My Wholly Heartbreaking Heretic

by Danielle Peterson

According to my balance sheet (I had a little slip in my wallet in which I did calculations; add internet banking to the list of things that is handy beyond your simple mortal comprehension), I had pretty much decimated my credit card on last minutes flights by that point. Sure, I could have gone and gotten a bank draft or even brazenly stolen some money, but I had a few days to kill before I was due back in Oregon. Now that I had gotten the reel, the intensity that I had felt had subsided somewhat, although that may have had something to do with the bourbon I had been swigging.

  I used the cash I had on me to buy a steak diner, a bus ticket to Reno, and a book to read on the bus (The Poseidon Adventure. I liked it a lot, and coincidentally there was a character named Muller in it). On the ten hour or so bus ride back to my home I nursed the Wild Turkey and came up with many a beautiful and eloquent thing to say to convince Ma Bichette to come and live with me in Reno, things that I promptly forgot the next day. What can I say? I know she uses me and that I’m pathetic, but I can’t help it. I was determined to get her to come back to me now that I had been reunited with her, but not determined enough to live on her farm; I have some tattered shreds of dignity. She deserved better than those filthy morons anyway. She deserves someone who will actually love her, not worship her from the dirt.

  I stumbled into my house sometime in the early hours of the morning. My first instinct was to call Ma Bichette and try to convince her on the telephone to come down to me, without delay, and to abandon her latest trick. She doesn’t really like that sort of thing, the romantic drunk dial, and I thankfully fell asleep on the sofa before I could call her. The next morning I showered and haphazardly grabbed a few changes of clothing from my closet before hitting the road.

  I arrived at her plantation later that evening. As it was dark no one was working, but I saw cracks of light leaking from the stable. I believe she was expecting me to call once I had acquired the film, so she was understandably surprised when she opened the door.

  “Rémi!” Ma Bichette exclaimed excitedly and threw her arms around my neck. “You have it?”

  She smelled so nice. Not like perfume or anything as artificial as that, she just smelled so nice, like all good things should. “Of course I have, ma bichette.”

  She kissed me and smiled. “You are the best!” She kissed me again. “I didn’t expect you to do it so quickly.”

  I smiled back, wanting to enjoy the moment before I started demanding my well-earned explanations. “You’re so pretty when you smile,” I said softly. Anything for that, the world for that.

  “Come inside,” she said and shut the door. The television was blaring in the next room, but she turned it off as we entered. She unbuttoned my coat and slipped it off my shoulders, the whole time making more declarations of joy.

  I drank it all in; her warm touch, her cooed benedictions, her untidy hair that was pulled back in a lopsided ponytail. But that simple moment of sheer contentment could never last. We sat on the sofa. I reached into my bag and pulled out the reel.

  “You knew what he wanted,” I said as I gave her the reel. “Why did you tell me you didn’t?” I could have berated her then, for the outright lies she told me, but at a certain point in a relationship you have to learn when to let things go if you want to continue said relationship.

  She stared at the reel canister for a second before replying. “I was worried you would think it was silly and you wouldn’t do it.”

  “Darling, it’s very silly. It is probably the silliest thing that I have been involved with. But I still did it, didn’t I?” I wonder when she shall get it through her pretty skull that I would do literally anything for her, regardless of the magnitude of silliness.

  “It’s very important to me,” she answered and opened the canister with reverent deliberation.

  “So I’ve gathered.”

  She looked up from the reel. “I suppose it’s time to tell you.”

  “Please.’

  “Before Maman died, she wanted to make sure that I would have a better life than she had. She didn’t want me to be a whore like she had been.” Ma Bichette never pulled any punches when it came to discussing her former career as a high-end prostitute. “So, one of the last things she before the cancer took her was to arrange my marriage.”

  I was stunned. She had never mentioned a hint of such a thing. “What?”

  She sighed. “I never told you because, well, it just wasn’t a good thing to bring up. Some men can get weird about that sort of thing since there’s a lot of baggage involved. And then after we changed, it was all just so irrelevant.”

  “Still, you think you may have mentioned something at some point.” I wasn’t angry, just, well, surprised.

  “Does it make a difference?” she asked, her eyebrows raised in expectant annoyance at the gall I had to be offended that she had never brought any of this during our two century-long on-and-off again relationship.

  “No, it doesn’t,” I answered honestly. If it did not change my love for her that she spent seven years as a prostitute, it certainly couldn’t bother me that she was married previously.

  She smiled weakly and squeezed my hand. “That’s why I never said anything. It was just a meaningless nothing that could be made into a problem. But yes, that’s what happened. I was fourteen and my husband, Jacque, he was older than I was by a few years, but a free man and that’s what she wanted, that I wouldn’t get involved with anyone who was owned. He worked at a forge.”

