Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (53 page)

Madame Doucet lay still and white in the bed, unmoving as the hours crept past. Outside were the sounds of revelry as if the French had decided to have a party to celebrate their relief at the passing of danger. Lanterns lighted the parade ground behind the commandant’s house in front of the barracks. The music of fiddle and mouth organ, along with the shuffle of feet, lilted on the night. Voices became louder and laughter rose now and then, perhaps from the passing of several bottles of wine. Elise heard it, but she could not bring herself to look out or to think of joining. She sat on, staring at nothing in the dim room lit only by a single bedside candle.

The noise died away finally. The only sound to be heard was the pacing of the sentries on duty. The night moved toward the hours just before dawn when the world was darkest and the human spirit at its lowest ebb.

“Elise,” Madame Doucet said, her voice cracked, husky. “Is it you?”

She had not been asleep; still, the sound from that figure, motionless and quiet for so long under the coverlet, startled her so that she jumped. She recovered instantly, leaning forward. “It’s I. How are you?”

“I don’t know. I feel so … odd.”

“You have been through a great ordeal. You should not talk now. Would you like something to drink?”

At the older woman’s slow nod, Elise brought water in a gourd dipper and raised Madame Doucet’s head, holding the dipper to her lips. When she was done, Elise took it away again.

“You are good to me,” Madame Doucet said.

Elise caught her breath. “I — no. I left you with the Natchez and I’m sorry, truly sorry.”

Madame Doucet’s lips moved in a faint smile. “It wasn’t your fault. I was afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Of living, I think.”

“Perhaps, but you are alive now and must have rest. Try to sleep.” Elise reached out to take the thin, blue-veined hand that lay on the covers. The fingers curled around her own, though with little strength.

“I saw death today.”

Was she wandering in her mind, as she had so often done at the Grand Village? Perhaps if there was no answer, Elise thought, the older woman would drift back to sleep.

Madame Doucet opened her eyes, staring up at Elise. “I was afraid of the Natchez, of the pain, but not of dying. I wanted to die. It seemed a good, glorious thing that was near, so near. When Reynaud came, I asked him to kill me, but he would not.”

Tears. So many had been shed, yet Elise could not prevent the rise of more, could not stop them from spilling warm and wet down her cheeks.

“My dear, my very dear. Don’t cry. It’s not so bad. Reynaud said I must wait and so I am waiting.”

It was perhaps an hour later, as the cocks began to crow and the dawn light ran pale into the sky, when Elise felt the fingers of Madame Doucet grow lax and saw that she breathed no longer.

19

ELISE WENT TO stay with Claudette in her two-room house within shouting distance of the fort. Claudette and her husband slept on a bed made of peeled saplings in one back corner of the front room. Their children slept in the other corner, tumbling over each other like puppies. Elise had a rough cot in the second, smaller room among the stacked furs, bundles of cloth and blankets, and boxes of pots and knives and beads, which represented the trading ventures of Claudette’s husband. It appeared that most of the men of the community dabbled in trading during the winter season even if they were planters during the rest of the year.

The days were filled with cooking, cleaning, tending the children, helping Claudette as she grew larger with pregnancy. As the summer advanced, Elise sometimes worked in the indigo and tobacco fields that Jules cultivated, weeding and picking off insects and worms. She was busy and that suited her; the work helped to keep her from thinking and made it easier to sleep at night.

There were times, however, when she would watch Claudette waddling about at the center of her home and family, secure in her husband’s affection, needed, swelling with new life, and her envy would be blighting. There would be no child born of her Indian idyll with Reynaud. She should have been relieved under the circumstances; instead, she was bitter. That much, at least, she could have had. Instead, she was left with thoughts and memories that haunted her waking moments and left her lying rigid, with clenched teeth and knotted fists, in the dark hours before dawn.

Reynaud had been forced to choose, for nothing, for nothing. His choice had not saved Madame Doucet, would not save the Natchez. And he had known, even as he made it, that it was useless. Gone. He was gone, swallowed up by the wilderness. He had renounced her for her own sake, forcing her to adhere to the choice he thought she had made when she walked out of the Natchez fort. And yet it had been against his will, she would swear it. He had not wanted to leave her, any more than she had wanted him to go.

She had so many regrets. She wished there had been more time for love, for laughter. She wished that she had made him know that she loved him with words and deeds. She wished that she could call back the night they had spent on the trail so that she could draw close to him once more, could take back the moments of scorn and anger. She wished—

Dear God, how she hated lying alone.

She felt so puny, caught in something beyond her control. They were all people, weren’t they? What then did the differences matter? Why could they not all live together without greed and fear, pain and death, and the terrible wrenching of the soul caused by duty and honor? She was French, but she felt bound by invisible cords to tins half-breed Reynaud-Hawk-of-the-Night-Tattooed Serpent. The cords were drawing tighter, strangling her as surely as if he had died and she must follow him into the afterlife. Her throat ached, and her heart, and mind, and body.

He was gone, and it was for nothing.

News came from the French expedition at the Grand Village. The French had been shocked, taken totally by surprise when they had approached the Natchez forts the morning after the capitulation and discovered that the tribe had fled during the night. There were charges leveled against Loubois and his men of incompetence at best and collusion with the Indians at worst. The Natchez had not only vanished; they had taken with them every pot and pail, every scrap of booty taken from the French during the massacre except for the useless cannons and a few rounds of shot. They must have made several trips during the night to remove such heavy pottery and ironware, such a storehouse of goods. That the soldiers and their Choctaw allies should have slept on, unknowing, seemed impossible. It was suggested in whispers that some of the gold taken from the colonists and the paymaster’s stores at Fort Rosalie might have been slipped into the pockets of those guarding the Natchez to persuade them to turn a blind eye to the escape.

