Wet Grave, page 2
“Let those who wish to, speak of armies and of supply-lines!” Blanque, clearly a cognac or two beyond the frontier of careful thought, had fallen under the spell of his own oratory. “It is personal courage, personal command, which broke the rabble in the Vendée. It was the sheer bravery, the audacity, of the commander, which delivered victory to the Republic's banners at Landau—”
“Enough!” With a crash the armchair at the head table was flung back. Humbert stood swaying on his feet, face crimson, eyes blazing in the candles' liquid glow. “Enough of this praise! Your words remind me of what I was—of what I am. And I will not remain here as an associate of outlaws and pirates!”
Captain Beluche, also an alumnus of Napoleon's army, lurched to his feet. “Pirates, is it?”
“Pirates!” bellowed Humbert, who had never liked Beluche. “Call yourselves what you will, and fly what flag you find it convenient to buy, what are you but thieves who take the goods of other men and sell them as your own? You, who only yesterday sent an American ship to the bottom without a thought, without a blink—yes, and paraded yourselves the next day in full view of the town, like whores, like dogs!” His hand smote the table with a noise like a gunshot, making all the tableware jump. “I spit upon such men as you!”
This was the point at which January went behind the piano. Even Captain Gambi, who generally didn't care who called him a pirate, was on his feet with a table-knife in his hand, screaming “Pig of a Frenchman!” and Beluche started straight over the table that separated him from Humbert, cutlass drawn—God knew where he'd had it during dinner—and nearly foaming at the mouth with rage and alcohol. Men yelled something about the Independence; women screamed. Hesione LeGros, quicker-thinking than most, plunged behind the piano, all her black-and-gold plumes askew, cursing at whichever of the several captains was her protector at the moment, and pulling from her tignon a very long and very businesslike stiletto. Her face was calm, her rosebud mouth almost smiling—January noticed she had a small mole in one corner, like a beauty-patch. The other Grand Terre girls clumped like scared sheep in the corner and shrieked like parrots in a storm, and January's mother, a chunk of sugar halfway to her coffee-cup, regarded the whole eruption with an expression of disapproval and disgust and didn't stir from her chair.
As it happened, Livia was the only person in the room who had an accurate estimate of Jean Lafitte's presence of mind and power over his men. The smuggler-boss was on his feet—without toppling his chair—and across the dining-room in three long strides, outstripping even Captain Beluche, who had a few yards' lead on him. Reaching Humbert's side, Lafitte held up his hand—with no appearance of hurry, or of fear. It was how January remembered him best, in later years: a tall, black-haired man in a black long-tailed coat, hand upraised, the other hand resting gently on the furious old general's shoulder. As if to say to both Humbert and the enraged and thoroughly inebriated corsairs, Let's all be quiet and think for a moment before this goes too far.
Humbert turned to him and burst into tears, laying his head on Lafitte's shoulder.
And as gently as if he had been the old man's son, Jean Lafitte led General Humbert from the room.
Slightly more than two years later, when the British attempted to seize and hold New Orleans as part of their long struggle against Napoleon, Jean Lafitte—rather to everyone's surprise—turned down a cash offer from the British General Pakenham and volunteered his services to the American forces under General Jackson instead. Benjamin January, twenty-one by then and as well trained a surgeon as was possible for a young man of color to be in New Orleans, fought in the free colored militia in the ensuing battle. Though the Americans won—and the British ceased boarding and seizing the crews of American vessels—it was still several years before either he or St.-Denis Janvier deemed it safe for him to risk a sea journey to France to continue his medical studies.
He was in France for sixteen years. For the first six of those years he studied medicine, and worked as a junior surgeon, at the Hôtel Dieu. St.-Denis Janvier died in 1822, but the little money he left his plaçée's son would not stretch to cover the expenses of buying a practice. Moreover, it was quite clear to January by then that even in the land of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité, no white man was going to hire a black surgeon to cut him open if he could find a man of his own color to do it instead. January tried not to be troubled by this, accepting it as he'd accepted the fact that in his former home he'd had to step off the banquette to let white men pass. . . .
