A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  I could smell the sharpness of coming frost deep inside my nose and throat. The cane cutters would have to start tomorrow or the next day, before ice ruined the sugar.

  When we came to the ciprière, my mother panted while steam blew past her face. She turned and a single tear glittered down each cheek.

  “Hera get this dress and give to her girl. Madame and Grand-mère buy dress for Céphaline, make her beautiful. And me—” She swept her hand along my skirt. “Nothing from me. Only words from me. Words you don't want. You get words from the doctor. He can take you with him when he go, and I never see you. Jamais! Never! I have nothing!”

  I tried to embrace her, but she turned so that I was draped along her back like a cape. I held her tightly, and she shook under my arms. I knew she was forcing everything back inside her. Then she wiped at her eyes and said, “Thirty minutes until Franz look for us. The old plants in the trees.”

  The black water stood like coffee around the cypress stumps in the swampy area, but we turned down a weed-choked trail into the forest itself. I had never been here before. The half-moon lit my mother's neck when she bent her head and pushed through the growth. This had once been a road wide enough for a wagon.

  “You are not finished,” I said to her back. “I always listen.”

  “Won't matter.”

  “Just tell me. Or why did you bring me?”

  We stumbled through bare vines like gray threads for a giant's shirt. My mother fell and the knife skittered into the leaves. She put her face into her knees and cried again, and I could only kneel beside her. “I never leave you alone,” she said. “I always sit in my chair, wait for who send for me. Or for you. But now I see no one come for you. You go to them.” She clutched the sack. “I make this dress for Hera girl, and she find someone. Maybe Christophe. She stay by Hera and have her baby. But Céphaline find someone and go. She take you with her, and I never see you again.”

  She laced her fingers behind her neck and pulled so hard that her knuckles swelled for a moment. When she stood, she cleaned her face with her sleeve. Salt in the cloth, I thought, touching the wet.

  “Nonc Pierre and the men cut this road,” she said, her voice lower. “Cut the cypress for Msieu house. Singalee men know the wood.”

  “When?” I found her knife in the leaves, and a stumbling of tiny feet rushed away from us.

  “Time pass. When they first come, Bordelon and Lemoyne. From France. Everyone from somewhere else. Except them Indian used to live here in the ciprière.”

  We pushed through to an open space in the trees. Brick walls draped with vines—two large square vats. Four iron pipes pierced the wall of the higher vat; they must have let the liquid drain into the lower vat.

  “Far from the house because that smell,” my mother said, her voice nearly dead. “When they make the indigo.”

  She always said the word like poison. I breathed carefully but smelled only cold standing water and the musk of a fox den.

  “Where the cane grow now, all indigo. They pick branches and pile them up in the first pool and soak with clear water. Then the leaves go rotten and make that smell. Drain the water into the second pool, and the women have to put up the dress and stand in the water and beat with a stick. Get the blue, have to beat the water. The blue settle on the bottom. But the smell go inside the skin. In the body.”

  A vine hung like a necklace from one of the pipes. The second vat was filled with dried leaves and brackish mud. Nothing blue.

  “Cane cut you,” my mother whispered, soft as soap foam on the wind. “But indigo go inside. Tout mort.”

  “All die?” Brick crumbled under my fingers.

  She nodded. “Nonc Pierre and the men build the house and barn, but the women make the crop. Four, five years. Then they bury.”

  The back row of the slave cemetery was a line of wooden crosses with arms nearly touching. No names. But my mother left pieces of broken blue bottle there once a year. And she said the name Amina.

  She bent to the ground. “Grow wild where all the seeds fell,” she murmured. Plants as high as her knees grew in patches, the small leaves shaped like fingernails. She covered her palm with the rag and pulled an entire plant from the dirt. I smelled nothing but damp earth and bitter green when she put it inside the sack.

  “Franz wait there,” she said. “Walk fast.”

  “Will it make us sick?”

  My mother pushed air through her nose in disgust. “I ever let bad touch you? You think I let a maringouin land on your arm, I see it?”

  Even a mosquito in our room couldn't escape her eyes and ears. She used to sit beside me in bed and wait for their warning.

