A Tyranny of Petticoats (9 page)

“Monsieur Decoudreaux, good afternoon.” My smile comes out more a grimace.

Etienne’s father stands at the open door of their shop. “Mademoiselle Madeleine, please, come inside until the storm passes. How is your family?”

I cannot refuse without being rude, so I follow him. “They’re all very well, thank you.” The store smells of freshly cut wood and the lemon juice they mix into the furniture wax. Etienne stands behind the counter.

“I’ll let the two of you visit a bit,” Monsieur Decoudreaux says, grinning as he abandons us for the workshop in back. He leaves the door ajar for propriety.

Etienne comes out, running his hands along a dressing table. “Did you make that?” I ask, and he nods without meeting my eyes. “It’s beautiful.”

I daydreamed about sitting before a dressing table like that, fixing my hair just so in front of the looking glass, readying myself for Antoine’s arrival.

My skin goes hot with embarrassment, and angry tears prick at my eyes.

Etienne steps closer, lowering his voice. “Maddie, you look — not quite yourself. Are you unwell?”

“I’m
furious,
is what I am.” The words come out before I can think them through.

He takes a wary step backward. “Not with me, I trust?”

“No. With myself, for being a fool.” He gestures for me to sit, and I plop down in a rocking chair, heedless of my posture. My hems are muddy, bedraggled strands of hair are escaping from my tignon, and I’m sure I look a mess.

Etienne props his hip against a handsome desk opposite me. “I doubt you’re a fool. At least, you never have been before.”

I look up at him. He’s a good man. He didn’t feed me extravagant compliments, didn’t flatter and flirt, but I’ve no doubt that he
meant
what he said. And if I’m to consider marrying him — well, he ought to know what I am, for better or for worse.

“I almost entangled myself in a — an arrangement. Like Madame Dalcour. Maman told me she and Papa wouldn’t even consider it. And today — today I found out that the man I thought was in love with me has made Eugenie Dalcour an offer. I thought I was special, but it wasn’t me he wanted at all — any girl would do.”

I bury my face in my hands.

Etienne reaches out and pries my fingers away from my face. “He’s the fool,” he says softly. “You are special, Maddie.”

He doesn’t let go of my hands. His bare fingers are big and warm and callused from his carpentry work.

“That’s kind of you. Kinder than I deserve,” I say. My eyes meet his and then skitter away. “I — I didn’t even
know
him. Whether he has brothers or sisters. What his favorite food is. What games he played growing up.”

“Are those things you think you should know about a future husband?” Etienne asks, and I nod. “Well. You know my brothers, and you know the games I played growing up because you were there. My favorite food is —”

“Your mother’s lemon pie,” I interrupt.

He grins. This one shows his teeth. “You remember that?”

“How could I forget? You’d eat the whole thing in a trice if she let you.” I laugh, thinking of the way Etienne used to scale the trees in the Decoudreauxes’ courtyard to get at the lemons and then beg his mother to make him a pie.

Etienne laughs too, then looks out the front window. The rain has stopped, in the way of spring storms. He stands, letting go of my hands, searching my face with his dark eyes. “May I walk you home?”

“Yes,” I say, taking his arm. “I’d like that.”

FOLKS AROUND HERE LIKE TO SAY WE came from the stars. Perhaps it’s simpler to think of us not as human but as creatures made of stardust — that if you cut us, not blood but constellations will pour from our wounds. And though I’ve never admitted to having such a thought to my sisters, when I stand under the night sky, with the infinite heavens stretched out above me like a shroud — it’s hard to imagine we came from anywhere else.

Many years ago, when creatures made of rock and fire roamed the earth, both gods and mortals trembled in our presence. In the southern lands of Europe, they appeased us with figs and olives plucked from low drooping branches, and we licked the juices off our fingers with delight. A season passed, or perhaps it was a lifetime, and we closed our weary eyes and awoke to a world of snow and ice. In the north we were giants, dark and stoic. We sat at the foot of the Tree of the World as the frost turned our limbs black with cold.

But even in our most formidable forms, we couldn’t compare to the vastness of the desert sky. It is a sacred thing even on the most ordinary of nights, with Mamá huddled over her
colcha
embroidery and the vaqueros singing Spanish love songs around the fire.

On first sight, that sky was where fear came to rest. It was a sleeping beast we tried not to wake as we stumbled alone in the darkness, catching cactus spines in the heels of our naked feet as the coyotes screamed in the moonlight. My sister Maria Elena was screaming too, only I didn’t know her as Maria Elena then, and I didn’t know why she was screaming. I hadn’t yet seen the damage, the way her foot was turned in on itself.

I’m not sure where we would be now had Papá not found us that night. At first glance, we must have looked like a creature with three heads huddled together under a mesquite tree, all fixated on what were once the hands of old women and were now those of young girls.

