A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [91]
“Where on Customhouse Street?”
“ ’Tween Bourbon and Burgundy. She got a little cottage there. Her man Corbier’s an upholsterer, but he don’t got much to say for himself.”
“If I was married to a voodooienne,” said January, “I wouldn’t have much to say for myself, either.”
He turned away from the kitchen door. From the barroom at the far end of the line of cribs a sudden commotion of shouting broke out, whoops and screams and curses. Someone yelled “Look out! He’s got a knife!” Through the window that looked into the yard a man’s body came flying, bringing with it a tangle of cheap curtains, glass, and fragments of sash. The man sprawled, gasping, in the some three inches of unspeakable water that puddled most of the yard, as another man came crashing through the remains of the window and half a dozen others—all white, all bearded, all wearing the filthy linsey-woolsey shirts and coarse woolen suspendered pants of flatboat men—came boiling out through the rear door. The audience from the cockfight in the corner of the yard gravitated at once to the far more inviting spectacle and the man in the mud was yelling “Christ, he’s killed me! Christ, I’m bleeding!”
The smell of blood was rank, sweet, hot in the bright air. January strode across the yard, forced his way to the front of the crowd in time to see the man on the ground sit up, face chalky under a graying bush of tobacco-stained beard. His thigh had been opened for almost a hand’s breadth, brilliant arterial blood spouting in huge gouts. The man fell back, groaning, back arching.
Without thinking January said, “Bandanna,” and Mary, who’d come running out of the kitchen beside him, pulled off her tignon and handed it to him. He knelt beside the boatman, twisted the blue-and-yellow kerchief high around the man’s thigh, almost into the groin, and reached back, saying, “Stick—something …”
Somebody handed him the ramrod from a pistol. He twisted it into the tourniquet, screwing it tight, his hands working automatically, remembering a dozen or a hundred similar emergencies in the night clinic at the Hôtel Dieu. “Bandanna,” he repeated, reaching out again, and a neckerchief was put into his hands. It smelled to heaven, was black with greasy sweat, and crept with lice, but there was no time to be choosy. He folded it into a pad, pressed it hard on the wound, the additional pressure closing it.
The patient groaned, reached out, and whispered, “Whisky. For the love of God, whisky.”
January took the bottle somebody handed down and poured it on the makeshift dressing. The man screamed at the sting of it, grabbed the bottle from his hand, and yelled, “Git this nigger away from me! Nahum! Git him away, I say! Who the hell let him touch old Gator Jim? I killed niggers his size ’fore I was old enough to spit straight!”
“He shouldn’t have whisky,” said January, as someone else held out another bottle. “He needs to have that cut cleaned and stitched, cauterized if possible.”
“The hell you say!” yelled the patient, trying to sit up.
“T’bacca juice’ll clean it just as well,” added another one of the boatmen, and that seemed to act as a license—every one of the men had a remedy. Gator Jim swigged deeply of the whisky and when January tried to stop him two men pulled him back, thrust him away into the muddy yard.
“You can’t—” began January, as the boatmen carried their friend back into the saloon. One stepped clear and stood in his path.
For some reason he recognized the man called Nahum Shagrue, whom he’d last seen at the Calabozo.
“Saloon’s for white men, boy.” Shagrue’s voice was very quiet, but his eyes were the eyes of a wild pig: intelligent, ugly, and deadly dangerous, calculating where and how to attack. He had a pistol and two knives in his belt, another knife protruding from the top of one boot, and the end of his nose was a flattened mass of scar tissue, as if someone had bitten off the tip of it long ago. The cut he’d got on his forehead from the city guard was a crusted mess over one spiky brow,