Ten-month-old Pierre, wide-eyed, gurgling happily, and as fat as a sausage, seemed the only one of the three who wasn't really sleepy.
"All right," Gaston agreed with a sigh as he snuggled down into the bed. "I'll lie here and take care of Pierre."
"Me, too," Marie echoed.
Armand kissed all three and waited beside the bed as he watched Felicite do the same. The two older children were already dozing off as he took his sister-in-law's arm and urged her away from the sleeping room.
"We must find you a place to sit," he said. "You are so near your last gasp, I really should carry you."
Felicite giggled. She was a head taller than he and outweighed him by half again as much.
"I'm just fine, Armand. You'll spoil me with this treatment. It reminds me of your brother when we were expecting our first."
"A little spoiling wouldn't hurt you," Armand insisted.
She laughed. "Truly, I am getting used to my delicate condition. I've been having a baby, just had a baby, or having another baby for years now." She leaned forward as if to whisper conspiratorially. "It seems to be something that I'm good at."
Armand grinned back at her. "Along with cooking, cleaning, sewing, and sister-in-lawing. Let's find you a place to sit and rest awhile and I'll bring you something to eat."
Jean Baptiste had been tying up the pirogue and was still standing at the end of the dock, engaged in a deep discussion with Emile Marchand. Armand didn't mind fending for Felicite. As a single man in her household, he was routinely provided good cooking, clean clothes, and a tranquil home life. Armand was grateful to her for those things. He also simply liked her ready wit and empathy for others. They were fine qualities in a woman, qualities he someday hoped to find in the woman he chose for his own bride.
An empty chair was finally located on the north side of the house next to Madame Hebert. The woman, a close friend of Felicite's, welcomed her eagerly, ready to talk. She was one of Laron's many sisters and had his handsome good looks, plus ten years.
"Doesn't he look slicked and pressed?" Madame Hebert said to Felicite as she pointed in Armand's direction. "Must be a lady on his mind."
Felicite nodded in agreement. "Yes, Yvonne, I have to agree. When a man combs back his hair and puts on a clean shirt of his own volition, there must be a woman on his mind."
Armand laughed and shook his head. "I only dress for Saturday night, mesdames," he assured them. Unlike most of the men present in their knee-length culottes, Armand wore trousers. He thought that the longer pants made him appear taller. "Even the most careless swamper shines up for Saturday night."
"So you have no interest in women?" Madame Hebert asked, disbelieving. "My husband has a cousin in St. Martinville. She is just turned fifteen and very petite I hear."
Armand smiled broadly at her. "Perhaps I must find an excuse to visit St. Martinville this winter," he said.
"He is planning a house," Felicite whispered excitedly.
Madame Hebert's eyes widened and Armand would have gladly stuck a stocking in his sister-in- law's mouth.
"I had not heard this," Madame Hebert declared.
"He has just been talking and dreaming about it with Jean Baptiste," Felicite explained. "When a man starts thinking of having his own house, you know he must be thinking of having his own wife."
Tutting with concern, Madame Hebert was shaking her head. "Does my brother know this? Poor Laron wishes his own house, I know. On his land it would look more like a bridge than a home."
Armand laughed. "Your brother knows all about it," he said.
"He will not need a house," Felicite pointed out. "Once Laron and Aida are married, they will live with Jesper."
Madame Hebert nodded. "Still a man always wants his own house, does he not?"
"Laron can share my house," Armand said. "In fact he has offered to help me build it. He says I needn't despair to live in it alone. If no woman will have me we will live as two old bachelors together."
"Two bachelors in a house!" Madame Hebert giggled. "Father Denis will worry about every female in the parish."
"Truth is, that I do hope to wed," Armand told her. "I just need to find the right woman, as my brother did."
Felicite laughed again. "Any woman would be lucky to get you," she said.
"And every man on the river has a bet on who it will be. Oops!" Madame Hebert covered her mouth with her hand, horrified at her own words.
