Suzette pushed her from behind toward the priest and Clement.
“Come stand here,” the priest said, looking straight at Philomene, and she took her place by Clement’s side.
The priest raised his hand for silence and began to recite the special slave ceremony he had prepared. His voice carried to all corners in the small dining room on Ferrier’s farm.
“You, Clement, do now, in the presence of God and these witnesses, take Philomene to be your wife;
“Promising that so far as shall be consistent with your relation which you now sustain as servant, you will perform your part of a husband toward her;
“And in particular, as you shall have your opportunity and ability, you will take proper care of her in sickness and in health, in prosperity and adversity; and that you will be true and faithful to her, and will cleave to her only, so long as God shall continue yours and her abode in such places as you can conveniently come together. . . . Do you thus promise?”
Clement said, “Oui.”
“You, Philomene, do now, in the presence of God and these witnesses, take Clement to be your husband;
“Promising that so far as your present relation as a servant shall admit, you will perform your part of a wife toward him: and in particular,
“You promise that you will love him; and that as you shall have the opportunity and ability, you will take proper care of him in sickness and in health, in prosperity and adversity; and will cleave to him only, so long as God shall continue his and your abode in such places as you can conveniently come together. . . . Do you thus promise?”
“Oui,” said Philomene.
“I then, with the consent of your masters and mistresses, do declare that you have license given you to be familiar together as husband and wife, so long as God shall continue your places of abode as aforesaid; and so long as you shall behave yourselves as it becomes servants to do:
“For you must both of you bear in mind that you remain still, as really and truly as ever, your master’s property, and therefore it will be justly expected, both by God and man, that you behave yourselves as obedient and faithful servants toward your respective masters and mistresses for the time being.”
The priest took a breath.
“Clement, you may salute the bride,” he said.
Clement fidgeted, looking to Philomene to give him some clue as to what to do next. Philomene could only give him a helpless shrug.
“You may kiss the bride now,” the priest said.
Clement took Philomene’s hand in his and brushed his lips quickly across her cheek, grinning sheepishly as he turned to face the room full of people, waiting for the next instruction.
And so they were bound together in the eyes of all who attended, as they already had been between themselves for some time, and married, after a fashion, as much as they were allowed to be.
* * *
Philomene delivered twin girls in the spring, with Oreline attending while Suzette was in the field with Ferrier. The babies were very small, but both seemed healthy. The two girls didn’t look alike, except for the similar looks of all newborns, with their jerky movements and changeling features. Clement saw his daughters for the first time on the following Saturday morning, when he rowed down to Ferrier’s farm.
It was Philomene’s scheme for the naming. The firstborn was named Elisabeth, after her grandmother, and the second twin Bethany, after Clement’s grandmother. They all quickly fell into the Creole custom of taking a part of the birth name for the common name, and in short order they could barely remember the christening names. Elisabeth became Bet, and Bethany became Thany.
Old Elisabeth scolded Philomene for changing Elisabeth to Bet, but she was so pleased with her granddaughter and the dramatic leap by two into the next generation of the family tree that everyone could tell her complaints carried no sting.
13
T he sky was dark, threatening rain, and Clement was anxious to be off before the storm broke. Dressed in his everyday pantaloons and loose shirt, he carried his only pair of shoes wrapped in his Sunday jacket. He hoisted the heavy packet of bearskins over his shoulder and stopped at Tessier’s big house for last-minute instructions.
A full season of planting and harvesting and planting again had passed since he and Philomene had married, and today was his day to present her with a real gift. He had gotten permission from Tessier to work on a rocking chair after his own duties were done, and from Ferrier he had permission to allow Philomene to keep the chair. He and Philomene, who were allowed to own nothing by law, not even themselves, would own this. Clement had taken to calling it “the moonlight chair,” since his labors were more by the light of the moon than by daylight.
Tessier, hat pulled low over his head, bushy eyebrows still visible, sat on the front gallery, braiding a horse’s leather rein. He bit off a large chaw of rich, dark tobacco and stashed it in his cheek before turning his attention to Clement.
“I’m going to trust you to get my boat back to me, boy,” Tessier said, using his tongue to adjust the wad in his cheek. “Narcisse Fredieu is waiting on those skins. Starting this early, you should be able to beat the storm coming. You got the pass?”
“Oui, M’sieu Tessier,” Clement said in his singsong slave voice, keeping his head bowed. “You can count on me, like always. I’ll look after that boat like it was one of my own baby girls. I’ll come rowing back on Sunday night, without it being none the worse for wear.”
“So, today your woman sees the chair, eh?”
“Oui, M’sieu Tessier,” Clement said. “I count on her surprise. Thank you for letting me work on it.”
“It was your own time, boy, and your money from smithing. Didn’t take anything away from me.”
