Saratoga Trunk (12 page)

“Then New Orleans is going to learn that a Dulaine has returned from France. I’m going to see New Orleans and New Orleans is going to see me.”

“They’ll come down on you.”

“They’ll wish they hadn’t.”

“I’ve seen a lot of women but I never saw any woman like you, Clio.”

“There isn’t anyone like me,” she replied quite simply. Then, “They’ll come to me. You’ll see.”

“Better not rile ‘em. They’ll find a way to make it hot for you. Anyway, you don’t want to stay down here steaming like a clam. We can clear out, go up to Saratoga for the races. That’s where I’m heading for. I wouldn’t be here this long if it wasn’t for you. You got me roped and tied, seems like.”

“Saratoga? Is that a nice place?”

“July and August there’s nothing like it in the whole country. Races every day, gambling, millionaires and pickpockets and sporting people and respectable family folks and politicians and famous theater actors and actresses, you’ll find them all at Saratoga.”

“I’d like that. But I haven’t enough money, unless I sell something.”

“Shucks, you’ll be with me. I can make enough for two.”

She shook her head. “No, I am going to be free. You want to be free, too. Perhaps we can have a plan together though. Tell me, is it cool there in Saratoga—cool and fresh and gay?”

“Well, not to say real cool. I’ve never been there before, but I’ve heard it’s up in the hills beyond Albany, and there’s pine woods all around, real spicy. And lakes. July, I was fixing to go up North. Come on.”

She sat a moment very still, her eyes fixed, unblinking, deep in thought. When finally she spoke it was in a curious monotone, as though she were thinking aloud. “Two more months here. That will be enough for me. I have a plan. There are things I must find out, first. These past few weeks—lovely—but no more drifting, drifting.” She sighed, straightened, looked at him with a keen directness. “Clint, will you stay here in New Orleans for a month or perhaps a litde more?”

He laughed rather shordy. “Wasn’t for you I’d been on my way before now. It’s too soft and pretty down here for me, and wet-hot. A week or two here and I was heading for St. Louis or maybe Kansas City and up north to Chicago. Clark Street, Chicago.”

“Go then.”

He looked down at his own big clasped hands, he glanced at the letter C so beautifully embroidered on the lower sleeve of his fine cambric shirt as he sat, coadess. In his hip pocket was a fine linen handkerchief hemstitched and marked in a design even more exquisite by the same hand—that of Kakaracou, expert though unwilling.

“You got me roped, tied—and branded. It’s all over me, burned into my hide. C. Stands for Clio.”

“It is for Clint, the letter C. You know that!”

“I’d have a tough time making ‘em see that down in the cattle country back home in Texas. Me, Clint Maroon, embroidered and hemstitched. God! I’ll be wearing ruffles on my pants, next thing.”

“Is it kind to talk like that?”

“No, honey. Only I was just thinking how you can start something just fooling around and not meaning anything but a little fun, like that day I up and spoke to you at the Market.”

Another woman would have said the obvious thing. But Clio Dulaine did not say, “Are you sorry?” She sat very still, waiting.

He stood up. “I’m staying,” he said, and came over to her and put a hand on her head and then rocked it a little so that it lolled on her slender neck; a gesture of helpless resentment on his part. Then he strolled toward the garden doorway, where the hot sun lay like a metal sheet. She watched him go, high-heeled boots; tight pants, slim hips, vast shoulders, the head a little too small, perhaps, for the width and height of the structure of bone and muscle; the ears a little outstanding giving him a boyish look. She rose swiftly and came up behind him and put her two arms around him so that her hands just met across his chest. She pressed her cheek against the hard muscles of his shoulder blade. “I am so happy.”

“Say that again.”

“I am so happy, Clint.”

“Say it again.”

She gave him a little push toward the garden doorway. He had told her he loved to listen to her voice, sometimes he caught himself listening to it without actually hearing what she said. Hers was an alive voice, it had a vital note that buoyed you like fresh air or fresh water, it had a life-giving quality as though it came from the deep well of her inner being, as indeed it did. He had once said to her, “Back home in Texas the womenfolks are mighty fine, they don’t come any finer, but they’ve got kind of screechy voices; I don’t know, maybe it’s the dust or the alky water or maybe having to yell at the ornery menfolks to make ‘em listen. Your voice, it puts me in mind of the Texas sky at night, kind of soft and purple.”

