A Million Nightingales (25 page)

“The burials are tomorrow.”

I sat in the chair worn smooth by Philippine's movements. Carved wood. Jean-Paul barely fit in his box now.

“My father wishes me to interview you.”

“Oui, msieu.”

“He has asked me to record exactly what happened before I arrived.”

“Oui, msieu.”

Jean-Paul murmured under his blanket, and my breath caught in my chest. Etienne did not look at the baby. He did not look at me. He looked at the paper before him, on Philippine's table, and I saw the webbing of red in his eyes. He had wept. His aunt, the only smile here, was gone; his mother was blind, and his father angry.

“My father has asked, repeatedly, exactly when you struck Msieu Vincent.”

Le Code Noir—the penalty for striking a master in the face was death. But he became my master only when she was dead.

“When he shot Madame Pélagie, msieu.”

“Did your action make the ball hit her?”

“No, msieu.”

“You cannot testify in court.”

My hand was at the back of Jean-Paul's skull.

“You are telling me,
only
me,” he said sharply.

“Oui, msieu. I struck him with the coffeepot when he was going to shoot her again. She was standing. She was still alive.” I fixed my eyes on the door. “She was still my mistress.”

No one came that night to visit with Msieu or eat with Madame. No one came that night to stay at Rosière for the burials in the morning. When Céphaline had died, Azure was full of guests. But the shame of Pélagie kept this house empty.

The servant from France slept on a pallet inside Madame's room. The doors down the hallway were all closed. The floor shone silver as when I had first arrived. I did not sleep outside Pélagie's door. Her body lay downstairs inside the wooden box. Her husband's body lay in the barn.

I lay in Philippine and Firmin's old bed, with Jean-Paul beside me. He lay on his stomach with his arms and legs curled under
him like a large beetle. But his mouth was open. His breaths dampened my arm.

It is dangerous to be so rested. My mother's voice came to me. The window shutters were closed tight. I would have to leave before dawn. If Mirande or Baillo saw me on the road to the house, I would say Léonide needed help early for the funeral.

I would have Jean-Paul tucked inside my cape.

But Jean-Paul fussed when the before-dawn air hit his face, as the door closed, and I pushed him inside my dress, where he latched onto my breast. The houses of le quartier were all dark. Someone snored in Sophia's room. No one cried.

He drank while I walked, and the feel of my feet moving while his mouth pulled at the milk made me dizzy. Sideways and forward. Slowing my steps. The stocks. The bell. He slept inside my dressfront. Milk leaked from his mouth and ran down my ribs.

Just past the bell, I shifted without thinking to the narrow footpath beside the road. The road was marred with deep ruts from cart wheels, full of water. A small reddish bayou alongside the foot trail I walked every day and night. When I stopped to listen for a cart, deep in the woods, Jean-Paul stirred, and each time my movements stopped, he made the bird sounds that would escalate into cries if his lips hadn't found my breast.

There was no sound. No animals. The sky was the deep black of no moon or sun or promise of anything. Not day and not night.

This was an animal trail. My animal trail, from Pélagie's room to Léonide's kitchen to le quartier. Every day. If I stayed, my feet would wear down wood floors and brick walkway and earthen road until my shoulders were swallowed by banks along my way. I would walk the same circles until I died, until Jean-Paul walked taller than me.

I heard nothing. No owls. No rustling. Only my son's throat working, though no milk came now, though he swallowed his own saliva and thought it sustenance.

A baby would never last inside an armoire. We would be found. Hervé and Jean-Paul could be killed. I saw my child dashed against a tree. Tucked into a basket and sold. Drowned
like a kitten. Useful for nothing. I saw myself lying under men in the trees. The trees were a wall beside me. I couldn't take Jean-Paul into the trees. Hervé Richard thought he loved me.

He loved what he thought of me.

I didn't know Hervé Richard. Only that he wanted me. He didn't know I had a son. Pélagie had been the property of the man who'd shot her. Her shame—that she had run from him, even as he'd tied her to chairs and starved her—her shame, not his, now kept everyone Creole and French away from her body. Her body was dressed in fine silk, but she belonged to those men.

She wanted a window.

You belong to no one. Not Msieu. Not God. You belong to me.

