Dead and Buried (2 page)

‘My mother is a mistress of the art of avoiding people she doesn’t wish to see.’

‘Two cents says she can’t.’

‘I wouldn’t embarrass you by making you borrow it from Rose.’

Hannibal seldom had a dime. Even his recent efforts to give up drinking and to reduce his intake of opium hadn’t improved his poverty much. The fiddler was currently playing for tips at the dockside taverns and the barrel-houses of the Swamp, the district around the turning-basin where American flatboatmen caroused. Many of the musicians who made up the funeral band weren’t even getting that much work.

Rose and January had more than once offered their friend a room in the attic of the old house they’d bought on Rue Esplanade, but Hannibal always refused. He tutored Latin and Greek at the school Rose had opened for free colored girls, but he recognized the school wouldn’t survive the rumor that he was living under its roof. The whites in town regarded Hannibal as slightly degenerate for playing as he did among the free colored musicians; though the free colored accepted him, he knew himself to be, at the end of the day, an outsider, a
blankitte
.

Today he did not, January reflected, look well. Always cadaverously thin, when they stopped playing and stood aside to let the coffin pass, his long, thin hands shook a little, and there was a faint wheeziness in the draw of his breath. For nearly a year, Hannibal had been free of the symptoms of the consumption that had stalked him like the shadow of death. But sixteen years as a surgeon in Paris had taught January that ‘cures’ of that disease were never reliable. At best it slept. Today was the first time January had seen his friend completely sober at the funeral of a fellow musician, but the graveyard stink, the muffled weeping, the black veils, and the nodding plumes on coffin and hearse could not have been comforting.

‘
Non intres in judicio cum servo tuo, Dominie
.’ Pere Eugenius’s voice rang clear and hard against the walls of the surrounding tombs.

‘
Libera me, Dominie, de morte aeterna in die illa tremenda, quando caeli movendi sunt et terra
 . . .’ From the cracks of a tomb nearby, a crawfish nearly as big as January’s hand crept out and dropped into a puddle; in the dense shadows at the rear of the open slot in the FTFCMBS tomb, he could see furtive movement among the scraped tangle of a previous occupant’s hair and bones.

‘He was m’ only frien’!’ Felix Glasson’s voice raised in a self-pitying wail. ‘Only one who cared ’bout me!’

‘Remind me to give up liquor entirely,’ Hannibal whispered.

‘Lord have mercy on us . . . Christ have mercy on us . . . From the gate of hell, deliver his soul . . .’

Deliver Rameses’s soul
, thought January, who had always had more imagination than was good for a man.
After having his body pass through the obscene indignities of death by fever, his soul deserves deliverance
. Nannette Ramilles buried her face in her hands and gave herself up to sobs; after a quick glance at her, Denise Glasson wailed, ‘Help me! I am faint!’ and sagged into Quennell the undertaker’s arms. On the other side of the coffin, Liselle pressed her hands to her veiled lips and turned to cling to her friends. Their sons were seven and two. After the death of Albert Ramilles, six years ago, Rameses’s mother, Nannette, had sold the cottage on Rue Burgundy and gone to live with her mother’s family down on Bayou LaFourche. Rather than put herself under obligation to her own mother, Liselle had chosen to have her husband’s body laid out for viewing in the back parlor of Beauvais Quennell’s coffin-shop on Rue Douane, where strangers and sojourners spent their final night.

‘
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Dominie, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Amen
.’

The pall-bearers bent, lifted the coffin to slide it into the tomb, and Felix – who had spent the interval alternately sobbing and reviving his spirits from a silver flask – staggered in the slicked mud, failed to catch his balance, and – to everyone’s horror – fell headlong, still clinging stubbornly to his corner of the coffin.

It struck the wall of the Delacroix family tomb with the force of a battering-ram. The polished cherrywood split from end to end and precipitated to the muddy ground not the body of Rameses Ramilles, but the corpse of a white man with close-cropped graying red curls, a ruffled white shirt, and a bright-green silk vest that was covered with dark, dried blood.

