by Frank Yerby
“Must you be so slow?” she demanded. “ ‘Tis all of a quarter hour since I rang.”
“I’m sorry, maîtresse,” the girl whispered. “What is it that you want?”
“Can’t you talk above a whisper?” Odalie said fretfully. “What ails you, girl? Of late you seem totally lacking in spirits. Are you ill?”
“No, maîtresse,” Zerline said; “No, I’m not ill—maîtresse desires?”
“A glass of port—chilled, and for heaven sakes be quick about it. My head is splitting.”
Zerline turned and walked toward the door. She walked, slowly, almost heavily, with nothing of her usually spritely gait. Odalie looked after her curiously. Then Zerline was turning through the doorway.
“Zerline!”
“Yes, maîtresse?”
“Come back here!”
The girl turned slowly. As she approached, Odalie could see the tears standing in her eyes.
“You’ve put on weight,” Odalie said, her black eyes narrowing. “And all of it about the waist too. Zerline . . .”
“Oh, maîtresse,” the girl wept. “Maîtresse!”
“Who was it, Zerline? Come, girl, pull yourself together! Who was it?”
“Heem, maîtresse knows—heem. Suzette, she runs, her—and fights; but I am not so fast as Suzette, me. Many time I run away; but one time I am too slow—and he is so strong like a bear, him.”
Odalie stood up slowly, the headache gone, forgotten.
“Go downstairs,” she said softly, “and put yourself in the care of Caleen. Tell her that you are to receive the best of everything. She is not to reproach you.”
Zerline looked at her mistress with eyes filled with tears of adoration.
“Maîtresse too good,” she whispered. “Now I get you that wine first, then I go.”
“Forget the port, Zerline. I don’t need it now.” She went out the door and down the stairs.
Stephen had not yet ridden out to the fields. He was busy in the great ledger book, recording the births of six male slave children, the sale of a thousand bales of cotton held over in his warehouse from last harvest, and the figures on the comparative yield of purple and striped cane as against the old Malabar variety. Hearing Odalie’s step, he looked up.
“Stephen . . .”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Stephen, I must ask you to have that man leave Harrow.” Wearily Stephen closed the big ledger.
“Didn’t we discuss that matter this morning?” he asked softly.
“Yes, but . . .”
“My answer is still the same, my dear. I can see no reason for changing it.”
“Well, I do! Perhaps you care not if he fills up the place with mulatto children! Perhaps that is nothing! But when he goes so far as to violate my own personal maidservant, it seems to me high time to call a halt!”
“Mike did that?”
“Yes.”
“I must warn him to confine his activities to Girod Street. This is not a thing to be tolerated.”
“Exactly. That’s why you must have him leave.”
Stephen looked at her.
“That—no,” he said quietly. “Mike has a home here for life. I gave him my word.”
“Either he goes,” Odalie declared. “Or I do!”
Stephen shrugged.
“The only choice in that matter,” he said, “is up to ye.” He stood up, taking his hat and his riding crop in his hand.
“Adieu, my dear,” he said. “I have work to do.”
Odalie watched him striding away in the direction of the stables. Her face was still. Only about the corners of her mouth was there a trembling, so that a person, watching, would have been unsure whether or not she were going to laugh or cry. Then she turned back into the house.
“Georges!” she called.
Stephen’s valet came out of the pantry. His face bore a guilty look, for he had been spending the better part of an hour trying to kiss Suzette, while she only laughed at him. He’d get her yet, though. She couldn’t do him that, no! She’d be his wife and soon.
“Yas, maîtresse?” he said.
“Georges, have the coach hitched. Get Caleen—and Zerline, too. Tell them I want them here at once!”
“Yas, maîtresse,” Georges said, and his voice was frightened. Never had he seen the young mistress look like this before, never. He scurried away to fetch the others.
Two hours later, the yellow coach rolled away from Harrow toward New Orleans. In it were Odalie and little Etienne, Caleen, Zerline, and Jean, a manservant. Zerline was crying softly; but Odalie’s face was pale and still. Old Caleen stared blankly out of the window.
