Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (11 page)

“Well, hell, I had him give me a lick or two with that cane of his for sayin' damn,” mused the runaway man. “For a man as crooked as a snake's hard-on he sure doesn't hold with cussin'. But I think he was mostly pissed 'cause old Sangre bargained him hard over that day's cargo. . . .”

“Other way around,” contradicted the whore, taking a bottle of laudanum from her reticule and dosing her whiskey with it. “Sancho Sangre's buyin' these days, not sellin'. Runnin' guns down to the rebels in New Grenada an' makin' the poor bastards pay double for rusty old blunderbusses you couldn't kill a dog with, less'n you whacked it over the head with the butt.” She scratched down the front of her emerald silk gown, tattered and soiled and sloppily laced over her bare flesh: it was amply evident she didn't even have a chemise beneath, let alone a corset. “Sangre still screwed Mulm good over the deal, though. I thought old Wispy-Whiskers would get his bully, Burke, to have a little word with Sangre on the way out, but Sangre brought three or four friends of his own....”

“I'd still have give a lot to hear Hessy when she got cussin',” sighed January as a way of steering the conversation back to the original topic, and the others laughed.

“Hessy shouted down Burke,” agreed Cuffee. “That takes some doin'. He's a big bastard. Mulm finally give her a couple drinks to shut her up. I don't think she ever did get money outa them two fellas.”

“Went to the same place, anyways.”
The woman Zulime shrugged. “I come on her later that day, sleepin' behind the privies, an' woke her when it start to rain. She give me a mi lugros-one of those blessin' things she made-to put up in the church.... See?” From her shabby reticule the whore produced a tin amulet of the crescent moon and a star, pinched and twisted of wire and scraps and fragments of dirty lace. “What a damn shame, that anybody'd hurt her.”

And presumably her dissatisfied customers had had plenty of time to take revenge on her if they'd wanted it while she was sleeping, reflected January, turning the little blessing-sign in his hands.

A crash in the saloon brought all their heads around. “You suck-ass hound, I can fuck an alligator in the ass an' I ain't about to be cheated by no lousy pimp like you!” Voices bayed, slurry with liquor and the quick rage of those who live by violence. Chairs rattled and scraped. Then a man came rolling, hurled out the back door and into the mud, a big-bearded keelboatman in heavy boots. The next second Mulm strode out the door and was on top of him, swift and smooth as a rattlesnake, his lead-headed cane in his hand.

Before the Kaintuck could get to his feet, Mulm kicked him, hurling him into the mud again, and proceeded to beat him with the leaden end of the cane: savagely, brutally, and without change of expression, his face calm, as if he were reading a shipping invoice. Twice the Kaintuck tried to get up and twice Mulm shoved him down again. The dull whump of the blows resounded across the yard like a steam hammer striking a pile of hides, while the rain sluiced them and mud and blood splattered like sea-spray.

In a few minutes the keelboatman's upraised hands fell. Mulm went on beating him, like a woman beating a carpet. “He gonna kill him,” whispered the whore Zulime.

The runaway only said, “Looks like.”

Thunder boomed and the rain redoubled, gray, blinding sheets of it. Mulm, thin fair hair hanging soaked about his ears, kept up with his beating as if contracted to deliver a specified number of strokes. When he finished he went inside, calling for a clean handkerchief to wipe his spectacles-January wondered where he'd get anything clean in the Nantucket. His victim lay in the mud without moving, until men came out from the saloon and dragged him away.

January left soon after that. The rain was easing. Men who'd spent the afternoon getting drunk would soon be in the streets. He didn't want to ask more questions about Hesione, knowing how such things got around. He had learned pretty much what he'd set out to-that the two men she'd quarreled with that afternoon had had no reason to seek her out that night.

Or no reason anyone drinking in the yard was aware of.

There were other customers, of course. And there were men in New Orleans perfectly capable of murdering a woman because they imagined she'd passed the clap along to them, though he couldn't imagine any man who wasn't a poxed degenerate in the first place coupling with Hesione. He made his way through the weedy wilderness of brokendown shacks, with the hot damp of the rain rising back out of the sodden ground and the drumming air thick with green scents, and wondered what his course of inquiry would be if Cut-Nose couldn't provide him with information about a child or sibling from Hesione's Grand Terre days.

