03 Graveyard Dust bj-3 Read online

  If it had been salt, January knew, it would have been bad enough. Salt was the mark of curses and ill. But this wasn't salt.

  It was graveyard dust, a cursing to the death.

  There was nothing else, no sign to tell him who might have been here, who had done the rite.

  She's probably home in bed. Nothing to do with this at all.

  January crossed himself and walked swiftly back to the house. Though the drums had ceased, he seemed to hear them, knocking in the growl of the thunder, in the darkness at his back.

  Colonel Pritchard was waiting for him on the gallery. "When I pay four men for five hours I don't expect to get only four hours and a half." The American studied January with light tan eyes that seemed too small for his head. As far as January knew, the man had never been a colonel of anything-there was certainly nothing of the military in his bearing-but he knew better than to omit the title in speaking to him.

  "No, Colonel," he said, in his best London English. "I am most sorry, sir. I heard a noise, as if of an intruder, around..."

  "I have servants to deal with noises if that's what you heard." The dust-colored eyes cut to Hannibal, who smiled sunnily under his graying mustache; Pritchard's mouth writhed with disgust. "And when I pay for four men for five hours I don't expect to get only three men and a half. And you a white man, too." He plucked the flask from the pocket of Hannibal's shabby, long-tailed black coat. Pulling the cork, the Colonel made another face. "Opium! I reckon that's what happens when you spend your days playing music with Negroes." He hurled the flask away, and January heard it smash against the brick of the kitchen wall.

  "I suppose that means an end to the champagne as well," Hannibal noted philosophically as they followed the master of the house back up the stairs. He coughed heavily, January reaching out to catch him by the arm as he half-doubled over with the violence of the spasm. Pritchard glanced over his shoulder at them from the top of the stairs, impatience and disdain on his heavyfeatured face. "Just as well. I think we've seen the last of the chamber pot, too."

  They remained in the ballroom, under the Colonel's sour eye, until two in the morning. Despite the open windows, the room only grew hotter, and the pain in January's back and shoulders increased until he thought he would prefer to die. Your back carries the music, he was always telling his pupils. Strong back, light hands. It surprised him that he was able to play at all.

  At around eleven, after a particularly gay mazurka, Aeneas came to the dais with a tray of lemonade. "What's that?" Pritchard loomed at once from among the potted palms. "Who told you to give these men anything?"

  "Mrs. Pritchard did, sir." The cook's English wasn't good, but he took great care with it, as if he feared the consequences of the smallest mistake.

  "Mrs. Pritchard-" The Colonel turned to his wife, who, probably anticipating the objection, had positioned herself not far away. "I thought I made it abundantly clear that I'm paying these men in coin, after they have satisfactorily completed their duties, and not by permitting them to make themselves free with my substance."

  "It's such a very hot night, Colonel," she said soothingly. Her English was just as awkward-and just as wary-as the cook's. "And, you understand, it is what is done..."

  "It is not 'done' in this house..."

  During their low-voiced altercation Aeneas stepped back beside the piano where January sat and whispered, "There's a boy back in the kitchen asking after you, Michie January. Says he's got to see you. Says he's your nephew."

  "Gabriel?" January looked up, trying to cover the fact that his arms were too weak from the strain of playing to reach for the lemonade. It was far later than his sister Olympe would ever have permitted any child of hers to be on the streets.

  Panic touched him at the recollection of the drums, the blood...

  "That's what he says his name is, yes, sir. He says he has a message for you, but he wouldn't tell me what." January glanced at his employer. Pritchard was already looking over at him, clearly expecting the next dance to start up. "I don't think I'm going to be able to get over there until the end of this."

  Equally impossible, of course, that the Colonel would consent to write out permission for any of his servants to escort the boy home.

  "He's no trouble," Aeneas assured January. "I'll tell him he has to wait. He's already asked if he can help with the tarts and the negus."

  That certainly sounded like Gabriel. But as he maneuvered his arms back to where the edge of the piano would take the weight of them and struck up the country dance "Mutual Promises," January felt his heart chill with dread. Something had happened. He felt sick inside.

