“But I’m still alive,” I said with satisfaction. Then it seemed the darkness around me was as much behind my eyes as in front of them, and I gave up trying to see through it.
WHEN I OPENED my eyes again, I was looking at a black hand. The light was soft, pinkish, and there was a wheezing sound coming from somewhere behind me; it sounded like a torn bellows. I moved my fingers and understood that the hand was my own. The mud on my palm cracked open, revealing the pale flesh beneath. My mouth was as dry as the mud, my head a circlet of pain that emanated down, then out to my shoulder, where it became a fire. When I tried to sit up, nothing happened. I blinked, gazing up into the maze of limbs and leaves over my face. It must be just dawn, I thought. I tried turning onto my side, away from the burning shoulder. This time I was successful. I pulled myself up onto my good arm. I knew where I was, I remembered how I had gotten there. But what was this whistling at my back? Carefully I turned my head. I was reminded that my cheek was torn, my jaw in some new configuration that made it throb like an outraged heart. I looked down at a bruised and naked body curled in a hollow between two roots, its arms and legs drawn in close, the side of its head swollen, bloody, and bruised, its mouth open, snoring as peacefully as if the moss was a feather bed. It was Walter.
A racket of blue jays in a bush nearby made me want to clutch my head, but my right arm was unresponsive to my command. I noticed a thin stream running nearby. The water sparkled as the sun flushed over the tops of the bushes and bright rays pierced the forest from every direction. I grasped a low branch passing near my nest, and pulled myself to my feet. I was unsteady, I was in the purest agony, but I was on my feet.
“Wake up, Walter,” I said in a voice to rival the jays. Then I recalled that my sleeping companion wouldn’t hear a gun fired next to his ear. How had he found me? Did he know his way in this place? I peeled a clump of mud from my hand and threw it at him, striking him on the leg. His eyes flew open, he coughed, then began to cry. I should have left well enough alone, I thought.
The stream probably ran toward the river. My way must be in the opposite direction. I took a step, then another; each one felt as if it might be the last. Walter sat up among the roots and babbled nonsense. “Quiet,” I said, straining to see through to some wider area of light. A chameleon rushed past my feet, another stopped on the root in front of me and eyed me, once from each side of its head. A world of idiots and monsters, I thought, and I left to tell the tale.
The air was damp, and the cold penetrated to my bones. It seemed to me there was a clearing beyond a bramble bush, but I couldn’t see how to get to it, as the bush was as long as a city block. Walter got to his feet and walked off in the other direction, toward what I took to be the river. Should I follow? He disappeared beyond the next tree, then I heard rapid footsteps. Slowly, painfully, I made my way in his tracks, skirting a tangle of broken branches and vines, then around the thick trunk of a bay tree. I was standing on the lawn looking up at the side of the house. Walter ran ahead of me across the grass, toward what looked like a pile of clothing. The sun broke over the roof of the house, bathing the scene with a freshness utterly inappropriate to what it exposed. The air was bright, chilly, and still. I saw the cloud of flies rising above the crumpled body of my husband. Walter had reached it. He bent over the body and began struggling to lift the head, shrieking all the while.
Don’t do that, I thought. Don’t touch him. The front doors of the house stood open, the dining room casements were all ajar, but there was no sign of living occupants. So the field hands had got up with the bell and gone out to their work, blissfully unaware that their master lay with his head nearly off on the lawn. Mr. Sutter had not come to join the fray; the vaunted patrol had skipped our house in its pursuit of the rebels. Was it possible?
I dragged myself toward the drive, pausing every few steps to get my breath. I thought I might die of thirst before I got to the door. If only Delphine is here, I thought. I went in through the hall, glancing in at the dining room just long enough to see that it was wrecked, chairs upended, broken glass everywhere, the remains of the ham mysteriously left on the carpet near the hall door. I went through the hall, out at the back, across the narrow yard to the kitchen door. It was closed. I tried the latch; it was locked. I leaned against it. “Delphine,” I said. “Are you there? Let me in.” The curtain at the narrow window moved, Rose peeked out, gave a shout, and dropped the curtain. “Let me in,” I said again. “I’m not a ghost. But I may be soon if you don’t open this door.” The curtain moved again. This time Delphine looked out. “Is that you, missus?” she said.
