A Million Nightingales (10 page)

How small were the pieces of bone? What happened to the hair?

Félonise told me not to go upstairs. Tretite's eyes met hers over
my head. Gray and brown. She didn't want Msieu to see me either. She told me if horses arrived, to stay in Tretite's kitchen.

I slept there, on the floor by the fire.

Every morning, my mother came to get the clothes. She asked me almost formally, “Who come to the house?”

“No one.”

“Who you serve?”

“No one.”

We ate meat Tretite left for us. Roasted chicken, which Grand-mère Bordelon ate in her bed. Msieu came back very late, and he only drank brandy. Madame stayed in her room.

Now Madame was as sad and afraid as my mother was all the time. Now Mamère sat beside me in Tretite's small dark room off the kitchen. She didn't pray. She didn't light the candles. We sat in the dark, the moon gone to a fingernail, the shutter closed tight.

The cart wheels creaked up and down the shell road in the morning, sugar hauled to the boat. I gathered Msieu's clothes from the floor of his empty bedroom. Tretite said, “Start the dessert now. Them sugar buyer come tonight, five of them. I can't cook the big dinner alone. Mo toute seule.”

I am all alone. She didn't mean only for tonight.

Tretite's headache made her eyes small with pain. The new pecans were soft and pale, and I roasted them in the pan until they browned sweet. We plucked the tiny feathers from the squabs, crowded them in the pan with wine and brandy, put them at the edge of the fire to roast.

Ten small birds on the platter, arranged around a bed of rice, and when I bent low next to Msieu, he glanced up at me.

“Bring us three more—” he began, and then he stared at my face, my eyes, my tignon. I slanted the plate gently onto the table.

But he finished. “Three more bottles of wine.” Then he dismissed me with a wave.

Dismissed. Like my mother's upturned chin.

“Azure,” one of the men said loudly. “And you named it?”

“My mother did,” Msieu replied. “For the color of the indigo.”

“Now you got all this sugar, you change it to something white?”

“Sugar isn't white until it gets to the refinery. Brown, oui?”

They all laughed. He didn't. Msieu said quietly, “Now the name means something else to me. The eyes of my daughter.”

“May she rest in peace,” one man said, and they crossed themselves.

My back was pressed against the cool plaster wall. Was she peaceful now? Là-bas? Where was her là-bas?

I heard her voice then. Patella. Hybrid. Classification. She was my governess. I was her pupil. I closed my eyes. Clavicle. The heat of the tongs bending the hair. The ink on her wrist.

The men moved into the parlor. The cigar smoke rolled to the ceiling, and when I carried dirty dishes past the open door, it was as if moss wreathed their shoulders.

Tretite and I washed the platters last. It was close to midnight. “They maybe want more pecan tart. Take these to the armoire.”

Preserve dishes and dahlia plates. Madame's favorites. “If Madame never comes out of her room again,” I said, “who will run the house? Grandmère can't get downstairs.”

Tretite nodded. “Put them in the armoire case she do.”

Inside the dining room, I hesitated at the armoire. Madame's footsteps whispered along the floor above my head. Grandmère's heaviness made four posters grind into the wood planks when she turned her body.

I laid the preserve dishes in a row on the second shelf, as always, and placed the platters on their sides. Pheasants and roses. Dahlias—why was that Madame's favorite flower?

Msieu's voice rang out from the doorway. “Did you count Lemoyne's last shipment? Let me get the ledger.”

Then he came into the hallway, tendrils of smoke before him. Again, he looked into my face, and he tilted his head to one side. I bent over the dishes. Then he went into his office.

Tretite's fire was banked for morning, the bowls laid out for biscuit dough, the pan laid out for roasting coffee beans. She was tying her hair up with string. Tretite's hair was long and thick, and when she let it down and put on her white dress, she looked
like a young girl from the back. Until she turned around and you saw her face, her lips folding in on each other, her eyes surrounded by lines like cross-stitching, from years of squinting into the smoke.

“They finish?” she whispered.

I nodded. “Where's Félonise?”

“That hallway bed.” Tretite glanced into her kitchen one more time. “Go quiet and ask her how many for breakfast. She say one them leaving tonight.”

I ducked into the hallway again. The parlor was quiet now; some of the men must have gone to sleep in the guest rooms. But no one ever opened Céphaline's door.

I would never see her again. I would never hear her words.