For the last two years Clement had been serving as a blacksmith’s apprentice. His training came only when he could be spared from the field, but he made good use of what time he had. Mastering the shaping of hot metal in the barn gave him a feeling of working his head as well as his body, and a skilled man was more in keeping with the high-yellow woman he called his wife. He had earned a little money taking on extra tasks for some of the neighboring farmers in the evenings. The serious jobs went to either the gens de couleur libre who hired themselves out or to the regular blacksmith, but an occasional small job came his way that allowed him to save four bits here and a few picayunes there. Tessier let him keep half of all he earned and held the money for him.
“You be careful,” Tessier said. “The water is rising, and by the look, this one is more than a squall. I don’t want to see you lose my boat and get yourself drowned in the bargain. You, the boat, and the furs are worth good money. Get on before the storm takes hold.” He let loose a stream of tobacco juice in the dirt.
Clement carried his cargo to the landing and quickly covered the chair, the bearskins, and his extra clothes with an oilskin tarp, lashing them down with a cord around the cypress plank in the back of the dugout. He elevated the packet as high as he could get it away from the water sloshing in the boat bottom, making the narrow dugout harder to balance.
Clement struck off, imagining the look that was sure to come over Philomene’s face when he brought her the chair. She was the root of his world.
* * *
Clement hummed to himself, an upbeat melody to challenge the darkening of the morning sky. He pulled at the oars, making his way downriver, recognizing plantations and farms on both banks of Cane River. The river had a bite to it today, giving unexpected tugs in first one direction and then another as the currents changed.
He thought about the months it had taken to make the moonlight chair. Finding the oak wood had been easy, since trees and newly felled branches were plentiful in the woods surrounding the quarter on his plantation. The curves of the supports had been the most difficult for him to master, getting them to come out even, and he had redone them several times before he got it right. When he finished the construction he painstakingly carved two images along the wide back o
f the chair, the full-faced boldness of a brown bear near the top and, directly underneath, the silhouette of a deer in flight. On the front panel Clement carved the likeness of an owl. They were all a little more crude than he would have liked, but he was satisfied they could be recognized as what he had intended, and he was sure Philomene would appreciate the effort. The arms of the chair he studded with melted-down pieces from used horseshoe nails, and he fitted the bottom of the seat with the hide from one of the cows that ran free in the woods, caught and slaughtered at Tessier’s order. Tessier kept the meat from the cow and deducted several bits from the money he held for Clement in exchange for a piece of the hide. Clement cured the skin himself, a stinking job that left his hands tender from the salt brine. He worked by the light of the fire in the evening. The others in the quarter teased him about his moonlight chair as they went off to bed, but there was envy in their voices, too.
The dugout lurched. Tessier had been right. The water was rising dangerously, and it was difficult to keep control of the oars. Before he was even halfway down the river, the water started to swirl in strange patterns around him as he paddled. The sky opened suddenly, hurling rain, and the sun vanished behind the clouds at almost the same moment, giving the river a dark and sinister look.
Because he had grown up on the river, Clement respected its moods, but he was also confident of his skill with a boat. He pulled strong against the oars. Normally that would have been enough, but the front of the boat kept getting caught up in furious little circular pockets, carrying him in directions he did not intend. Clement started to sweat through his clothes, even though the weather was cool and damp, and he realized that his body was telling him what his head had not yet registered. He was afraid and was having trouble steering to either shore. Landings dotted the river every hundred yards or so, wherever there was a plantation or farm large enough to need access to the river. Although he was always within sight of land, he couldn’t get to it.
The water moved faster beneath him, and sheets of lightning crackled threateningly around him. Clement tried to scoop water out with the bailing gourds, and then his hands, but neither made any difference. He needed to put ashore anywhere he could manage and wait out the passing of the storm. The river slipped from dingy gray to black, now and then becoming so dark that it seemed nighttime, and the storm beat back the sun. At times he could judge his position only during frozen moments when a crack of lightning brightened the sky. By the time the booming echoes followed, Clement was back in the dark. Water began to come rushing at him from every direction, seeping up from below, falling from above, driven from the side by the wind that drove the wet into his face and eyes. Lurching waves brought water in over the low sides of the dugout, as if he were out in open sea rather than on a river.
A strong blast of wind blew off one corner of the tarp, leaving it snapping menacingly in the changeling wind. He could hear the play of tarp against wood, tarp against cargo, and the light rope that had held it in place was a dangerous nipping thing, at the whim of each sharp gust. The only way to save the cargo would be to bring the boat safely to shore without tipping over in the choppy water, a task advancing in hopelessness as the storm wore on and the waterlogged dugout rode lower in the water.
All at once he felt an insistent tug of the water, different from the random tossing he had managed to control so far. Clement looked in front of the boat to his right and saw a suckhole forming, widening in its greed to pull everything it could to its core. He gave up on the idea of being able to save the boat and, in the same instant, yielded to a wink of recognition. It was Philomene’s glimpsing of the end for him, by water. The thought did not keep him helpless for long. He had no intention of dying just yet, leaving the wife he had always wanted and two daughters. If it was his time, it would have to fight to take him.
