War Brides

by Helen Bryan

  She dropped her eyelashes again, thinking. I know what you can do. You can get me away from here. I’ll get Mama La Bas to help with a spell so you’ll do it. For a gris-gris to work on someone you needed some hair or something from that person, something they had been in close bodily contact with.

  “Early tomorrow morning, Miss Fontaine. Dawn tide. Worst luck.” Evangeline Fontaine, with her teasing chatter, soft voice, pretty frocks, flowers, and pearls reminded him of a butterfly. He admitted to himself she was enchanting. He remembered Alice and felt obscurely guilty, but seized the moment anyway. “Your uncle tells me I’m to attend your ball tonight. I say, you will dance with me, won’t you? Before I go? I leave shortly after midnight for home.” If the predictions were true that war was coming he would never see Evangeline again, so he wasn’t betraying Alice by asking an exceptionally pretty girl to dance. If only—he bit on something hard and spat it discreetly into his hand and put it on the side of his dessert plate just as Celeste rose and announced they would take coffee on the veranda.

  Evangeline groped for her bag and stood up. “Oh look, you got the gold baby!” she exclaimed. “I hope it brings you luck.”

  Richard pushed back his own chair. “Miss Fontaine, it will only bring me luck if you save me the first dance,” he said boldly, remembering the tingle of her touch on his arm, her breath in his ear. He suddenly wanted nothing except for her to touch him again.

  “Of course I’ll dance with you, Lieutenant,” Evangeline said, her hand brushing his, “on condition you give me the gold baby. I’ve never managed to get one in my own cake.” She raised her eyes to his, sweetly, and held out her hand. It had been in his mouth, and there must be some spit on it. Surely that would do for Mama La Bas.

  “A fair exchange,” said Richard. He picked it up and dropped it into her outstretched palm.

  “Oh! Here’s Maurice,” said Evangeline, suddenly nervous as a tall, middle-aged man with heavy dark brows and a stern expression made his way toward them. Maurice ignored the guests and their greetings and stared coldly at Richard, who was struck by the man’s resemblance to a Spanish painting he had seen once, of the Grand Inquisitor. He hoped what they said about Maurice being as good as engaged to Evangeline wasn’t true. The man struck him as a brute.

  Evangeline snapped her purse shut and excused herself. In the hallway she stopped the butler, who was carrying a tray of liqueurs to the veranda. When he went back to the kitchen could he please tell Delphy she needed her for a minute?

  At four o’clock in the afternoon, in a shuttered room off Congo Square, Mama squatted on the earthen floor, sucked her pipe between toothless gums, and waited to hear what her visitor wanted. Her feet were bare, tucked under stained calico petticoats, and each bore a flat white scar where the big toe had been. The air was fetid with tobacco, herbs, chickens, and decay. Candle ends flickered on a makeshift altar covered with small figures made of cloth, human hair, animal bones, beads, feathers, and dried snakeskin. She had been born a slave and had once had another name, but so long ago everybody had forgotten it. Now she was just Mama La Bas. It meant “the devil’s wife.”

  Her rheumy eyes blinked. The high-yellow girl Delphy who worked at the Fontaines’ had yet to get to the point. Mama guessed the problem concerned a man and knew that men always meant trouble. “What you got to pay me?” she asked finally. Delphy knelt in front of her, fumbling to untie a knotted handkerchief. Finally she removed something from its folds and placed a ring in Mama’s pale palm.

  The old woman’s sight was blurred, but the spirits had given her eyes inside her head. Her fingers told her the gold was soft, the ring old, the stones precious. She traced a cluster of diamonds, felt the familiar pattern, and a shock went up her arm like a cottonmouth had sunk its fangs in it. “This here ring come from a Fitzroy. Bad, bad thing. Uh hunh. Stones make a pattern, family crest. I born on the Fitzroy place. Ise a chile, me an’ my sister polish they damn silver every day. Had the same damn crest on it. Ole Miz Fitzroy whup us with the poker if we din’ shine it bright enough.” Mama spat. “She whup us anyhow. Hard. Hard as she could. Sometime she git that poker hot first. Oh, I know this crest well’s I know the devil hisself. My, my, my. Never ’spected to have this ring in my own hand. Whut you doin’ with it? You stole it?”

