The Gilda Stories (2 page)

Of course there was talk around most dinner tables in the parish, especially after Bird had come to stay at the house. Macey was certain that if there was a faith Gilda held, it was not one she knew. The lively look that filled her employer's eyes now usually only appeared when she and Bird spent their evenings talking and writing together.

Some things were best not pondered, so Macey turned and hurried back down to her card game with Bernice, the cook. Gilda prepared a plate and poured from the decanter of red wine. The Girl looked furtively in her direction but was preoccupied with the cleanliness of the room and the spicy smell of the food. Her body relaxed while her mind still raced, filled with the unknowns: how far she was from the plantation, who this woman might be, how she could get away from her.

Gilda was barely able to draw her excitement back inside herself as she watched the girl. It was the clear purpose in the Girl's dark eyes that first caught her. A child's single-mindedness shone through. Deeper still was an adult perseverance. Gilda remembered that look many years before in Bird's eyes when she had returned from her one visit to her people, the Lakota. There was an intensity, curiosity, and vulnerability blended together behind a tight mask of resolve.

More importantly, Gilda saw herself behind those eyes—a younger self she barely remembered, one who would never be comfortable with having decisions made for her. Or with following a path she'd not laid herself. Gilda also saw a need for family that matched her own. She closed her eyes, and in her mind the musky smell of her mother's garments rose. She almost reached out to the phantom of her past there in the lamplit room but caught her breath and shook her head slightly. Gilda knew then she wanted the Girl to stay.

Answers to her questions slipped in among her thoughts as the Girl ate. She was startled to discover the understanding of where she was and who this woman might be. She set her glass down abruptly and stared at Gilda's narrow face which glowed with excitement even in the shadows of the lamplight. Her dark brown hair was wound low at the back of her neck leaving her tiny features exposed. Even within the tight bodice of the blue beaded dress she now wore, Gilda moved in her own deliberate way. The brown cigar she lit seemed too delicate for her broad gestures.

The Girl thought for a moment:
This is a man! A little man!

Gilda laughed out loud at the idea in the Girl's head and said, “No, I'm a woman.” Then without speaking aloud she said,
I am a woman, you know that. And you know I am a woman as no other you have known, nor has your mother known, in life or death. I am a woman as you are, and more.

The Girl opened her mouth to speak, but her throat was too raw, her nerves too tight. She bent her mouth in recognition and puzzlement. This was a woman, and her face was not unlike her mother's despite the colors painted on it.

Its unwavering gaze was hard-edged yet full of concern. But behind the dark brown of Gilda's eyes the Girl recognized forests, ancient roots and arrows, images she had never seen before. She blinked quickly and looked again through the lamplight. There she simply saw a small woman who did not eat, who sipped slowly from a glass of wine and watched with a piercing gaze through eyes that seemed both dark and light at the same time.

When the Girl finished eating and sat back again on the settee, Gilda spoke aloud. “You don't have to tell me anything. I'll tell you. You just listen and remember when anyone asks: You're new in the house. My sister sent you over here to me as a present. You've been living in Mississippi. Now you live here and work for me. Nothing else, do you understand?” The Girl remained silent but understood the words and the reasons behind them. She didn't question. She was tired, and the more she saw of this white world, the more afraid she became that she could no longer hide from the plantation owners and the bounty hunters.

“There is linen in that chest against the wall. The chaise longue is quite comfortable. Go to sleep. We will rise early, my girl.” With that, Gilda's thin face radiated an abundant smile as youthful as the Girl's. She turned out one of the lamps and left the room quickly. The Girl unfolded a clean sheet and thick blanket and spread them out smoothly, marveling at their freshness and the comforting way they clung to the bowed and carved wood of the chaise's legs. She disturbed the placid surface almost regretfully and slipped in between the covers, trying to settle into sleep.

This woman, Gilda, could see into her mind. That was clear. The Girl was not frightened though, because it seemed she could see into Gilda's as well. That made them even.

The Girl thought a little about what she had seen when the woman opened herself to her, what had made her trust her: an expanse of road stretching narrowly into the horizon, curving gently away from her; the lulling noise of rushing wind and the rustling of leaves that sounded like the soft brush of the hem of a dress on carpet. She stared down the road with her eyes closed until she lost the dream in deep sleep.

