A Million Nightingales (38 page)

He had filled his trunk with fabric and needles and clothes and
his new boots, which he would save from the long, dusty journey on the cart. He had nothing when he came, I told myself. He has things he loves now.

When he turned to wave at me from the cart, his smile was measured and small as ever. Then he faced the road that led from Opelousas to Grand Coteau.

David was angry, his thin face clotted with held-in tears. “He had to learn a trade,” I said, in the yard. “He will return.”

Finally he said, “He told me you always said that when you left. ‘I will return.’ And you didn't come.”

“I came when I could,” I told him. His eyes didn't waver. I went back into my kitchen. My kitchen. Bricks and my windows, where the moonlight fell blue from the eastern sky three nights of each month.

Charité said, “He ask Madame Lescelles send him to Grand Coteau, work with Jean-Paul, and she look at him like he crazy. Tell him, your work drive the cart and deliver the goods.”

The next week, Charité appeared with no basket, no sweet peppers, no madras, no candles. “Gone,” she said. “Supposed to pick up tobacco and cigar from somewhere. Drive that cart and never come home.”

Her tears smeared hot at my neck when she fell into my arms. She whispered, “He could put me on the cart. He could say, My mother ride with me today.”

She stopped shaking and pulled away.

“Fourteen now. A man. I smell him grown, and I knew he would go,” Charité said. Her eyes were nearly hidden in the roundness of her cheeks, and her arms were so wide now from good food that they flattened themselves against her sides. “I come on a cart. He come on a cart. I had him a few years.”

She must have cried all night, because her eyes were smaller in the morning than in the afternoon. Madame Lescelles studied me coldly in her store. Someone had delivered the cigars. I bought three of them for Msieu Vosclaire, who had stayed at the house for months. I laid them on the clean desk in the office.

We kept it as an empty office, for men who needed to confer with someone in private or to write documents for court. The boarders ate in the dining room, but the office would not make a good parlor anymore. Parlors were for women who received callers. I received business. And the desk made me know Julien Antoine would return.

Two months later, Jean-Paul rode with Msieu Vidrine to Ope-lousas to deliver furniture, and he bounded off the cart and ran into the kitchen, not to embrace me but to lay his palms along my face.

“Feel this!” He had calluses from the needles and leather. “Here.” He handed me a parcel. A simple dress, brown watered silk, the puffed sleeves ending in a spray of lace.

“Lace is worked by showing the absence,” he whispered. “The empty space is the art.”

He fixed me hard with his eyes and then spun to hold out his arms.

“David is gone,” I said.

He knew. I saw the shift in the hollows that held nothing.

“You saw him.”

He would have moved his muscles differently if he'd been surprised. His smile required many muscles. “He came to the barn where I work. He asked people where Vidrine's place was. He had cigars and tobacco in the cart, and he said we could drive north and sell them until we had enough money to take a boat to Ohio.”

“Ohio?”

“Where everybody is free.”

The dress was warming to my hands. I had forgotten how thin silk was against skin. Maybe David took the same road as Hervé Richard.

“Did you want to go?”

He straightened his cuffs. “Msieu Vidrine came out to the barn and saw the trunk full of cigars. He bought five.” Jean-Paul looked past me at the fire. “Are those biscuits for me?”

———

Some days, I didn't want to rise in the morning. Tretite was awake before me, and blew on the embers and roasted the coffee. Her eyes were clotted with pain, and she moved as though blind, but I couldn't rise. The men's feet moved on the floors above my face. My ceiling. The sun shone on the chinaberry trees outside, their purple-star blooms, and the chickens groomed their feathers by the shed.

But I couldn't move. He wasn't mine. He might have gone. I would never see my mother.

All the coins and paper and fingers and the years of waiting and washing and then waiting. All the bones growing longer, and the hair, and the meat we ground between our teeth and the waste that left us to melt into the earth.

