Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (21 page)

“They killed Artois to protect this secret,” he went on. “Everything I've heard about this man Mulm says Don't trust this man farther than you can throw a medium-sized house. I don't know what he told Ti-Jon and whoever else is in on it, but if he's bringing in guns for a slave revolt, it's because he's going to end up richer.”

“And is that what you're trying to do?” Olympe folded her work-roughened hands. “Save these slaves-if there is a revolt bein' planned-from bein' double-crossed by Mulm? Or are you just out to prove Mulm killed Artois?” She regarded him dispassionately. Their mother had had even less use for her than she'd had for January, and Olympe, January knew, had grown up very much alone. She'd always had a painful skill for going to the heart of events, for separating tangled issues and intents.

“Both. I'd like to pin the murder on him, yes. Artois was my friend and I loved him like a son. Hesione's murder, too. But I don't think I can.” When he'd waked, late, after getting Ti-Jon's warning, he'd found in the privy a scrap of paper bearing the torn remains of a note in Shaw's ill-spelled scrawl. His landlady had only regarded him with her unblinking fishy stare when he'd asked if Shaw had left, or sent, a message for him.

“Americans don't know how to write,” she'd said. “So I tore it up.”

Since Shaw's note-which had come while January was at Rose's-set a meeting time in the market that had already come and gone by the time January found the various pieces, he'd proceeded to bathe and had gone to Olympe's rather than to the Cabildo. At this point he wasn't sure what he could say to Shaw that wouldn't result in generalized reprisals, repressions, and arrests. In the police coming down on whomever they'd suspected lately of making trouble-possibly Olympe and her family as well-whether they had proof of misdoing or not. Like God's rain, the police tended to fall upon the just and the unjust alike.

“I assume Mulm would lie to Shaw as he lied to TiJon, and get his white friends to back him up.”

“You're assuming Mulm lied,” pointed out Olympe. “You don't have one scrap of proof. I'm not saying Mulm didn't kill the boy or wouldn't have, but for a man who talks about justice as much as you do, you're quick to think ill of an American. Whatever's going on, whatever's being planned, it's more than you know-more than I know. I know what they say about Mulm and I know the things he's done. He buys and sells slaves, and backs the State officials who're stealing Indian land and then blackmails those same officials into giving him tracts to sell.... Ti-Jon knows all this, too. You don't think he's checking those guns, to make sure they work, before sending them along? That he's keeping an eye on every move Mulm makes?”

“No,” said January. “No, I don't think Ti-Jon trusts Mulm as far as he can see him. I think he's doing what he can.”

“Then leave it,” repeated Olympe. “You're a bull and you're right on the threshold of the china-shop door, brother. There's a lot of people will die if les blankittes start looking for rebels in every cabin and barracoon. Keep your mouth shut till the storm's gone by.”

“And you think it'll do them any good?” demanded January. “I don't care if these slaves-these people who're planning revolt-are buying guns, but do they really think killing white men will set black men free? They tried it here in 1811 and the army crushed them before they made it as far as New Orleans. Nat Turner tried it, and Denmark Vesey tried it, and all it got them was hanged. And that's without a Judas like Mulm on their side, waiting to turn a dollar on whatever little plot he's got going on the side.”

“So what do you advise?” Olympe's voice was cindery-velvet. “Lay down under the lash? Let les blankittes know they can do as they please with us and ours because we're afraid to die as others have died to be free? Wait around till we can find gentlemen who're honest and upright, and willing to sell guns as well? I'm all ears.”

She cradled a creamware cup in her hands, eyes like stones holding his, steady and angry and cold. “You tell me what we're to do.”

January said nothing.

Her voice was soft, but when she spoke he felt the Power in her, as he felt it in Mamzelle Marie. She was not only a healer, he thought, but a Queen in her own right. “Ti-Jon knows what he's doing, brother. If anyone knows how to trick a trickster, it's Ti-Jon. And if Mulm's the only Judas he's got to worry about, that's all right, because at least Ti-Jon knows Mulm's a snake.”

As January rose to leave, she said, “There'll be plenty of time to go after Mulm later. If you think you can.”

So when Shaw came to the house of Madame Bontemps the following day, with apologies about his absence, January passed on to him only those fragments of gossip about the Avocet family that he'd gathered from Dominique and her friends, most of which he was fairly sure Shaw already knew.