I touched one dish, not wanting to pass the parlor door and the men. The dahlia had fifty-two petals. I turned toward the stairs, and Msieu stood there. He said, “You will go with the man in the black suit.”

He took my arm and turned me out the front door with the wooden sun bursting above it. I tried to free my arm from his fingers, but he pulled me around the gallery and toward the river.

“Msieu, I am going—”

“You will go on the boat.”

I tried to stop my feet, but he held my elbow, his thumb digging into the soft part inside. He had seen my face. Did he know I knew? No. He remembered only that I was alive, and Céphaline was not.

Mamère. Mamère. Maybe she could stop him. Talk to him.

“Msieu, I have nothing to take with me. I need to go back and get my things. Please.”

We were on the path to the landing, trampled hard by all the barrels of sugar. “My things, Msieu,” I said, and tried to wrench away my elbow.

“You have what you need,” he said. A small man waited at the landing, on the short dock. The boat lifted and sank with the water, and Msieu pushed me onto the ramp, over the brown riverbank.

She said that boat was dark and the wood screamed. She was inside, held between her mother's legs.

I was in the cargo hold with hogsheads of sugar, which trembled like a thousand drums around me.

She said her mother cried but silent so no one would hear, and the tears dripped into her hair when she sat on her mother's lap, hot when they fell on top of her head and then cold when they slid down her neck. Water on her skull. But Mamère didn't know skull. Skull like Céphaline's, like Doctor Tom's. Under the dirt.

Knowing the word
skull
wouldn't help me now.

I put my arms around my knees. The wood shook under my dress.

She had her mother, on that boat. Her mother had her.

The cargo room was full of burned-sweet smell rising from the sugar and molasses. Tiny drops of brown shook around my feet. Dark like Céphaline's boutons when she scratched them; like a coffee bean held between Mamère's lips.

I cried silently so the small Msieu wouldn't come back.

She had her mother. Her mother had her. I had no one.

The wood of this boat croaked like an angry raven. What had screamed in the wood of my mother's boat?

This boat moved slowly against the current. North. Not skimming fast down the river with cloth and nails and Céphaline's medicine from Paris.

He sold me because every time he saw my face, he was reminded of hers.

I pushed my face into the sleeves of my dress to smell my own hair, and my mother's soap. Back at Azure, my mother's tears
dripped onto herself. Not onto me. Her mother had had her, even as the boat wailed and moved and took them away.

My mother said if I was gone, she would join me. Là-bas. But I wasn't dead. How would she find me?

When we pulled away from the landing at Azure, he pushed me ahead to the deck, where some of the hogsheads of sugar had been loaded, but then he'd paused.

The small Msieu looked at my face then for the first time. I could barely keep my footing and put out my hand to the railing. We were headed north to New Orleans. The wind pushed the sails, but the current tried to take the boat back. The lights of Azure were gone.

The batture along the river's edge full of deadwood. The moon lit only the tunnel of trees along the river, and after a time, we passed the heap of charred black that had been Petit Clair. The river water rushed below, marked with the circle of light from the lantern.

“She going to jump?” another man said. He'd been at the dinner table, too, his moustache with tips so thin and drooping, I thought of Céphaline's commas, curling from her pen. He was Msieu Bordelon's factor, the man who sold the sugar during grinding and came south with goods from New Orleans—coffee and cloth and iron hoops for the hogsheads.

“You—are you planning to jump?” the small Msieu said. I was afraid to look into his face. He was only a few inches taller than me. His voice was French, but the hairs on his wrist were pale brown.

If I said “No,” that would be a lie, because I was thinking that I could still float now, at this moment, down the river toward home.

If I said “Yes,” he might beat me. He might beat me anyway. He might lift up my dress right here. He might laugh. He might burn me, like Eveline said someone had done once to her. I had seen the round gray scars at the soft edge of her breast when she took off a dirty chemise for me to wash.

If I said the truth, which was that I didn't know, he might be
angrier than with either of the other answers, because Msieus didn't want anything complicated. They didn't want to hear the word
I.
Never. There was no I.

My teeth held my tongue.

Then palm trees appeared like chimney brushes against the outline of night sky. Maybe Les Palmiers, a place Madame often mentioned. North on the river, closer to New Orleans. But a name Mamère knew.

The other man said, “You bought her just now? She mute?”

The small Msieu said, “I thought she was speaking when she was brought to the boat.”

He stared at me for another moment, and the boat shuddered on against the current. Don't look down. He'll think you'll jump. You might jump. If you jump, you can find a branch to float you down.