My own braids were so long, they wrapped around my head three times under the tignon. At night, my head ached from the weight. I was afraid to cut them. The
ni
is in the hair. Where was my mother's
dya?
The first time I cut Jean-Paul's hair, my fingers felt his skull. The African men's hair grew in whorls and curls. If we let Jean-Paul's hair grow, it would be long and wavy to his shoulders. He was a boy. I held his
ni
in my fingers, then kept it in a cloth bag under my bed.

Tretite didn't sing. She hummed. The words had been worn down to sound. Finally she stood in the doorway. “You only twenty-some years old. Too young to be tired. Get up and heat that iron for Msieu Vosclaire.”

My hand moved into the air beside my bed. The absence of wrinkles. Clean white space. My family was an odd assemblage of animals. Not a herd.

Msieu Vosclaire stayed permanently in the far north bedroom. He worked all day as clerk of the court and drank one glass of wine while he read the newspaper at night. Then he went to sleep.

Joseph slept sometimes in the shed. He brought wood once a week. We left food for him. His mouth moved over the cornbread and meat, but I could only imagine the stump of a tongue.

Charité was not my sister. But she drank coffee with me and Tretite every morning at ten. She set her basket on the floor and rested her elbows on my table.

The American men spoke loudly in front of the house.

“It's run by a nigger.”

“No, it's not.”

“You've seen her. High yellow gal. I don't care how much the French like them, they're dirty. I wouldn't stay there.”

“Vosclaire says it's clean.”

“I'm staying at the other place. Eibsen. German.”

But we had full rooms most nights. We cleaned the baseboards with a brush, swept the yard, washed the bedframes with boiling water in spring, oiled the hinges on the armoires.

It was clean. But at night, I was afraid. Men in the dining room and upstairs, some of them coming home drunk. One day, I asked Madame Lescelles, leaning on the scarred counter so thick with varnish it looked as if the marks swam under our hands, “Do you have a gun?”

She nodded toward her lap. The counter. She moved her fingers. Leaning closer to her as I'd ever been, I saw the rifle on the shelf under the counter.

“Do the Americans think about taking your money?”

She said, “They think about it all the time.”

“Will you find one for me?” I said quietly. “A small pistol?”

She called the gun a derringer. In the silent house that night after I paid her, the gun was heavy in my apron pocket, the candles out in each room. I listened at each door for the sound of sputtering, so that no flames or carelessness could erase all our hard work.

I painted my name on the window in 1825.

Bricks and mortar. Wooden floors polished with lemon oil and soapy water that made me think of Félonise, her spindle fingers sealed to mine. My building, now that Julien Antoine was moving to Philadelphia to be with Jonah Greene. He sold the property to me for nine hundred dollars.

During his last few weeks in Louisiana, Julien Antoine wrote the sales transactions. I paid him three hundred dollars, with the balance of six hundred dollars due in exactly two years: May 23, 1827. Just as I had been paid for with part cash, part promise, when I was property.

The promise, the mortgage, was my son.

My own body couldn't be used as security, because if I were sold back as a slave, I couldn't own the building or Jean-Paul. A lawyer, Msieu Charles Drouet, was appointed to oversee the transaction and make sure the balance was paid on the property.

“You receive one hundred dollars annually, no?” Julien said, his fingers buried in his sideburns. “It is a safe mortgage. Jean-Paul is the only thing you own. And as well as you've maintained the property, you will continue to make money.” He looked out the window. “I worry about leaving you alone, except we know Henri Vosclaire will be a steadying influence.”

We had one last carriage ride together. “Are you ready?” I asked.

When we were far from town, the rented carriage stopped outside a thick woods near Bayou Courtableau. I knew what the livery driver thought when Msieu Antoine and I walked into the trees. He kept his face averted. The moss and bark and damp earth smelled strong. I had not been in a woods for years. I had eight rooms now. My wood, sanded and varnished and dead under my feet.

