Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (8 page)

“So why did Célie Jumon buy a gris-gris from Olympe?” asked Dominique, eager as a child. “And why do they think the gris-gris ended up poisoning Isaak instead of Geneviève?”

“Olympe says the gris-gris had nothing to do with Isaak's death, that it wasn't poison at all,” said January. “What I'm trying to learn now is, where was Isaak Jumon between Thursday, when Geneviève swore out a warrant distraining him as her slave-”

“Oh, shame!” cried Dominique.

“Sounds like her,” remarked Livia Levesque.

 “-and his death on Monday night. Not to mention such things as why Jumon didn't leave a sou to Geneviève, which he didn't.”

“She'd have poisoned the boy herself, I wager, out of spite.”

“Mama, surely not!”

“Could she have? Isaak would be staying as far away from Geneviève as he could. He didn't take refuge with Célie's parents. . . .”

“He wouldn't have anyway,” said Minou, gathering a length of mist-fine point d'esprit over the head of the other sleeve. “Monsieur Gérard never liked Madame Jumon, even before the shop rental incident, because of her `former way of life.' He was mortified nearly to death when his precious daughter Célie married her son. AIthough after thirteen years you'd think Monsieur Gérard would forget about Geneviève being a plaçée. I mean, everyone else has, and he's always polite to Iphègénie and Phlosine and me when we come into his shop. Although just the other day he said to Phlosine-”

“Thirteen years?” January set down his cup. “Thirteen years? I thought . . . I mean, I know Jumon never married, so there was no reason for him to put his plaçée aside...”

“No reason? That hypocritical moneybox, no reason? And it wasn't he that left her,” Livia added, returning her attention to the sleeve. “She left him, or rather bade him leave, for she kept the house and the furniture and all he'd given her. And Jumon did marry, two years after that, to get control of his mother's plantation I daresay, which she wasn't going to turn loose to any man who hadn't done his duty by the family and given her a grandson. Not that it did him the slightest bit of good, or her, either. She went to Paris. The wife, I mean.”

“Wait a minute-What?” It was unheard of for a plaçée to leave her protector. “Geneviève left Jumon? Why?”

“Jealous,” snapped his mother. “She heard there was marriage in the wind.”

“Oh, don't be silly, Mama, you don't know that!” protested Minou. “And no one-I mean, we all know . . .” She hesitated, looking suddenly down at her sewing, and a dark flush rose under the matte fawn of her skin.

“We all know men marry?” finished her mother. Dominique drew a steadying breath, and when she raised her head again, wore a cheerful smile. As if, thought January, it mattered little to her that the fat bespectacled young planter who had bought her house for her, and fathered the child who had died last year, would not one day marry, too. “Well, if she's as grasping as you say, she wouldn't have let him go for a little thing like that.” She made her voice languid and light.

“Hmph,” said Livia, unable to have it both ways. “At any rate, that whining nigaude Noëmie-his wife-went back to Paris, and Laurence's maman sold up the plantations, and the brother's never had a regular mistress at all, so far as anyone knows.” She shrugged. “Laurence Jumon never breathed a peep. When he was sick back in twenty-four he gave Geneviève money to buy both their sons from him, in case he died, and they'd still be part of his estate. That mother of his would have sold off her white grandchildren, if she'd ever had any, never mind her colored ones. Jumon and Geneviève had parted company by that time, but he paid every penny to educate those boys, not that anything ever came of that. For all the airs Antoine and his mother give themselves Antoine's just a clerk at the Bank of Louisiana. And Isaak . . .”

Her gesture amply demonstrated what she thought of a boy of education becoming a marble sculptor. “He's as bad as you, Ben, wasting the gifts M'sieu Janvier gave you...”

“Not wasting them at all, Mama.” January smiled at her. He'd long ago realized that being annoyed at his mother would be the occupation of a lifetime. “M'sieu Janvier paid for my piano lessons as well as for Dr. Gomez to teach me medicine. I think as long as I'm making money at one or the other . . ”

“Not much money.”

But January refused to fight, though the wound hurt. “So Geneviève turned M'sieu Laurence out, because of this engagement-it would have given him control of more property, surely? A plantation?”

