The girl Delly lay quietly on the bed, her face wrapped in several bar rags and what looked like somebody else’s torn-up mother-hubbard bound around her chest and shoulder.
“Dumb bitch tried to pull him off me,” growled Williams to January, gently holding the bottle to Delly’s lips. “Can you swallow a little of this, honey? Easy... not too much... that’s my good girl.” She patted Delly’s hand encouragingly. “Didn’t think I could goddamn take care of myself.” She took the cigar out of her mouth for a gulp of the sherry, then passed the bottle back to Hannibal. “How bad’s she hurt, Ben? She be all right?”
Hannibal’s note had said, Bring your kit, so January had brought the battered leather case of probes, forceps, fleams, and scalpels that his mentor in New Orleans had given him back in 1817, when he’d left to study medicine in Paris — little realizing at that time how useless it was for a black man to attempt to practice medicine on whites, even in that land of liberté, egalité, etc. Oddly enough, in the two years since his return to New Orleans in 1833, he’d found himself acquiring a clientele after alclass="underline" unfortunately, all of it among the poorest class of freed (or runaway) slaves, who couldn’t afford the mainly light-complected physicians patronized by the better-off free colored artisans.
January had long ago resigned himself to the fact that he was going to be playing piano for his living the rest of his life.
In addition to the tools of his one-time trade, he’d brought vials of camphor and opium, and bundles of herbs recommended by his voodoo-priestess sister and various “root doctors” — freed and slave — in the countryside. One of these he held out to Hannibal.
“Can you get some boiling water from the Turkey Buzzard, and steep about a quarter of this in it?”
The Turkey Buzzard stood about a hundred feet from the Broadhorn, and combined the usual Swamp amenities of barroom, gambling parlor, and bordello with about a dozen beds for hire in three or four chambers, qualifying it as a hotel. It boasted a kitchen of sorts, and a dining room that served up grits, beans, and whatever mules might have given up the ghost the previous day — occasionally varied if an alligator happened to get too far from the canal at a time when the patrons were sober enough to hit it.
“Did you put anything on this, Mrs. Williams?” January asked, gingerly beginning to unwrap the bandages on Delly’s face.
“Like what?” The proprietress pulled her snarly light-brown hair back into a knot on her nape. “My daddy said duck shit an’ cobwebs was good for cuts, but I was goddamned if I’d go huntin’ for a duck in the middle of the night. ’Sides, that was just for little cuts, not a big hack like he gave her. There’s ducks down at the turnin’ basin by the cemetery, though, if you need—”
“My teachers swore by brandy.” January flinched a little as the bandages stuck, then came away from the split mess of brow and cheek. Though crusted almost shut with blood, Delly’s brown eyes blinked up at him unharmed.
“You mean brandy-brandy?” asked Williams doubtfully. “Or the tonsil varnish me an’ Railspike make out of tobacco juice an’ red pepper?”
“Brandy-brandy, if you’ve got it.”
Williams fished in a broken goods box under the bed. “You want Lemercier or Saint-Valbert?”
Stifling the urge to inquire how bottles of France’s finest had wound up in the back room of a New Orleans bucket shop, January asked instead, “What happened here?” as he took the bottle and gently began to clean the wounds with its contents. “And how do you know the thief was trying to steal your uncle’s Bible? What happened to the thief, by the way?”
“Absquatulated, the pusillanimous fuckard.” Williams perched back on the bed at his side and took a thoughtful swig of the Lemercier. “Lit out of here like I’d stuck a burnin’ fuse up his arse. I marked him good, though. And I know he was tryin’ to steal my Bible ’cause he come in here an’ tried to buy it yesterday afternoon.”
“Buy it?”
“Yeah. I thought it was queer.” She took the cigar from her mouth and blew a thoughtful cloud, lashless blue eyes narrowing in their tangle of lines and crusted paint. January would have guessed the saloonkeeper’s age at forty or so — his own — had he not known how quickly the harsh life of the riverfront dives aged a woman: She was probably a decade younger than she looked, and unlikely to live a decade longer.
“This po’-faced jasper comes in here yesterday afternoon, just as I got the doors open. Asks for rum an’ stands here sippin’ at it — who wants to taste it, fer God’s sake?” She took another gulp of the Lemercier, and passed it back to January to daub on the long knife rake that slashed across Delly’s right pectoral and down the side of her breast. Delly herself lay listening, jaw gritted hard, her eyeballs drifting now and then from the opium. January guessed she wasn’t used to it, from the way one swallow seemed to have dulled the pain.
On the other hand, of course, Hannibal’s favored brand was quadruple-strength Black Drop that would knock out a horse.
Now Delly whispered, “You said he was a ringer, ma’am.”
“That I did, honey.” Williams squeezed the girl’s hand again. “That I did. He was dressed rough, like most of the hard cases that come in here — plug hat, Conestoga boots — but he wore it like he didn’t want to touch the insides of his clothes with his body. His hands was clean, too. You could tell he hadn’t never done hard work with ’em, not like hau-lin’ on a line or pole-walkin’ a boat up a bayou. His hair, too, clean an’ cut short, an’ he had one of them sissy little beards, just around his mouth. Well, he coulda been a gambler, an’ it wasn’t none of my laundry to wash.” She shrugged. “But then he starts an argument with the next man who comes in — Snag-Face Rawlin, that was — pushin’ on about some-thin’ in the Bible, like who was the first King of Israel or somethin’ like that. Next thing I know, he asks me, do I have a Bible to settle the question? Snag-Face is sayin’, Oh, hell, what’s it matter? But this stranger just won’t quit, an’ wants to settle the question—”
“Herod,” whispered Delly through teeth clenched against the pain, as January quickly cleaned out the wound on her chest with the hot herbal wash Hannibal brought in. “Was Herod the first king of Israel?”
“That was it. He pushed a bet onto Snag-Face — fifty cents Herod was. And when I guess Herod wasn’t, he said all damn an’ blast, an’ would I sell him the Bible so’s he wouldn’t make that kind of fool mistake again? I said no, it was my uncle’s Bible. He offered me five dollars for it, and when I said no, he offered me ten.”
January’s eyebrows shot up. Cheaply printed evangelical Bibles could be purchased for twenty-five cents, new.
Williams ground out her cigar under her heel. “So I figured, when my door creaks open in the dead of night an’ some plug-ugly with a handkerchief tied over his face holds a gun on me an’ says, Gimme the Bible, I’m guessin’ it was the same po’-faced bastard with the sissy beard.”
January finished tying off the stitches and took from his satchel clean rags for a bandage. “I think I’d like a look at this Bible.”