The Undertaker's Assistant

by Amanda Skenandore

  The woman nodded, then looked at Effie. “This your wife?”

  “No, ma’am.” Tom looked down, the dark coloring of his cheeks deepening. “This is Effie. She was sold to Mr. Saulnier during the War. Worked his land a spell before escaping. We were hoping someone about these parts might remember her and them other slaves brought up from the city with her.”

  Effie extended her hand. The old woman grasped it with surprising strength and pulled her close. Her free hand patted the planes of Effie’s face, the dip and swell of her cheekbones, the rise of her nose and the slope of her jaw. “You couldn’t have been but a babe then.”

  “Seven, according to the bill of sale.”

  “Weren’t supposed to sell ones that young. Not that it ever stopped ’em.” The woman sighed. “Effie. We got several here about this bayou who done slaved for Mr. Saulnier. Several more a little farther on who still work that land. I’ll see who I can rustle up.”

  Effie helped her hang the last of the washing while Tom passed out candied pecans to an ever-swelling crowd of children. By suppertime they had a bowl of rice and crawfish in their hands, and a worn couch and a bedroll in the front room of the woman’s home on which to sleep. Word had spread of their arrival and people gathered around, dust-covered and sweaty from the day’s labors.

  Effie sat on the woman’s front porch, her bustle tucked beneath her, legs dangling over the side. The moss-speckled wood creaked beneath her weight. Tom stood beside her, shaking hands and repeating his introduction. Then he listened. Those in the crowd were tentative at first, crossing their arms and glancing over their shoulders. But once the first spoke, others quickly chimed in.

  The men talked of heavy debts and diminishing wages. They wanted their own land, but rarely had a dollar to squirrel away. They wanted their wives out of the fields. A colored school for their children.

  “There isn’t a school here?” Effie asked.

  “Nearest school’s twenty miles yonder in Thibodaux,” one of the men said.

  “Don’t take no colored children anyhow,” said another.

  Tom flashed a wistful smile. “New Orleans is likely the only place in the whole South with integrated schools, and the White League’s made such a hullabaloo about it, I doubt they’ll last long.”

  Mention of the White League brought forth a slew of new complaints. Armed Regulators roaming about with lynching rope conspicuously hitched to their saddles. Crops plundered. Threats of whippings, beatings, and worse against anyone who voted the Republican ticket in the coming election.

  “My boss wants me to sign some Loyalty Certificate, saying I promise to vote Democratic,” one among the crowd said. “Scared if I don’t, he’ll fire me. Or worse.”

  “A colored man from Lafourche Crossing was kilt just last month.”

  “The Smiths down by Chevreuil Bayou was run off their farm.”

  Anger wrestled with the fear in their voices. Mr. Guillot’s body, stiff and swollen, bullied into her mind. The vagabond from the morgue.

  She stood and walked away from the crowd. The last rivulets of sunset pooled at the far horizon. Frogs croaked from the nearby waterways. Emotion bloated inside her, pressing at the underside of her skin. Would that she had her trocar and could drive it into her gut to relieve this pressure.

  The old woman—Maddie was her name—came up and handed her a burning cattail. “Keeps the skeeters away.”

  The smell was familiar to Effie, not only the woody fragrance of the smoke but the earthy scent around her. The moss-draped oaks, the still water of the nearby swamp, the blooming spider lilies. The reminiscence hit her not as it had at the slave pen, sharp and sudden, but with the almost sleepy awareness of one coming to from a dream. She breathed in deep and let the scent fill her lungs, hoping to fill the familiar surroundings with concrete memories. Nothing.

  A fleck of hot ash flitted onto her hand, burning her skin. She snuffed out the cattail and retreated to bed.

  * * *

  In the morning, Tom borrowed a bony old mare—the only horse anyone in town owned—and traveled to meet with men from the neighboring communities. Several people remarked how well he road despite his missing leg. Effie had grown so used to his smooth gait and nonchalant demeanor she’d all but forgotten the injury.

  She was glad not to be going with him. Last night’s disquiet had only just begun to deflate, and any more talk of politics might start it building again. Besides, she had her own affairs to attend. No sooner had she and Maddie finished scrubbing the breakfast pans than an old man arrived in a dilapidated box cart.