We came to a clearing and a small bayou, sluggish and black, with insects making dappled circles as they landed. Julien Antoine's fingers were firm on my wrist to guide me over a trailing vine. Suddenly my heart felt hot, behind my breastbone. The trees, where Hervé Richard waited for me, where lovers met and people hid and kissed. I pulled at Julien Antoine's hand, and his chest met mine. His coat smelled of lavender water. His sideburns brushed my neck. His wrists crossed behind my spine, held me tightly for a moment.

Then he sighed. “Give me the gun,” Julien said. “You are afraid. You could marry, no? A man would be better protection than a pistol.”

Surprise was bitter in my throat. “You are joking, true? I cannot by law marry a slave or a white man. Free men of color marry their own kind.”

“I was not joking.” He smiled. “I have been in Paris, where love seems more important than law and business, but that may be pure sentiment.” He studied the small derringer. “Etienne de la Rosière would say this kind of gun is only useful for hunting a man. The men on the steamboats all have one. They are for gamblers and cheats.”

“No one will be hunted unless he hunts me. I will not be hunted like Madame Pélagie.”

The small pistol made a sharp report when he showed me how to pull the trigger, and the ball disappeared into a tree trunk. “You will not need to use it, I wager,” Julien said. I flinched when the gun fired the second time. “You will only need to show it, unless the person is a fool, to put him into his place.”

My place.

“You do not appear to know your place,” Madame de la Rosière, the wife of Etienne, said to me one day when she saw me outside the courthouse.

I had gone to deliver a letter for Mr. Smythe, a lawyer staying upstairs while he partitioned an estate. He said a doctor had recommended Madame Antoine's as the best place for fresh coffee and comfortable rooms. He mentioned perfectly white shirts.

From my lemon tree in the back, we made lemon oil as Félonise had taught me. Each room was a still life; Pélagie had called her rooms still lifes, and I arranged books and flowers and objects. I looked at the men as collections of muscle, bone, brain, and organs, as Céphaline had appraised us all.

Every morning, Tretite tied grosgrain ribbons around the clean stacks of clothes and linens. Men liked the codes for their rooms. Green for Mr. Smythe. Red for Msieu Séjour.

My place was full of men who ate lunch or dinner, Tretite's roasted chicken or ham, her biscuits, her pralines. For all these years, they had smoked cigars and drunk fresh coffee until evening
with Msieu Antoine, and even after the place was mine, they still lingered to talk courthouse business, since I was right across the street.

There was no liquor. No excuses for the people who hated me.

My place, according to Madame de la Rosière and the other wives, was underneath a trader or gambler or farmer. My place was with Jeanne Heureuse, whose house at the edge of town was dark. My place was inside one room, on one bed, under many men that the mesdames wouldn't dream of acknowledging in the street.

I held the letter for Msieu Séjour—the spidery ink handwriting had made me pause there, in the courthouse lobby, to think of Céphaline. Her pages and pages of notes. The bones and trees and birds. She had always whispered the names of the birds. The heron I had thought would lead me back to Azure in the tangle of watery skeins that was Barataria. The veins in her wrist, pulsing blue-green and moving under the skin when Doctor Tom bled her.

Madame de la Rosière swept past me with two other women, their wide skirts brushing the dusty floor. “Decent women—”

“This is not New Orleans, where they congregate at will.”

“She could be whipped for dressing that way.”

She had left Paris to marry Etienne when she was seventeen. Their money was joined. Their bodies were joined. They had two daughters, who were very small. He never came to town, and I was happy not to have to see him from my own window.

That winter, the wind blew and blew, every day, blew every leaf and piece of cane trash from the carts into our doorways and under our tables. Then frost rimmed the windows, grew itself furred on the chinaberry branches, and stiffened the sheets.

People could barely walk. My laundry blew down, and when we hung wet clothes inside, cinders from the fire leaped to burn two shirts, which I had to replace.

Madame Lescelles handed me needles and said, “Losing cane out there, all that frost and wind. Why I never buy land. Flood or freeze or blow away, all that dirt. But people still come here for provision. This don't fly away.”

The dust gathered on my bottles of bootblack and wrapped soap cakes. The sky turned black with smoke and roiling ash from the sugar mills.