  I don’t want to get into the specifics, because this isn’t a history lesson, but free colored Creoles had their own social structure and their own rules on who could marry who and what have you (which is ridiculous in any social strata, but that’s neither here nor there) and no, it would not be done for a free-born woman, or girl rather in her case, to be married to a slave. If you’re into social history it’s very interesting, considering that some colored Creoles even owned slaves themselves, but, yeah, getting a bit off track here.

  She shuddered at the memory. “He always stank so bad, like brimstone. Jacque was nice in public, that’s why Maman set it up. But in private, oh, what an awful man he was. He was mad at the whole world, at everyone and everything, all the time. He didn’t hit me, at least not at first, but he yelled at me and was just plain mean. And he showed me all of his anger. I didn’t like him at all, but I was young and scared and had just lost Maman. I didn’t know what I should do in that situation. I thought that maybe that’s what a marriage was like,” she said with a cynical laugh, “and that’s why maybe Maman had never married. Because it would be better to be a whore and be reviled by your community but have your own money and not have to answer to some awful husband.”

  “Oh, ma bichette,” I started to console her, but she just shrugged.

  “It’s all right,” she said simply. “It was so long ago. So, before long I was with child-”

  I did not want to interrupt, but that’s one of those things that stimulates the lizard parts of my human brain into a reaction. “What?”

  She ignored my interjection. “When I was pregnant Jacque started to be physically abuse. Nothing heavy, just a smack on the face here or a thrown bottle there. I realized that things were going to get worse. I was not going to put up with that. If I was going to be treated badly I might as well make a better living than I was. So after Baptiste was born I took him and just left the house one day and never came back. I knew the Madam of a decent place and spoke with her.”

  “Oh, ma bichette,” I said again, picturing my beautiful little doe, waif-like and wandering the muddy streets of early 19th century New Orleans, tiny baby in her arms and nothing to her name but the presumably filthy dress she had on. That she spoke of her hardship with such straightforward plainness made me love her more. So brave and strong.

  “It’s not like a colored teenage girl with a baby had much in the way of options,” she defended herself, mistaking my compassion for judgment.

  I shook my head. “No, darling, that’s
not it, I just feel horrible for you, that’s all.”

  “Really? But it was so long ago, and it’s not like I was the only girl that happened to.” Ma Bichette finds my normal levels of sympathy both mystifying and wonderful. She smiled. “You are so sweet, mon canard, to care about me before you even met me.”

  Sometimes she makes me want to throw my hands up and surrender to whatever heart-breakingly bizarre thought processes she goes through. “Of course I care, that’s awful,” I replied and squeezed her hand. “I wish you had told me.”

  Ma Bichette smiled. “Rémi, you’re not the monster you think you are. You agonize so, but you’ve got the heart of lamb. You’re no monster, believe me, I’ve known monsters.”

  “Go on,” I urged her. For her sake I hoped that her son hadn’t died, but considering that I had never even heard of him up until this point and infant mortality rates were very high at the time, well, it was not looking good for little Baptiste. This still all somehow tied into the film I had been sent to retrieve too, and I was eager to hear the rest.

  “I got right into the life. I knew what to do, and all the tricks and stuff, as I grew up around them. I was starting to get popular and make a lot of money, but…” she trailed off. “That’s no life for a child, and especially not for a boy. I had no relations to send him to and I didn’t want him to grow up like me, to be uneducated and live on the margins of society. I know that that was a big dream for a colored son of a whore at the time, but, well, I am ambitious. I spoke to a girl I worked with who had a son as well. She knew of a group of Quakers all the way up in Pennsylvania, and they took in children in Baptiste’s situation. They educated them, they taught them good trades, and they even treated them as equals. They are good people, Quakers, and I would never take from one of them.”

  The moment I realized that she had given up her son when he was just a baby my sympathy must have shown on my face, because her own face fell from it’s façade into a rare glimpse of sorrow. “Oh, ma bichette,” I found myself saying for a third time. I could think of nothing else to say.