  “This here’s Joe Watkins,” Maddie said. “He born at the Saulnier place and worked there till Emancipation. He’ll take you around, see if anyone who came up with you still here.”

  Effie shook his hand and clambered into the cart beside him. The wheels squeaked with each rotation and the loose-fitting side boards rumbled, but they managed a conversation over the din. He asked many of the same questions Maddie had yesterday—when Effie had come to the Saulnier place, how old she’d been, how many slaves had been in the coffle with her up from New Orleans—then sat quietly a moment with her answers.

  “Don’t reckon I remember ya, but them War years were funny about the plantation.”

  She stared out at the threads of mist still tangled about the underbrush and tried to swallow her disappointment. “I came up with a man. Jonesy he was called. Young, early twenties maybe.”

  “Jonesy . . . big feller, right?”

  Effie nodded with such vigor her bonnet slipped down over her eyes.

  “Yeah, I ’member him, I think.”

  “Is he still here?”

  “Hmmm . . . Jonesy.” He took a swill from the water jug beside him and smacked his lips several times. “Nah, don’t think so. But we ask Lula. She ought be about today.”

  “What about Mr. Saulnier? Would he remember?”

  “He done passed a few years back. Lost both his boys in the War. Just him and the missus till he died. She done sold what she could and moved back to be closer to her kinfolk. Charleston, I think.”

  Another disappointment. She tried not to let it rattle her, made a point of keeping her shoulders from slumping and forced a smile when Mr. Watkins looked over.

  They passed over a narrow bridge as creaky and weather-bleached as the wagon, then through a patchwork of forest and fallow fields. She wiped the stickiness from her brow and tried to conjure specific memories to hang upon the familiar landscape. Soon they were back in the company of rows of sugarcane. Dark figures dotted the fields, backs bent over the green leaves, clothes wet through with perspiration.

  “Not much different than before the War. Plantin’, growin’, cuttin’, millin’—we’s busy all year round,” Mr. Watkins said. “Mean work it is. When they’s ready for harvest, them canes be taller than your head.”

  He asked for the second time how old she’d been when Massa Saulnier bought her. Seven, she yelled over the wagon’s rattle.

  “You seem like a strong girl. Bet you was out in the field with the rest of us.”

  Like the forests and smell the night before, his description of work in the cane fields stirred nothing more than a vague recollection. Her past was all around her, yet still beyond her reach.

  Effie jumped from the wagon without bothering to ask Mr. Watkins to slow the mule. Soft red dirt cushioned her landing. She walked into the field, letting her hand trail over the thin ribbed leaves that drooped from the canes. The lower leaves, just starting to brown, rasped against her skirt. She closed her eyes and let the sun’s warmth sink into her skin. The air hung still, trapping the dampness and buzz of insects like a sleeve around her.

  Yes, she’d been here, at work in the fields. She remembered the way the leaves’ pointy tips had pricked her bare forearms. She remembered the rustling sound that heralded those rare but heavenly breezes. Snatches of those days bombarded her then: flicking away the dried mud from her skin after hours of weeding, waddling along
the rows with a heavy water bucket and ladle, lumbering toward the wagon with an armload of newly cut canes.

  But something wasn’t right. She ungartered her stockings and flung them off along with her boots. The soil was cool and silky beneath her soles. It swallowed her feet when she stepped and squished between her toes. Phantom sounds rose around her—voices lifted in song, knives hacking against cane, a whip cracking somewhere in the distance.

  Despite the sun’s heat, Effie shivered. She listened, straining to hear that rumbling baritone above the others. Yes, there it was. Jonesy.

  When she climbed back into the box cart, Mr. Watkins asked no questions, but urged the mule onward. They reached the heart of the plantation and he pointed out the brick sugar works building and several rows of weather-rotted slave cabins. Effie tried to dredge from these a more continuous stream of memory, but again only flashes came, nothing that linked to her life before the slave pen. Her mind, it seemed, had born the ravages of time no better than these untended cabins, worm-eaten and rusted. Foolish to have thought she could raise intact something so long interred.

