Iron Lace (15 page)

He tied his supplies on his back and started toward the ridge. The mud sucked at his boots and slowed his pace. He had never felt so alone. He knew the swamps around Faustin’s house, a ramshackle structure on stilts that had withstood generations of storms and rising waters. He knew those swamps and their attendant marshes, and even when he was trapping or running a trotline alone, he knew his absence would be noted if he didn’t return. But no one would ever guess he was here.

He wasn’t frightened. How could a man be frightened, when he had lived through the murderous fury of a hurricane? How could he ever be frightened again, when absolute terror had once filled every space in his body? He remembered the moment when he had lost his mother and sister, and the moment when the skiff had exploded into a hundred pieces. He remembered the instant when he could no longer cling to consciousness and the world had dissolved into darkness.

Less clear were the memories of waking with Zelma Terrebonne standing over him. At first he had believed her to be his mother. He had felt her stroking hand, cool against his forehead. He had smelled the strong odor of peppermint oil, used to combat fever, and tasted the sweetness of honey and elderberries against his lips. Then he had opened his eyes and known that his mother was dead.

He hadn’t been able to speak. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to, afraid of what he would be told if he asked questions. Perhaps the fever had thickened and slowed his tongue. When he next
awoke, Auguste Cantrelle had been standing by his bedside, intoning his new name. He had known the truth. He hadn’t been strong enough to make himself understood, but his thoughts had been clear.

By the time the fever was gone and he was strong enough to speak, he had become Étienne Lafont. Not in his mind. He had never forgotten his real identity. But outwardly he had become Étienne, the laughing, bright-eyed friend of his childhood. He was no longer a child, and his friend was no longer alive. But he had pretended. He had known, without quite understanding why, that to be Étienne was safe. To be Raphael Cantrelle, son of a woman scorned by her family, by an entire village and by the lover who had cut her adrift to die, was not safe at all.

The mud sucked at his boots, but he kept moving. Finally, the water deepened, and he half swam, half waded, to the ridge.

He rested on solid ground and stared at the splintered trunk of a tree that had once been a flourishing cypress. He was surprised that even this much of it had survived. Twelve years before, the tree had already been dead.

There had been two more trees, and now they were gone. In twelve years, much wind had blown, and at every high tide water had washed over the ridge. There was a good chance no sign of the other trees would ever be found, but he had hours to look for roots, for cypress knobs and suspicious depressions in the soft earth. He untied his pack and made a small fire from driftwood to roast a fish he had caught and cleaned the night before. Then, after a handful of shriveled grapes from a
chénière
vineyard gone wild, he began his search.

The sun had risen in the sky when he finally paused to reflect on what he had found. The tree that still stood was
probably the middle one of the three. Beside it, far to the left, Raphael had found a honeycomb of roots and rootlets not far under the soil. The ground was spongier there, as if the small hollows around the roots had caused the earth to shift.

On the other side of the remaining tree, and far behind it, he had found cypress knobs. Cypress was as impervious as stone, and the knobs could have been left by a lumbering foray into the marsh a century ago. But they were important in helping him tell where to start his journey.

He sat back on his heels and watched the remaining trunk as the sun rose. The shadow was nearly twice as long as the trunk itself, distorted, but clearly defined. The shadow slanted far to the right. As the sun rose higher, it slanted still farther.

Finally the sun was in the correct place in the sky. He rose and realized that his hands were trembling. He went to stand in a direct line with the shadow, but far from its end, where he thought the shadow of the entire tree would have ended. Then he took eight steps forward. Eight steps. He remembered the number clearly. It had mattered so much to him that Juan be pleased.

He turned, and his shoulder faced the emaciated tree trunk. He took eight more steps. Here the shadows of the two trees would merge—if the trees still existed. Using the trunk as a guide, he tried to imagine a tree growing where he had found the roots. He adjusted his position a little; then he turned again and stared at the horizon. Once there had been a gap in a line of trees in the distance. Now all the trees were gone.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the horizon as it had once been. Desolation filled him. Missing the right spot by an inch was as bad as missing it by a mile. He could dig and dig and never find a thing. And what was he looking for?
The memories of a man who had probably perished in the storm? Items that might have had meaning for Juan, but would be useless to him?

He searched his own memory, imagining the horizon. The gap had been to the left. He opened his eyes and adjusted his position again; then he paced off eight more steps. He marked the spot with driftwood and went back for his shovel. It sank willingly into the shell-studded soil, until there was a sizable hole, several feet deep and wide.

