Cane River

by Lalita Tademy

  “We can move all your personals with you, anything you want,” Joseph said. “I have to do this, Emily. None of you are safe here. I’m not safe. You never have to worry. I’ll take care of you and the children for the rest of your life, but there’s no other way. They’ll hurt us all if we go on as we’ve been. I’ll come see you in the new house.”

  Joseph took a breath. He was still standing just inside the doorway, circling his floppy sunhat around and around in his blunt-tipped hands. His movements were slow and heavy, and he had been drinking more than usual.

  “She’s not coming here to replace you, ’Tite. That’s not the purpose of this. I’ve told her about the children, she knows how I feel about them, and they can visit. I’ve talked to Angelite and T.O. They’re old enough to understand, especially Angelite. She and Jacques already had to make their choice.” He advanced farther into the room, until he was close enough to reach out and touch Emily, but he kept both hands on his hat. “The little ones need to realize their father isn’t abandoning them. They’re what I’m proudest of in my life. We can’t marry, we always knew that, and we can’t live under the same roof now, either. Even your father knew, and tried to warn me when he was alive. They’ll come for us, by fire or bullet or rope, and we won’t even know who did it. It is already hard for me to do business in town. This is the way it has to be.”

  Emily lifted her chin. “You do this thing and I can’t be held to loving you again.” Even as she spoke the words, she recognized the falsity in them.

  Joseph sat warily in the straight-backed chair, as if he were a stranger in his own house. He pulled out the pint bottle of whiskey he carried during the day and lifted it to his lips. It was almost empty. Emily watched the last of the dark brown liquid disappear.

  “At least you’ll be alive,” he finally said, wiping the wet from his mustache. “At least we’ll all be alive.”

  He stood, slightly unsteady, and disappeared through the front door.

  The evening light faded, and later that night Joseph still hadn’t returned. Emily started her nighttime preparations, making the rounds in the house, checking each of her children. She spent a moment looking at her portrait over the fireplace before retiring to the bedroom, where she turned down the wick on the lamp to begin her wait for Joseph to come to the bed they had shared the entirety of her adult life.

  He never came.

  * * *

  The next morning broke clear and dry, a perfect May Louisiana day. Emily had Angelite bring her a fresh washbasin of water, then sent her out to see to the children’s breakfast and dress. Emily had washed, starched, and ironed everything two days before and instructed them all to wear their Sunday clothes. She settled herself in front of the dressing table in her bedroom and spent a good portion of the early morning there. Joseph could milk the cow himself. Her movements were exact, with no joy to the preening. Today she had to look her best. She was determined that the inevitable move be civil and orderly. She piled her hair high on top of her head in a loose topknot, designed to look more effortless than it really was, working faithfully to catch each stray strand that misbehaved.

  Laboring in front of her dressing table mirror, she heard masculine voices outside, but she did not break her morning preparations to investigate. When she was satisfied that she smelled fresh and that her hair was perfect, she called for Angelite to help pull her corset tight. She picked her best dress from the armoire, a long, dark gray frock that fell to the ground in three layers, cinched tight at the waist and accented by a jewel-buckled belt that emphasized the petiteness of her figure. The sleeves were massive and tulip puffed at the top, in the fashion of the day, and narrowed as the material traveled the length of her arm, ending with six round buttons that sparkled if the light caught them the right way. There was delicate black lace at the cuffs and matching black lace at the collar. It was Joseph’s favorite dress. She removed her hat from its hatbox and set it on the bed. Emily drew on her delicate black transparent gloves with the intricate spidery pattern. They were cut off below the knuckles and left her long, elegant fingers exposed. The gloves were the first grownup gift Joseph had ever given to her.

  By the sounds, the men were gathering outside. Emily gave herself one last look into the mirror, took a deep, steadying breath, and entered the front room, where she inspected her children, each outfitted in their best visiting attire. Angelite held Buck in her arms, and from T.O. all the way down to Mary, they stared at her anxious and wide-eyed, stiff in their Sunday finery, but they did not speak. Only when she satisfied herself that they looked their best did she pull back the curtains and peer into the front yard.