  The vast plantation house had fared little better than the cabins. Faded white paint peeled from the grand colonnades. Vines swallowed half the facade.

  “Some feller in St. Louis owns it now,” Mr. Watkins said. “This and about near all the land. Sho did shine back in the day.”

  He seemed almost wistful, and strangely the neglect and decay roused a similar pang in Effie. Not for her former master, nor the sons who’d died in the War. Not for the house or the cabins or the crumbling sugar works. But for the connections forged and broken here, now weathered to dust. At least some testament to it should remain. Even the chains and shackles would someday rust and crumble. Then who could say it happened at all?

  “What about this Miss Lula?” she asked, fearing Mr. Watkins too had lost himself in the past. “Might we still talk to her?”

  They found Miss Lula with her lunch pail sitting with a group of other field workers in the shade of an oak tree. They all knew Mr. Watkins and greeted him warmly, dragging over a stump for him to sit on and pushing chunks of cornbread and cold chicken into his hands. They offered food to Effie too, but she declined. Her stomach hadn’t stilled since leaving New Orleans.

  “You ’member a young buck that come in the War years, name a Johnny?” Mr. Watkins asked Lula.

  “Jonesy,” Effie said.

  Lula bit off a hunk of biscuit and chewed for some time. “Yeah, I remember him.” She turned to Effie. “You some kin of his?”

  “No, a . . . friend. We came up in the same coffle from New Orleans.”

  Lula cocked her head and stared. “I’ll be! Little Effie. You sho did grow up big and fancy. What you doin’ back?”

  “I’m trying to piece together my life before the War. Jonesy and I were together in New Orleans before Mr. Saulnier bought us. I’m hoping he might know something.”

  “Why you talk all funny like?” one of the other laborers asked.

  She spun the shortest explanation she could, eager to return to the topic of Jonesy and wary of spawning more questions, leaving out all mention of what Adeline termed her unfortunate occupation.

  “But about Jonesy,” she said when they were satisfied. “Does he yet live in these parts? I’d so like to see him again.”

  Lula flashed a curious expression, then shook her head slowly. “No one seen him since you’s all run off. We thought since neither of you was brought back by them patrollers that you made it to safety together.”

  Effie tried to wind back from her recollection of hiding in the grass at the edge of the Union camp to when she’d been with Jonesy in the swamp. He’d carried her as they fled, his arms tight around her, his heart thumping steadily in her ear, and then . . . nothing. She squeezed her eyes closed and tried to envision it. Only muted daylight shone behind her lids.

  “Real shame about all that,” Lula said. “Some of them other boys weren’t so lucky.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Massa had them two who the patrollers brought back covered in hot tar and nailed to the fence. Kept ’em there even after they was dead so no one else would think of runnin’ off to join the Yanks.”

  Effie was grateful she hadn’t eaten. Bile burned in her throat and rose the longer she listened. Had she slowed them down after all? Had they been right to want to leave her behind? She looked at the ground between her feet. A fat millipede scampered between the tufts of grass and burrowed into the red soil. “When I followed them into the swamps that night . . .” Her voice caught. “I didn’t know they were running away.”

  Lula shook the biscuit crumbs from her skirt. “You always was on Jonesy like a wart on a frog. At his heels every morning on the way out to the field, beside him every night by the fire, gobblin’ up everything he don’t eat, though your cabin be clear across the yard.”

  “You talk like I was a stray.”

  “You was!” She balled up her lunch cloth and tossed it into her pail. “Queer little thing, as I remember.”

  Effie stood. She wished she were back on the boat bound for New Orleans. A mosquito landed on the back of her neck. She slapped it dead and wiped the smear of blood off on her skirt. “That’s all you know?”

  “Don’t take no offense. All orphans is strays. And Jonesy didn’t seem to mind much . . . ’cept . . .”

  “Except what?”

  “Well, only one of you’s here.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Effie carried Lula’s words with her the rest of that day and through the next. They sat with her on the steamboat as they chugged back to New Orleans a day early. Tom said it was because he’d made it round to all the settlements and towns and best get back to update the big bugs on the goings-on here. But Effie knew they’d left on account of her. She’d not managed a smile, not even a fake one, since returning from the old Saulnier plantation.