"Are they truly betting?" Felicite asked.
Madame Hebert looked chagrined. "You know these men, everything to them is a horse race, even romance."
Armand laughed, unoffended. "You well may be right, Madame." He glanced once more at his sister-in-law. "Let me get you something to eat."
Felicite looked toward the line of people waiting to be fed. "Oh, it is too much trouble," she told him.
Armand shook his head. "Nonsense, I have nothing else to do," he insisted, adding with a teasing smile to Madame Hebert. "The woman of my dreams could be watching me at this very minute. I do so want to make a good impression."
The two women laughed like young girls. Armand bowed smartly to them and took his leave. The smile lingered on his face as he made his way through the crowd. The Marchand homestead was prosperous enough, with a sturdy double-house on the levee and several smaller outbuildings around the back. On the river side a broad cypress dock stretched out into the river, providing both easy access to water and a wide storage place for ready-to-ship goods.
Tonight that dock was being used as a dance floor, and a quartet of couples, some in bare feet, others in dancing slippers, were moving with lightfooted exuberance through the movements of the Lancier Acadien.
Armand watched them enviously a moment. He loved to dance but rarely did. The young ladies, all of whom had known him since childhood, were always polite and willing, but he could tell that they were less than charmed to be partnered by a man whose stature made him most likely eye level with their bosoms. And of course he felt strange himself. When a fellow pulled a woman close, she was supposed to look up into his eyes.
The swirling dancers were like the brightest flower garden in springtime stirred into wild motion. He watched with longing. To be young and in love and dance away the night.
He pushed away the frivolous thought. He knew about being in love. He could not recall with accuracy the day that he knew he loved Aida Gaudet. It was like owning to the day he knew that he loved the river, his family, his life. He felt he had always loved her, even when she was a young girl. And from the first moment in his life that he felt desire, it had been exclusively for her. Her smile, her laugh had entranced him and he had dreamed of her, sighed after her ever since. But he could never have her.
He knew her too well. Aida was sweet and often kind, but she was also giddy and featherbrained. She loved beautiful things, clothes, ribbons, flowers. She surrounded herself with loveliness. It was only natural that the man she would call her own would be perfect.
Armand was clearly imperfect: short and plain and ordinary. And she saw him only as another of the legions that desired her. She no longer flirted with him, of course. He refused to allow it. He might not be special to her, but she was special to him and he would not let their friendship be otherwise.
Once he had wished for her, longed for some magical charm to win her. But it had never occurred. And when Laron declared his intention for her, Armand had put away his hopes completely. She was to be his best friend's wife.
Someday there would be a woman for Armand. He knew that. Someday a shy sweet girl, just as high as his chin, would look up to him as if he were the tallest man in the world. He would be a good and faithful husband, devoted and loving. And perhaps, perhaps eventually, he would forget about Aida Gaudet.
He wished that day would hurry up and arrive. Armand made his way back toward the food tables and cook fires at the far side of the house. The whine of Ony Guidry's fiddle resonated and the voices chatting and visiting were raised loudly above the
sound. All around the area of the house, under each tree or open space, gatherings of friends and neighbors flourished.
A circle of farmers was standing together swapping stories amid laughter and guffaws. They could tell jokes from sunset to sunrise with hardly a break for a cup of coffee. Many of the jokes were about Creoles, the other French-speaking people of Louisiana, who were generally disliked and distrusted. Creole ancestors had been nobles or those aspiring to nobility in the West Indies. Acadians were descendants of yeoman farmers, pioneers who sought freedom and egalitarianism. The two groups did not mix well.
Occasionally jokes were told about Frenchmen, who were thought to be much like Creoles. But most often the subject of Acadian humor was the Acadians themselves.
Oscar Benoit called out Armand's name and waved him over to a small group standing near an overgrowth of lilas. The man was already laughing as he slapped Armand on the back.
