Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (23 page)

He glanced sidelong at Rose. Head up, face calm, she walked as if to the market, while everything she'd built up-the translations she was doing, the network of employers on whom she relied for her rent, the jobs she would not finish-crashed down around her, behind her, with an almost audible roar. She would write everyone, of course, from Grand Isle, with some kind of tale. And the second note January sent Olympe via little Giuseppe included instructions about salvaging Rose's possessions from Vroche's. But when Rose returned to the city, if she returned, it would be to a welter of broken threads and a bad impression of unreliability, and the long, tedious, painful process of building everything up again.

When a man marries, John Dryden had said centuries before, he delivers hostages to fortune. And I didn't even have to marry her to put her in danger, to tear a jagged hole in her life. No wonder she kept me at a distance all this time. No wonder she kept EVERYONE at a distance.

Only when they were in Natchez Jim's boat, struggling to row against the heavy sweep of the Mississippi currents, did Rose say, “Do you think he'll leave town after he's accomplished ... what it is that he means to accomplish?” She spoke in Latin, and did not mention Mulm's name; held the tiller with the same casual adeptness she'd shown poking around for snakes in the swampy lakeshore. In the Barataria, no one grew up ignorant of the ways of boats. “Nonscio,” replied January. I don't know.

Her mouth tightened. Already, out of the city, she was relaxing, though that distant look did not leave her eyes. “He has property,” she went on, “so it isn't likely. And if, as you say, he has a scheme of his own in mind, we'll be able to do something with that.” And seeing the glance of inquiry January shot her: “We know our young friend wasn't the only person he murdered. We'll find allies. We just don't know where, yet.”

They left Jim's wood-boat in Algiers, and walked the three miles or so to the head of Bayou des Familles, through cypress swamps that crowded along the edges of the higher land near the river. For the most part they were entering a land of small hunters, small trappers, and occasional farmers; a land where cypresses towered, clothed in rags of moss, to unbelievable heights; where the airless heat seemed to steam between trees uncut since these lands had risen out of the sea and where the only sound was the steady croak of frogs, the stiff harsh rustle of palmettofronds, and the occasional leathery creak of a branch in winds far up in the forest crown. It was slave-stealer country, smuggler country, and as they worked their way by pirogue down Bayou des Familles to Little Barataria Bayou, and from there through the low mazes of the marshlands, January and Natchez Jim took turns sleeping, and never let their hands be far from their completely illegal guns.

Past Crown Point the true marshes began. The cipriere thinned from an unbroken forest to a succession of wooded islands in wide beds of reeds and alligator-grass. The sedges towered head high, navigable only when a man would stand up to look out across the reeds, and not always then. January had never felt easy in this country: here, he was always conscious of how tenuous was man's occupation. The very earth and water and sky conspired to trade places, shallow bayous shelving to mud and flottants-floating blankets of grasses riding unsupported on the water's surface-masquerading as islands to trick the stranger.

No wonder the American Army had never been able to come in and deal with Lafitte.

A world of birds and dragonflies, silent but for the plop and whisper of oars or pole, and the peeping choruses of frogs. Turtles basked on logs, arranged neatly in order of size, largest to smallest, with smaller turtles perched on the larger ones' backs. Now and then the water would slurp and January would look down and see a six-foot gar-fish that could take a man's arm off, sliding so close to the boat he could count the teeth in its ugly undershot jaw, or gators blinking sleepily in the reeds. Olympe had given them oil of citrus mixed with aromatics, which kept some of the mosquitoes at bay, but even in the brutal heat of the day they were everywhere. At night they would settle on Jim's little tent of netting like a thirsty cloud.

The spaces of water got larger, between the squiggly islands of grass and mud. The sky grew huge. Clouds moved across it like traveling cities in the afternoons, and in the mornings the first sun on the water was a sounding cymbal of brass.

Whatever is happening in New Orleans, thought January, we are out of it now. Slave revolt and betrayal; Uncle Veryl's grief, and Artois lying in his crypt...

Whether Henri would return to Dominique, when he came back to town with his bride in the fall, or whether she'd have to raise her baby alone...

