“The wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way. And the mouth of fools poureth out foolishness,” Baba Simza said triumphantly. Then, to take away the sting, she grinned at her grandson. “I’m glad you and Nadyha are taking back the treasures from them. Those gaje are magerd’ o choros.”
They were Gypsies, though they never called themselves that, they called themselves Romany, and it was Romany words they used interspersed with English. Simza was a sixty-year-old woman, her face sun-creased and darkened, her hands strong and work-hardened. She was the Phuri Dae, the wise woman of their vitsi, or clan. Nadyha and Niçu were her grandchildren—her favorite grandchildren, as a matter of fact, because she had eighteen. Niçu’s wife, Mirella, she also considered her grandchild, for when a Romany woman married she became a member of her husband’s family.
Nadyha, Simza admitted to herself, was especially beloved. She had been a pretty child, and now that she was twenty she was an amazingly beautiful young woman. As happened occasionally in their vitsi, Nadyha had been born with fairer skin than was usual with the Romany. Her complexion was a light tawny shade, instead of the normal earth-brown hues. Instead of dark black-brown eyes, even at birth hers were hazel, golden brown around the irises shading into dark green, and her eyebrows were lighter than her ebony hair. Her nose was small, her mouth wide and generous but not lush, her face a gentle oval. Children born with these unusual looks were rare in their vitsi, and they were usually considered especially gifted, intelligent people. It had proved true with Nadhya; she was a skillful weaver and seamstress, at a very young age she had become, under Simza’s tutelage, an expert drabengri, a medicine-woman, a healer. She could sing well, she played the guitar with an expertise that had far surpassed her teachers. She had a way with animals that no one had ever seen. All Romany, especially the Vlach-Roma, as they were, loved horses; in fact, they considered horses their brothers. But Nadhya loved all animals, even those that the Romany thought unclean, and they seemed to return her love without stint.
But none of these things were why Simza thought Nadhya so special. It was her spirit, her heart, her love of freedom and independence, her stubborn will, her determination to enjoy the things in life to the utmost, whether it was growing herbs or nursing a wounded bird or playing the guitar. She was strong, and sometimes angry and bitter, but Simza thought that Nadyha would surely grow in wisdom as she got older, and when she found a good husband. If she ever did consent to such a thing, Simza thought with an inward sigh. Nadyha seemed to have nothing but resentment and disdain for men.
Her elder brother, Niçu, was much like her in temperament, but his features were those typical of Romany men: black hair; brown-black eyes; his cheekbones a high, bony prominence; his face long with a sharp square chin. His complexion was that of a lighter brown than some, though the Romany complexion came in many different shades. But their skin had none of the copper tint of the Indian, or the olive tint of Araby. Uniformly the Romany skin was of plain but varying shades of brown, with no red or yellow hue.
His wife, Mirella, was one of the prettier Roma, for sometimes the severity of their features—which made the men look dramatic and fiery—made the women appear hard and sharp. Mirella had a long face with a pointed chin and a long, thin nose, but her lips were small and full, and her dark eyes danced with happiness. At least, in the normal course of life she was happy. She loved her husband so much; her dream since she had been a small child was to marry Niçu. They had been married for two years now, and Mirella had lost two children. Sometimes the sorrow showed, at times when she was unaware, mostly when Niçu was not present. But she was a good-natured young woman, easily amused and entertained, and she was only nineteen. She and Niçu had plenty of time.
Now Nadyha chuckled at her grandmother calling the Blue Beasts “wicked thieves,” for it might be said—and would be said, always, of the Gypsies—that she and Niçu were the thieves. Sometimes this made Nadyha very angry, but now it amused her. She took Niçu’s arm and said, “Let thy foolish words cease, fool, and let us understandeth our wayeth.” She often made fun of Simza’s biblical quotes, which were always in King James English.
“Go with amaro deary Dovvel,” Simza called after them.
They melted into the dense forest in a northerly direction. It was mid-June, and the night would have been too warm, except for the falling damps. A maize-yellow half moon lit their way, though they didn’t need it, for they had walked and ridden this path since they were small children. To a stranger, the woods would look dark and threatening, tall cypress and oak looming above, trailing their long ghostly Spanish moss-beards. But to Nadyha and Niçu it was their home, night or day. An owl’s cry sounded, and they looked up to see if it would dive-bomb them, as the larger males often would. But though he kept hooting derisively at them they never saw him.
