Wet Grave, page 33
In the absence of the slightest information about the victim, the circumstances, or any conceivable motivation for the murder, it was as good a way as any to pass the time.
But that wasn't what Rose meant now, and January knew it.
His mind returned to the reeking heat and darkness of the waterfront at New Orleans, the tail-end of summer, 1832. Even at that hour of the night—and he'd heard the Cathedral clock strike three as he'd left the garçonnière above his mother's kitchen—there was activity along the levee, stevedores unloading bales from the big, ugly flat-sided steamboats, filthy ruffians in coarse calico shirts and heavy Conestoga boots driving pigs from the flatboats by the light of torches, whores in tawdry dresses plying their trade in the shadows. Music jingled from the saloons along Rue du Levee, where men gambled through the night, somewhere a slave gang hauling wood onto a boat wailed a primitive holler. Roaches the size of mice crept on the sides of the warehouses, or flew with roaring wings around the flaming cressets; the warm air breathed and blew with the storm that flickered far out over the Gulf.
New Orleans. The home January had fled sixteen years before, seeking education and freedom in France.
He'd made his way along the levee, away from the docks where the steamboats waited three-deep and toward the taller masts of the ocean-going ships. The Duchesse Ivrogne, on which he'd come from France only two days before, would not even yet have left port. When he'd risen, sleepless, dressed and gone out, he'd told himself it was to see if the Duchesse was still in port, and to learn what her captain would ask to take him back to France again, though what the man would have been doing up at three in the morning January hadn't considered—perhaps in his heart he'd known that wasn't his intent at all. Around the ships the dark was thicker, and there was little activity beyond the scurryings of rats. Between the wet hulks, the river gleamed with the reflection of the distant torches, the occasional riding-light.
January found an empty wharf and walked out along it, the stink of the river pungent in his nose with a thousand memories. Hereabouts, where the river bent, the current was ferocious.
He didn't think it would take him long to drown.
He could barely see the wharf's end when he reached it. Occasional heat-lightning outlined the sable clouds of trees on the opposite river-bank, but illuminated nothing nearer. He'd advanced feeling his way with his feet—an absurd precaution, he thought, with the part of his mind still aware of the world of the living: wasn't the point of his coming here tonight to walk off the end of the wharf in the dark?
But when he reached the end he only stood there, looking out into the blackness, with the electric whisper of far-off storm-winds passing like silk ribbons over his face.
Whether he would have jumped he still didn't know. He knew—even three years later—that he'd been close to it.
But behind him he heard music, the light sweet embroideries of a single violin, playing a Mozart air in the dark.
And he turned back.
A white man was sitting on a bollard about halfway between the wharf's end and the levee behind them, a thin man of medium height whose long dark hair hung straggling over his shoulders like a disheveled mermaid's. He played like an angel, dismissed from the Heavenly Choir, for drunkenness, perhaps, because a squat black bottle of gin sat on the wharf-planks at his feet. He didn't look up as January came back toward him out of the night, only embellished the little dance-tune till it sparkled, calling secret rhythm and resonance from it until it seemed to speak of all joy, all light, all life.
He hadn't been there when January had walked out onto the wharf. He must have followed him, and sat down to play.
Then he looked up at January with the darkest eyes January had ever seen, and said: “You look like a man who needs a drink.”
He was the first white man since January's return to his home city who had addressed him as a man, and not some lower form of life. When January had departed in 1817 the town had been mostly French, and the Creole French had long ago come to accommodation with their half-African libre cousins who made up most of the town's free-colored community. To Americans, who seemed to have taken over the town in their thousands, all blacks were potential slaves.
January said, “I do.”
The fiddler nudged the bottle at his feet with the toe of one battered boot. “Try this. They lie, who say drafts from the River Styx bring oblivion. Who knows what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil. . . .”
