A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [92]
“He needs to have that wound cleaned if he isn’t going to get blood poisoning,” said January. “And he needs to have it stitched, and the tourniquet loosened every five minutes if—”
“What, you think you’re some kinda doctor, boy?”
January had enough sense not to reply.
“We kin take care of our own ’thout no uppity nigger tellin’ us what to do,” said Shagrue. “Now you git, ’fore you’re the one needs cleanin’ an’ stitchin’.”
From within the saloon, January could hear the harsh upriver voices. “Holy Christ, get him some whisky.” “I hear cowshit on a wound’ll draw the poison right out.” “Lady over on Jackson Street got a cow.…” “The hell with them fancy French doctors, get me old Injun Sam.… Sober him up first.…”
January knew the man would die.
He turned, and his eyes met those of the boatman before him; pale like broken glass, cold and intolerant and abysmally ignorant.
And proud of it.
He turned away.
FIFTEEN
Olympe Corbier opened the door of her small, ochre-stuccoed cottage on Rue Douane and stood looking across at her brother for some moments, her thin face blank beneath the orange-and-black tignon. Behind her the room was filled with light and thick with the smells of incense and drying herbs. A cheap French chromo of the Virgin was tacked to the wall under a wreath of sassafras; on a narrow table of plank and twig before it stood a green candle on one side, a red one on the other, amid a gay tangle of beads. That was all January could see past her shoulder. Somewhere in the house a child was singing.
She said, “Ben.”
It was the woman who had been at Congo Square.
“Olympe.”
“Marie said you was back.” She stepped aside to let him in. When he mounted the tall brick steps he gained over her in height. Tall for a woman, she was nowhere near his own inches. She was dressed much as she had been Sunday, in a bright-colored skirt badly frayed and the white blouse and jacket of a poor artisan’s wife. The fine wrinkles that stitched her eyelids and were beginning to make their appearance around her lips detracted nothing from the vivid life of her face.
“Marie?”
“The Queen. Laveau. But it was all over anyway, that Widow Levesque’s big son was back from France and playin’ piano like Angel Gabriel. Nana Bichie told me in the market, where I buy my herbs. That you had a lady in France, but she died, and so you returned.”
Her French had deteriorated. Even before he had left, it had begun to coarsen, the js shifting into zs and the as to os, the endings and articles of words fading away. Like his, her voice was deep and made music of the sounds. In another room of the cottage—or perhaps in the yard behind—a young girl’s voice sounded, and the singing child stilled for a moment. Her eyes changed momentarily as she kept track of what was going on, as mothers do—or as other children’s mothers always had. Just a touch, then her attention returned to him.
“You never came.”
“I didn’t know you’d want me to,” he said. “We’d fought.…” He hesitated, feeling awkward and stupid but knowing that their quarrel sixteen years ago was something that still needed getting past. “And I felt bad that I hadn’t come back, hadn’t made the time to look for you, before I left for France. I was stupid then—and I guess I didn’t quite have the nerve now. I don’t know how long it would have taken me to get the nerve, if I didn’t need your advice.”
“About Angelique Crozat?”
He looked nonplussed. Her dark face split into a white grin and the tension of her body relaxed. She shook her head, “Brother, for a griffe you sure white inside. You don’t think everybody in town don’t know about that silly cow Phrasie Dreuze hangin’ herself all over you like Spanish moss at the funeral and layin’ it on you to ‘avenge her daughter’s murder’? It true like she sayin’ that somebody witched her pillow?”
“Put this in her mattress.” He produced the handkerchief from his coat pocket—his slightly-better corduroy coatee,