Always & Forever: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 1) (45 page)

“Monsieur,” the doctor interrupted. He gestured inside. “You
see all these people. I can only do so much, my friend. I’m needed here.”

“But you could bleed her, or – ”

The doctor shook his head. “I won’t bleed another fever
patient. It does no good.” He put a hand on Phanor’s arm and spoke more kindly.
“You might try placing a bowl of sliced onions near the bed. Keep her clean and
give her plenty of water. Her life is in God’s hands.” 

Josie fashioned a fresh diaper for Gabriel with a clean dish
towel. Sitting on the hard bench alongside her work table, she rocked him until
he gave in and went to sleep. Long after she could have laid him down on a
pallet of aprons, she held him close and admired the thick, dark eyelashes. His
ears were just the shape of Bertrand’s, she thought, but he had Cleo’s upper
lip. Love him as she might, he was not her child.

Whatever else God had planned for her on this earth, Josie
thought, He surely meant for her to have a baby of her own. She closed her eyes
and said a quick prayer: “Mary, Mother of God, may it be so,” she whispered.

At last she laid him down. She cleaned out the ashes in the
grates, packed up the remaining pies and shuttered the windows. With a bonnet
on her head and an extra one on Gabriel, she locked up the kitchen, picked up
her basket, and marched with Gabriel through the burning sun. In only a few
minutes, a dark stain spread from where Gabriel slept and sweated against her,
and though it was less than a half mile to the other kitchen where Louella
worked alone, Josie felt faint by the time she reached it.

Louella had all the windows and the door open, keeping store
for customers who had no appetite. When Josie entered, she found Louella
napping in a cow-hide chair next to the counter. At least a dozen unclaimed
pies sat on the table, safe from flies under a linen cloth, and the smell of
apples and cinnamon filled the little shack.

Josie lay Gabriel down and untied the over-sized bonnet. She
found a gauzy piece of cheesecloth to cover him and wiped his sweaty forehead
with a damp cloth. He slept on.

Louella stirred behind her. “Law me, Mam’zelle,” she said,
“what you got there?”

Josie pulled back the gauze a little and showed her. “It’s
Gabriel.”

“De good God brought us lil’ Gabriel? Where Cleo?”

Once Josie had told Louella all she could, she explained
they would close the second kitchen for the rest of the summer. With the fever
and so many ships quarantined in the river, business was too slow to burn two
fires, heat two ovens.

“I’m going to Cleo’s house, Louella,” Josie said. “Phanor
can’t do it all alone.”

“You go on den. Dem gran’chillen of mine half grown -- I
ready for a baby in dese arms. Me and Gabriel be fine.”

Josie drank two cups of water before she left. She packed a
small basket of fruit and a bottle of water, then dampened the neck and sleeves
of her dress to cool her in the long walk to Rue Noisette.

By the time she found the house with the persimmon tree,
Josie felt drained and light-headed. She’d drunk the bottle of water she
carried half an hour earlier, and the sun dried the beads of sweat as fast as
her body could produce them.

Phanor’s horse switched his tail at the flies in the shade
of an oak. He was here then. Before going in, Josie pulled off her bonnet and
searched in back of the house for the well. She drew a bucket up and wet her
kerchief to wipe her face and the back of her neck. What relief. She opened her
bodice and held her chin up to let the water drip from her throat down between
her breasts. When she lowered her head, she saw Phanor watching her from the
back doorway.

The carnal heat in his eyes seemed to burn the very air
between them. An answering desire flashed through her body and for an instant
she felt bared to him, body and soul.
Phanor
.

Quickly he adjusted his features and assumed an every-day
expression of mild welcome.

To cover her embarrassment, Josie picked her bonnet up from
the grass, her own arousal as surprising to her as Phanor’s. She turned her
back to him to button her bodice and shake the wet fabric loose from her
breasts.

At the door, she glanced up at him and then shifted her gaze
to her shoes. “Gabriel is with Louella,” she said.

He nodded and moved aside for her to come in. The windows of
Cleo’s little house were open on every side for ventilation. The shutters kept
out the direct sun beams, and it was surprisingly cool inside. The main room
boasted a lemon yellow settee and a matching chair. The mahogany table was
scarred and scrubbed, though it had once been very fine. Josie followed Phanor
into the nursery tinted with blueberry and buttermilk paint. Gabriel’s crib, a
carved oak bed draped with delicate netting, stood near a shuttered window.
Toys littered the floor.

