Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (25 page)

January knelt, squinting and peering at the dust on the floor, on the trunks: years' worth of it, decades. Under the layer of grime the floor was scratched. The attic seemed the smallest because its three sides, where the hip of the roof ran down to the floor, had at some time in the past been boarded across, forming smaller storage areas too low to enter without kneeling. Two of these were simply latched. The third, the smallest, across the downstream end of the house, was locked, with an old-fashioned sash-ward lock, the only lock in the house that hadn't been replaced or renewed.

“You can't say she kept him in the cupboard,” protested Hannibal. “Anyway, it would have disturbed the dust if it had been opened, and you can see it hasn't.”

“Open it anyway,” said January. “I want to broaden my outlook.”

He wasn't sure what he expected to find there. Bottles of arsenic, perhaps, or Isaak Jumon's clothes. He knelt, and crawled a little way in on all fours, holding the candle before him, and the smell rose up around him and made his flesh shrink on his bones.

An old faint stink ground into the wood of the floorboards, attenuated by time: piss, and waste, which even cleaned up cannot ever be completely eradicated. All the attics had stunk of mice and rats. This was different. Someone had been kept up here, long ago.

He angled the candle's light into the black awful space's farthest corners, and spiders edged away, indignant at the interruption of their affairs. The dead husks of withered palmetto bugs made long black streaks of shadow.

The floor was scratched a little, old scratches. All around the lock, the wood of the door was scraped, as if someone had ground at it patiently, hopelessly, with a chip of metal or a bit of stone, or maybe the edge of a ring, in an effort to get free. Drips and spatters and little squiggles stained the floor, black with age, amid a paler brown mottling, puddle after puddle after puddle, cleaned up but never cleaned up enough. Something lay in the farthest corner, where the roof met the floor, and January stretched on his belly to pull it out, mouse-chewed and dropping a clatter of rodent pellets as he brought it to him. It was only a rag, knotted hard in a circle and then later cut with what looked like scissors, so that the knot remained. Opposite the knot, the tough, damasked linen was stained black. January touched the cut ends together. The circle they made wasn't quite fourteen inches around. Too small to have gagged an adult.

“There's more of them back here,” said Hannibal quietly.

January backed out of the cupboard, to see his friend sitting on the floor near the high-piled trunks and boxes, hands filled to overflowing with chunks and scraps and bights of sheet, cut and knotted, wrinkled, stained with mouse-piss and blood.

“There's a whole cache of them behind the trunks. As if she just cut them off, and shoved them out of sight.”

January turned them over in his fingers, disgust and loathing rising like physical nausea in him as he identified which bonds had to have been tied around wrists not more than an inch in diameter, which had bound ankles, or been gags. No chicken foot, no beef tongue sewed up around silver and guinea peppers, no black wax and graveyard dust, had ever touched him with what he felt now: the sense of evil in its purest and most gruesome form.

He said, “Let's get out of here. I've seen enough.” From halfway up Rue St. Louis he looked back at the house, tall and impenetrable, shrouded in its galleries between tall impenetrable neighbors. For some reason it reminded him of the square brick tombs in the cemetery, names scriven on the marble of those who slept there forever: rotting bones, for the most part, shoved back into corners until time would compound them forever with the earth. At a horse trough outside a grocery on Rue Dauphine he stooped to wash from his hands the filth of the attic's floor, black streaks like graveyard dust in the starlight.

It was five days before January heard from Therese. Having made the journey to Milneburgh once to jog his sister's memory on the subject, he didn't feel able to do so again. In any case he could ill spare either the train fare or the time. For two days he worked at his translation of The Knights attempting to deal tactfully with jokes about wrestling coaches and such lines as: Lying, stealing, and having a receptive arse are all absolute necessities for a political career. . . .

Had that bookseller ever read this play?

And every day, working at his desk, January would smell it, the bitter stench of hair and hooves and gunpowder burning, where someone had made smolder pots in a courtyard to disperse fever from the air. Walking back from Rose's rooms in the evening, he passed Dufillio's apothecary on Rue Chartres and saw that the show globes on display-enormous alembics and bulbous jars of colored liquid, blue and green and crimson in equal proportion most of the year-were now uniformly filled with red, a glowing warning to those travelers who came off the steamboats and walked about the city in the mosquito-whining dusk. There were fewer women in the markets, fewer stevedores even among the diminished numbers along the levee; fewer children played in the packed earth of the Place d'Armes. The Guards, when he went to the Cabildo in the mornings to see Olympe, hovered near to watch and listen, and hustled him and Gabriel quickly out. It seemed to him that the prisoners were very quiet.

