Please Remember This (17 page)

“That’s nice. Are you going to be interested in buying some used water pumps this time next year?”

“No. Apparently Nina Lane used a fountain pen and she liked to use lots of different-colored ink. Look here.” She pulled out a sheet from the manuscript. “This is just a colored Xerox, not what they will be producing the facsimile from, but you can see all the colors. Obviously there was no system to it—”

“She has never sounded like a very systematic person.”

“That’s certainly true. When the ink in one cartridge ran out, she would grab another, screw it in, and keep going.”

“Okay.”

“The result of this is that they can tell in what order
she did her corrections. Because there’d be this phase when the old ink in the pen would blend with the new, so you can tell that when the peacock blue shades into the midnight violet, she did the peacock blue first. Apparently she skipped around in the manuscript. She would get an idea for one kind of change and make it throughout. Then she’d get another idea and follow it through. So they scanned the whole thing into a computer this summer, and thus were able to print up a list of her revisions in the order she made them.” Tess patted another stack of paper. “They send me every little thing, hoping to keep me happy.”

“And what is all this revealing?” Ned had a historian’s basic respect for evidence. But you needed someone to interpret it. Otherwise it was just pointless data.

“A lot of stuff that isn’t very interesting.” Tess found a page much earlier in the manuscript and looked at a passage in the editor’s introduction. “She was turning her dependent clauses into nominative absolutes. Do you know what a nominative absolute is?”

“Sort of. But only because I took Latin,” he apologized, “and know about ablative absolutes … or at least I used to. Is this what my wacky-meter is supposed to be operating on? Grammar?”

“No. The editor has this idea about the mother-and-daughter characters.” She handed Ned another piece of paper. It was a clean typescript, probably from the editor’s introduction.

On page 13, we see the violet ink shading into emerald green. This initiates a set of changes all
focusing on Bracine and Rentha, the mother and daughter among the riverboat people. Nina Lane is adding physical details and developing an edgy concern to Bracine’s dealings with her daughter. Rentha is not eating and is repeatedly noted as being weary.

Previous critics—all of them male—have suggested that the daughter is ill. I would argue instead that during these “green revisions” Nina Lane decided to make Rentha pregnant. All of the green revisions to the setting involve increasing the fertility of the landscape and tying Rentha to it.

This is, of course, highly speculative, but one thing that previous critics have ignored is that Nina Lane was herself pregnant while doing these revisions. She may have been recording her own symptoms.

“This is interesting,” Ned acknowledged. “But what does it have to do with me?”

“The editor wants definite confirmation that Eveline Lanier was indeed pregnant when the
Western Settler
sank.”

“Herbert was born six months afterwards. There’s no doubt about that. A priest came from Leavenworth to baptize him, and all the records about his birth are consistent. But Eveline was the mother, the Bracine figure,” Ned pointed out. “So I guess that’s what’s fun about writing fiction. You can do whatever you want.”

It was time for dinner. As always, the family sang the doxology, and then Carolyn directed them all
where to sit. Doug was next to Caitlin, of course, and Tess next to Phil. Ned was conscious of being sorry for a moment. He had enjoyed talking to her.

But what was he expecting? He had been too busy to be paying any attention to people’s social lives, but clearly Matt and Carolyn hadn’t invited Tess just because she was the new kid in town, needing a place to go for a holiday. She was Phil’s girlfriend.

To the extent that Ned had ever thought about it, he would have guessed that Phil would fall in love with someone who was the exact opposite of himself, someone who was flaky and spiritual, sort of a younger version of Sierra. She would fascinate him and frustrate him, and then he would make them both miserable by trying to change her.

But what had Phil ever done to make Ned think he would do something so stupid? He would choose a mate with the same good sense and caution that he applied to everything.

And it was hard to find fault with Tess although admittedly Ned sometimes found himself trying. She was organized, she was efficient, she was reliable. She was not going to drive Phil nuts. Moreover, she seemed to be self-reliant. Ned thought Phil was the greatest, he really did, but Phil was not a touchy-feely sort of guy. He was best at things that could be crossed off lists. A clingy woman, one who was emotionally dependent, would be forever unsatisfied by Phil, but Tess Lanier didn’t seem to be needy at all. She wouldn’t be forever whining at him to stay home and pay attention to her. She had her own business
and her own interests. She wouldn’t need something that Phil couldn’t provide.