Not a sparrow falls, Jesus had said, whose death God does not mark.

Perhaps he, January-and Hesione-would have to be content with that knowledge.

In the meantime the summer days lay hot on the town. With most of his pupils away, January had the leisure to read, and sleep, and play music for his own pleasure. Evenings of walking with Rose, or Rose and Artois-aimless, peaceful walks along Bayou St. John or under the plane-trees of the Place d'Armes, with talk of music or books or the good-natured gossip of friends. Artois gesturing, pouring out his speculations about why thunderstorms formed or what scientists like Redfield and Brandes wrote about them, and how barometers could be improved; Rose smiling, more like a friend than the boy's teacher.
Pralines and coffee in the market stands.
Rose's calm profile in the evening light, and the smile that came and went.

January asked her what she dreamed, and she tucked away her smile and glanced aside, and said, “Terribly ordinary things, I'm afraid: gardening--I miss having a garden-and counting gloves.”

“Counting gloves?”

“My mother would never wear a pair again if they got the slightest spot on them; I inherited them, in every color one could imagine.... I don't know why they fascinated me so, because after I was about ten my hands were too big to fit into them. She had dainty little hands, my mother, and let me know in no uncertain terms that no true lady had big, clumsy paws and long fingers like mine.”

Her hands were big, true, but they were long and supple, like those of a Renaissance portrait; January took one and brought it to his lips, seeing as he did that the glove she wore had been mended, not once but several times. Her mother, like his, had been a plaçee: she had undoubtedly been expected to become one, too.

A few days after his talk with Olympe, January got a job playing for a cotillion at one of the big hotels in Milneburgh, and rode out in the steam-cars with the other musicians, walking home late along the shell road beside Bayou St. John with the cicadas rattling in the trees. That Friday he took the steam-cars again to give a lesson to the Saulier girls, daughters of a Frenchman who stayed in town to mind his importing business and entertain his mistress during the week; January would see the man sometimes on the Rue Burgundy, where M'sieu Saulier's plaçee had her house. That Friday, too, he walked from the Sauliers' cottage to Dominique's little lakeside dwelling, and drank lemonade with his sister on the gallery over the water, and talked of the affairs of the town.

Dominique was quiet, and when she talked, she spoke in a bright, airy, brittle voice of what Henri had said to her, or the gifts he had given. But it was clear to January from stories repeated, and the hesitancies while Dominique counted up days in her head, or from the way her maid would look at her mistress when Dominique's head was turned, that she had seen Henri seldom lately, and not for any long period of time. “Poor thing, his mother is driving him absolutely distracted, ” she said, fanning herself with a circle of stiffened silk. “My heart bleeds with pity for that horrid girl he's marrying, who'll have Aurelie Viellard for a mother-in-law, which nobody deserves, even a girl who sold off her nurse and half-sister, not to mention spending the rest of her life trying to find husbands for those ghastly sisters of Henri's.. . . Do you know they're trying to make a match with old Theobald Trudeau for Manon? He's a perfectly nice man, of course, even if he does charge two dollars a pound for quite ordinary China tea.... Not that the way the girls look is their fault, of course. And sheep are actually quite amiable creatures, unless one has to marry a girl who looks like one......”

When it began to rain, and Phlosine Seurat appeared with a rosewater jelly to tempt her friend's appetite, the three of them went inside and January played for Dominique and her guest-after a short delay to tune his sister's little sixoctave piano, which as usual had succumbed to the damp. Afterward he tried to find out what the plaçees knew of local rumor, but like his mother, neither Phlosine nor Dominique had the slightest interest in the murder of Hesione LeGros and were instead consumed with questions and gossip concerning the baroque details of the Avocet scandal.

“Darling, of course Vivienne Avocet and her husband's brother were lovers! Everyone in town knows that!”

“I've heard she just about bankrupted her husband Guifford, too,” added Phlosine, a slim young woman whose nervous, fairylike beauty always reminded January of jasmine blossoms. “Not that there was much money there to begin with. And Guifford himself was an absolutely pestilent man, not that Bertrand is any saint. And that poor little dab of a sister of theirs, caught between them and being treated like a servant by both.”

