Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (37 page)

Like cushions the creepers absorbed his voice. The dark in the green aisles deepened. Somewhere close by, frogs began to croak.

Guardians of the way to Hades, Aristophanes had made frogs. Pale fat-bellied souls of the dead.

He found his way back to the Bayou Metairie and followed it east to the stone bridge of the Bayou Road. The white shell of the roadbed crunched beneath his boots as he walked back through the crying darkness to town, as if he trod a carpet of shattered bones. Twice he turned to look into the dark of the trees, positive someone followed and watched.

But there was no one there.

“Ah yes, they're out there.” Marie Laveau turned a slice of yesterday's stale bread over in a yellow pottery bowl of batter, judging with an exact eye its state of saturation before she laid it in the frying pan. “Cut-Arm and his friends.”

Morning light touched the heavy black curls of her hair where she'd pinned it carelessly on the top of her head; warmed the painted earthenware bowls lined around the table where her children sat, spoons in hand, waiting with eager expectancy for their breakfast. Someone had put yellow hibiscus and late-blooming magenta crape myrtle in a blue jug on the table, a splash of gaudy color. A dragonfly paused for an instant in the open windows, then flicked away.

“They've been out there for six months now, since he ran from General deBuys. I buy herbs now and then from them, and the snakes they trap and kill. I don't know where their village is.” She dropped the bread into the pan, sizzling in the butter; the heat from the hearth where she sat was like a glowing yellow wall. “I haven't looked.”

“I thought you knew everything,” said January.

She glanced up at him, lazy eyes fathomless. “I know there have been free colored who've sold information to the police about Cut-Arm and his friends, for money to buy themselves a shop, or their children an education,” Mamzelle Marie went on. “I know how some among the voodoos spy and creep and gather information, not knowing how to keep their mouths shut about what they learn. I know there are things that it's better for all I don't know.” She forked slices and laid them on the plate. At the back of the hearth a small pot bubbled, its smell rank and gamy and tiny bones floating among the roiling scum of fat. On the hearth's edge seven or eight mouse pelts lay spread to dry on a folded piece of newspaper. The heads, tails, and feet, neatly severed, lay on another piece on the windowsill, surrounded by a ring of powdered red pepper to keep off ants. “Will you eat with us?”

January shook his head. “I'll have some coffee, though.” He'd cooked up grits and molasses for Hannibal and himself before leaving the garçonniere that morning, all they could afford. Rose, who'd spent most of yesterday doing her translating in Hannibal's room to keep him company, had promised to return today, that the fiddler not be left by himself.

“Could you find out where the village is?” He drew a chair to the end of the table nearest the hearth. Mamzelle Marie continued to work as they talked, first finishing the lost bread, then checking the boiling mice, dipping a holed spoon into the broth and lifting clear tiny lumps of flesh, from which she picked the bones with her fingernails.

“I could, in time. But they trust me more, knowing I don't know and have not sought.” She laid a tiny femur on a cheap pottery plate. “I meet them Sundays, as you saw, or sometimes if I need something special or if they're not at the dancing I'll leave a drawing of it-a snake or a ground puppy or a deer's foot-in the crook of a certain tree. Like as not two days later it'll be here on the step.”

“Would Isaak have gone to Cut-Arm?”

“He might. Cut-Arm-Squire he was called back in those days-never had much use for the free colored. Ti Jon would have told him Isaak was a runaway, which of course was true. Cut-Arm's always willing to help those who'd be free.”

“Will you come with me?” he asked. “Help me? We can make a case of some kind, Corcet and I, out of the fact that the body they buried as Isaak's had no arsenic in it, but Greenaway can argue around that in five minutes. Greenaway's thick as thieves with Genevieve Jumon's lover. Maybe the man truly believes Madame Celie actually did the murder. Maybe it's just what he wants to believe.”

“They all believe,” said Mamzelle Marie quietly, “that one who worships the loa will do murder. It's all one to them, Protestant or Catholic. You read that jour nalist's story. They hear the drums at night, they see the people dancing in the Square, and they get afraid. This lover of Madame Genevieve, this banker who uses her money at interest, he loves the Protestant God, and sees God only with one face, and that face white.”