How would he be—this grandson of hers that she was leaving behind? Little Inch—blood and bone and breath of his grandsire. Oh, well, she’d come back again; there were so many things to teach this little one, so many arts, crafts, subtleties: He must outwit his enemies as she had for so many years outwitted them. In seeming surrender, he must conquer.
The coach rolled on through the gathering haze of early August. On the table in the great hall the note gleamed white, there against the fine old yellowed fabric. And the night came down in a vast stillness.
When Stephen came back to the house, Andre was with him. The young Creole had ridden over from his own plantation and joined Stephen in the fields. They had talked of many things as they rode through the rows of cane: the sickening corruption in municipal politics which Mayor Denis Prieur seemed powerless to check; the rapidly disintegrating situation between the Creoles and the Americans in the bitter tax and governmental control dispute; the weakening influence of the church under the onslaught of the Protestant sects, particularly the Presbyterians with their powerful speaker, Ciapp, especially since Father Antoine had died in ‘twenty-nine.
“And what a funeral they gave him!” Andre said. “Why, even the Freemasons attended as a guard of honor, and you know how they regard all things Catholic.”
“Aye,” Stephen grinned maliciously. “But how much greater a burial did they give that pirate, Dominique You, the next year? Why, if ye recall, the Mayor declared a holiday. And of the two men which was the greater? ‘Tis always Barabbas the people want!”
“You have much right in that,” Andre said sadly. Then his handsome face lighted with a smile. “Here we are talking like old men, when ‘tis only a few short years since we stole the fat drunkard’s pants . . .”
“Seven years, Andre.”
“Seven? Ma foi—so many? It seems but a day.”
“To me it has been a long time—a hellish long time.”
“You’re not happy, my old one?”
“No, Andre, I’m not. I’ve gained everything I wanted. My lands, my big house, my bride—and my son. Yet there is but an emptiness here. I think sometimes I should have caught the next upriver packet that day we watched Lafayette.”
“Stephen!”
“I’m sorry, Andre. We have had some times together, haven’t we?”
“But yes! Remember in ‘twenty-eight when we patrolled against the threatened slave insurrection?”
“Aye—the Nigras had a time of it then.”
“And that same year we went down to the Place D’Armes to see Andrew Jackson. And those two little fillies, you remember, Odette and Jeanne-they both wanted you; why, Odette pouted for the better part of an hour before I convinced her that I wasn’t a bad fellow really.”
“Softly, Andre,” Stephen grinned. “ ‘Tis best not to recall those scrapes—at Harrow even the trees have ears. Well, here we are.”
Andre dismounted.
“Amelia wants a town house,” he said, “but I postponed the construction—there’s too much sickness in the city now. You know, Stephen, this year even the Creoles are dying—and yellow fever never used to bother us.”
“Then perhaps ye will consider cleaning up that filthy hole of a town. No wonder it’s a plague spot; why, right now ye can smell New Orleans three miles against the wind. Carrion, vermin, sewage. By
our Lady, do they all have to die to become convinced?”
“Apparently—more than three thousand have perished now, and the summer is yet not half spent.”
They went up the stairs and into the great hall. Stephen went to the bell cord and rang for Georges. Then he turned and walked back toward his friend. As he passed the little table, the note caught his eyes. He picked it up, and tore open the envelope. His pale eyes moved in swift little jerks over the page. Andre stood there, watching Stephen’s face.
“What is it?” he demanded. “Why do you look so?”
“ ‘Tis Odalie,” Stephen said very quietly. “She’s left me—she’s gone back to her father’s house in New Orleans.”
“You’re riding after her, of course?”
Stephen looked at his friend and the corner of his lip curled upward in a half smile.
“No, Andre,” he said, “no, I’m not.”
“But, Stephen . . .”
“My dogs, my horses, my blacks—and my women—obey me, Andre. She will come back. I shan’t lift a finger—but she’ll come back.”