Juan had not told him how deep to dig, but Raphael imagined that whatever he was looking for was neither too deep nor too near the surface. The ground was still firm at this level, but if he dug much farther he would find water. He dug another foot, then sat back on his heels to consider his next move.

He decided to pace off the distance again. He followed the same plan as before, calculating feet and angles with the help of the tree trunk. This time he ended up a short distance from his first hole. A new hole brought the same result as the first. He spent the rest of the afternoon carving a ditch between them. By the time it was clear there was nothing to be found, he was exhausted, and disappointment was a heavy weight inside him.

There could be many reasons for his failure. His calculations could be wrong; his memory could be faulty. Crazy old Juan might never have buried anything here in the first place. Or Juan might have survived the hurricane, come back for his treasure and sailed away, never to return to the
chénière.
What, after all, had been left for him to return to?

Raphael rested beside the ditch, his head on his knees. Gulls cawed in the distance, and the salt-tinged air was nostalgia in his lungs. He was hungry, and if he wanted to eat tonight he
had to forage for food. He could dig for weeks, and even if something lay waiting for him beneath the earth, he could still miss it. He gazed at the tree trunk, then pivoted and gazed at the horizon, where trees had once stood.

He shook his head. Perhaps there had never been trees there. Perhaps Juan’s treasure was a childhood dream, one he had held on to for comfort in the years after his mother’s death. Hadn’t he held on to others? He had told himself that life here had been good. That if his mother had lived, she would have made a comfortable place for them here, that people would have seen that he was a good boy and learned to be kind to him.

Now he knew what a dream that had been. No one who knew his father’s race would ever be kind to him. He had been set apart. He had been destined, like all people of mixed blood, to belong nowhere. Either he lived a lie as Étienne Terrebonne, or he doomed himself to a future of isolation, misfortune and bigotry. And was he any different from what he had been yesterday? Wasn’t he the same man, no matter what the race of his father?

There were colored men on the bayous, men who spoke French with Acadian accents, men who fished and trapped and went to the dances, the
fais-dodos,
in their own communities, just like their white neighbors. They were accepted—in their place. If they didn’t get ideas about being better than they were supposed to be, if they didn’t look at white women or act surly with white men, if they understood their lot and kept to themselves.

But he would never be accepted. He had lived as a white man, danced with white women. He had been educated by his adoptive mother, who had wanted something more for him
than life in the swamps. He had overstepped all bounds. Now, if he ever told the truth, he might not have a future at all.

But even if he stayed silent, the truth might be told. Auguste had said it was written on his features. Zelma had explained the swarthy hue of his skin as
chénière
blood. The mix of nationalities here had been more varied than on the bayous. Surely Étienne had Italian blood, or Portuguese. Perhaps someone in his family had come from the Canary Islands, like the many who lived in Saint Bernard Parish. But Zelma was no longer alive to fend off questions, and Faustin did not care enough.

The horizon didn’t change as he stared at it. No trees grew there, not even in his imagination. He saw a blank stretch of sky, the sun moving slowly toward the water. Soon it would be night. There was nothing more he could do here today.

He was standing to go when something caught his eye. In this direction, there were trees. Not as many as he remembered, but trees. And between two clumps of them was a noticeable gap. He frowned and stared, trying desperately to remember, to recall a day twelve years before when he had been frightened of ghost trees and shrouds of Spanish moss. If this was the direction he had been told to face, then somehow he had forgotten Juan’s instructions. He tensed, trying to force a different memory, but he could remember only the instructions he had repeated to himself every night for the past twelve years.

Perhaps the problem was not the instructions, or his memories of them. He spun to peer at the tree trunk, then the patch of soft earth where another tree had stood. His calculations had been based on the trunk serving as the middle tree, but maybe the cypress knobs had not belonged to the
third tree. Maybe the third tree was to the left, not the right, and the trunk was not the middle tree at all.

He was excited now. He walked toward the area where the third tree could have been. The ground was marshy. The third tree had stood on solid ground when he came here with Juan, but land and water frequently changed places. Hadn’t he found Juan’s well in the water? He waded in his bare feet, moving only inches farther out every time he turned. Just when he was certain the search was futile, he stumbled. Something snagged at his toes. He knelt and felt the ground with his hands. He found the almost imperceptible stump of a tree.

He stood and imagined the angle of this tree’s shadow. Once it had been a tall, stately cypress. Just past noon, its shadow would have extended back toward solid ground. He imagined the place where the shadow of the other tree might have ended. He marked the stump with a branch. Then he returned to the place where the shadows might have touched. He turned toward the gap in the trees on the horizon and took eight careful steps.

He was standing twenty yards from the ditch he had dug. He was almost at the water’s edge now. He remembered that the water had been much farther away when he was seven. But so much had changed. So very much.

