A Million Nightingales (16 page)

He must mean Athénaïse. I tried to look at the men cutting in the ciprière, but the Indian man jerked me toward the long, low shed.

They left me chained to a ring in the first room, the wooden door propped open. My clothes were in a pile beside me, and the water dried on my skin. I curled into a baby-circle with my back to the door and heard voices pass and fade, heard the axes ringing and men shouting and cursing, heard the white man laughing. I never heard the Indian woman, though she left a dish of saga-mite near me, as if for a dog.

My skin. The splintered boards of the wall were pocked with termite holes. Céphaline's skin had betrayed her. Killed her. Her skin hung on the wall of her mother's bedroom, or in the downstairs parlor, perfect and white in her portrait.

After a time, voices rose in a clamor. Men were in the yard. I smelled meat. Maybe Joseph had killed the white man and roasted his thick thighs.

I sat up and tied my tignon around my chest. Gooseflesh. Like plucked birds. My dress was wrinkled and dirty as cleaning rags. Chains on my wrist and ankle. I could only tie the sleeves
around my waist, so that my dress was an apron to cover part of me.

My neck bent when I tried to look out the open door. Doctor Tom said the animals whose necks didn't bend had a hard time in life. My fingers. My teeth chewed there until I had a piece of myself to hold in my mouth.

Eight men sat around the cooking fire. The tallest—his back with grin-scar on one shoulder, fleur-de-lis on his other. Athé-naïse. He'd left twice, and the Indian hunter found him twice.

The Indian woman came in to take my dish. She had a small pistol in her waistband. Her hair was straight, to her shoulders, and a faint line was tattooed from each corner of her mouth to her jaw, like a strange dripping of blue. Her eyes were blacker than the water.

She unlocked the chains, left the one on my wrist, and led me to the trees behind the shed. When I was finished, she brought me back toward the fire and chained me to a post. The trees turned dark.

The men spoke in low voices, French and African and English. The Indian man was gone. Athénaïse kept his eyes on the last light hanging silver in the sky, the only man not staring at me.

“Have you decided what it is you're good for, dear?” The white man threw animal bones into the fire.

When I didn't speak, he said, “Let me help you decide. I left Ireland with nothing, dear, just as you ran with nothing yesterday. But now I own this little enterprise. Sally, though, isn't the best of cooks. And as she's my wife, I can't really let her sell her other useful wares, dear, but you, on the other hand, could make yourself comfortable here, cooking and washing. All these men are working for money, to buy themselves freedom. We take them to New Orleans when they've earned it. Work for a year, and you'll be free to go. And if you want to provide other services, the men can pay you. I'll deduct it from their wages, dear.”

The Indian woman spat into the fire.

The sagamite rose in my throat. The white man's boots were black with mud, like a second skin over the leather. The black men were barefoot. He drank from a flask, again and again,
before lighting his pipe. Some of the other men had cigars or pipes as well, and two of them drank from a gourd.

I had to gamble. It would be safer to tell him a story away from the other men.

“I can tell you inside,” I said softly, and he rose and motioned to the Indian woman. She unchained me again and led me back into his room. He shut the door and chained me to the rings.

“Don't think to try anything brilliant,” he said.

The smell of alcohol wafted from his skin, and the burned meat on his fingers.

“Msieu de la Rosière bought me in New Orleans, just a while ago,” I said. “I'm a—” What was the English word?

“You're a high yellow bitch,” he said softly.

“Cadeau,” I said. “Gift. A gift for his son, when he returns from Paris. I am—untouched. Msieu de la Rosière will pay you.”

“You can't be free from your master.” His voice was soft and reasonable. “But if you work hard, you can be free here.”

Behind him, the Indian woman shook her head slightly, twice.

I said, “Take me back, and he will pay you. I wasn't running, just gathering moss and got lost. I left my jewelry and my good dresses at Rosière. I am not to wear them until I am given as the gift.”

He swallowed again from the flask and pulled the tignon down with his walking stick. He moved my breasts with the tip of the stick. “How does he know you're untouched?”

My eyes focused on the wall behind him, making him a blur before me. “Msieu checks me. With his fingers.”

