Property (Vintage Contemporaries) (17 page)

I would die where I stood. Then miraculously a solution occurred to me, one I’d seen the negroes use, to my disgust. I bent down and plunged my hands into the cool mud, then smeared it over my face, my arms, and into my hair. Put it on thick, I told myself, squatting to get another handful. The buzzing subsided. I went on, feeling my way. I was out of the mud on soft ground, then my feet found a patch of cool ferns that felt like a carpet laid beneath my feet. I stopped, listened, heard a variety of noises, but none of them voices. They wouldn’t waste what little time they had left in this world to search the swamp for a wounded woman, I thought. A powerful lethargy swept over me. My legs were leaden; I could not lift my head. A little farther, I told myself. I could make out the trunk of a big oak just ahead, as wide around as a cabin. I staggered to it, stumbling in the maze of its roots, which sprawled out in every direction, making various moss-covered nests. I sat down in one of these, close to the trunk. It seemed a perfect resting spot. When I moved my arm, the pain made me cry out. My dress was stuck to my back from my shoulder to my waist. How much blood have I lost? I wondered. I heard a rushing sound overhead, a crack of branches in the brush nearby. I could not remember why I was in the forest at night. My head ached. I opened and closed my mouth. It felt as if my jaw was broken. I could see Sarah’s face, her lips pulled back over her teeth like a snarling dog as she struggled with me. “They will kill me,” I said, but she wasn’t listening, or didn’t hear. No, I thought. She heard me well enough. It was her hope that they would kill me.

“But I’m still alive,” I said with satisfaction. Then it seemed the darkness around me was as much behind my eyes as in front of them, and I gave up trying to see through it.

WHEN I OPENED my eyes again, I was looking at a black hand. The light was soft, pinkish, and there was a wheezing sound coming from somewhere behind me; it sounded like a torn bellows. I moved my fingers and understood that the hand was my own. The mud on my palm cracked open, revealing the pale flesh beneath. My mouth was as dry as the mud, my head a circlet of pain that emanated down, then out to my shoulder, where it became a fire. When I tried to sit up, nothing happened. I blinked, gazing up into the maze of limbs and leaves over my face. It must be just dawn, I thought. I tried turning onto my side, away from the burning shoulder. This time I was successful. I pulled myself up onto my good arm. I knew where I was, I remembered how I had gotten there. But what was this whistling at my back? Carefully I turned my head. I was reminded that my cheek was torn, my jaw in some new configuration that made it throb like an outraged heart. I looked down at a bruised and naked body curled in a hollow between two roots, its arms and legs drawn in close, the side of its head swollen, bloody, and bruised, its mouth open, snoring as peacefully as if the moss was a feather bed. It was Walter.

A racket of blue jays in a bush nearby made me want to clutch my head, but my right arm was unresponsive to my command. I noticed a thin stream running nearby. The water sparkled as the sun flushed over the tops of the bushes and bright rays pierced the forest from every direction. I grasped a low branch passing near my nest, and pulled myself to my feet. I was unsteady, I was in the purest agony, but I was on my feet.

“Wake up, Walter,” I said in a voice to rival the jays. Then I recalled that my sleeping companion wouldn’t hear a gun fired next to his ear. How had he found me? Did he know his way in this place? I peeled a clump of mud from my hand and threw it at him, striking him on the leg. His eyes flew open, he coughed, then began to cry. I should have left well enough alone, I thought.

The stream probably ran toward the river. My way must be in the opposite direction. I took a step, then another; each one felt as if it might be the last. Walter sat up among the roots and babbled nonsense. “Quiet,” I said, straining to see through to some wider area of light. A chameleon rushed past my feet, another stopped on the root in front of me and eyed me, once from each side of its head. A world of idiots and monsters, I thought, and I left to tell the tale.

The air was damp, and the cold penetrated to my bones. It seemed to me there was a clearing beyond a bramble bush, but I couldn’t see how to get to it, as the bush was as long as a city block. Walter got to his feet and walked off in the other direction, toward what I took to be the river. Should I follow? He disappeared beyond the next tree, then I heard rapid footsteps. Slowly, painfully, I made my way in his tracks, skirting a tangle of broken branches and vines, then around the thick trunk of a bay tree. I was standing on the lawn looking up at the side of the house. Walter ran ahead of me across the grass, toward what looked like a pile of clothing. The sun broke over the roof of the house, bathing the scene with a freshness utterly inappropriate to what it exposed. The air was bright, chilly, and still. I saw the cloud of flies rising above the crumpled body of my husband. Walter had reached it. He bent over the body and began struggling to lift the head, shrieking all the while.

Don’t do that, I thought. Don’t touch him. The front doors of the house stood open, the dining room casements were all ajar, but there was no sign of living occupants. So the field hands had got up with the bell and gone out to their work, blissfully unaware that their master lay with his head nearly off on the lawn. Mr. Sutter had not come to join the fray; the vaunted patrol had skipped our house in its pursuit of the rebels. Was it possible?

I dragged myself toward the drive, pausing every few steps to get my breath. I thought I might die of thirst before I got to the door. If only Delphine is here, I thought. I went in through the hall, glancing in at the dining room just long enough to see that it was wrecked, chairs upended, broken glass everywhere, the remains of the ham mysteriously left on the carpet near the hall door. I went through the hall, out at the back, across the narrow yard to the kitchen door. It was closed. I tried the latch; it was locked. I leaned against it. “Delphine,” I said. “Are you there? Let me in.” The curtain at the narrow window moved, Rose peeked out, gave a shout, and dropped the curtain. “Let me in,” I said again. “I’m not a ghost. But I may be soon if you don’t open this door.” The curtain moved again. This time Delphine looked out. “Is that you, missus?” she said.