“Aye, there's the rub,” January had agreed, and bent to pick up the bottle. He answered in the English in which the fiddler had addressed him, the white man's voice not the twangy rasp of all those Americans who had told him all those things that a nigger couldn't do these days, and had asked him for his free papers, to prove he had the right to walk around by himself: rather, it had the slight lilt of the educated Anglo-Irish, overlaid with the whispery hoarseness of consumption.
“Or do you think you'll find someone that you've lost in those waters?”
With cholera walking the dark streets of every city in the world that year, it was a reasonable question. January saw again what was, at that time, his last clear recollection before the long haze of grief and agony in which he'd taken ship for New Orleans from Paris—his wife Ayasha's body, stretched across their bed in their grilling-hot room in Paris, her long black hair trailing down into the drying pools of vomit on the floor. The disease had spared her nothing. She had suffered and died alone.
“Not think,” he'd replied, the whole conversation with this slight fantastic figure feeling to him like something from a dream. As the past two months, since finding Ayasha's body, had all felt like a dream. “Hope.”
“Hope is something the living do.” The fiddler coughed, switching the bow into his other hand so that he could press his hand to his side. “. . . to hope til Hope creates/from its own wreck the thing it contemplates. . . . It's too silly an occupation for the dead.”
January took a sip of the gin—which was cheap and unspeakably bad—and said, “You may be right about that.”
The diligencia jolted, bringing him back to the present. To the knowledge of money in his pocket, and Rose—whom he had not known existed on that hot storm-whispering night three years ago—at his side.
Slowly he said, “Hannibal has been my friend for three years. Drunk or sober, I don't think you could find a more peaceable soul in creation—or a more hapless one.” He spoke French—across from him the two German merchants muttered together in their native tongue and glanced worriedly out at the gray and yellow landscape of stone, distant pines, and dust. The entire journey had been a series of translations and recapitulations, and even in the close confines of the swaying coach January and Rose had a curious sense of privacy, as if everyone else were trapped within their own linguistic worlds.
“But it is also true,” he went on, “that I have no idea what Hannibal did, or even what his name was, before the night I met him.” The morning after that encounter on the waterfront January had gotten his first music pupil in New Orleans, and two nights after that had been hired for his first job playing at a quadroon ball. Hannibal had been playing as well, as usual the only white among musicians who ranged from musterfinos—men who were considered to be “of color” on the grounds of one African great-grandparent—down to January's nearly-pure African blackness. For this reason alone the fiddler was considered rather degenerate by the whites in the town.
“No,” said Rose softly. “No . . . He's never spoken of his family, or where he comes from, not even when he's drunk.”
January nodded—Hannibal had never mentioned what he was doing in the deserted darkness of the New Orleans levee, contemplating the River Styx.
“Oh, he'll mention that he was up at Oxford, and his speech gets very Irish when he's drunk. He turned up in New Orleans about a year before you did; he'd teach the girls at my school to play violin, piano, and harp, and would correct their Latin in exchange for supper. I couldn't pay him in cash, of course.”
Her mouth quirked reminiscently as she spoke of the school she'd taught at on Rue St. Claud, the smile fleeting away the next moment like the silver flash of fish among reeds. January well recalled the old Spanish house to which she'd first led him on a night of wind and rain during the terrible season of yellow fever in the summer of 1833. Most of her students—daughters of quadroon and octoroon plaçées by their white protectors, even as she was herself—had left the city then. Only six remained, four of those desperately ill with yellow fever. He remembered Rose's bitter tears at their death. Two years later, she still grieved for them, and the loss of the school had been like the loss of her family.
January's hand sought hers, its tightening an unspoken reassurance. We will have a school again. She flashed him another quicksilver smile. Their wedding-night had been spent in the big old house on Rue Esplanade that was, miracle of miracles after years of mutual poverty, their own. It was still a matter of astonishment to him that though he daily missed Ayasha still, his grief did not lessen the wonder of his love for Rose.