  Only one of you’s here.

  Just because he’d not made it to the Union line with her didn’t mean Jonesy was dead. They’d gotten separated was all. By that time of the War, the Yanks held much of southern Louisiana. Maybe he ended up at a different camp. Or stowed away on a boat and made it downriver to New Orleans.

  She would search the War records. The enlistment rolls, pension applications, contraband camp filings. Adeline or Samson would know how to get such documents. His name was bound to turn up.

  Tom offered to walk her home when their steamer docked at the levee, but Effie declined with a flat no. It struck her only after they departed she ought to have added thank you. Instead of heading up Poydras toward Mrs. Neale’s, she took Canal, then Royal Street into the Quarter. The streets were still crowded, despite summer’s quickening, thick with the smell of hot pepper and roses.

  She started toward Adeline’s house, but then realized it was Sunday, the day of Mr. Chauvet’s fête. Samson would be there too. Not an hour had passed in St. James that her thoughts didn’t circle back to him. She found him in the fields, laboring as she had done all those years ago. She found him in the lengthening shadows of the slave cabins, where he too must have hidden from the sweltering heat and sun. She heard the echo of his voice in the sharecroppers’ woeful tales.

  But with her wind-snarled hair and travel-rumpled dress, Effie was hardly fit to call at Mr. Chauvet’s. Her feet slowed, and she thought to turn around. Best return to the boardinghouse and wash the St. James mud from between her toes, the stench of river and burning cattails from her skin, and set about polishing her buttons to quiet her mind.

  But what of this pressure, threatening like the noxious effluviums of the dead, to bust her from within? Three days gone and only a spattering of new memories to show for it. Nothing that connected her to kin. Only Jonesy. Who’d not been seen or heard from since they’d run away into the swamps.

  Had Lula been right? Had Effie been nothing more than a stray to him? Like a wart on a frog. Had she been the reason the patrollers found them?

&n
bsp; Effie kept walking, farther into the Quarter. Her arms ached from carrying her travel bag, but she did not slow. Adeline had mentioned St. Phillip Street when speaking of Mr. Chauvet, and she headed there in hopes of finding his house.

  She wouldn’t trespass beyond the foyer or tarry long. Wouldn’t ruin the fête with her dour mood and drab attire. She and Adeline could speak in the carriageway, the kitchen, out on the street. Effie didn’t care. She only needed Adeline to tell her Jonesy wasn’t dead. To reassure her they would find his name on some ledger or roll, even as they’d failed to do with her kin.

  Then Adeline would fetch Samson for her and he’d walk her home. How foolish she’d been to dither over his proposal. Would that she were already his wife and needn’t part with him on Mrs. Neale’s steps and pass night’s hours alone.

  The afternoon sunlight was waning when she reached St. Phillip Street. Several stately townhouses lined the road. She asked a flower peddler if she knew which residence belonged to a Monsieur Chauvet. The girl, a dark-skinned Creole with dirt-stained palms, shrugged and shook her head.

  “He’s hosting a party. You might have seen a line of carriages earlier.”

  The girl pointed to a wide, three-story home down the way. Effie bought a gardenia bloom from the girl for her trouble and threaded the stem through one of the buttonholes of her jacket. A small improvement to her tired appearance. And certainly to the smell of burning coal and river weed and mud that clung to the fibers of her dress.

  Two homes the size of Mrs. Neale’s could fit within the residence the peddler had directed her to. White molding crowned the brick facade with a wrought-iron balcony stretching the width of the second-story. More molding and a fanlight window capped the front door.

  Voices sounded from within. Laughter. Clanking glasses and the strings of a mandolin. Effie hesitated, wishing herself across town in the quiet of her small room, but desperate to see Adeline and Samson.

  A servant in a crisp, tailored suit answered when she knocked. He eyed her like she were a fishmonger trying to sell last week’s catch, and bid her wait—not within the chandelier-lit hallway, but on the steps—while he gave Mr. Chauvet her name.