Of course, he knew who we were.
What
we were. Everyone always does. There has rarely been a time when our appearance hasn’t been preceded by our reputation; our arrival comes with a change in the air, a scent on the breeze that brings both peace and desolation. But Papá had a young wife with a baby she’d just buried in his baptism gown, so when he found three monsters disguised as little girls, he took us home to his morose wife, who didn’t seem to mind that the stench of death still lingered in our hair long after she bathed us with yucca root. After all, death was something she’d seen her fair share of, and besides, we have just as much to do with life as we do with death. Or so she reminds herself when she thinks we aren’t listening.

But that’s the thing about monsters; we’re often in places you don’t expect. Or want.

We’ve always been depicted as old women, as if we’d sprung from the depths of hell as hideous spinster crones with hunched backs and clawed fingers crippled with arthritis. Mamá says that’s just an interpretation and we shouldn’t pay no mind to silly stories folks got in their heads; no one can dispute that my sister Rosa is the prettiest girl this side of El Paso. And Maria Elena’s leg might cause her trouble, but I dare you to look at that sweet face and tell me there isn’t beauty there. If I’m honest, though, I think I preferred our previous form to this one. At least then the mortals knew to leave us well enough alone.

It’s late now. I can feel my eyelids getting heavy, and I know I need to start making my way back home if I don’t want one of my father’s
peónes
finding me tomorrow morning when they bring the cattle out to pasture. The thought of them finding me asleep in the desert like some lost lamb, with dust gathered in the folds of my serape and my dark hair unraveling from its plait, makes me cringe. I was never much one for the nighttime; that’s Rosa’s time. When the moon is full and the village asleep, my sister roams the plains with her hair flying loose in the warm desert wind. My time is day, with the
cocina
alive with heat and noise and the smell of bread baking in the
horno
lingering in the air. And Maria Elena, the youngest of us all, her time is the morning, when the sun is just a whisper in the sky. That’s what Mamá calls us:
mañana, día y noche
. Morning, day, and night.

From where I sit I can barely make out the ranch in the dark. The flickering light of a solitary oil lamp burning in a window is the only indication that the house stands there at all. I glance down and examine the thread I hold protectively in my hand. Right now, it’s a deep carmine color, dyed such by Maria Elena’s careful hands. But according to those stars burning high above my head, that color is soon to fade. With that thought, I shiver in the dark, and even I’m unsure whether it’s because I’m cold or afraid.

I start down the hill, zigzagging past the puffs of white yucca flowers that stand out against the night like floating apparitions. As I approach our adobe home, I can just make out Rosa’s pretty hair in the moonlight. At first, I think perhaps she is waiting for me, as if our roles are a torch we have to pass off, as if day has to hand the sun over to the night. Then I see James. I freeze, and my wool skirt catches in the spines of a lechuguilla plant.

It’s been a few years since Texas won its independence, and though Papá still doesn’t trust the
Americanos,
with their harsh dialect and strange trading wares, James is different. James has been here all his life — even before my sisters and I were found wandering in the desert. He is as much
Tejano
as we are. That is, if we are
Tejano
at all.

James gently tilts Rosa’s chin and leans his face toward hers, and I look up again at the stars, embarrassed by the intimacy of it. The sky makes even the desert look small; though it was the desert that could have killed our mortal forms on that first night, it was the sky, so black in its infinity, that we feared.

I wake the next day to the sounds of Maria Elena hard at work on her loom. As usual, I have slept through most of the morning. I stretch and then rise to roll up my bed to put it away for the day. We sleep on sheepskins covered with wool blankets. They make for soft and pliable beds.

Walking into Maria Elena’s weaving room is like pushing into a spiderweb; a catacomb of interwoven strands of yarn hangs from the ceiling and across the smooth adobe walls in brilliant shades of red, yellow, and green. In the center of it all stands the loom, stretching high over Maria Elena’s small head.

Maria Elena insists that this lifetime is her favorite. It’s true that she says that about every place we’ve been, but Maria Elena lives for beginnings. New place. New people. New day. She’s often awake far before the crow of
el gallo
echoes across the rancho, setting to work on her loom before the sun has peeked up over the horizon.

I make my way into the room and find the loom has stopped. Maria Elena’s head is bent and she has a tiny thread cupped in her hands. Hearing my footsteps, she looks up. Her expression is one of hope and sanguinity. “One of the villagers gave birth this morning,” she says, holding the thread up for my inspection.

I gently pluck the thread from Maria Elena’s dainty grip, but I don’t have to look very closely to see that it isn’t going to last very long. The thread’s intended green hue has already faded, the color slowly being replaced by a shimmering silver with which I am all too familiar. Even if I hadn’t already read it in the stars last night, I would know. The child’s only fate is death.