  There were three buckboard wagons and several restless horses already harnessed out front. Three white men loitered around them, looking aimless and slightly chagrined. That didn’t include Joseph, who stood off to the side, alone. He still wore his workclothes from the day before.

  Emily recognized each of the men. Antoine Morat, Joseph Ferrier, and John Fletcher. Joseph’s friends, lowly placed on society’s ladder, the best he could do as long as he was with her. This had to be one of their more unpleasant chores on Joseph’s behalf. These men performed his odds and ends without questions. They had come to the house in more settled days, and she’d served them dinner and wine at her table or provided a cool drink after they’d witnessed a business transaction or moved oxen from one pen to another. Often they came just to drink and tell lies to pass an evening. Today they waited for Joseph’s command to move her away.

  She gathered up the smallest ones, Mary and Little Joseph and Josephine. Emily wanted her family above reproach. “Keep a close eye on them, Angelite.”

  “I’ll take care of you, Mère.” T.O. stepped forward, serious, in his black suit, starched white shirt, and floppy black tie. “I’ll find a way to take care of all of us.” His eyes were like coal, blazing from his ashen face with the bravado of a frightened man-boy of fifteen. A lock of his sandy hair had defied the comb. She licked her fingers and smoothed it back.

  “You are the man of the family now, but today we do this my way,” Emily answered. “Help Angelite mind after your sisters and brother. I don’t want any talking or crying in front of those men, not by any of us. Keep everyone in the house and keep them quiet. Will you do that for me, T.O.?”

  “Oui, Maman.”

  “Thank you.”

  Emily smoothed her dress one more time. She tilted up her chin, pushed back her shoulders, and slowly stepped outside onto the front gallery.

  “Monsieur Joseph, these are my rosebushes. How will you give them to me?” She kept her voice strong, as if she were exchanging pleasantries with a shopkeeper.

  They all turned to look, six pairs of eyes from inside the house and four from outside.

  “Come now, Emily,” Joseph said. “We’re going to move whatever you want. You just take these boys in the house with you and point out what you need. We have plenty of space in the wagons.”

  “The horse in the barn is mine, given to me by my father. And I’m not going anywhere without my rosebushes.”

  “We can dig up some of the bushes so you can replant them at the new house.”

  “It has to be before three o’clock,” Emily said.

  “What?” Joseph said.

  “You know it’s bad luck to touch the roses after three o’clock,” Emily said. “The roses are your responsibility.”

  “Emily, don’t do this.” Joseph shifted his weight forward and looked directly at her. His tone turned hard and dangerous, caught between his two audiences.

  Without further word, Emily went back into the house, leaving the door open behind her. There seemed to be no motion anywhere, inside or out, except for hers. Her children watched her carefully, waiting. The oil painting mocked her from its position of honor over the fireplace in the front room. She allowed herself only an instant to wonder at the strange, overconfident girl captured on canvas, hand resting lightly on the chair, staring out at a future full of pro
mise. Emily moved quickly. She had to drag a chair over and stand on tiptoe, working at the hook and wire to get the portrait down. She didn’t call on anyone to help her, and each was hesitant to come to her aid unasked. The painting had never been removed before, and the rectangular patch of wallpaper underneath looked fresh and new compared with the familiar pattern exposed to the air and sun. Emily gently placed the painting next to her rocking chair and sat down calmly.

  “Come,” she said to her children, trying to give a reassuring smile, motioning to the couch and chairs.

  They followed suit and sat down tentatively, alternating between keeping their eyes down and glancing apprehensively at this tiny woman who was their mother.

  As if a signal had been given, the men moved inside. It was Joseph who decided what went to the new house. Emily asked for nothing other than the rosebushes, her horse, and the painting. She was unresponsive to questions the men put to her, and they stopped asking. She rocked. The men edged around them reluctantly, throwing guarded glances toward her and the silent children, loading those things that Joseph pointed out. Except for Antoine Morat. He caught Emily’s eye once when Joseph was in another room, and Emily was sure she saw a slight gloat to his smile.