It looked promising. Maybe another Ravenal man would marry well.

Chapter 10

 

R
emembering his promise to Dr. Matt, Ned set his alarm for seven on Friday morning. It made no difference. He woke up at five anyway and couldn’t go back to sleep. He had to return to the site. Who knew what he’d find in the next barrel?

More merchandise for the Ravenal brothers’ store; that was the answer to that question. A balance scale and a spring scale. Twelve crosscut saws and eighteen keyhole saws. One hundred and thirty-six drill bits. A couple thousand cigars. Two hundred and ninety-seven wooden spools that must have held thread. A little case of china doll heads. They were Friday’s strangest find.

Ned was at one of the rinsing tables outside the schoolhouse, repacking the doll heads to take them into town. They looked a little creepy, these rows of sweet-faced, pink-cheeked, disembodied heads smiling up at him from a black rubber mat. Maybe he could get someone to make one into a doll. Was that something Tess could do?

As he was labeling the dolls’ box, he heard the sound of a vehicle approaching from the excavation site. It was his own truck, heavily splattered with
mud. Phil was behind the wheel, obviously having driven over from the excavation site. He usually stopped by in the late afternoon to see what had been found that day.

“We’ve got some more passenger belongings.” Phil unrolled the window of the truck as he pulled up to the rinsing table. “A couple of really nice trunks.”

So far, everything had been packed in wooden barrels and boxes, but the three trunks Phil had in the back of the pickup were leather with brass fittings. Ned carried the largest over to the table and turned the hose on it. It was very well made. With brass strips covering all the seams in the leather, it might be the most watertight thing they had found. The water cleared the mud off the darkened leather. Rounded brass nailheads formed a monogram. LHL. Louis Henry Lanier.

This was unbelievable. Ned had never expected that they would know who had owned any of the artifacts. But this was clearly Louis Lanier’s.

“Call Tess,” he shouted to Phil. “This is her family’s stuff.”

“It is?” Phil was unloading the last trunk from the truck. “How do you know?”

“A monogram. Call her. Use the phone in the truck. She’ll want to be here.”

“She won’t have her car downtown. It will be faster if I go get her. And today is the start of the Christmas shopping season. She’ll probably think she shouldn’t leave.”

“Make her come.” Tess always had plenty of counter help. “She shouldn’t miss this.” Ned picked
up the hose again. He would have time to get the worst of the muck off before Tess arrived.

The trunks were locked. But the Canadians who had taught him about freshwater preservation had advised him to learn the basics of lock picking. He went back into the schoolhouse to get his set of lockpicks.

He had the first two trunks unlocked when Phil drove into the school yard.

Tess was flushed, pushing her hair back off her face. “I thought you said that all their belongings were in the cabins.”

“I was wrong.” Ned handed her a pair of rubber gloves and a jacket that was warmer and more waterproof than what she was wearing. As she put them on, he raised the lid on Louis’s trunk. “These must have been things they didn’t need on the journey.”

There was less mud inside than they had seen before. The superb construction of the trunk had kept it out. The pieces of the first garment lifted out easily, a black wool topcoat with silk facings. It was the first time they had found any silk. None of the other passengers had packed silk. Only the Laniers had been able to afford it.

There were pants to go with the coat, and beneath them was a layer of small white buttons, suggesting that Louis—or Rex, on his behalf—had packed several cotton or linen shirts. Louis had also been traveling with a sterling-silver shaving set complete with a toothbrush holder, a little covered soap dish with a removable drainer, and a pair of small candlesticks. Across the bottom of his trunk was a layer of books. The pages were muddy pulp, but the gilt writing on the leather covers could still be read. There was a
Bible, and a novel titled
Redburn.
Ned had never heard of it, and neither had Phil or Tess, but it was by Herman Melville, the author of
Moby Dick.
There was also a collection of Longfellow’s poems and two Victor Hugo novels, apparently in the original French.

“He must have left his copy of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
at home,” Phil said dryly. Tess made a face at him.

