When the carriage drew up outside, Celeste could hear it through the gap under the door. There was a knock, sharp and brief. Marie called out that it was unlocked, and Odette entered, bearing books. She was a head shorter than Marie and might have been called petite by a stranger, but she filled a room when she entered it. Filled it with an intensity that seemed to beam from her eyes. Odette dressed well and reeked of the city and some amount of wealth, even though when traveling to St. Marie Parish, she dressed for the road.
“How are you Marie,” she asked. The meaning was clear.
“Doing fine today.” Marie smiled, but it wasn’t her mother’s fullest smile since the Sadness had only moved on the day before. Celeste had learned to read her mother as she’d learned to read the sky. Six years old and reading almost everything around her, except books from Odette.
Marie set her sewing aside, greeting Odette without getting up. “I finished the book.”
“And what did you think,” Odette asked
“It was difficult. Harder than the last one. There were times when I wasn’t sure I could make it through.”
“Life’s that way for most of us. A book’s a journey.” She smiled as Marie held out the old book to be taken away. “Glad to see it gone, are you?”
Marie nodded. “But I appreciate it, as always. Appreciate what you do for us.”
Odette took the book and handed it off to Celeste to hold as she fished inside the satchel. “I’m not done yet.” She straightened again, holding two books as she glanced around the room. “And what about Bernard. How’d he manage?”
Marie looked proud and grew before Celeste’s eyes, reclaiming just a bit more of what the Sadness had taken on its last visitation. “Managed fine. Finished his book days ago.” She pointed to the table across the room and Celeste took the cue and leapt after it.
“Good man. A book’s like an opportunity. It doesn’t do you any good unless you pick it up and accept what it has to offer.” She handed one book to Marie and set another on the table next to Celeste’s drawing. “And what of Augustin?” she asked.
“Still reading too. Picks up whatever Bernard reads. Does it when his papa’s not reading, so you may need to bring him his own book next time.”
Odette turned her attention on Celeste and her drawing. Her eyebrow ticked up. “You have a good eye,” she admitted before turning back to Marie. “She and Augustin are still close?”
“Almost inseparable. Like they were twins, but born so many years apart. Like she was held back until that storm brought her.” She smiled at Odette who was giving her that look she had for things she thought frivolous. “Twins do run in the family,” Marie added.
“They do, but they don’t run that way. Still, I suppose that’s a good thing they’re close.”
“I think so,” Marie said softly. “Celeste sees so much more about things than we see. And such a sweet child.” She smiled at Celeste.
“Hopefully, not too sweet to stand strong.” Odette said. “We hope for the best and expect less in return. Don’t be naïve. When life is tough, you endure. If you have the power to change something for the good, then you use that power.”
Celeste wasn’t sure who this was meant for—maybe for her, but her mother took it onto herself as she always did. Always bore the load, even when it pressed her down.
Marie sighed. “I endure the best I can. Only now and then you need a little time away from it all.” She looked at Celeste and sang softly as if sharing a secret.
“Falling star, Falling star,
Fall on me, Fall on me
Fall down once, Fall down twice,
Make me shine, Make me shine.”
Celeste’s eyes laughed for her mother as they always did when she sang that song. A passed-down song. Passed from mother to child, time and again—from too far back to know the names. Family members lost to time, lost from memory, except maybe in that simple song. A long line of women singing that song down the years, passing it forward with maybe just a little something of themselves in it, like something inherited; the shape of the eye, the length of the hand. A musical tone. A shade of brown.
“What’s it about?” Marie asked, nodding to the book on the table by Celeste.
Odette answered Marie, but her gaze was on Celeste. “About a man finding his way home, but finding it the long and difficult way around.”
Marie sighed.
Bears
Her sixth birthday would stand tall enough in her memory to be seen, clear as could be, from decades after. She’d look back on that three part day from low valleys of days that weren’t so good.