And then he'd met Ayasha. And understood that if he wanted to marry this very young and very competent Berber dressmaker—at eighteen she had her own shop, her own small clientele, and looked like a desert witch inexplicably trying to pass herself off as a Parisian artisan—he'd need money.
That was when, and why, he went back to music.
For ten years he played for the Opéra, for the balls and parties of the restored nobility who'd returned to Paris in the wake of Louis XVIII and of the wealthy who'd founded their fortunes on the wreck of Napoleon's empire. For ten years he and Ayasha lived in happiness in a little flat on the Rue de l'Aube near the river. In the newspapers he followed the careers of Lafitte, and Humbert, and those privateer captains who'd once had their fortified camp on Grand Terre. His account of General Humbert's birthday dinner became an after-dinner tale for his musician friends, when Humbert became Commodore of the Navy of Mexico, or when word got out concerning Dominic Youx's participation in the plot to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena and spirit him away to live out his days in a comfortable town house in New Orleans.
The American Navy ran Jean Lafitte out of his new headquarters on the Texas coast in 1821. Rumors swirled about what became of him, but no one knew for sure. René Beluche became the Commodore of the new nation of Venezuela. Vincente Gambi, and Antonino Angelo, and Lafitte's captains met their fates variously at the hands of the American Navy or the British campaign against pirates and slave-smugglers. Some simply encountered those deaths that awaited so many white men in Louisiana: yellow fever, malaria, typhus.
In 1832 the Indian cholera reached Paris.
Ayasha died.
January returned to New Orleans—to the town he had hoped never to live in again. To the only family he knew.
To a city he had left while it was still an outpost of France in the New World. But he found, on his return, that the city had been inundated in his absence with Americans intent on making a profit from slavery, from sugar, from cotton, and from everything else they could lay their hands on. Much of the city was now the province of upriver Kentuckians whose rapaciousness made Lafitte and his cronies look modest and whose manners made even such hard-bitten souls as Cut-Nose Chighizola appear refined.
For a few years January lived in the garçonnière behind his mother's house, the small separate chamber traditionally given to the growing son of the household. His mother had married a free carpenter of color upon St.-Denis Janvier's death, and was now a respectable widow. January made new friends, and renewed his ties with old. He played at quadroon balls and at the Opera, and at the parties of Americans, free colored, and Creole French alike; he found refuge in the familiar joys of music from the almost unbearable pain of loss in his heart.
He met a young schoolmistress named Rose Vitrac, Ayasha's opposite in nearly every way: erudite, gawky, bespectacled, and so heart-scarred and frightened of men that it was nearly a year before she could endure the touch of his hand without pulling away.
He learned, a little to his surprise, that it was possible to love passionately without lessening for a moment the ache of the love that had gone before.
And in all those years since 1812 he never so much as remembered Hesione LeGros' face, until one day in the summer of 1835, when he walked into a shack near the back of town and saw her dead body, with her head in a puddle of blood.
TWO
“When you a woman and black—not to mention dirt poor, God forbid”—the mocking sparkle in Olympe Corbier's dark eyes was like the flash of dragonflies over a bitter lake—“there ain't a man in this town'll smirch his boots crossin' the street to save your life. What makes you think anybody'd come out here after she's already dead?”
Kneeling on the floor beside the body, January looked up at his sister, who had knocked at the door of his lodgings an hour after sun-up, asking him to come with her here. He knew she was right.
Olympe was his full sister, by that African field-hand his mother never spoke about. When at sixteen she'd run away to join the voodoos, her mother hadn't even troubled to look for her. Her work as healer and midwife among the poorer artisans, laborers, and freedmen of the town had given her scant respect for the whites who made the city's laws.
Still it angered him that the City Guards hadn't troubled to send an officer out to this straggle of shanties, shelters, and one- and two-room cottages huddled on the fringe of the still-more-unsavory district of town universally known as the Swamp. It wasn't more than half a mile from the turning-basin of the canal that connected New Orleans with the lake, and probably less than a mile from the river itself. Although one of the liveliest and wealthiest cities in the United States lay so close, oaks and cypress still grew among the wretched dwellings here; reeds and marsh-grass stood thick just outside the door.
