Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard by Barbara Hambly

and middle-aged and had the sad thinness to him that sometimes befalls men when their wives die. The empty silence of the other side of the little cottage, the stillness of the yard where the kitchen doors gaped dark and deserted, told its own story. January knew that thinness, that shadow in the eyes. It was what had driven him from Paris, what had driven him back to the strange land of his tangled birth roots and the only family he had.
    It was clear to him, as if he had read it in a book, that Isaak and Celie had been this man's family. And now Isaak was gone.
    “Isaak never spoke much about his family to me,” Basile Nogent said, in the hoarse rough voice of a consumptive. “He told me once that he wanted to put them behind him and, another time, that he forgave them, both father and mother, for what they were, for what neither could help being.”
    He shook his head. “An old quarrel, he said. And I understood that it was a pain that he-that Isaak-knew he had to overcome. He saw his father many times, and his uncle Mathurin. He'd meet them near the coffee stands at the market, or in a cafe on the Place d'Armes; sometimes he'd go by the big house on Rue St. Louis and sit in the courtyard and talk. It is not good when families divide like that, for whatever reason. There.” He pointed to the marble block of a half-carved tombstone, like a classical trophy-of-arms: sword, shield, wreath, and cloak. A graven ribbon looped the sword hilt, bearing the legend JUMON. “Mathurin Jumon commissioned that last September, at his brother's death.”
    A quirk of irony broke the grief of that wrinkled face, and he ran one thumb-a knob of muscle like a rockover the curls of the cherub's temple. “There is a species of insanity that strikes when a will is read. I have wrought marble for forty years. . . .” His gesture expanded to touch the two rooms of his little shop, to the doors that opened into a yard filled with yet more images still: a dog , sleeping  on a panoply of arms; two putti struggling, laughing, over a bunch of grapes; Athene with her owl reading a book. “As three-quarters of what I do is to decorate graves, I see people every week who have just heard wills read.” His breath whispered what might at another time in his life have been a laugh, and he coughed again. “I always told Isaak that when I die I'm going to be like the savage Indians and have everything piled up in a big pyre and burned with me.”
    The sculptor again briefly closed his eyes. Did he think he could hide the thought that went across them? wondered January. The grief that asked, Who do I have to leave it to anyway?
    And the same, he thought, could be said of himself. And for an instant the memory came back to him, suddenly and agonizingly, as if he had found Ayasha's body yesterday; as if he had never seen that picture in his mind before this moment. As if he had not awakened every morning for twenty-two months in bed alone.
    Ayasha dead.
    He still couldn't imagine how that could be possible.
    Couldn't imagine what he would do with the remainder of his life.
    “He was-a good boy.” Nogent's voice broke into January's grief, like a physical touch on his arm. “A good young man.” The rain that had been falling since early afternoon, while January had been on the streetcar to the American faubourg of St. Mary to teach his three little piano students there, finally lightened and ceased; a splash of westering sunlight spangled the puddles in the yard.
    “Tell me about Thursday,” said January. “About the day they came for him.”
    Nogent sighed again, as if calling all his strength from the core of his bones to do work that had to be done. “Thursday,” he said. “Yes.” He led January to the back of the shop, where the light struck a simple block of marble. At first glance the headstone seemed unadorned save for the name, LIVAUDAIS. But sculpted over the block was what appeared to be a veil of lace, the work so exquisitely fine