A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  I pulled myself from the hollow and lay on the ground moving my legs and arms to awaken them. An insect. A helpless, foolish beetle. No brain. The brain was buried under rubble. The second vat was destroyed, a few bricks like jagged teeth all that remained, the four pipes like spindly fingers caressing the spine of the uprooted sapling that lay on top.

  “Mamère,” I whispered at the shutter. “Mamère.” My voice broke, my throat coated with ice and musk.

  She opened the door, and I fell inside at her feet. “Mamère. Mamère. Mamère.”

  She put me in the washtub with cold water, so we didn't make smoke, and my body shook so hard my collarbone felt cracked. She put my soiled dress in the fireplace and pulled hot ashes over it. I told her Céphaline had died, I had been sent to get Nonc Pierre, and then I hid in the cane.

  She said nothing. Not a single word. When I was dry and wearing her only other dress, she lay beside me in the bed, warm and solid. She stared at the smoke-darkened ceiling above us, her lips moving only from the inside where she chewed at them softly with her teeth.

  We washed nothing. My dress burned with morning's breakfast, the musky fox smell gathered in our bricks. Outside, we lit fires under the pots and began to make soap, with the tallow and fat collected from Tretite. No one came onto the gallery. Not Msieu's hat or Madame's hand over her eyes.

  Mamère said nothing. She laid out the wooden soap forms and held a coffee bean inside her mouth. Sometimes her right eyebrow twitched and leaped when the sounds of crying drifted in the wind.

  In the afternoon, horses and carriages pulled into the shell road. Nonc Pierre came to the clearing. “Tretite say she need you.”

  I dried my hands and walked slowly beside him. “Did you find Msieu last night?” I asked.

  Nonc Pierre nodded. A bruise darkened his arm, maybe from a horse's kick. He said, “You stay last night here?”

  I nodded, too.

  He said, “Céphaline die. You know that?”

  I shook my head and put my apron over my chin.

  “Man come from New Orleans on the boat tomorrow. He make a painting of her. That's what Tretite say.”

  I waited for Tretite in the pantry. The parlor was crowded with Auzennes and strangers. Félonise took my hand. “She die easy?” she whispered. Her gray eyes moved over my face.

  “I don't know.”

  “Was you there?”

  “I went to get Msieu.”

  She sighed. “Madame stay in her room.”

  I waited for Msieu to burst into the house and see me, to remember who slept near Céphaline, but he didn't come inside.

  After the visitors left, the house quiet except for the crying that tore through the upstairs, I stood on the stairs. Madame stayed in her room, Félonise sleeping in the hall outside her door. Was I meant to sleep outside Céphaline's? Did she still lie in her own bed, or was she in her mother's bed, covered with her mother's skin?

  In Tretite's room off the kitchen, we watched the back door of the house. “How she die?” she asked finally.

  “I don't know.”

  “You know them bone and piece,” she said. “I hear you talk. What stop working first? The head or the heart?”

  “I don't know.”

  “He put the death mask on her face. How they do. They make the face with plaster. Then he make the painting. How they did Msieu's grandmère, in France. The one over the fireplace.”

  Céphaline's face, covered with white paste again, her eyes still blue under her eyelids. No. When someone died, did the color fade? What about the eye in the broken jar, black with dirt now in the woods?

  Tretite said, “Go home. She wait. She afraid for you.”

  “Hair,” she began. “You believe now. It is not dead.”

  Céphaline's hair hadn't killed her. But something inside her brain had made her heart stop working. Her blood.

  She went across the room to the chest, and I was surprised when she brought out the piece of blue cloth and the bracelet of my hair. Those were hers, hidden. Privé.

  But she held them on her palms. “My mother's hair.”

  The black braided circlet. She always placed it by the candles and prayed for me, so I always thought it was mine.

  “Hair hold the ni. The inside of—” She stopped, looking out the window. “The inside of you. When the France people talk about Dieu, say the soul.”

  My braid felt heavy down my back. I was afraid of the glittering in her eyes, the way she held the cloth and the circlet so still. I was afraid of every human animal on Azure.