Her hand tightened in return, and in a lighter voice she said, “So for all I know, Hannibal could have left a trail of corpses from here to Ireland and on across the Continent. Unless . . .” She hesitated, genuine doubt springing into green-gray eyes that were her legacy from a white father and a white grandfather. “You don't think he could have done murder while under the influence of opium, do you? And not remember?”
“My nightingale, do you have any idea how much opium it would take to render Hannibal unconscious?”
“Hmmn,” said Rose. “There is much in what you say.”
“Even supposing he—or anyone—could lay hands on such a quantity,” went on January—who had considered the possibility already—“there wouldn't be a question of his having done it. And it sounds like there is. Though why he would be staying on a hacienda evidently operated by a madman, when we last saw him running off with the prima soprano from that Italian opera troupe. . . .”
January saw the bandits and heard the shots at the same instant that the clattering rhythm of the coach-team broke. A bullet punched through the side of the coach, and the old Swiss valet on his jump-seat opened his mouth as if to protest, but no sound came out, only blood. As he toppled over, the guard's voice yelled from above, “Bandits!” In the same moment, the coach itself lurched, swayed precariously; there was another salvo of shots and Rose dropped forward, scooping up the rifles that had been put ready in the coach at the previous night's stop in Perote.
One of the team's been hit, January thought, in the second before the coach bumped, slewed, tipped in what felt like a horrible slow dream-like somersault. . . . He grabbed Rose around the waist and caught the wall-strap with the other hand—the Swiss valet pitched from his seat, dead-weight flying, smashing into January's back as the big vehicle went over. Dillard was the only other passenger who braced himself for the impact and the two German merchants plunged and tumbled in a whirlwind of dust, hats, and spattering specks of blood: horses screaming, a blurred jumble of dark shapes glimpsed through the reeling windows, the warning shout of the Indian guard on the box above.
The impact of something or someone drove the breath from January's body; gunfire cracked all around.
He drove himself up at the windows above him before the coach stopped skidding—it didn't occur to him till later to wonder what would have happened had the attack come in one of those places where the road swung along the brink of a gorge. Young Padre Cesario shoved a rifle into his hands, and January flipped up the window like a trap-door, and fired at one of the forms that came pounding toward him through the dust. January ducked down, caught another rifle—Rose was loading—popped up and fired. “Where'd you learn to handle a gun, boy?” demanded Dillard, emerging like a gopher from the window beside him. Anywhere in the United States it was illegal for a black man to own or use firearms. A bullet plowed the window-frame near his hand, spraying splinters.
“Fighting for Jackson at New Orleans.” January could almost hear the Tennessean's brain crunch as it assimilated the hero-President's name. “British didn't run around like this, though.” He fired, and a looming horseback shape flung out its arms and fell.
“Sure is like tryin' to shoot weasels by starlight,” Dillard agreed, and spat tobacco.
Behind the fallen coach the Indian guard yelled something: January turned and got off a shot at more ragged, wolf-like shapes clambering over the rocks above the road, heard another bullet strike the coach roof. A man inside cried out. A rider loomed out of the dust, bloody spittle stringing from the barbed Spanish bit in the horse's mouth. January glimpsed a scarred, bearded face as black as his own under the wide-brimmed leather hat, the flash of silver on the pistol the man aimed down at him; Dillard's gun roared in double thunder with the dark-faced bandit's. Both shots went wild, and in the next second the coach driver sprang up almost under the hooves of the bandit's horse, swinging his empty rifle like a club, while on the ground by the coach in a tangle of harness the two surviving horses kicked, screamed, thrashed.
The dark bandit wheeled, plunged into the dust, shouting “Vamanos, toros!” to his men. One unhorsed bandit tried to mount a fallen comrade's horse, and Dillard coolly shot him in the back; the animal whinnying, backing, reins tangled in a thicket of creosote-bush in the ditch beside the road. As the bandits rode off, the Tennessean swung himself up through the coach window and went to get the horse; January ducked down into the coach again. Strange, he thought, that one of the first men of African blood that he'd seen in this country had been trying to kill him.