“In here,” Phanor said. “She’s fairly quiet now.”

Josie entered Cleo’s bedroom. Having watched over Molly the
last two days of her life, Josie knew what to expect, or thought she did. But
this wasn’t Molly, it was her own Cleo, and the dusky yellow of her skin
shocked her. She put a hand to Cleo’s forehead. It was hot, but there was no
sheen of sweat on her skin.

“She needs water, I think,” Josie said.

“I didn’t know whether to wake her.”

Josie considered for a moment. “I think we better.”

Phanor sat on the bed and propped Cleo up while Josie held
the cup to her mouth. She didn’t really waken, but she swallowed, and Josie
managed to get enough in her that she began to sweat a little.

Cleo groaned when Phanor laid her down again. Her head sank
into the deep pillow, and she tossed back and forth.

“She’s so hot,” Josie said. She pulled Cleo’s heavy black
hair above her head and removed the feather pillow. She took up the cloth
Phanor had left in a basin of vinegar water and began to cool her down.

Phanor leaned against the door jamb watching her hands
squeeze the water out of the cloth. As she wiped Cleo’s arms, he said, “I
didn’t think you’d come.”

Josie looked at him. “She’s my sister.”

After a moment, Josie asked him, “Do you think she forgives
me?”

“Chamard comes here, Josie. Can you forgive her?”

Josie’s hands stopped. “He comes here?”

“I think he loves her. And his child.”

Josie waited for the pain to wash over her as it had so many
times before, whenever she had allowed herself to think of Bertrand’s teasing
brown eyes full of light, his mouth on hers, or worst of all, of Bertrand in
Cleo’s bed. But this time, the pain seemed old, familiar, and muted. Life had
moved on. She was not the Josie of two years ago. She was not even the same
girl she had been after Gabriel’s birth when she’d hurt so much she’d wrenched
him from Cleo’s arms. She felt shame, and regret lingered for that awful day,
yes, but no more yearning for Bertrand.

So Cleo relives her mother’s life, Josie reflected. Like
Bibi, she loves another woman’s husband, a white man who can never be hers.
Thank the good Lord Josie was not playing her mother’s part. Poor Abigail.

Josie looked around Cleo’s room. Three dresses on
satin-wrapped hangers hung from pegs on the wall. One was red velvet, another
blue silk, the third a bronze satin and lace. Fine dresses, costly and elegant.

Phanor followed her eyes. “She sings for a living,” he said.
“At
Les Trois Frères
, where I met you that Sunday afternoon in the
spring.”

“So this is Cleo’s house?”

Phanor nodded. “She makes her own money.”

“Then she truly is free,” Josie said.

Throughout that day and the next, Cleo sweated and moaned,
tossed and flailed from her fever and aching bones. Josie and Phanor kept a cup
of water at her lips whenever she seemed too hot to sweat. They cleaned her
when she bled or vomited, and they wiped her skin with vinegar water. Phanor
replaced the first onions in the bowl near the bed and burned the old ones, and
he and Josie both prayed for her.

In the early morning of the third day, Josie left to help
Louella start the baking. She was to return at mid-day to relieve Phanor and
allow him to conduct his business in the afternoon. Still a block away from the
kitchen, Josie heard Gabriel hollering. She broke into a trot and pushed open
the kitchen door – Louella stood at the fireplace adjusting a roast on the
spit. Gabriel sat on the floor, his dress tail stuck under the leg of the heavy
worktable, his little face red and angry.

“Louella, how could you?” Josie rushed to lift the table leg
off Gabriel’s dress and grabbed him into her arms. “There, now, sweetheart,
it’s all right.”

“Mam’zelle, you gone spoil dat chile,” Louella said. “He
gone be underfoot, in de ashes, get hisself burned you don’ put dat leg back on
de dress.”

Josie rocked him in her arms. “I’ll keep him in my lap.”

“You tink you can cut dem peaches and keep a chile’s hands
out of de way, you a better woman dan I am.”

Josie pared and cut peaches, mixed in sugar and cinnamon,
all the while taking care to keep the knife out of Gabriel’s reach. In spite of
her lack of sleep, and her fear for Cleo, she took joy in the child. She fed
him peaches, not minding at all that he smeared juice all over her dress. By
the time the fruit was ready for the pie shells, Gabriel and Josie both had
sticky arms and faces.