  The freezing air hurt my earlobes, the only part not covered by my tignon. “You aren't finished,” I said. “I do listen. I heard you talk about the ni with Hera. And dya. Faro.”

  I thought that would stop her, but she shook her head. “What you listen, don't matter. You are not Bambara. You are patella. You believe the hair is dead.”

  “How can it not be?” I shouted into the wind, but then we smelled the smoke.

  Two FARO

  A leaf. A leaf rolled and left to fire.

  Not sweet. Not cane. When we came out onto the headland road, we saw a smear of red light in the distance. Not Azure. Msieu Lemoyne's house—Petit Clair.

  We ran through the cane toward the place where Franz was not waiting. He had already crossed our fields to ring the work bell, shouting for the slaves to join him with buckets.

  Over the cane that glistened in the wind, the house burned somehow small and red, like the fireplace of God behind a grate of tree branches.

  By morning, Msieu Lemoyne's house was smoldered coals between brick piers. From where Mamère and I stood with the others from Azure, we could see pieces of iron like spider legs.

  “Smoke a cigar and forget where he put it,” Tretite said. Blue smoke twirled from the ashes. “His cook, Nonnie, in my bed now. Shiver all night. She finish her pantry and go upstairs, and he sleep, and the fire start on his desk. Nobody else to help, and he so heavy, and she so old. She only get him to the stairs and no more.”

  His body in there? Like the tallow for our soap? Wood ashes and skin ashes? Cigar—leaves of tobacco Msieu Lemoyne grew special. A plant burning into paper and then wood. Bones and hair.

  “They believe Nonnie? Msieu and Madame?” I whispered. We had heard her ragged sobs inside Tretite's room, the hoarse gasping again and again.

  Tretite shrugged. “She burn her hands, try to get him out. Don't you believe she try? But tonight she have to tell his people come from New Orleans. Maybe they don't believe.”

  When we returned to Azure, my mother walked toward the clearing without speaking. I cleaned the ashes from the gallery railings and even the tops of Doctor Tom's glass jars. Cane ashes we saw every day during harvest, splintery black needles. But these ashes—floor and carpet and skin and money—were gray flakes and dark cinders and white trembles of powder that melted when I touched them.

  These ashes made the Bordelons anxious. Azure would host the Lemoyne relatives from New Orleans who came to pay their respects to Msieu Lemoyne. “Seventeen ninety he build it,” Msieu said to Madame, his sideburns black with soot. “Nothing saved. Nothing. But I can run the sugar mill with Franz. We won't have to break the harvest.”

  Madame moved purposefully through the rooms, adding flowers to a vase, nudging right the portrait of Msieu from France. Madame's fingers skated on the shine of her long dining table. She loved her house as if it were a person; my mother touched her own things this way, like Eveline touched her children's heads and shoulders.

  Upstairs, she said to Céphaline, “You have to make an opportunity from tragedy. The Lemoynes will bring so many people from New Orleans, and they will stay here.” Then she turned to me. “Moinette. Go get your things. Céphaline needs to be prepared. You will stay in her room from now on, whether she prefers it or not.”

  Mamère was not at the washpots when I g
ot to the clearing. She wasn't inside the house, when I put my other dress and other tignon into a bag. I touched the chest, her altar, which held only the daytime ornaments of wooden plates and carved forks. The bone comb lay on the mattress.

  She wasn't finished with me. Not with her words and lessons. Gravy. Blood. Faro. Ni.

  ———

  I was afraid to sleep there, in Céphaline's room. I was afraid to break something, to burn hair. The cook Nonnie had fainted away. “Her heart so fear it might stop,” Tretite said. What if I pulled on Céphaline's hair and more fell out?

  Who would comb my hair now? Even though I shouldn't remind Madame that I had hair, maybe I could slip away to my mother, at least for a moment.

  Her skin was still white, but there were holes in Céphaline's nose. Tiny black holes. And the boutons had moved from her cheeks to her jaw and forehead, like nail studs painted red.

  I went to the kitchen for the alum. Tretite's face was ringed with silver tracings of dried sweat. She was so worried and busy cooking for the guests, she hadn't had time to wipe her forehead.