“You know what I find suspicious about the whole story?” Dominique set her tea-spoon down, and widened her eyes. “That Vivienne was sewing in the parlor with Sister Annette at the time of the murder. Because according to Therese's cousin Louise, who knows the sister of the cook on Avocet, Annette Avocet hates Vivienne. She calls her `that French imbecile' and to get back at her Vivienne makes Annette repair her dresses and wear her castoffs....”

“Marie-Ursule-that's Guifford's plaçee,” explained Phlosine, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a nearly-bankrupt planter who'd been married less than a month to have a town mistress, “-says Guifford and Bertrand tried to get their sister into a convent so they could each have a bigger share of the plantation. Bertrand tried to get up an affair with Marie-Ursule, too: just to enrage Guifford, Marie-Ursule says.”

“Really, p'tit,” sighed Dominique, shifting her aching back a little within the shaped cage of her “motherhood” corset, and tucking a pillow behind her, “I don't see why you don't help M'sieu Shaw with finding proof that Bertrand did it, instead of wasting your time about that tiresome woman in the Swamp.”

No, thought January later, as he rode the steam-cars back through the stagnant heat toward the city again, no, she does not see. ... And indeed, he could understand her puzzlement. A drunk old woman was dead-so what?

But though he jotted notes of everything the two young women had gossiped about the Avocets, to pass along to Shaw the next time he saw him, he felt a great sense of impatience with the affair, and a great sense of distance. For most of the week, he knew, Shaw had been down in Plaquemines Parish, patiently quartering the plantation for some kind of physical evidence to add to the slim facts he'd been able to glean, or for some indication of what might have become of the missing overseer.

Yet as January printed in his notebook Mistress Marie-Ursule Bertrand tried to seduce... the obviousness of Guifford Avocet's death, in its tangle of money, passion, and family hatreds, faded before the maddening question of why the man with the gouged boot-sole would lie in wait to murder a woman of no value....

Guifford Avocet, from all January had ever heard, sounded like a completely unpleasant man who had all but asked for the blow that had ended his life. Hesione LeGros had owned nothing, had presented no threat to anyone ... Or had she? A jolt of the train made his pencil veer-Well, that looks enough like “bankrupt” for me to remember what it is when I see Shaw. . . .

He gazed past the thinning cypresses, to the first wretched gaggles of tents and shacks and pigpens that gradually gave place to the rude board houses, then the low built pastel dwellings of the French Town, the clapboarded wooden houses of the American; the walled cemeteries and muddy streets and overwhelming privy-reek of New Orleans, simmering under the molten weight of the afternoon sun.

There's something about Hesione's death that I'm not seeing. Something behind it, that will make it make sense.

And Guifford Avocet, with his new wife and his mistress in town and his two stopped clocks and his missing overseer-the man had been replaced already, according to Shaw, by someone just as capricious and heavy-handed as the missing Raffin-can rot, for all of me.

He wondered if Shaw felt the same.

On the day of Henri's marriage to Chloe St. Chinian, January went again to Dominique's, accompanied by Rose and, at the last minute, by Artois. January wasn't certain how his sister would react to the presence of the octoroon half-brother of Henri Viellard's bride in her home, but Artois was virtually the only member of the family not invited to the wedding-and, it turned out, January had greatly underestimated his sister.

She met them on the shell path down to her door with eyes wide in mock astonishment, crying, “P'tit! Why, today of all days! What a surprise!” And laughed gently at his well-meant concept of her overwhelming distress.

Dominique took to Artois at once. The two of them compared notes about the family and laughed hilariously over coffee and gingerbread about the procession from town and the reception at the Viellard “cottage.”

“What did they think I was going to do?” demanded Artois when Dominique referred to their gathering as the most distantly separated table at the wedding-breakfast. “Stand up and make a speech? Demand to escort my sister down the aisle?” He gestured with his coffee-cup, spilling coffee on his sleeve.

“Benjamin was offered five dollars to play at the wedding-breakfast,” put in Rose, something January hadn't intended to mention.

“Oh, you should have taken it, p'tit!” cried Dominique. “Then you could tell us what it was like! I wonder if they really did dig mad old Uncle Joffrey out of his plantation to come.”