“My time is past,” Françoise said. “Now we must secure the best position for you that we are able. Once I am gone, Rosedew will have to be sold. Perhaps your portion will allow you and Monsieur Ferrier to better your lot.”
“Oui, Aunt Françoise,” Oreline said respectfully. “I promise to come back to visit every week.”
* * *
The wedding was a modest affair. When the ceremony was over, Oreline moved away from Rosedew to Ferrier’s small farm, a bumpy step down from plantation life.
Only Françoise Derbanne was left in the big house on Rosedew, Françoise and her visitors and her servants.
7
I n the ten years following the death of Louis Derbanne, everyone on Rosedew had learned to adjust to the hard luck that kept to the heels of the plantation like a mean-spirited dog.
Suzette endured, always standing, waiting to serve, without complaint. She had spent her entire life taking care of people who could not take care of themselves. She pretended to care about the knot of infirmities that tightened around Françoise. She pretended to care that Eugene Daurat brought little candies and trinkets from his store for Gerant and Philomene. As the children grew older, Eugene even gave Gerant a real carpenter’s awl, the handle nicked and worn and the point dulled but still serviceable, and he often brought bits of calico for Philomene to patch a skirt or sew up a new josie. Suzette pretended to care each week when Oreline confided during her visits how homesick she was for Rosedew and how worried she was about Françoise’s physical decline. Since the birth of her children and the selling of her niece and nephews, Suzette had become unflinchingly certain about what mattered.
All she really cared about now was her own family.
Outside Françoise Derbanne’s bedroom, Suzette drew Gerant and Philomene close to her. She stooped low and whispered so only they could hear. “Philomene, you stay where Madame can see you in case she wakes. If she starts to fret, send Gerant to come find me.”
“You know you can count on me, Maman,” Philomene said in the matter-of-fact way she had. “I can handle Madame by myself, get her to calm down and do whatever I want.”
Suzette stared at her daughter’s serious face, then pinched her hard on the arm. “That is dangerous talk, and you must never say anything like it again.”
Philomene looked surprised but not sorry. “Yes, Maman,” she said at last.
Suzette hurriedly left the big house by the back door.
Despite the gauzy shadows of haze across the evening sky, the full moon lit the way for Suzette’s nightly journey to the quarter. As she began her walk, she reached into her apron pocket. Her fingers found the items she carried with her everywhere, the rosary Françoise Derbanne had given her over a decade before and the stiff scrap of tanned cowhide, a present from a young boy to a young girl who still had dreams.
Only a few steps down the path, she suddenly turned and began to run back to the house, almost stumbling on a loose stone in the dark.
“Gerant, Philomene,” Suzette whispered urgently into the stillness of the back room, opening her arms wide. They came to her, and she clutched her children, pressing them to her as tightly as she could. The boy smell of Gerant mixed with the odor of wax from his lighting of the candles, and the sharp scent of lye soap from the supper dishes had found its way into Philomene’s braided hair.
“My babies,” she said. Then, loosening her grip, she stepped back to put distance between herself and them. To Philomene she said, “Why can’t you understand the danger?”
“I will send for you if Madame stirs,” Philomene said. “Please do not worry, Maman.”
Suzette felt their eyes looking after her as she went out again into the night. Sometimes she couldn’t get enough of Gerant and Philomene. Other times she couldn’t attach herself to them at all, as if they were already gone. Her children were house raised, she thought. Maybe she could keep them safer than Palmire’s children.
Suzette was still small, and she was still pretty. It was easy to trace in her facial features and body proportions the African ancestors on her mother’s side and the stray drops of Caddo Indian from her father. For a time, the spicy snap of her name and the way she had been brought up had tricked her into believing that she was also partly colored Creole, immune. At twenty-five, she saw more clearly now. The open-faced sweetness of her youth had been replaced by a nagging vagueness that came and went of its own accord, and although she still claimed a child’s distinction of soft brown eyes too big for her face, the shimmering of possibilities was no longer reflected there.