  “I wash your hair, I be careful for your ni,” my mother said. “I braid, I hold gentle on your ni. My mother tell me on the boat. They leave us one bucket salt water. She say in my ear about the hair. Say if she die, on the boat, who tell me the words?”

  My mother got up and sat beside me. The rush back of her chair whispered as it pulled her shape into itself.

  Her eyes swam with tiny red veins, as if she hadn't slept since I had. “Say the water around the boat was faro. Faro is the soul of water. Faro give the rain and ni of the corn. Faro give shells so people have money.”

  She put the circlet of hair in my hand. “On the boat, the wood scream. Loud like birds. Scream, scream in the waves. One room for us. So dark and listen to the sounds. She whisper like this.”

  She touched my ear. Cold coursed through my neck. “My mother say faro make the wind spirit, Teliko. But faro tell the people wear copper rings on the ear, to hear Teliko words, and the French take my mother's copper.”

  She pressed my lobe gently. “She have four holes in each ear. Cry and cry. Say no one can hear now, say what if I don't remember. But I remember the words. Then we get here, and nothing is the same.”

  The hair was woven so tightly, it could have been thread.

  “She in the indigo all day. At night, I come from the old woman, and my mother wash my hair.”

  She had oiled the bracelet—almond sweet smell.

  Her eyes were night black on me. Did she look like her mother, telling me now? She wasn't sick, she wasn't going to die, but I had left her. Only a long pathway to the house, but I was gone, and she spoke fast, as if I would leave her just now, run away from the story.

  “Two years, she can't breathe. Then she can't eat. The old woman say when my mother die, I have to keep her ni safe. In the house.” She nodded at the things in my fingers. “Some hair and some water. Say the other part is dya, shadow of you inside. Faro keep the dya in the water, keep it clean. Then, next baby born take them both. Ni and dya go to the baby. The baby of your blood.”

  The hair in my hand didn't look like mine at all.

  They buried Céphaline in the family cemetery. The stone was carved in New Orleans, brought down on the boat. Céphaline Eugénie Bordelon, 1796-1811. The artist took her dress and her death mask back to New Orleans, where he would paint.

  Madame never left her room after that day. Félonise carried her food inside and closed the door. I walked up to Tretite's at dawn, after my mother had given me milk and coffee and whispered to me, “Quiet. Don't talk unless someone say. Nobody there now. Doctor gone. Governess. So nobody eat dinner. You stay by Tretite.”

  I did. Tretite made the food, and I carried the platters to Félonise in the pantry but not to the dining room. I stayed in the pantry by the bags of pecans. I didn't want Msieu to see me. He was gone all day counting hogsheads of sugar to be taken to New Orleans.

  After he was gone, I polished the furniture in the office, with the ledger book. How much was I worth now? I never touched the book. In the guest room, the artist had left white plaster dust on the floor. The plaster was absorbed instantly into my damp cloth. How small were the grains?

  How small were the pieces of bone? What happened to the hair?

  Félonise told me not to go upstairs. Tretite's eyes met hers over my head. Gray and brown. She didn't want Msieu to see me either. She told me if horses arrived, to stay in Tretite's kitchen.

  I slept the
re, on the floor by the fire.

  Every morning, my mother came to get the clothes. She asked me almost formally, “Who come to the house?”

  “No one.”

  “Who you serve?”

  “No one.”

  We ate meat Tretite left for us. Roasted chicken, which Grand-mère Bordelon ate in her bed. Msieu came back very late, and he only drank brandy. Madame stayed in her room.

  Now Madame was as sad and afraid as my mother was all the time. Now Mamère sat beside me in Tretite's small dark room off the kitchen. She didn't pray. She didn't light the candles. We sat in the dark, the moon gone to a fingernail, the shutter closed tight.

  The cart wheels creaked up and down the shell road in the morning, sugar hauled to the boat. I gathered Msieu's clothes from the floor of his empty bedroom. Tretite said, “Start the dessert now. Them sugar buyer come tonight, five of them. I can't cook the big dinner alone. Mo toute seule.”

