A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  But Madame de la Rosière's face, always turned expectantly toward her husband, was somehow vague and sad in love, in the darting blurred eyes and the chin so still while she listened to his impatience.

  When Etienne arrived, her whole figure turned into love. Her mouth wasn't set and waiting, but open and expectant, while he entered the room. And her eyes didn't matter, because she touched him every day, his hair, his coat, his knee.

  I didn't want to feel that way about anyone else, ever, to have to wait, and die a little while she was gone. I never wanted a baby.

  I said to Fantine now, “I will get you some cloth and ribbon, sew you a dress for when you are thin again.”

  When she threw her arms around me, her belly felt so hard; how could water and blood and baby be hard as a gourd?

  Madame Pélagie said nothing to me about that night. My blood came, and hers and Amanthe's, all at the same time now. When I washed all the cloths, the smell of the water tipped out near the two chinaberry trees was heavy and thick as freshly killed pig. The trunks should grow tiny fingers or maybe fur.

  The white squares of linen hung on the line were like sheets of paper in the early summer sun.

  The best dogs had papers. Horses had papers. Msieu examined them before he bought, before he bred. I had papers. I was worth more now, because I could sew and dress hair. Pélagie had papers that Msieu Antoine had written and notarized at the courthouse in Opelousas.

  When Fantine had her baby, I went to le quartier to help, cleaning the hot blood and skin, the baby covered with white wax like myrtle.

  When we told him, Msieu said, “First infant to arrive since we were sold to the Americans. Louisiana will never be American. She will be named for loyalty.”

  He wrote in the book: négritte, Francine, 28 de mai 1812.

  One more time, all of our blood came together, and disappeared with the water and bluing. Then Msieu and Madame left for Paris, Amanthe riding up in front, Philippine crying, and Firmin watching with his purple-rimmed eyes and collapsed cheeks.

  Back at her house, staring into her fire, Philippine said, “Ocean passage never certain. Ocean have storm and wind.”

  “Msieu said the ships are bigger and faster now,” I said. “His son just arrived, oui, with no trouble? They will write to us from Paris. Pélagie will get a letter, and I will come to you.”

  “You read?” Philippine whispered.

  “You cannot tell anyone. Not Sophia. No one.”

  Philippine said, “No. No one.”

  Firmin said, “Get a letter, but letter say nothing of Amanthe.” “But she will be inside the paper the same.”

  I had never written an entire word, only the M on my skin. Each time paper or ink was near, I was afraid to try—if the ink made a blot that wouldn't launder clean, how would I explain?

  My plans were on the paper inside my head. I had made Pélagie need me, for her beautiful hair and skin. In New Orleans, I would tell her about my mother's laundering skills, her fine seams and decorative stitches far better than mine. Msieu Bordelon would always need money; he would sell my mother, and she would sew lovely clothes and linens for sale in New Orleans, in Paris.

  I read over Pélagie's shoulder when she made her lists of material to purchase, glanced at the pages of Msieu's daily journal when dusting his desk—not the ledger book of accounts. Msieu's flowing script slanted like people walking against a wind.

  Temperatures dropping. Price for sugar increasing. Two hands sick with putrid throat and one with pleurisy. Apollonaise in stocks again for breaking tools.

  In the garçonnière, Etienne wrote no letters. When I brought his coffee, he was writing lists as well. The names of animals:

  Four deer in south quadrant near bayou. Raccoon. Raccoon. Nest of snakes in lower canefield. Feral pig sighted near Washington.

  He did not glance up at me. I moved behind him. He was taller than his father. His jackets collected dust from his riding. His hair swirled over his forehead like black feathers, and beside his eyes, scrolls of lines curled out like carved decorations from the sun.

  Another week, he wrote names and towns:

  Livaudais, New Iberia: gelding. DelaHoussaye, Saint Mar-tinville: four bays. Rapides Parish dealer: quarter horse.

  He hunted nearly every day or disappeared looking for horses to buy. I swept the dirt from the garçonnière floor, and collected dirty clothing, but rarely saw him.