While Tretite slept and the men were gone, the only sounds were the creak of the shutters against the angry wind. Tretite had lost a tooth. It lay in a dish. Céphaline and I had touched the teeth in Doctor Tom's office. What if Céphaline had a son, with the man chosen for her? What if her son had her blue flame eyes, but he was an Auzenne who cared only for horses and gambling? Would she have loved him because he was her blood? Would she have sent him away?

But her own mother had loved her without reservation. Madame Bordelon would have died in her daughter's place.

Etienne's wife rode past in their carriage, her bosom trembling like flan, but never him. He had two daughters. No sons.

But Pélagie—what if she had borne a son by the husband or
the brother, hated and hateful? She would have sent the boy away as soon as possible to boarding school. She would have had her window, in New York, somehow.

I had a window.

Jean-Paul had left the three dolls for Francine on his bed. Francine was fourteen, old enough to have children of her own, who would sleep in her bed.

Joseph slept in the shed. He ate one plate of food each night, and he drank himself insensible. He had nothing besides his clothes and his hat. It was easier to have nothing.

Jean-Paul sent no message. He merely appeared, the week before Christmas. He was cordial. Vague. A pleasant guest.

He hugged Tretite, he pressed his lips to my cheek, he sat at the table and ate the gumbo we made for him. Then he sat in the office and sewed, while I went over the ledgers. He said, “I worked on a sofa all week. Brocade. Gold and green. Not a good combination.”

“We should go to Mass,” I said, but we didn't move. I wanted to hear the chirp of small scissors, to hear him breathing.

“I hate the people at Mass when Msieu Vidrine makes me go,” he said politely. “I cannot speak of their clothes or their stupidity. I cannot bear their self-satisfaction.”

“Is Msieu Vidrine unkind to you?”

He shrugged. “No. But he speaks endlessly, about the work, the weather. It makes me tired to answer. Always he needs an answer. He says I must learn to be more pleasant and friendly. To him and the people who buy the furniture. On Sunday, we have to speak about the weather as well.” Finally he looked up. “I want someone to listen. But you are not there.”

His eyes so dark they were nearly purple. His brows fine and black as if painted on his forehead. I stood behind him and combed his hair down, while he let me. “Maman?” he said again.

Hair is dead. A collection of vines. Decorations for your scalp. Scalp covers the skull. Skull holds the brain. Where is the
ni
, inside these strands that lie sideways?

“My name reads Antoine, but he is not my father.” “No, he is not your father. Solely your guardian.” If I told him it was Etienne, he would see the man on his horse, riding his fields. Memory people. Would that make my son angry or fill him with the same melancholy as his father?

“I never saw my father,” I said. “I didn't know who he was. Your father can do nothing for you.” Then he turned around. His teeth were level with my eyes. “My mother always told me I belonged to her, not to the man who believed he owned me. And that was true.”

One night, I dreamed of her, sitting at the table with me, our fingers working and our eyes not on each other. We were sorting rice, taking out stems and pebbles. She whispered, “Someone put white stones where they bury. Stones so many like God was laughing and lose his teeth. And they stick in the earth. A big God. Not my mother's god. Not the god from Senegal. Another one. From here only. Louisiana God.”

I put a stone on the earth the following year.

I bought a piece of land, and a white angel.

Tretite died of pneumonia in the winter, and we buried her in the Opelousas cemetery, near the plots owned by the Lescelles family and other free people of color.

TRETITE. BORN
1765,
DIED
1828. The mason carved a stone with those words, and an angel. A white gown. No more words. No Beloved Wife, Mother, Daughter. No last name. She was not really Julien Antoine's property. She belonged to herself now.

I was thirty years old. Jean-Paul would soon be fourteen, the age when he should be sent to Paris.