They crossed over a ribbon of deep black swamp, on a sturdy cypress bridge that had been built by the Romany in their great-grandfather’s time. Then the ground slowly fell until they were walking across great fields of tobacco, now shabby and fallow. The Union soldiers had no time for sowing and reaping, and the Negroes that could have claimed rights to the fields seemed not to want to do such labor since they had been freed back in 1862.
These had been the Perrados fields for over a hundred years, as the Gypsies had been Perrados Gypsies for that span, too. Now the Blue Beasts had stolen Manuel Perrados’s money, his home, and finally his and his sons’ lives. The eldest son, Jerome, had been killed at Gettysburg, and the younger son, Christophe, had died in Spotsylvania. Manuel Perrados was seventy-four years old, and had lost his second wife, Genevieve, ten years previously in the yellow fever epidemic that had crippled New Orleans. He had never ceased to grieve for her, and had been so devastated by the loss of both his sons, that when the Union Army decided that his taxes for his considerable holdings would be $8,000, he quietly had a massive heart attack and died.
Manuel Perrados’s great-great-grandfather had immigrated to New Orleans from Madrid in 1762, bringing with him nineteen Gypsy slaves and two black slaves. He had bought in this new Promised Land a fertile tract of land just north of New Orleans, along Bayou Sauvage, and started raising tobacco. It didn’t take long before Perrados Tobacco was famous for its smooth richness, and the Perrados family grew richer along with their tobacco, and bought more and more land until their plantation sprawled across forty thousand acres. Manuel Perrados’s great-grandfather had built the lavish Spanish plantation home along the banks of soft-flowing Bayou Sauvage. And it was then, and it was Nadyha’s and Niçu’s great-great-grandfather, that had saved all of the Perrados horses, fine mounts imported from Spain at great expense, from a barn fire. Their Gypsy ancestor had been badly burnt and had died within two days. With overwhelming gratitude Xavier Perrados had set his Gypsies free; and because he had always been a fair and just master, his Gypsies stayed with him, and they became paid and valuable employees. He had even started a school for the Gypsy children, hiring a schoolteacher that taught them to read and write both in English and in French, for Xavier Perrados had married a Frenchwoman, and the burgeoning Creole culture in New Orleans was already heavily Francophile.
Both Nadyha and Niçu were tall, with long legs, and they walked quickly. Soon they came to the grounds of the Perrados mansion, several acres of landscaped grounds surrounding the great house. It was an old Spanish villa of a warm peach-colored plaster, the main hall of two stories, the two perpendicular wings one-storied. The doors and windows were all graceful arches. In the central courtyard were beds of roses, old roses that scented the entire grounds, surrounding an enormous five-tiered fountain, eight feet high, with a sculpture of a lovely Grecian woman holding an urn from which the water gushed.
Nadyha and Niçu didn’t go toward the front of the villa, however, for they had no desire to see how it was now damaged. When Major William Wining had taken the Perrados mansion for his headquarters, it had been the elegant old villa’s death sentence. He and his men
lazily quartered their horses in the courtyard, and now the rosebeds were all trampled and ruined. The horses drank from the fountain, and often when the soldiers got drunk they jumped into it and played silly games. On one night of debauchery they had decided to use the Grecian lady for target practice. Evidently they were so drunk that their aim was bad, because she hadn’t been shot to pieces. Part of her face was chipped, and the lip of the urn was half-gone, and the crook of her left elbow was missing. That same night they had decided to have horse races, making the winning post Manuel Perrados’s library. The horses had galloped up the fine marble staircase, chipping and cracking every step.
On this night it seemed every window had a lantern or two shining in it, and Nadyha and Niçu could hear two dozen men singing a vulgar song and laughing uproariously. “Filthy frogs,” Nadyha muttered darkly. In ancient Romany, “frog” was the name of the devil.
She led Niçu closer to the house, toward the left wing. Here was a summerhouse, surrounded by oaks, with the lawn green and maNiçured in Manuel Perrados’s time. Now it was overgrown with weeds. She went to a soaring magnolia tree, set apart and encircled by a low wrought-iron fence. Beside the tree, on either side, were two plants, with many tall, slender reed-like stalks and long, thin leaves.
