Fever Season (21 page)

“Because they never reached Milneburgh,” answered January. “Nor have they appeared in any of the clinics—I’ve been asking. They’re the poorest people in this street, you know, and since Jacques’s brothers died last year they have no other family in town. Everyone else has just enough money to leave: the Dèliers, and the Dugues on
the other side; I think the Widow Kircher across the street and her daughter have gone as well, if I remember what Olympe’s told me. Get some candles,” he said, sliding carefully out from beneath the mosquito-bar again. “There’s some things I’d like to have a look at over there.”

The latch on the rear door of the Perrets’ small house had been broken, and by the stains and mildew on the floor just within the doorway this had been done not quite a week ago. “Robbed right after they left,” murmured Hannibal, holding aloft half a dozen beeswax candles in the Dèlier’s best dining-room candelabra. January had left money for the candles in the store cupboard they’d broken into, reckoning they would need the stronger light.

“Were they? I wonder.” The house consisted of two rooms only. This, their bedroom, looked out onto the yard with its tiny kitchen. There were no slave quarters, no garçonnière over the kitchen: a young couple, the Perrets had been childless so far and certainly too poor to afford a slave. “They didn’t have much to steal. Just looking at the outside of the house, any thief would know that.” He touched his friend’s wrist, raising the lights. They showed the white gauze of the mosquito-bar hanging down free, not tied back out of the way.

January had hunted enough mosquitoes within the tents of mosquito-bar—trying to singe them to death with a bedroom candle where they clung to the gauze without immolating the house—to know that nobody in Louisiana would leave the bar untied.

He led the way to the narrow cypress bed. Unlike those at the Dèlier house next door, there were sheets still on the mattress, the top sheet simply flung back.

It could mean only that Nicole Perret was an untidy housekeeper, but the spic-and-span neatness of the rest of the room put a lie to that. In the armoire that was one of
the room’s very few pieces of furniture he found a smock—such as a harness-and-wheel mender like Jacques Perret would wear to work—folded on a shelf, along with two calico shirts and two pairs of breeches. In the drawers were two petticoats, some stockings, a few chemises and tignons, and two corsets.

Folded up and put away upon retiring?

Two pairs of shoes, a man’s and a woman’s, were under the bed.

Brushes and combs still lay on the small vanity table, though the drawers of that table had clearly been opened and gone through for earrings, bracelets, whatever could be found. A cheap French Bible lay on the floor.

“No sign of violence.” Hannibal pushed open the door that led through into the parlor. Shadows reeled as he put the candelabra through to look. “Though I suppose if one woke in the middle of the night with a man pointing a shotgun at one, one’s impulse to violence would be limited.” He came back into the bedroom, stroking at his graying mustache.

“No,” said January softly. “No sign of violence. No smell of fever or sign of disease. A band of men,” he said. “A band of men roving the streets, carrying clubs—probably carrying guns—breaking into houses where the neighbors are gone, where the inhabitants would not be missed.”

“That means they were watching the place.”

“Maybe,” said January. “You can make a fortune in a year, in the new Indian lands, planting cotton—if you have the hands.” He touched the small porcelain bowl of hairpins on the little dresser, something no woman would have gone to the lake—or anywhere else—without. “It would be worth putting a little time in, to learn who has no family to miss them and no neighbors to be able to say
exactly when they vanished. Marie Laveau isn’t the only one to employ spies. And in the fever season, no one would look. Everyone would assume they simply died and were buried. By the time anyone who knew them came back to town, they couldn’t even identify a body.”

He shivered, the fear he had felt that night turning to anger, a deep and burning rage. Remembered the boatman’s dark eyes gazing out from string-wrapped pickaninny braids:
I don’t go up there anymore
.… “As they would have assumed of me.”

Hannibal set the candles down and trimmed the wicks. What person leaving town for a few weeks wouldn’t have taken the candle scissors from the corner of the dresser? What woman, who couldn’t afford more than two corsets, would have left both behind?

Very softly, January went on, “Americans coming into town complain about our people sticking together. They make jokes how everybody knows everybody’s cousins and sisters and friends and business: how you need an introduction to so much as have dinner. But there’s a reason for it.”