“I’m alive,” I said. “They didn’t kill me.” She pulled the bolt and the door swung out before me. “Lord, missus,” Delphine said, leading me inside. “What happen to you.”
“I got away,” I said. “I hid in the woods. But they shot me.” I gestured to my shoulder. In the process I saw my mud-daubed arm, my torn and bloody sleeve, and I remembered that I was covered in mud. “Get me some water,” I said, sinking into a chair at the table. “I’m dying of thirst.”
The fire was up, there were pots already boiling, good smells of bread and meat. Delphine put a glass of water in front of me and I drank it at one gulp. “More,” I said, holding out the glass. Rose brought the pitcher and filled it again. Delphine went to the kettle and poured hot water into a bowl, then brought it to the table and added some cool from the pitcher. She took a cloth, dropped it in the water, and wrung it out. “I hardly knows where to start,” she said. I took the cloth and wiped my face, wincing when I found the gash in my cheek. “Thas a bad cut,” Rose observed. Delphine was unfastening the back of my dress. “All these bits of cloth stuck in the wound,” she said. “It gonna hurt to clean this out.”
“I can’t lift my arm,” I said.
We heard a whining sound coming from the house, and in a moment Walter stumbled into the yard. He was holding his face in his hands, weeping. His hands and bare chest were stained with dark blood. He stopped, took us in, and held out his arms, tears mixed with blood streaming down his face. His forehead was so swollen his eye was closed up.
“Poor chile,” Rose said, going to him. “What they done to you?” She picked him up and he buried his face in her neck.
“He’s crying because his father is out there dead on the lawn,” I said.
There was a brief hush in which everyone noticed that I had spoken of my husband as Walter’s father. Delphine took the cloth from me and rinsed it in the basin. “Master killed,” she said softly.
“Rose,” I said. “Go down and find Mr. Sutter. Tell him to come to the house at once.” Rose put the child down, handed him a piece of bread, and went out, glancing about the yard nervously, starting at the chickens. Walter sat near my feet, chewing his bread from one hand and picking at the dried mud between my toes with the other. “Stop that,” I said, pulling my feet in under the chair.
MR. SUTTER WAS dead too. They had stopped at his house first, sneaked in a window, and cut his throat. When Rose got there she found the door wide open and Cato, the driver, standing on the porch. “Don’t go in,” he told her. “Just tell missus Mr. Sutter been murdered in his bed.”
“Send a boy for the doctor,” I told her on hearing this news, and she headed back to the quarter. Delphine was filling a tub with warm water. “Best I cut that dress off you with the scissors,” she said.
“Just get it off,” I said wearily. “I don’t care how you do it.” She had unknotted the skirt and was cutting it up the front when we heard heavy footsteps coming rapidly through the house. “Lock the door,” I said, but before Delphine could get off her knees, a deep male voice called out, “Hallo. Is anyone here?”
Blessed Providence, I thought. There are still white men alive. “In here,” I called out. “In the kitchen.”
One by one they filed into the yard. There were four of them, dressed in vaguely military coats, high boots, armed with swords and pistols. Where were they when I needed them? Their eye
s grew wide as they discovered me, sitting in my kitchen, covered in mud, my face swollen and bleeding, my useless arm cradled in my lap. I recognized one, an acquaintance of my husband, a lawyer named O’Malley. “Mrs. Gaudet,” he said solemnly. “It is my unhappy duty to inform you that your husband has been murdered.”
I hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. It was as if I had been in a foreign country, a land where madness was the rule, and returned to find nothing changed but my own understanding. I glanced at Delphine. She looked dismayed, though her features were composed in an approximation of servility. She’s worried about what will happen to her now, I thought. We all are. Every minute of every hour. Mr. O’Malley stood waiting for my response. He was worried I might have gone mad and he would have to deal with it. “I know it,” I said calmly, to his obvious relief. “I was there.”