But Christophe said the river never helps when someone runs. The brown water hides brown skin until it takes the color from the arms and legs, and the bodies wash up white.

If I jumped, how would I see Azure, with the levee banks tangled high with river trash and driftwood?

The full moon wakes in the east and sleeps in the west, my mother said. This moon was on its downward arc. White as a soap cake, but missing two days’ worth of a sliver, as if my mother had shaved off a portion for washing.

The boat was slowing for the next stop. This house had an allée of trees covered with oranges, nearly glowing behind the lanterns someone held at the landing.

The water churned—but water would hold my soul.
Faro?
The water spirit? Would I would drift down to her, even if I died? Then she could join me là-bas.

“Orange Grove,” someone shouted.

The small Msieu said sharply, “Put her with the cargo. We'll only be here a few hours. If we bring her ashore, she might run.”

I could see nothing, not even the outline of all the hogsheads in the hold with me. The eye focused when it was given enough time to adjust, Céphaline used to say.

Your eyes were purple when you were born, Mamère used to
say. Then when you grew, they turned brown and followed me around, every moment of the day until I had to leave you at the end of the canerow.

What did I look at until you came back?

Sais pas. Don't know. Maybe the sky. Maybe nothing.

I cried until my dress was wet as if we'd washed it. No one else was on the boat now. I tried to make my brain work, but my head felt swollen as Eveline's baby who died.

Her baby gone. Madame's baby gone. My mother's baby gone.

Think. Your brain is the same size as theirs. The small Msieu had eaten with Msieu Bordelon. They knew each other somehow. All the sugar was loaded for New Orleans, where everything was sold.

Under my dress was worth money.

The other lips. That night Hera sat with Mamère while she sewed, and they talked about the marks. Two on each side. The four lips. The ones on your face. The ones between your legs.

In New Orleans, someone would lift my dress and stick his hand there and then buy me.

“They put their finger there,” Eveline said once, shrugging.

I could mark my face. Hera said she didn't mark Phrodite's face because it wasn't good. If my face was scarred, no one would want me.

I moved my wrists against the iron bracelet, which was attached to the ring in the wall. My apron. I still wore my apron from serving. Maybe there was something in the pocket with which to cut myself. Numb fingers into my apron pocket. Small round objects, smooth long ones.

Coffee beans and clothespins. My palms felt only their shapes, my hands were so cold.

I threw back my head against the wood, banging the bone covering my brain. Nothing to scar me. And if I did scar my face, then what would I be sold for?

What if the small Msieu shot me, like a lame horse, for my ruined face?

Then I would be là-bas. And Mamère would find me there. In the other world.

But what if Mamère waited for me to come back to her? Not là-bas but in our bed, lying there but not sleeping? Sitting, just like me, waiting.

Iron scraped in the lock. My eyes were dry and swollen as if sand filled the holes. I saw the eye in the indigo vat, imagined Doctor Tom's eyes now, and Céphaline's inside the earth.

What was my mother looking at? What did she want me to do?

A brown-skinned man in a white jacket studied me. He put down a plate with cornbread and a small, limp pile of bacon, and left a tin mug of water and a bucket. I wouldn't drink the water. I wouldn't use the bucket. I wouldn't lift my dress. They might be listening.

We left Orange Grove. People shouted, “North!” The iron bracelet left red ridges in my right wrist. My eyes filled with water again. Where did it come from? Maybe all the water in my body would leave through my eyes and I would never have to use the bucket.

My legs were stiff. A rush bloomed inside my back when I tried to move too far, my spine bending wrong. Vertebrae.

Knowing the word didn't matter. I was staked down like Marie-Claire, whorls of pink flesh decorating her cheeks. It didn't matter that Céphaline had taught me all those words, merely by saying them. I needed other words, if I was going to live.

I had to use the bucket. I said words to myself, words Céphaline had used when her mother was angry. Only excretions. Sweat. Urine. Tears. Where in the folds of the brain did our words form?

Nothing on my tongue would help me now. When the small Msieu opened the door and seemed surprised to see me amid the sugar, I waited for the right words to come from a secret branch of the softness inside my bones. But somewhere between my eyes,
which saw the key's teeth move into the lock at my hand, and my throat, which filled with fear when they took me out onto the deck where the river reached wide and brown to the levees, where rooftops were visible now, no sentences formed themselves for me.

“He sold you with no defect,” the small Msieu said, studying my face at the railing.