These are no longer our concerns. They will all go on without us. He would think this, and look back at Natchez Jim, like Charon poling lost souls across the Styx, brass-gold multitudes of dragonflies hanging in the air about him thick as the falling leaves of Vallombrosa.

On the third day they emerged from among the matted flottants and passed by Grand Terre, with the open spaces of Barataria Bay on their right and the clean wind sweeping the gnats and mosquitoes and dragonflies aside. January saw the tangles of live-oaks that furred the island's central ridge, the thickets of mimosa and oleander almost hiding old crumbling wharves and the huts of the fishermen. Lafitte's house, he remembered hearing somewhere, lay on the seaward side of the island, where the privateer could lie in a hammock on his gallery through these blazing heavy summer days and look out to sea.... Or maybe that was something he'd read in a romance.

“Did you read romances about Jean Lafitte?” he asked Rose, and she turned from contemplation of the porpoises cavorting in the bay and regarded him with sparkling eyes.

“You mean the ones that claim he was the son of noble parents, banished from the familial castle for nameless accusations of wrongdoing? I wouldn't dream of such a thing.”

“I guessed your mind was of too elevated a nature for such entertainment. So is mine.”

“I particularly liked the one that talked about his castle-”

“On Grand Terre?
I take it he imported the stone.”

“And evidently took it away with him when he left. I remember in the book it had a dungeon as well. I suppose he could have used it for drowning prisoners in-the water here lies even closer to the surface of the ground than in town, and goodness knows you can't dig a hole anywhere in New Orleans without it filling up.”

“Is there anything on Grand Terre now?” asked January, shading his eyes to look up at Jim.

“What you see.” The boatman's face creased at the talk of castles and dungeons and wandering scions of the nobility. “Shrimpers and hunters-you see every kind of bird God made, in winter. Trappers. Some of the folks run cattle.” He pointed to a small herd, dozing half-unseen under the mimosas. “Now and then men will come down from town, or over from Mobile, and snoop around looking for `Lafitte's treasure' that's supposed to be buried. But of course Lafitte didn't bury his treasure. He put all his money in the bank, like anyone with sense.”

“Cora and I used to sneak over and look for it,” recalled Rose. She brushed back the tendrils of hair from around her face. Though freed of the law requiring her to cover her hair, she'd kept her tignon to protect her head from the sun, but her thick brown braids hung down below it, making her seem younger and more wild. The sun had deepened the freckles on her cheeks and nose. January couldn't imagine living without her and sometimes felt ready to drown Jim, just to have an hour alone with her to make love.

“Madame Vitrac-my father's wife-would have whipped the both of us if she'd known, because of course there were as many slave-stealers about then as there are now. I'm astonished no ill ever befell us. What surprises me still more is that everyone on Grand Isle knew there was no treasure-of course Lafitte wouldn't have buried money, he didn't trust half of his captains around the corner! The same way everyone on Grand Isle knows that Lafitte never fell in love with a blue-eyed damsel from Charleston, much less married her and reformed... but you still find that story cropping up every time you turn around. People in the market get so offended when old Cut-Nose laughs at them for it. And people still come here looking... and digging.”

January watched the orange-trees and the tiny thatched houses glide past, the grazing cattle and the egrets-white or slate, or those black-and-white birds the locals called lawyers-wading among the flottants. On this side of the island there was little in the way of beach, just stringers of shells washed up from the bay floor, and mats of grass, creeping with brown ghost-crabs no bigger than the palmetto-bugs that infested the town. Here and there, rickety wharves thrust into the bay, pelicans perched on the pilings, studying the water like German university professors in grave silence, and gulls yarking and quarreling like an illmannered rabble in a lower-class apartment-building in some Paris backstreet. Against the glare of the bay's shining water, the squat shapes of shrimp-boats floated like enormous ducks; closer to the islands, pirogues and luggers appeared and disappeared between the flottants, dark-haired young men lifting a hand in greeting when they saw Jim, or calling across the water in their old-fashioned lilting French, was he back down from town already, hah?

New Orleans already seemed like something decades in the past.