"Tell them that new joke that's going around," he said. "You always tell these things better than I can."
"Which joke?" Armand asked, refusing an offer of tobacco.
"You know," Benoit insisted. "The one about the farmer who called his wife by the mule's name."
Armand shook his head. "I don't know it."
"Oh but you must, you always know them."
Armand shook his head once more.
"Oh well, I must tell it myself."
He motioned for the men to gather around him as
he began. Armand listened eagerly along with the rest.
"The Madame was to throw her farmer out of the house," Benoit told them dramatically. "For while they were loving he called her by another woman's name."
The men gathered made collective sounds of humored horror.
"She was furious!"
Many nodded. One of the Acadians whistled in understanding of the seriousness of the mistake. All, along with Armand, leaned closer, grinning in anticipation as Benoit continued.
"The farmer swore he was innocent of any wrongdoing, saying to her that the name was not the name of another woman but only the name of his mule."
A couple of the men snickered.
"So she said she would forgive him, because she knew that he talked to that worn-out old mule all day as he worked. But she told him she thought that it was very strange that he would make such a blunder at such a time."
The group around Benoit nodded in grinning agreement.
" 'But dear wife,' the farmer said to her. 'Your face was turned from me. From that direction any man might have mistaken you for my mule.'"
Hoots exploded from those gathered, but Benoit was not yet finished.
" 'And,'" he continued. " 'I spend a lot more of my life staring at hers than staring at yours!'"
The roar of laughter was nearly deafening. Armand chuckled along with the rest, shaking his head.
"You fellows with your stories of marriage misery are going to rob me of my dreams," he complained.
"If they are dreams of women," Emile Granger shot back quickly, "only death can steal them."
Armand laughed along with the others before continuing on his way.
He noticed a heated quorum gathering. Father Denis was right in the center of the verbal fray and Armand had the good sense to immediately put some distance between himself and the good father. The old priest was bound to try to draw him in and Armand wanted no unpleasantness to ruin his Saturday night.
Finally he made his way over to an old woman sitting in front of a big black cauldron. She seemed almost lost in thought as she stirred the mixture of fish and vegetables in the dark, rich roué.
"Are you cooking up something good for me, Nanan?" he asked.
A grown man's use of the childish nickname for godmother might have made another woman's eyes twinkle and another woman's lips curl in a smile, but Orva Landry merely looked up and gazed at him critically.
"You have not been to see me," she said simply.
Armand bowed his head slightly by way of apology. "I did not realize that I was neglecting you," he said.
"I have heard your name," she said, looking at him intently, her rheumy eyes serious and purposeful. "I have heard your name on the water."
Armand was momentarily taken aback.
Orva Landry, some said, was older then the bayou. She was a cold and mostly silent person whom few
thought of as a friend. But she was held in great respect by the people of Prairie l'Acadie. Orva Landry was la traiteur, the treater.
Born in the place the English called Nova Scotia, she had lived through the Grand Derangement, the time of terror when women had been pulled from their houses, children captured at play, and men herded from the fields. They were forced onto English boats that carried them away from the land they had tended and toiled upon for one hundred and fifty years. All for their failure to swear allegiance to an English king.
According to local legend, Orva, a frightened little child, had been separated from her mother and father, her sisters and brothers, and never saw them again. But as God is often wont to do, when He taketh away He also giveth. Orva Landry was given the treater's gift. Where the young girl, now an ancient crone, had learned the secrets of charms, gris gris, and hoodoo, no one knew. But she could heal both man and beast, had treatment for any ailment, and heard the voice of Joan of Arc speaking to her on the river.
"You have heard my name, Nanan?" Armand asked, disquieted. Perhaps more than any human on the Vermilion River, Armand Sonnier knew Orva Landry as a person. Therefore he feared her less than most. But he never for a moment doubted her gift.