  Let me introduce you to Monsieur le Cholera, he had said to the drums that had mocked him for the hard-won security of his freedom, for the complex beauties of the music that was his life. January could still remember the first time he'd met St.-Denis Janvier, the sugar broker who had purchased his mother, himself, and his sister Olympe. Could still see in his mind the man's close-fitting coat of bottle-green satin and the fancy-knit patterns of his stockings, the eight gold fobs and seals that hung on his watch chain. Could still feel the rush of relief that went through him when that paunchy little man had told him, I have purchased your beautiful mother in order to set her free, and you, too, and your sister. Relief unspeakable. I'll be safe now.

  No more nightmares about his mother going away, as others on the plantation had gone so abruptly away. No more fear that someone would one day say to him, You are going to go live someplace else now-someplace where he knew no one.

  All his life, it seemed to him, he had wanted a home, wanted a place where he knew he was safe. He'd been eight. It had taken him a little time to learn to be a free man, to learn the ins and outs of a different station, what was and was not permitted. To learn to speak proper French and not say tote for "carry," or aw when he meant "bien stir. " But throughout the boyhood spent in the gar?onni?re behind the house on Rue Burgundy that St.-Denis Janvier gave his new mistress, throughout the years of schooling in one of the small private academies that catered to the children of white men and their colored plac?es, January had never lost that sense of being, in his heart of hearts, on firm footing. At least the worst wasn't going to happen. At least he wasn't going to be taken away from those he loved.

  From "Mutual Promises" they whirled into "A Trip to Paris." The ladies laughed and skipped in their bellshaped skirts, their enormous lace-draped sleeves that stood out ten inches from their arms; gentlemen flirted decorously as they held out white-gloved hands to white-gloved hands. Mr. Greenaway of the pomaded curls hovered protectively around the wealthy Widow Redfern, fetching her crepes and tarts and lemonade and presumably soothing her not-very-evident grief while she talked business with Granville the banker. Granville himself showed surprising lightness of step in dancing with his drab little pear-shaped wife and with every pretty maid and matron on the American side of the room. From the sideline, Mrs. Pritchard watched with resigned envy.

  The American ladies all seemed plainer than their French counterparts, duller, an effect January knew wasn't entirely owing to having less sense of dress. No American lady would be seen in public, even at a ball, in the rice powder and rouge that no Creole lady would be seen without. It seemed to him, too, that they laughed less. He supposed if he were a woman married to an American he wouldn't laugh much, either.

  St.-Denis Janvier had sent him to study with an Austrian music master, a martinet who had introduced to him the complex and disciplined joys of technique. Music had always been the safe place to which his soul had gone as a child: joining in the work-hollers, picking out harmonies, inventing songs about big storms or his aunt Jemma's red beans or the time Danro from the next plantation had fallen in love with Henriette up at the big house. All of this, Herr Kovald had said, was what savages did, who knew no better. Kovald had played for him that first time the Canon of Pachelbel-and January's soul had entered onto that magic road, that quest for beauty that had no end.

  He
had studied healing also, and in much the same fashion: first with old Mambo Jeanne at Bellefleur Plantation, who'd showed him and Olympe both where to gather slippery elm, mullein, lady's slipper, and sassafras in the woods. Later he'd been apprenticed to Jose Gomez, a free man of color who had a little surgery down on Rue Chartres. Reading the books Gbmez had of the English surgeons John and William Hunter and watching dissections of sheep and pigs from the slaughterhouses, January had seen no difference between the music that was the life of his soul and the harmonies of blood and organs and bones. And when, finally, the long wars between France and England and the United States were done and it was safe to cross the seas, January had gone to Paris, to study surgery at the Hotel-Dieu.

  He'd been admitted to the College of Surgeons there and had continued to work at the clinic, unable to go into private practice either in Paris or in New Orleans. To be sure, free surgeons of color practiced in both cities, but they were invariably of a polite walnut snuff, or hue. January had long accepted the fact that no American, and few Frenchmen, were ready to trust their lives to someone who so much resembled a pantomime-show Sultan's Ethiopian door guard.

