To seek the help of the loa was, at best, an act of mistrust in the goodness and the power of God.

Satan has no power, the old priest had said, over a good man whose heart is pure.

Of course, P?re Antoine had never been any man's slave, either.

The full bronze lips quirked down at one corner when he did not put forth his hand to take the little red silk bag. "You think God didn't make jack honeysuckle and verbena, with the power to uncross any that's crossed?" she asked. But in her tone he heard no anger. Only exasperation, like a mother whose child refuses to wear a coat on a cold morning. He shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mamzelle, and I thank you. But I can't."

Paul Corbier and Gabriel were at the Cabildo when January got there. A grudging Guardsman led them all from the watch room through the yard and up the two flights of rickety steps to the gallery where the women's cells were. The madwoman whose children were dead still sobbed and muttered somewhere, pleading for someone to stop her father and her husband from entering the cell at night and sitting on her chest. More loudly, a drunken voice interminably sang "The Bastard King of England." The day had already turned hot.

"Mambo Oba?" Olympe shook her head, leaning against the barred window in the cell door to look out at her brother, husband, and child. "She's no enemy of mine. When I was with Marie Saloppe, Mambo Oba set herself up against us, and we put fixes on one another; I think she sent a gator to live under the floor of Saloppe's house. But that was years ago. We see each other at the Square, now and then, or in the market." She shrugged. "That's all in the past." "Hmn," said January. The conflicts among the voodoos in town-breaking into one another's houses to steal bottles or idols or calabash rattles supposedly imbued with Power, placing crosses and fixes on one another's houses or followers-had given January a mistrust and a disgust for them, even before the final dance at the brickyard. It had seemed as childish and petty as the tales they told of the loa, how the goddess Ezili had had an affair with this god or that god, creating scandal; how the god Zaka would run away in fear from the Gu?d?, the dark lords of the Baron Cemetery's family; less like gods than like children, and illmannered ones at that. It had seemed to him greedy, too, for it was clear to him that money lay at the bottom of it, fear and influence over the minds of potential customers. He knew perfectly well that when white ladies, or colored, paid Olympe to tell their fortunes, Mamzelle Marie took her cut.

"Mamzelle Marie says somebody likely paid Mambo Oba," said January, and his sister nodded. "Likely. She always was the kind who'd put a fix on her next-door neighbor so the neighbor would pay her to come take it off." "I thought you all did that."

"Only when the rent's due, brother." The fine lines around her eyes deepened with a malicious smile. January glanced at the Guard who stood nearby, gauging the broad Germanic cheekbones, the fair hair, and the heavy chin. Leaning close to the window he asked, in the fieldhand African-French of their childhood, "Where were you on the night Isaak Jumon died?" And he saw her eyes change. Wondering if he'd pass that information along. "Olympe, your life is at stake here. They arrested you because you wouldn't say." "They arrested me because I'm a servant of the loa," she replied. "That journalist Blodgett, he's been here twice. Asking about pagan gods, and hoodoo, and demons, writing notes in his little book to make white folks gasp and whisper over their tea. What does it matter where I was, if I sold poison that could be used anytime?" "Olympe..." said Paul desperately, and Gabriel bit his lip.

And January understood. "The twenty-third," he said. "St. John's Eve. Were you at a dance?" Behind her in the cell a free colored woman got into a shoving-match with a slave over who would next use the communal latrine bucket, and Olympe glanced quickly back over her shoulder like a cat when another cat enters the room. There was a bruise on her face, and the lower edge of her tignon bore a line of crusted blood.

A bitter smile creased the corner of his sister's mouth. "If 1 were," she said, "you think I'd say? If a hundred men and women saw me there, do you think any of them would be able to testify in court? Do you think any of them could testify without getting a beating for it, for being out past curfew, for slipping away from their masters, to be with one another and the loa?"

"There must have been freedmen there," said January. "Or free colored."