Livia looked as if she'd have liked to enlarge on her son's folly and ingratitude, but in the end she could no more resist slandering a rival than a child could resist a sweet. Besides, reasoned January, the conversation could always be brought back around to his shortcomings. “Trianon,” said Livia, with spiteful satisfaction. “And another one across the lake. Geneviève must have hoped to make free with some of the proceeds. But Madame Cordelia sold them up, and put the money in town lots. If she'd held on-”

“But you see,” said Dominique, “Geneviève and Isaak have been estranged for just years. Isaak was the only one of the boys who was still friends with their father-and I always thought poor M'sieu Laurence seemed terribly lonely. He'd come to the Blue Ribbon Balls and chat with us girls, and be so gallant and sweet, not like a lot of the gentlemen who look at you so when they don't think you can see, even if the whole town knows you already have a friend. All he wanted to do was dance. . . .”

Livia's sniff was more expressive than many books January had read.

“No, truly, Mama, we can tell.” Dominique gently discouraged Madame la Comtesse de Marzipan, the less obese of Livia's two butter-colored cats, from playing with the ribbons she was sewing on the sleeve. “At any rate, when he was taken sick last fall, both Isaak and Célie visited him every day. At least that's what Thèrése tells me, and her cousin was one of M'sieu Laurence's maids. When M'sieu Laurence died he left Isaak-oh, I don't know how much money, and some property as well, I think.”

“He left him a warehouse at the foot of Rue Bienville, half-interest in his cotton press, a lot on Rue Marais and Rue des Ursulines, which if you ask me isn't worth seven hundred dollars, fifteen hundred dollars' worth of railway shares in the Atlantic and Northeastern, and three thousand dollars cash.”

January didn't even bother to inquire where his mother had obtained these figures. He merely whistled appreciatively. “Not bad for a marble carver living in the back of his employer's house. I presume they've only been waiting for the probate.”

“Which would have gone through a lot more quickly had not four-fifths of the judges in this city turned tail and fled at the first rumor of fever.”

“Well, yes,” said Dominique: “But also, M'sieu Laurence's mother contested the will. You are going to do something about it, aren't you, Ben? Not about the will, I mean, but about Olympe being arrested? You can't let them-I mean, they won't really . . .” She let the words hang her trail off unsaid.

January was silent. Madame la Duchesse de Gateaubeurre prowled idly into the room, levitated effortlessly up onto his knee, and settled her bulk, making bread with her broad soft paws.

“Olympe wouldn't have done such an awful thing!” insisted Dominique. “And as for Célie Gérard having had anything to do with it-stuff! Why would she have wanted to kill her husband?”

January remembered that sweet-faced child turning away from Shaw, her hand pressed to her mouth with the shock of having confirmed the doubts that had tormented her through the horror of the night. Mamzelle Marie's words rose to his mind: a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man.

Célie, Isaak Jumon had said. And died.

“I don't know,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe I ought to find that out.”

“I knew about the will, yes.” Basile Nogent rested his forehead for a moment on his knuckles, against the shoulder of an infant angel carved to look like a white boy. The sculptor was small and middle-aged and had the sad thinness to him that sometimes befalls men when their wives die. The empty silence of the other side of the little cottage, the stillness of the yard where the kitchen doors gaped dark and deserted, told its own story. January knew that thinness, that shadow in the eyes. It was what had driven him from Paris, what had driven him back to the strange land of his tangled birth roots and the only family he had.

It was clear to him, as if he had read it in a book, that Isaak and Celie had been this man's family. And now Isaak was gone.

“Isaak never spoke much about his family to me,” Basile Nogent said, in the hoarse rough voice of a consumptive. “He told me once that he wanted to put them behind him and, another time, that he forgave them, both father and mother, for what they were, for what neither could help being.”

He shook his head. “An old quarrel, he said. And I understood that it was a pain that he-that Isaak-knew he had to overcome. He saw his father many times, and his uncle Mathurin. He'd meet them near the coffee stands at the market, or in a cafe on the Place d'Armes; sometimes he'd go by the big house on Rue St. Louis and sit in the courtyard and talk. It is not good when families divide like that, for whatever reason. There.” He pointed to the marble block of a half-carved tombstone, like a classical trophy-of-arms: sword, shield, wreath, and cloak. A graven ribbon looped the sword hilt, bearing the legend JUMON. “Mathurin Jumon commissioned that last September, at his brother's death.”