As they stepped over the knee-high fence, Nadyha said, “These are the ones, Niçu. And for your information, they’re not weeds, they’re elachi, and these seeds are Grains of Paradise. Here, you have to cut them, see?” She knelt by one plant. Straggling out messily from the bases of the plants’ stalks were long, skinny tendrils with pods on them about the size of green peas. Nadhya took a long knife from the sheath on her belt and cut some of the tendrils close to the base of a stalk. “Don’t cut the plant,” she warned her brother. “It’s going to be hard enough for me to get them to grow without them being wounded.”
“You mean we’re going to have to dig up—never mind,” Niçu said resignedly. Now he knew why Nadyha had a spade stuck in her belt. He knelt on the other side of the tree and began harvesting the green strings running along the ground. He had thought, since apparently this plant was so special that his grandmother had called it a treasure, that it might have a strong scent, but he sniffed of the tendrils and smelled nothing but earth, and the heavy perfume of the magnolia blooms above him.
From the house now came sounds of heavy boots stamping. Nadyha and Niçu stopped cutting and looked up alertly. Then another song burst forth, some martial song with a heavy beat. The men were marching, probably around the long, Spanish oak dining table, so old it was black with age. A gunshot sounded, then another, as they sang. They were probably firing their guns into the air, ruining the delicately modeled plaster ceiling. Grimly Nadyha and Niçu went back to their work.
After they had cleared all the tendrils and carefully put them in their rucksacks, without a word Niçu pulled the spade out of Nadhya’s belt and started digging. “Be careful, you’re not digging a ditch,” Nadhya scolded. “Don’t touch the taproot, dig a ways around the base of the plant in a circle.”
“Hai, Kralisi Nadhya,” he retorted sarcastically.
She watched him critically for a few moments, and saw that in spite of his put-on impatience he was digging carefully and gently. Then, taking hold of a low limb of the magnolia tree, she swung herself up and climbed about halfway up the tree. Straddling a thick branch, she looked up, to both sides, down to the branches below. Finally, on a skinny twig shooting off the branch she was sitting on, in the uncertain moonlight she saw the perfect magnolia bloom. It glowed white and pure, with no shadow of a bruise on it, and it was as big as a dinner plate. Holding to the trunk of the tree with her left hand, she stretched out precariously far to reach the twig, which was bent with the flower’s weight. Reaching under the bloom, she managed to get her thumb and forefinger on the short stem and snapped it. Holding it carefully she climbed down one-handed.
Niçu had finished digging up the plants, which were lying on their sides with wet clods of earth clinging to their short, thick roots. “Got it?” he asked as she jumped down from the tree.
“See?” she said proudly, holding the flower out to him.
He saw the perfection of it and smiled a little. “Misto kedast tute, Phei.”
“Thank you, Brother.” She retrieved a basket she had made, closely and intricately woven, from her bag. It was filled with wet Spanish moss, and tenderly she nestled the magnolia bloom into it. Then she and Niçu stepped back over the fence and went past the villa, to the grounds far behind. Here was a cemetery, with a high iron gate and cleverly wrought into the arch above the gate was the name “Perrados.” As was necessary here, the dead weren’t buried, because the land was so low-lying that graves often filled with water and floated up the coffins. The graveyard had many, many white tombs, some of them pillared like Grecian temples, most of them with ornate carvings. Nadyha and Niçu went straight to one tomb that was large but unadorned, except for a marble pediment that read: Manuel and Genevieve Perrados, Beloved of God.
At the center of the door Nadyha laid down the basket with the magnolia blossom. Manuel Perrados had loved magnolia blooms dearly. Together they said, “Good night, Kako Perrados, Kaki Perrados. We are glad you are with amaro deary Dovvel.”
Then they made their way to an obscure corner of the graveyard, where long white plaster walls had been built, so that the tombs were made as a mausoleum, stacked three-high. On the door of each was a cone-shaped tin holder, most all of them holding bouquets of dried herbs. The tomb they sought was almost in the middle of the third wall, with the inscription Guaril, rom Simza on it—Nadyha and Niçu’s paternal grandfather, Simza’s husband. Taking a chain from around his neck, Niçu hung it upon the holder. It was a humble tin chain, but the links were as delicate as spun silver, and an elaborately carved tin cross hung from it. Niçu had made it.
