The bayou rose and fell when it rained, when the sun shone, when we passed it on the way to the fields. Where were the water gods? Faro? Only in the ocean? Which god watched me, with these buckets and dippers and iron tubs holding mud?
I kept plans in my brain, stored somewhere along those wrinkles I remembered from Doctor Tom's jar. But the day I saw the moss boats, the gray tangles piled high, a stab of pain went behind my eyes. The empty sockets of my skull. My mother's hands and mine in the moss when it lay in soft piles.
We walked back to the house. Philippine had cooked her own corn early. I could smell the wild onion she'd put in the meal. Her daughter Amanthe was visiting le quartier. She told us, “Two men argue with Msieu up there, bring all that moss to sell, but Msieu tell them cure it first and bring it back—my people too busy for moss.”
It was my turn to grind our corn, and I didn't even think. Sophia and the others stayed outside. I took my other dress off the peg, rolled it with my clothespins into a bundle, and tied it to me with my apron strings. I wrapped the jar of corn and the empty gourd into my cape, turning away from Fantine's shelf of small things—broken gourd with shiny insides, pretty pieces of bark, stones.
Her brothers were racing in the street, and people cheered them on. I walked behind the privies, to the narrow ditch where they were perched. The ditch ran to the little bayou in Msieu's woods.
The smell of our leavings was strong in the ditch. The rain washed our dirt all the way to this water.
At the bayou, a smaller pirogue trailed behind the larger cha-lan boat, which held high piles of moss. I took large handfuls of moss and dropped them into the pirogue, and then I got in, untied the rope, hunched myself into the moss up to my waist. It was high enough to hide me if someone saw the boat. The sun was hot red in the trees. I picked up the paddle. The pirogue slid fast down the narrow bayou.
If someone shot me, in my skull, or in my heart hitting the bone in front of it so hard, then my body would float down the water anyway. What did it matter now, how I got there? Là-bas?
The moss was blooming. The first time I saw the tiny lavender flowers at the end of a curl—three tongues of bloom, small as a clothespin doll's would be—I was six. The flowers went under the boiling water in Mamère's washpot, and her wooden paddle held them under for a long time.
Bayou Rosière entered Bayou Courtableau near Washington, the town with the large boat landing. Amanthe often talked about what traders could bring up from Washington and what they had to take by cart instead, like an armoire.
If another boat passed me, it would be a trader, an Indian, or someone looking for slaves. But not yet for me. Not yet. They thought I was grinding corn—or in the privy—or in the woods.
The boat moved in dark water, paddle turning the ripples silver. I prayed that no one else was bringing moss, prayed that I would hear anyone approaching. Branches dangled in the current. I needed a story. If the boat made it past the plantations that lined Bayou Courtableau, with the sun now red as embers between the tree trunks, I would try to pass the same way the men had brought me. Then the Atchafalaya? The swamp.
Someone would see me, before then. Someone would have to take me through the swamp. I would have to pay with my skin to get back to New Orleans, before the bayous went south to the Barataria and the camps run by Lafitte. Lafitte's privateers would sell me or keep me there, like the ocean-eyed woman who had brought me the food.
The trees were lit from behind as if on fire. All the msieus. Tall and fat and small and deadly. Fingers and red eyes and boats.
I kept to the left bank of the bayou. No one would be looking for me yet. The moss-sellers were having coffee with Msieu and Madame now. They would argue about price and then go down to the boat and see the pirogue gone.
Sophia would lose her meat, for losing me. Losing my body. And suddenly I knew I would miss Fantine, her soft voice and her huge cheeks, her touch on my shoulders when we were in line.
I slowed the pirogue too much, and the boat shuddered sideways in the current. Water splashed onto the moss at my knees. A new current was pulling toward the left, a bend of wider water. Bayou Courtableau. Heading south.
The water pulled me of its own strength. The darkness was indigo now, the color of Mamère's piece of cloth. The mosquitoes were thick around my eyes. I pulled the pirogue to the bank near a root and held on while I slid mud thick and slimy like mucus over my face and arms, the way men did when hunting at night.