A quirk of irony broke the grief of that wrinkled face, and he ran one thumb-a knob of muscle like a rockover the curls of the cherub's temple. “There is a species of insanity that strikes when a will is read. I have wrought marble for forty years. . . .” His gesture expanded to touch the two rooms of his little shop, to the doors that opened into a yard filled with yet more images still: a dog , sleeping  on a panoply of arms; two putti struggling, laughing, over a bunch of grapes; Athene with her owl reading a book. “As three-quarters of what I do is to decorate graves, I see people every week who have just heard wills read.” His breath whispered what might at another time in his life have been a laugh, and he coughed again. “I always told Isaak that when I die I'm going to be like the savage Indians and have everything piled up in a big pyre and burned with me.”

The sculptor again briefly closed his eyes. Did he think he could hide the thought that went across them? wondered January. The grief that asked, Who do I have to leave it to anyway?

And the same, he thought, could be said of himself. And for an instant the memory came back to him, suddenly and agonizingly, as if he had found Ayasha's body yesterday; as if he had never seen that picture in his mind before this moment. As if he had not awakened every morning for twenty-two months in bed alone.

Ayasha dead.

He still couldn't imagine how that could be possible.

Couldn't imagine what he would do with the remainder of his life.

“He was-a good boy.” Nogent's voice broke into January's grief, like a physical touch on his arm. “A good young man.” The rain that had been falling since early afternoon, while January had been on the streetcar to the American faubourg of St. Mary to teach his three little piano students there, finally lightened and ceased; a splash of westering sunlight spangled the puddles in the yard.

“Tell me about Thursday,” said January. “About the day they came for him.”

Nogent sighed again, as if calling all his strength from the core of his bones to do work that had to be done. “Thursday,” he said. “Yes.” He led January to the back of the shop, where the light struck a simple block of marble. At first glance the headstone seemed unadorned save for the name, LIVAUDAIS. But sculpted over the block was what appeared to be a veil of lace, the work so exquisitely fine that the very pattern of the lace was reproduced, draped half over the name, the name readable through it-a truly astonishing piece. “We were working on this for old Madame Livaudais. Two-two City Guards came with the warrant. Isaak put aside his chisel and looked at it, and said, `This is ridiculous.' Very calmly, just like that. To the men he said, `I see my mother has decided to waste everyone's time. Please excuse me for just a moment while I get my coat and let my wife know where I'll be.' Cool-cold as the marble itself. But the way he touched the block”-Nogent mimicked the gesture, resting his palm for a moment on the flowered delicacy of the counterfeit lace's edge, holding it there, bidding it farewell-“I knew.”

The movement of his eyes pointed back to the kitchen building that lay athwart the end of the yard. A little flight of stairs ascended to the rooms above, a garçonnière and chambers that would have belonged to household servants, had there been any. “He went up to the rooms they had, over the kitchen there. I kept the Guards talking, led them away from the doors here so they would not see. He must have gone up the scaffolding of the cistern-you see it there in the corner?-and over the wall into the next courtyard, and so out onto Rue St. Philippe and gone. He didn't tell Célie; only that he was going with them. The Guards must have waited here for him twenty minutes before they went to look. I think he did that so Célie wouldn't be accused of helping a runaway to escape. Even then, he thought of her.”

“May I see?”

Nogent followed him out into the yard and to the cistern, where, sure enough, January found the scuffing and scrape marks on the frame of the scaffolding that held up the enormous coopered barrel in a corner of the yard. Like most yards in the French town, Nogent's was hemmed by a high wall, brick faced with stucco that had fallen out in patches, affording handholds. The fringe of resurrection fern along the top seemed to be broken, as if by passage of a body going over, but with the new growth already flourishing it was impossible to tell. January made a move to scramble up himself and see, but the lancing pain in his arms as he lifted them brought him up short.

“And the night of the twenty-third?” he asked, turning back to the old sculptor. “The night he died? Was young Madame Jumon here then?”

“That animal Shaw asked the same.” Nogent spoke without rancor-animal was in fact one of the more polite terms by which members of the French and free colored communities referred to Americans. “And I tell you what I told him. Madame Célie and I had supper together, here in the house, just as dusk fell. Then I went to bed. I tire more easily than I used to, you understand.”