  The men loaded up all of the children’s beds, miscellaneous furniture, lanterns, and most of the kitchenware. One of the wagons was for livestock, hogs, and chickens, and they tied a milking cow behind it. Last, Joseph loaded up her dressing table and the rocking chair she had been sitting in, both gifts he had given in happier days.

  They used the lead wagon for the human cargo. Joseph Billes’s family, Emily, children, and grandchild, were helped into the buckboard and began the journey to their new home two miles away. Joseph himself drove the horses forward, in silence, and the other wagons followed. The strange caravan made its way from the river side of Aloha over to the wooded side on Cornfine Bayou where the new house waited.

  When they arrived the men began to unload and carry the heaviest furniture into the house.

  “Come to the barn, ’Tite. This is important,” Joseph said. He untethered Emily’s dapple gray horse from the back of the wagon and led him to the barn.

  Emily left the children in the wagon and followed. Out of sight and earshot of the others, Joseph pulled a package from the saddlebag and handed Emily a small canvas bag.

  “There’s five hundred dollars in cash here, ’Tite. Don’t let anyone know you have it, and hide it well. If there’s anything you need, just send T.O. over. He can come for me anytime, to the house or the store or the mill.”

  “It appears that suddenly you see the wisdom in me having money of my own,” Emily said, but there was no satisfaction in it.

  She stuffed the sack between two piles of hay and collected her children out of the hot sun. T.O. drew up water from the well, and they waited in the barn until the men left. Before going into the new house for the first time, Emily dampened the roots of the rosebushes the men had left leaning against the gallery.

  “We will replant them along the side of the house first thing in the morning,” Emily said to her children. “There is never any excuse for a bare-dirt yard.”

  * * *

  Joseph Billes married Lola Grandchamp the next day in a small, private ceremony in Cloutierville and brought his bride back to his house on Billes Landing.

  To the townspeople, Joseph Billes had mended his ways and married white, a signal that it was safe to return to the substance of their own pursuits.

  * * *

  Joe Billis was very fond of His Children but all his friends demanded Him to a White Girl He did.

  --Cousin Gurtie Fredieu, written family history, 1975

  * * *

  38

  T wo weeks after the incident at Billes Landing, on a muggy midsummer day, T.O. came to Philomene’s farm. Suzette sat on the front gallery, snapping beans for supper, and she could feel her great-grandson’s misery even before he got off his horse. T.O. dismounted, respected her politely by tipping his hat, and went straight away to the side garden where Philomene tended the tomatoes.

  “It’s Maman,” Suzette overheard T.O. say. “She will not get up from her bed. She won’t eat.”

  “Does she have fever?” Philomene asked. Alarm made her voice rise.

  T.O. reddened. “It isn’t urgent. She is not that kind of sick.”

  Philomene brushed past T.O. without stopping to take off her work gloves or change her bonnet. Harnessing the mare, she called to Suzette, “I will be back when I get to the bottom of this.” Philomene rode straight-saddle in the direction of Emily’s new house on Cornfine Bayou, T.O. straining to keep up on his horse beside her.

  Night had fallen and the full moon was high when Philomene returned alone, worry chiseled across her forehead. “We must act quickly, Maman,” she said to Suzette. “The girl is hurt, she needs us near. Emily doesn’t know what it is to be without a man, crying all day for what is already gone.”

  “Emily could move back here,” Suzette said. “We can make room.”

  “No,” said Philomene. “Joseph put the land in the name of the children. If she leaves the property, even for a short while, there could be trouble later. We must move there.”

  Suzette knew Philomene well enough to know she had already decided on some course of action and would be almost impossible to sway. She protested anyway. “There are twelve years of sweat, prayers, and Sunday dinners put into this house.”

  Philomene untied and removed her bonnet, and Suzette noticed for the first time a lone gray strand in her daughter’s hair.