The three of them worked together to rinse Louis Lanier’s belongings. The pieces of each garment were folded flat, stacked on large, gridded plastic trays used to deliver bread, and loaded back into the truck to be taken to The Cypress Princess freezer. The leather book covers received the same treatment. Phil usually couldn’t endure the tedium of such work, but he was, Ned noticed, doing fine now. It probably had something to do with Tess being here.

Daughter Marie’s trunk was next. She had been seventeen when the boat had sunk in May of 1857. Ironically, she had died the following January, drowning in the river.

The first thing in her trunk was a length of textile, edged by a fringe. Ned lifted it out and laid it on the rinsing table’s screen inset. Phil turned a gentle stream of water on it, and a pale circle the size of a dime appeared. The circle gradually widened, revealing an ivory fabric with a paisley design in shades of coral and blue-green. It was a wool shawl, large enough to be swirled over a woman wearing a hoop skirt. Beneath the shawl, a layer of white buttons and some pieces of white silk ribbon might have come from cotton undergarments or nightwear. Beneath
that were three silk dresses, two pair of shoes, and several lengths of uncut silk. Unlike every other garment they had uncovered, Marie’s dresses had been sewn with silk thread. They were intact.

“Look at these colors,” Tess said. “This is so strange. These are the colors I wear. Look at this.” Rather than lift the heavy, sodden fabric, she knelt down and craned her head so that her face was next to a corner of a pale green gown. Ned had always thought her eyes were blue, but the fabric made them shimmer with a green light that he hadn’t noticed. She stood up and started pointing to the fabrics. “There’s no pure white, just ivory. There’s no brown, just this apricot. Everything is light but clear. This could be my closet.”

“She wasn’t married,” Ned pointed out, “and she moved in fancy society. She wouldn’t have worn dark colors.”

“It’s more than light and dark. There is not a hint of gray in any of these colors. She had the same coloring as I do.”

“She was your something-something great-aunt. It’s not a big coincidence.”

“You don’t have a picture of her, do you?”

“No. The Yankee occupation of New Orleans wiped out those Laniers socially, economically, everything. The only family records left down there are the ones in the churches. And Marie died long before Fleur-de-lis got a photographer.”

At the bottom of Marie’s trunk were again some books—this was obviously an educated family—mostly in French, but there was one collection of the English Romantic poets. In the corner of the trunk,
as if they had been wedged in as an afterthought, were a few baby things: a little silver mug and an ivory teething ring. Neither was monogrammed or appeared to have been used. They must have been for the baby whom Eveline was carrying.

“Why are they in Marie’s trunk?” Phil asked and then answered himself. “Because they packed like every other family in the world. At the last minute you start sticking in stuff wherever it fits.”

“That’s for sure,” Ned agreed. “I was always finding the girls’ swimming suits in my suitcase.”

Tess was still looking at the silks. “It does make them seem real,” she reflected. “Rushing around at the last minute, cramming more things into their trunks. That’s what anyone would do.”

“They were real,” Ned answered. “They were real people.”

It took some time before Marie’s possessions were rinsed and stored on the bread trays. Tess pushed back the cuff of her rubber glove to check her watch. “Can I use a phone? I should be sure everything is okay in town.”

“Use the one in Ned’s truck,” Phil said.

Tess opened the driver’s door and took out the phone. As careful as she had been, the front of her jacket had gotten wet, and its thin insulation clung to her. She was narrow through her torso and hips, but her breasts were surprisingly full. Of course, Nina Lane had had a bust line that was out of proportion to the rest of her frame. That was why, Ned had learned from one of his sisters, she had worn all those crocheted vests.

Eveline Lanier had packed fewer clothes than her
daughter, and they were in richer colors, a brown-orange that Tess called russet, a bottle green, a deep red.

“Are these your colors?” Ned asked her.

“Hardly.” Apparently he should have known that.

At the bottom of Eveline’s trunk was a wooden box and a tin one. Ned eased open the hinged lid of the wooden one. It was filled with small glass bottles with wax-sealed stoppers. Several had broken—they must have been packed in paper—but there were at least a dozen intact. Ned took one out and held it up to the light. Any label had long since dissolved.

“We’ll need to get it analyzed, but I’m guessing that this is laudanum.”

Tess looked at him inquiringly.