Foolish or intelligent? Which would hurt me, or help me? I looked at his buttons. Obedient.

“Oui, msieu,” I said.

“Did you try to run from Azure?”

“Non, msieu.”

“Why were you not needed?”

He must know about Céphaline. He must not know I had been there that night. I said, “His daughter is gone now.”

His eyes were the silvered gray of a new cane knife. My eyes moved down. My feet on the shaking wood. Screaming wood.

“You,” he said, and the brown-skinned man came again. Coffee stain on his jacket sleeve. “Stay here while I prepare for the landing. She is not to move.”

On the riverbank, two heads were mounted on poles at the bend, where the boat slowed.

The eyes were gone. The skin was dried like hide. Purple brown. The hair was coated with dust from the river road. The curls left were pale as gold.

“Saint John the Baptist.” The steward spoke softly. “They try to rise up. Heads above the city and below.”

The pikes had gone into their brains then. And how did they find a man willing to mount them there? Lifting them and then …

They were not faces. I closed my eyes until the boat stopped moving when we docked at New Orleans.

The other man, the factor, tied a small rope around my raw wrist. I pulled my shoulders in, like a cape. The men were everywhere— their eyes went to my face, my dressfront.

On the wharf, the Msieu and the factor bought coffee, breaking open bags and chewing a few beans. The smell—the bean tucked into my mother's cheek—my eyes filled with water again. It should be dry inside me now.

My mother had had her mother, when they brought her here to the slave market. Or did she come to Azure straight from the boat with sails, sold at the landing? She had her mother's hand.

“I never stay here longer than necessary,” the small Msieu said to the factor, who pulled me along the dock.

“With all the balls and dinners?” the factor said.

“People make money at home, and they lose it in the city.” The small Msieu studied sacks of coffee, iron hoops, and heaps of cloth.

He gestured to the boat. “Engage dock nègres to move the sugar.” Then he looked at the men on the wharf. “I have forty arpents of new land,” he said, his voice lower now. “I need five men to clear it. Africans, but it's unlikely I'll find any here. Since the damned Americans have changed the law, I'll have to take a boat down to Barataria Bay. Jean Lafitte always has Africans for sale.”

The factor nodded. “When I met you at Auzenne's place, he mentioned it. Did you enjoy the sight of the daughters?” He stopped abruptly, the rope bristles burning my wrist. I was an animal—larger than a dog, smaller than a horse. A mule. Petite mulâtresse.

The Auzenne girls. Their fair cheeks and perfect curls. He might have to come back for one of them soon, and I might come back, too.

But the small Msieu flicked away their names with his fingers. “Too far south. And my son remains in Paris. I want to leave tomorrow for the Barataria.”

The factor whispered, “You would truly buy from Lafitte and the privateers? With the Americans patrolling?”

You couldn't watch them or let your eyes meet theirs. A shoe paused nearby; a white toe poked from its hole like a pale grub.

The small Msieu shrugged. “This one can't clear the land. Bor-delon said she wasn't needed.” He shaded his eyes to look at the levee. “She can be needed somewhere else, he said, and I agreed.”

The factor's voice seemed distant. “Bright girl is worth good money in the city. Or trade with Lafitte for some men.”

Hera's voice—Bright hardship. My mother—Take but one candle light a room.

While we walked to the hotel, two men stopped us. “You sell that one, oui?” Fingers on my sleeve. A hand with sparse black hairs, a jacket with a grease stain like a map, a knee round as a saucer when a man bent a leg up onto a block and studied me.

If one bought me, what did it matter if he hit me with that hand or covered my face with that jacket or pushed that wide knee between my legs?

I would let all my blood out of my body as soon as I could, and it would clot and dry like sugar boiled in the last pan, and then someone could grind up the solid blood into powder. Drink my body in coffee.

Finally we went into a door below a sign on a large house. The factor handed the rope to a woman with cheeks red from a cooking fire.

She opened the door of the storeroom, and I sat on the cloth coffee sacks piled near the olive oil jars. “You break something, I make him pay,” she said, and locked the door.

The bricks were warm and not trembling. I took off my tignon and made my hair into a pillow at the back of my head.

Lie down make me too rested, my mother said. Lie down mean I can't watch.

Watch me. Watch me.

Who do I pray to?
Ni? Faro?
No water here. My blood would turn to powder, and someone could thicken soup with my body. A red soup. Beef meat and sang mêlé.