My mother. My son. What if Hervé Richard made me leave him here, on the soft bed of oak leaves near my feet? What if Hervé Richard took me in the armoire to New Orleans and then tied me to a chair? He wanted my face. What if he didn't want my brain or my measurements or the issue of my body?

No issue.

I could take Jean-Paul back right now to Fantine. She would feed him. She would love him. He might love her. I could come back for him someday. When I was free.

His lips pulled hard again when I turned to hurry back. My arm hurt from bending. My left arm. The arm that did less work except to hold him.

I wrapped my cape around me more tightly and ducked past the low branches along the trail. If he stayed with Fantine, he would live.

The hooves approached from the street. Jean-Paul slept now, from my walking. Baillo leaned down from his horse and said, “You forget something?”

I said, “Léonide wants to start cooking early, for the funeral, so I have to leave my son now.”

He waited outside Fantine's door. I laid Jean-Paul next to her, and she turned away from Basile's back. The cabin smelled of sweat and milk and salt, warm cloth and almond oil. Jean-Paul jerked his head against her. Fantine said sleepily, “Ain't time yet.”

I whispered into my son's ear, “Adieu.”

My nipple was sore and cold. I buttoned my dressfront outside under my cape. Baillo slumped on his horse. I walked quickly up the road, and the sky began to turn purple in the trees. The hunting path through the woods was past the allée of crape myrtle trees. The hooves followed me at a distance all the way to the kitchen, where Léonide's fire sent smoke in black smudges across the dawn.

The second time he spoke to me, Etienne said, “Your baby stayed here with the old couple who ran. You never heard them plan to escape?”

“Non, msieu.”

“You were here but never heard them speak of where they would go?”

Did he not know that Amanthe was their daughter and that his own mother had taken her away forever? Did he not even know their names?

“Non, msieu.”

“Two more ran last night. For anyone who knew of these plans, or where the slaves are hiding, the penalty will be death.”

“Oui, msieu.” I tucked my lips between my teeth to keep them from shaking. Hervé Richard had come and gone. A week had passed. Pélagie lay under the earth. Jean-Paul lay sleeping on the bed. At night, he twitched and moved against my ribs, as hot as bread.

Etienne rubbed his middle finger hard between his brows. “My father doesn't want you to serve in the house again. He is not certain that you had no part in his sister's death.”

Was I allowed to say: I tried to save her, I touched her more than I have ever touched another human animal, every day I washed her and curled her hair and pulled the stays on her corset until her shoulder blades, not angel wings but shoulder blades, rose and a deep hollow formed between them and she couldn't reach the sweat so I wiped it from her skin there?

I said nothing. These words were not allowed.

“My father is unmoving in his opinions once they are formed.” Then he put his elbows on his knees and curled his shoulders toward the fire as if the heat were a cape.

But when Msieu Laurent went to New Orleans, Léonide insisted I help her with the meat. A hard freeze had set in, the cane couldn't be planted because the furrows were solid as stone, and the cold meant pigs should be killed for the smokehouse.

At the long wooden table we waited for the sound of iron crushing bone. Pig skulls were long and slanted compared to ours. Their brains would be made into jelly.

We were covered in blood, after we had cut the ribs into curving shelves. The ax severed the spine. The wind blew tiny splinters of iced blood from the table. The entrails, for sausage casings, were transparent as wet muslin in my fingers. I breathed in the salty, coppery blood—why did blood scent not enter my lungs, as the indigo smell had spread its poison in my grandmother's body?

When I went to feed Jean-Paul, his whole face drew back like a frightened turtle from the smell of my stained dressfront. In the lines of my knuckles, the dried blood was black.

His fingers were still curled soft as shrimp—easy to bite off if the wrong animal found him. His arms and legs tender. His skull pulsing under the useless thin fur in the cold room.

When the meat was ground into sausage and cooked into jellies and the hams submerged in their salt baths and then hung in the smokehouse, I went back to the canefield.

The silver air turned gold, and the frost melted into the earth. We pulled the seed cane from the matelas pile, where it was stacked in the field against frost. At night, my nostrils were coated with rings of white frost—no, rings of dried salt. I tasted the salt. All the excretions of our bodies contained salt—tears, urine, sweat. Saliva?

