A Million Nightingales (9 page)

When he'd ridden away, I ran into the cane.

The fields were mostly stubble, ice and sharp fibers cutting my feet like razors. I ran toward the path my mother had taken me down. There was nowhere to go. Just like the doctor. The river would drown me, and in the swamp, the dogs would find me.

One day. No one would remember me for a day. Then Tretite could tell me what words were said.

On the headland road near Msieu Lemoyne's place, the last of the canestalks whipped the side of my neck, cutting like fingernails. I jumped down into the irrigation ditch and pushed through the frost-stiff weeds the way Mamère had taken me.

The path into the ciprière was still marked by our footprints and no one else's. I ran, my back stinging with sweat, like stars pricked my spine. At the indigo vats, an animal moved in the brush. I climbed over the brick walls and dropped inside the lower vat.

I sat in the corner with my dress over my knees. My kneebones under my cheek. Nothing in our faces where our cheeks were. No cartilage, no real muscle.

The sternum protects the heart.

Was her mother still lying on top of her, to protect her from— from what? Herself? Would her mother die now, too, to be with Céphaline—where? Would les blancs go to the same place we would?

Mamère. Did she hear shouting now? Was she preparing herself to go where I went: là-bas or into the ciprière or—

Where would I go? The air settled more frost onto my head, my shoulders, the bricks. All the women here in the vat, dresses tucked up at their waists like rolls of extra skin. Their faces, when they tried not to breathe. I tried not to breathe.

My grandmère. Four scars on each cheek, her teeth showing when she drew air through her mouth, trying to escape the stench that rose from the water.

How could she have escaped from the very air? And how would I run through the water?

Then I heard horses. Faint snorting and rattling, hooves ringing on the trail through the trees. LeBrun from Bontemps—dogs for nègres—was he out looking for me already?

No dogs. Only men, talking low. Not calling me, or anyone else.

No one had taken this trail for months, my mother had said. Did she know where I'd come? Did they have her on a horse, holding her up to make her look for me?

I climbed out of the vat, slipping once so brick took the skin from my wrist, and fell in the clearing.

Msieu's voice cut through the woods like cane slivers. “Did you lash him tight? He's slipping.”

A fox den—I remembered the smell from when my mother brought me here. I pushed through the vines toward the musky
scent, praying the fox was out hunting now, or gone forever. The scent was strongest in a heap of branches and leaves. I slid into the fox den, my shoulders and head still outside, and laid my cheek flat on the crackling cold leaves.

Only flashes of movement showed through the tree trunks, and I prayed no one could see me, my black dress and dark tignon like burned wood, my right cheek turned up to the moon like a stone.

“Get him off the horse. He's not dead yet, but he won't wake up. I hit him too hard. Get the horse in there, too.”

Nonc Pierre's voice. “Msieu, pardon, but no horse go in there.”

“Then you take the horse to the river. No knife or bullet. Hit the damn horse in the head and throw him in so when he washes up south, it looks like the doctor drowned.”

The leaves warmed to my cheek, or my cheek cooled to the earth. Msieu had killed Doctor Tom. Would he remember I had been there, too?

Michel spoke now. “Msieu—we have to cover the man up?”

Nonc Pierre said, “Horse didn't hurt nobody.”

Msieu said nothing. Something was dropped, in a heap, and then a gunshot, so loud it was as if the bullet went through my own ears into my skull. My brain.

But when the ringing ceased, only silence. No one else would have heard, not across all the cane.

The horses snorted, reared up, and thundered hooves on the earth. Dampness on my skirt, and on my cheek. My heart hit the long, flat bone that protected it like a door.

“Cover him up. I will bring lime. Make certain it is permanent.” Msieu turned his horse; the creaking of leather. Then he rode through the brush.

The men were silent until Nonc Pierre rode the white horse away. Then they began to dig.

“All this dirt don't look strange, someone come?” Christophe said. “Best get the dirt from the woods, not right here.”

My tears slipped into my right ear, and the ringing shovels were underwater. Now they would find me, and Christophe would make me lift my dress before Msieu killed me, too.

No one would look for me except Mamère. And she would look forever.