  Before he left, Msieu instructed Uncle Phanor and Etienne that no one could be spared the cane weeding and woodcutting for the sugar mill; with Amanthe gone, only I was in the house.

  Pélagie argued with her brother. “During summer season, with few visitors, Moinette will be capable. But in November, Laurent, when you return for the harvest, I will need a new girl as well, to prepare the house for the holidays and spring.”

  “November is grinding, and all the slaves work the fields.”

  She smiled. “Bien sûr, Laurent. Fine. I will sell a horse and buy a girl.”

  Léonide was old and moved so slowly with all the weight gathered around her legs and waist that she refused to leave her hearth. She sat on a chair to cut the vegetables now and moved the chair close to the fire to stir her pots.

  Etienne rode the fields only briefly, Uncle Phanor complained. Etienne often returned after dark, carrying dead animals—deer, rabbit, birds. Léonide roasted the meat, and Pélagie studied the bodies on the table, frowning at Etienne.

  I heard them in the parlor.

  “I was trained to shoot by the men who guarded Marie Antoinette—did you not know that? Have you seen a mob, in Paris? We ride above the crowd. Not above endless fields of cane that don't move.”

  Uncle Phanor, his white hair dancing in a circle around his pink skull, drank his wine and said impatiently, “First you didn't want to be sent there. Now you don't wish to be here.”

  “My father chose the military college, and I obeyed,” Etienne said. Pélagie motioned me to cover the food with netting. “My father chose my return, and I obeyed.”

  “He wants you to show some regard for the land.”

  “I am meant to ride above bent backs now and look into the distance. I prefer the forest, where I roamed as a child.”

  “You are not a child.”

  “You are not my father.”

  He was gone for weeks to horse races. I removed Uncle Phanor's fingernail parings and Léonide's vegetable parings and Pélagie's fabric parings and her blood.

  In late summer, rain fell almost every afternoon, and the clean clothes hung dripping and transparent on the lines. I remembered the muscles in Mamère's wrists leaping when she twisted wet shirts.

  My fine sewing needle slid easily into the gray spots on my wrist. Old wounds. The boat. The bayou. The blood rose in its usual buttons. Boutons. Boutons on skin had brought me here. Foolish red bumps on white skin. I dipped my finger into the blood and painted the heads of my new clothespins, the ones Firmin had carved for me.

  As a child, before I knew how to work, I had scratched eyes and smiles into the heads, made them moss wigs and leaf skirts. I had danced them near my mother's feet, tickled her with their hair.

  The blood wasn't paint. It sank into the wood and turned black and rubbed off.

  The letter came in August. They had been a month at sea and then a month for the letter to return to Louisiana. Madame was in Paris, in her aunt's apartment, seeing the best doctors for her eyes and her shortness of breath and her headaches.

  In le quartier, I whispered, “When Pélagie read it to the uncle, she didn't say Amanthe is no longer with me or Amanthe is ill.”

  “Nothing for Amanthe,” Philippine said.

  “That mean she is fine,” Firmin said. “Only talk about the bad, for us. If we die or run. If nothing, we work.” He went outside, as he always did when his face couldn't contain what he felt.

  We were all waiting for the harvest, and for January, when Madame would return with Amanthe, when Pélagie would find her suitor d
uring the balls and dinners of spring, and we would prepare for our journeys.

  River waters rose at the end of September from a storm out at sea, and all the rain of the summer gathered in the yard and fields to meet Bayou Rosière when it spilled over. The earth was covered in brown trembling. Etienne stayed inside, swearing as the water rose to the edge of the porch. “My father will blame me. Somehow I will have brought the rain from France.”

  The cane in two fields was washed away. Le quartier was flooded, and people waded up to the barn. The water finally receded, leaving behind lines of black dirt on trees, walls, the brick pillars of the house, watery lines like horizons of a ghost world hovering above the earth. Pélagie ordered us to scrub everything.

