Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (3 page)

“What'd they say at the Cabildo?” January tried to move the arm of the woman who lay sprawled in the gummy pool of drying gore a few feet from the front door of the shack. The muscles were hard as wood. Most of the blood had soaked into the dirt floor, and the smaller patches were already dry. The smell was indescribable, early decay mingling with the metallic sharpness of blood and the reek of piss and the spit tobacco with which the floor was liberally daubed. Ants streamed in inch-thick black ribbons from three or four directions, under the shack's ill-fitting board walls. Unlike the patient flies they went about their business, as ants do, unimpressed by humankind.

“That they send somebody by'n'by.” The girl spoke Creole French, slurred and sloppy, the kind January's mother and January's schoolmasters had beaten out of him by the time he was nine. She seemed in awe of him, maybe because he wore boots in the summertime and spoke with authority. Maybe because he was Olympia Snakebones' brother.

“They'll send along the Coroner.” Olympe's sweet, deep alto was like bronze and gravel. “He'll come an' he'll say, Yep, she dead all right. Takes a white man to figure that one out.”

There was a chuckle among the neighbors clustered around the front door or peering in the back, men and women who made this shabby corner of the town their home out of poverty or stubbornness or unwillingness to be too closely scrutinized by the minions of the country's various laws. January turned the corpse over, and it came all of a piece, like a plank. She must have been dead some hours before midnight. She'd been stabbed three or four times in the chest, and once in the side. Her throat had been cut, probably at the point of death or just afterward, when she'd quit fighting. There were cuts on her palms and fingers as well.

The whole front of her faded, twice-turned, ill-fitting charity-bag dress was sheeted with blood, and moving with ants.

The half of her face that had lain in the drying blood of the dirt floor was unrecognizable. The other half, with all its wrinkles smoothed away by death, touched his mem ory: the full pouting lips, the neat, small upturned nose. The tiny mole, like an old-fashioned beauty-patch, just below the corner of the mouth.

The mole touched a memory in his mind.

He'd seen her, January knew, around the levee. In almost three years back in New Orleans, he'd seen just about everyone in town at least once or twice, as he'd crossed be neath the shade of the plane-trees on the Place d'Arrnes, or walked along the boisterous chaos of the river-front among the cotton-bales and hogsheads of sugar and molasses. He'd noticed her because she wrapped her tignon like an island woman, not in the usual New Orleans style. The faded old Turkey red dress she wore was the same every time. Sometimes she'd be sitting under the plane-trees, braiding little animals of straw or folded tin, giving them to passers-by. Other times, drunk, she'd sit cross-legged on packing-boxes and call out to the deck-hands and stevedores in a singsong rasp. Once January had walked past her and she'd said, in a perfectly conversational tone, “I let you fuck me in the ass if you buys me a bottle.”

“What was her name?” he asked now.

“Hessy,” answered Suzie. “Hessy LeGros-Hesione. An' she wasn't so bad, you know, 'cept when she was real drunk. She tore up Richie here pretty bad last month when she got the horrors....” She nodded to her young man, who did indeed have a healing cut on his right hand. “Who'd a' done this?”

Who indeed?

“Could you good people leave us for a few minutes, Olympe and me?” He sat back on his heels and straightened his back, looked around at the neighbors. “I want to take a better look at her, see if the bastard did more than kill her.”

There was a murmur and they backed away, so that Olympe could close the rickety doors. Moving carefully-he could already see the dirt floor was scuffed all over with tracks around the body-January turned up the tattered skirts. It was difficult to tell because of the fluids and matter leaking out of the corpse, but he didn't think the woman had been raped, either before or after death. Her bodice waist hadn't been torn open, only ripped on one shoulder, as if she'd thrashed away from an attacker's grip.

Dribbles of tobacco-spittle, old and new, stained the front of her dress.

He got to his feet, and wiped his hands on a bandanna handkerchief from his pocket. “What do you know about her?” he asked his sister. Voodoos could generally be counted on to know whatever there was to be known.

Olympe shrugged. “That she was a drunkard; that she was poor; that she didn't deserve to live this way. Or to die this way.” In the morning heat, sweat already blotched his sister's faded calico bodice. “She was a free woman. No family that I know of. She claimed she used to be Jean Lafitte's mistress, but I don't think that was true.”