The few chickens stirring around the henhouse scattered as she walked into their domain, and she clucked at them softly. They were used to her. The straw pricked at her fingers as she felt around in the setting beds. She took only two eggs, putting them in her apron pocket. After pulling the door shut behind her and fastening the latch, she kept on the path to the cookhouse. Three buttermilk biscuits were hidden in the pantry where she had left them this morning, wrapped in a white rag. She put those in her other pocket, along with a jar she had filled with molasses and a small kitchen knife.
Instead of the footpath that would take her past the overseer’s house, Suzette cut through a small patch of pines to approach the quarter from behind.
She went to see her father first, careful to step around the rotted plank on the porch. The place held the tight, close odor of mold and waste. The cabin had not been whitewashed for three planting seasons, and the floors had not been limed for well over a year.
“How is he?” Suzette whispered to Elisabeth as she came through the door.
A small fire burned in the fireplace and threw patterns of light and dark around the room, highlighting the spare furnishings. There were two pallets at opposite corners and three seats at a small table set with wooden plates and several drinking gourds. Only Gerasíme, Elisabeth, and Solataire lived in the cabin now. Gerasíme breathed loudly, his head protruding from a ragged gray blanket on the pallet, his hair long and wild, tangled and sweat soaked on the log pillow. Elisabeth sat by his side on a pine stump.
“Better,” Elisabeth said. “I salved the cuts, and he’s able to sleep now. This overseer’s meaner than the last. Five stripes this time.” She lightly wiped Gerasíme’s face with a damp rag. “If he doesn’t get back out to the field tomorrow, there’ll be more lashes on top of these. I’ll make sure he doesn’t miss the morning bell.”
“You need to get some sleep, too,” Suzette whispered as she unwrapped the rag from her pocket. “I brought an egg and biscuits. Where is Solataire?”
“Trying to hunt up some meat.”
“I’ll be going to sit with Palmire a little, then.”
“Move around careful,” Elisabeth warned. “Even Madame may not be able to help if the overseer finds eggs in your apron.”
“I’ll say it’s for the house.”
Suzette continued down the line of cabins in the quarter. Several men and women holding gourds waited their turn around the small hand mill to grind their corn ration for tomorrow’s dinner in the field. They stopped talking as she neared.
“Good evening,” Suzette said, slowing a little.
“How is Madame?” one of them asked.
“Still poorly,” Suzette answered. “Mam’zelle Oreline comes back to Rosedew tomorrow to stay until Madame is better. With her son.”
The group nodded tiredly, and Suzette kept moving along the line of cabins, almost to the end.
Young Clement and his mother, Eliza, ate their evening meal outdoors on the elevated porch of the cabin next to Palmire’s. Suzette waved. Eliza was Suzette’s age, and Philomene and Clement were inseparable whenever she allowed her children to come down to the quarter.
“Has Madame picked up any?” Eliza called out.
“Still about the same,” Suzette said in passing, and tried to continue on, but Eliza motioned her in.
“What’s to come of us when Madame dies?” the young woman asked with urgency, and altho
ugh Clement sat quiet, he listened hard, as if Suzette’s words could make the future.
No matter how many times someone asked Suzette the question, the pain was raw and caught her fresh. She surprised herself with her outward calm, walking, talking, performing her chores, all the while on the edge of a consuming terror.
“I don’t know, Eliza. The talk is they will sell the place.”
“Can you say something about me and the boy going together?” Eliza implored.
“There’s nothing I can do,” Suzette said, turning away. “I have to see to Palmire.”
No light came from her sister’s cabin, no smoke from the chimney. A sadness engulfed the small dwelling, an emptiness that flowed from the inside out. The door was open, and Palmire sat motionless on her pallet. Suzette almost expected to see Paul’s chubby legs pumping as he ran to greet her, Solais behind his older brother, and Melantine in the corner, blowing bubbles to amuse herself. It had been seven years since the children had been sold from Rosedew, and Suzette still thought of them as babies. They were as grown as her own two, and although she knew they were still on Cane River, they belonged now to some other place.