  The waters had washed over the grove where the two Africans were buried, left gaping holes without the rough boxes Hervé Richard had nailed together. The men were gone, into the Atchafalaya, down through Barataria, out to sea, where storm winds had swirled them, maybe all the way across the ocean to Africa.

  But their bodies would have been bleached white by the water.

  Their souls—did they believe in dya? If they believed, maybe their souls would wash onto the African beach where they had been captured, and maybe they could rest there.

  Msieu returned for the harvest in November with a young woman: Lise, Pélagie's cousin. Madame was to stay in Paris for treatments.

  Pélagie clasped Lise to her, the woman thin and small, with black straight hair done in a braid around her head. “I missed you so, I couldn't bear it. You'll stay all spring season in the wilderness!”

  Pélagie's letters had not been for love, then, only loneliness. She and Lise spent hours in Pélagie's room, sewing, whispering, laughing, and I learned to dress Lise's hair in the new Grecian style.

  Msieu rode the place with his son. Msieu's face was altered, deep lines grooved around his forehead and down his temples, like a replica of his drooping moustaches pasted above his eyes. In the office, Etienne said angrily, “The rain was incessant, and the cane was rotting before the floods did their damage.”

  His father said only, “Blow after blow. That is to be expected.” When Etienne came out, he frowned at me, where I was polishing the small table in the hallway and the gilt mirror on the wall. “Nothing is ever to be expected with him,” he said, passing me with a rush of smoke and alcohol on his breath.

  Because of the floods, the cane harvest was bad. Msieu spent hours in his office with Etienne, with sugar brokers, and Msieu Antoine, the lawyer. “I'm strongly suggesting that you mortgage, Laurent,” one broker said. “For security, you have the house, some land, or slaves.”

  Msieu poured another drink. “I do not mortgage. It is a dangerous practice.”

  “It is an accepted measure,” Msieu Antoine said. “You need money for repairs and planting.”

  “It means the possibility of loss. It is how French land falls into American hands.”

  “We have the surety of loss now,” the sugar broker said.

  I finished oiling the wood in the hallway beside the office door. Mortgage must not mean sell. Lend? Which slaves would they lend?

  In the parlor, Pélagie chose new plates for the dinner parties. “It must be fairly lavish, or perceptions will not be met,” Pélagie said. “The Prudhommes are making a decision.”

  I slid the bed warmers under her coverlet. She and Lise pored over a magazine from Paris, and Pélagie said softly, “I want a window.”

  “A house?”

  “No. A window, in a city, with my apartment above. That's all.”

  “In New Orleans?”

  “No! In New Orleans, I am not a Creole. I would never be respected. They love only those born here.”

  “You plan to return to Paris?”

  “No! He will never find me in America.”

  “But to never see Paris again?”

  “In Paris, I am only a foolish young widow from Lyon. But in New York, I am from Paris. I can sell clothing. Parisian style. Perfume, gloves, hats. Madame Delfin—do you remember her? She is waiting to send me the dresses. But I need a place. A window.”

  “A store.”

  “A window. A wall with a window and my name over it.”

  “How much will you need?”

  Pélagie whispered, “As much as a plantation will bring.”

  “What?”

  “Look at me. Look at this Attakapas territory. The women here are barbarians. My brother's wife cannot see, so she may be excused. But you have seen the farm wives and drab little women in town?”

  “I have seen everyone noticing your beauty.”

  “My brother has expanded Rosière every year. Some of that land is mine, though I've never even looked at it. The men can exclaim over dirt. Dances and dinner parties. It will be easy.”

  “But to marry again, after one husband already dead?”

  Pélagie closed the magazine. “There is nothing else to be done. And sometimes, when the man is older, and the heart is weak, too much love can be—”

  “What?”

  “The last thing you enjoy on earth.”

  “Pélagie!”

  “Oui?”

  What did the whorls of her brain store? She called for me again and again, in the night. She called me to make certain she was still executing some order or plan. Her husband was dead. Who was trying to find her? How would the window hide her?

  Pélagie and Lise planned the meals. “I've hired five slaves from Madame Prévost in Opelousas,” Pélagie told her. “For the whole weekend. Three women to serve the food, one extra groom, and one cook. Léonide is beside herself.”

