Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave Read Online Free PDF Page A

the edge of the filthy bed to wait for him as he went out into the yard.
    Summers, New Orleans slowed, like a stagnant river sinking in the heat. Sugar harvested in November, a desperate race against frost. In December, slaves dragged the long, coarse sacks through the cotton-fields before the bitter-cold first light dawned and picked the sharp, dry boles with chilblained fingers that bled. First frost brought the businessmen back to New Orleans from their country places in Milneburgh or Mandeville by the lake, brought the steamboats downriver in droves with the winter rise. Flatboats came in from Ohio and Kentucky, loaded with pumpkins and pigs and corn and tobacco-spitting Kaintuck louts who gawked at everything they saw. Harvest and business and trade and sales, ships coming in from the Gulf, Christmas and Carnival and Mardi Gras ...
    Summers, everything stopped. The wealthy familiesthe Destrehans and de McCartys, the Bringiers and Livaudaises-fled the gluey heat that settled on the town, fled the clouds of mosquitoes that hummed over every gutter and puddle and the riotous proliferation of gnats and fleas and immense brown palmetto-bugs. Fled the reek of the gutters and the swollen carcasses of dogs, rats, horses rotting for days in the mud. Many years, they fled worse things as well, yellow fever some years; sometimes cholera, too.
    The only people left in town were the poor and the relatively poor. Little business was done. The markets were quiet, the teeming levees nearly still. Even the gamblingparlors were a little subdued.
    So nobody in Hesione LeGros' neighborhood was in any tearing hurry to get anywhere.
    They waited for January in the shade of the rickety gallery of the cottage visible from Hesione's window: Suzie and Richie sitting side by side on the steps, another couple a few years older-the woman with a baby at breast-and two or three single men lounging in the cypress-tree's shade. January guessed that some were runaways, picking up a few cents a day at whatever inconspicuous jobs they could find and sneaking out to the plantations from which they'd escaped to visit their friends and families when they could. There were many such, in New Orleans.
    “Who found her?” he asked.
    R.ichie raised his hand tentatively, a little uncertain if that was the question that had been asked, and January inquired in English, “When was that?”
    “Just after sun-up, sir.”
    
     The young man seemed relieved to be able to reply in his native tongue. “I was on my way down to the levee to see could I get loadin' work, ad I saw five or six dogs, diggin' at the wall of the shack. Two of 'em was Doc Furness' dogs from the Swamp, but the rest was wild ones, that live in the woods. You don't usually see 'em around folks' houses by daylight. It didn't look right to me.”
    No, thought January. And the dogs would smell carrion even above the general fetor of privies and garbage and back-yard pigs that hung over the neighborhood in the heat.
    “Was the shutters open or closed?”
    Richie looked a little startled at the question, but shut his eyes a moment to picture it, then answered, “Closed, sir. I opened 'em up, to see.”
    “They's open when she come home last night,” added the other man on the porch, taller and stringier than Richie and without the tin slave-badge. He spoke French, but January had seen his eyes, knew he'd followed the discussion in English. “I remember thinkin' how the place would be just roarin' with mosquitoes inside.”
    “But you didn't see a light burning?”
    The tall man shook his head. “I walked back with Hessy from town, round about full-dark. She'd been down the market, pickin' up what she could from the market women that was closin' up. She had a couple baskets of berries, just gone off a little an' mushy. She asked me if Titine here would like some.” And he patted the slim sloped shoulder of the woman with the baby on the gallery's single broken-down chair at his side. “She give