He stepped back through the shutters to the yard, drew them closed behind him and worked a wedge of the splintered wood between them to hold them shut. Hannibal blew out the candles, plunging the tiny yard from shadow to Erebean darkness.

“It’s so we can prove who we are,” said January. “So none of us is out there alone.”

He slept the remainder of the night at the Dèlier town house, unwilling to walk the streets of the French town until daylight. In the morning he and Hannibal made their way back to Gallatin Street, to the shabby groggery
operated by the freedman Lafrènniére. Lafrènniére told them the woman Nanié usually could be found there around noon—“Before she starts her work,” he put it—and as it was already well past ten, January paid a couple of picayunes for two bowls of beans and rice, and asked if Nanié had ever found her friend.

“Who—Virgil?” Lafrènniére winked. “Nanié, she got lots of friends. Virgil, I think Bronze John must have got him.”

“He wouldn’t have run away?”

Two or three children peeked in through the back door, staring at the unprecedented spectacle of a white man consuming beans and rice in their father’s grocery. Hannibal, who abhorred children whatever their race, ignored them.

“Run away? Why?” The barman shrugged. “Virgil had four hundred dollars saved up in the Bank of Louisiana, to buy his freedom with. He paid his wages at the cotton press over to Michie Bringier, and Michie Bringier gave his word not to sell him. And why should he, when he’s bringin’ in five dollars a week? Michie Bringier, he has six, seven men that sleep out—two of ’em livin’ in the attic just down the street. Why’d Virgil want to run away? Where’d he go, that he’d have it this good?”

Nanié, when she came in, confirmed this. “I think it have to be fever,” she said, a worried frown on her gap-toothed face. “It musta took him away from home. I keep hopin’ I’ll find him in one of the hospitals, but this was a week ago now that Virgil didn’t come visit me like he said he would. Widow Puy, what own the shed in back of her place that he slept in, rented it out yesterday to somebody else.”

“And there was no sign that he’d been taken sick at his shed?” January asked.

“No, sir.” The ‘sir’ was a tribute to his well-bred French and black coat.

January was silent, thinking. The woman was raggedly dressed, but the colors of her thirdhand gown were sufficiently bright, coupled with the overabundance of cheap glass jewelry, to indicate her trade. She wasn’t wearing a tignon, either, her pecan-colored hair wound up in elaborate ringlets and cupid knots on her head; she was stout, and shopworn, and not very clean.

At last he said, “Has this happened to anyone else you know? Someone who lived alone, and had no family, that disappeared out of where they live? Or off the street?”

She nodded immediately. “Stephan Gaulois’s pal ’Poly and his wife. They didn’t live alone—I mean they live with each other—but their neighbors been took with the fever, both sides, and they ain’t been on St. Louis Street long enough that anybody know ’em. Stephan say he thought the fever took them, too, so he broke in their house to find ’em, but they gone. ’Poly’s wife, Lu, just got her freedom, and they took that house not seven months ago.”

January said softly, “Show me.”

There was not that much to see. ’Poly and Lu had occupied a two-room shack in the sloppy gaggle of buildings that backed the canal and the turning basin, close behind the St. Louis Cemetery. It was a neighborhood, like the Swamp and Gallatin Street, given over largely to Kaintuck keelboatmen, cheapjack gamblers, purveyors of nameless drinkables, and bravos and whores of assorted hues and nationalities. The lot on one side was still vacant, knee-deep in hackberry and weeds, where pigs rooted among
stagnant ponds. On the other side stood a house and a sort of shed. Both were boarded tight.

They entered through the back door, whose bolt had been broken off in the socket. “That was done when I got here,” explained Nanié’s friend Stephan, who joined the party on the way up from Gallatin Street. He was the light-skinned man who’d been at the table with her last night.

“Was there mud on the floor here when you came in?”

The man frowned, trying to think back. The mud tracked from the door to the bed. The mosquito-bar, untied, was thrown sloppily aside. Half a dozen of the insects clung like the brown grains of wild rice to the exposed inner surface of the gauze.

“I don’t remember,” he said, and January nodded. It was pretty clear which tracks were Stephan’s. They led from the door through to the front room, the outlines of his bare feet in all places overlying the muddle of boot-prints that had been there before. He was barefoot still, like most workers on the levee, and his feet even shod would have been broader and longer than any others represented by the pale ghost shapes on the bare plank floor.