  “It’s…” she was going to say ‘all right’ I believe, but she didn’t want to continue the lies, at least not at that moment. “…it’s all over, it’s too long ago. I sent him there, and I never heard from him again. Of course I wouldn’t hear from him, he was just a baby and couldn’t write. I suppose he grew up to be a good man and had a good job, just he grew up as an orphan is all. I never mentioned it because I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about that I abandoned him twice, once when I sent him up there, and again when I became like this. I always thought that maybe, maybe when I was retired I could go and find him, but I couldn’t after we changed. Because what would I say? My apologies that I sent you to an orphanage, and, oh, by the way I am a monster? He didn’t deserve that, to have the mother he presumed was dead show up and announce that she was a murdering beast!” All of this came out very frantically and in a higher tempo than her usual speech, and the dawn of a tear glistened in her eye.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, struck near dumb by my sudden realization of the scope of what I had taken away from her. “If it wasn’t for me you could have gone to him. I wish you had told me, my darling. I would have sent for him.”

  She laughed shortly. “Yes, have him come home to live the life of a bastard and see his mother get murdered. No, it’s better that he never knew me. I don’t think he even remembered me, he was barely a year when I sent him up there.” She had settled back into her usual veneer of control and blinked away the conspicuous tear. “What happened happened, and there’s no point in feeling sad or sorry for myself.”

  I said nothing. Instead I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around her. I felt her relax and she leaned into me. She sighed and said “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you. I don’t like lying, but I do it a lot because it’s easier than telling the truth. I always have a reason. I suppose that doesn’t make it okay.”

  I paused before replying. Of course I did not care for her lying and her manipulations, but after what she had told me, combined with the sort of life I already knew she had lead, I couldn’t summon up the sentiment to chide her for her habitual deception. “Don’t worry about what you’ve said or haven’t said before, I love you,” I said. I supposed that was a good middle ground, I wasn’t condemning her nor was I telling her she should continue.

  “I wanted to pretend it was a reoccurring dream, something that hadn’t really happened but I still remembered,” she murmured slowly. “But it is not. I can’t convince myself of my own lies, even if I can convince everyone else. That is annoying.”

  “I bet. But you don’t have to lie to me,” I replied. “Doesn’t it feel better to tell the truth finally?”

  “No,” she answered. “You can’t give me back what I lost. No one can,” she replied flatly. “It doesn’t matter who I tell.”

  She was right, of course. There’s this idea that if you purge yourself of your mental woes you’ll ‘feel better’ to some extent. It works for me, I suppose, although I don’t really ‘feel better’ after writing all this, as much as I hope that it will count as confession somehow. I don’t really know if I deserve to feel better anyway. I don’t know (although I certainly hope) if there is anyway she could ever really feel better about having had to give up her son, but merely telling me about it wasn’t going to magically fix it.

  To get Ma Bichette to agree it’s better to appeal to logic than to emotion. “But now that you told me, I can maybe help. And it will be less stressful to try to keep it a secret any longer.” I wanted to convince her to get in the habit of perhaps telling the damn truth more often than not.

  “Yes, you’re right,” she answered with a bit more emotion in her voice. She pulled away from me. “It’s good that you know. You should know. And you should know the rest of it as well, like what’s on that reel.”

  I had briefly forgotten about the reel. “It’s your descendants, isn’t it?” I said after a moment of contemplation. “Votre famille heureuse.”

  She stood up suddenly, the canister held between her hands. “A few years ago I saw a baby who looked just like him, exactly like him. I thought that it would make me sad, but it didn’t. It made me so happy to stop pretending that he was never real. I knew then that I had to find out what had happened. I went to Fallsington. The orphanage was closed a long time ago, but I spoke with a lady at one of their churches. I told her I was doing genealogical research,” Ma Bichette smiled broadly. “I said I was looking for my great-great-great grandfather. She showed me their records, and Baptiste was buried nearby. He lived to be seventy-three, and was married and had five children. He owned a lot of land, so I think he had a farm.”

  This all sounds rather bleak, having outlived her only child by a century, but I had not seen her so happy for so long. She had finally reclaimed her son, even if it was belated. “That’s wonderful,” I commented, but she didn’t hear me. Her eyes were focused on ghostly visions that were still tangible to her, even through insurmountable realities and mistakes.

  “I managed to track down one of the lines,” she said and she shook off her daydream. “In Boston. I went there. I wasn’t going to say anything to them. I have no idea what I would say. I wanted to see them. I didn’t want to scare them, so I waited until they had all left the house. I don’t know where they went. I want to think they went to the zoo, or to the beach, or something fun like that. I went into the house. I wanted something of them, something that I would carry around with me, so I would never lose him again. I was planning on taking some of their photos, not many, just a few. But then I saw this. They had a dozen films. I hope they just think that this one got lost.”

  “And you bought a projector to watch it? And a film camera to make the film of you to convince me to do this in the first place?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t risk you not doing this. I had to make you believe your precious anonymity was at stake. I couldn’t lose this.
I couldn’t lose them again.”