As for the captive French women and children, they had indeed become the hostages of the Choctaws. Loubois had naturally refused to pay the ransom demanded at first, but as the plight of the women became more pitiable, he had entered into negotiations. Having no gold or goods with him, he had given the Choctaws time to feel that their demands would be met so that they allowed the prisoners a little more freedom. Loubois had then moved in secret to load the women and children onto the small ship, a half galley, that had brought him and his men upriver, then he had given the order to set sail for New Orleans. The only prisoners left in the hands of the Choctaws had been one man and a number of Africans.

The situation had been dangerous for some moments after the departure of the prisoners was discovered, but finally the Choctaws had accepted promises of payment and left in a dignified dudgeon. The French soldiers under Loubois had set themselves to the task of burning the forts of the Natchez and rebuilding Fort Rosalie on the bluff above the river.

The same source that brought the news of what had taken place after Elise and the others had gone also gave a thorough report of the earlier events. From being something of a pariah, Elise found herself a heroine for her part in leading the French women and children into at least partial freedom. The women of the community dropped in to visit, to satisfy what was apparently a long-standing curiosity about her. They asked infinite questions concerning her own experience among the terrible Natchez and stared at her as if expecting that she would be different from them somehow because of what she had been through. None dared ask directly what it had been like to be the woman of a tattooed war chief, albeit one half French, but the question lingered unspoken in the air as they fanned themselves on the porch in the warmth of the evenings.

The spring advanced into summer. It was heard that the children from Fort Rosalie who had been left unclaimed by family or friends, some twenty-four of them, had been taken in by the Ursuline nuns, an order only two years old but already making its presence felt in the colony. The surviving men and women had been given other grants of land closer to New Orleans, though a few had returned to their old lands near the Grand Village despite occasional raids by small Natchez war parties. Elise sometimes thought of going back herself, of starting over on her own lands. They were so far from the fort, however, that it would be dangerous, and, in any case, she could not seem to find the heart for the enterprise.

In June an itinerant priest passed through the Natchitoches country, going to minister to the Caddo. He paused long enough to baptize Little Quail and then to perform a ceremony of marriage between the Indian woman and Pierre Broussard, trader. The service was brief, the celebration not much longer. When it was over, the couple loaded their horses and rode away along the trail into the forest. Little Quail had ridden proudly on her own mount. It was an honor not often accorded to the women of the Adaes and Caddo with whom she and Pierre would trade or to any but the Sun women of the Natchez, but one that she now accepted as her right.

“Do not be sad,” the Indian woman had said to Elise. “We will return soon and often. And we will bring to you what word of Tattooed Serpent we can.”

They did, indeed, bring word, though other news seemed to spread on the air, “to take the wind,” as the Indians phrased it. It was said that Reynaud had joined his brother, the Great Sun, and his mother at their camp on the side of a lake somewhere up the winding reaches of the Black River. They were engaged in building a fort on a bluff above the lake and were planting crops to feed the people. The new location was only fifteen leagues, straight across the Mississippi and over a swamp, from their old village; and not much more than twenty, south and cast through the forest, from the fort at Natchitoches. It might as well have been a thousand for all the good the knowledge did Elise.

The defeat of the tribe had caused a splintering so that while most of the Natchez gave their allegiance to the Great Sun and his war chief, some followed Path Bear, and others had sought sanctuary among the allied tribes, the Yazoo and the Ouachita. The men under Path Bear were the ones responsible for the attacks on the new Fort Rosalie, as well as the ambushes of French military patrols and traders on the rivers in which a number of men had been killed.

On a sweltering day in mid-July, Claudette’s sixth child was born, a girl. Elise was named the godmother. She spent the days that followed tending the baby with anxious care while Claudette alternately laughed at her fascination with the small, red-faced infant and sighed that the baby had delayed her entrance into the world too long to be blessed by the priest.

A trader paddling up the Red River, which lay sluggish and thick with mud in the August drought, brought word that a ship named the
Somme
had come from France bringing Alexis, Sieur le Perier de Salvert, the brother of the governor, who had been appointed the king’s general in charge of quelling the Indian uprising. This energetic gentleman took a few weeks of rest to recover from the long voyage, then began to gather and outfit an expedition to hunt down the Natchez.

There was a tale, brought perhaps by someone aboard the newly arrived ship, that the Company of the Indies, which had been the most successful of the many bodies established to colonize Louisiana, was ready to throw up its hands and admit defeat. Their stated reason was the depredations caused by the savages. In truth, the company had been looking for an excuse to be released from its charter for some time due to the lack of profit compared to the enormous expense of the project. It was supposed that the crown would be forced to take over the colony once more, should the rumor be verified.

The weeks and months slipped past. With little appetite, Elise grew thinner. She also became restless, a condition that progressed to an irritable boredom and finally to a desperate need to do something, attain something, to change things in some way. She spent her spare energy while not tending her god daughter studying Jules’ fanning methods and trading methods and sometimes made small suggestions for improvement. In token of her good advice, he made her a gift of a bolt of material, thinking that she would like to stitch herself a dress. Instead, she gave it to Pierre to trade for Indian pottery and baskets of the kind she had found most useful while among the Natchez. These she sold to the women of her acquaintance and with the money bought more goods to be traded.