“Catherine, meet your husband,” he said.
“So that’s how his cuff link ended up in the belly of a catfish!” Dolly exclaimed. “Y’all, I just can’t believe this. Do you have any idea how many years this whole community has wondered what happened to this couple? Go back to that ‘meet your husband’ part, Anna.”
“Catherine, meet your husband,” he said.
“Hello, husband,” I said, which made him smile. I had to smile myself. I told him I’d introduce him to his wife if only I knew who she was.
“Would you like to find out?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to be a good wife.”
I’ll never forget what he said next: “I’d rather have a happy woman than a good wife.”
He asked me, to my surprise, if I liked my wedding frock—a high-collared, stiff gray linen dress with a frumpy topcoat. I told him it was a hand-me-down from Sister and that I suspected it would look like a potato sack were it not for the very tight lace collar. He moved very close to me. First he untied my bonnet and sent it sailing into the slough. Next he unbuttoned my topcoat, slipped it off my shoulders, and tossed it in as well. Then he unbuttoned the choking collar of my dress. After pausing to consider the result, he opened another button below it, and another. For a moment, I thought he might keep going all the way down my dress, but then he stopped and studied me—like a painter reviewing his work—and said, “You can breathe now, Catherine.” No, I couldn’t. I had stopped breathing the moment I felt his fingers brush against my throat.
He asked whether I was happy with my hair, which Father insisted that I wear pulled back into a fat braid wound tightly and pinned against the nape of my neck, with a heavy black crocheted net to cover it. Father found blonde hair offensive. I shook my head in response. Andrew asked if he might take it down. I turned my back to him and felt him begin removing pins from my hair, taking care not to hurt me as he freed me of my confines. He threw the net into the slough and continued sliding pin after pin away until I felt the heavy, loosed braid fall down my back. And then his hands were in my hair, unwinding it from every constricting hold till it was completely unbound.
Slowly I turned around to face him. He twirled a strand through his fingers. Then he laid his free hand against the opening he had made in my dress, against my bare throat.
I thought he was about to kiss me again as he had in the church—in fact, I hoped he would—but instead, he sighed, shook his head, and let his hands fall to his sides. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m getting ahead of myself.”
“Holy mackerel!” Daisy said.
“I might need me a Liberty National fan if we keep readin’ this,” Dolly said.
“Ladies,” Evelyn said, “we must not interrupt the narrative flow. Do continue, Anna. We will try to keep quiet till you finish.”
Andrew asked if he might show me his favorite spot on the creek and held my hand as he led me there. We leisurely followed the Tanyard farther into the woods, around one bend and then another, until we came to the loveliest little waterfall, where the creek deepened on its way to the river. The pines towered above. All around this length of the creek, the ground was carpeted with emerald moss so thick that it felt like a cushion beneath my feet.
We sat down next to each other on a black wrought-iron bench that looked as if it belonged in drawings I had seen of New Orleans. There beside the falls, we remained quiet together, listening to the water flow over the rocks and rhythmically plunge into the deepening channel below.
Finally, Andrew said, “You think I know everything about you, so why don’t you tell me something I don’t know?”
“I believe I’m the one most entitled to ask that question,” I said, which made him laugh.
And then he offered me a bit of new information: until a year ago, he had made his living on the water.
I was intrigued. How?
But he shook his head and refused to tell me anything else until I reciprocated. He had the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t look at it without smiling back.
“Tell me, Catherine,” he demanded, “have you robbed the collection plate, daydreamed about stowing away on a riverboat during your Father’s sermons—anything scurrilous like that?”
“Much worse,” I said. I told him about all the poetry I had read—all secular and some of it romantic in nature.
“Ha!” he said with that gleaming smile. “Good for you! Which devil poets have you dallied with?”
I reported that I had devoted most of my reading to Tennyson, Byron, and Mr. Edgar Allan Poe.
“No Coleridge?” he asked. And then he looked into my eyes and recited in his velvet voice, ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.’”
I realized, as those exquisite words flowed out of him and into me, that this was as intimate as I had ever been with another human being. But it wasn’t close enough. The blackness of my solitary past seemed as if it might devour me, like a great wave swelling ever higher till it rose above my head and crashed over me, pulling me down to the depths and pinning me there.
As he had done before, Andrew seemed to read my thoughts. “Catherine,” he said, laying his hand against my face. My own hand was drawn to the open collar of his shirt, and I laid it against his bare skin as he had laid his on mine.
Suddenly, like a crack of lightning, a shot rang out from somewhere across the creek. Andrew, as startled as I was, looked up to see if he could judge where it came from. He told me we must hurry, and he put his arm around me to help me through the woods as we ran back to the carriage.
The horses seemed to sense our urgency and wasted no time making their way along the creek to another new road through the woods, where the way was clear for them to gallop. Andrew kept an arm around me as we sped through the pines. We stopped abruptly when the woods opened onto a lawn and the most beautiful house I had ever seen—graceful and grand, with double porches and lovely scrolled bannisters. It took my breath away.