Then he smelled blood down in the coach and saw Rose with the breast of her dress all crimson with gore. . . .
She was knotting one of her hat-veils around a wound in Padre Cesario's wrist and the blood clearly belonged to him—or to the poor valet Da Ponte, crumpled in a huddle—but the sight of it nearly stopped January's heart.
It could have been Rose.
Like that, in a second, everything we could have had together, all the years of our happiness, gone . . .
He began to shake, as if with malarial chill. “Are you all right?” He hoped his voice didn't sound as hoarse to her as it did in his own ears.
She nodded. Her hands were black with powder and her long hair—beautiful walnut-brown and curly, more like a white woman's than a black's—stuck with sweat to her face and hung down in strings where it had escaped chignon and hat.
We're going back to New Orleans and to hell with Hannibal. . . . YOU'RE going back to New Orleans and I'll join you there after I've wrung his neck for him. . . . We'll open the school on Rue Esplanade and live happily ever after forever unless you get kidnapped by slave-traders or die in another cholera epidemic or in childbirth. . . .
He drew a deep breath and looked around. “Anyone else hurt?”
The two merchants shook their heads. One of them bent over Da Ponte, tried to straighten him; January and the other merchant opened the coach door above them like a trap-door, and gently helped out first the priest, then Rose, then lifted out the valet's body. He was old and fragile and had spoken only Italian; January wondered what he'd been doing in Mexico, and if he had family back in Locarno. He'd been shot through the throat.
It could have been Rose.
Dillard and the guard came back, each leading a bandit's horse. The bandit January had shot lay sobbing some distance from the coach. He'd been dragged, and then trampled, by his terrified mount. Blood bubbled from his mouth and spread over the crotch of his thin, ragged peasant breeches. His unshaven face contorted with agony; January fished his rosary from his pocket, knelt beside the man and twined the blue glass beads, the battered steel crucifix in the filthy hands.
The bandit couldn't speak but brought the rosary up to his lips and kissed it.
“Your sins are forgiven you,” whispered January in Spanish, and made the Sign of the Cross. Standing, he took from his pocket the pistol he'd purchased in Vera Cruz. “Go with God.”
And shot him through the head.
He was wiping the blood off his rosary when the Indian coach guard came over and said in Spanish, “Don't waste your powder on such a one, Señor. El Moro may attack us again before we reach the city.”
“Sorry.”
The other men were unharnessing the surviving horses, dragging the dead ones clear. Checking hocks, knees, tendons. Already the sopilotes—the gray-headed black vultures—were circling, waiting for the living to clear the hell away and let them eat. January heard, far off on the still, thin air, the ringing of church-bells. It was Sunday, he remembered. They had climbed into the diligencia at two in the morning in Perote, and he had been so sleepy, he had barely been able to murmur his prayers.
He walked a little distance from the coach with its scattered debris of luggage, hat-boxes, letters from a burst mailsack, and the book one of the Germans had been reading, past the towering knee of gray rock that had concealed the bandits' attack. He felt dizzy, with the sun's heat rising off the stone and the road and the clear, brittle desolation of these oak-dotted mountains, but the air nonetheless steely with chill.
I've been in this country a week, he thought, and already I've killed a man.
He wondered if Hannibal were still alive at all.
Coming to Mexico, it had been in his heart to wonder about what it would be like where slavery had been done away with, as the abolitionist Yankee driver had said.
And now he knew.
Born a slave, for sixteen years of his manhood he'd lived in France in a world completely free. Free to study medicine, free to study music, free to wed a woman he loved . . . free of the ghastly burden of being the black son of slaves in Louisiana that he had carried like a slab of stone all his life.
And he'd learned that freedom made no difference whatsoever when Death came calling.