It wasn't nine in the morning and the heat was like a hammer. Flies crept thick over every splash and puddle of the blood-trail that started by the shack's upstream wall and ended under the body. The cloud of insects overhead, up under the shack's low roof, made a dull droning, inescapable as the stink of sewage or the sticky creep of sweat behind January's shirt-collar.
Heat, stink, flies. Summer in New Orleans.
“I heard how you not supposed to move somebody who been killed,” said one of the neighbors, peering in around Olympe's slim, tall form. A square young man, he wore the numbered tin badge of a slave whose master let him “sleep out”—find his own room and board in exchange for a percentage of what he could earn as a laborer. At this time of year, there was little work to be had, even on the levee or the docks. “How you supposed to not touch nuthin' till the Guards had a look.” His ungrammatical French was the fluidly sloppy get-along speech of an Anglophone who has made his home among French-speakers for a few months, not the half-African patois of the slave quarters. Born in the eastern states, January guessed automatically, and sold down the river . . .
“I sent Suzie right away downtown to the Cabildo.” The young man nodded back at a girl of sixteen or so who crowded up behind him. “I did look around, see if I could find some kerosene or pepper or somethin' to keep the ants from comin' in. But they's all over the place already. Hessy been dead awhile. Else I wouldn't a' left her just lay on the floor.”
“What'd they say at the Cabildo?” January tried to move the arm of the woman who lay sprawled in the gummy pool of drying gore a few feet from the front door of the shack. The muscles were hard as wood. Most of the blood had soaked into the dirt floor, and the smaller patches were already dry. The smell was indescribable, early decay mingling with the metallic sharpness of blood and the reek of piss and the spit tobacco with which the floor was liberally daubed. Ants streamed in inch-thick black ribbons from three or four directions, under the shack's ill-fitting board walls. Unlike the patient flies they went about their business, as ants do, unimpressed by humankind.
“That they send somebody by'n'by.” The girl spoke Creole French, slurred and sloppy, the kind January's mother and January's schoolmasters had beaten out of him by the time he was nine. She seemed in awe of him, maybe because he wore boots in the summertime and spoke with authority. Maybe because he was Olympia Snakebones' brother.
“They'll send along the Coroner.” Olympe's sweet, deep alto was like bronze and gravel. “He'll come an' he'll say, Yep, she dead all right. Takes a white man to figure that one out.”
There was a chuckle among the neighbors clustered around the front door or peering in the back, men and women who made this shabby corner of the town their home out of poverty or stubbornness or unwillingness to be too closely scrutinized by the minions of the country's various laws. January turned the corpse over, and it came all of a piece, like a plank. She must have been dead some hours before midnight. She'd been stabbed three or four times in the chest, and once in the side. Her throat had been cut, probably at the point of death or just afterward, when she'd quit fighting. There were cuts on her palms and fingers as well.
The whole front of her faded, twice-turned, ill-fitting charity-bag dress was sheeted with blood, and moving with ants.
The half of her face that had lain in the drying blood of the dirt floor was unrecognizable. The other half, with all its wrinkles smoothed away by death, touched his memory: the full pouting lips, the neat, small upturned nose. The tiny mole, like an old-fashioned beauty-patch, just below the corner of the mouth.
The mole touched a memory in his mind.
He'd seen her, January knew, around the levee. In almost three years back in New Orleans, he'd seen just about everyone in town at least once or twice, as he'd crossed beneath the shade of the plane-trees on the Place d'Armes, or walked along the boisterous chaos of the river-front among the cotton-bales and hogsheads of sugar and molasses. He'd noticed her because she wrapped her tignon like an island woman, not in the usual New Orleans style. The faded old Turkey red dress she wore was the same every time. Sometimes she'd be sitting under the plane-trees, braiding little animals of straw or folded tin, giving them to passers-by. Other times, drunk, she'd sit cross-legged on packing-boxes and call out to the deck-hands and stevedores in a sing-song rasp. Once January had walked past her and she'd said, in a perfectly conversational tone, “I let you fuck me in the ass if you buys me a bottle.”