Clint Maroon stood a moment on the steps facing the courtyard and looked about him and listened and let the sun beat down upon his bare head and on his shoulders covered by the unaccustomed fineness of the cambric shirt. From the house, from the kitchen ell, from the
garçonnière
with the stable beneath came the homely soothing sounds and smells of life lived comfortably, easily, safely. In the kitchen Kaka was preparing the early midday meal that followed the morning black coffee. Clio, vigorous, healthy, was an early riser, a habit formed, doubtless, in her schooldays in France. She had, too, the habit of the light continental breakfast and the hearty lunch. Clint Maroon sniffed the air. The scent of baking breads delicately rolled, richly shortened; coffee; butter sputtering. He thought of the chuck wagon. Beans. Pork. Leaden biscuits. Come and get it! Under Clio’s tutelage he had learned about food in these past three weeks. He had learned to drink wine. Whisky, Clio said, was not a drink, it was a medicine. Wine, too, was something you cooked with, oddly enough. As for frying—that, it seemed, was for savages. Back in Texas everything went into the frying pan. You even fried bread. Clio was shocked or amused. Kaka was contemptuous. Things
à la.
Things
au.
He had learned about these, too.

From the stable came a swish and a clatter and the sound of Cupide’s clear choirboy tenor. Cupide was in high spirits these past weeks. The little man worshiped the Texan. He scampered round him as a terrier frisks about a mastiff, he fetched and carried for him, he tried to imitate his gait, his drawling speech, his colloquialisms. Sprinkled through his own
pot-au-feu
of French, English, Gombo, this added a startling spice to his already piquant speech. “
Bon jour!”
he would say in morning greeting. “Howdy!
Certainement!
I sure aim to. It is a pleasure to see you as you drive the bays, Monsieur Maroon. Uh—you sure do handle a horse pretty. Yessiree!”

Triumph irradiated the froglike face; the great square teeth gleamed in a grin. “I speak like a true
vacher,
yes?” Maroon delighted in teaching him bits of cowboy idiom. The peak of Cupide’s new knowledge was reached when one evening, standing in the drawing-room doorway to announce dinner, he had shouted, gleefully, “Come and get it or I’ll throw it away!” Ever since the death of Nicolas Dulaine the little man had been ruled by women in a manless household—Rita Dulaine, Belle Piquery, Clio, Kaka. Now he and Clint Maroon were two males together; it was fine; he smoked Clint’s cigars, he tended his horses; together they went to the horse sales, to the races. He loved to polish the Texan’s high-heeled boots, to brush his clothes; he neglected the work in the house where, in his little green baize apron, he used to rub and polish floors, furniture, crystal.

Now, as he sluiced down the horses in the stable, he sang and whistled softly a song he had picked up with a strange rhythm. Queer music with a curious off-beat that you caught just before it dropped. He had heard it played by a tatterdemalion crowd of Negro boys who wandered the streets, minstrels who played and danced and sang and turned handsprings for pennies. The Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band they called themselves. Their instruments were a fiddle made of an old cigar box, a kettle, a cowbell, a gourd filled with pebbles, a bull fiddle whose body was half an old barrel; horns, whistles, a harmonica. Out of these dégagé instruments issued a weird music that set your body twitching and your feet shuffling and your head wagging. A quarter of a century later this broken rhythm was to be known as ragtime, sdll later as jazz. Cupidon, whose ear was true and quick, had caught the broken rhythm perfectiy. He had learned, too, not to strike the high note fairly but to lead up to it—”crying” up to it they called it later. His whistle sounded jubilantly above the swish and thump as he worked.

The man standing on the steps in the sun’s hot glare was thinking, Clint, you better be drifting. Say
adios.
You’re fixing to get into a sight of trouble. You’re locoed. Suddenly, from within the house, Clio began to sing. A natural mimic, she was imitadng the song of the blackberry woman who passed the house on her rounds, having walked miles from the woods and bayous, her skirts tucked high above her dusty legs, her soft, melancholy voice calling her wares. Now Clio imitated her perfectly and with complete unconsciousness of what she was doing. Artless and lovely the song rose above the fountain’s faint tinkle, above Cupide’s whistle, above the clatter of pans in the kitchen.

Black-ber-ries—fresh an’fine,

Got black-berries, lady, fresh f’om de vine,

Got black-berries, lady, three glass fo’ dime,

I got black-berries, I got black-berries, black-RER-ees!