"Oh, I'll buy a ticket to that," Olympe returned sardonically. "Let's see: a man gets up and says to that churchgoing jury, Oh yes yes that voodoo witch who lays spells of ill luck on those who cross her, oh yes I saw her there I saw her there clear? You are a fool,"

Rose was right, thought January. The woman in the Cathedral came to mind, making her furtive purchase-if it was a purchase-from Dr. Yellowjack while looking around as if she expected the Protestant God to strike the building for idolatry. It would take more than absence of proof to free Olympe.

More quietly still, and still in the half-African patois of the cane fields, he asked her, "How did you know they hadn't found a body?"

Her brows pulled together, as she turned the matter over in her mind. "When the men came to get me I kept my shell with me," she said at last. "The shell that calls the loa. I kept it in my mouth.

Later I asked the shell, and I asked the spider that spins a web in the corner of the cell, and I asked the rats in the walls: who it was that had killed Isaak Jumon. And they all three told me the same: that Isaak Jumon isn't dead."

"His brother saw him die," said January. "Why would his brother lie?"

Olympe shook her head. "I don't know, brother. I only know what they said, those voices out of the dark."

"You pig-faced whore! " screamed a voice in the cell. "Who you callin' whore, bitch?" screeched another. A chorus of screams ensued, and the Guard thrust January and Paul aside to come up to the bars. This proved an ill-judged interference, for someone hurled the contents of the communal latrine in question over him, and the women continued to tear at one another's hair and shriek.

Cursing, the Guard shoved January and Paul back along the gallery, "You two get out of here, now! Damn stinking wenches..."

"He's the one stinking," giggled Gabriel, and his father shook him hard by the shoulder as they descended to the courtyard.

"Damn them," Paul whispered desperately. "Damn them for keeping her there." They crossed swiftly through the watch room, quieter than it had been yester day without the Guardsmen and clerks and prisoners on the way to the Recorder's Court, though even on Saturdays, masters brought in their slaves to be whipped. The hear in the room was terrific, and flies swarmed and circled in the blue shadows of the ceiling.

"Are you well?" asked January, as they came out onto the arcade. "Are you managing, with the children?"

His brother-in-law nodded, and gave Gabriel a quick hug. "With my boy here to help me, yes.

And Zizi-Marie is the best assistant in the shop a man could ask for. But Ben, listen. I've got an offer of work, a big order, from Orialhet at St. Michael Plantation. It's nearly fifty miles up the river. Olympe says I should go, that you'll-you'll look after her here. I shouldn't ask it of you, but..."

"No," said January immediately, "go." He knew that in the slow summer season, it was Olympe's earnings, from reading the cards and making gris-gris, that put food on the Corbier table. "Should I stay with the children? I'm supposed to be looking after my mother's house when she leaves for the lake, but..."

"I'll be back every few days," said Paul. "And Zizi-Marie is old enough to look after things. Butdo what you can for Olympe. Please. Gabriel and Zizi-Marie will come to see her, bring her food and clean clothes. And she'll need an attorney, a lawyer to plead her case..."

"I'll see what I can do." January wondered if such a person could be induced to plead on credit, like a grocer, until Drialhet paid up or the winter season of balls brought money again.

What am I thinking? he wondered then, as he watched his brother-in-law and his nephew make their way up Rue St. Pierre away from him. From above, dimly, he could still hear the madwoman screaming in her cell, the windows of which pierced the high wall three stories over his head. Could hear voices raised, cursing, weeping, quarreling.

He remembered the dead man, bundled away in the storeroom under the stairs, like dust swept under a rug. Olympe would need all the luck she could get, he thought, to even make it to her trial.

When Paul and his son had gone their way January drew from his pocket the copy of last Friday's Courier that Basile Nogent had given him. The advertisement said:

FIFTY DOLLARS REWARD will be given to any person apprehending and lodging in jail a quadroon boy called Isaak. He is very white and has a fine complexion and will try to pass himself as free. He is 19 years old, 5 feet, 6 inches tall, slenderly built but with great strength of chest and arms, has a narrow face and fine teeth, black hair curly rather than woolly, and a small mustache. He reads and writes, and speaks French, and English only brokenly. Apply to Mr. Hubert Granville of 1005 Prytane Street.