He marked the place, then went back for his shovel. He had just enough time to dig one hole before he would be forced to return to his camp. He dug a hole one foot wide and one foot deep. The sun continued its descent. He gauged that he had one more hour until dark, and dug faster. Now he was forced to choose between breadth and depth. There would be time tomorrow for both, but not tonight.

He chose breadth, assuming that the tides had carved
away some of the soil on top of the ridge. Whatever Juan had buried would be closer to the surface now. His shovel dipped, and he lifted and tossed the dirt behind him. The rhythm of digging no longer soothed him. He was tired, discouraged, aching. He wanted only to eat, to sleep, to forget. But he thrust the shovel into the widening hole again and again.

The shovel hit something solid.

He was so exhausted that for a moment he thought only that he had hit a root, a chunk of buried driftwood, a portion of someone’s wind-tossed skiff or lugger. He thrust the shovel into the hole again, and again it wouldn’t penetrate.

This time he knelt and dug away what dirt he could with his fingers. He followed the outline of the object. It was flat and square. He scrubbed the top until his fingertips were raw. Then, standing, he wedged the shovel in the side of the hole and pried.

The object was a metal box, about one foot square and deep. He removed it from the hole with trembling hands. Juan had hidden something, and he hadn’t lived to come back for it. He felt a stab of sympathy for the old man who had befriended him, a man who had known his father and spoken well of him. Juan had indeed sailed away forever.

He wiped the box with his shirttail. A rusted padlock hung from one side, sealing the box tightly shut. With the aid of the shovel and a piece of iron-hard driftwood, it was a small matter to force it apart.

He sprawled on the ground with the box on his lap. It wasn’t often that a man held dreams in his hands. He could open the box and find nothing more than letters or photographs, another man’s dreams.

Or he could open it and find his own.

The sun was nearly gone before he pried open the rusted lid.

The flaming colors of sunset revealed dreams that were too splendid for a man awake.

T
he mirror beside Lucien’s office door proved his worst suspicions. He was paler than he had been yesterday. Paler, with the faintest hint of blue about his lips, as if his blood, pumped by a heart that frequently faltered, could no longer defy gravity’s pull.

He turned away and gazed out the window overlooking the wharf recently built for the Gulf Coast Steamship Line. The wharf was the finest monument to his tenure as president, sleek and efficient, like the SS
Danish Dowager,
the newest of the company’s ships. In Antoine’s time the wharves had been so inadequate and the charges so high that some shipping interests had begun to find different routes for their cargo. Antoine hadn’t had the foresight to realize that a port in trouble meant that a shipping company based there was in trouble, too.

But what could one expect from a man who had resisted logic and convention when he threatened his own son-in-law? A man whose sanctimonious visit to Grand Isle had brought about his own death?

Antoine’s death. The death of Marcelite Cantrelle. The deaths of her son, daughter and unborn child.

The scene outside the window blurred. Lucien’s heart lurched painfully. When the Gulf Coast office building had been constructed after Antoine’s death, Lucien had specified that the walls were to be extra thick and the windows small. He hadn’t wanted city noises to find their way inside. But there were no walls thick enough to keep out the noises of the river, the whistles of the tugboats, the bells.

There was a bell sounding somewhere in the distance now. A man never realized how many bells there were until they began to toll away his final days.

He fumbled for the back of his desk chair and sat, dropping his head between his knees. He managed a deep breath, then another. How could it be that at the beginning of a new century, an age of amazing progress, there was still nothing that could be done about a heart that wouldn’t beat properly?

He had journeyed north nearly a year ago, to New York and Minnesota, unsuccessfully searching for a cure. No one in New Orleans except his personal physician knew the extent of his illness. Even Aurore had no idea. Luckily, she hadn’t asked questions about the trip, even though it had stretched into weeks. He imagined that a rigorous schedule of dances and parties had kept her too busy to worry. She had never been home when he telephoned. He had returned to find her social schedule full, just as he had hoped.

The bell continued to toll. Lucien sat up and reached inside his desk drawer for a letter. He laid it carefully against his chest and willed his heart to beat steadily again. He murmured some of the text of the letter, a soothing French litany he knew by memory.

“‘You are not guilty, my son. You must lay aside this burden and take up your life. There was nothing more you could have done to save those poor souls lost in your skiff. So many people, hundreds upon hundreds, died that night. Can a father blame himself because his newborn son was ripped from his loving arms, or a mother because her daughters were safely nestled in the room of a house that collapsed? These were acts of God, acts that could not have been changed.’”

