Property (Vintage Contemporaries) (12 page)

We had just finished dinner when a second letter arrived from my husband. It was in his formal style, as if he’d recently made my acquaintance, and referred to my mother as Mrs. Gray. I read, with relief, that he was unable to attend the funeral because of his recent injury and the pressing necessity of the repairs to the mill. How far away, how long ago, my life with him seemed as I read aloud his expressions of regret and sympathy to my aunt.

“It’s just as well,” she observed. “We don’t need anyone else being carried off by this pestilence. As soon as my poor sister is buried, we should all leave town until the weather turns.”

But I had no wish to leave.

Toward dusk my aunt and I went into Mother’s room to place her body in the shroud. My aunt pressed my arm and said solemnly, “Manon, I have seen how this disease disfigures its victims. I pray you will understand when I say I would rather not see my sister’s face.”

“I can’t wish anyone who cared for her to share the memory I have,” I said truthfully, and she touched my cheek in sympathy. We left the pillowcase covering Mother’s face, slipped the shroud over her body, and stitched it closed at her feet.

We sat in the parlor sewing until it was dark. I was so exhausted I continually spoiled my work, ripping out as many stitches as I put in. My aunt, observing my frustration, urged me to bed. As I passed through the dining room I heard Peek and Sarah talking softly in the court. Peek was still weeping; there was a tearful catch in her voice. Unless Mother made some other plan for her, I thought, she is mine now. Sarah was doubtless telling her how hard her life will be when she comes to the country. In truth I hate to bring her there because she won’t get on with Delphine, though they are much alike. We have no need for a contrary cook. “Another mouth to feed,” I said as I collapsed across the bed, straight into a dreamless sleep.

THE FOUL VAPORS of the sickroom were inadequate preparation for the pestilential stench of the cemetery, yet at the gates we were accosted by free negroes who had set up as purveyors of meat pies and orgeat water. My aunt and I exchanged incredulous looks, pressing our handkerchiefs to our noses beneath our veils, as our carriage followed the hearse into what seemed to me the very vestibule of hell. Everywhere we looked, rough pine coffins were scattered in groups, awaiting gravediggers. Some had broken open in the drop from the cart, exposing their contents to great swarms of flies. I saw one box, tipped on its side, from which a shock of long black hair poured out into the mud. At every crossing there were pyramids of bones, dug out and stacked to make room for the new arrivals. The gravediggers, crude Irishmen cursing the dead, plied their shovels in knee-deep water. With a gasp my aunt pointed to a mourning couple, the woman hiding her face in the man’s arms, while he looked on tearfully at two negroes who stood on either end of a floating coffin endeavoring to seesaw it into the watery grave. How grateful I was that Mother’s family owned a crypt. My grandfather had purchased it after a spring flood sent coffins floating down the streets of the Carré. In our city, as my uncle says, underground means underwater.

The scene at this edifice was hardly less grisly. There had been a general winnowing of the dead in the crypts and the bones had simply been tossed onto the path, so we were forced to alight from the carriage with care that our skirts not sweep some finger or thighbone along with us. To our relief, Père François had arrived, the crypt was open, and three negroes stood ready to move Mother’s coffin into place. My aunt, weakened by the sun and sickened by the atmosphere, clung to my arm as we approached. The priest came quickly to her aid, murmuring his condolences to me even as he signaled the men to unload the hearse. I could not speak. I thought of how little Mother had liked Père François, of Father’s skepticism about what he called “your mother’s superstition.” The negroes labored past us, shouldering the coffin, shoved it into the space with much groaning and sweating, and backed away, their foreman being careful to pass close enough to my aunt to receive the carefully folded bill she extracted from her sleeve. The priest droned some prayers in Latin, made the sign of the cross, which my aunt and I copied like monkeys, and we were done, all of us eager to get far away from the place as fast as we could, lest we inhale that which might keep us there forever. Once we were seated in the carriage, I closed my eyes and kept them closed until I felt the horses pick up their step at the gate.

Great billows of dark clouds were rolling in from the north, and there were flashes of lightning followed by low and distant thunder. In the short time it took to get back to the town, the sun was obscured, the temperature dropped notably, and a few drops spattered against the sill. My aunt lifted her veil and looked out hopefully. “Perhaps our prayers will be answered,” she said, which amused me. People are always praying for the weather to change and, as it eventually must, they conclude they have been instrumental in effecting what was actually inevitable. My husband continually urges me to pray for rain or, after it comes, to pray for it to stop.

More and more drops fell. By the time we turned onto Rue St. Ann it was a steady downpour. We pulled up to the curb, where I was annoyed to see the front door wide open and Sarah standing outside under the abat-vent, in casual conversation with a mulatto man I did not recognize. “Why, it is Mr. Roget,” my aunt observed. She drew her skirt around her in preparation for her descent.