Like the taste of my own blood. Salty and rich.

Sophia craved salt, and a few times I had brought her small pinches of salt from the house.

Now, nursing Jean-Paul with my hands still cold and my legs aching from the canefield, I understood how much they needed salt, and meat. Mamère and her coffee, warm under her fingers in the morning.

I understood how desperate they were for the feathery pink ham, salty and solid in their back teeth. I bit off a callus from my palm. Hardtack. No salt in my skin. Where did the salt go?

Gervaise ran that night and took his baby with him. Sophia didn't scream or cry in the morning. She simply said, “He say Msieu could sell his son. He say you was sold to Madame Pélagie but who know about your son? Say nobody take his son or he die.”

“But how will he feed Amadou?”

“Amadou make a year last week. He eat cush-cush. I don't know what Gervaise feed him, but he live.”

Fronie came outside, her braids mussed from sleep, and Sophia smoothed the hairs. “Didn't say, What she do I take her son? Nothing. Say in his mind, She got Fronie.”

Was Gervaise in a camp of cimarrons with Philippine and Firmin? Or had they all been caught and taken to the cypress camp? Would Athénaïse see them? What if he had killed the white man, and he ran the camp himself now? Or the Indians? What would the brother and sister do with a baby like Amadou?

Days later, Gervaise slipped into le quartier and left Sophia a curl of Amadou's hair inside a map he had drawn. But she burned the map, saying she couldn't understand what he had tried to show her. She tucked the curl into her pocket and turned away from the fire.

Msieu Antoine came while Msieu de la Rosière was still in New Orleans. The Frenchwoman had been sent away as she was incompetent, and I was called to the house. Madame de la Rosière looked at the walls with her cloud eyes. She did not play the piano. She asked Msieu Antoine to read to her in the parlor.

When I brought breakfast to Etienne in the garçonnière, he glanced up from his maps. He asked me nothing. He began to speak.

“The Prudhommes will never visit this house again.”

My fingers arranged sugar on the tray. White, sparkling shards.

“I was trained to kill for the protection of royalty, not to save a slave. All people will remember is that two French citizens are dead. And you live.”

His boots needed blacking.

“All my mother ever wanted was to see me again, and my father refused my return until now. Now she touches me but cannot see me.”

Am I meant to feel pity for you? All I ever wanted was to touch my own mother again.

He lifted his chin at the fields. “Reading Latin wasn't necessary for me to grow sugarcane. And unless I'm going to kill everyone here, with a massive plan, the military was useless as well.”

But he'd killed someone to save me. My eyes stayed on the bootheels. “How old were you when you were sent away?”

“Twelve,” he said. “I was always in the woods. The Indians lived on the back of this place, by the ciprière, and one old man taught me to hunt. He called me a voyageur. Coureur-de-bois. A woodsman. We went for miles into the forest, hunting deer, even bear. We skinned the bear and took the grease down the bayou to sell.” He moved his fingers on his hand-drawn map—preparing to hunt Philippine and Firmin? To see where the slaves could be hiding? He had inked in forests and bayous and slices of land along the water like crowded long teeth. “Now there are plantations everywhere. The Indian hunters are drunk in Opelousas.”

Etienne didn't know about the logging camp, the red trade cloth in my mouth. The clearwater breath of the Indian woman, the smoky smell of her brother's hair.

“Son.” He moved his boots on the wooden floor, and some of the drying mud fell into the cracks. “I will be the only son forever.”

Until your father is gone.

“My mother will stay blind here, until she dies.”

But you'll know. My toes pushed the clots of mud I would add to my land outside this door. You'll know when she dies. She will call to you. My mother will pray, holding the bracelet of hair, saying the African words I will never hear again unless someone sends me to Azure and she hasn't been sold. I will never know.

His eyes—darker than his mother's milky irises. Not the fierce flame blue of Céphaline's or the gray blue flecked with gold of Pélagie's. Etienne had eyes dark and muddy like indigo cloth. Soldier blue.

Taking the key from Madame's table, I told Léonide we needed ham. Madame had ordered a large dinner for Msieu Antoine and Etienne. She could see nothing. The men were in Opelousas until night. The dinner would be very late.