  “I made the arrangement already with Monsieur Billes,” said Philomene, putting aside the sweat-stained hat, her face hard. “That was the reason for my delay. I agreed to sell him this property, minus a piece for Bet to stay on as her own. In exchange, we get land on the other side of the river next to Emily’s.” She struck a more conciliatory tone. “We earned every acre here, Maman, and it served us well, but this parcel was the poorest of Narcisse’s land, ringed by swamps. It gave our family a start, but most have gone on to their own lives now, or died, and the farm is getting to be too much for us alone. We’ll have less land, but the soil around Emily’s new place is richer, the house bigger and already built.”

  “I am old, almost at the end of life, and you would uproot me again?” Suzette heard the whine in her own voice. Although she spoke the words, and her mind could reach back over seven decades, it was almost impossible for Suzette to accept herself as an old woman. Time had forced her to create a special place in her mind for death, a place already packed to overflowing, so many of the people who shaped her already gathered there. Elisabeth, her sister Palmire, Gerasíme, Nicolas Mulon, Marraine Doralise, Oreline Derbanne, Narcisse Fredieu. She had outlived them all.

  “We can bear the move across the river to Cornfine Bayou, for Emily.” Philomene stood unwavering in the face of Suzette’s resistance. “Family does for family, and young life around will do us both good.”

  * * *

  The night before the move, Suzette rummaged in her private storage, a cigar box where she kept her special things. Inside was a broken string of white rosary beads, an old oak figurine Gerant had carved, and her tatted lace handkerchief. She removed the shabby cowhide strip Nicolas had given her and rubbed it for luck. Memories of long-ago days broke free. She felt her whole life had been spent traveling from one cramped space to another. Always there seemed to be a next place.

  As Philomene checked the house before turning in to bed, she came upon Suzette, reflecting. “You seem lost in thought,” she said, entering the room.

  “I’ve been thinking about a last name,” Suzette said.

  “You have a last name, Maman. Madame Mulon.”

  “If I can pack up and start fresh at my age,” Suzette said, “I can change my last name.” One of the few advantages of growing old, she decided, was the freedom hidden in it. People seemed to relax their expectations, suddenly allowing so much more, word or deed. “
Mère Elisabeth is gone, bless her soul, and Nicolas’s people never did want me to be one of them. There’s no need to hang on to Jackson or Mulon. From now on, everyone is to call me Suzette DeNegre.”

  It amused Suzette to take a new name, especially one of her own making, insisting they all call her by something entirely different. If she felt like it, she might even change her last name again. If she felt like it.

  * * *

  At Emily’s new house Suzette took as a personal campaign the effort to save the transplanted rosebushes, whose flowers were wilted and drooping since the short journey from Billes Landing to Cornfine Bayou. She pruned back stems to the five-leaf, slow-soaked the bushes to encourage deep rooting, and set traps for beetles. Already she saw improvement.

  All of the women shared chores, helped tend Emily’s children, looked after the chickens and livestock, put in a vegetable garden. Family Sunday dinners moved with Philomene and Suzette to the other side of the Red River, to Cornfine Bayou.

  In the beginning the house was unfamiliar, and Suzette had great difficulty keeping still in bed. From her room she listened to the night’s quiet sounds or pushed her feet into slippers to walk the house before returning to bed. One night, prowling noiselessly down the narrow hallway toward the kitchen, she heard the subdued hum of conversation. Philomene’s reassuring voice played counterpoint to Emily’s hollow-toned dejection. Not wanting to disturb their intimacy, Suzette stayed silent, listening.

  “It is difficult for you to believe at this moment, but you can survive this,” Philomene said.

  Emily’s voice sounded limp. “I know you mean well, Maman, but you can’t understand. There is no happiness left for me. Surviving isn’t enough.”

  “You have never allowed sadness around you, child. It will be that way again.”

  “Why, Maman?” Emily asked. “Why would you give up your farm to move here?”

  “A family belongs together.”