“Only one pair of shoes here,” remarked Hannibal, kneeling to look under the bed.

January brushed his fingers over the dried mud of the tracks. Two or three days old, at a guess. It had rained daily for weeks.

“Lu only had the one pair,” provided Nanié, twisting her necklace of cheap red beads around her fingers. “Lu only just bought her freedom, over to Mobile, and come to town; ’Poly got his papers not so many months back. They didn’t have much, and that’s a fact.”

“What happened to them?” Stephan, who had gone to look in the front room again, now returned, his face troubled
and angry. “I thought they might have been took by the fever when they was away from home, but now you show me them tracks. Who’d come in here and take ’em away? And where’d they take ’em?”

“At a guess,” said Hannibal quietly, “to the Missouri Territory, to pick cotton.”

January and Hannibal parted in the weedy little yard before Lu and ’Poly’s humble shack, Hannibal to make his way back to Mademoiselle Vitrac’s school to offer what assistance he could and perhaps to cadge a meal. January intended to return to Gallatin Street and ask Hèlier what he knew about ’Poly, Lu, and Nanié’s Virgil, but something else Natchez Jim had said to him came back to mind. So, instead, with a certain amount of misgivings, he made his way upstream to where the turning basin lay at the end of the brown stretch of the Carondolet Canal.

The area around the basin was known, quite descriptively, as the Swamp. Even the City Guards didn’t go there often. This time of the afternoon it was getting lively, and January moved with silent circumspection among the rough-built shacks and sheds that housed the bordellos, saloons, and gambling dens that made up nine-tenths of the businesses thereabouts. Once, he was stopped by a trio of hairy and verminous keelboatmen who demanded his business—it took all the diplomacy of self-abasement he could muster to get out of the confrontation with no more than tobacco on his shirt—and as he passed the two-room plank shed owned and operated by a woman known as Kentucky Williams, that harridan and the ladies of her employ, sitting uncorseted in their shabby petticoats on the sills of their open French doors, rained him with
orange-peels, cigar-butts, and some of the most scatalogical language he had ever heard in his life.

“Sure makes me proud to be an American,” remarked Lieutenant Shaw, slouching down the single log that served as a step before an establishment called the Turkey-Buzzard, then wading over to January through the ankle-deep swill of the street. The gutters that surrounded every square of buildings in the French town and gave them the name of “islands” did not extend across Rue des Ramparts, nor had the municipality bothered to lay down stepping-stones across the streets in this district.
And why should they?
thought January dryly.
No wealthy cousins of the largely Creole City Council are likely to cross
these
streets
.

“Not your part of town, Maestro.”

“Nor yours, sir,” observed January, falling into step with Shaw. Out of long habit he kept to the outside, as men of color were expected to, leaving the higher, marginally drier weeds along the buildings for his chromatic better. “If I may say so.”

“You may,” replied Shaw gravely. “You may indeed.” Behind them Miss Williams, a strapping harpy with a long snaggle of ditchwater blond hair and a pockmarked face like the sole of somebody’s boot, screamed a final insult and flung half a brick. It hit Shaw’s shoulder with the force of a cannon-shot, but he caught his balance and walked on, merely rubbing the place with one bony hand. “And they say women ain’t strong enough to go into the army. You know, if you’re despondent and all that an’ really want to die, Maestro, probably settin’ out all night and lettin’ the fever get you would be more comfortable than comin’ down here. Not that these folks ain’t dyin’ like flies in every attic an’ back room an’ alley,” he added somberly.

A corpse, puff-bellied already in the heat, lay just outside the door of the Tom and Jerry saloon on the other
side of the street. January wondered whether that was Bronze John or a statement of management policy concerning winners at the gaming tables.

“I’ve been out all night already,” he replied quietly. “And I must say it nearly worked.” And he recounted to Shaw the events of last night, and what he had found in the houses of Nicole Perret, and ’Poly and Lu. “Over the past week or ten days, people have been coming into the clinic, or coming to my sister Olympe, or to others, and asking us to look through the fever wards for people who have disappeared, but don’t seem to have come down with fever. Always people of color or blacks.”