“What was her name?” he asked now.
“Hessy,” answered Suzie. “Hessy LeGros—Hesione. An' she wasn't so bad, you know, 'cept when she was real drunk. She tore up Richie here pretty bad last month when she got the horrors. . . .” She nodded to her young man, who did indeed have a healing cut on his right hand. “Who'd a' done this?”
Who indeed?
“Could you good people leave us for a few minutes, Olympe and me?” He sat back on his heels and straightened his back, looked around at the neighbors. “I want to take a better look at her, see if the bastard did more than kill her.”
There was a murmur and they backed away, so that Olympe could close the rickety doors. Moving carefully—he could already see the dirt floor was scuffed all over with tracks around the body—January turned up the tattered skirts. It was difficult to tell because of the fluids and matter leaking out of the corpse, but he didn't think the woman had been raped, either before or after death. Her bodice waist hadn't been torn open, only ripped on one shoulder, as if she'd thrashed away from an attacker's grip.
Dribbles of tobacco-spittle, old and new, stained the front of her dress.
He got to his feet, and wiped his hands on a bandanna handkerchief from his pocket. “What do you know about her?” he asked his sister. Voodoos could generally be counted on to know whatever there was to be known.
Olympe shrugged. “That she was a drunkard; that she was poor; that she didn't deserve to live this way. Or to die this way.” In the morning heat, sweat already blotched his sister's faded calico bodice. “She was a free woman. No family that I know of. She claimed she used to be Jean Lafitte's mistress, but I don't think that was true.”
“No,” agreed January, suddenly realizing where he'd seen that neat little mole before. “But she was mistress to one of his captains.” And as he moved cautiously around the room examining the criss-crossed tracks, and the contents of the room's single shelf, he recounted the events of General Humbert's birthday dinner, twenty-three years ago.
“Here's her visitor, look,” he said, crouching to show Olympe the print of a wide, square-toed boot. A notch had been scored in the heel, as if the wearer had trodden on something sharp. The tracks led from the rear door—which looked out into the woods—to the chair beside the bed, near a packing-box on which a burning candle had been set. The candle stump remained, in a messy dribble of pale brown “winding-sheets,” themselves already sagging with the heat.
Scratches in the dirt floor marked where the chair had been knocked over and later set back on its legs. Deep heel-gouges showed where the visitor had sprung, strode, struggled among the vaguer scuffings of Hesione's bare feet, all covered and mucked over by the first great splash of blood. A yellow-and-green tignon lay trampled there, too.
Blood and tracks crossed the floor to the body.
The man's tracks continued. Beside the bed, which was planks on a frame nailed to two walls and a bedpost in the corner—the moss mattress was rucked a little, but hadn't been turned or had the lumps shaken out of it in months and it crawled with bedbugs and fleas. Along the wall, where a shelf held three dirty and louse-ridden tignons, an assortment of unwashed gourd dishes, four braided-straw cats and horses, a lot of whiskey-bottles and a nearly-empty sack of coffee-beans. Beans scattered the shelf and the table beneath it, which also bore a dirty cup and bowl, and a basket of strawberries creeping with flies. A small handful of beans scattered the floor immediately underneath. When January crouched beside them he observed that they were shiny, without dust.
In the dirt of the floor beside the beans, two small round blobs of white candle-wax gleamed, also dustless. Under the table, under the bed, around the scraped slots near the table that marked the chair's usual place and all throughout the weeds that poked in under the shed's walls, the unclean debris of a hundred frugal meals decayed: bread-crumbs, fruit-cores and pips, the knuckle-bones of sheep and pigs, picked clean by ants. These were mingled with wads and stains of chewed tobacco of varying ages, though a considerably larger number of these—fresh—splotched the dirt floor around where the murderer had sat in the chair by the back wall.