On the front porch stood a woman. She looked old from where we sat, though I couldn’t really tell from the carriage. She was holding something at her side. Andrew stared at her, his lips slightly parted as if he couldn’t decide whether to speak. She motioned for him to come. He gave the horses another of his strange commands, and they delivered us to the front steps, where Andrew helped me down.
“What has happened, Appolline?” he asked. The woman standing before us on the porch had skin the color of cocoa and very pale blue eyes. She looked older than my parents—perhaps in her seventies. At her side, she held a pistol.
“This the woman?” she asked in an accent similar to Andrew’s but much heavier.
Andrew introduced us, and I said, “How do you do,” or something equally stupid under the circumstances. The woman said nothing but looked me up and down.
Andrew asked her again—what had happened?
She said something that sounded like “say-fin-ee.”
“Alright, I’m breaking my own rule,” Evelyn said. “C’est fini is French for ‘It’s finished’ or ‘It’s done.’ French would make sense for a man from Louisiana, would it not?”
“You speak French, Evelyn?” Dolly asked. “Why, honey, you’re just as smart as a whip, do you know that?”
“Thank you, Dolly. I’ll hush now. Go ahead, Anna.”
Andrew and Appolline spoke briefly in words I didn’t understand. He occasionally glanced at me, and Appolline nodded agreement to whatever he was saying.
Finally, Andrew turned to me and said he needed for me to trust him right now. We had to get Appolline out of Blackberry Springs quickly, but he promised to explain everything as soon as we were safe.
Then he kissed me—quickly but softly—and told me Appolline would help me get ready while he attended to her troubles.
Before I had a chance to say another word, Andrew disappeared behind the house, and Appolline
motioned for me to follow her inside. I paused for just a moment before the sweeping staircase. From the entryway with its soaring ceiling, I could see a music room to my right, a parlor to my left, and a grand dining room straight ahead. It was incredible—like something out of a poem.
Appolline motioned for me to follow her into an elegant bedroom with a tester bed. Spread over it were the loveliest dresses and underthings I had ever seen—all of them silk, satin, lace, and fine cotton. There was even a pair of breeches with a white blouse and riding boots. Appolline pointed to them and said what sounded like ‘poor voo.’”
Anna paused and all the women looked at Evelyn.
“Pour vous means ‘for you,’” she said. “Go on, Anna.”
Women around Blackberry Springs never wore breeches.
“Best for now,” Appolline said. Then she showed me a skirt that unfastened at the waist and opened up like a cape. “For when people might see,” she said. She folded the skirt and put it into a small grip. Then she told me to change while she packed for me.
I stepped behind a silk screen and hurried out of my very Presbyterian clothes. Appolline brought me some of the fine underclothes, along with the breeches, blouse, and riding boots. When I was dressed and stepped from behind the screen, she paused from her work to study me, walking around me in a circle and looking me up and down. She said, “Bébé chose well,” and resumed her packing.
None of the fine dresses were going into the grip she was packing. “What about those?” I asked.
She told me I couldn’t wear them where we were going and promised that “Bébé” would buy me more. She said we had to think only of life right now.
I followed her back to the carriage and climbed in behind her. Giving the horses the same kind of foreign command Andrew had spoken, Appolline sent us on our way up a dirt road away from the house and across a cotton field to a small shotgun cottage at the edge of the woods. She climbed down and began tugging at my trunk, trying to get it down.
She looked surprised when I offered to help. The two of us carried the trunk onto the front porch and then slid it inside the house. Appolline opened it and told me I would never see it again. She asked what I wanted to take with me.
I looked down at the frumpy clothes, all handed down from my sister and none of them even belonging to me. I thought of my poetry disguised as philosophy. Surely there would be no way to carry books with me wherever we were going. I considered my journal, which would be impossible to hide with the three of us traveling together. I would die of embarrassment if Andrew should read any of it. I removed the two blank journals from the trunk.
“Nothing else,” I said. “I don’t want any of it.”
Appolline picked up a rug in the kitchen and opened a small trapdoor beneath it. “No one will look here,” she said. I helped her slide everything I owned down the wooden steps of her root cellar. Covering the trapdoor with the rug, she said again, “Say-fin-ee.”
“I just can’t believe this landed on our doorstep,” Anna said, looking at Daisy. “Hey, what’s the matter?”
“I don’t feel so good,” she said.
CHAPTER
twenty-nine
Daisy endured one more bout with nausea before she turned a corner and began improving. She had been walking on crutches, but Dolly insisted she be able to walk without them before going back to Ella’s, where she would have to contend with stairs.
“You sure you wanna try to put weight on it?” Reed had one arm around Daisy’s waist and was holding his other hand out so she could brace against it. Now that she wasn’t in constant pain anymore, and Anna had helped her get a bath, wash her hair, and put on clean clothes, she was getting restless.
“I’m just sick o’ this room,” she said. “No offense.”
“None taken. I’m ready when you are.”
Daisy took a tentative step and winced.
“Hurts?” Reed asked her.
“A little. Mostly it’s just sore. Let’s try to make it to your porch.”
He helped her slowly walk into the fresh air of the porch and sit down on the twin bed.