The mud dried into a mask over my cheeks and around my lips. My mouth pressed tight like Mamère's. My face the color of hers.
The only light was directly ahead of me, a faint blue stripe painted on the black water as if on a snake's back. The new moon had risen above the trees. It was very thin, a rim of white plate peering from dirty dishwater sky. The banks and trees beside me were silent, until men's laughter echoed far behind me. Like barking.
I paddled closer to the side, looking for anywhere to hide, any break in the trees. There were pauses in the laughter, places where the bayou bent and the sound was muffled. Then an eddy pulled at the nose of the boat, leading past a caved-in place in the bank.
A frayed rope. I tied the boat to the huge root dangling from the cave-in. Please don't let the bank fall on me now, I prayed, looking up. Là-bas. Please. I have nothing to show you. Nothing.
The water was black. Faro. The gods of water. Please. Here is my hair. My hair. I slid off my tignon and felt the mosquitoes settle on my forehead. I pulled hairs from the nape of my neck, felt the skin holding and then the prickle of hurt. Baby hairs, Tretite used to call them. They dropped from my fingers into the water. Here. Please.
Sell myself. Ask for money or offer diversion on their journey south. But when they were finished, they might kill me anyway. So they wouldn't have to feed me.
They were closer now. Creaking of wood. A big boat or raft. Several voices. From de la Rosière?
I lay flat and covered myself with the moss. My neck a collar of dried mud, my face stiff, my hair full of mosquitoes.
“Somebody leave a boat.”
“No, somebody hunting.”
“Right there?”
“Picking moss. Look.” The men spoke the rough French of Acadian trappers and hunters.
“We can use another boat. And whatever he got in it.”
“I can't use no buckshot in my face. Maybe one them Attaka-pas. With a knife.”
“We got this load of skins now. Can't use that small boat.”
“Maybe he got skins in there.”
“Maybe Attakapas, and he skin you. Eat you at midnight.”
But their voices were past now, drifting, muffled, through the hair covering my ears.
I had wet myself, and the liquid mixed with the water in the boat to smell sour and sharp. The mud on my fingers cracked. The nape of my neck stung.
My heart. It wasn't a small burned muscle. It bloomed and then shrank. The pain breathed inside my chest. The heart inside Doctor Tom's office, so long ago. Mine had burst. The blood warmed that channel behind the long bone. I would lie here and drown in my own blood and waste and the bayou water soaking into my skirt. The water gods had chosen liquid for me.
The moon moved.
I closed my eyes. My heart.
When my teeth tore at my fingers, the skin renewed itself. Meat. Each time something happened, my heart hurt so badly that there must be a tear, a gash. Did the heart repair itself? Were the scars raised and shiny like those on our skins?
They could kill me like a fox and strip my skin and sell it to someone who would lie on the flatness and force himself inside it. Or hang me on the door and my skin would lean against it like Sophia while they pushed at me.
I still couldn't move. Rustlings in the woods, movement in the water, and night birds in the branches. Finally my stomach beat hard with hunger, not my heart, and I reached for the jar of dried corn.
Holding three kernels in my mouth for a long time, I tried to cook them with my saliva. Hot
liquid. My teeth worked the dried corn. I was an animal now.
Some of the mud fell from my lip into my mouth and settled onto my tongue, under the corn. The corn rested on my tongue— the stove of my mouth. I couldn't see the moon at all.
A rope. A rope was looped around my neck. Loose and then tightened.
Crime against God. I tried to sit up. They would kill me and then punish my body.
The rope scratched my throat, pulled from behind. I tried to hold the sides of the pirogue. The sky was purple now. The trees were not a wall. Whoever was behind me pulled steadily.
The water was black and smooth. No one would punish my body. It wasn't theirs. It belonged to my mother. Then God. Là-bas. I rolled over the side of the boat into the bayou.
The rope went slack. I worked my fingers between it and my skin. But the water pulled me, too. My eyes opened. Particles floated past me. I breathed the water through my nose. The water in my hair, like floating in Mamère's washtub when I was small. I had never floated since then. My mouth opened. The water entered all my passages. I would see Mamère. Mamère?