“And who is Mr. Roget?” I asked, frowning at this person who had the impudence to tip his hat to me before he turned and walked away. Sarah slipped back into the shadows of the doorway.

“He is the fellow who wanted to buy Sarah from your uncle,” she replied. “He was quite a pest on the subject; still I hated losing him. He is an amiable person and an excellent builder. You should see his faux marble; it’s a wonder.” And leaving me with this information, which conveniently omitted my uncle’s response to Mr. Roget’s suit, she called out to the coachman to take her hand, and leaped nimbly across the mud to the banquette.

IT RAINED HARD all night, and in the morning the air was cool, the sky a pale blue, and the city in a celebratory mood. I looked out the front door to see my neighbors having coffee on their balcony while all around them their house shook with the clatter of shutters being thrown open. Indeed, all up and down the street there was an echoing creak of hinges, the slap of wood against wood, and the occasional call of greeting as neighbors saw one another for the first time in weeks. My aunt came in dressed for church, pulling on her gloves. “I’m off to mass to give thanks,” she announced cheerfully. “Won’t you join me? Everyone will be there.”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“I don’t know how you manage without the consolation of religion.”

“Yet I do,” I said, smiling, having no wish to offend her. Father thought highly of Aunt Lelia and said she could even make a virtue of religion, which was high praise from him.

“Very well, I will pray for you, darling,” she said, coming to kiss my cheek. “And for your poor mother’s soul, which is in heaven.” Sarah came in carrying the breakfast tray. “In the dining room,” I said, waving her back. I followed my aunt to the door and watched her join a stream of pedestrians at the corner, all elegantly dressed, greeting one another lightheartedly. None, I thought, would name the true cause for his high spirits and say what each one felt: “Others have died, but I am alive.” I went back into the dining room and took a piece of bread from the plate. I called for Sarah, who appeared in the doorway, her eyes cast down.

She had kept out of my way since the night Mother died, hiding in the kitchen or staying in her hot room with the baby, appearing only when called for. I swallowed the bread, watching her. She seemed to stiffen before my eyes, to become stone, even her eyes didn’t blink; it is a trick she has. “You must know,” I said, “that servants are not allowed to receive visitors at the front door.”

“Yes, missus,” she said, moving only her lips.

I sat down at the table and tore off another bit of bread. “Pour me some coffee,” I said. She picked up the pot and leaned over me, directing the hot black stream into my cup. I was certain she knew I knew all about Mr. Roget. “Who was the man you were speaking to yesterday?” I asked.

“His name Mr. Roget,” she said. She had a cowed look about her, expecting the worst.

“What was his object in coming here?”

She set the pot carefully on the trivet, then stepped back so that I couldn’t see her. “My brother sent him to tell me he got work on the docks.”

“Who has work? Mr. Roget?”

“No, missus. My brother. He hired out from his master to work on the docks.”

“And what is your brother’s name?”

“Clarence.”

I sipped my coffee. A brother, I thought. What a clever invention. I wondered if she’d made it up on the spot or if she and Mr. Roget had worked it out together. “It’s unusual, isn’t it,” I said, “for a free man to carry messages between two slaves?”

Of course she made no response. After a sufficient silence, I tired of having her standing behind me. “Leave me,” I said. “Go and tell Peek to help you open the shutters.”

MOTHER’S ESTATE IS left entirely to me and is greater than I thought. She had set aside a small inheritance I knew nothing about, and it has grown impressively. So I am to have the house, the furnishings, sufficient income to live comfortably, and two slaves, Peek and a boy named Isaiah whom Mother has hired out to a baker in town. All this is mine, and yet it is not mine, because my husband can, and doubtless will, dispose of it just as soon as I can get it. “Is there no way to preserve this to myself?” I pleaded with the lawyer.

“Not unless you were to divorce your husband,” he said. “And that could take years. In the meantime he would have control of the estate.”

My aunt sat beside me, her lips pressed tightly together, trying to block out the word “divorce” by batting her eyes.

“Of course, when your husband passes away, the property will all come to you,” the lawyer reassured me.

“If there’s anything left of it,” I said.

As we left the lawyer’s office I observed to my aunt, “The laws in this state are designed to provoke the citizens to murder.”

She gave me a disapproving look. “It’s the same everywhere,” she said. “A woman’s property is her husband’s.”

“My husband won’t want Peek. What am I going to do with her?”

“Peek is a problem,” she agreed. “Come and have coffee with me, and we will discuss it.”

Mother’s will requested that Peek should not be sold at market, or hired to any establishment, and that she not be required to leave the city, as, Mother had written, “she has a terror of country life.”