A Million Nightingales (19 page)

He held a cane knife in the fire. It shimmered red and softened, and he pounded it with the iron mallet. He shouted, “Bring men here all that way and they die. Bury tout seul because nobody put water on the head. Nobody need water from les blancs. Water inside them.”

“Gervaise,” Sophia said.

“Alcindor.”

“No. You leave that name. Not your name now.”

“Hashim. Azor. Accara. Aguedo. They say names to me. Nothing else. They Mina and no comprend. Not the names on the paper.” He hammered the knife until it broke, sharp as a bird scream in the night.

In Pélagie's room, clothes had arrived in a trunk. She would meet a husband, go to Paris to choose clothes and furniture for her new house. I would make my way off that boat, floating like a corn kernel atop the water. I took off my tignon. Did Gervaise believe what my mother did—that in my hot, damp hair were spirits named
ni
, traces of my other life? Our other lives?

“Some women will look up, at the paintings and mirrors,” Péla-gie said. “Those must be dusted every day. And women will look down, at the floor and table legs. Those must be swept and oiled every day.”

“You cannot have another woman for the house,” Msieu said impatiently. “We are planting cane. We cannot buy new furniture and clothes without sugar.”

“I know women. If you want to marry your son next year to someone from Opelousas or New Iberia, you will let me begin work on the house now. The mothers of the girls will have eyes. And despite what you think, women have some power in the family. For marriage.”

Amanthe and I worked into the night, and when once our palms slid cloth in the same circles over a table, I remembered Félonise's hand sealed to mine with the sheen of our work. Amanthe's hand was broad and dark, her arm quivering with extra fat above the elbow, but she fit her shoulder companion-ably to mine when we left a room. “I am glad you came,” she whispered once.

I nodded. “I am glad you gave me your dress.”

We worked dust and grit from the floorboards with small brushes.

The women began to come, when Pélagie saw them at Mass in Opelousas and invited them for dinner. They looked at Madame—her hair in a chignon but with a golden fillet wrapped around the forehead—and Pélagie with a rosy satin ribbon worked around her forehead, anchoring the curls at her ears.

“Your hair!” they said, and Pélagie slanted her head proudly. “My girl was trained in New Orleans.”

I made them believe that. She would take me to New Orleans someday. The carpenter, Hervé Richard, had mentioned free women of color who lived there. They had somehow bought themselves. They could sign their own names. They could dress hair for money.

The women studied the garden, where Pélagie had Manuel the groom planting white-flowered crepe myrtle trees in an allée from the road to the house, and five orange trees in a circle, not for their fruit but for the white blossoms, and in the pathways white roses.

“When my sister-in-law returns from Paris next spring, her eyes will be clear, and she will see an angel garden. All white, in the moonlight.”

———

Madame said she could see only what was inside a small circle directly in front of her. When she spoke to us, she turned her head and brought it forward toward our faces, like a turtle coming out of a shell, and powder fell from her cheeks.

“Moinette. Bring us coffee. Léonide has made a fresh pot.”

Msieu Antoine was writing a long document, and Pélagie was poised over the paper. “Why does Laurent want this notarized?”

“Because we are leaving for Paris soon, and Laurent is worried about supervision and succession,” Madame said.

“Etienne is the successor,” Pélagie said. “I have my own little money.”

“Yes, sweet, but explain it to me now. Laurent won't ask you.”

Pélagie pleated the muslin of her dressing gown over and over on her thigh, her fingers moving as if she played an instrument. “I was married at sixteen to Micael Vincent, as you know, and went to Bordeaux with my husband, but he died three years later. I remained with his family until last year, when I decided to go to Paris.”

“And he left you community property?”

Pélagie looked out the window, a tiny pulse moving in her cheek. “The Bordeaux property is owned by his father and brother. I signed it over to them after he died. I didn't want to stay in Bordeaux. I took some settlement money and went to Paris.”

Madame de la Rosière nodded. She said softly, “Pélagie, I cannot see your clothes or jewels. Laurent said your mother gave you jewels and some cash for your dowry, when you married, and that your husband's family thought there would be more.”

“They did.” Her cheek pulsed again.

“You are happier here, no?”