  "At least here in Paris one is free," Ayasha had said to him, Ayasha who had fled her father's harim in Algiers rather than be wed against her will. "And no one can take that from you."

  Ayasha had worked in Paris as a seamstress since the age of fourteen. By the time January met her, she owned her own shop.

  No one can take that from you.

  Except, of course, January had discovered, Monsieur le Cholera.

  It would be two years in August since he had returned home and found Ayasha dead.

  Since then he had discovered that he had progressed not one step farther than that terrified slave boy on BelleAeur Plantation, in terms of what life could and could not take away.

  It was June. A deadly time in New Orleans.

  "That's absolute nonsense," blustered a railway speculator in a dark gray coat. "Tom Jenkins says he's been down the river almost to the Belize and there hasn't been a sign of yellow jack, much less the cholera, anywhere in the countryside."

  "Not in the countryside, no." Dr. Ker of the Charity Hospital took a glass of champagne from the little waiter's tray with a polite nod of thanks. "On the whole the cholera isn't a disease of the countryside. We've had two cases of yellow fever here in the city."

  "Two?" Granville snorted. "Well, there's a reason to turn tail and run, by gosh! Are you sure they were yellow fever, Doctor? Dr. Connaud-he's my physician, and a splendid fellow with a knife, just splendid!-says it isn't possible that there should be epidemics three summers in a row."

  "It's the newspapers," declared Colonel Pritchard. "Damned journalists'll print anything that'll sell their filthy rags. They don't care about the local businesses, or what it does to a city's property values if word gets around there's fever. All they think about is getting a few more copies sold.

  As for you, Dr. Ker, I'm sure you'll find if you open those two so-called fever victims up that there's some kind of reason for the same symptoms..."

  Was that what young Gabriel had walked from Rue Douane in the old French town to tell him?

  January wondered. What he wouldn't tell the servants of this stranger's house? That Olympe was sick? Or her husband, Paul? One of the other children?

  Yellow fever? Cholera?

  Not cholera, he prayed desperately. Blessed Virgin, please, not that.

  And while his arms trembled with fatigue, and his heart squeezed with dread, and he felt as if someone were trying to pry his shoulder blades loose with crowbars, he skipped through moulinets, bris?s, cross-passes, and olivettes, as lightly as a happy child running in a meadow of flowers. A wave of faintness passed over him; he concentrated on ballottes and glissades, on the glittering protection of the music's beauty that could almost carry his mind away from the pain.

  Hannibal swung into a lilting solo air, embroidering effortlessly as January lowered his throbbing arms to his thighs to rest. Like a bird answering a slightly drunk muse, Jacques took up the thread of music on his cornet. Uncle Bichet came in third on the cello, the round lenses of his spectacles flashing in the gaslight, an odd contrast to the tribal scarring on his thin old face. At intervals in his harangue against those who conspired to ruin the local real estate market with rumors of plague, Pritchard watched them dourly; watched, too, the unobtrusive door to the back stairs.

  January wished the Colonel buried alive in graveyard dust.

  "Lemonade only, you understand?" January heard him say to Aeneas, when after a purgatorial eternity of heat and tobacco stench and aching muscles the clock at last sounded two. "Mrs.

  Pritchard will be over in the kitchen to weigh up the leftover chicken and pastries. I don't want the lot of you gorging on them or passing them out to those musicians. And I won't have them wasted. Mrs. Pritchard..."

  His voice lifted in a preemptory yap. His wife-who might have been presumed to have earned a little privilege on the night of her own birthday ball-turned with a sigh from the farewell embraces of her friends.

  "He's quite right," said the Widow Redfern, who had wormed her way-Mr. Greenaway doglike in tow-into the Creole group of ladies. "I find one always has to count the champagne bottles after a party, and measure the sugar. It's really quite prudent of your husband..."

  "Am?ricaines," murmured Madame Jumon, flashing a humorous grimace as she kissed Mrs.

  Pritchard warmly on her unpowdered cheeks and took her departure on her son's black-banded arm. "What can one do?"