Armand had been born frail and feeble. He had come into life feet first and too early, and his mother was too weak to properly care for the sickly child.
Armand's father had wrapped his baby son in a blanket, laid him in the floor of the pirogue, and poled down the river to Madame Landry's tiny house.
The old woman tended the child and was credited by one and all for keeping him alive. The Sonniers named her as Armand's godmother and throughout his life he sought her out when he was ill. Armand knew Orva Landry. And if she said she spoke to voices on the river, Armand knew that she did.
"Are you sure it was my name that you heard?"
Madame Landry glared at him impatiently. "A human does not get so deaf that she can't hear the voices clear," she said gruffly.
Armand apologized. "What do they say, Nanan?"
" 'There is uncertainty on the wind,'" she quoted. "Swirling around us now on this prairie is change, unexpected. And you, mon fils, you are at the center of it."
Armand's brow furrowed. Although everyone knew that Madame Landry spoke with the revenant specter of Joan of Arc, the saint's name was never mentioned. Superstitious and fearful, people spoke of her euphemistically only as the voices. To his knowledge the voices had never before spoken his name. It was disconcerting even to think that they knew it.
Armand shook his head thoughtfully. He knew of nothing, no one, with whom he was in conflict. He glanced around the gathering. His gaze paused momentarily at the little irritable-looking crowd speaking with Father Denis. Perhaps the trouble was there.
"Did they mention Father Denis?" he asked.
"Father Denis!" Orva huffed with disregard. "The voices care not for rich Frenchmen, even those who wrap themselves in robes."
The two spiritual leaders of the Prairie l'Acadie had very little mutual respect.
"Then what can this vision be about?" Armand asked.
The old woman stared at him for a long, thoughtful moment, then nodded in the direction of the river.
"It's about her," Madame Landry said quietly.
Armand turned in the direction she indicated just in time to see the most beautiful woman on the Vermilion River alight from her father's pirogue. Her dress swirled around her like a pool of lilies in a summer breeze and her voice was as cheering as music on the water. The music had ceased as if by design. Laughing and lovely, she had every eye upon her.
A twinge
of shock stilled Armand's body and he involuntarily swallowed.
"It's about Aida Gaudet?"
The old woman didn't answer immediately but continued to study Armand.
He felt the heat rise to his cheeks. She couldn't know. He was sure of that. Madame Landry couldn't know how he felt about Aida.
"What about her?" he asked quickly.
Orva tutted in disapproval and continued to stir her brew. An uncomfortable silence dragged between them. Armand waited.
"A careless word spoken is like a tree falling into a mighty river," she told him finally. Raising her chin, she looked him straight in the eye. "Most times the tree merely lies to rot and be swept away. But sometimes when the water is low and the yonder bank delicate, the river will swirl around the tree with some force, wear away the weak side, and cause the flow to meander in a new direction."
"What are you saying, Nanan? That a careless word of mine has changed the destiny of Aida Gaudet?"
Madame Landry nodded as she lowered her gaze to the boiling pot of aromatic gumbo. "She will not wed the young Boudreau," she said quietly.
Armand was surprised. He remembered speculating to Laron that if he married a woman he did not want, he would be miserable. Could it be that Laron would take his words seriously? Armand found the thought lightening his heart. But he rallied against the wishfulness. Separating Aida from Laron would not turn her in his direction. Aida was flighty and carefree. She liked handsome, dashing men, and Armand was forever short and plain. But he hoped Aida would find a husband whose heart was not engaged elsewhere.
"I find that news not disquieting, but welcome," he told the old woman.
She huffed in disapproval. "Well, perhaps you should not," she said. "Altering the fate of one alters the fate of all."
He knew the admonition was true. Laron could never marry the German widow, of course. And they could have no legitimate children. But he would be a good man to her, loyal and true as any husband, and even a fine father to the little ones she had. Those would all be positive things. Armand could not see any bad consequences. Of course, there was the jilting.
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