Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (19 page)

“Contessa d'Ernani, huh,” sniffed January's mother at the news that Coquelicot St. Chinian had been informed by letter of her son's death. “If Veryl St. Chinian expects that one to contribute so much as a wooden nutmeg toward the cost of a tomb, he'll find his mistake-or to put in money toward the funeral. And just like Dosia St. Chinian to forbid the boy to be laid in the St. Chinian family tomb. As if she was more than a cousin twice removed herself, before she married Raymond.”

“You can't really blame her for that,” temporized Catherine Clisson, a lovely, serene-faced woman whose left-handed alliance with a sugar-broker had nearly broken January's heart when he was very young. She waved her black lace fan, for the heat of the candles that lined the tables and glowed from the wall-sconces was smothering. “The way Raymond carried on with Coco was an insult to any wife.”

“It's no reason to behave scaly toward the son. And if Dosia St. Chinian thinks that daughter of hers will give her free lodging now that Chloe's married Henri Viellard, I can only say I hope she enjoys the company of the cousins she's been sponging off since Raymond St. Chinian's death-if they'll have her, now she's no longer got an heiress with her.” Livia Levesque rustled into the rear parlor in a fluffy whisper of black-and-eggplant silk, to find out how much Dominique had paid for the bourbon in the sauce on the tart and inform her that she'd been cheated.

Artois had spoken so often of having been sheltered that January was a little surprised at how many people crowded into Dominique's cottage for the wake. But Coquelicot St. Chinian was the daughter and the granddaughter of plaçees, and related to half the free colored demimonde of New Orleans. In addition, there were many more who had simply known and liked the boy. Dressed in various degrees of mourning black, they passed through the two candlelit parlors, and in and out of the rear bedroom, where Artois lay in his coffin, dressed in his best coat and weskit, a young dandy to the end. Their weeping and cries formed a muffled eddy of sound at the rear of the house, against which the soft-voiced conversations in the front parlor had a gentling sound, like padded silk rolled around broken glass.

“I wish your mother wasn't right so often,” sighed Bernadette Metoyer, whose rivalry with January's mother dated to the dim recesses of some antediluvian age. Bernadette had bought a chocolate shop when her protector had paid her off upon his marriage, and had invested the proceeds advantageously; she was dressed in an elaborate fantasia of black crepe that left little smudges of black on everything she touched, and jangling with jet. “I wouldn't want to speak ill of Coco-I've known her longer than you've been alive, Ben, almost-but I'd be surprised if she even went into mourning for the boy. Completely aside from not wanting to admit she has a child, if she's got some other man in tow, which I'll go bail she does by this time ... she looks dreadful in black. Always did. Did someone write to Chloe St. Chinian?”

And she glanced-rather self-consciously-around as she spoke the name.
As if, thought January, Dominique weren't fully conscious of her anomalous position vis-a-vis the boy whose body lay now in the rear bedroom of the house Henri Viellard had bought her.

“Rose did,” he answered. “I understand Madame Chloe Viellard is at Bois d'Argent, downriver in Plaquemines Parish.”

Bernadette sniffed. “That makes sense. Her mother-in-law is at Viellard Plantation across the lake. I wager if the family had a plantation in Texas, Chloe would find a reason to be there.” She bustled off to intercept Dominique on her way to greet yet more guests, to tell her she shouldn't be on her feet in her condition and to inquire about her cook's way of making flan. Five minutes later January saw her on her knees in front of Artois' casket, convulsed with sobs, as if the boy were her own son.

And this was not, he understood, either hypocrisy or hysteria. Bernadette Metoyer's grief-like that of his mother's other friends, of Artois' more distant cousins and friends still more remotely connected-was as genuine as her cheeriness had been only moments before.

This was something else that whites did not understand. He had been hired, many times, to play at the wakes of white people, and had always found them eerily silent and cold. Why stifle your genuine grief, grief at the shortness of life, grief at the vast network of might-have-beens that covers all the earth like a shining nimbus, only because you are not closely connected with the point at which Death has touched this time?

Why not grieve deeply and loudly, sharing your grief with the closer family, letting them know they're not alone?