“Prob’ly shouldn’t let your foot dangle like that—let’s prop you up.” He put pillows against the headboard so she could lean against it and prop her feet up on the bed. Then he went into the kitchen and came back with an ice pack, which he laid against the stitches he had sewn in.
“I thought Dr. Sesser told you to come by so he could take your stitches out.”
“He did. But I never had stitches before and I’m kinda scared to go.”
“I don’t think it’ll be bad.”
“Would you take ’em out?”
“I’ve had more practice puttin’ ’em in, Daisy.”
“I just don’t think it’ll hurt if you do it.”
Reed went to the kitchen to wash his hands and sterilize the surgical scissors and tweezers from his medical bag. Then he came out and sat on the edge of the bed, with Daisy’s feet in his lap. He blotted the stitches with alcohol and then swabbed a spot just above them, where he gave her a shot of the local anesthetic Dr. Sesser had left to deaden her foot. Just a tiny dose would be all she needed this time.
“Doin’ okay?” he asked her.
Daisy nodded, but he knew she was anxious about it. He ran his finger lightly over the stitches. “Feel any pain?”
She shook her head. “Can’t feel anything.”
Reed began clipping the stitches and gently removing them with the same tweezers he had once used to pull shrapnel out of bleeding soldiers. But this time The Dust Storm didn’t kick up. He was too focused on Daisy.
“All done.”
Daisy had been looking away while he worked. Now she leaned forward to see for herself. “Painless,” she said with a smile.
Reed grinned at her. “My bill’s gonna be a doozy.” He traced the scar with the tip of his finger, then looked up at her. “I scarred you for life, Daisy.”
“You saved my life, Reed.” They looked at each other for a moment before she said, “I need to tell you somethin’, and you’re gonna think I’m crazy.”
He smiled at her and shrugged. “Already leanin’ in that direction.”
“Pull up a chair. Dolly’ll have a conniption if she comes out here and sees two single unmarrieds sittin’ on the same bed.”
Once Reed sat down in the rocker, Daisy blurted out, “I saw Charlie this mornin’.”
“What do you mean, you saw him?”
“I mean I saw him, plain as day, standin’ right in the back corner o’ your room. Has all that morphine made me completely bonkers?”
“You’re not takin’ morphine anymore. And I don’t think you’re bonkers. You were seein’ him before the snakebite, right? Like that time at the curb market you told me about?”
“Yeah, but this was different. I had to be dreamin’, right? Only how could I dream and drink water at the same time?”
“Back up just a little.”
“When I woke up this mornin’, I was thirsty, so I sat up and took a drink o’ water. But then I tried to put the glass back on the nightstand and dropped it—spilled a little puddle on the floor and had to get outta bed to wipe it up. When I got back in bed, Charlie was standin’ in the corner o’ your room, smilin’ at me.”
“Was he in uniform?”
“Yeah, his dress uniform. And here’s the strange part—well, the even stranger part. There was a white dove sittin’ on each of his shoulders.”
“Did he say anything—Charlie, I mean?”
“Yeah, when he turned the doves loose. He took the first one off his right shoulder, cupped it in his hands, and said, ‘I had to go, but you didn’t send me.’ Then he lifted it up and said, ‘Fly now.’ It circled above the bed three times, and every time it went around, some of its white feathers turned all these beautiful colors. When all the feathers were rainbow colored, the ceiling opened up and the dove flew out to a bright blue sky. Then Charlie took the second dove off his left shoulder
and held it in his hands like before. It was wearin’ somethin’ around its neck—an eagle on top of a cross hangin’ from a red, white, and blue ribbon.”
Reed knew exactly what a Distinguished Service Cross looked like. He had discarded two of them in a drawer back home. The mention of them was like a kick in the gut, which Daisy must have sensed, like always.
“You want me to stop?” she asked.
“No, keep goin’.”
“Charlie said, ‘Heaven is deacon’s joy. Let him go.’ And then he lifted up the dove, and it flew straight up before glidin’ back down and flutterin’ past that bottom drawer in your chest of drawers. Then it took off through the hole in the ceilin’ and into the sky. When I looked back down, Charlie was gone.”
Reed felt his eyes stinging, his heart racing, and his stomach churning. The Dust Storm, he feared, might swallow him for good this time. He was taking deep breaths, trying to keep calm, but they were coming faster and faster as his ears began to roar, and he felt like his head was spinning. He held it in his hands to try to stop the unnerving motion.
“Reed? Reed!”
When he finally got a grip on himself, Daisy was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands on his shoulders. He was struggling for normal breath, like a runner who had finally finished a race he always knew he couldn’t win.
“You need to tell me,” Daisy said.
He shook his head, as if the thought of letting her near the images in his mind would surely do them both in.
Daisy laid a pillow in her lap. “Lay your head down here and stretch your legs out that way.” At first he only blinked at her. She calmly repeated her directions, patting the pillow and pointing to the bed so that Reed could understand.
“Your foot,” he started to protest.
“Don’t worry about that right now.”
He lay down on his side with his head in her lap and curled up on the bed. She stroked his hair as he struggled to calm down.
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