“No,” agreed January, suddenly realizing where he'd seen that neat little mole before. “But she was mistress to one of his captains.” And as he moved cautiously around the room examining the criss-crossed tracks, and the contents of the room's single shelf, he recounted the events of General Humbert's birthday dinner, twenty-three years ago. “Here's her visitor, look,” he said, crouching to show Olympe the print of a wide, square-toed boot. A notch had been scored in the heel, as if the wearer had trodden on something sharp. The tracks led from the rear door-which looked out into the woods-to the chair beside the bed, near a packing-box on which a burning candle had been set. The candle stump remained, in a messy dribble of pale brown “winding-sheets,” themselves already sagging with the heat.

Scratches in the dirt floor marked where the chair had been knocked over and later set back on its legs. Deep heel-gouges showed where the visitor had sprung, strode, struggled among the vaguer scuffings of Hesione's bare feet, all covered and mucked over by the first great splash of blood. A yellow-and-green tignon lay trampled there, too.

Blood and tracks crossed the floor to the body.

The man's tracks continued. Beside the bed, which was planks on a frame nailed to two walls and a bedpost in the corner-the moss mattress was rucked a little, but hadn't been turned or had the lumps shaken out of it in months and it crawled with bedbugs and fleas. Along the wall, where a shelf held three dirty and louse-ridden tignons, an assortment of unwashed gourd dishes, four braided-straw cats and horses, a lot of whiskey-bottles and a nearly-empty sack of coffee-beans. Beans scattered the shelf and the table beneath it, which also bore a dirty cup and bowl, and a basket of strawberries creeping with flies. A small handful of beans scattered the floor immediately underneath. When January crouched beside them he observed that they were shiny, without dust.

In the dirt of the floor beside the beans, two small round blobs of white candle-wax gleamed, also dustless.

Under the table, under the bed, around the scraped slots near the table that marked the chair's usual place and all throughout the weeds that poked in under the shed's walls, the unclean debris of a hundred frugal meals decayed: bread-crumbs, fruit-cores and pips, the knuckle-bones of sheep and pigs, picked clean by ants. These were mingled with wads and stains of chewed tobacco of varying ages, though a considerably larger number of these-freshsplotched the dirt floor around where the murderer had sat in the chair by the back wall.

“He searched the place,” said January.

Olympe looked around at the jumbled bedding, the neglected dishes, the whiskey-bottles gleaming in the weeds, and gave a mirthless chuckle. “Like you can tell?”

“Oh, yes,” said January. “You can follow his tracks, for one thing. Look, he carried a candle, a wax one, not the tallow one on the box there, so he must have looked around after she was dead. Were the shutters open or closed when she was found?”

Olympe frowned, and glanced at the single window. “They was open when I got here.” They were open now, and between two cypresses another shack could be seen, a ramshackle cottage pieced together from bits of old flatboats, with chickens scratching around its rear door. January looked back at Hesione LeGros' body. At her dirty dress and dirtier gray hair, and the bare feet whose toenails had grown out into curving horny claws. He recalled the parure of topazes she'd worn with that gaudy redgold dress: that gorgeous necklace, earrings, bracelets the size of slave manacles. The glint of the stiletto in her hand, and the smile on her lips. I'm gonna shoot that man of mine for this....

The ground here was low, close by the cypress swamp that lay all along the back edge of town. In the winter it would be freezing cold, and there was neither stove nor hearth. A ragged mosquito-bar hung over the bed, torn and looped carelessly back. By the number of bites on Hesione's face and neck it couldn't have done her much good. But then, she was probably drunk most nights, by the time she slept.

He let his breath go in a sigh. He hadn't recognized her when he'd seen her on the levee, inebriated and foulmouthed and already grown old. Hadn't connected her with that bright-eyed girl in the defiantly gaudy dress.

Life battered the poor.

Olympe came back to his side. “What was he lookin' for? She didn't own but the clothes she wore.”

“Maybe some of her neighbors can tell us.”

He started to cross toward the door, but his sister stepped in front of him: “You ain't just gonna leave her lay?” The flies had settled again. The body, which he'd returned to its original position face-down, looked as if it had been covered with a shroud of black lace, one that moved and glittered in the morning light.