Lucien fell silent. As he had many times before, he told himself that Father Grimaud was correct. He could not have changed the events that occurred the night of the hurricane. He had seen truth in the form of a giant wall of water. And had he known that Antoine would die that night, making Marcelite’s and the children’s deaths a terrible irony, nothing would have been different. Nothing.

“Papa?”

Lucien sat up straighter, and thrust the letter from Father Grimaud into the drawer. He couldn’t stand with his heart still squeezing painfully in his chest, but he nodded at Aurore, who stood in the doorway, and gestured for her to take a chair.

“I know you don’t like me to come here,” she said, as soon as she had seated herself.

“But you come anyway.”

“The riverfront is just too interesting. I can’t seem to stay away.”

She sounded so much like the young Claire Friloux that for the briefest moment Lucien wondered if he had been cast back in time. But no, the woman sitting beside his desk was Aurore, Claire’s only surviving child. Her voice was like her mother’s, but her hair was a shade lighter, her eyes a paler blue. Claire, at eighteen, had been rosy-cheeked and robust, with
a wicked, throbbing laugh that made men yearn for her. He, the victor, had discovered how quickly that laughter could be extinguished.

Aurore was dressed in a dark tailored suit that made her thin features even plainer and a blouse of ivory lace that provided no contrast to her complexion. He recognized the hat that perched on top of her thick roll of hair. He had selected it himself. Bird-of-paradise plumes drooped artfully over one side of her face, a coquettish touch for a young woman who had too little of the coquette about her.

“There must be more important ways for you to spend your time,” he said.

She smiled, but the smile did nothing to light up her face. “Papa, if I’m to provide you with an heir to Gulf Coast, don’t you think I should occasionally see what happens here?”

“It will be enough that your husband sees.”

Her gaze didn’t falter. “And if there is no husband?”

His heart lurched painfully. The morning was still pleasantly cool for April, but he could feel a fine sheen of perspiration dampening his shirt. “Don’t talk nonsense.”

“Nonsense? I haven’t met a man I want to marry.”

“You’re like all young women today. You expect love and forget duty. When you realize what’s expected of you, you’ll find a dozen suitable men.”

“A dozen?” For just a moment, there was a gleam in her eye that hinted at hidden vitality. “Perhaps that’s too much to hope for, when I can’t even seem to find one.”

Lucien wanted her to leave. The problem of his daughter and Gulf Coast Steamship was one he had gone over and over in his head since the surgeon in Minnesota had warned him that the days left to him were few. “What exactly do you want to see?”

This time, there was more than a hint of vitality. Her eyes blazed a more brilliant blue. “Will you give me a tour of the new dock?”

“I haven’t the time.” He stood. “And I see no point, but if you must see the wharf, then I’ll have someone else show you.”

She stood, too. “I’d rather you did.”

Lately it had been hard to dismiss her. “I’ve explained I’m too busy.”

“Papa, are you feeling well?”

Lucien wasn’t pleased that she had noticed a difference in him. “Of course.”

“It’s just that you seem tired recently. And I think you’re afraid the walk will tire you more.”

“That’s foolish. Not another word about it to anyone! There are plenty of people who would be upset if they thought my health was suffering.”

She didn’t flinch. “Why?”

“Because I’ve just made a huge investment in the
Dowager,
and in building that dock. I built it, not the dock board. I invested in our long-term future by improving the port, just like some of the other steamship companies have done. And I’ve loaned the dock board money for further improvements.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“The money had to come from somewhere.”

“And so you borrowed it in order to lend it?”

He was surprised she had understood. “In a sense. I borrowed it from myself, from other investments and property.”

“And will the commissioners pay you back eventually? Or do you own the dock now?”

“Gulf Coast has sole use. We’ll be paid back by credits on revenue.”

“With interest?”

She was leaning toward him, completely occupied by their conversation. He couldn’t recall ever having seen her so animated. “No. The board wasn’t authorized to pay interest. We can only hope the company will benefit in the long run.”

“But the short run might be difficult?”

“Not if we have a good year. Not if the improvement of the terminal here pays off immediately, the way I expect it to.”

“I think I see why rumors that you’re ill might create problems. Everything is very carefully balanced, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He frowned, realizing for the first time that he had discussed the situation with her as if it were something she needed to know. “But I don’t want to burden you with my business dealings. This is far too complex for you to think about.”

“Oh, it’s not a burden.” She smiled; it was a very different smile from the one he had noted earlier. This time, her face was altered until she could no longer be considered plain. “But you’ve conveniently gotten me off the subject of your health.”

“I told you, I’m well.”

“So you did.”

