Barbara Hambly - Dead water

Olympe flicked a corner of the cloth aside with the back of her fingernail, and made a face. Above her glittering forehead the tignon she wore—the headscarf mandated for all women of color, libre or slave—was dark with moisture: Olympe loved to dance and would have done so in the heat of noon-day, let alone the sticky magical warmth of evening. Her great dark eyes rose again to his.

“Somebody good and mad at you.” Like January, when their mother had been bought and freed by St. Denis Janvier, Olympe had been given a tutor to eradicate the casual African sloppiness from her speech. It hadn't worked, of course. Nobody could teach Olympe a thing she didn't want to learn. Having discovered early in life that she could annoy her mother by saying “tote” for “carry” or “niame-niame” for “food,” Olympe still spoke like she'd been cutting cane all her life.

“Not at me,” said January. “Rose found this in the room of one of the girls at the school. The girl's been sick, on and off, for weeks.”

“That's no surprise.” Olympe pulled a pin out of her tignon and used it to turn over the half-rotted head in its crumple of newspaper and cloth. “When Queen Régine puts a cross on somebody, she follows up with poison if she can.”

January's face hardened. “I thought it was something like that.”

“Who is it?”

“Cosette Gardinier.”

Olympe nodded. Voodoos dealt in secrets, and the free colored community of New Orleans throve on gossip and the intimate knowledge of everybody else's business. “That mother of hers been takin' her older girl, Fantine, to the Blue Ribbon balls all last winter an' this one,” she said. “And she ain't got a place yet.”

January nodded. The information wasn't new to him. White men would come to the Blue Ribbon balls—the quadroon balls—to dance with their free colored mistresses, their plaçées, and to gamble and chat with their friends away from their wives. Fathers would bring sons there to meet the young ladies of the free colored demimonde, quadroons or octoroons sometimes as fair-skinned as white girls themselves, carefully educated in fashionable accomplishments but, unlike the white girls, educated also in the techniques of pleasing men.

The men sought mistresses, not whores, quasi-wives who would live in their shadow for years, sometimes decades. A woman like Cosette's mother—or January's, for that matter—could parlay the house and housekeeping money that were part of the arrangement into serious investments and a good living even after the protector was long gone.

Most plaçées taught their daughters to follow in their footsteps, a necessary education when the alternative was a life of sewing other people's clothes or doing other people's laundry to put food on the table. It was sheer Quixoticism for January's wife, Rose, to open a school for girls of color that taught science, mathematics, Latin, and literature, as well as music, drawing, and just enough poetry to be able to converse with men, and Cosette Gardinier had wolfed down this heftier intellectual fare with the hasty guilt of one who knows she'll be forced into a more acceptable feminine mold on the morrow.

He said, “Fantine is how old?”

“Nineteen.”

January pressed his sister's shoulder. “Thanks.”

There was no sign now of Queen Régine's bright red bodice and red-striped tignon in the groups beneath the trees. The gate on the upstream side of the square opened into a muddy lane that ran past the basin and on beside a high brick wall whose top was a fringed jungle of resurrection fern. The smell of the basin was bad, with the privies of its plank-built saloons draining into it, but the stench from beyond the wall was infinitely worse.

January saw the flicker of Queen Régine's striped tignon as she turned a corner of an even muddier lane—the municipal gutters didn't extend farther inland than Rue des Ramparts, and it had rained that afternoon, as it did nearly every afternoon in summer. He followed cautiously, boots slurping in the ooze. The iron-barred gate that led into the cemetery stood ajar.

Once inside the cemetery, visibility dropped to two feet. Though light lingered in the sky, January knew it would fade fast. The ground was even wetter here, and sent up, with each step, a ghastly reek of mortality. Around him tombs rose like little brick houses in some silent, horrible city. Because the ground-water in south Louisiana lay so close to the surface, even a shallow hole would fill, and corpses buried in New Orleans earth had a way of working to the surface in the winter. After the first flood or two brought coffins bobbing down the streets—giving a new meaning to the phrase “Grandma's coming to visit”—tombs began to be built above the ground.

Some were only brick benches barely knee-high and stuccoed to protect the soft local brick from crumbling away. Others stood as tall as a man, with marble slabs on the front inscribed with the names of their occupants. Some had little railings before them of wrought iron, like yards before the houses of the dead; others were fronted with locked and gated grilles. Nearly all sported spikes or brackets, so that family members could hang wreaths of zinc or jet-bead flowers on the Feast of All Saints, when they came to patch the stucco, renew the whitewash, and picnic among the graves.

It had been seven months and a half since the Feast of All Saints, and even on tombs newly furbished up, resurrection fern had begun to sprout in crannies. Those tombs that hadn't been repaired for a year, or two, or ten, were gay little islands of greenery, with the stucco rotting away and the bricks crumbling within. Crayfish crept in and out of the cracks of such tombs, breeding it seemed by spontaneous generation in the pools where the ground lay low; three-inch roaches and palmetto bugs emerged from crevices almost visibly picking their teeth.