Hubert Granville. January folded the paper up again thoughtfully. Perhaps it was only a coincidence, but Hubert Granville was the vice-president of the Bank of Louisiana, at which, if he remembered rightly, fine education or no fine education, Antoine Jumon was employed as a clerk.

Nine o'clock was striking from the Cathedral. From the streets that led into the Place d'Armes, dilatory servants still made their way, baskets of split willow on their arms, bound for the markets along the levee downstream. To his right Rue Chartres stirred with activity, shopkeepers or their servants scrubbing the thresholds, the slaves of the wealthy washing down the flagged carriageways that led back into the secret courtyards that lay behind those shops. A pralinniere strolled past him with her sugared wares, brown and white, nearly brushing elbows with the journalist Blodgett, bustling half-drunk on some errand on the levee with his notebook in his hand.

January smiled. Saturday was a half-holiday, and the day was early yet. The banks wouldn't close until one. A singularly trusting boy, Rose had said of Antoine. Well we'll just see bow trusting. Anyone unfamiliar with the crowds, the din, the frenzied hauling of cotton bales and hogsheads of sugar and rum from point to point along the levee during the winter months would have compared the long riverfront today with a hive of bees at swarming time. But to January's eye the activity today was slow: too few crates, too many men standing idle. Eight steamboats loosed their columns of grimy smoke from tall stacks trimmed in crowns of gold, where in the winter there'd be three times that many lined up two deep along the wharves. Mates and supercargoes yelled directions at their gangs, while plaves unloaded trunks and portmanteaux from their masters' carriages; captains strolled among the crowds with manifests in their hands; pilots in the dusky shade of the market arcades drank coffee and traded minutiae about the height of the water the other side of Red Church and whether the bar off some nameless island below Natchez had crumbled away yet or not. A respectable-looking little gentleman in a gray coat was showing a gold watch to an obvious Yankee businessman and talking up what was clearly an auction scam; a couple of men dressed as stevedores out of work-and there were enough of those around the docks these days-lolled suspiciously close to a pile of crates of English saws and chisels left on the dock beside the Philadelphia. January picked his way through the knots of men,. unobtrusive in his rough clothes and blue calico shirt, and searched the faces for the one he knew.

In time he saw the man he sought, in the midst of a gang of workmen unloading crates marked PORCELAINES FINES DE LIMOGES from a dray in whirlwinds of straw and packing. He waited until the foreman-distinguishable from the men he worked with only by the shaggy beaver hat he wore-was called to the deck of the Bonnets O 'Blue by the mate, then ambled over.

"Ti Jon."

Most of the men had slacked off the moment the foreman's back was turned, wiping their brows or whistling for the young boys who sold ginger beer along the levee. January gestured to one of these, and offered Ti Jon a drink.

"Ben." Ti Jon brought up the kerchief he wore around his neck-the only thing he had on above the waist-and wiped his face.

"World treating you well?"

The stevedore shrugged. "My railway shares are down." A few inches under January's great height, Ti Jon was lean-bodied and, like January, African dark. He belonged to a man who lived on Rue Bourbon, to whom he paid seven dollars a week for the privilege of finding his own food, lodging, and work. Monsieur Dessalines didn't care where Ti Jon acquired any of these things so long as he made his appearance Saturday nights with his week's money, a situation that suited Ti Jon just fine. "This business with the Bank of the United States has caused me to put off running for Congress until the next election, not this one."

"I think that's wise," said January gravely.

"Yourself?"

"Oh, I'll run," said January. "I have faith in President Jackson. And, I just got back from playing for the crowned heads of Europe, so I have a little time on my hands."

"I read about that. The Paris Daily Democrat said you were a veritable genius."

January pulled a modest face. "Well, I was. But I strained a muscle in my back lifting all the gold they threw on the stage."