January remembered suddenly the woman in the Cathedral, looking around her nervously at the unfamiliar images and Stations of the Cross; the golden-haired child who supposed that nuns routinely kidnapped little girls. “Granville mistrusts even Catholics, and won't promote them past a certain level in his bank.”

She set down the last of the mouse-bones, rose and signed January to remain where he was. “I promised Dr. Ker I'd help him at the hospital today, but I'll send Marie with a note, that there's something else I must do.” She nodded to her daughter, who was clearing off the dishes, silent as the Zombi serpent. “Maybe when Cut-Arm sees me with you he'll know you're to be trusted, for all you're a policeman's friend.”

They walked out the Bayou Road, and along the path that skirted the Bayou Metairie on the lakeside, with the morning sun strong on their heads. After an hour's walk they left the path and plunged north into the cipriere.

Ahead of him, January watched Mamzelle Marie's straight slim shoulders, half-bared by her blouse of red-and-blue calico, sunlight filtering through the oak leaves to dapple the coppery skin. Her mother, he thought, or her mother's mother, had paid the price of freedom, as his own mother had, taking a white man into her bed and using whatever she had to use to buy that freedom for her child. Fortune Gerard's mother had beyond doubt done exactly the same thing, and why not? Who among the free colored wouldn't betray Cut-Arm to the whites for money to buy themselves a shop, and buy schooling for their children? If you're knee-deep in water on a sinking boat, you get your child and your child's children yet unborn onto shore-or at least onto a sounder vessel-at whatever price you and those in the doomed craft with you have to pay.

Mother, he thought, I've done you an injustice-not that Livia would ever have admitted to making any sacrifice for anyone. His hand sought the rosary in his pocket: Virgin Mary, who understands women, forgive me.

“See there?” Mamzelle Marie pointed to a bag of red flannel, hanging nearly hidden by beards of moss in the branches of a cypress tree. “That's Ti Bossu, that guards the paths. They move him from place to place, Cut-Arm and his friends. They know we're here.”

Throughout the day they sought, working their way upstream. Ponds and marshes and sloughs crisscrossed the land among the trees, cut-off loops of old waterways that once had absorbed a high rise in the lake or one of the greater bayous or the river itself. Cypress and willow hung gray-trunked over the still water, cypress knees poking from the green sheets of duckweed like an army of submarine monsters frozen in the act of rising to invade the land. Palmetto and oak backed them, and thickets of loblolly pine, false harbingers of hope that the going would get easier-then suddenly they were in wet ground again, trying to find their way along root lines and ridges without getting soaked.

How Mamzelle Marie determined their route January didn't know. He was glad of her guidance as they strove patiently through the woods, coming out now among the pines of the lakeshore, now above the fallow cane fields along the Bayou Metairie. He was glad of her company, too, in the hot silences of the advancing day. Sometimes she would point out the faint prints of tortoises or snakes in the soft mud of the water verges, identifying water moccasin or garter snake or king snake by their traces; sometimes speak of the habits of the deer, or the possums, or this or that planter who lived along the River Road. She asked him about Paris, and his studies at the hospital there, and listened while he told of the balls given by members of Napoleon's lately come nobility to which members of the new King's diplomatic corps would not go.

He found himself speaking to her of things he hadn't remembered for years, or had put deliberately from his mind, and with them all the memories of that time of his life: walking with Ayasha along the Seine on summer mornings when the hay boats would come in from the countryside, or sitting in the window of their rooms in the Rue de l'Aube late at night, a balcony barely wider than a windowsill, hearing the voices from the cafe on the ground floor and seeing its lights reflected on the sootblack brick walls on the other side of the street, but unable to see the cafe itself because of the height of the building and the narrowness of the street.

All memory, it seemed to him, of Paris had been erased from his mind by those final, terrible months of the cholera, by Ayasha's death. Now Mamzelle Marie's quiet uninflected questions coaxed it forth again, gentle as if seen in candlelight. He understood then how she came to know everything, to fit all things together in a giant mosaic of intelligence. She listened, and she remembered, and she cared.