As they worked, Josie described Cleo’s symptoms to Louella
and what she and Phanor were doing for her.

“She ain’t had no bleeding?”

Josie shook her head, worried again they’d had no doctor.

“Well, de Lord know you doing what all you can. Bleeding or
no, it up to God.”

Gabriel wanted to walk. Josie let him hold her two fingers
and led him around the kitchen. He boldly let go of her hand and lit the room
with his smile as he tottered from bench to chair and then back to Josie’s
arms.

“Dat’s de thing,” Louella said. “You get dat baby tired out
‘fo you leave him wid me. I gone put him to sleep and finish up wid dese pies.”

Josie kissed Gabriel good-bye and tied her bonnet on. For
the twentieth time since summer began, she wished she’d brought a parasol with
her to New Orleans. The sun sucked the life right out of her, and last night’s
rain only made the air thicker, not cooler. She resolved to try a short-cut to
Cleo’s house now she knew where it was.

The street she chose took her to the poor people’s cemetery.
No crypts here to keep the departed out of the muck and foul water. The dead
delivered by the mule carts were merely swathed in old sheets. Only a few had
been granted the favor of a wooden box for their remains, yet, distressingly,
these coffins floated in their graves as water oozed up through the ground, the
rains raising the water table even higher. The flies around the coffins and
shrouded bodies buzzed loud enough to be heard across the road. Josie quickened
her steps and put her kerchief to her nose, but she couldn’t keep her eyes from
the men tossing the bodies from the mule wagon into the pit they’d dug. With
each thud, rats as big as possums scurried out of the way and then quickly
returned to the feast.

A mound of stained bones flanked the mass grave, their burial
space being usurped for the newly dead. In a solitary grave nearer the
cemetery’s wrought iron fence, a man stood on a coffin and tried to rock it
back and forth to settle it in the water-logged pit. He gave up and punctured
the lid with a pick axe to let out the gases. Josie gagged from the stench and
ran the rest of the way past the muddy graveyard.

By the time she reached Cleo’s house, the smell and sight of
death had chased all her courage away. Frantic to see if Cleo breathed, Josie
burst through the door, startling Phanor into dropping the palmetto fan he was
weaving.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

Josie rushed into the bedroom to see Bertrand Chamard on his
knees beside the bed, one arm flung over Cleo’s waist, his head resting on the
sheet next to her. Josie froze in the doorway. Phanor came up behind her and
put a hand on her shoulder.

“She’s dead,” Josie said, no air behind her voice.

“No. She’s the same. Come away,” Phanor said.

He sat her on the yellow settee and held her hand. “What
happened to you?”

“I just got scared,” Josie said, and wiped the tears away.
“How long has he been here?”

“A little while. He hasn’t moved from her side since he
came.”

Chamard appeared at the door. His eyes were swollen and red
and his skin was very pale. “When will the doctor be back?” he said.

“No doctor,” Phanor said. “The man I talked to said to do
what we’re doing.”

“Phanor says you have my son, Josephine,” Chamard said.
“Thank you.” He picked up his hat. “I’m going for a doctor.”

Josie took up the vigil at Cleo’s bedside. When she placed a
damp cloth on her forehead, Cleo opened her eyes. “Josie,” she said, and closed
them again.

Within the hour Chamard returned with a gentleman in a fine
black coat and top hat. Circles under the doctor’s eyes made him look tired,
but his regal bearing promised medical wonders.

The doctor leaned over the bed and pulled Cleo’s eyelid up.
She fought him and cried out. Chamard held her hands. “Cleo, darling, lie
still. He’s a doctor.”

The man felt of her neck and her hot skin. With his foot, he
shoved aside the bowl of onions on the floor. “What nonsense,” he said gruffly.
“Have you a basin?”

Josie fetched one from the cupboard in the other room. The
doctor placed it under Cleo’s arm, withdrew a lancet from his bag, and cleaned
it on his pocket handkerchief. He tapped the blue vein in the elbow and cut
through the soft skin until he had a steady trickle of blood. The three men and
Josie stood mesmerized, all eyes on the stream pooling in the basin. When he’d
drawn perhaps a pint, the doctor pressed his thumb over the wound to stop the
bleeding. “A bandage, please,” he said.