Wood hit me on the back. Then my hair was pulled hard. My arm wrenched as I was pulled up into a boat.
One hand held my hair, one hand hit me in the chest and belly. Pushed hard. The water came from my nose and mouth.
An Indian man studied me, holding my hair and the rope. His fingers twisted my hair to turn me back onto my stomach, and he put one foot on my back as he paddled.
We bumped into my pirogue, and he reached over. My corn. My bundle. My clothespins and dress and tignon.
He put them down and tied my hands behind my back, then pulled me over with my hair. My forehead burned. My mouth was full of iron.
His eyes were black as pot bottoms. He was the same man who had brought back Athénaïse. He tied my feet to a ring set in the bottom of the boat and put his rifle over his legs and began to paddle again.
I couldn't move. Only my head. The last of the water fell from my mouth onto my chest.
We floated down the bayou for a long time. No houses. No town. No other people in the light when the forest turned green. A great heron lifted when we passed a bend in the water. Forever I would be propelled down roads of water while birds flew away with annoyance in the snap of their wings.
Barataria. Back to Azure. Just take my skin. Take my hair and sell it to France. Céphaline said they needed hair in Paris for wigs. I will grow it again, and you can cut it and sell it. Over and over. I can be a crop.
I couldn't turn to see him. I wasn't a crop. The minute he untied me, I would take his gun. Or make him shoot me. I would shoot myself if I could get the gun.
We entered smaller bayous, wound through water oaks and then cypress until faint hammering echoed through the trees.
The pirogue stopped at a raft of cypress trunks. Beyond them was a clearing, where a white man in a boat pointed a long rifle toward the sky but stared at eight black men up to their waists in murky water, swinging axes in the cypress trees.
The Indian whistled.
The rifle dropped, and the man swung around to point it at us. Reddish beard and blackened teeth when he grinned. A crushed hat, a smear of mud around his eyes like a raccoon, but the fingers holding the gun were white.
“A favorable expedition, I see,” he shouted, and motioned for the Indian to bring me in.
I had never heard a voice like his. Rolling and slurring. He spoke English, but not like Doctor Tom.
The Indian man never spoke.
The white man said, “Where did you run from, dear?”
I sat on the ground in front of a low shed with four doors. An Indian woman came from a palmetto-thatched house nearby. She said something in another language to the Indian man. She held a rifle of her own and nodded toward the black men in the swamp. The sounds of axes had lessened.
The white man said, “I don't want to hear those guttural Attakapas words, Sally.” He pointed and she got into the pirogue with the gun.
“Not all day, dear,” he said to me, and slapped me across the face.
“I didn't run. I belong to Msieu de la Rosière,” I said, trying to remember all the English words. I hadn't spoken English in a long time. “He sent me to gather moss.”
“With corn.” He held up my bundle.
“I like to eat corn.”
“You hadn't gathered much, then, dear?”
“I fell asleep.”
The Indian man sat nearby with his own gun, watching.
“Rosière is north by five miles or so,” the man said. “Surely there are plenty of trees close to there for moss. You see, Joseph finds people when they run. Not when they gather moss for a few hours.”
I didn't know if he would hit me again. Blood coated my teeth. Either he would use me or kill me. It didn't matter.
“How long have you been gone?”
“A few hours.”
He slanted his head to study my dress, my hands. Bayou mud clung to my face and neck. “You've been working in the fields, dear. What else can you do?”
I didn't answer. I waited for him to hit me or tear my dress. Hera said when Msieu Bordelon bought her, the trader made her strip, and Msieu looked away and said, “How many children?” She said the trader told Msieu, “Pinch the milk parts and guess.”
This man slapped me harder and said, “This is your job?”
More blood trickled onto my teeth. It tasted just as it did when I tore my own skin.
“To act as though you are above speaking to a man? Do they then fuck you with a vengeance, dear?”
The bayou water still inside me rose and flew from my mouth, landing on his boots.