Rose's half-brother Aramis Vitrac owned one of the several small sugar plantations that ranged along the flatlands on the bay side of Grand Isle. Aramis and his flaxen haired, rabbity-faced wife Alice bade Rose welcome with unaffected joy. They gave Rose and January rooms in the dilapidated outbuilding where the house-servants slept-“I hope you understand,” Rose said when January climbed the gallery's tall steps to the doorway a few minutes later, “that I'll always want-I'll always need-a room of my own, just to get away, to be solitary. I can't live cheek-by-jowl with anyone.... Why are you smiling?”

“Because I like to hear you say the word `always.”'

They stayed at Chouteau Plantation, as it was called, among the oaks and the oleanders and the weak, thin, matte-green stalks of Creole cane, for just over two weeks.

Rather than idle in a place where others had to work for their keep, January would go out in the mornings with the fishermen whose catches served the whites' tables and the stew-pots in the quarters as well. Rose helped her white sister-in-law Madame Alice in the kitchen-the plantation cook was less than proficient-and with the sewing, or teaching young Hilaire and Liberal and Pierrot and Matte-Rose their lessons. When the afternoons grew cooler, she would take long walks with January along the dunes on the Gulf side of the island, trailed by a floppy-eared pack of the household hounds, observing the clouds and taking measurements of the wind. There was no barometer, but Rose took note anyway of clouds and the feel of the air. Pelicans flew in formation-“I've caught them rehearsing, on the other side of the island,” January assured Rose in a solemn voice-and dragonflies hung thick above the tangles of mimosa. They gathered driftwood, breaking desiccated boughs from the long lines of dead gray salt-leached trees washed up along the beaches, to make fires in the sand and sit listening to the waves until late in the night. They set crab-traps, and waded out in the bath-warm waters to harvest them, and got bit on the ankles; later watched the moon come up, lying in each other's arms. January, though he had only a guitar at his disposal-there wasn't a piano on the island-found himself, for the first time in years, writing music again. It was like returning to a house long shuttered, where once he had lived and been happy.

Time was not the same in Grand Isle as it was in other places.

Nothing was. The outbuilding where they slept stood on piers five feet high, and the Big House stood on stilts taller yet. Pigs and cows were penned in the tangle of fern and hackberry beneath. “We're far enough from the sea to be clear of the highest tides, surely?” January said, and Rose raised her eyebrows and looked at him over the rims of her spectacles.

“You've never been here during a hurricane.” When he shook his head, she said, “You may yet. This is the season for them. Alice told me there was a bad one only a few years ago.”

When a week later the sky grew black and the waves ran higher and higher up the Gulf shore, when wind drove the rain sideways with such violence that January could not walk upright from the door of the kitchen to the outbuilding's stairs to his room, he said, “I see what you mean about hurricanes.”

The draft-whipped flicker of the single candle's lightit was two in the afternoon-caught the quirky V of Rose's smile, briefly shown and swiftly tucked away, as if she'd been punished as a child for laughing at things out of turn. “No, you don't,” she told him. She folded up her telescope, through which she'd been watching the clouds over the tossing ridge of oak-trees, and struggled to pull closed the shutters, for the rain drove across the gallery and into the room. “This isn't a hurricane. This is just a storm.” The gusts caught the mosquito-bar above the bed and made it billow like a gesticulating ghost.

“Then tell me when a hurricane is coming,” retorted January, catching the other shutter and hauling it against the wind, “and remind me to go hide in the swamp until it's done.” He remembered one of the big storms during his childhood that someone had said was a hurricane. It hadn't been anything like this. Worse, almost, than the wind itself-which was strong enough to make the little building slowly rock, creaking, as if it were a ship at anchor-was the constant brittle roaring of the trees, an animal noise that drowned thought and shredded the nerves.

“If I could tell you when a hurricane was coming,” replied Rose, “they'd elect me Queen of this island. Some of the old people claim they can by the way the birds all fly in land, or the way the waves run up onto the beach, or by the greasy look of the sky. But mostly it takes everyone by surprise. And by the time anyone knows it's on the way, it's too late to run. Faugh,” she added, taking off her spectacles and trying to wipe the rain from them; impossible, because her dress was wet through from the rain, as were January's shirt and trousers. “Oh, double faugh,” as a draft quenched the candle, leaving them in near-darkness broken only by the phosphor-blue madness of the lightning.