Lucien wanted nothing so much as to sit down again. He considered who to send with Aurore as an escort. His secretary had a gentleman’s manners, but he was no match for the stevedores and screwmen. Aurore needed an escort who would command authority and still treat her with the proper deference.

“Wait here. If you really insist on this, I’ll find someone who can give you a tour.”

“I really insist,” she said pleasantly. “Yes, I think I must insist, Papa.”

Once again she sounded like her mother, but this time
Lucien noted an underlying strength he had never heard in Claire’s voice. Lucien was filled with the disquieting notion that for eighteen years he had badly underestimated his daughter.

Aurore prowled her father’s office while she waited for his return. If she had designed this building, she would have placed it as close to the water as possible; then she would have created long windows that could be thrown wide open, so that the smells and sounds of the river seeped inside the room.

She had always loved everything about the riverfront: the sight of cotton bales stacked like the building blocks of a snow king’s castle, the warehouses filled with bags of aromatic coffee beans from exotic South American countries. She loved the chants of men unloading the ships, the mule bells and shrieking locomotive steam horns, the odors of creosote and freshly milled lumber, the smoke of coal fires. There was nothing in her life that compared to the thrill she felt on the rare occasions when she came here.

She thought of Ti’ Boo and the days they had spent together on Bayou Lafourche. Ti’ Boo was going to have a baby. Her letters were fewer now, but when she wrote she sounded happy. Jules was a considerate husband and a hard worker. No, Ti’ Boo did not feel like a muskrat caught in a trap. And the baby she carried—a girl, she hoped—made up for the things that weren’t good, the disease that had ruined Jules’s meager sugarcane crop, the flood that had washed away their kitchen garden.

Aurore remembered that she had felt alive in Bayou Lafourche. But afterward she had come home to an empty house and an empty life. There were other young women in New Orleans who reveled in the social whirl of the city, par
ticularly the carnival season, with its luncheons and dances, its dinners and formal balls. But she wasn’t one of them. Perhaps if her father had agreed to let her attend college she might have been happier. But Lucien hadn’t seen a need for more education. The Newcomb College set, with their bloomers and their emphasis on exercise, had seemed unwomanly to him.

She looked out her father’s miserly window and envied the men below, all engaged in backbreaking labor. The stevedores unloading tons of bananas might have to worry about hidden tarantulas or poisonous green snakes that had survived the long voyage, but at least they were free when work was finished to do whatever they chose and go wherever they wanted. In contrast, she had to fight for every breath, every idea, every dream.

The office door opened, and she turned at the sound of her father’s footsteps. She stood very still and stared at the man who had entered with him.

“Aurore, this is Étienne Terrebonne, our new traffic manager.”

She made the appropriate response, but her eyes never left those of the man standing beside her father. He was dressed in a classically styled blue suit, but there was nothing dandified about him. He looked as masculine in the suit, with its starched white shirt and striped four-in-hand scarf, as he had in rough Atakapas cottonade.

“I understand you want a tour?” he asked in excellent, barely accented English.

Relief and curiosity warred inside her. Étienne hadn’t pointed out that this was their second introduction. She still considered it something of a miracle that Lucien had never
learned of her trip to Côte Boudreaux. “Yes, I’d like a tour very much,” she said. “You’ll be my guide?”

“If you’ll allow me.” He gave a slight bow.

“Absolutely. It should be fascinating.” She smiled politely, exactly as expected.

“Étienne, I don’t want Miss Le Danois to have any unfortunate encounters,” Lucien said.

“I’ve already sent word that I’ll be showing her the dock.”

“Good.” Lucien turned. “Aurore.”

She had been dismissed, and she was delighted. She didn’t speak again until they were outside in the roadway. Étienne took her arm and pulled her closer to the building. A wagon loaded with bags of coffee passed. He didn’t drop her arm immediately. They stood together in the shadows and stared at each other.

“Hello again,” he said finally.

“You must have some things you’d like to tell me.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Everything.”

“Everything, and a tour of the terminal, too?”

“We could do the tour another time.”

He smiled for the first time since they had been reintroduced. A year had passed, but she recognized the effect of that smile. A familiar connection had been established. “I told you I was going to find my place in the world,” he said.

“But you never mentioned it would be here, in the middle of my father’s business.”

“I didn’t know.”

“And the clothes?” She stepped back a little to view him better. “The perfect English?”

“The English was far from perfect when I came, but I
learn quickly. As for the clothes…” He shrugged. “Do they matter?”

“I’d say they matter a lot. If you dressed as you did on the bayou, my father might have hired you to unload his ships, but not to manage anything.”

“Exactly.”