“I’m alive,” I said. “They didn’t kill me.” She pulled the bolt and the door swung out before me. “Lord, missus,” Delphine said, leading me inside. “What happen to you.”

“I got away,” I said. “I hid in the woods. But they shot me.” I gestured to my shoulder. In the process I saw my mud-daubed arm, my torn and bloody sleeve, and I remembered that I was covered in mud. “Get me some water,” I said, sinking into a chair at the table. “I’m dying of thirst.”

The fire was up, there were pots already boiling, good smells of bread and meat. Delphine put a glass of water in front of me and I drank it at one gulp. “More,” I said, holding out the glass. Rose brought the pitcher and filled it again. Delphine went to the kettle and poured hot water into a bowl, then brought it to the table and added some cool from the pitcher. She took a cloth, dropped it in the water, and wrung it out. “I hardly knows where to start,” she said. I took the cloth and wiped my face, wincing when I found the gash in my cheek. “Thas a bad cut,” Rose observed. Delphine was unfastening the back of my dress. “All these bits of cloth stuck in the wound,” she said. “It gonna hurt to clean this out.”

“I can’t lift my arm,” I said.

We heard a whining sound coming from the house, and in a moment Walter stumbled into the yard. He was holding his face in his hands, weeping. His hands and bare chest were stained with dark blood. He stopped, took us in, and held out his arms, tears mixed with blood streaming down his face. His forehead was so swollen his eye was closed up.

“Poor chile,” Rose said, going to him. “What they done to you?” She picked him up and he buried his face in her neck.

“He’s crying because his father is out there dead on the lawn,” I said.

There was a brief hush in which everyone noticed that I had spoken of my husband as Walter’s father. Delphine took the cloth from me and rinsed it in the basin. “Master killed,” she said softly.

“Rose,” I said. “Go down and find Mr. Sutter. Tell him to come to the house at once.” Rose put the child down, handed him a piece of bread, and went out, glancing about the yard nervously, starting at the chickens. Walter sat near my feet, chewing his bread from one hand and picking at the dried mud between my toes with the other. “Stop that,” I said, pulling my feet in under the chair.

MR. SUTTER WAS dead too. They had stopped at his house first, sneaked in a window, and cut his throat. When Rose got there she found the door wide open and Cato, the driver, standing on the porch. “Don’t go in,” he told her. “Just tell missus Mr. Sutter been murdered in his bed.”

“Send a boy for the doctor,” I told her on hearing this news, and she headed back to the quarter. Delphine was filling a tub with warm water. “Best I cut that dress off you with the scissors,” she said.

“Just get it off,” I said wearily. “I don’t care how you do it.” She had unknotted the skirt and was cutting it up the front when we heard heavy footsteps coming rapidly through the house. “Lock the door,” I said, but before Delphine could get off her knees, a deep male voice called out, “Hallo. Is anyone here?”

Blessed Providence, I thought. There are still white men alive. “In here,” I called out. “In the kitchen.”

One by one they filed into the yard. There were four of them, dressed in vaguely military coats, high boots, armed with swords and pistols. Where were they when I needed them? Their eyes grew wide as they discovered me, sitting in my kitchen, covered in mud, my face swollen and bleeding, my useless arm cradled in my lap. I recognized one, an acquaintance of my husband, a lawyer named O’Malley. “Mrs. Gaudet,” he said solemnly. “It is my unhappy duty to inform you that your husband has been murdered.”

I hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. It was as if I had been in a foreign country, a land where madness was the rule, and returned to find nothing changed but my own understanding. I glanced at Delphine. She looked dismayed, though her features were composed in an approximation of servility. She’s worried about what will happen to her now, I thought. We all are. Every minute of every hour. Mr. O’Malley stood waiting for my response. He was worried I might have gone mad and he would have to deal with it. “I know it,” I said calmly, to his obvious relief. “I was there.”

IT WAS HOURS before I spun together the threads of the various stories and produced a credible fabric. I hardly cared, but it was a kind of sewing, and I used it, as usual, to keep my mind off my own suffering, which was intense. First there was the pain occasioned by Delphine picking the bits of cloth from the wound in my shoulder and cleaning it with alcohol. When Dr. Landry finally arrived, he admired her nursing skills and my endurance, then set about determining the outermost limits of the latter. The shots of brandy I downed at the start had worn off by the time he’d dug out three lead balls and announced there were only two to go. “I can’t stand one more second,” I cried. “Don’t you have something stronger than brandy?” He poured another glass. “I’ve seen soldiers who could not hold up as well as you,” he said, a compliment for which I felt the greatest indifference. After what seemed an hour, he held up another ball in his tweezers and dropped it into the washbasin with a sigh. “I’m going to have to leave the last one in. I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s buried too deep in the muscle.” I raised my good hand to wipe the perspiration from my forehead. “That’s the best news I’ve had in days,” I said. Then he gave me the worst, which was that I would never recover the use of my arm. One of the balls had chipped a bone and severed a tendon at the top of my shoulder. “You’ll be able to use your hand all right,” he said. “Eventually you may be able to raise the arm a little.” While I reeled from this diagnosis, he took out his needle and thread and went to work on my face.