And if the dead boy's mother hadn't come, all the more reason to let Artois' spirit know how dearly he had been loved.

Even Rose-whom January knew to be a deist, without belief in Heaven or Hell-wept, rocking back and forth in a corner of the bedroom with her arms folded across her breast. She was the closest thing that Artois had had to a sister, perhaps, in all the assemblage: Sometimes it feels like you and she are my family, the only ones who understand.

January went into the room again and again throughout the night, to sit beside Rose sometimes, to hold her sometimes, cradling her in silence. Grieving that it had to be Artois' death that had broken that barrier between them. When James brought Uncle Veryl in, January could see the old man struggling to restrain his tears, the way white men did. Saw Veryl's uncertainty, his polite puzzlement, at the intense emotion in the room with the casket, the lighter conversation and copious consumption of tafia punch in the front parlor and outside in the yard.

He cannot understand, thought January even as he went out to shake hands with him, to quietly thank James for bringing the old man to Dominique's house.

And even at that, the wake was quiet compared to others January had attended. The free colored demimonde took many of their ideas of refinement from the whites with whom their blood was mixed. Had the wake been among Olympe's friends the “respectable” free artisans of color, the less wealthy and less self-consciously “white”-there would have been dancing, and more music than just January playing Dominique's little square pianoforte. Though the liquor flowed more freely as the hot night deepened, no one got really drunk. Most of those present were women, who were, or had been, plaçees.

Had the wake been among Olympe's friends, it probably wouldn't have been over in a single night.

At around two in the morning Agnes Pellicot and one of her daughters walked Dominique to Agnes' house to rest for a few hours; the wake itself went on. January played, sometimes sad tunes, popular ballads, or the gentle complexities of Bach; sometimes dances, light and gay. Others spelled him at the piano, either plaçees or some of the other musicians who'd remained in town through the summer's heat. In the morning the women brought out more food and in time M'sieu Quennel came to the door with his black-carved hearse, his darkly caparisoned sable horses, his choir of eight children, the candle-flames they bore pale as white flowers in the hammering mid-morning sun.

January took the Spanish guitar that was his second voice and the other musicians gathered trumpets or elarionettes, or showed up with tambourines and drums. Dominique came back from Agnes Pellicot's house clothed in simple black (“She shouldn't wear complete black like that,” declared January's mother, who'd also gone home to change, “she looks worse than the corpse in it.”), to preside over the distribution of black gloves, black scarves and armbands, black mourning-rings with little crosses on them, and the tall, thick white beeswax candles in their paper-lace holders that, January knew, would cause connoisseurs of funerals to proclaim this one “properly done.” Everything in Dominique's house was, by this time, smudged with the sooty residue of crepe as if there'd been a fire. Therese would be weeks getting it clean. James brought Uncle Veryl, and walked beside the old man and Rose behind the coffin as they made their way along Rue Burgundy to Rue St. Louis, and so lakeward to the New Cemetery through the grilling heat.

Only when the coffin was slipped into the domed “oven” of the temporary crypt, and Uncle Veryl left the churchyard to be escorted home by James, did the music change. The solemn dirges gave place to gayer marches, the reminder that death is not forever, that sunrise always comes. There would be more food, January knew, back at Dominique's-poor Therese had been left back at the kitchen with old Martine and Minou's cook Becky to prepare it and intercept what Bella would bring. Stronger punch-tafia and whiskey-laced lemonade-“sweet-beer” made from ginger-water and sugar, pralines and gingerbread and cake. Looking ahead of him at Dominique, walking arm-in-arm with Rose and Olympe, January saw how haggard his sister looked despite the rest she'd been taking as often as she could.

The wake would continue through the day and into the night. It would be tomorrow before he could seek out Shaw again, to tell him what he'd learned from Cut-Nose and La Violette.

That was another thing that a white man would not understand; certainly not the square-jawed heroes of the melodramas that Artois had read and laughed at with Rose, the young men who could not sleep until their wrongs were avenged.

First, you honor the dead. First, you do what you can to care for the living.

Then you take your revenge.