“I had heard M'am Vivienne had an eye to a fine pair of shoulders,” agreed Shaw, as he and January crossed the steaming gutters of Rue Bourbon-as usual Madame Bontemps had refused to permit the Kaintuck on her property, though her argument this time was that people will know, whatever that meant. “That seems to be about all the qualifications that new overseer of theirs has: that, an' the fact that hirin' him put Miss Annette's nose out of joint. He sure don't seem to know much about runnin' work crews or raisin' crops.”

“And did Guifford Avocet have a fine pair of shoulders?” inquired January, thinking about Minou's tale of Bertrand's compulsion to romance whatever women his brother attracted.

“Lord knows whether a woman would think so.” Shaw spit at a toad on the rim of the gutter; the amphibian appeared to have heard all about Shaw's accuracy with tobacco, because it didn't move. “He was good-lookin' enough, I guess, slim like the sister-the brothers got all the looks in that family. But he was the one who came into town an' lived high an' went to danceables an' drove a match' team. Bertrand was the one stayed on the plantation an' bulled the slave women: him an' Raffin both, sounds like. M'am Vivienne didn't even meet him till she'd married his brother. I learned all this from M'am Vivienne's daughter Laurene, who's so far the only one in the Parish who'll give me the time of day, but every time I speak to her either her ma or her Aunt Annette'll grab an' haul her away.”

Scarcely a surprise, thought January.
He was astonished the Kaintuck had found the opportunity to get close enough to a young French Creole girl to learn even that much. Shaw looked tired: framed by his long, greasy hair, his ugly face was unshaven, and settled into lines of watchfulness. Like himself January realized, Shaw understood that there was something about the situation he wasn't seeing, something he didn't know that would make all these contradictory facts make sense.

Yet his own mind kept returning to its anger and grief, and he barely heard his friend's account of finding where cloth had been burned in the woods-“You ever try to burn cloth so's none of it remains? Or get away from other people on a plantation long enough to do it, without bein' missed?”-and of the lawyers' wranglings over Guifford's intestacy and Bertrand's upcoming trial. Again and again he pulled himself back from saying, Who cares that a thoroughly nasty white man was killed by his thoroughly nasty brother... or whoever it was? An innocent woman was killed. An innocent boy was killed. I know who was behind their deaths....

And Olympe's words, and Ti-Jon's, would clang like shackles before his mouth. Keep your mouth shut till the storm goes by... There's a lot of people will die. And, You can use a badman to a good purpose. Keep this quiet... as a favor to me... and to yourself. . .

Oh, Artois my friend. . . .

“. . . Artois St. Chinian,” said Shaw.

January stopped, blinking in the gloom of the market. “I am truly sorry,” repeated the Kaintuck, “about Artois St. Chinian. I lost my sister when she was about that age. Is there anythin' I can do?”

Rage blinded him: You could have stayed in town and caught Tyrone Burke for Hesione's murder BEFORE he had time to kill Artois! They stood twenty feet from the spot where Mulm had put a gun into Artois' ribs, had said, Get in the carriage, you won't be hurt. . . .

So angry was he that January had to look past the policeman's shoulder, to the brick pillar behind him where the tattered remnants of Artois' funeral announcement still clung. Someone had already partially plastered it over with another: The funeral of Mlle. Marie-Ines Nourette. Someone's daughter.
Someone's child.

Someone he didn't even know.

Maybe she hadn't been drowned in the gutter of Gallatin Street, but she was still dead, and someone's life was still empty. The rage went out of him, though he could not have said why, and he found his eyes burning with tears.

With startling gentleness, Shaw gripped January's shoulders and pulled him to him in a swift hug; rough, almost like the grappling of a wrestler, but light, and as quickly released. January stood for a moment looking at that lank deadly shape, the ugly unshaven face and pale eyes, remembering he had been angry at this man and remembering that Shaw knew he'd been angry.

He put out his hands, took both of Shaw's between his own. “Thank you.”

In the white man's eyes, usually watchful and detached as a forest beast's, he saw only concern for him, and compassion for his pain.

He found himself saying, “There's nothing you can do now, but later, yes, we'll talk.”

“Later after I find which of those folks down in Plaquemines Parish is lyin' the most.”
Shaw sighed, and the glimpse January had had of a brother in grief, of a man who had also lost someone he loved (Where? When? How? What had been her name?) disappeared behind the gray eyes of a wolf again. A weary wolf, on the trail of elusive prey. “You be all right?”