I turned my head slowly, so that my silver cheek wouldn't show, but my mud-covered one. Dark like the night, the leaves, the soil.

Michel said, “Nobody come down here. I never hunt here. Have to find something heavy for him, so nothing dig him up. Wrong to leave him like this.” His voice broke. He was nearly as afraid as I was.

The mud was colder and colder on my cheek. My legs were asleep. The men didn't speak.

Msieu's horse came back through the woods. He said, “Wait.”

Glass shattered on the floor of the vat, against the bricks, again and again. The doctor's jars. Then pages fluttering, books landing.

“Michel—start on the bricks. You got that hammer.”

When the horse had left again, Christophe said, “That a eye down there?”

Michel said, “Quiet.”

Christophe said, “Damn. All them clothes. Bury now.”

“I said quiet.”

They dug, and the rhythm of the shovels was my breath.

Then they began to throw in everything they could find—scrap wood, fallen branches—what if they needed the very pile I lay under? But they knocked bricks from the walls and collapsed the second pool.

The warmth of my eyelids was like tiny blankets.

When the thudding stopped, Christophe finally said, “Say a prayer?”

Michel said, “Say a prayer no one ask question and you cutting cane tomorrow.”

Then they walked back through the woods, and when I finally opened my eyes, the moon had fallen from the edge of the earth.

Nowhere to run. No one knew what I had seen, but if I didn't get home to my mother and clean myself, someone might guess. And if Msieu knew the slave sent for Nonc Pierre had never come back, he would think me guilty of something.

I pulled myself from the hollow and lay on the ground moving
my legs and arms to awaken them. An insect. A helpless, foolish beetle. No brain. The brain was buried under rubble. The second vat was destroyed, a few bricks like jagged teeth all that remained, the four pipes like spindly fingers caressing the spine of the uprooted sapling that lay on top.

“Mamère,” I whispered at the shutter. “Mamère.” My voice broke, my throat coated with ice and musk.

She opened the door, and I fell inside at her feet. “Mamère. Mamère. Mamère.”

She put me in the washtub with cold water, so we didn't make smoke, and my body shook so hard my collarbone felt cracked. She put my soiled dress in the fireplace and pulled hot ashes over it. I told her Céphaline had died, I had been sent to get Nonc Pierre, and then I hid in the cane.

She said nothing. Not a single word. When I was dry and wearing her only other dress, she lay beside me in the bed, warm and solid. She stared at the smoke-darkened ceiling above us, her lips moving only from the inside where she chewed at them softly with her teeth.

We washed nothing. My dress burned with morning's breakfast, the musky fox smell gathered in our bricks. Outside, we lit fires under the pots and began to make soap, with the tallow and fat collected from Tretite. No one came onto the gallery. Not Msieu's hat or Madame's hand over her eyes.

Mamère said nothing. She laid out the wooden soap forms and held a coffee bean inside her mouth. Sometimes her right eyebrow twitched and leaped when the sounds of crying drifted in the wind.

In the afternoon, horses and carriages pulled into the shell road. Nonc Pierre came to the clearing. “Tretite say she need you.”

I dried my hands and walked slowly beside him. “Did you find Msieu last night?” I asked.

Nonc Pierre nodded. A bruise darkened his arm, maybe from a horse's kick. He said, “You stay last night here?”

I nodded, too.

He said, “Céphaline die. You know that?”

I shook my head and put my apron over my chin.

“Man come from New Orleans on the boat tomorrow. He make a painting of her. That's what Tretite say.”

I waited for Tretite in the pantry. The parlor was crowded with Auzennes and strangers. Félonise took my hand. “She die easy?” she whispered. Her gray eyes moved over my face.

“I don't know.”

“Was you there?”

“I went to get Msieu.”

She sighed. “Madame stay in her room.”

I waited for Msieu to burst into the house and see me, to remember who slept near Céphaline, but he didn't come inside.

After the visitors left, the house quiet except for the crying that tore through the upstairs, I stood on the stairs. Madame stayed in her room, Félonise sleeping in the hall outside her door. Was I meant to sleep outside Céphaline's? Did she still lie in her own bed, or was she in her mother's bed, covered with her mother's skin?

In Tretite's room off the kitchen, we watched the back door of the house. “How she die?” she asked finally.