The smell was what one could expect. After passing through two cholera epidemics and any number of fever summers, January was only glad it was no worse. He'd heard rumors that in the rear parts of the cemetery, not only crayfish but small alligators lived in the swampy puddles, and was half inclined to believe it.

Queen Régine, of course, could be six feet from him among the tombs and he'd never see her.

He knelt almost the moment he was through the gate, picking out the tracks of her small, narrow shoes in the mud. There was barely enough light left for that.

They led away to his right, between two high sepulchres that surrounded the still-taller edifice of one of the burial-society group tombs. January followed cautiously. Once the woman he tracked guessed his presence, she would take pains to hide. With night coming on fast, he'd never find her.

Movement caught his eye and he turned. But it was only an undertaker wheeling a black-draped barrow with a little coffin. A solitary mourner followed, a woman. Not the baby's mother, January guessed, for she did not wear black, but a moss-green gown whose figurings of rust and cream blended in the twilight like the pelt of an animal half-hidden in leaves. An old family, he thought, for the pair halted at an unkept tomb whose name had been eradicated by time. The woman unlocked the grille that surrounded it; the faint scrape of metal sounded loud in the cicada-rattling dark.

Was everyone but the child's mother, and this woman, away in some summer home by the lake?

Or was there some other story there, one that nobody would ever know, in the half-secret burial of a child's coffin in the gathering dusk?

January slipped around the corner of a marble-fronted mausoleum inscribed with the name DUFRESNE, and saw Queen Régine.

She was on her knees between the two-story tomb of the Blanque family and a low bench surmounted by the statue of a sleeping baby. She dug in the earth with a stick, like a fierce child making mud-pies in the dark. But it was a deadly serious occupation, for graveyard earth, January knew, was the chief component of death-spells, of the jujus of ruin and fear. She worked furtively, glancing around her, pausing now and then to scoop up handfuls of the wet black earth and scrape them into the gourd bottle she carried tied to her belt.

January used the DuFresne tomb to shield him as he edged nearer. He could hear her voice now, a high-pitched jumble of whispered nonsense words, some garbled African, others broken bits of Spanish or Chickasaw, memorized from someone who'd memorized them herself long ago. He heard the name of the demon Ozoncaire, a favorite of the voodoos: “Hex him good, Ozoncaire, don't let him sleep nor eat till he decide this case for Bernadette Metoyer. . . .”

As he emerged around the other side of the tomb, January saw that she was burying something—a split beef tongue was what Olympe used, with the name of the judge in the court case her client wanted to win sewed up in it. He waited and watched as she lit a black wax candle and dripped some of the wax on the newly-turned earth and while she worked a few coins down into the soil.

The Queen buried the candle-stump, corked the gourd, worked a few bricks loose from the near-by tomb to cover the place so the priest of St. Jude's wouldn't see that the earth had been turned. Then she got to her feet to find January standing mere inches away.

She turned to bolt and January caught her by the arm. Her hand whipped to her tignon, and he grabbed her other wrist before she could stab him with the pin she held. She spit in his face, but he was ready for that, too, and didn't loosen his grip as many men would have. “I got a warning for you,” he said.

She froze, seeming to get smaller in his hands, like a rat pulling itself together before it bites. Her lifted lip showed sharp teeth, and gaps where the bearing of children had lost her some of them. “What I need a warning for, me?” she asked. “Ain't nobody can take me on and win, piano-player.”

“They know it's you who was hired to cross Cosette Gardinier. If ill befalls her, they'll know whose door to come knocking on.”

“And who's ‘they'?”

“Those that have her good at heart.”

The voodoo spit again, this time on the ground. “You dreamin', piano-player. There's none got that girl's good at heart.”

“ I have Cosette's good at heart,” replied January quietly. “And if she dies, you think anyone's going to listen when you say it was someone in the girl's own family behind it?”

Queen Régine tried to pull her arm away; anger blazing in her hot little eyes. “The poison won't kill her. Her mama just want her sickly, to stay out of the way when Yves LaBranche come around courtin' the older girl. LaBranche been lookin' on that Cosette a little too close.”

“That's what they tell you,” retorted January. “Cosette was like to die two nights ago. So maybe somebody else added a bit to what you gave the candy-lady on Rue Burgundy, thinkin' if the girl does die it'll be easy for you to take the blame.”

The accusation of the old woman who sold pralines along the Rue Burgundy was a shot in the dark—January only knew Cosette was deeply fond of the pink-dyed coconut candles—but he saw the anger and alarm flare in the mambo's eyes. Then rage took their place, and she jerked on her hands again, her little wrists like sticks, lost in January's vast grip.

“You lyin', piano-player,” she snarled. “You take your hand off me! No man lay a hand on Queen Régine!”

“Let the girl alone. I'm warning you.”

“ You warning me ? I warning you, piano-player!” And she pulled hard at his grip, so that when he opened his hands suddenly she staggered back, and fell over the low tomb with its chipped marble child. Furious, she sprang to her feet, no more now than a shadow in the darkness, a shadow from which one single skinny finger, clotted with graveyard dirt, stabbed out at him.