Dead water

as he dragged the girl forward and tore open her dress. She's yours for a thousand dollars. . . . Go ahead, feel of her. . . .

In his dream January saw again the young girl weeping with shame, and the handsome and ineffectual Mr. Quince, his hands full of copies of the Liberator, standing by shaking in fury.

But Quince is more a man than I, thought January. At least he went around the boat speaking out against what he saw. And not letting mockery stop him.

His dream changed. He was with Rose, walking along the banks of a bayou deep in the Barataria country, in the old pirate-haunted lands where Jean Lafitte and his men had roved and hidden out thirty years before. Rose, in boy's garb, had been speaking cheerfully of what her neighbors in that country, former pirates themselves, had told her about the logistics of hiding treasure—and January, and the half-dozen slaves who'd gone along with them— knelt by the side of the bayou, just where January had deduced they should, and from the water drew the old iron ship's cannon, plugged with tar, from the hiding-place where one of Lafitte's captains had left it.

In his dream he saw again the glitter of the gold in the new sun, and Rose with a necklace of blazing topazes strung around her hat.

That gold had been taken away from them—and given back.

On the other side of the bayou in his dream, January saw the woman he'd seen in other dreams: a flicker of blue robe, the gentle face that watches over the world. A halo of insubstantial stars.

She asked him, Did you think the gold was given to you to use for yourself alone?

And he knew then that God never gives anyone gold to use for themselves alone.

Then he was back in the parlor, as he had been earlier that evening, with Judas Bredon saying, . . . we're looking for people with houses.

And in the shadows, like a ghost in an aureole of ghostly stars, God's Mother winked at January and smiled. He saw that under her blue veil she wore Mrs. Fischer's green–and–cream–colored dress.

He woke and knew it was very early, not daylight, not even the early-rising summer dawn. He wondered what had waked him. The smell of smoke from the kitchen of the house next door, as their slave-woman built up the hearth-fire that would be her personal hell for another sweltering day? The clanging bell of a steamboat, far down the Rue Esplanade?

Then he heard again, from the yard below their window, a stealthy scratching, the scraping whisper of a basket laid down on the bricks.

Silent, January slipped from beneath the mosquito-bar, and by touch in the dark—for the night-lamp had long gone out—crossed the bedroom and gathered his shirt from the single chair. Slipping the garment on, he moved through the parlor on naked feet, past the pantry with its scents of candlewax and last night's coffee. He kept close to the wall, where the floor would not creak, and as he did so he heard the rustle of someone on the rear gallery.

He remembered the kitchen fire that had burst out while they were gone, started, Gabriel had said, no one knew how. . . . They were lucky the house had not burned down.

Guede-Five-Days-Unhappy, tear the roof away from over his head. . . .

January shot back the bolt and threw the door open in time to see Queen Regine gather up her basket, preparing to leave.

The old woman whirled as January stepped out of the door and put himself between her and the stair down to the yard. In the gray fore-light of not-yet-day her black eyes glittered like a startled beast's, and she raised one skinny hand. Then she lowered it and looked down, and following her eyes, January saw, almost under his feet, a cross written in brick-dust, and the scribbled loops of a veve in water that smelled of verbena.

He had been brother to a voodooienne long enough to know those signs meant life, not death, and his eyes went to the Queen's in questioning wonder.

She said, “You save my child.”

“What?”

“I take the cross off you,” said the old woman, “an' put blessin' on this house. You save my child. I seen you in a dream—dark, an' shoutin', an' guns firin' off. Water rushin' in, an' great black weights movin' around in that dark. You went back in that dark to save my child, and brought her up out to the light.”

My granny knows about them things. . . .

“Julie is your granddaughter?” he asked, knowing even before she nodded that it was true.

“She has the Knowin' in her,” said Queen Regine. “Since she was a little thing, she an' me, we shared the Power. But her mama take her to Church, so she don't think about Power no more, and don't want it. But between us, between her an' me, it's still alive.”

January said, “That's why you went down to see the Silver Moon off? To say good- by?”

“To kiss her,” said the Queen. “An' to put my Word on her, though she don't believe it no more; just to see her once more. Her master, he sell her to that Irish as a maid for his popotte, and they all promise, we won't sell her, we make her a good maidservant. . . . But she's afraid. And I'm afraid. I know I'll never see her again, not in the flesh. Sometimes I felt her scared so bad, scared one night. . . . But that mornin', as I was cookin' in the kitchen, her fear came on me so strong, I near fainted. And I put my head down on the table an' I see her in the dark, trapped an' scared, with things fallin' on her an' the water comin' in. . . . An' I see you. And I thought . . .”

Her few white teeth shone in a wry crone's grin.

“. . . I thought, Lord Baron Cemetery, don't let that hex take hold on him now! You went back for her,” she finished with tears swimming silver in her eyes. “You went back and you didn't have to, you didn't even know for sure she was there. But my girl, she's alive now 'cause of you. She's walkin' to freedom 'cause of you. So I put blessin' on your house, blessin' wherever you walk. Blessin' to guard you, whatever you do.”