Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard Read Free

him for showing interest in that poor sister of his.”
    A sharp rustle sounded in the trees to the side of the house. January held up his hand, listening. The drums were silent.
    Aeneas and the original waiter had been joined by a third man, young and barely five feet tall, hastily buttoning a white linen jacket and rinsing something off his hands with water dipped from the rain barrel. With him was a young woman in the first stages of pregnancy, retying the headscarf that all women of color, slave or free, were by law required to wear. They turned immediately to lay out the slices of beef and ham, the tarts and cakes and petits fours, on the yellow-flowered plates. “I'll be back,” said January softly. He slipped down the gallery steps and around the corner of the house into the trees.
    Given the trouble his curiosity had caused him in the past, January reflected that he should know better. In any case, he had a good idea of what he would find in the darkness where the trees got thick. Though by this time, he told himself, if she'd been there-been part of it-she'd be gone.
    And what good would it do me to know? He didn't want to admit it, but the brought back memories.
    Mats of leaves and pale shaggy curtains of moss quickly obscured the bright cool rectangles of the windows. Light glinted on puddles of standing water, and the ground gave squishily underfoot. Twenty feet from the house, January scented blood again and the heavy grit of drums had quenched smoke still hanging in the air. He listened, but all was still.
    Even so, he felt their eyes. Not those who'd risked a whipping to sneak out and follow the sound of the drums. Not those who'd sung the keening, eerie, driving rhythms of those songs in a half-forgotten tongue. The eyes he felt on his back were the eyes of those they'd come to see, to touch; to sing to and to give themselves to, flesh and hearts and souls.
    January knew them well.
    Papa Legba, guardian of all gates and doors, warden of the crossroad.
    Beautiful Ezili, in all her many forms. Zombi-Damballah, the Serpent King.
    Ogu of the sword and the fire January quickly pushed the thought of that burning-eyed warrior from his mind.
    And the Baron Samedi, the Baron Cemetery, boneyard god grinning white through the darkness. . . .
    A hundred feet from the house, trees had been felled. Here new construction would begin with the first frost of autumn. Embers still glowed where a pit had been dug, quenched now with dirt. From his pocket January took a box of lucifers, and scratched one on the paper. It showed him the rucked earth where the veves had been drawn, the dark spatters of spilt rum and the darker dribblings of blood. Near the pit a headless black chicken lay, feet still twitching, ringed by fragmented silver Spanish bits. Two plates also lay on the ground, each likewise surrounded by silver. One was heaped with rice and chickpeas. The other held a cigar and a glass of rum.
    Those whose aid had been sought were known for liking tobacco, rum, and blood.
    January lit another match and stepped closer, careful where he put his feet. The plates were white German porcelain, painted with yellow flowers. Around them, inside the ring of silver, dark against the paler dust of the ground, a line had been drawn in sprinkled earth.
    If it had been salt, January knew, it would have been bad enough. Salt was the mark of curses and ill. But this wasn't salt.
    It was graveyard dust, a cursing to the death.
    There was nothing else, no sign to tell him who might have been here, who had done the rite. She's probably home in bed. Nothing to do with this at all.
    January crossed himself and walked swiftly back to the house. Though the drums had ceased, he seemed to hear them, knocking in the growl of the thunder, in the darkness at his back.
    Colonel Pritchard was waiting for him on the gallery. “When I pay four men for five hours I don't expect to get only four hours and a half.” The American studied January with light