Gilda stood outside the door, listening for a moment to the Girl's restless movement. She easily quieted the Girl's turmoil with the energy of her thoughts. The music and talking from below intruded on Gilda, but she resisted, searching out the glimmerings of her past instead. How unnerving to have stumbled upon them in that moment of recognition while watching the Girl eat her supper. The memory was vague, more like a fog than a tide after so many years in which Gilda had deliberately turned away from the past.

With her eyes closed she could slip backward to the place whose name she had long since forgotten, to when she was a girl. She saw a gathering of people with burnished skin. She was among them. The spiced scent of their bodies was an aura moving alongside them as they crossed an arid expanse of land. She couldn't see much beyond the curved backs and dust-covered sandals of those walking in front of her. She held the hand of a woman she knew was her mother, and somewhere ahead was her father. Where were they all now? Dead, of course. Less than ashes, and Gilda could not remember their faces. She couldn't remember when their eyes and mouths had slipped away from her. Where had the sound of their voices gone? All that seemed left was the memory of a scented passage that had dragged her along in its wake and the dark color of blood as it seeped into sand.

She grimaced at the sense of movement, the thing she most longed to be free of. Even there, in that mythical past she could no longer see clearly, she had moved nomadically from one home to another. Through first one war then another. Which sovereign? Whose nation? She had left those things behind sometime in the past three hundred years—perhaps even longer.

She opened her eyes and looked back toward the door to the room where the Girl slept, smiling as her own past dissolved. She no longer needed those diaphanous memories. She wanted to look only forward, to the future of the Girl and Bird, and to her own resting place where she would finally have stillness.

Again the music broke into her thoughts. For the first time in a long while she was eager to join the girls in the downstairs parlor for the evening, to watch Bird moving quickly among the rooms, and to listen to the languidly told stories the girls perfected to entertain the gentlemen and make the time pass for themselves. And when the night was edged by dawn she would gratefully lie down next to Bird, welcoming the weight of her limbs stretched across her body and the smell of her hair permeating her day of rest.

During her first few months at Woodard's the Girl barely spoke but did the chores she was directed to in the house. She began to accompany Bird or Gilda some months after, to shop for the house or buy presents for members of the household, which Gilda did quite frequently. The Girl carried the packages and straightened up Gilda's suite of rooms, carefully dusting the tiny vases and figurines, the shelves of books, and rearranging fresh flowers, which she picked from the garden once she became comfortable enough to venture outside alone.

Sometimes she would sit in the pantry while the girls were around the table in the kitchen eating, talking over previous evenings, laughing at stories, or discussing their problems.

“Don't tell me I'm ungrateful. I'm grown. I want what I want and I ain't nobody's mama!” Rachel shouted at Fanny, who always had an opinion.

“Not that we know of,” was Fanny's vinegary retort. Rachel only stared at her coldly, so Fanny went on. “You always want something, Rachel, and you ain't coming to nothing with this dream stuff. Running off, leavin' everythin' just 'cause you had a dream to do something you don't know nothin' 'bout.”

“It's my dream an' my life, ain't it Miss Bird? You know 'bout dreams an' such.”

Bird became the center of their attention as she tried to remember what would mean the most to these girls, who were really women, who had made their home with her and Gilda.

“Dreaming is not something to be ignored.”

“But going to a place like that, next to the water—ready to fall in 'cording to her dream, mind you, not mine—is just foolish,” Fanny insisted.

“It's a dream, not a fact. Maybe the dream just means change, change for the better. If Rachel has a dream, she reads it. Nobody else here can do that for her,” Bird said.

“Anyway, I ain't packed nothin'. I'm just tellin' you my dream, is all. Damn you, Fanny, you a stone in my soup every time!”

The women laughed because Rachel always had a way with words when they got her excited.