"Well, my mama always said there's no such thing as an unmixed blessing." Ti Jon sipped his ginger beer and grinned at the make-believe. "What can I do for you?"

"I'm looking for someone. Boy name of Isaak Jurnon."

He saw Ti Jon's eyes change. Wary.

"I thought he might have gone to the Swamp."

"His mother send you?"

January shook his head. "I've never met his mother. From all I've heard of her I don't think I want to."

"You don't." The dark Congo eyes glanced at him sidelong, tallying information that he didn't want to reveal. Asking himself how much he could or wanted to say.

"The police say my sister poisoned him. That she was paid to do it by his wife."

"Now that's a lie." Ti Jon glanced at the foreman, still deep in conference with the mate over where the crates of PORCELAINES FINES should be stowed. "Who ever's saying it. Isaak spoke of nothing but that girl. How he loved her, how he felt bad for running away like he did, leaving her no place to go but back to her father. He kept saying he'd go back to her, he'd find a way to go back." He was silent then, a muscle standing out for a moment in his jaw. Then, "He's dead?"

January nodded.

"What a damn shame. He was a good boy, steady. It right, that the girl's gone back to her daddy?"

"For now. But she'll go to trial for it next month, and hang, along with my sister, unless we find the truth of what happened."

"Filz putain. " Ti Jon was silent for a time, arms folded, gazing unseeing into the confusion of the levee. Then he sighed. "A week ago Thursday, he came into Widow Puy's grocery asking after a place to stay."

January had spent a night in the attic over the Widow Puy's, on the occasion of having had a white man tear up the papers that proved him free. It had cost him fifty cents for sleeping room with a dozen other men, men who'd mostly reached the same arrangement with their masters that Ti Jon had, though a couple of them, January guessed, had been runaways. He'd had to leave his boots as collateral while he got the fifty cents from his sister Dominique. It was the last time he'd ventured out of the French town with fewer than three copies of his papers hidden on his person.

"I figured him for a runaway and found him a job sweeping up at the Turkey-Buzzard. Later on he told me-That true, what he said about his mother claiming him as her slave? Damn." He shook his head in wondering anger. "Some people shouldn't be let to have children or should have 'em taken away and given to those who'll treat 'em well. When did he die?"

"When did you see him last?"

Ti Jon's glance flicked aside. "Saturday," he replied. "Saturday morning. A week ago. This advertisement came out in the papers Friday, and Isaak said when he read it Friday afternoon he couldn't hardly work at the saloon, feeling every man who came in was looking at him and would be waiting for him in the alley out back when he came out. You know what it's like down the Swamp."

January knew what it was like down the Swamp. "You know where he went?"

Ti Jon shook his head. "Just he was leaving town. I got to go."

The foreman was still deep in colloquy with the mate. In any case it was inconceivable that Ti Jon wouldn't know everything that went on among the run away s and sleepers-out of the slaves in New Orleans. January's eyes met Ti Jon's for a moment, seeing the lie in them. Seeing also the opaque look that said, I know you know, but what you know isn't going to do you any good.

Why?

A man passing close by the dray cried out in anger, his hand going to his pocket; a boy went darting away into the crowd. Foreman, mate, and half the loading-gang turned to watch as others joined the hue and cry, turning the Place d'Armes almost instantly into a shoving seethe, but January guessed what was actually going on, and turned his head in time to see the three loiterers by the Philadelphia casually shove three boxes of the carpentry tools off the edge of the wharf.

Then they walked away quickly, in different directions, hands in pockets, without looking back.

There'd be men in a rowboat under the dock, to hook the crates aboard.

But all that was none of his lookout. He'd seen such things before. The foreman yelled from the deck of the Bonnets O'Blue, "You men! We ain't got all day! " and Ti Jon nodded to January.

"Thanks for the drink."

"Thank you," said January. "If you hear anything else of where Jumon might have been, please let me know. There's lives at stake."

Ti Jon hesitated. "I'll let you know."