“Yes.”

“Laurent wants to name you owner of a large portion of the new land along the bayou, the parcel he bought last year. Monsieur Antoine will make certain the transaction is legal, and then you will be able to bring something to your new arrangement, whomever you meet here.” Pélagie began to speak, but Madame said, “We have a long voyage to Paris, and crossings are always
dangerous. You and Etienne are to take care, if something happens to us. My uncle Phanor will come from New Orleans to supervise this season. And Laurent says you are not to overspend while we are gone.”

Pélagie was silent; how did Madame de la Rosière know she had agreed? I poured the coffee. Pélagie's fingers were pressed so hard on the small table that her nails were white.

“Pélagie. What is your middle name?”

“I won't say it.”

“What! Won't say it? I'm sorry I never knew. After Laurent's mother died, when your father married again, Laurent was fifteen. He was sent to school and never saw you until you were already five.”

“It means death. Three times.”

“I don't understand.”

“You don't have to.

“Pélagie Ernestine. Three times my mother was pregnant, and three times my father hoped for a son, and three times she had a girl she named for him. Ernestine. And three times they died. Then when she had me, she died. In childbed. So he named me Pélagie, after her. Ernestine for the son he didn't have. And sent me to my aunt in Lyon.”

There was a long silence, and then Pélagie raised her voice. “Moinette! Will you hurry? I have ink on my sleeve now.”

Everything Pélagie said was prepared. She felt nothing. She had calculated ahead of time answers for any questions, responses for any admiration—and if someone said something unexpected, a quickness in her face let her reply.

I watched her closely, to learn. Ever since the boat had left Azure, I had only listened. Slow in my mouth and quick in my brain. I needed to plan the right sentences, to say not what I really thought or felt—as Céphaline always had—but what people wanted me to say.

Mamère—she said so little because she couldn't keep her true thoughts from her sentences. When she spoke, she meant every word.

When I returned to Azure, I would tell her about everything—
the bags of coffee on the wharf in New Orleans, the African women with wreaths of scarring, the blackened marbles of bird meat on my tongue. The way the water had felt when the gods rose in the silt under my feet and floated away down the bayou toward her.

For now, I listened to Pélagie, fastening her into a new dress just as a carriage arrived.

She said, “Oh, Monsieur Prudhomme, look at your sideburns. Dark hair looks so much more attractive on a man than on a woman. Your coat? Moinette—” She handed me the man's coat and said, “My brother tells me you know everything about horses, and I am ashamed that I never learned to ride. But in Paris—”

One night, she spoke to herself, voice fierce and low as Cépha-line's reading from her own pages. Pélagie murmured, “A window. Only a window. I can do the rest.”

Did she mean a mirror?

“He will not come. He will not know.”

Did she mean Etienne? Was she planning to take Msieu's money, somehow?

Pélagie wrote a letter.

Dearest, Can you not find your way here, to the wilderness of Louisiana? for my heart is sore with the loss of your company. Can Paris not afford to lend you to me for a time?

The wilderness of ciprière swamp and canefields, of this house miles from a small town.

But if a lover came from Paris, who would she love here? Her plans were to find a husband. My plans depended upon that, as well.

They rode in the carriage, Msieu and Madame, Pélagie, and Msieu Antoine, who would escort Pélagie to the dances. We
rode atop, with trunks full of clothes and gifts. To my surprise, Amanthe whispered to me that she would see the third man she had loved.

“I can only love him a few times a year. He cannot leave his place, and I cannot leave Rosière.” She turned her head to the trees, and cords of muscle stood high in her throat.

I wondered if Hervé Richard, the carpenter, ever came to a dance. But his owner was a free man of color. The French Creoles wouldn't have him in their houses. And there wouldn't be any use to love someone for only a few nights. It would be dangerous to love at all.

Grand Piniére was the name of the first place. The pines made a carpet of needles to quiet our wheels. The house was yellow, with green and red trim. The wind chattered in the pine trees, and women's voices like breaking glass all around us. Pélagie is your sister? But she is lovely! Ah, oui!