On Wednesday a note reached him from Dr. Ker, asking his help at Charity Hospital with fever cases.

In two days, nearly a hundred had been brought in, mostly impoverished Germans and Irish from the shacks where Girod and Perdido Streets petered out into the marshes behind the town. For two days January worked late into the nights, wiping down bodies flushed with jaundice, making saline draughts, watching in helpless frustration as the various volunteer physicians of the town administered whatever remedies they considered appropriate for a disease as mysterious as death itself bleeding, emetics, “heroic” doses of calomel and mercury (“If their gums don't bleed, it ain't enough to work”), plasters that raised blisters on the emaciated flesh. Sometimes their patients recovered, damaged kidneys releasing bloodblack urine in a flood. Sometimes they died.

And with every new case brought in, with every wrung and wasted corpse January helped carry down to the courtyard for the dead-carts, he thought, Not the cholera. We can deal with the yellow jack if the cholera doesn't return.

The Louisiana Gazette ran an editorial furiously denouncing the white-livered cowards who fled the city-the healthiest spot in the nation! at the rumor of a little summer fever. Pere Eugenius, meeting January late one evening in the brick corridor of the hospital, remarked dryly that members of the City Council had requested that the Cathedral not toll the passing bells, “Lest folks coming through on the steamboats get the wrong impression.” Twice Burton Blodgett was ejected from the hospital's courtyard at the request of Councilman Bouille, when the journalist showed signs of trying to get up conversations with the volunteers who worked the wards.

On the second occasion, Bouille-who had been in and out of the hospital all day in an effort to accommodate Ker's requests for help and to assure the staff that there was, in fact, no epidemic-all but wrested the journalist away from a plump German gentleman named Weber, who had been a physician in Bavaria but was insufficiently versed in French or English to have much of a practice in New Orleans. “There is no cholera, understand?” He almost shouted the words at the German. “ Uerstehen? Der ist nein. . . . You make-him understand,” the Councilman ordered January, who happened to be nearby. “And you!” Bouille added, turning in fury to the loitering reporter and snatching the notebook from his hand. “Sniffing about where you have no business, seeking scandal and panic, like a muckraker hoping to stir up treasure from the bottom of a pool by fouling it for all who rely upon it for sustenance! All you care about is your miserable rag-no, not even that, but your wretched name, your delight in seeing `Our Correspondent' in print!”

“I care, sir,” retorted Blodgett, drawing himself up to his full height in the glare of the gallery lamps, “about the First Amendment of the Constitution-and also the laws of this city that guard a citizen against theft of his prop; rry.” He held out his hand for the notebook.

Bouille ripped the pages from it and threw them to the wet bricks of the courtyard. “Citizen? Citizen?”

“He is a citizen and a taxpayer.” Dr. Ker descended the gallery stair and crossed the courtyard quickly to the growing knot of volunteers, medical students, and surgeons. “The notebook is his property-and in fact, Charity Hospital is public property-”

“Easy for you to say,” snapped the Councilman, a wiry little French Creole who had been in three duels that January knew about. “You are not a native. You have no stake, you do not care what businessmen and investors in the rest of the world think of our city. You, an enemy of this nation! But I assure you, I will report your attitude to the Council, and you”-he turned on Blodgett again-“The editors of every paper in this city will hear, not only from me but from other members of the Council, members whose assistance and advertising they may require in future-”

“City Councilman Bouille says that there has been no cholera,” translated January quietly, to the thoroughly alarmed German. “And he would appreciate it if you do not speak on the subject to anyone. This is how panic and rumor start, which can ruin businesses.”