A window. A school. Perhaps a tailor in Paris. More money than I had been able to save. Passage on a ship, a place to live, necessities. Tretite's burial had been expensive. Her plot of land was my piece of earth. I washed dust from her white stone. The day she was buried, Charité and I were the only women to mourn
her. All the women on Azure—were they buried now, too? My fingers rested on the carved indentations of Tretite's letters. My mother had no stone. Her name was Marie-Thérèse. Her body rested on the surface of the bayou. Dangerous to be so rested. No resting place.

When I left the cemetery, Msieu Césaire, shrunken and small as a child, stooped inside his fine black coat, was leaving his wife's tomb. Keeping my gaze on the trees, I let him go ahead.

The boardinghouse was quiet all Mardi Gras season, when everyone went to New Orleans. Every month, when it seemed that the numbers on the paper would be what I wanted, they danced in a different way before my eyes.

For the first time in my life, I was alone. Msieu Vosclaire, the other boarders, were not even a herd. Only a shifting school of fish, swerving around the furniture and into the dining room and up the stairs.

Charité asked me, “Why you never think of a man?”

“I think of one man. But it's only thinking. If I had a man, one more to cook for, to wash for, he might tell me to sell the house for something else. A farm. A boat. You know the truth. A woman cannot run a boardinghouse if she marries.”

The days passed as though blurred. An old painting. I needed to find a girl to help but couldn't bring myself to look for a slave. To buy someone, even to find an indentured servant, would cost more money. The hundred dollars received annually for Jean-Paul would be traded for someone else.

He could come home. But he would learn nothing. All those beds to be made. The eggs. The still lifes of each evening. Two chickens cut up in a pot, with tomatoes and onions and herbs. The shirts flat and limp by the fire when it rained. The conveyance of crumbs. The coffee beans. Mamère.

Joseph came to the back door every afternoon, when he woke. He motioned with his head to ask whether he should bring in wood, his long black hair oily and straight around his shoulders. Where was his pirogue? Where were his woods? When he was a child, he lived in the trees, until we came. New animals.

Msieu Vosclaire was a creature of habit, with his paunch touching the table until he pushed himself away, and his one glass of wine at the desk. He wrote a letter each night to his sister in Saint Louis, Missouri, and then he left it for me on the dining room table. His were the last shoes to move over my head. The white envelope glowed in my candlelight. He tried to keep his promise to Julien Antoine, to make people aware that this was a respectable place.

But I was still sang mêlé. My hair. My skin. Even my money was not respectable.

One morning before dawn, when I went out past the shed to dump the ashes, a man put an arm around my throat. He held my hair at the back of my skull so tightly my head couldn't move. His words were English. “Whorehouses got plenty of whore money. Take me to it.” He pushed a knife tip into the skin above my collarbone, and blood slid down my breast while he jerked me toward the back door.

The money was never in the house. I knew someone would try to find it there. I said, “Under the tree. The stone.”

He said, “All that money for fuckin all those men. This one's free.”

He pushed me to the ground. The ashes inside my nose, stinging my eyes. He cut my skirt from the bodice, cut the bodice in half, and tore off the cloth.

“Branded, huh—you ran away.” The knife tip touched the fleur-de-lis on my shoulder. “Mongrel cur.”

I had heard his voice somewhere. Then he pushed into me so hard that the earth went into my mouth.

He was a mongrel. Only an animal. A dog could bite me. My blood and skin all he had. He was not human. He would not kill me.

When he was finished, the smell of his tobacco hung over me. My teeth were grinding against the ashes, my eyes stung. He kept my hair clenched in his fist, a knot at the back of my skull, while he arranged his clothes.

Then he let me go, and I raised myself on my knees. I could see out of one eye. He wanted me to see him.

The trapper—his empty gums, his red face. He had seen me at the store and on the road. He thought I was Madame Lescelles's daughter. He spat tobacco juice onto my feet. Then he turned to dig up the stone.

The belt. Mongrel cur. He had killed Jeanne Heureuse.

I didn't have the gun. I felt bowls of mud on my knees. The ashes were for lyewater. The bucket was near the woodpile. The wire handle was cold. I said, “Sir. Sir.”

