"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

badge of a slave whose master let him "sleep out"-find his own room and board in exchange for a
percentage of what he could earn as a laborer. At this time of year, there was little work to be
had, even on the levee or the docks. "How you supposed to not touch nuthin' till the Guards had a
look." His ungrammatical French was the fluidly sloppy get-along speech of an Anglophone who
has made his home among French-speakers for a few months, not the half-African patois of the
slave quarters. Born in the eastern states, January guessed automatically, and sold down the river
...
"I sent Suzie right away downtown to the Cabildo." The young man nodded back at a girl of
sixteen or so who crowded up behind him. "I did look around, see if I could find some kerosene
or pepper or somethin' to keep the ants from comin' in. But they's all over the place already.
Hessy been dead awhile. Else I wouldn't a left her just lay on the floor."
"What'd they say at the Cabildo?" January tried to move the arm of the woman who lay sprawled
in the gummy pool of drying gore a few feet from the front door of the shack. The muscles were
hard as wood. Most of the blood had soaked into the dirt floor, and the smaller patches were
already dry. The smell was indescribable, early decay mingling with the metallic sharpness of
blood and the reek of piss and the spit tobacco with which the floor was liberally daubed. Ants
streamed in inch-thick black ribbons from three or four directions, under the shack's ill-fitting
board walls. Unlike the patient flies they went about their business, as ants do, unimpressed by
humankind.
"That they send somebody by'n'by." The girl spoke Creole French, slurred and sloppy, the kind
January's mother and January's schoolmasters had beaten out of him by the time he was nine. She
seemed in awe of him, maybe because he wore boots in the summertime and spoke with
authority. Maybe because he was Olympia Snakebones' brother.
"They'll send along the Coroner." Olympe's sweet, deep alto was like bronze and gravel. "He'll
come an' he'll say, Yep, she dead all right. Takes a white man to figure that one out."
There was a chuckle among the neighbors clustered around the front door or peering in the back,
men and women who made this shabby corner of the town their home out of poverty or
stubbornness or unwillingness to be too closely scrutinized by the minions of the country's
various laws. January turned the corpse over, and it came all of a piece, like a plank. She must
have been dead some hours before midnight. She'd been stabbed three or four times in the chest,
and once in the side. Her throat had been cut, probably at the point of death or just afterward,
when she'd quit fighting. There were cuts on her palms and fingers as well.
The whole front of her faded, twice-turned, ill-fitting charity-bag dress was sheeted with blood,
and moving with ants.
The half of her face that had lain in the drying blood of the dirt floor was unrecognizable. The
other half, with all its wrinkles smoothed away by death, touched his mem ory: the full pouting
lips, the neat, small upturned nose. The tiny mole, like an old-fashioned beauty-patch, just below
the corner of the mouth.
The mole touched a memory in his mind.
He'd seen her, January knew, around the levee. In almost three years back in New Orleans, he'd
seen just about everyone in town at least once or twice, as he'd crossed be neath the shade of the
plane-trees on the Place d'Arrnes, or walked along the boisterous chaos of the river-front among
the cotton-bales and hogsheads of sugar and molasses. He'd noticed her because she wrapped her
tignon like an island woman, not in the usual New Orleans style. The faded old Turkey red dress
she wore was the same every time. Sometimes she'd be sitting under the plane-trees, braiding
little animals of straw or folded tin, giving them to passers-by. Other times, drunk, she'd sit cross-
legged on packing-boxes and call out to the deck-hands and stevedores in a singsong rasp. Once
January had walked past her and she'd said, in a perfectly conversational tone, "I let you fuck me
in the ass if you buys me a bottle."
"What was her name?" he asked now.