You couldn't save Artois, thought January. But neither could I. He said, “I'll be all right.”

Knowing he would get no more information from Mamzelle Marie than he had from Olympe, January returned cautiously to the Swamp twice, to make what observations he could of the Nantucket from the shade of a seedy stand of loblolly pine on the next lot. He dressed in rags, a slouch hat over his face, and cheap rum spilled on his clothing-once a ruffian coming out to piss in the trees spit tobacco on him, but that was about all. He kept clear of the regulars he'd seen there before-Cuffee and Zulime-and left before sundown.

He didn't see Tyrone Burke again, though Mulm came and went in a neat tilbury several times a day. The publican seemed to consult with a steady stream of Americans in the back room of his saloon. Most of these were roughnecks, filibusters, and river-rats, coming in sober in mid-afternoon and only going into the Nantucket later to drink. On one occasion four of them came out, obviously bored, to harass the little group of drinkers in the yard. The male slaves left as soon as they could do so, but the four Kaintucks surrounded Zulime, and though she shook her head and tried to wrench free of their hands, they pulled her into one of the sheds with them. She came out again about a half-hour after the last of them returned to the saloon, stumbling like a drunken woman. Stood leaning against the side of the building, half doubled-over for some time, before at last staggering away down the muddy street.

On his second visit January saw Ti-Jon talking in the yard with Mulm. You'd better watch your back, my friend, thought January, shaking his head as he watched carts and drays go out with loads piled suspiciously high over what could have been false bottoms. You'd better watch it good. Whatever Mulm was planning, it would be the worse, he thought, for those who depended on any weapon he sold.

“What do you think is really going on?” asked Rose the night after that second expedition to the Swamp. January had washed off the liquor, the mud of the Swamp, and the filth from his dirty slop-shop clothing, in a tub in her room, with much giggling and splashing; the book-lined room still smelled of wet straw-matting and soap. “How could anyone make money off a slave revolt? If he turned them in for a reward, wouldn't they just say he'd sold them the guns?”

“Not if they don't know it's Mulm who sold them,” said January. “He's using Ti-Jon as a go-between, maybe others as well. If Ti-Jon dies-and it may be weeks before his death is discovered, with his owner out of town-all the buyers know is they've got a cache of guns.”

“Do you think that's Mulm's plan?” She sat propped on the pillows, her long brown hair, kinked from the strings in which she'd braided it beneath her tignon, catch ing brass glints from the single candle's light. Outside the mosquito-bar, insects whined in protest; with the coming of evening she'd opened the shutters and the French doors onto the gallery, and the noise of the levee, and the near-by taverns, came faintly to them, even at this hour.

“I don't know,” said January. “I don't think so.” Her bed was narrow-he lay on his side, his back to the wall, the netting pressed itchy into his skin, and still there was barely room for them both.

“What's likelier is that Mulm's going to have a posse of his filibusters out picking up runaways who don't join the revolt, but who simply take advantage of the confusion and flee. That happens, you know. Slaves hear of a revolt and take to their heels. They figure the local patrols will be too taken up guarding against the rebels. Which they will be. I was seventeen when the last big revolt took place in Louisiana. To hear the rumors at the time you'd think Spartacus and his army were on the march. There's nothing that puts whites in a panic like a revolt.”

“'Thus
does conscience make cowards of us all.'” Rose blinked past the candle-light to the open cobalt square of the door. “And of course that plan has the advantage that Ti-Jon-and whoever the actual rebels are-won't know about the intercepted runaways at all. It sounds like a great deal of expense for relatively little money.”

“Not if Mulm keeps his men west of the rebels. That's the way runaways will go. West, to cross the Sabine into the Texas territories of Mexico. Personally, I think there are eas ier ways of making a living than gun-running, but what do I know? I'm only a piano-teacher whose last student just quit `until times get better.”'

Rose slid down into his arms then, and the candle guttered in its holder and went out untended; they spoke no more. But afterward January lay awake, smelling the wax and the woodsmoke from the kitchen below, listening to far-off drunken singing from the direction of Gallatin Street, and the slow chiming of the Cathedral clock, and wondered again, with a kind of tired despair, what he could offer Rose in the way of a future. They'd make it through the summer somehow, of course. He'd pick up a dozen students at the first frost, when the businessmen started coming back to town, and more when the sugar-harvest was done. Enough to save money for the following summer's doldrums, but little more.