“Whoever the Guards send to look at the place, he'll want to see it as it was when she was found.” Even as the words came out of his mouth he felt like a simpleton, and Olympe's eyes jeered at him, at his trust in the white man's laws. Two years his junior, she had known from earliest childhood, perhaps even before he had, that their mother had no great regard for her slave husband's African-featured children, lavishing her care instead on their lovely lacetrimmed half-sister by St.-Denis Janvier. Now she didn't even speak, only looked at him with that combination of incredulity and scorn.

“I'll go down to the Cabildo,” he said, “and see they send someone.”

“Oh, I'd go along to watch that, brother,” retorted Olympe. “Only I got the ironin' yet to do this morning.” Still, she settled herself on the edge of the filthy bed to wait for him as he went out into the yard.

Summers, New Orleans slowed, like a stagnant river sinking in the heat. Sugar harvested in November, a desperate race against frost. In December, slaves dragged the long, coarse sacks through the cotton-fields before the bitter-cold first light dawned and picked the sharp, dry boles with chilblained fingers that bled. First frost brought the businessmen back to New Orleans from their country places in Milneburgh or Mandeville by the lake, brought the steamboats downriver in droves with the winter rise. Flatboats came in from Ohio and Kentucky, loaded with pumpkins and pigs and corn and tobacco-spitting Kaintuck louts who gawked at everything they saw. Harvest and business and trade and sales, ships coming in from the Gulf, Christmas and Carnival and Mardi Gras ...

Summers, everything stopped. The wealthy familiesthe Destrehans and de McCartys, the Bringiers and Livaudaises-fled the gluey heat that settled on the town, fled the clouds of mosquitoes that hummed over every gutter and puddle and the riotous proliferation of gnats and fleas and immense brown palmetto-bugs. Fled the reek of the gutters and the swollen carcasses of dogs, rats, horses rotting for days in the mud. Many years, they fled worse things as well, yellow fever some years; sometimes cholera, too.

The only people left in town were the poor and the relatively poor. Little business was done. The markets were quiet, the teeming levees nearly still. Even the gamblingparlors were a little subdued.

So nobody in Hesione LeGros' neighborhood was in any tearing hurry to get anywhere.

They waited for January in the shade of the rickety gallery of the cottage visible from Hesione's window: Suzie and Richie sitting side by side on the steps, another couple a few years older-the woman with a baby at breast-and two or three single men lounging in the cypress-tree's shade. January guessed that some were runaways, picking up a few cents a day at whatever inconspicuous jobs they could find and sneaking out to the plantations from which they'd escaped to visit their friends and families when they could. There were many such, in New Orleans.

“Who found her?” he asked.

R.ichie raised his hand tentatively, a little uncertain if that was the question that had been asked, and January inquired in English, “When was that?”

“Just after sun-up, sir.”
The young man seemed relieved to be able to reply in his native tongue. “I was on my way down to the levee to see could I get loadin' work, ad I saw five or six dogs, diggin' at the wall of the shack. Two of 'em was Doc Furness' dogs from the Swamp, but the rest was wild ones, that live in the woods. You don't usually see 'em around folks' houses by daylight. It didn't look right to me.”

No, thought January. And the dogs would smell carrion even above the general fetor of privies and garbage and back-yard pigs that hung over the neighborhood in the heat.

“Was the shutters open or closed?”

Richie looked a little startled at the question, but shut his eyes a moment to picture it, then answered, “Closed, sir. I opened 'em up, to see.”

“They's open when she come home last night,” added the other man on the porch, taller and stringier than Richie and without the tin slave-badge. He spoke French, but January had seen his eyes, knew he'd followed the discussion in English. “I remember thinkin' how the place would be just roarin' with mosquitoes inside.”

“But you didn't see a light burning?”

The tall man shook his head. “I walked back with Hessy from town, round about full-dark. She'd been down the market, pickin' up what she could from the market women that was closin' up. She had a couple baskets of berries, just gone off a little an' mushy. She asked me if Titine here would like some.” And he patted the slim sloped shoulder of the woman with the baby on the gallery's single broken-down chair at his side. “She give 'em to me just there where the path splits.”