“People in the rest of the world, even in the rest of the United States, they do not understand our city,” Bouille stormed, cheeks mottled with rage. “They have only to see words like fever and cholera and they panic, like fools, like women, like children!” He stepped aside to avoid two volunteers carrying a dead man to the gate. “They think, `New Orleans is a dangerous place!' And it is not. It is the most healthful spot in the world. As its true inhabitants know! You shall hear from the Council,” he ranted at Dr. Ker, “your editors shall hear from the Council,” he continued, whirling again on Blodgett, who had stood this whole time like a man who perceives himself about to be martyred for Justice's sake, “and you, sir, shall hear from my-”

“I think it would be best if I had a few words with Mr. Blodgett outside,” said Ker firmly, and took the reporter's arm in his hand, nearly dragging him toward the hospital gates. Bouille looked as if he would follow and complete his challenge, but it began to rain again, a driving black downpour that cleared the court in moments.

Encountering January later in the fever ward, Ker muttered, “I don't hold with dueling as a rule, but there are people for whose sake one is almost willing to sacrifice one's principles.”

January laughed. “Don't lower your standards, sir. Bouille isn't worth it.”

The doctor laughed in turn, and went upstairs, to the small ward where two women had just been brought in, vomiting and with a number of other symptoms that bore a fearful resemblance to the scourge that had swept the city two summers before.

Returning home late, January found a note from Dominique, delivered at some time the previous day by being pushed under the garçonniere door. It said simply-or as simply as any communication from Dominique ever said anything-that due to social exigencies of the most pressing kind, Therese had not been at liberty to make the journey to Mandeville to inquire after her cousin Aveline until Wednesday. Upon arrival in that charming resort (its advantages over Milneburgh cataloged in full, with speculation appended concerning the cost of Mandeville real estate and Henri Viellard's abilities and inclination to purchase a cottage there), Therese had discovered that Aveline had been sold. Therese, who during her last visit with Aveline had been severely twitted on the subject of serving “a woman who ain't no better than she should be,” considered that this served Aveline right.

A VIOLENT ALTERCATION IN DEFENSE OF THE CONSTITUTION

AN AMERICAN REPORTER RISKS DEATH

In 1776, the founders of this great Republic fought David-like against the Goliath of tyrannical Foreign Monarchs for the rights enumerated in the Constitution, chief among which was the right to Freedom of the Press against any form of censorship, coercion, or hindrance. Yesterday afternoon, a representative of the American Press in this City likewise bravely laid his life in the balance in defense of those selfsame rights against just such a foreign would-be tyrant, a pettifogging bloodsucker named Bouille who, with the backing of the foreigners whose grip upon the throat of this beautiful City the recent elections attempted to loosen . . .

“Ya-allah, ” muttered January. He shoved the Abeille into his pocket as his brother-in-law sprang from the deck of the steamboat Boonslick and threaded toward him amid the morning confusion of the wharves. Gabriel, who'd accompanied January to the levee, ran to meet his father, full of news and questions; “It's going well,” said Paul Corbier, clasping January's hand. “I go back in the morning, but Michie Drialhet says no matter how much or how little work gets done, we'll make up the time somehow, for me to be here the seventeenth. Is she well?”

“She's well.”

Fever was in the air. Or more literally fever's fear. Even to the uninitiated, the market and the levee had a slack air, and those who sold, or loaded, or unloaded, or bargained in the long morning shadows of the market arcades were few, grim, and silent. One would think, looking about, that there were no wealthy people in the city, or that the well-off men had neither wives nor offspring. Only servants and the poor.

“The crisis seems to be over for the moment,” January replied to his brother-in-law's question about the past three days. “Ker paid me off this morning-out of his own pocket, I suspect-and slipped me and Weber and the other volunteers some food from the hospital stores, since there's no funds to cover us. But even without new cases of fever coming in, half the ones still in hospital have developed pneumonia.”

“I'm not sure but that isn't worse.” Paul added a couple of oranges from a market stand to the bread Gabriel had brought from home in a willow basket. “At least the yellow jack is over quickly. Pneumonia . . .” He shook his head. January remembered his own bout with pneumonia-lung-fever it had been called then-as a young man, weeks of lying exhausted in bed even after the fever and delirium had cleared. And at that, he had been carefully nursed by Bella. The patients who crowded the hospital wards, yellow with jaundice and wheezing as they tried to breathe, muttering in broken Gaelic or the dialects of upcountry Lombardy and Bavaria, stood as little chance of recovery as had the slaves on Bellefleur, once the sickness had them.