IT WAS HOURS before I spun together the threads of the various stories and produced a credible fabric. I hardly cared, but it was a kind of sewing, and I used it, as usual, to keep my mind off my own suffering, which was intense. First there was the pain occasioned by Delphine picking the bits of cloth from the wound in my shoulder and cleaning it with alcohol. When Dr. Landry finally arrived, he admired her nursing skills and my endurance, then set about determining the outermost limits of the latter. The shots of brandy I downed at the start had worn off by the time he’d dug out three lead balls and announced there were only two to go. “I can’t stand one more second,” I cried. “Don’t you have something stronger than brandy?” He poured another glass. “I’ve seen soldiers who could not hold up as well as you,” he said, a compliment for which I felt the greatest indifference. After what seemed an hour, he held up another ball in his tweezers and dropped it into the washbasin with a sigh. “I’m going to have to leave the last one in. I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s buried too deep in the muscle.” I raised my good hand to wipe the perspiration from my forehead. “That’s the best news I’ve had in days,” I said. Then he gave me the worst, which was that I would never recover the use of my arm. One of the balls had chipped a bone and severed a tendon at the top of my shoulder. “You’ll be able to use your hand all right,” he said. “Eventually you may be able to raise the arm a little.” While I reeled from this diagnosis, he took out his needle and thread and went to work on my face.
O’Malley and his men busied themselves putting the house to rights. They picked up my husband’s body and moved it to the icehouse. Mr. Sutter was brought there too, wrapped in a blanket so none of the hands could see him, as it is well known that the sight of a dead overseer agitates the negroes. Two of the patrol stayed downstairs all night, prowling about ceaselessly, though there was no danger of the insurrectionists returning. After wrecking the house and taking off everything from flatware to footstools, as if they intended to set up a plantation of their own down the way, they had marched to the river road in time to run right into the patrol.
The chase was violent and protracted, much of it in the bottomland, where mud and the darkness complicated the outcome. One of the patrol was shot in the leg, another stabbed through the eye. Four of the negroes, including the captain, were shot dead, the other two were captured and trussed for hanging. The patrol had passed half the night in pursuit and spent the other half moving the captives downriver, where they were joined by a second patrol coming north who informed them that a battle was raging in Donaldsonville and all men called. It was not until morning that Mr. O’Malley recollected seeing my spoons gleaming in the mud and thought to investigate the Gaudet plantation.
When it was all over, they had captured fifty negroes; every one was shot or hanged in the next few days. Casualties among the planters were not heavy. There were a dozen injured and two murdered: my husband and his overseer, Mr. Sutter.
THE NEXT MORNING my aunt came up from town; she was followed by a mule-drawn cart containing two coffins sent from Chatterly by my brother-in-law, Charles Gaudet. This gentleman arrived with his son Edmund in the afternoon. I refused to see anyone, as I was too sick to leave my bed, so all the arrangements fell to my aunt, which suited everyone. She sent me her own maid, a capable nurse, who administered different medicines and fed me soup, tea, and custard. Though it hurt to eat, I was ravenous. All day I listened to the front door opening and closing, the drone of voices, at first subdued, but, as the rooms filled and my aunt served a buffet dinner with quantities of wine, gradually more lively, occasionally punctuated by laughter. My aunt looked in on me every hour to describe the progress of the funeral. All the planters for miles along the river attended, for even those who had disliked my husband, or scarcely made his acquaintance, understood the importance of standing at his graveside. In the afternoon they walked out to the cemetery for a brief ceremony, then came back to the house for more food and wine. I heard it all through a curtain of pain. Toward dark they began to drift away, and so did I, into a feverish sleep. When I woke it was morning and my aunt was sitting next to my bed with an envelope in her lap.
“How are you feeling, my dear?” she said.
There was an agreeable moment of clarity in which I knew that my husband was dead and buried, followed by a blast of pain so powerful it chased out every fact save itself. “Never worse,” I said.
“What can I give you?” She gestured to the table of medicines.
“Just a little water.”
She poured a glass and brought it to my lips. “Is the letter for me?” I said when I had swallowed a few sips.
“It is from Joel Borden. He particularly asked me to bring it to you.”
“Let me see it,” I said. My aunt proffered the envelope and I made an awkward business of opening it in my lap. I shook out the page and read:
My dearest Manon,
The enormity of your misfortune is so staggering I hardly know what words to write. First your dear mother, and now this horrible misfortune and loss. If I can be of any help to you in days to come, please call upon me. If not, I hope it will be some small comfort to you to receive the sympathy and affection of your devoted friend,
Joel
“This is so kind,” I said. Then the stabbing pain in my face reminded me of my injuries. I laid my palm against the bandage over my cheek. “What will I look like when my face is healed?”