  I held my tongue. I’m certain you have a good idea of the gist of my thoughts at the moment anyway. Besides, any irritation I may have harbored melted away at the pure joy she radiated.

  “Do you want to see it?” she asked me. She was nearly bursting with pride.

  “Of course,” and before the words were out of my mouth she left the parlor and sprinted up the stairs. I imagined that she was more eager to see it herself than to show to me, but I was understandably curious. I didn’t run up the stairs like she did though.

  Ma Bichette was carefully placing the reel onto the machine. “There’s two girls,” she explained hurriedly. “Pamela, she’s nine, and Denise, she’s seven. I don’t know much about them, but Pamela got a hundred on her spelling test, they pinned it up on the wall. I’m so proud, she’s probably a better speller than I am. Shirley is their mother, but the father, Marcus, he’s mine,” she said. “I think he works for the power company. I went through their mail and saw his paycheck.”

  She turned the projector on. “Shirley is holding the camera, I think,” she narrated.

  The scene was of a grassy backyard on a sunny summer’s day. Two thin black girls, one in a yellow bathing suit and one in a lime green bathing suit, ran pell-mell across the lawn and jumped through a lawn sprinkler, until they noticed the camera, in which instance they immediately started to do cartwheels. The smaller one tried to push the older one out of the way, but the older one just shrugged her off.

  “Here comes Marcus,” Ma Bichette said, and on cue her however so many greats grandson ambled onto the screen. He had a cigarette in one hand, which he placed on an ashtray before lumbering over to his girls. Marcus walked with a slight limp, but he was fit enough to pick up the smaller girl and swing her around while the older one climbed up his back. The older one, Pamela, looked directly at the camera for a moment, no doubt responding to something her mother said. She then dropped to the ground and ran towards the camera, which followed her into the house, where she came back into view after few seconds. Pamela was hoisting a scared looking ash grey kitten above her head, which presumably her mother told her to treat more gently, because she immediately lowered it and then cradled it against her chest.

  Denise, the younger girl, ran past the girl and her cat and promptly returned with a frightened looking kitten of her own, albeit a black and white tabby. She nuzzled it against her face with over enthusiastic affection, and received a few wild swipes at her face in return. Marcus walked past them into the kitchen. The scene abruptly ended.

  Ma Bichette was silent for a moment. “I’ve watched that so many times, and I never get sick of it. I wish so much that…” she sighed. “Well, no sense crying over it, that won’t get anything accomplished. I should be grateful that I have this. I am. I have this.”

  By the dim light of the projector I could see her looking at me in the darkened room. “I’m just happy you’re happy,” I said.

  “Are you tired?” she asked.

  I nodded slowly. I had driven ten hours, of course I was tired. Tired and cold.

  “I’m going to watch this again. Go lie down in bed, I’ll be in a minute.” She removed the spent reel and set it back on the spindle to be played again.

  I left her alone with her family, and I collapsed onto the bed. I lay there for a moment, trying to suppress my own demons. I have sired many a child in my many days. I am not as attached to them as I should be, however, for the simple fact is that I know I will outlive them during said siring. Should you take a puppy to the veterinarian and he tells you that it has some horrible canine disease and will die within a week, you can’t let yourself get attached, no matter how much you feel that you should love it and cherish it. It will be nothing but dust before you know it.

  The first time that Ma Bichette and I broke up I was wreck. I rebounded almost immediately with another lady and before I knew what happened I had three children with her; two boys and girl. I supposed that I would cross that bridge of explanation as to why I didn’t age when I came upon it, but that opportunity never presented itself. They all were spirited away in a cholera epidemic. The task of washing them and preparing them for burial was my grim chore. The girl, Violetta, she was not more than two. She died with her soft brown eyes wide open and I laid coins upon them, lest they stare lifelessly out into oblivion. Some of our neighbors died as well, but the ones who survived looked at me with pity. Not what luck I had to live, but what misfortune I had to survive.

  I heard the projector running in the next room. I exhaled slowly and rolled over onto my side. I chose this, she didn’t. I don’t have any right to complain.

  I disrobed and crawled under the thick quilt. She hadn’t changed the sheets in a while; she’s never been big on housework. But I didn’t mind, it was a welcome bouquet. The light from the hall streamed into the bedroom. I tried to sleep, but I could not shake the feeling of being so very forsaken.

  The light turned off and I heard footsteps coming to her bedroom. I heard the distinctive rustling her undressing, then sensed her slip into bed next to me. I did not move from my position.

  “Your feet are like ice,” she commented and wrapped her arms around me.

  I wasn’t aware of anything else she said or did. I fell asleep almost immediately.