“Your sister, now,” she said, as they stopped past noon and shared water from one of the bottles he carried slung over his shoulder. “She came to the voodoos first out of hatred, looking for the Power to fight those she believed turned her mother into a whore. All she saw was the hoodoo, the juju: Burn this candle and money will come to you and make you strong. Sprinkle graveyard dust on this man's floor and he will die. She made witch dolls against your stepfather for years, and buried bottles of beef gall and red pepper with St. Denis Janvier's name written on them in the cemetery. And, of course, he did die. I never met a human being who didn't, in time.”

“I remember when Mama found the makings of a hoodoo in Olympe's room.” January unwrapped the packet of bread and cheese he'd brought along, handed the voodooienne some of each, and wondered a little that he'd be here, sitting on an oak root with this woman. Dangerous, they said. A poisoner or a procuress. Certainly, Granville would have added, an idolator. An enigma who danced with the serpent Damballah.

But then all women were enigmas, infinitely faceted. Rose like a many-petaled blossom of interleaved brilliance and pain, fear of men and love of gardening, knowledge of steam engines and chemical reactions and optics all woven together. Olympe, who spoke to spirits in bottles and then turned and played Juba-this and Juba-that with her children. You never knew them, thought January, and for some reason saw in his mind the pink-tinted portrait of a sixteen-year-old maid-in-waiting to a murdered French Queen.

“Sometimes you need to hate, until the hate's all gone,” said Mamzelle Marie. “Until you see for yourself what a waste of time it is. The loa understand that, the way the saints sometimes don't.” She plucked a purple blossom of marsh verbena, and turned it in the fawnspotted light. “Your sister could have gone Dr. Yellowjack's way, all cleverness and skill and Power, with no more heart to him than a shrike. Or been like Mambo Oba, selling gris-gris and telling fortunes and reading the bones, seeing nothing but the money in the pot on the kitchen shelf. There's good and there's bad, in people and in the loa alike-saints and devils, light and dark, and sometimes the dark ain't so dark as you think.”

January was silent, remembering Olympe in the King's arms.

“What was it your friend likes to say, about what the maggot said to the King of France? He told me once.”

“(Text unavailable)” said January. “It's Greek, from the playwright Menander. 'We live not how we wish to, but how we can.' ”

“So,” she said. “The loa help us do that, Michie Ben. Same way the saints help us do that. Sometimes God seems a long way off. I've seen you watch the voodoo dancing, and I've seen you light candles and pray for your sister's soul to be safe from Hell.”

The day's heat and the constant movement had told on her, as it had on him; a line had settled between the corners of her nostrils and the side of her mouth, and another pinched, very slightly, the dark clear arch of her brows. “But so many are in Hell now. The loa come here-here to Hell, to us, to be with us as we dance. And they say, We didn't get left behind in Africa. We're here with you, on the ships on the ocean, in this land. We remember your names and what you care about, you and your parents and your children. You judge your sister harshly.”

January worked the cork back into their water bottle, and did not meet the woman's eyes. “ `Thou shalt have no other gods before me,' God said.”

“Is that what you think they are? Ogu and Ezili and Bosou? Some other god other than the one that's in the Cathedral?” Her eyebrows lifted, gently mocking. “Ben, when you go see a white man, you put on your best black coat and your best high hat and you talk your best French that you learned in school, and he listens to you because of what you look like, as much as for what you say. If you could paint your face white you'd do that, too. But when you go see Ti Jon, or Natchez Jim, or the Widow Puy, you put on a calico shirt and talk gombo like the rest of them”-her voice slurred articles and pronouns in the Creole way-"so they'll listen to you and won't say, Hah, there goes somebody who's like the whites.

“You think you're smarter than God, Ben? You think God hasn't figured that one out, too? If a man's been beat, and his woman's been raped, by any man, white or black or purple, you think that man's going to see God's face the way the man who wronged him tells him it is? God finds all sorts of ways to speak to those that need Him, Ben. He's a man with a sword, to those that need a rod and staff to comfort them, whether that man's called Ogu or St. James. He's the man with the keys in his hand, to those that're in chains, and seeking a way through the door to Heaven. You're like your friend Granville, that only sees God's face like his own in the mirror.”

Still January said nothing. But he remembered the leap of flame against the brickyard walls, and how it felt to surrender to the drums, to couple as gods couple, or animals, without grief or disappointment, laying all in the hand of God.