  “Msieu and Madame talk. Lemoyne daughter, she sell Petit Clair. She don't want the land. But Msieu want the land. And the sugar mill. He grind his crop over there. But right now, he has no money.”

  When the Auzennes needed money, they sold field hands. They always talked about it during Sunday dinners. “Always extra chickens or pigs or Pierres,” Msieu Auzenne had laughed once.

  “Who will he sell?” I whispered. Her fingers sorted tiny stones from the rice.

  “Céphaline,” she whispered back. “She marry the money, Msieu buy the land next door, and build a new house for them. Watch to see the husband treat her right. What Madame say. Say Céphaline fragile.”

  The chicken meat on the cutting board glistened pink. The breastbone was splintered, and marrow welled up in the tiny holes.

  She handed me a small bowl. “Egg white. Go.”

  I applied the paste to Céphaline's skin. If the yolk, with its red speck, was the beginning of the baby, what was the white?

  Her eyes stayed beautiful. Doctor Tom had left eyebright to erase the red. She would not stop writing at night. I tried to look inside her eyes, for the veins, but she closed them.

  “Now we're supposed to embroider, and I'm meant to tell you secrets,” she said. “But I have none.”

  “Oui,” I said. My hands were in my lap.

  She spoke through the white shell on her face. “You have to sleep here now. But we are not friends. And we are not like sisters. The Auzenne girls pet their maids and say they are like sisters. My parents have no other child.”

  “I understand.”

  “My mother says in France women wear their hair up so high, people at the opera cannot see past the styles. She says the medicine is coming from Paris. For my face. Then we won't have to use this.”

  I sponged off the paste, and her boutons glowed. She opened her eyes. “Lemoynes and Auzennes tonight.” She said their names as if they were diseases. “Your foolish lessons of beauty will be judged, but no one will ask of my own.”

  I shook the faceted bottle and dipped in the comb, careful not to let too much liquid collect on the teeth. The camphor smell was sharp. Black as mine, her hair, when I pulled the teeth gently from her forehead over her skull. Like rows of the thinnest grass, with her scalp the earth between. The blue veins near her temples, the pinkish irritation at her nape, the tiny red puckers where she'd had sores and scratched them.

  Under the scalp was the white bone and the swimming brain. Inside the folds and valleys, where were the words and recipes and numbers? How did a man's brain decide he wanted under the dress? How did a woman's brain learn to measure the pictures painted on a dish?

  “You can smell the smoke even up here,” she said drowsily. “Grandmère said this morning it smelled like Haiti when she was small. They grew sugar in Haiti until the revolution.”

  She closed her eyes. Somehow, her voice sounded like her grandmother's now, repeating a story in exactly the same way.

  From up here, the tops of the canefields were gold and brittle, and the cane fires licked the distant fields, and the sugar mill at Petit Clair sent up black veils of smoke. All that grass from India turned into money. Then a burning leaf of tobacco erased it all.

  Her hair was black, thicker from the liquid, and when the strands had dried, I heated the curling tongs over the lamp.

  “I don't mind the combing,” she said suddenly. “It makes me drowsy. But the curling I hate. Don't burn me, Moinette. Don't.”

  “No.”

  The black spikes of iron separated, and I clasped the end of the first section. I twirled slowly, as Zerline had shown me. The sweet almond oil in the hairdressing hissed a bit, and I went as close to her temple as I could. She winced, and I said, “Don't move. Please.”

  When I opened the tongs, my hand trembled. The curl fell fat and shining to her shoulder. I let out my breath. Voices downstairs.

  “If God had invented a particular torment for me, he couldn't have chosen better,” she said.

  For me as well. If I burned her, would Msieu burn me, in the same spot on cheek or neck? A boy groom at Auzennes’ had let the youngest daughter fall from her horse and her arm was broken. His was broken, too. Who had taken his arm and snapped the bone?

  Céphaline's voice was bitter as fig leaves but her breath too sweet as it rose toward my face, almost as if she'd been eating candied orange rinds. But she hadn't. Not since last year.

  I held the tongs over the lamp again, and she said, “It is damaging my brain. I know it. Every time you put the heat so close to my head, I feel it burning inside.”