The man looked back over his shoulder into the cool dim room he had just left. He looked about him. In the sight and the sounds of the mossy courtyard there was something blood-stirring, exhilaradng. The pulse in his powerful throat throbbed. He knew he could not go. He went down the steps, quick and light. The bedroom, the stable, the kitchen. The kitchen. Discord there, he knew. Kakaracou was a powerful ally or an implacable foe. She knew no middle course.

He had spoken to Clio about her. “That mammy of yours, she hates me like poison. Every time I look at her she turns away from me like a horse. I’m just naturally peaceable, but I’m fixing to have a little talk with Kaka.”

“It isn’t you. It’s men. You see, she lived with Mama and Aunt Belle all those years. Men, to her, mean trouble and tears.”

Now he strolled across the courtyard to the kitchen doorway and stood there a moment while the delicious aroma of Kakaracou’s cookery was wafted to him from stove and table. Kaka did not glance up as his broad shoulders shadowed the room. At the French Market she had got hold of some tiny trout, cool and glittering in their bed of green leaves, and these she was broiling delicately. Her workday tignon of plain brilliant blue was wound around her head; she was concentrating on her work or perhaps away from him. Her wattled neck stretched forward, her lower lip protruded, she looked like a particularly haughty cobra.

“You ain’t got one kind thought for me, have you now, Mammy?”

Her swift upward glance at him, jagged and ominous, was like a lightning stroke. He went on, evenly,

“Funny thing. When I meet up with somebody I don’t like, or they don’t like me, why, either I get out or they do, depending on which is doing the hating. I’m staying.”

She eyed him balefully; she began to speak in French, knowing that he comprehended no word of it; taking great satisfaction in spitting out the venomous phrases. “Lout! Common cowboy! Scum of the gutters! Spawn of the devil! I hate you!
Je t’Atteste?’’

“My, my!” drawled Maroon. “I don’t parley Frongsay myself, but I sure do admire to hear other people go it. I kind of caught the drift of what you were saying, though, on account of that last word; it’s the same in American as it is in French. So I caught on you weren’t exactly paying me compliments, Mammy.”

Suddenly, swiftly, like a panther, he stood beside her; he caught her meager body up in his two hands. Her own hands he pinned behind her neck, one of his powerful hands held them there, the other grasped her skinny legs at the ankles and thus he held her as if she had been a sack of feathers. A little series of tooting screams issued from her throat like the whisde of a calliope coming down the river on a showboat. But they could not be heard outside, what with Clio’s singing, Cupide’s whistling and swishing and the cries of the hucksters in the street. Kaka’s eyes protruded with hate and fear. Her face had turned a dirty gray.

Clint Maroon looked down at her. Suddenly his eyes were not blue at all, but steel color. When he spoke he was smiling a little and his voice was gentle and drawling, as always.

“Holding you the way I am, Mammy, I could give you a little twist, two ways, would crack your backbone like you split those fish. You’d never talk or walk again and nobody’d know I’d done it.”

Like a snake she twisted her head and tried to sink her teeth into his arms. “Uh-uh. Shucks, I won’t hurt you. I just thought you ought to know. We’re going to be friends, you and me.” The glare she now cast up at him made this statement seem doubtful. “Oh, yes, we are. Miss Clio, she never had any fun—not to say, fun. Two sick old women a-whining and a-bellyaching all the time. Now you and me and maybe Cupide there, all together, maybe we can fix it so’s she’ll be rich and happy. She wants fun and love and somebody to look after her. I don’t aim to do her any harm. I want to help her.”

Suddenly he set her on her feet and gave her a gende spank on her bony posterior cushioned with layers of stiffly starched petticoats. She swayed and put out one hand, gropingly, as though about to fall. Then he curved his arm about her meager shoulders and pressed her to his side a moment and hugged her like a boy. “I love you because you love her,” he said.

Kakaracou looked up at him. “You mean she will be rich? And everything
comme il faut.
Respectable.”

“Sure respectable. But we got to play careful.”

She looked up at him with the eyes of an old seeress, bright and wicked and wise and compassionate. She ignored his threatened brutality, his mad display of strength as though they never had been used against her.

“How you like pie Saint Honoré for dinner tonight, effen you and Miss Clio going to be home for one time?”