  “No, ma’am. Young lady I work for say to ‘change it for gris-gris.’”

  “You messin’ wid evil here, girl, tradin’ this ring what bring bad luck. Ev’n if I didn’t know it belong to the Fitzroys, I can still feel the evil inside it. I tried to run away once. Miz Fitzroy made them hold me down, took that knife and cut my toes herself, so’s I couldn’t run away no more, couldn’t hardly walk. I only eight.

  “I’se cryin’ ’hind the barn, toes bleedin’, hurt so bad, still do hurt so bad and they ain’t even there. Ole uncle born in Africa come creepin’ over when it get dark, give me a poultice for my toes, tell me if go steal him a chicken an’ he show me how to make a bad curse, last a long time, case I lookin’ to curse somebody. You got a bad whuppin’ if you stole a chicken, but I crep’ out on my hands an’ knees an’ took that chicken and then Uncle showed me what to do. I cursed ’em good. Sometime helped the gris-gris along a little. Just one Fitzroy lef’ now, son’s youngest boy, Maurice. He bad too, rotten bad like the rest of the family, done kilt two niggers workin’ for him already, beat ’em to death hisself. They say he get worked up while he beaten ’em, like he really enjoin’ hisself. His grandmama like that too, when she beat us, cut my toes. Maurice,” she rocked silently for a minute, “ain’t gwine have no chillun. He gwine die crazy as his daddy. The family gone die out, I done fixed that already. Not to say I cain’t do more. But first…hee hee hee.” Mama reached over on the altar for a strange little figure with stitched crosses for eyes, human hair, and a crude knitted penis. It was stuck all over with pins. She twisted another pin through the torso.

  “Yes, ma’am, but Miss Evangeline cain’t wait. Mr. Fitzroy fixin’ to marry her. But she scared of him, tell her mama and daddy she don’t want to live way out there by herself with the alligators at Belle Triste. Her mama and daddy shoutin’, what a lil’ girl fresh out of school know, the Fitzroys old family, the richest folks in town, she gon’ marry him or they put her in the Irish convent till she git some sense. They say her daddy gambles, owe the Fitzroys money. They say Mr. Fitzroy give her that ring, tell her it belong to his grandma, so it the most valuable ring he can give her, show her and everybody else she his. Other folks say he like Miss Evangeline ’cause her mama give her daddy four boys before Miss Evangeline born, Miss Evangeline sure to give him some sons. She afraid, want to get some help quick, before he kill her. ’Cause there’s another problem.”

  “You think I ain’t heard? Word all round in the Treme ’bout her and her uncle Charles’s boy, that Laurent Baptiste, one his grandma ole Miz Fontaine dote on. Everywhere he go, Miss Evangeline not far behind. Just cousins. He down here in the Treme playin’ that music of his, Miss Evangeline an’ her friends just happen to walk in, hear her cousin playin’. Ole Miz Fontaine make him a nice garçonnière, off by the river so he kin do what boys do, in private with a Creole girl, colored girl, no white girl! He there, here come Miss Evangeline to pay her grandma a visit. Sneakin’ down to that garçonnière at night. Miss Evangeline,” Mama spat again, “a damn fool. Laurent too. Don’ they know nothin’? They’s talk in the Treme already ’bout kissin’ cousins. When white folks start talkin’ ’bout it, trouble comin’. You seen niggers hangin’ befo’, girl? I has. Seen worsen’ hangin’s. You tellin’ me Maurice Fitzroy got his eye fixed on her? That boy ain’t got long to wait, gon’ disappear soon. They gon’ find little pieces of him all over the bayou if the alligators ain’t et it all. Her too maybe. But he too mean to kill her easy, he find some bad way to pay her back first for the shame she bring him.”

  The girl lowered her voice and looked at the ground. “She know. But it’s real bad. She enceinte. And she scared to death.”


  “Don’t care how scared she is, I won’t get ridda no more babies! They come back, hauntin’ in the night. Cryin’ in the corners. Cain’t get no peace.”

  “She ain’t studyin’ to get rid of it. Laurent Baptiste goin’ to France. Just now they’s a man from England visitin’ the family, think Miss Evangeline looking mighty sweet, but he goin’ home tomorrow. England a long way off from here. She got to act quick. She want a gris-gris make him to take her with him, get married on the ship. She say the captain can marry ’em.”