Liselle and several others – not all of them ladies – screamed. Madame Glasson, evidently forgetting that she’d been fainting with grief moments before, seized the undertaker by the arm, jabbed a finger at the corpse, and yelled at the top of her lungs, ‘Who the hell is
that
?’

Into the momentary silence that followed Hannibal said, quite quietly, ‘It’s Patrick Derryhick.’ He stood looking down at the face of the man in the mud and weeds at his feet, his own face chalk-white as if he were a corpse himself. ‘He was up at Oxford with me.’

TWO

‘
W
ell!
’ declared Madame Glasson, ‘I
trust
the Society isn’t going to pay for
any
of this, considering poor Rameses wasn’t even
in
that coffin!’

M’sieu Quennell – who was on the Board of Directors of the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society – bowed. ‘The matter will be discussed at the next meeting, Madame. Now perhaps Madame would care to see to her son? He does not seem to be well.’ Felix Glasson, after a bout of drunken hysteria, had retreated behind the Metoyer family tomb to be sick.

January, meanwhile, helped Hannibal lift the stranger’s body on to the flat top of a nearby bench-tomb, then turned to intercept Nannette Ramilles – who looked ready to yank her long-time rival Glasson’s lavishly-feathered black turban off and pull her hair. M’sieu Glasson and Granpere Ramilles were arguing in the strained low voices of men who have disagreed all their lives and are about to start shouting at the top of their lungs. ‘The Watch should be here any minute,’ said January quietly. He’d sent his nephew Gabriel dashing for the Cabildo within minutes of Derryhick’s body hitting the mud. ‘We can’t all wait here. It shows no respect—’

‘Respect?’ hissed Nannette Ramilles. ‘It is
she
–’ her gesture at Denise Glasson was like hurling garbage – ‘who hasn’t the slightest respect for my son, for all her crocodile tears—’

‘How
can
you?’ Madame Glasson sagged into the arms of the nearest member of the Board of Directors as if she had been shot. ‘How
can
you, after all I have been through—?’

‘All
you
have been through?’

‘Mesdames, please . . .’ January’s wife Rose stepped between them, something January wasn’t sure he’d have had the courage to do. ‘Before all else, we need to consider Liselle.’ She took the young widow’s hand, put an arm around her shoulders. Tall, slim, and with a curious air of awkward gracefulness to her movements, Rose had begun to acquire a position of her own in the
libre
community when she’d opened her school. Though many of the wives of the free colored artisans – and many of the quadroon and octoroon demi-monde – regarded her determination to teach free girls of color the same curriculum available to boys as quixotic (‘
There’s
a recipe for a life of poverty,’ January’s mother had sneered), her good sense and dedication had won respect.

She went on, ‘As the wake was to be at my house – and all the food is there already – I’m sure poor Liselle would be much more comfortable out of this sun. If you, Madame –’ she nodded to Nannette Ramilles – ‘and you, Madame –’ to La Glasson – ‘would let it be known that is where you’re going, you know everyone will follow.’

She gave Liselle a gentle hug and said in a quieter voice – but not so quiet that the two mothers couldn’t hear, ‘You must be suffocating under that veil, darling. And there’s nothing you or I can accomplish here . . .’

Liselle whispered, ‘Rameses,’ but allowed herself to be led away among the tombs. They were joined by Olympe, whose husband had been left behind at the January residence to look after the children and greet returning guests. For a moment it was touch and go whether anyone would follow. Everybody present seemed determined to present their version of events to the Watch and to be in on the drama first-hand.

But in truth, the cemetery was blisteringly hot and smelled as only a New Orleans cemetery can smell on a blisteringly hot October day. The promise of shade, chairs, and lemonade won out. Uncle Bichet – tiny, bespectacled, and, like January, marching with a guitar instead of his usual bull fiddle – began to play a Rossini march with an odd little African twist to it, and the other musicians took it up. With luck, reflected January, they’d get all the people out of there before the Lieutenant of the City Guard appeared.