Pierre Arceneaux greeted his daughter heavily when the coach stopped before the high town house. He had aged greatly in the last three years, so much so that the burden of managing Bellefont had become too great for him. So it was that now for months at a time he retired to his three-story town house that was one of the wonders of New Orleans, and left the management of the plantation to assistants. Now as he greeted his elder daughter his face was lined and grave.
“I have no doubt that you know what you’re doing,” he said, “but any dissolution of the marriage contract grieves me. However, come in, child; you’re always welcome.”
Followed by her retinue, Odalie got down from the coach and walked into the house.
“Take the coach around to the south end,” old Arceneaux said wearily. “My groom will attend to the horses.” Then he followed his daughter into the house.
Odalie had gone at once to her rooms on the second floor. Slowly the old man climbed the curving stairs. The crystal chandelier with its chimes of cut quartz was still, unstirred by any breath of air, and the heat was like a physical weight, pressing down upon his head. Outside Odalie’s door, Pierre paused until he had regained his breath.
“Go down,” Pierre said to Jean, “and tell Jules to bring us wine.” As the Negro left, the old man sank down upon the nearest chair. “I am not well,” he complained. “The years have left a heaviness in me.”
“Nonsense, father,” Odalie said. “You look like a stripling.”
“Thanks, but it isn’t so. Odalie . . .”
“Yes, father . . .”
“What if I sent a messenger to Stephen asking him to come and discuss this difficulty? To my mind he has done well with Harrow. Perhaps the nature of your complaint will not seem so serious upon re-examination.”
“No, father. I’ll never go back. What’s done is done.”
“You’re being very foolish, my girl. Stephen has grown in Louisiana. There are those who say he’ll reach greater things yet.”
“I don’t doubt it. Stephen has ability. Only he has no sense of the fitness of things. If he prefers his big brute of a river captain to me—why, then let the two of them stay up at Harrow without me.” She rose and crossed the room.
Down below, the alley was all but deserted. As Odalie watched, a wooden ox cart groaned through the narrow street below the gallery. It was piled high with something, the exact nature of which Odalie could not discern, since its contents were covered with canvas. But as it passed beneath her, the heavy stench rose up and struck her in the face. She put her handkerchief to her nose, and leaned out of the window. Then she was jerking her head back in, turning to Pierre.
“What is it?” the old man demanded.
“That wagon—” Odalie said. “Father, am I mad, or is that a human leg I see sticking out from under the canvas?”
“You’re quite sane,” Pierre told her grimly. “They pass this way every day.”
“Mon Dieu!”
“Yes—more of them every day—with the unclaimed and nameless dead stacked up like cordwood. The whole world seems to be dying, Odalie.”
“But, father, what on earth—why?”
“The fever, again—and worse than ever before. This time it’s sparing no one. Even the blacks are dying and they’ve always been immune to it. Still want to stay in New Orleans, Odalie?”
The tall girl faced her father.
“I’ll chance it,” she said; and went, on with her unpacking.
Throughout the rest of the summer, the deaths continued to mount. Odalie forbade Caleen to take little Etienne out even for air. The boy fretted in the sweltering heat of the house. At night, no one slept. The boy cried fitfully. And Zerline, heavy with child, tossed upon her cot, her lips swollen and covered with blisters. There was a headlong rush to leave the city. By October twenty-fifth, only thirty-five thousand people were left out of New Orleans’ normal population of more than eighty thousand souls. Still Odalie held on grimly.
On the night of October twenty-eighth, Odalie was shaken awake by Caleen’s horny old hand.
“Maîtresse come,” she said. “Zerline, she dying, her!”
Without bothering even to don a robe, Odalie ran down the dark hall in her nightdress. The mulatto girl was twisting on her cot, locked in the most violent convulsions.
“Get Jean,” Odalie said. “Tell him to ride for Doctor Terrebonne. Come, Caleen, we’ve work to do.”
Caleen shook her head.
“Too late,” she said. “Her die sure.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” Again Caleen shook her head.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing. Her die.”