  I am all alone. She didn't mean only for tonight.

  Tretite's headache made her eyes small with pain. The new pecans were soft and pale, and I roasted them in the pan until they browned sweet. We plucked the tiny feathers from the squabs, crowded them in the pan with wine and brandy, put them at the edge of the fire to roast.

  Ten small birds on the platter, arranged around a bed of rice, and when I bent low next to Msieu, he glanced up at me.

  “Bring us three more—” he began, and then he stared at my face, my eyes, my tignon. I slanted the plate gently onto the table.

  But he finished. “Three more bottles of wine.” Then he dismissed me with a wave.

  Dismissed. Like my mother's upturned chin.

  “Azure,” one of the men said loudly. “And you named it?”

  “My mother did,” Msieu replied. “For the color of the indigo.”

  “Now you got all this sugar, you change it to something white?”

  “Sugar isn't white until it gets to the refinery. Brown, oui?”

  They all laughed. He didn't. Msieu said quietly, “Now the name means something else to me. The eyes of my daughter.”

  “May she rest in peace,” one man said, and they crossed themselves.

  My back was pressed against the cool plaster wall. Was she peaceful now? Là-bas? Where was her là-bas?

  I heard her voice then. Patella. Hybrid. Classification. She was my governess. I was her pupil. I closed my eyes. Clavicle. The heat of the tongs bending the hair. The ink on her wrist.

  The men moved into the parlor. The cigar smoke rolled to the ceiling, and when I carried dirty dishes past the open door, it was as if moss wreathed their shoulders.

  Tretite and I washed the platters last. It was close to midnight. “They maybe want more pecan tart. Take these to the armoire.”

  Preserve dishes and dahlia plates. Madame's favorites. “If Madame never comes out of her room again,” I said, “who will run the house? Grandmère can't get downstairs.”

  Tretite nodded. “Put them in the armoire case she do.”

  Inside the dining room, I hesitated at the armoire. Madame's footsteps whispered along the floor above my head. Grandmère's heaviness made four posters grind into the wood planks when she turned her body.

  I laid the preserve dishes in a row on the second shelf, as always, and placed the platters on their sides. Pheasants and roses. Dahlias—why was that Madame's favorite flower?

  Msieu's voice rang out from the doorway. “Did you count Lemoyne's last shipment? Let me get the ledger.”

  Then he came into the hallway, tendrils of smoke before him. Again, he looked into my face, and he tilted his head to one side. I bent over the dishes. Then he went into his office.

  Tretite's fire was banked for morning, the bowls laid out for biscuit dough, the pan laid out for roasting coffee beans. She was tying her hair up with string. Tretite's hair was long and thick, and when she let it down and put on her white dress, she looked like a young girl from the back. Until she turned around and you saw her face, her lips folding in on each other, her eyes surrounded by lines like cross-stitching, from years of squinting into the smoke.

  “They finish?” she whispered.

  I nodded. “Where's Félonise?”

  “That hallway bed.” Tretite glanced into her kitchen one more time. “Go quiet and ask her how many for breakfast. She say one them leaving tonight.”

  I ducked into the hallway again. The parlor was quiet now; some of the men must have gone to sleep in the guest rooms. But no one ever opened Céphaline's door.

  I would never see her again. I would never hear her words.

  I touched one dish, not wanting to pass the parlor door and the men. The dahlia had fifty-two petals. I turned toward the stairs, and Msieu stood there. He said, “You will go with the man in the black suit.”

  He took my arm and turned me out the front door with the wooden sun bursting above it. I tried to free my arm from his fingers, but he pulled me around the gallery and toward the river.

  “Msieu, I am going—”

  “You will go on the boat.”

  I tried to stop my feet, but he held my elbow, his thumb digging into the soft part inside. He had seen my face. Did he know I knew? No. He remembered only that I was alive, and Céphaline was not.

  Mamère. Mamère. Maybe she could stop him. Talk to him.

  “Msieu, I have nothing to take with me. I need to go back and get my things. Please.”

  We were on the path to the landing, trampled hard by all the barrels of sugar. “My things, Msieu,” I said, and tried to wrench away my elbow.

