Barbara Hambly - Dead water

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.

“You keep your silence, and you stay out of this matter if you know what's good for you! You think 'cause your sister a voodoo you got a suit of armor, but you don't! I curse you! In the name of the Baron Cemetery, in the name of the Guédé, in the name of the Grand Zombi, I curse you, to the ruin of all you touch, and the destruction of all you hope!”

In the blackness her eyes had a slick silver gleam, like a demon's eyes in shadow. Her voice turned shrill and nasal, like the voices of those ridden by the Guédé spirits in the voodoo ceremonies along Bayou St. John.

“Guédé-vi, take the gold from out of his hands! Guédé-Five-Days-Unhappy, tear the roof away from over his head! Marinette-of-the-Dry-Arms, take his wife from him and let him walk the roads of the earth to search for her, and men hunting behind him and even the priests of God raising their hands against him!”