He swung his beard around, and I threw the lyewater into his face. He screamed and fell to the ground, scrabbling at his eyes. He would kill me now. I ran into the kitchen, my hands before me, and felt my way to my room, to the gun beside my bed.

But he didn't follow me.

A sheet wrapped to my body, I went outside, where Joseph stood over the trapper, whose throat was cut. Joseph wiped the blood from the knife. He put the knife back into his boot.

The blood was hot and metal and steaming on the dirt. I could see half the world. The ashes had sealed themselves to one eye. Joseph dragged the body toward the alley.

No sound. No one had bothered to investigate the scream, and the night-morning was quiet. Only a horse, far down another street, hooves soft and steady.

I pushed my clothes into the fire, filled the tub with cold water, and cleaned the dirt from my teeth, the liquids from my legs, and rinsed my eyes again and again, but ash had burned my left eye, and I could see nothing from that side.

My boarders, two Creole brokers in town for business, were sleepy and pained from the rum they had drunk the night before. They barely acknowledged me bringing their shirts and hot water. They left with Msieu Vosclaire.

In the yard, the blood had turned black and hard as pebbles and burned saucers. But when I raked the dirt into the fire under my washpot, the smell of burning red made me sick.

Joseph came back toward dark. He sat on a dirty blanket nested against the back fence. “What did you do with him?” I asked.

He dug a small channel in the dirt with his knife and filled it
with water. Then he floated a chicken bone down the bayou he'd made.

The body floated somewhere. Joseph's black eyes met mine. He took three dollars from my hand and left to buy drink.

That night, I finally shivered and cried near the windows covered with Jean-Paul's curtains. Me. Not Madame Eibsen or Madame Delacroix. Mongrel. All the men. Leave their seed. Ride me and then ride the horse, ride back to the house, to the woods to kill animals and sell skins. Skin. What if their sons, left by the mothers, sold or traded or just left, walked in the same woods and killed their fathers over the last raccoon? What if their sons sat beside them in a tavern and didn't like the sounds of their words and shot their fathers, stepping over their bodies when they spat and left? Left. Left and left, over and over.

My eye was so burned and blurred that I could not cook or wash. My hands were skinned. People believed me—the wind had blown an ash into my eye, tripped me up to scrape my face and arms and knees.

Msieu Drouet let me borrow two hundred dollars to hire a girl, as I couldn't run the house. A free woman of color in New Iberia had a niece who needed a trade, so a fifteen-year-old girl named Noémie was apprenticed to me for one year, for two hundred dollars, to learn washing, sewing, cooking, and cleaning. Msieu Drouet filed the papers in the court, the same day I received the payment for the year for Jean-Paul.

I sat up all night in the office, writing the sums in the ledger, holding my good eye close to the paper. All we were. Conveyance of numbers and crumbs and passages full of liquid.

But something had entered my blood and wouldn't leave. Not a baby. Not seeds. Something foul that made me burn and made me weak and made me faint.

I locked the front door.

The girl Noémie brought hot poultices for my belly. She was a nervous, kind child, with cinnamon-colored eyes and small hands, which she left hanging in front of her like a squirrel while she waited beside my bed. She said, “Should I let in boarders?”

“No,” I said. “No one.”

Noémie pulled up a chair. “You are so beautiful. My mother had heard of you. She heard you were married to a white man.”

I shook my head no. Noémie whispered, “She said your beauty got you this house. A big brick house.”

I closed my eyes and told her to get Charité from the store.

Charité brought a tea she mixed for monthly troubles. I told her it was fever. But this was a different burning, and my head filled with wiry boiled moss so that my thoughts were caught and tangled.

All the rivers and bayous led to the ocean, past walls of earth. The men built wooden walls and brick walls, and we moved inside them small as ants. Cages and chains. Then we went outside to gather pebbles and crumbs and bring them back. The birds caught seeds in their beaks and huddled in their nests. Léonide and Tretite could cook, but I had to lie down and lift my dress. Christophe and Gervaise could cut cane and move wood, but Jean-Paul had to drown.