He made his choice, working the chair free from under the tarp by feel, the heavy oilskin and the free end of the rope snapping and lashing at him. It caught him several times on his body, he couldn’t distinguish where, but he felt a sharp sting as something caught the soft flesh under his eye, opening him up. It was raw. There was no time to investigate. Standing as high as he dared, and straddling the boat with his feet placed flat against the cypress planks on the side that made up the hull, Clement balanced in the boat the best he could. He threw the chair as far as his strength and equilibrium would allow.
Heart beating wildly, he dove into the cold, rain-pocked river in the same direction as the chair, as far from the drag of the suckhole as he could get. When he broke the water’s surface, his lungs pulling in fresh air that came mixed with blinding drops of rain, Clement bumped into something solid. It was the rocking chair, still afloat and bobbing in the roiling river. Clement grabbed hold of the chair with one hand and used the power of his legs and one free arm to swim with all of his capacity, feeling the current massaging his body as if innocent of harmful intent. When he felt he must have swum far enough from the suckhole, he lifted his head to take a quick look around in the water to get his bearings. The rain was varied now, beating down on him hard and soft by intervals, driving into his eyes, and Clement made his plan to swim to the opposite shore, away from the suckhole. His muscles had begun to ache, and a cramp in his left leg formed a hard knot of pain that set his teeth on edge.
When the bank was close the choppy water came to his aid, pushing him this time toward the safety of solid earth. He never let go of the chair, paddling and swimming as best he could, until his toes gripped the slimy mud that let him know he had reached the bank at last.
Clement clawed his way up the slippery slope, aware that he had to keep moving, pulling his knotted, worthless leg behind him. He hung on to the chair, crawling out of the water as if separating himself from the underbelly of the river. He fell back as often as he moved forward, inching his way in stuttering forward progress. He used whatever seemed strong enough to support his weight, cypress knees, branches, palmettos that cut at his hand but propelled him forward, although slowly. He pulled himself closer and closer to safety, away from the reach of the waters that in some spots spilled over the bank completely. At one point he slithered like an alligator on his stomach in the red clay, one hand and arm for pulling, the other for protecting and keeping the chair close to him.
At last he came to rest, when he was sure the wet he felt around him was rain and not the river. He closed his eyes for just a minute, to rest and gather strength, but opened them again with a start as he realized that if he did not keep moving, he would curl himself along the forest floor and drift off to sleep.
Clement knew well the lay of the land along the banks of Cane River from making so many deliveries for Tessier, but he wasn’t exactly sure where he was. He was certain that he was on the left bank, instead of the right bank where he needed to be, but it wasn’t clear to him how far down he had gone. The sky had ripened into a pale red color, as the sun fought to escape, and he was able to make out shapes better than he had before. He looked back in the direction of where he thought the suckhole should be, but he couldn’t see it. It had changed its location or perhaps disappeared entirely. He saw what could have been pieces of smashed wood floating on top of the water near the other bank, but the pouring sheets of rain obscured his view. Even though it was the middle of the day, it was dark and dim, and he wasn’t sure of anything. If it was the boat, he thought, he could not have gone back for it anyway.
His muscles complained. The spurt that had allowed him to escape had played out, run its course, and it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other and move himself forward, he and the chair. Incredibly, the chair looked to be whole, except for gouges in the wood he knew he could fix. It was soaked through, as was he, but of the two of them, the chair was in better shape.
He walked through the woods uncertainly at first, following the line of the bank, until he came to the splayed live oak tree he recognized as marking the Greneaux plantation, on the wrong side of the river. He carried his
trophy chair, weary, until he came to Monette’s Ferry. The regular boatman sat under the protection of his lean-to wrapped in oilskin, a wiry gens de couleur libre who bit off a plug of tobacco as Clement approached.
“I need to get to the other side, M’sieu. I got caught in the storm.”
“I can see that myself. You’re lucky. It’s only habit got me out here today. I can get you across, but you tell Monsieur Tessier that’s twelve and a half cents added to his bill.”
There was a posted sign, which Clement could not read, but he knew that it advertised the rates for passage across to the other bank of the river. Twenty-five cents for a man and a horse, $1 for any four-wheeled vehicle pulled by two horses, and $1.50 for a loaded wagon or coach with four horses, including the driver and passengers. He had been across many times with Tessier and just as many without him.
“Where you going?” the boatman asked.
“I need to get across to M’sieu Narcisse Fredieu’s and then back home. I lost my load to a suckhole, and the boat is gone.”
“Only a fool would go out in that storm this morning. By the looks of you, the storm won.”
The boatman offered Clement a grimy hand rag, and Clement wiped his face and cleared his eyes. When he pulled back the towel, it was stained with streaks of brownish red, and he cautiously touched the spot at the crest of his cheek where the skin had opened. The gash was tender but not too deep, and still running red. It had missed his eye.
Cane River Page 14