“Goddamn it. If Joseph takes you back, and you tell about that other nigger, and they come for him, he'll hang. You tell about me, I'll offer de la Rosière so much money he'll have to sell you. And I'll make you wish you had hung.” He drank again and stared at my breasts. “You'd be better off here. The men will pay you. They won't argue.”

He dropped the empty flask and said loudly, far too loudly for our conversation, “I'm first. And then everyone else can pay.”

He wanted the other men to hear.

He put his head down to study the opening to his trousers, and the Indian woman named Sally came up behind him and pulled a
sash around his neck. She tightened it quickly, and he fell to the floor.

I put my arms around my chest. She lifted her chin, and I understood that she meant for me to wait. She pulled him to the bed, laid him on his side, and his mouth sagged open like a dead fish. She slid the sash from under his throat, and he drew in a huge shuddering breath and remained unconscious.

But she backed herself into the wall near the bed and knocked against it, several times, grunting and moving against the wood, and I thought she had gone mad. Her face was as blank as if she were grinding corn. She screamed.

Then one man laughed outside, and one spoke in a murmur low and long, and I knew what she was doing. The men thought they heard his pleasure. They thought their turn would come tomorrow.

I hid my face in my arms until she unlocked the chain, careful not to clink the metal, and put my clothes before me. When I was dressed, she opened the door, holding the rifle, and motioned to the men at the dying fire. They breathed heavily, and one said, “Not time for sleep yet,” but she pointed the rifle at him, and the men filed into the other room. She followed them and then fastened the huge padlocks on the door.

One man cursed inside, and another whispered like boiling water.

Then she handed me my bundle. When we had walked silently, far into the ciprière on a narrow path, she took a candle from her pocket and lit it. Her eyes were so black that the small flame danced in her pupils when she leaned toward me. After what he'd said about her, maybe she would kill me herself now.

Her throat worked and she spoke awkwardly in French, not English. “No one is free,” she said. We stood near pools of black water and huge cypress stumps, some so old their centers had collapsed into hollows like washpots. No one had been back here for a long time—the brush caught at my skirts, and she slashed at vines with her rifle.

“Jamais,” she said. Never. “They are never free.” She pointed to the ground, and then held up eight fingers.

In the trembling circle of candlelight, the earth was rucked up
in places. Footsteps of a giant who'd traveled in the woods. A water god.

I bent closer and saw an edge of cloth.

Graves.

The Irishman pretended to take the men to New Orleans when they'd worked long enough, but he killed them here. She saw my face and nodded. Her voice was flat and harsh. “Two years of work. Then he cuts with the knife.” She ran her fingernail across my throat. “No shot. The other men can't hear. My brother hunts for new ones.”

The Indian man stepped out of the trees, and I screamed. She moved forward so quickly that the candle caught the edges of my hair, and she clapped her hand over my mouth.

The smell of burned hair made me choke and pull against her. Now they would kill me and burn my muscles for meat.

“No, no sounds,” she whispered. “No screams.” Her brother came closer to me, his mouth held tight as a sickle blade.

She took her hand away. “You can't stay here. No other women. I know how to work him.” She put her finger on her own chest.

I spat the burned-hair taste from my mouth. “Why do you stay?”

She leaned close to me, breath of clear water, somehow sweet. “He is my husband. He has papers. Wife. My uncle sold my brother for a slave, but he sold me for a wife. We cannot go. Our names, the papers—we were in jail.”

She said something in her language to her brother, and he came forward, holding a piece of cloth and a rope.

To me, she said, “He takes you back for gold. And I say to my husband that you ran.” She pulled my wrist up. “I want money. Gold money. For me. For New Orleans.”

He was tying my hands again, and I turned to her, the rope burning my skin. “I can—”

“No,” she said again, and sliced the cloth into my open mouth, tying it tight behind my head, my hair wound into the knot until tears stung my eyes. “Don't run again. Money is you.”

Her brother tied another piece of cloth around my eyes. The
current of the bayou pushed gently under the boat. He took me back the way I had come. The water gods far underneath me were silent, curled at the bottom, only watching the wood slip past above them.

The drivers, Mirande and Baillo, left both pieces of cloth tied. It was just daylight, because the sun was barely warm on my head and my shoulders where my dress was down.