  “Unn-uhn! This a mess! Where Miss Evangeline at now?”

  “At her aunt’s. Big party. Her mama busy with the ball tonight.”

  “This here Englishman, he there too?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “His name?”

  “Richard Fairfax.”

  Mama shook her head and muttered something and sighed. She sat for a minute, working her gums on the pipe, then got up and shuffled to a corner behind the altar. She fumbled in the gloom among her scraps and chicken feathers. She took up bits of this and that and mixed a concoction in a dirty jelly glass. She spat into it, poured it into a brown medicine bottle. “Whut you got the man touched? No good unless you got that.”

  Delphy took the gold baby Richard had given Evangeline from the handkerchief and handed it to Mama. “Been in his mouth,” Delphy explained.

  Mama crooned tunelessly to it for a minute, licked on her finger and touched its head. “Richard Fairfax,” she said, dropped it into the mixture, and corked it up tight.

  She held up the vial. The gold baby gleamed in the murky liquid. “This what she need. He got to drink it. It strong, but you put it in a julep—enough good whiskey and he can’t taste it. For twelve hours after she can make him do anything she want. This gris-gris powerful, but you tell her, got to be quick, only work for a few hours.” Mama pocketed the ring. She wouldn’t sell it; she would make an offering to her mother’s spirit.

  When Delphy came back from Mama La Bas, Celeste’s veranda was filled with lunch guests saying good-bye. Among the cars lined up at the curb the Fontaines’ chauffeur paced impatiently by the car. “Miss Evangeline, yo’ mama say it high time for you to git home and git ready, Delphy or no Delphy. You leave Delphy behind if you have to and come on home. Yo’ mama got enough to worry her with this ball already.”

  “Just one more minute.” Evangeline saw Delphy slip in at the servants’ door. “Aunt Celeste, may I have a piece of your stationery?” Evangeline scribbled a hasty note to Laurent and spoke quickly to Delphy: she would dress without her help. She watched her maid slip out of the servants’ entrance with the note and a worried expression.

  There had been a rainstorm, but by seven in the evening the sky had cleared. As dusk fell flambeaux were lit and fireworks burst sparkling across the darkening sky. The colorful floats belonging to the krewes were lined up, and the city’s prettiest and most prominent girls were gathering up long skirts and trains, climbing aboard, tripping up rickety wooden steps in satin slippers to their flower-decked “thrones.” A stray firework shot low across the front of the float and they shrieked. Then they smoothed their hair and fluffed their dresses, and the bolder girls pulled illicit compacts from tiny evening bags—“painting” was strictly forbidden by parents at home and the nuns at school—and furtively applied lipstick and powder. When they were all seated and arranged, members of their fathers’ krewe handed up their bouquets, bonbons, beads, and gilded doubloons for them to toss to the crowd.

  Evangeline Fontaine’s coming-out ball was the last party before Lent, and it was going to be splendid. The girls were in a fever of excitement, whispering that Evangeline’s father had hired a train to bring a famous dance orchestra down from New York, hundreds of live lobsters packed in ice, caviar, a chef from Delmonico’s, and an entire hothouse worth of orchids. As they waited for the float to move, the girls fished tasseled dance cards from their evening bags and compared them, to see who had begged what dances with whom in advance. Between giggles and cries of “He said what?” “I knew he was sweet on you!” and groans of “But he always steps on my feet!” the girls cast sideways glances at Evangeline, who wasn’t saying anything and didn’t look at all happy.

  The other debutantes stopped chattering to whisper about what was wrong with Miss High-and-Mighty. She had a real grown-up dress from a real Paris couturier, cloth-of-gold, beaded with tiny purple and green crystals that sparkled in the torchlight. It was low-cut too. The girls thought it was a wonder she had been allowed out of her house in anything so daring. “Lo and be-hold!” muttered one cattily.

  Evangeline didn’t need powder and lipstick: her cheeks were flushed just enough to highlight her perfect, creamy skin, and her dark eyes glittered in the torchlight. The other debutantes felt eclipsed and dull by comparison and muttered resentfully that everybody knew the Fontaines’ business had lost a fortune in France and that Evangeline’s father had been gambling heavily—how come she still got to wear the prettiest dress and have the biggest ball? On top of that, rumor had it that she was as good as engaged to Maurice Fitzroy and would be the first of them to get married. Evangeline was always first.