  “I would never touch you with it,” I said carefully. I hadn't come any closer than two fingers’ width to her head—measuring with my eyes. My throat filled with saliva—the word Céphaline used, saying men spit tobacco and saliva—and some liquid of fear moved through me.

  Félonise handed me coffee and cakes and cold meat. Msieu Lemoyne's daughter, from New Orleans, and her husband. The Auzennes, without their girls. They spoke of the fire, the slaves, the sugarhouse that Msieu would run while they decided what to do with Petit Clair. They didn't mention Nonnie.

  Then Msieu Lemoyne's daughter said, “Céphaline! You are not a child any longer but a lovely young woman! We will bring my husband's cousins tomorrow, and they will be so glad to meet you.”

  Céphaline's hair glowed. Her boutons were covered with fine white powder, but what remained were tiny dusted biscuits all along her cheeks and jaw. She knew. She stared at her mother, and her mother stared back.

  I could hardly sleep on my pallet in the corner of her room. Céphaline read by candlelight, and Madame came in twice to tell her to stop. Finally, Madame blew out the candle and took the book.

  My mother lit her candles now. Prayed. Did she stare at the empty bed? Did she eat from the peacock plate?

  I had slept away from her only once. I curled on my side and saw everything in the clearing. My mother's skirt, near my face when I was small, a bleach spot like a cloud in black sky. Shiny pink scar on her forearm from a burn. Cast-iron pots, with craters like healed skin. Clothespins lined up to dance in the sand. Washboard silver but veins of rust like washboard blood.

  Even the sweet olive bush seemed to watch me, and the cane was taller than the sky. When I was small, our clearing was my mother's own earth, no one else's, and as long as I could touch her skirt every now and then, I never wanted to leave.

  She came in the morning with the clean ironed clothes in the cart, and I met her in the shade. “Mamère.”

  She lifted her chin. She couldn't dismiss me. We had just started. “Dorm bien?” I whispered.

  Her lips were held tight like a grain of rice was between them.

  “I asked Madame if I could bring the clothes down to our place. But she said I have to dress Céphaline now.”

  Mamère took the basket of dirty linens. Fifteen coffee beans were inside the napk
in blotted with remoulade. I had hidden them there, but I couldn't tell her that.

  Her eyes swam with light, and she turned away.

  “Even their conveyance is impractical,” Céphaline said, looking out her window, and her mother frowned.

  “The new carriages are like that,” Madame said.

  I tied the ribbon close to Céphaline's forehead.

  Downstairs, I helped Tretite clear the table from the huge company breakfast. The Lemoyne woman had gone back to New Orleans, and the husband stayed here, to help with the slaves at Petit Clair. I took coffee to the office, where Msieu and the husband opened the ledgers.

  “Why does he keep those grisly things in there?”

  “He's a doctor,” Msieu said. “They study the body. Me, I don't want to know what is inside. Just my stomach feels well, I'm happy.”

  “He's an Englishman?”

  “Better than American.” Msieu ruffled more papers and said, “Lemoyne had forty-five slaves over there.”

  “What if some of them run? No one's there but your driver Franz?”

  I heard Msieu turn pages. “Franz is good. The sugarhouse is full speed. Nobody runs much here, as LeBrun has those dogs. Chiens de nègre, chiens de renard.”

  Dogs for blacks, dogs for fox.

  “Fox more fun.”

  “Only bozals run—those new Africans. You can tell by the scars they came on the boat. I have only a few bozals. Mine are Creole. Mine don't run. I'll ride your place all day and send Franz over there at night.”

  “It's not my place. It's hers. Until she decides.”

  I measured nothing here. I moved the flat silver tool along the tablecloth scraping the crumbs. Saving the rice grains, the edges of cornbread for Tretite to take to her chickens. Conveyance. Tretite carried the food to the chickens, and then she'd kill one and carry it back here for the pot. Coffee from beans, sugar from grass. Swallow and wait for it all to pass from your body. Take off the clothes and wash the gravy and sweat and stains from where the food passed through you and into the privé.

  The armoire was filled with Madame's dishes from France. So Céphaline could live and a man could take her from here and put their money together and build a wooden house and buy dishes from France and have children who wanted dishes.