Occasionally Gilda sat with them, as if they did not work for her, chiming in with stories and laughter just the same as Bernice, the dark, wary cook, or Rachel, the one full of ambition. There were also Rose, kind to a fault; Minta, the youngest; and the unlikely pair who were inseparable—Fanny, the opinionated, and Sarah, the appeaser. Mostly the Girl kept apart from them. She had never seen white women such as these before, and it was frightening not to know where she fit in. She had heard of bawdy houses from her mother who had heard from the men who sipped brandy in the library after dinner. But the picture had never added up to what she saw now.

These women embodied the innocence of children the Girl had known back on the plantation, yet they were also hard, speaking of the act of sex casually, sometimes with humor. And even more puzzling was their debate of topics the Girl had heard spoken of only by men. The women eagerly expressed their views on politics and economics: what slavery was doing to the South, who was dominating politics, and the local agitation against the Galatain Street “houses.”

Located further from the center of activity, Gilda's house was run with brisk efficiency. She watched over the health of the women and protected them. But her presence was usually more presumed than actual. Most often she locked herself in her room until six in the evening. There she slept, read, and wrote in the voluminous journals she kept secured in a chest.

Bird managed the everyday affairs, supervising most of the marketing and arbitrating disputes with tradesmen or between the girls. She also directed the Girl in doing the sundry tasks assigned to her. And it was Bird who decided that she would teach the Girl to read. Every afternoon they sat down in Bird's shaded room with the Bible and a newspaper, going over letters and words relentlessly.

The Girl sat patiently as Bird told a story in her own words, then picked out each syllable on paper until they came together in the story she had just recited. At first the Girl did not see the sense of the lessons. No one she knew ever had need of reading, except the black preacher who came over on Saturday nights to deliver a sermon under the watchful gaze of the overseer. Even he was more likely to thwack the Bible with his rusty hand than read from it.

But soon the Girl began to enjoy the lessons. She liked knowing what Fanny was talking about when she exclaimed that Rachel was “as hard headed as Lot's wife,” or recognizing the name of the Louisiana governor when she heard it cursed around the kitchen table. Another reason she enjoyed the lessons was that she liked the way Bird smelled. When they sat on the soft cushions of the couch in Bird's room, bending over the books and papers, the Girl was comforted by the pungent earthiness of the Lakota woman. She did not cover herself with the cosmetics and perfumes her housemates enjoyed. The soft scent of brown soap mixed with the leather of her headband and necklace created a familiar aura. It reminded the Girl of her mother and the strong smell of her sweat dropping onto the logs under the burning cauldrons. The Girl rarely allowed herself to miss her mother or her sisters, preferring to leave the past alone for a while, at least until she felt safe in this new world.

Sitting in the room with the Girl, Bird was no longer aloof. She was tender and patient, savoring memories of herself she found within the Girl. Bird gazed into the African eyes which struggled to see a white world through words on a page. Bird wondered what creatures, as invisible as she and the Girl were, did with their pasts.

Was she to slip it off of her shoulders and fold it into a chest to be locked away for some unknown future? And what to do with that future, the one that Gilda had given Bird with its vast expanse of road? Where would she look to read that future? What oracle could she lay on her lap to pick out the words that would frame it?

Bird taught the Girl first from the Bible and the newspaper. Neither of them could see themselves reflected there. Then she told the Girl stories of her own childhood, using them to teach her to write. She spoke each letter aloud, then the word, her own hand drawing the Girl's across the worn paper. And soon there'd be a sentence and a legend or memory of who she was. And the African girl then read it back to her. Bird enjoyed these lessons almost as much as her evenings spent alone with Gilda. And with the restlessness that agitated Gilda more each year, those times together had grown less frequent.

Gilda and Bird sometimes retreated to the farmhouse for a day or more, spending most of the time walking in the evening, riding, or reading together silently, rarely raising questions. Sometimes Gilda went to the farmhouse alone, leaving Bird anxious and irritable. This afternoon Bird prolonged the lesson with the Girl a bit. Uncertainty hung in the air around her, and she was reluctant to leave the security of the Girl's eagerness to learn. She asked her to read aloud again from the sheets of paper on which they'd just printed words. The halting sound of the Girl's voice opened a space inside of Bird. She stood quickly, walking to the curtained window.