I heated the curling tongs in the guest bedroom. Pélagie's marks, my marks, Mamère's marks. I slid the tongs down each section and rolled them up steadily, just tight enough, and counted to eight. Ten curls on each side. She stared in the mirror, not at the other women moving around us. Eight. Move to the next section. Eight. Then five fingers of each glove. I counted the same way as in the field, hoeing weeds from the cane. Move the hoe once, twice, thrice, and then take three steps. Three, three, three, three.

Even a fly breeds before it lays eggs, Céphaline whispered once in front of the mirror, where I dressed her hair for dinner with the Auzennes’ cousin. But it doesn't have to look at the other fly.

The last curl dropped onto Pélagie's shoulder. It was so hot that she flinched and let it hang for a moment in the air before her.

While they danced, we stayed outside the kitchen. The sounds from the violin were shards inside my ears. Amanthe waited for the man she would love tonight, but he hadn't arrived.

By the time we slept, in the horse barn, in the long central hallway between the stables, she had heard. She shivered with tears beside me. Manuel, the groom, had just told her the third man
she had loved, the valet named Autin, had died of a fever weeks before. She said Autin's lips tasted of mint, because he chewed the leaves before he saw her, and his mouth was soft as baby's cheeks, the only other time she had ever kissed someone.

She put her shawl around her face and lay shaking, while around us voices rose and fell in the straw.

A week later, we rode a long way to a ball outside Perreauville. The house, Cécile, was very large, and when the dancing and dinner were finished, people who lived in town left in their carriages, and the ones staying settled into the garçonnières and guest rooms. The slaves had pallets all along the railings of the gallery, wrapped around the entire house. I lay on my side, my cheek to the cool green-painted boards. The water of this bayou broken up by islands of sleeping people, their shoe-soles brown or foot-soles pink, or their feet tucked into blankets like puckered cocoons. How did some people stay warm, with no coverings, and others shivered each night?

I was awakened by a hand on my shoulder, on the cloth over my scar. Fingers hot. Branding iron again. I twisted away, but a man whispered, “Non, non, mademoiselle. Your madame. She call.”

A groom? He smelled of horses—his coat black, his trousers lighter. He walked ahead of me, his head uncovered, a few strands of silver hair twined like wire at his temple when he turned his head.

He pushed me into a storeroom and closed the door. Then his hand clamped over my mouth. Calluses hard as dry beans on my lips when he rubbed his palm over my face. No windows. Coffee beans. My skull's empty spaces filled with tears. I couldn't breathe.

“I know why she call for you. He saw you. I know what you work. And me—I see you, too.”

He tore off my tignon and crossed my two braids over my mouth, held them tight with one hand like reins and worked at my dress with the other hand. He knew how to unfasten women's buttons. When I bucked away, he pulled my head back hard.

“I first this time. You scream, no one hear.”

He said, “Stand still. You move, I hurt you where he can't see.”

He held my braids tight. Strangle. That was what my hair was for. He worked open his trousers and rubbed himself against my thighs. Blind. Rooting. No pain, just wetness as before, with the boat's mate on our passage north. They spent themselves on their idea of me. Not me. Not me.

When he hit my head against the wall, my brain shivered. My skull. Céphaline said it was such thin bone. My thighs are muscles. We eat the muscles of the cow and pig. His saliva dripped onto my shoulder.

His elbow hit me in the side when he used his handkerchief on himself. But wetness remained on my thighs. “Now mine mix with his,” he said, low. “I first.”

Then he said, “Scream I say I catch you in here thief.” He took the braids from my mouth and pulled. My neck bent. Leash. Reins.

“Scream I say you thief this money from Msieu Ebrard.” He held a gold coin. His teeth were white.

Slapping games with Fronie—my hand shot out, and I raked the coin with my fingers.

He couldn't hit me. He couldn't leave a mark.

He turned me with my braid, and the hairs at my temple pulled my skin away from the bone.

Madame Pélagie sat at her dressing table, in the guest room. I had thought the groom was lying, but she nodded for him to leave.

I tasted leather from his palm. He was gone.

Pélagie tightened her wrapper. “I know you were sleeping already. There is another task.”

She led me down the hallway, much longer than Rosière's, and at the back door, she paused. “Do you want to work in the window?”