Suzette walked over and touched Palmire’s shoulder. Palmire looked up, lines etched deep in her forehead and around her eyes.
“You must eat, sister,” Suzette motioned, and unwrapped the last of the biscuits and the other egg.
She lit a fire in the fireplace and waited for the flames to take hold, gathering up Palmire’s small skillet and wooden plate. Suzette took the covering off Palmire’s weekly ration of bacon in the corner, cut off a small piece with the kitchen knife she brought, and put it in the skillet to fry. When there was enough grease in the pan, she cracked the egg and fried it up, too, and scooped it all out onto the wooden plate alongside the biscuits and molasses.
She sat stiffly in Palmire’s pine chair, watching her sister listlessly swallow the food. When Palmire finished, Suzette wiped the skillet and dishes as clean as she could, and the two of them sat in the childless cabin wrapped in silence.
Suzette finally got up. She needed to get back to the big house to make sure Françoise had not called for her. She touched the door and pointed out toward the moon.
“Tomorrow night,” Suzette motioned to Palmire.
Palmire nodded.
* * *
No amount of punishment, reward, or deadening routine could ease the growing dread that reached from the big house to the quarter and into the fields. In more ordinary times it was the season to be totally absorbed in the fourth and final picking of the cotton harvest and the brief, sweet lull before the planting of the new crop. Instead all hands waited anxiously for word from the big house. The overseer had lost some of his power to an even bigger terror, and the lash on the backs of the dispirited slaves now had the opposite effect of what he intended. The more he whipped, pushed, and demanded, the slower the tempo in the field became, the more hoes and pickaxes and oxen’s yokes turned up mysteriously broken, the more twigs appeared in the swelling baskets of fluffy white at the end of each row of cotton. The questioning pop of the lash and the answering human refrain could be heard most days now as the overseer performed his work unchecked.
In the big house visitors still called, but their stays became shorter as Françoise became less responsive. Narcisse Fredieu was among those who came most often, and Eugene Daurat traveled sometimes by boat and sometimes by horse the six miles between Rosedew and the farm downriver he now shared openly with Doralise Derbanne.
In the end, it was the women’s job to tend to the dying. Suzette and Oreline often found themselves alone in the dark back bedroom with the weak, shrunken Françoise. Her skin had taken on a strange translucent quality, and after long hours with no relief, Suzette sometimes believed she could see the blood straining to squeeze through the raised ropelike veins of Françoise Derbanne’s hands.
“Have you talked to M’sieu Ferrier again?” Suzette began hopefully in a whisper, careful to tamp down any insistence in her tone. “Will he buy all of us together?”
Oreline looked nervously at the supine figure of her aunt, who in troubled sleep drew ragged, raspy breaths.
“This is not the time to discuss it,” she whispered back.
It was bad news. Suzette knew Oreline well enough to recognize when she was trying to avoid something she did not want to face.
“But it will be your money when they sell Rosedew. It comes to you, not M’sieu Ferrier.”
“Sometimes I think I tell you too much, Suzette. Monsieur Ferrier is my husband. He is the one to take care of such matters. I have given you my word that we will buy both you and Philomene. He has agreed to that much. But he cannot see his way clear to buy Gerant. The boy is too young to be of the kind of help he needs in the field, and Monsieur will not move from his position. We are not rich. We only work a small farm, and we need someone for planting right now. Perhaps Eugene Daurat can help with Gerant. I can talk to him on your behalf.”
Suzette knew pushing any harder would force Oreline into defending her husband, taking his side against hers. She clamped down hard on her bitterness, as if it were a metallic bit set in her mouth. What kind of man needed to be shamed into buying his own son?
“I would be grateful if you would talk to M’sieu Daurat, Mam’zelle.”
Suzette busied her hands folding linen, letting time pass before beginning again. “Mam’zelle, if it’s help with planting you’re after, my sister Palmire can do the work of a man in the field. She’s the strongest hoe woman on Rosedew, and she can pick two hundred pounds of cotton a day. Deaf and dumb doesn’t stop her from being a good hand.”