Doctor Terrebonne did not reach the house of Pierre Arceneaux until six o’clock the next morning. By that time Zerline had been dead almost eight hours. Neither Jules nor Jean, the Negro menservants, had been able to find a priest. At the last, Odalie had knelt beside The unconscious girl and whispered as much as she knew of the sacrament of Extreme Unction, adding in the places where her memory had lapsed, her own fervent prayers.
When the little doctor came into the room where the dead girl lay, Odalie scarcely recognized him. His face was covered with a thatch of iron-gray beard. His clothes hung loosely like bags from his once ample form, and his eyes were streaked with fiery red, peering out from great blue hollows.
“You come too late,” Odalie said.
“I know. I am always too late now. Merciful God! As if the fever were not enough . . .”
“Not enough? You mean that there is something more?”
“Cholera. If there is a man alive in New Orleans when the hot weather abates he should thank the divine intercession of all the saints!”
“Doctor,” Odalie said. “Surely you exaggerate.”
Doctor Terrebonne was writing in his little book of records:
“Name: Zerline; Race: Colored; Slave to Madame S. Fox; Age: Twenty—” He looked up at Odalie’s words.
“Madame,” he said, “I can only suggest that you have your horses hitched to your carriage now—this instant—and drive out of New Orleans at a gallop. Good night, Madame. I will have the dead cart call for the remains.”
“The dead cart?” Odalie whispered. “You mean that horrible wagon with—oh, my Cod!”
“Exactly. One will pass this way before noon. I shall have the driver stop.”
“No!” Odalie said. “She will have decent Christian burial—and masses for the repose of her soul.”
“If Madame can find a priest—most of whom are dead by now, because of their unswerving devotion to the cause of ministering unto the sick. Asiatic cholera is no respecter of clerical garb—and if Madame is willing to undertake the labor of grave-digging with her own patrician hands . . . Good day, Madame.” He left with a curt bow, already hurrying to his next call.
He’s mad, Odalie thought; then she turned and went back into the room where Zerli
ne lay. Carefully, she and Caleen wrapped the bloated figure of the girl in a winding sheet then, summoning Jean and Jules, they had her lifted tenderly into the carriage. Arming the Negroes with spades, they set out for the burial ground. As they were leaving the house, the dismal ox cart turned into the street. The driver was a black, hideously pockmarked from smallpox.
“Bodies?” he croaked: “Any bodies? Out wit your daid!” And behind him Odalie could see that the cart was uncovered, the bodies strewn about like curiously lifelike puppets, piled up so high that here and there a head hung over the side, lolling loosely on the neck. Then the cart plodded past, and the stench rolled into the coach windows. Holding her kerchief to her nose, Odalie looked back. One fat old man had fallen from the cart, save for one foot that was entangled in the railings; and as the cart moved, he bumped on the cobblestones like a thing of rubber, his bald head stained with dust.
“Bodies,” the driver called. “Bodies! Out wit your daid!”
The sky hung low over the city like a grey iron lid, and no slightest wind stirred. As they passed through the deserted streets, they saw houses boarded up; these, Odalie realized, were the homes of those who had first left the city. But as they went on, other deserted houses stood with doors and windows opened and the furniture undraped. Time and again she had to turn her head to avoid the sight of a sodden bundle of rags lying amid the filth of a gutter—sodden, shapeless bundles that had once been human beings.
They drove, unopposed, into the gates of the cemetery. The coachman drew up his pair just inside the door. Leaning out, Odalie could see the great open trenches into which the death carts were dumping their loads. There were dozens of freshly dug graves; but now, apparently, even the grave diggers were fled, for, at their approach, two or three carrion crows flapped heavily up from the open graves. At one place there were mounds of the dead, where the drivers of the dead cart, careless, or heedless of the fact that here there was no trench, had simply spilled their cargoes out upon the ground.
Odalie pointed to a clear spot and the two Negroes went to work. When they were done, they laid the body gently in the earth, and waited bareheaded while their mistress said a prayer. Then, at last, they covered Zerline with the rich, black earth and turned again homeward.