January wondered what kind of wake the Avocet family had given their murdered brother, down in Jesuit's Bend. Guifford's brother was in jail, his wife had been deceiving him, and his “poor little dab of a sister” had been mistreated to a degree that would engender few tears. Would Shaw be able to talk to the house servants about things seen or overheard at the funeral?-for of course a French Creole planter would no more have admitted a Kaintuck to the house than he'd have let in a field-hand. And would the house servants-who had no more use for Kaintucks than their masters did-tell him even if things had been said in the corners concerning the infamous bloody shirt or when the clock in the parlor had stopped?

Walking as he was up near the head of the procession, January was one of the first to cross the cypresswood plank at the intersection of Rue Burgundy and Rue du Maine, closest to Dominique's house. They'd picked up a good deal more of the neighborhood in their return from the cemetery, and the procession straggled behind them for over a hundred feet. Across the street from Dominique's cottage, and a few houses down, stood the town house of the Stael family, a modest building as town houses went, painted a pinkish clay color and shut up now for the summer.

The shop in its lower floor-which sold musical instruments, sheet music, ladies' fans, and silk flowers-was closed likewise; if it hadn't been, January didn't think he'd have taken any special note of the two men standing in the carriageway's arched blue shade.

But he did notice them. And when one of them spit tobacco on the sidewalk, he took a second look.

And for a moment, his eyes met those of Franklin Mulm.

The saloonkeeper stood with hat politely off and hands folded, the sunlight glinting on his little square-lensed spectacles, looking, in his close-buttoned dark coat and old-fashioned stock, more like a Yankee importer than the whoremaster, slave-dealer, blackmailer, and gun-runner that January knew him to be. The other man had left his greasy slouch hat on, but even under its shadowy brim January could see the thick single bar of eyebrow above the broken nose, the pale, wary, vicious eyes.

January's hand stilled on the guitar-strings.
His stride checked, the other musicians flowing past him; Pylade Vassage nearly ran into him and came close to swallowing his flute. “What is it, man?” he asked, and January shook his head. “Somebody step on your grave?”

In the sweating glare of the afternoon sun, January felt cold. Cold and tingling in spite of his exhaustion, and filled with rage, as if he could stride out from among the strut ting mourners and cross the street, seize Mulm by his stringy neck and Burke by the tobacco-stained front of his shirt and shove both down into the offal-choked gutter, to hold them there until they inhaled the shitty water and drowned.

What are they doing here?

The first of the mourners streamed between him and the town house: Bernadette Metoyer and her sisters, all sporting black ostrich plumes in their tignons that scat tered the banquette with a rain of fluff, like grimy snow. “Benjamin, for goodness' sake, get moving!” snapped his mother, cocking her parasol back to look up at him. “Have you fallen asleep?”

Not, reflected January, do you have a touch of the sun? Not, are you in grief for your young friend? Not, are you ill? He shook his head, making himself smile as he had learned to when his mother behaved like herself; the only way he had learned to dispel grief.

And when he stepped forward, and looked back at the carriageway again, the two white men were gone.

The wake lasted through that night, and broke up only on the following morning. Dominique had long since gone back to Agnes Pellicot's to go to bed-their mother had returned to Milneburgh almost immediately after the funeral, without, as far as January could see, even acknowledging Olympe's existence. But Rose remained, acting as hostess, and January would not have left her to perform the task alone. Everything that had taken place since she'd waked him at sun-up two mornings ago blurred into a long, single corridor of grief and information and images-colors-the blue of Mackinaw Sal's Mother Hubbard and the green of the resurrection fern that grew in Veryl St. Chinian's courtyard. Rose's head pressed to his shoulder and the shuddering of her breath beneath the hard corset-stays. The taste of bread-pudding and the smell of candlewax and decay.

Artois was gone.

He'd never see him again.

He walked Rose home after the last company had left Dominique's house. Exhausted and numb and only just beginning to feel the real grief, the genuine grief that settles in after the funeral's noise and drama are done. He climbed the stairs with her in the forenoon's pounding heat, meaning only to say, when they reached her door, Let me know what I can do.