“It’s an opium derivative, used as a sedative.”

“Opium?” Phil asked. “That must have been addictive. Do you think Granny Lanier was a doper?”

“She owned slaves and she was chemically dependent?” Tess said. “What an admirable individual.”

Ned shook his head. He didn’t believe that Eveline Lanier had been addicted to anything. “She certainly recovered well enough,” he pointed out. “She lived to be eighty-one. And she was the one who really turned the town into a place where you would want to live.” Eveline had organized the first school and had started the public library with books she had persuaded people in New Orleans to donate. “We also don’t know that the stuff was hers. You remember, Phil, when we would go on vacation, Mom would always take charge of all the medication—Emma’s inhaler and everyone’s acne pills. This could have been Eveline’s husband’s,
her daughter’s, or for a friend. We aren’t going to know.”

He labeled the box and put it in one of the buckets for underwater storage. The bottles he wiped, labeled, and wrapped carefully in newspaper. Phil was still rinsing the remainder of Eveline’s dresses.

“You can go ahead and open that last box,” Ned told Tess.

It too had been inside Eveline’s trunk. It was tin, and the lid fit tightly. Tess had to take off her rubber gloves.

Ned heard her gasp.

“What is it?” He and Phil bumped into each other as they crowded close.

It was Eveline’s work basket, her sewing things. Protected first by the well-made trunk and then by the tightly fitting metal box, the contents were far cleaner than anything they had yet seen. Everything was damp, of course, but the contents were merely grayish.

Ned motioned for Phil to get their most finely meshed tray, and he handed Tess a plastic watering can with a thin, arching spout, the kind used to water houseplants. Tess started to pour a gentle stream into the box. Bits of white thread rose and drifted in the water.

Tess stopped pouring. “Those are French knots, and this looks like a line of satin stitching. Eveline was working on something that was in this embroidery hoop.”

The base fabric must have been linen or cotton, and it had disintegrated. All that remained were the silk threads and the metal hoop.

“There are hundreds of these knots.” Tess looked up at Ned. “What do we do?”

There was no way of reconstructing the stitchery design. Ned handed Tess a pair of tweezers and had her collect a sample of the knotted and cut threads. The rest they let wash away.

Tess was still working bare-handed. “Look at these scissors. They are exquisite.”

In her palm lay a small pair of gold-plated scissors. A scrolling design was etched along the blade and down around the handles. “I would miss these if they had been mine.”

Ned took them from her. There were faint scratches in the gold plate. These scissors had been used.

“Pins …” Tess was still taking things out of the box. “Needles. She certainly did bring a lot of needles. But there’s nothing worse than running out of needles.”

The pins were loose. They must have been folded in paper or cotton. But the needles had been pierced through a small square of dark wool.

Ned started picking up the pins.

“Knitting needles … this must be silk embroidery thread.” Tess lifted the watering can and began to pour water until the threads straightened into neat skeins. “Look at these colors … aren’t they beautiful?”

Ned used another tray to line up the skeins as Tess passed them to him.

“Look. These needles are still threaded.”

Tess was holding another piece of the dark wool. Six needles had been laced into the fabric with a single
stitch, and looping around each needle in a figure eight was grayish thread. A moment later the water turned it white.

“It’s the same thread as before. These were the needles she had already threaded to finish that project. You do that. You thread a lot of needles at once, and then you don’t have to—”

Tess broke off. She was suddenly pale, looking as if she might faint. Ned was across the table from her. He dropped his hose and leaned forward, grabbing her shoulders in case she fell. The water from the hose splashed across his legs.

Phil had been loading bread trays into the truck. He hadn’t noticed. “Are you all right?” Ned asked softly.

“It’s so real … she threaded those needles. She was going to use them.”

“I know,” he murmured, his head close to hers. This had not been a utility sewing box. There had been no extra buttons, no darning egg. This was needlework done for the love of needlework.

Tess loved needlework.

“What’s going on?” Phil’s voice seemed to boom. “Is something the matter?”

Tess straightened and stepped back from Ned’s grasp. His gloves had left two damp spots on the sleeves of her upper arms. “I was just thinking about how much everyone on the boat had lost, and I know these are just needles, but sometimes it’s the little things that you miss the most.”