  Gabriel was waiting in the kitchen. He was a tall boy, slim like his mother, January's sister Olympe, and handsome as his father, who was an upholsterer with a shop on Rue Douane. He had, too, his father Paul's sunny goodness of heart. As January crossed from the back gallery to the kitchen he could see his nephew, through the wideflung windows, helping Aeneas and the kitchen maid clean up endless regiments of crystal wineglasses, champagne glasses, water glasses; dessert forks, coffee spoons, teaspoons, dessert spoons; platters, salvers, pitchers, creamers, tureens; a hundred or more small plates of white German china painted with yellow roses, half again that many napkins of yellow linen.

  Above the foulness of the privies on the hot night air, the dense stink of Camp Street's uncleaned gutters, from around the corner of the stables January could still catch the whiff of drying blood.

  "Uncle Ben!"

  "You look like you been pulled through the mangle and no mistake." Aeneas set aside the mixing bowl he was drying and unstoppered a pottery jar of ginger water.

  "Danny, bring Michie Janvier a cup." The little waiter fetched it; Gabriel discreetly supported January's elbow while January raised it to his lips. "You ever want to hire this boy out as a cook, you come speak to me about it, hear?"

  "I'll do that." January returned the cook's grin, then studied the inside of the empty cup with mock gravity and measured with the fingers of his other hand the distance from the rim to the damp line the liquid had left. "Looks like a gill and a half I drank. You want to mark that down for the Colonel's records, in case he gets after you for where it went?"

  Aeneas laughed. "Me, I'm just thanking God there's no way for him to measure the air in here, or he'd sure be after us about what your nephew breathed since eleven o'clock. Kitta, you got all the saucers in?"

  They had to know, thought January, looking at the kitchen maid Kitta, the watchful-eyed little Dan bringing still more champagne glasses and yellow-flowered plates back from the house. He saw how they smiled at one another and how the little man relaxed when the woman touched his hand.

  Which of them, he wondered, had sent for the voodoo-man?

  Or woman.

  January glanced down at Gabriel and saw the shaky relief in the boy's smile. Of course he wouldn't have told these people about sickness, if it was the cholera. That was a good way to get a thrashing from a man like the Colonel, freeborn or not. How dare you go around scaring my servants with your lies? Most A
mericans didn't understand the difference between free coloreds and black slaves.

  "Thank you for looking after him," January said. "We'll be bidding you good night." He put a hand on Gabriel's shoulder and guided him from the kitchen and into the shadows of the yard.

  Behind them Aeneas called out, "You mind how you go.

  That'll be all we need, thought January. Some officious member of the City Guard demanding to see our papers. 'Are you aware that it's two in the morning? That the cannon in the Place d'Armes fired off at ten to warn people like you"-meaning both blacks and colored-"to be off the street?"

  He glanced back at the kitchen. The other musicians had already gone. By the grubby topaz glow of a dozen smoky tallow candles, the cook, the menservants, and the kitchen maid Kitta had recommenced the Augean task of washing every dish, fork, and sparkling bit of hollowware.

  Little Dan carried a yoke of pails to the cistern; firelight leapt over Aeneas's sweaty face as he fanned up the flames under the boiler to heat it. In the ballroom's four long windows the white beauty of the gaslight dimmed and disappeared. Carriage wheels creaked and slopped in the muddy street, and voices called a final good-bye: French. The Americans had left a full thirty minutes ago. A moment later Mrs. Pritchard emerged from the rear door of the house, carrying a candlestick; she murmured, "Soir" to January and Gabriel as they passed from the kitchen's lights into the dark side yard that led around to the stilldeeper darkness of the street.

  There was no sound around them now save the gulping of the frogs, the incessant whine of mosquitoes, the drum of the cicadas in the trees. He asked softly, "What is it?"

  Not the cholera. Please, Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin, not the cholera.

  "It's Mama." Gabriel's bright smile, the cheerfulness he'd shown in the presence of the servants, dissolved, showing the fear in his eyes. "The City Guards came and got her. They say she done murder-killed a man."