  “You have what you need,” he said. A small man waited at the landing, on the short dock. The boat lifted and sank with the water, and Msieu pushed me onto the ramp, over the brown riverbank.

  Three PASSAGE

  She said that boat was dark and the wood screamed. She was inside, held between her mother's legs.

  I was in the cargo hold with hogsheads of sugar, which trembled like a thousand drums around me.

  She said her mother cried but silent so no one would hear, and the tears dripped into her hair when she sat on her mother's lap, hot when they fell on top of her head and then cold when they slid down her neck. Water on her skull. But Mamère didn't know skull. Skull like Céphaline's, like Doctor Tom's. Under the dirt.

  Knowing the word skull wouldn't help me now.

  I put my arms around my knees. The wood shook under my dress.

  She had her mother, on that boat. Her mother had her.

  The cargo room was full of burned-sweet smell rising from the sugar and molasses. Tiny drops of brown shook around my feet. Dark like Céphaline's boutons when she scratched them; like a coffee bean held between Mamère's lips.

  I cried silently so the small Msieu wouldn't come back.

  She had her mother. Her mother had her. I had no one.

  The wood of this boat croaked like an angry raven. What had screamed in the wood of my mother's boat?

  This boat moved slowly against the current. North. Not skimming fast down the river with cloth and nails and Céphaline's medicine from Paris.

  He sold me because every time he saw my face, he was reminded of hers.

  I pushed my face into the sleeves of my dress to smell my own hair, and my mother's soap. Back at Azure, my mother's tears dripped onto herself. Not onto me. Her mother had had her, even as the boat wailed and moved and took them away.

  My mother said if I was gone, she would join me. Là-bas. But I wasn't dead. How would she find me?

  When we pulled away from the landing at Azure, he pushed me ahead to the deck, where some of the hogsheads of sugar had been loaded, but then he'd paused.

  The small Msieu looked at my face then for the first time. I could barely keep my footing and put out my hand to the railing. We were headed north to New Orleans. The wind pushed the sails, but the current tried to take the boat back. The lights of Azure were gone.

  The batture along the river's edge full of deadwood. The moon lit only the tunn
el of trees along the river, and after a time, we passed the heap of charred black that had been Petit Clair. The river water rushed below, marked with the circle of light from the lantern.

  “She going to jump?” another man said. He'd been at the dinner table, too, his moustache with tips so thin and drooping, I thought of Céphaline's commas, curling from her pen. He was Msieu Bordelon's factor, the man who sold the sugar during grinding and came south with goods from New Orleans—coffee and cloth and iron hoops for the hogsheads.

  “You—are you planning to jump?” the small Msieu said. I was afraid to look into his face. He was only a few inches taller than me. His voice was French, but the hairs on his wrist were pale brown.

  If I said “No,” that would be a lie, because I was thinking that I could still float now, at this moment, down the river toward home.

  If I said “Yes,” he might beat me. He might beat me anyway. He might lift up my dress right here. He might laugh. He might burn me, like Eveline said someone had done once to her. I had seen the round gray scars at the soft edge of her breast when she took off a dirty chemise for me to wash.

  If I said the truth, which was that I didn't know, he might be angrier than with either of the other answers, because Msieus didn't want anything complicated. They didn't want to hear the word I. Never. There was no I.

  My teeth held my tongue.

  Then palm trees appeared like chimney brushes against the outline of night sky. Maybe Les Palmiers, a place Madame often mentioned. North on the river, closer to New Orleans. But a name Mamère knew.

  The other man said, “You bought her just now? She mute?”

  The small Msieu said, “I thought she was speaking when she was brought to the boat.”

  He stared at me for another moment, and the boat shuddered on against the current. Don't look down. He'll think you'll jump. You might jump. If you jump, you can find a branch to float you down.

  But Christophe said the river never helps when someone runs. The brown water hides brown skin until it takes the color from the arms and legs, and the bodies wash up white.

  If I jumped, how would I see Azure, with the levee banks tangled high with river trash and driftwood?