  “How many people are you expecting?”

  Pélagie shrugged. “We will see how successful my work has been. But I hope to see forty or so. Monsieur Prudhomme's family, I know.”

  “Ah.” Lise smiled. “That one.”

  Then Pélagie called me to her dressing table, where we were trying different accessories. “Moinette. Monsieur Ebrard will attend.”

  I twisted up a section of hair to pin with the feathered ornament she was considering. His sideburns. His cravat. His groom.

  “Monsieur will remember you. He will stay in the garçon-nière.”

  I couldn't ask how old he was, why he didn't want to see her, or Lise. Or maybe he wanted to see them, dance with them, marry them. After a diversion for the evening.

  “Yes, madame.”

  Lise looked through dress patterns holding a swatch of blue silk, pale as summer sky through glass.

  I went into the hallway when she asked for the stone to sharpen scissors, but waited until they spoke.

  “Pélagie. You are without shame.”

  “I am without a husband yet, and with an abundance of hospitality required of me. There is no need to be coy, as Americans pretend to be here. She is fifteen, I think. She could have been sold for a high price in New Orleans, but she wasn't. How my brother acquired her I don't know. Ebrard will notice her again.”

  “And what if she has a child?”

  Breed. Like good dogs. I bit at the loose skin on my thumb and tasted almond oil from her hair. “If she has girls, they will be attractive. Do you know what they are called? Daughters of joy.”

  Lise turned pages, with the cricket sound of paper. “And boys?”

  “Someone in New Orleans told me her mother drowned one like a kitten and told the woman it had died at birth. Isn't that horrible? But the men hate to see them. They're useful for nothing, apparently, so often they're sent to school in France.”

  “But she belongs to Laurent, oui? And so would her children. You wouldn't have to decide.”

  Pélagie must have moved the dresses in the closet again, because the sachet scent wafted out the doorway. “I will make my own purchases when married. Moinette understands me, and she is indispensable as well as quiet. I will buy her when we leave.”

  I wouldn't think about joy and kittens, because I only cared about the part where we left.

  The wome
n dressed in Madame de la Rosière's room and in Pélagie's room. The silks glowed like butterfly wings, but when I began dressing hair along with the other maids, the smell of burned oil and pomade mixed with clouds of too-sweet powder. As I moved from neck to neck, the scent made me feel ill. Some of the necks were very young, white and smooth and unmarked, and the curls fell fat and lazy to their napes. Some of the necks were darkened by the sun, etched with lines like palm bark. The rats of extra hair were like small animals. My fingers held them onto a skull and pinned the thinning brown or black hair around the pad.

  What if I were to offer them mine formed into a rat? Curling black hair on the white scalp, wrapped with blond strands?

  The older men dressed in Msieu's room. The younger men dressed in the garçonnière.

  Msieu Ebrard had ridden with Etienne and others on horseback, come from a race. He had no carriage, and no groom. I would dress the models in the window. In Paris. My mother would sew. Just a few minutes with Ebrard's voice and the ache.

  Only his eyes moved, when I passed. He wore a blue coat. Etienne watched him watch me. Another young man stood with them. A tan coat.

  During the dancing, violin and piano music twirled over our heads, and skirts twirled at our feet, while we carried trays of ham and squab. Meat torn with teeth.

  The skirts fell away like dead flowers onto the floor when the women retired. I helped Madame Ebrard's servant undress her. The skin hung from her sides, under her arms, in heavy dewlaps. Where did that fat come from? Her angel wings had fallen. I took her dress, which had a spot of oil on the bodice from a dropped piece of meat.

  Then I went downstairs to clean crumbs from the tablecloths.

  Fat and ashes in the threads.

  The older men talked about Americans in the parlor, smoke like moss curling under the door. The younger men played cards in the garçonnière; shouts of “Five! No!” rang out.

  “He will ask before the weekend is finished,” Lise said to Pélagie, checking dresses for tears. “He cannot be more than an arm's length away from you.”