“I can make no promises, Suzette, but I will try. I don’t think you appreciate how much I’ve done for you already. This isn’t proper talk with my aunt on her sickbed. Let’s hear no more about it.”
The days passed in dreary repetition, grinding down all three of the women in the back room, until Françoise began to use the short spurts of strength that came to her to fight against life. The curtains stayed tightly drawn at her request. She refused to sit up, and she choked on the food they brought to her bedside. After a time she refused to eat or be fed at all, pushing away anything they brought like a petulant child. She slipped in and out of consciousness.
The more Françoise’s condition worsened, the less useful Oreline became, until Suzette was forced to take hold of the situation.
“Mam’zelle,” Suzette said gently but firmly, “you should send for the priest. She can’t last much longer, and she would want to die in grace.”
“Oui,” Oreline said. “Send Gerant for Father Blanc.”
The priest and Gerant returned together, Father Blanc on his chestnut bay and Gerant on the Rosedew mare. Still smelling of haste and horse sweat, the priest went directly in to Françoise without stopping for his customary pleasantries and set about the task of performing last rites. After he finished they served him café au lait, and the three mourners waited respectfully for Françoise Derbanne’s spirit to depart. When she neither died nor regained her senses, Father Blanc rode back to St. Augustine at a far less hurried gait than when he had arrived.
And still Françoise hung on.
Suzette thought it must be true what they said. Creoles pas mourri, ils desseche. Creoles don’t die, they dry up.
* * *
Françoise Derbanne finally died on a Thursday, two weeks after receiving last rites, with Oreline sitting at her aunt’s bedside, holding her limp hand, and Suzette cleaning up after the mess of the attempted morning meal. It had taken Françoise a long time to die, just like her husband, Louis. Unlike in life, in death she passed without drama or instruction. She just stopped breathing.
Suzette said a quick prayer, made the sign of the cross, and got up off her knees. There was much to do. Her red-rimmed eyes burned and her back was stiff, the result of her having sat up most of the last three nights tending to Françoise, and she refused to embrace the sentimental scene of th
e niece’s final farewell to her aunt. She let it pass through her without sensation, unwilling to be weighed down with the dead when the living were at risk. Her gingham dress clung to her, and her cocoa skin was slick, even more from the dread that had settled down deep within her than the familiar wet heat.
“Mam’zelle Oreline . . . Mam’zelle . . .” Suzette spoke to the pale, trembling woman in the same tones she had heard her father use when steadying a high-spirited horse, more importance in the tone and continuity than the words themselves.
“First we’ll say a prayer for Madame Françoise together,” Suzette crooned, “and then I want you to go to the front room and sit down while I take care of everything in here. I’ve brought your rosary. We’ll send Gerant to fetch back M’sieu Daurat. They know him well enough on Cane River, you don’t even have to worry yourself writing out a pass. We should send for Narcisse Fredieu, too. You need family around you right now. Philomene will get you some nice sassafras tea while we wait for them to get here. We’ll wait together. I’m still here, Mam’zelle. Aren’t I always here when you need me? Come on with me now. I’ll take you myself and get you settled in the front room, and I’ll be back to sit with you directly after I do a few things. You’re a Derbanne, Mam’zelle, and you can get through this. I’ll help you.”
Oreline offered no resistance, allowing herself to be guided toward the front of the house, away from the still-warm body of her aunt.
“Look at those roses, Mam’zelle Oreline. Still pretty. Those flowers know how to keep on blooming year after year whether they’re looked after or not.”
Suzette had cut some of the roses from the yard and arranged a cluster of soft yellows and salmons and reds in the cut crystal vase Louis had brought back from France so many years before as an anniversary present for Françoise.
Even though Suzette had pulled back the heavy drapes at the window and thrown open the windows, the house still had the closed-in smell of infirmity and deterioration. She had spent each spare minute of the last few weeks cleaning walls, floors, and windows, bringing in pails of soapy water. As though by scrubbing she could hold back the moment when everything she held dear could be torn from her, the way she knew it had from so many others.
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