Nadyha said, “Purodod Guaril, Baba Simza says to tell you that you are still her most ves’ tacha, and still her best te’ sorthene. She will join you soon at deary Dovvel’s table.” Then she and Niçu spoke the same farewell they had given the Perrados, and returned to the great magnolia tree.
The soldiers were still singing drunkenly, and marching and shouting and shooting. Nadyha and Niçu picked up the two plants and started to leave. But Nadyha stopped and looked thoughtfully at the wrought-iron fence.
“No, Nadyha,” Niçu said in a warning tone. “Those pieces are short but they’re heavy. Not that you couldn’t carry them,” he added hastily at the baleful glance Nadyha turned on him. “But we couldn’t haul them and be careful with the plants at the same time, could we?”
“I guess not,” she said reluctantly. “Oh, well, we can just come back and get it. Maybe we’ll come in the full moon, so I can see better, and I can save some of poor Kako Perrados’s favorite rosebushes.”
“If you figure on stealing the fountain, you’d better let me know ahead of time,” Niçu grumbled. “I’ll have to build a big, heavy cart to haul it.”
WHEN THEY WALKED INTO the firelight of their camp, Simza and Mirella both burst into laughter. The plants, being very old, had multiplied richly over the years, so that the bunch of stalks was about two feet in diameter, and both plants were about four feet tall. Nadyha and Niçu had continuously shifted their long, fat burdens on their way back to camp, but carrying them was awkward. As soon as they had seen the light of their wagons through the trees they had both held the plants upright in front of them. They looked like two bushes with long legs.
“I thought you said these were grains,” Niçu complained as he set his plant down underneath one nature’s wall of their camp, a huge, drooping weeping willow tree. “If these things are grains then I’m an ant.”
Nadyha set her plant down and hurried to the pump to wash her hands. Both she and Niçu were covered in mud, for they had left as much dirt clinging to the roots of the plants as possible. They washed up and went to sit by the campfire. Mirella had made them a pot of chicory tea with orange peel
, Niçu’s favorite. It was spicy and refreshing, but it was not a stimulant; in fact, chicory tea had a slight sedative effect.
Nadyha said, “I’m going to rest for a little while, but then I’ll take care of the elachi, Baba Simza.”
The old woman nodded, then stood up and stretched. “That’s good, Nadyha. They’ll wither and die in the night. I’m going to bed.”
They bid her good night. Niçu went and sat on his wagon steps to remove and clean his muddy boots. Mirella asked Nadyha, “Do you want me to help you with the elachi?”
“No, there’s no need. I already have the beds fixed, all I have to do is set them in it and water them,” Nadyha answered. “You go ahead and go to bed, Phei.” Nadyha called Mirella, “Sister,” and loved her like one.
When Nadyha finished her tea she took her plants to the beds she had prepared, raised beds underneath a nearby oak tree. With some difficulty she got them planted just right, with the taproot securely covered, and then quickly put small spadefuls of light, sandy soil around them. With her watering can she hauled water to them and poured only one canful each.
When she finished she put out the campfire, tended to her animals, and readied herself for bed. Lying there, looking out of the wide opening in the back of her wagon at the tree-roof overhead, she could not get her mind to rest as her body longed to.
She thought about the day coming, of all the things she hoped to do, and there were many. She wished it was time to go to town, to sell their wares, but that was still at least two weeks away. Nadyha was restless, impatient, eager for new things, experiences, sights, even people. She loved her family, but she was young and passionate and such a calm lifestyle often frustrated her.
She thought of her brother and Mirella. They loved each other so much, and though they weren’t demonstrative Nadyha could clearly sense the passion between them. She herself had passion, physical desires, but they were unformed, nameless, and certainly had no object. She even tried to make up an imaginary lover, a man that she desired and could love, but she simply couldn’t do it. For the most part she despised men, at least gaje men, and even some romoro.
The River Palace: A Water Wheel Novel #3 Page 5