“Tie her up, then, Joseph,” he said to the Indian man. “Strip her and throw some water on her, for she stinks. If she just ran last night, they won't have been looking long. How long's the other Rosière nigger been here?”
He must mean Athénaïse. I tried to look at the men cutting in the ciprière, but the Indian man jerked me toward the long, low shed.
They left me chained to a ring in the first room, the wooden door propped open. My clothes were in a pile beside me, and the water dried on my skin. I curled into a baby-circle with my back to the door and heard voices pass and fade, heard the axes ringing and men shouting and cursing, heard the white man laughing. I never heard the Indian woman, though she left a dish of saga-mite near me, as if for a dog.
My skin. The splintered boards of the wall were pocked with termite holes. Céphaline's skin had betrayed her. Killed her. Her skin hung on the wall of her mother's bedroom, or in the downstairs parlor, perfect and white in her portrait.
After a time, voices rose in a clamor. Men were in the yard. I smelled meat. Maybe Joseph had killed the white man and roasted his thick thighs.
I sat up and tied my tignon around my chest. Gooseflesh. Like plucked birds. My dress was wrinkled and dirty as cleaning rags. Chains on my wrist and ankle. I could only tie the sleeves around my waist, so that my dress was an apron to cover part of me.
My neck bent when I tried to look out the open door. Doctor Tom said the animals whose necks didn't bend had a hard time in life. My fingers. My teeth chewed there until I had a piece of myself to hold in my mouth.
Eight men sat around the cooking fire. The tallest—his back with grin-scar on one shoulder, fleur-de-lis on his other. Athé-naïse. He'd left twice, and the Indian hunter found him twice.
The Indian woman came in to take my dish. She had a small pistol in her waistband. Her hair was straight, to her shoulders, and a faint line was tattooed from each corner of her mouth to her jaw, like a strange dripping of blue. Her eyes were blacker than the water.
She unlocked the chains, left the one on my wrist, and led me to the trees behind the shed. When I was finished, she brought me back toward the fire and chained me to a post. The trees turned dark.
The men spoke in low voices, French and African and English. The Indian man was gone. Athénaïse kept his eyes on the last light hangin
g silver in the sky, the only man not staring at me.
“Have you decided what it is you're good for, dear?” The white man threw animal bones into the fire.
When I didn't speak, he said, “Let me help you decide. I left Ireland with nothing, dear, just as you ran with nothing yesterday. But now I own this little enterprise. Sally, though, isn't the best of cooks. And as she's my wife, I can't really let her sell her other useful wares, dear, but you, on the other hand, could make yourself comfortable here, cooking and washing. All these men are working for money, to buy themselves freedom. We take them to New Orleans when they've earned it. Work for a year, and you'll be free to go. And if you want to provide other services, the men can pay you. I'll deduct it from their wages, dear.”
The Indian woman spat into the fire.
The sagamite rose in my throat. The white man's boots were black with mud, like a second skin over the leather. The black men were barefoot. He drank from a flask, again and again, before lighting his pipe. Some of the other men had cigars or pipes as well, and two of them drank from a gourd.
I had to gamble. It would be safer to tell him a story away from the other men.
“I can tell you inside,” I said softly, and he rose and motioned to the Indian woman. She unchained me again and led me back into his room. He shut the door and chained me to the rings.
“Don't think to try anything brilliant,” he said.
The smell of alcohol wafted from his skin, and the burned meat on his fingers.
“Msieu de la Rosière bought me in New Orleans, just a while ago,” I said. “I'm a—” What was the English word?
“You're a high yellow bitch,” he said softly.
“Cadeau,” I said. “Gift. A gift for his son, when he returns from Paris. I am—untouched. Msieu de la Rosière will pay you.”
“You can't be free from your master.” His voice was soft and reasonable. “But if you work hard, you can be free here.”
Behind him, the Indian woman shook her head slightly, twice.
I said, “Take me back, and he will pay you. I wasn't running, just gathering moss and got lost. I left my jewelry and my good dresses at Rosière. I am not to wear them until I am given as the gift.”
A Million Nightingales Page 13