“Dr. Landry is an excellent surgeon,” my aunt assured me. “He put twenty-seven stitches in my Ines’s forehead and there is barely a scar.”
“But my mouth,” I said, probing the spiky threads that ran from inside my lip to the base of my chin.
My aunt made no reply. Perhaps she thought me frivolous, though I doubt any woman can entertain the possibility of disfigurement with equanimity. I folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope. I had to use my left hand to move my right hand into a useful position. What would look worse, I wondered, my face or my arm hanging limp at my side?
“Manon,” my aunt said, “where is Sarah?”
“She hasn’t come back?”
“No one has seen her.”
“Delphine must know.”
“No.”
I looked at my hand. There were three bruised marks just behind my thumb. “She bit me,” I said.
“Merciful heaven,” my aunt said.
“She took my husband’s horse and rode off. I begged her to let me get away, but she wouldn’t.”
“Then she has run away,” my aunt concluded.
“But where?” I exclaimed.
“She can’t have gotten far. She is probably hiding in town. It would surprise me if Mr. Roget didn’t know something of her whereabouts. I shall write to your uncle to make inquiries at once.”
My husband is dead, I thought. Why would she run now, when she was safe from him? It didn’t make sense.
“She has her baby with her,” I said.
“That will make it all the easier to find her.”
I could see her face again, her lips drawn back over her teeth, her eyes crazed and glowing in the torchlight as she pointed out my husband
to his murderers and stood by until the blade had descended upon his neck.
“Yes,” I agreed. “We’ll find her.”
I SENT FOR Delphine to quiz her about Sarah, and to find out what she knew about that night. She said she had gone into the yard after supper to throw out the dishwater and when she came back she saw three of the runaways standing in the kitchen. So they were already in the house when I was speaking to my husband in his office. Delphine slipped out of the yard and crept along the back of the house to my window, where she threw pebbles until Sarah looked out. “I tole her what I seen,” Delphine said, “and she say for me to wait ’til she pass me her Nell, so I hid by the wall. Then she wrap up the chile and pass her down to me.”
“But I looked out then,” I said. “I didn’t see anyone.”
“I seen you, missus,” Delphine said. “But I was ’fraid to speak out and I figure Sarah tole you, so I stay still ’til she pass Nell down to me. Then I run ’roun the other side of the house and thas when the shots ring out. I hid in a bush ’til you was all running out on the lawn.”
“And you gave the baby back to Sarah.”
“Yes, missus,” she said. “She call to me, then I run back to the kitchen and lock myself in with Rose ’til you come.”
“Where do you think Sarah might have gone?” I asked, though I didn’t expect an honest answer. Delphine hung her head. “I don’ have no notion, missus,” she said.
“No matter,” I said confidently. “She won’t get far. If she hasn’t returned within the week I shall take out a notice in the journals, and that will bring the slave-catchers like flies to sugar.”
Delphine made no response. I considered the last information as good as delivered to Sarah’s ear. “Send Rose to me,” I said. “She’ll have to serve upstairs until Sarah is returned.”
MY FATHER WOULD never keep a runaway, but he never let one stay away either. If it took him six months and cost as much as the man was worth, he would gladly take the loss for the example it set the others to see a malcontent returned in shackles and straightway sold at market. He made sure all our negroes were informed of the proviso to the warranty, that whoever bought the man must know he had run away and could not be trusted, and that his value had been accordingly diminished. This policy resulted in a very low rate of absentees from our farm. Father deplored the laxity of his neighbors, who allowed a hand to disappear for two or three days at a time, always when the crop was in an urgent condition, then return to take his lashes and rejoin his companions with tales of his cleverness in eluding capture. Father wept with laughter when relating to us the policy of Mr. Hampton of Lafourche Parish, who administered a certain number of lashes for each day the slave went missing: fifteen for one day, thirty for two, etc. Father called this plan “the three-day furlough,” for it was revealed that most of Mr. Hampton’s regular runaways returned by midnight of the third day, which this gentleman cited as proof of the efficacy of his system.
Property (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 11