  “Maybe she’ll get to go to Paris for her honeymoon!” said one girl with a sigh.

  “If she does she ought to stay there!” snapped another girl. “You wouldn’t catch me stuck way out at Belle Triste with nothing but Maurice Fitzroy and the alligators for company.”

  Belle Triste, Maurice’s two-hundred-year-old plantation, was named for a giant swamp oak heavily draped in hanging moss that guarded the gateway to the drive and looked like a woman in mourning veils. Long ago an early Fitzroy had died in a duel and a young Fitzroy widow had never shown her face in public again, but wore a mourning veil to her dying day. An air of gloom, or something, clung to the place.

  “Sssh!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t,” she went on. “They might be rich, but everybody knows there’s something wrong with all the Fitzroys. They get sick or go funny in the head. Some people say it’s a curse. Didn’t Maurice’s father have fits and nobody ever saw him because he had to be locked up in the cellar with a nurse? And what about his aunt who used to wander off into the bayou and one day never came back? They say a slave dropped her on her head when she was a baby—it was revenge because they’d cut her toes off.”

  “Mama agrees they’re strange, but she says it came of marryin’ cousins too many times ’cause nobody else was good enough.”

  “Hush! She’ll hear!”

  In a lower voice, “And they say Maurice goes wild sometimes, crazy even, he gets this sort of fixed look and turns real mean, that he killed two of his field hands in one of his rages.”

  “Well, they probably asked for it. My daddy says if the colored hands get out of line somebody has to teach them who’s boss.”

  Evangeline clutched her seat as a firework burst over her head, and the krewe’s band exploded into “When the Saints go Marching In.” The float started with a lurch that made the girls shriek. As the float swayed above the masked crowds, she fought down the nausea that came in waves. The dress her father had insisted her mother order was too tight in the boned and beaded bodice. The couturier’s fitter who brought it from Paris had adjusted it over and over again. She was sure that she had it right, yet Evangeline complained it was too tight, and she couldn’t breathe. And tonight everything smelled so! The odor of hot dancing bodies, the cloying jasmine wet from an earlier rainstorm, gunpowder from the fireworks, beer, horse dung, sewers, the levee, all mingling with the greasy clouds rising above oil drums where oysters were frying for po’ boy sandwiches. “Po’ boy for sale, git yo’ po’ boy sandwich while they hot! Befo’ the parade start!”

  Around the float a sea of heads bobbed, merging masked and unmasked heads into a sinister hybrid. What a lot of Loup Garou masks this year, Evangeline thought dizzily. Every time she raised her eyes the lupine, part-human face of Loup Garou, the werewolf who lived in the bayou, leered up at her,
torchlight reflecting off human eyes in the slits.

  Someone knows…

  A few feet away the whispering switched to a fresh scandal about one debutante’s unmarried cousin, discovered to be “in the family way.” During a pause in the music, Evangeline caught the words “her family…a paper…the judge signed it, it’s official, she’s crazy and degenerate,” “kept under lock and key,” and “baby taken away,” “disowned,” “never come back.” Crying and pleading and begging to stay at home, the girl had been bundled into a car and taken away. Probably to the convent they had all heard of, in a distant country parish run by a strict order of Irish nuns who kept leather straps hanging next to their rosaries.

  “And that’s not all. Guess what our cook says someone told her,” and then “Laurent Baptiste” and “They say he had a white girl! In his garçonnière!” “No! That can’t be true! Who was it? Did they see who it was?”

  There was a smothered snicker. “Now that’s really crazy! He’s colored…what kind of white trash girl would…” As they gossiped the girls tossed doubloons and sweets and strings of beads, waving gaily.

  Someone knew.

  It was easy to spot Richard Fairfax in the crowd. He seemed intoxicated—by the balmy night, the procession, the bands, the excited crowd…or the strong mint julep Delphy had given him before he set off for the parade. “Richard!” Evangeline called now. She smiled radiantly as he turned, waved and tossed him a handful of doubloons. Richard caught one, kissed it, and swept her a bow.

  “Don’t forget our dance,” he called.

  “Well,” said the girl on Evangeline’s right, sourly, “you have another admirer. That English officer’s certainly good looking. Doesn’t Maurice get jealous?”