I couldn't see the doorways but heard people gathering. No one was cooking yet. The single fire I smelled was the one the drivers had built for me, behind us in the street.

“The old man says she's valuable because of the looks, but what of her brain? He said she's been slow in the head since the day he bought her,” Baillo said behind me. I heard the ringing ache of iron in the coals. I made myself see Mamère's fireplace.

“They do the face elsewhere. Like the old man. Look at his face.”

“That's foolish, for financial reasons, and inhumane, for religious reasons,” Mirande said. “The old man said lightly. Don't hold it hard as for the African. Didn't teach him anything.”

I heard it only as a falling away of ash. A sparkle.

Then I tasted black, saw black, felt the sear on my shoulder. Blacksmith. Molten. Red in my throat.

I lay in the dirt. A tiny sharp stone was embedded in my cheek. My dress was put up over my shoulders. I heard breathing in all the doorways. My blood was moving to my shoulder, to the burn, the blood surging forward and then pulled away, gathered again there, beating hard. Pulse. Pulse. Trying to find the problem.

The blood tries to clean the wound, Doctor Tom said.

Sophia's sharp fingers took my wrist.

“If she runs again, you are responsible,” Baillo said, and she pulled me inside.

“You run again, I find you and kill you, me,” she hissed, pouring cold water on the burn, then tying a piece of salt pork there with
the cloth from my mouth. She studied the material for a moment. Red trade cloth. “Where this from?”

My whole body felt hot now. How did the burn travel through my blood? Is that what blood did, take heat everywhere to disperse it?

“Where?” she spat, wrapping the cloth under my arm, over my shoulder, around the meat.

“The Indian found me. Same one found Athénaïse. Hunter.”

“That was my meat,” she whispered in my ear. “On your shoulder now. Time to work. You run, I kill you.”

In the field, my hoe took the small grass. Unwanted grass. No money grass. The hoe moved the earth in rows around the other grass. The India grass. The sugar grass. The money grass.

The sweat dripped in my eyes. Salt. Seawater. My tears. My blood. Salt inside. Salt meat melting on my skin. Meat tied to meat.

Flesh. Sophia wants flesh. The Indian didn't want my flesh. Wanted money. Gold flesh. Doctor Tom said the wound from a duel rotted in a man's leg once, and he cut it off. What did you do with the leg? Céphaline asked. They were in the parlor. She was supposed to play the piano. But she asked him about legs, skulls, eyes.

His family took it, Doctor Tom said. I don't know what they did with it. Strange to bury somebody piece by piece, eh? His leg could hold the spot until the rest of him was ready.

My shoulder cooked. The passages. We eat the meat, sugar juice, dried corn. We move the earth around the good grass. We cut down the tree. We catch the chicken and burn the flesh.

Someone had cut off the heads of the men I'd seen along the river when the boat took me from Azure. What did they do after they mounted the heads on poles? Why waste the body? The body was gold. Why not dry strips of leg and arm in the sun, with salt? Hardtack. Humantack.

Pickle.

The sun beat down on the rows. Salt. Water. Falling on the grass that waved chest-high, would grow over our heads until we cut it down, burned the leaves, and rolled the bones in the grinders.

Fantine walked home beside me. She led me to the tub, untied the salt pork from my back, and threw it into the fire, where it hissed.

She helped me step into the washtub. The water felt as if it etched ice on my burn. A flower. A flower of—of what?

Fantine poured water onto my head and rubbed soap, then a few drops of sweet oil into my hair. She began to untangle the snarls with her fingers and a wooden comb.

“Only way is get somebody love you,” she said softly.

Outside, Sophia said loudly, “He give me a chain to lock up at night. So she don't run. She like a wild animal and who knew?”

Fantine said, “The men look. But you won't look back.” She stretched a section of hair into a black web on my arm.

“Get them love you, you get things. A place. Some oil for your hair. A dress.”

I looked up at her. “I don't want love.”

“Sophia don't want love. But she get what she want.”

The little bones lay on the table. “I want to go home. If you love, you get a baby. I don't want a baby.”

“She stand up when he love her,” Fantine whispered. “I stand up.”