By the time he himself returned to his house – the largest of those owned by the members of the Board – the place would be, as Hannibal had predicted, crammed to the rafters, not only with those who had been to the funeral, but also with every other member of the free colored community as well.

And all of them talking at the top of their lungs, oh joy
.

He moved through the crowd, picking out those he knew the Watch would want to speak to: Beauvais Quennell, the undertaker; Medard Regnier, who was the manager of the hotel that backed on to Quennell’s yard. He sent one of the older children after his sister; as a voodooienne, she knew secrets that even the insatiable gossip of the French Town couldn’t fathom, but he guessed she would be of more use at the house.

Then he went out to the hearse and fetched the sheet that Quennell used to cover the coffin, to keep the expensive velvet pall clean from funeral to funeral. This he carried back to the low bench-tomb where Hannibal sat beside the body of his friend.

‘Are you all right?’

The fiddler considered the question for a long moment, as if translating it from a language half-forgotten. ‘I’d thought . . .’ he began, then fell silent.

‘Help me with this.’ January spread out the sheet. Hannibal took two corners. Together they covered the corpse.

‘They’re going to want to know what you can tell them about him.’

Hannibal drew a deep breath, a hoarse wheeze in his scarred lungs, and let it out. ‘They can jolly well write to his family for the information.’ He glanced up at January, the pain in his eyes almost physical, like a man who has been beaten. ‘The address is Princeton Row in Dublin.’ He picked up his violin, tucked it under his arm, and followed the moving mass of mourners away toward the cemetery gate, the long crape veil on his hat floating behind him like Death’s shadow in the sickly light.

‘I seen folks squoze theirselves into weddins,’ drawled a voice from behind the nearest tomb. ‘An’ I won’t say I didn’t invite myself to the inauguration of Andrew Jackson
and
sleep that night on the floor of the White House – leastwise that’s where I woke up –’ Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Watch stepped into sight and spat a line of tobacco at a cockroach the size of a mouse, which was climbing up the broken remains of the casket – ‘but this’s the first time I seen a man stow away for a ride in somebody else’s coffin. This our friend?’

With surprising gentleness he turned back the sheet, stood looking down at the square face with its pug nose and round chin.

‘According to Hannibal, his name is Patrick Derryhick.’ January moved the sable linen further back, to let Shaw take the dead man’s wrist and try to move the folded arms. Having raised the body like a dropped plank from the ruined coffin to the low top of the bench-tomb, he knew already Shaw wouldn’t be able to do it. ‘There’s still a little flex in his ankles,’ he added, as Shaw reached down to feel the rigid thighs and calves.

The Lieutenant of the City Guard, an unshaven, straggly-haired back-hills Kentuckian, didn’t look capable of understanding the average newspaper, but he nodded and pushed back one of the dead man’s eyelids. ‘Can’t have been put to bed much after midnight, then. I’m assumin’ the feller who paid for the box was sleepin’ at the overcoat-maker’s last night, rather ’n in his own parlor?’

January nodded. ‘Rameses Ramilles and his wife had a single room in Marigny, behind LaForge’s Grocery on Rue Burgundy. His mother lives out of town. They have two sons. M’sieu Quennell—’ He bowed as the undertaker approached, and Shaw held out his hand.

‘M’sieu Shaw, is it not?’ The undertaker’s tinted spectacles glinted like demon eyes as he inclined his head. He spoke hesitant English; the Americans who dwelled on the other side of Canal Street generally took their dead to American undertakers, and in any case they wouldn’t have used the services of a black man, no matter how fair his complexion. ‘We have met, sir.’

‘Over that feller whose son claimed he’d been poisoned an’ wanted him resurrected an’ looked at, yeah.’ Shaw shook Quennell’s hand. ‘Can’t say it’s a pleasure, sir, but I will say it’s damn unexpected.’ He turned to consider the body. ‘As I recollect it, you got a little room at the back of your shop, fixed up for them as slings their hooks whilst away from home.’ His rather hard gray eyes narrowed. ‘Left side as you goes in through the shop—’