“I don't know.”

“You know them bone and piece,” she said. “I hear you talk. What stop working first? The head or the heart?”

“I don't know.”

“He put the death mask on her face. How they do. They make the face with plaster. Then he make the painting. How they did Msieu's grandmère, in France. The one over the fireplace.”

Céphaline's face, covered with white paste again, her eyes still blue under her eyelids. No. When someone died, did the color fade? What about the eye in the broken jar, black with dirt now in the woods?

Tretite said, “Go home. She wait. She afraid for you.”

“Hair,” she began. “You believe now. It is not dead.”

Céphaline's hair hadn't killed her. But something inside her brain had made her heart stop working. Her blood.

She went across the room to the chest, and I was surprised when she brought out the piece of blue cloth and the bracelet of my hair. Those were hers, hidden. Privé.

But she held them on her palms. “My mother's hair.”

The black braided circlet. She always placed it by the candles and prayed for me, so I always thought it was mine.

“Hair hold the
ni.
The inside of—” She stopped, looking out the window. “The inside of you. When the France people talk about Dieu, say the soul.”

My braid felt heavy down my back. I was afraid of the glittering in her eyes, the way she held the cloth and the circlet so still. I was afraid of every human animal on Azure.

“I wash your hair, I be careful for your
ni,”
my mother said. “I braid, I hold gentle on your
ni.
My mother tell me on the boat. They leave us one bucket salt water. She say in my ear about the hair. Say if she die, on the boat, who tell me the words?”

My mother got up and sat beside me. The rush back of her chair whispered as it pulled her shape into itself.

Her eyes swam with tiny red veins, as if she hadn't slept since I had. “Say the water around the boat was
faro. Faro
is the soul of water.
Faro
give the rain and
ni
of the corn.
Faro
give shells so people have money.”

She put the circlet of hair in my hand. “On the boat, the wood scream. Loud like birds. Scream, scream in the waves. One room for us. So dark and listen to the sounds. She whisper like this.”

She touched my ear. Cold coursed through my neck. “My mother say
faro
make the wind spirit, Teliko. But
faro
tell the people wear copper rings on the ear, to hear Teliko words, and the French take my mother's copper.”

She pressed my lobe gently. “She have four holes in each ear. Cry and cry. Say no one can hear now, say what if I don't remember. But I remember the words. Then we get here, and nothing is the same.”

The hair was woven so tightly, it could have been thread.

“She in the indigo all day. At night, I come from the old woman, and my mother wash my hair.”

She had oiled the bracelet—almond sweet smell.

Her eyes were night black on me. Did she look like her mother,
telling me now? She wasn't sick, she wasn't going to die, but I had left her. Only a long pathway to the house, but I was gone, and she spoke fast, as if I would leave her just now, run away from the story.

“Two years, she can't breathe. Then she can't eat. The old woman say when my mother die, I have to keep her
ni
safe. In the house.” She nodded at the things in my fingers. “Some hair and some water. Say the other part is
dya
, shadow of you inside.
Faro
keep the
dya
in the water, keep it clean. Then, next baby born take them both.
Ni
and
dya
go to the baby. The baby of your blood.”

The hair in my hand didn't look like mine at all.

They buried Céphaline in the family cemetery. The stone was carved in New Orleans, brought down on the boat. Céphaline Eugénie Bordelon, 1796-1811. The artist took her dress and her death mask back to New Orleans, where he would paint.

Madame never left her room after that day. Félonise carried her food inside and closed the door. I walked up to Tretite's at dawn, after my mother had given me milk and coffee and whispered to me, “Quiet. Don't talk unless someone say. Nobody there now. Doctor gone. Governess. So nobody eat dinner. You stay by Tretite.”

I did. Tretite made the food, and I carried the platters to Félonise in the pantry but not to the dining room. I stayed in the pantry by the bags of pecans. I didn't want Msieu to see me. He was gone all day counting hogsheads of sugar to be taken to New Orleans.

After he was gone, I polished the furniture in the office, with the ledger book. How much was I worth now? I never touched the book. In the guest room, the artist had left white plaster dust on the floor. The plaster was absorbed instantly into my damp cloth. How small were the grains?