In the morning, Celeste sat on the porch with her mother, stringing beans. She was good at that and as thorough as she was with weeding because a bean with the string left in by carelessness was an awful thing to chew and could ruin the rest of the dinner for her. Marie’s hand settled over Celeste’s where they busied themselves among the beans. That settling said, Be Still. Then her mother’s long pointing finger told Celeste to look up. Look out there beyond the Climbing Oak. Celeste did and saw a bear standing plain as day in a break in the underbrush where the woods began. The bear was looking at them but set off again once it caught Celeste’s eye. Celeste might have let loose a stream of excited chatter but Marie’s touch said, Wait.
A cub appeared and came to a shuffling stop where its mother had just been and it likewise took a good look at Celeste. But its mother grunted and the cub remembered to keep up, and was gone. The cutest thing Celeste had ever seen. Nothing could ever be as cute as that cub, but she would never get to keep it for herself. “Yours to see but not to own,” her mother reminded her.
Later, she sat in the Climbing Oak with her brother and told him about the bears, knowing he had seen them before. She climbed up without help, just to tell him. He was thirteen and would retreat to the branches of the tree to dream and look far off to a future he wanted. When Celeste came climbing up, he cautioned her, but she wouldn’t be scared off by talk of nasty falls and broken necks. She had something to tell him, and having done that, was cautioned again. “Don’t go near the bears,” he told her. “Especially not a cub when its mama’s around.” She agreed, though she also imagined there was wiggle room in that agreement.
They climbed down when they saw Bernard roll an empty barrel into the yard below. He set it out like a table and gathered up three stand-ins for stools and set them around it, but rather than set it for a meal, which it was too small to hold, he slapped a deck of cards down in the middle. His friend John Stone was coming around and they liked to play cards. “For pleasure. Not for money,” he liked to say, “since neither of us has any.”
Celeste knew John Stone and knew he was an Indian, though she’d never seen him wear feathers or paint. He dressed and talked like anyone else. A Red Man, she’d heard him called by someone in town, though he didn’t look very red to her. A nice red man who lived down the road away from town with a nice black lady, Sandrine, who was her mother’s only friend.
With Augustin and Celeste hovering around the barrel, John Stone asked if they would like to join in, and they said they would. Bernard asked if Celeste knew how to play poker and she said that she did. Augustin had taught her. One of those valuable life skills. Marie stood on the back porch with her arms crossed, not sure about her little girl playing poker, but she relented, since it was Celeste’s birthday, and she let her use one of the chairs since the ground was dry.
As they played, Celeste was always drawn to the Jack, particularly the one-eyed kind. She managed her cards well and never bothered to sort them since she could see that sorting in her head. So no one could judge how she felt about her hand. When she looked up to find John Stone trying to read her face, she just looked back without expression, offering nothing.
“Don’t bother trying to tell anything from that child’s face,” Bernard told him. “It won’t show you a thing."
A movement in the woods caught Celeste’s eye but it was only someone�
�s dog out exploring, but it brought the bears to mind so she told John Stone about them.
“Celeste likes the bears,” Augustin explained. He tossed out one card. Confident, but wanting to improve his position.
“As long as she likes them from a distance,” Bernard said. He dropped three cards onto the barrel. Not a good sign, but he was a hopeful man and didn’t give up easily
John Stone enjoyed the game but mostly for the company it offered. His hand wasn’t taking him anywhere and he folded it onto Bernard’s discards; more interested in what Celeste held. “My grandfather told me that the bear was a great dreamer,” he explained to her. “She is not afraid of the dark and sleeps the long sleep through the winter, hidden in the earth. Dreaming.”
“What does the bear dream about?” Celeste asked him.
“I was never told, or never thought to ask,” he said.
“Maybe you could ask him now,” she offered.
“He is gone.
“Then if I find out, I’ll tell you.” She spread out her cards across the barrel. Three threes and two Jacks. Both of them one-eyed.
That night she dreamed she watched her father working at the forge. As her father shaped the iron, her eyes drifted to the fire and the shapes in the red heat. She wondered if he saw those shapes and fashioned them into the iron. But the shapes she saw were meant for her, and what she saw was a bear.
Smear
She didn’t go into town very often, but on that unfortunate day she walked in with Augustin to see their father at work.
“Three things,” her father explained to them without looking away from the fire. “That’s what you need to turn this bit of iron into something useful or something beautiful.”
“What three things?” Celeste asked, though she already knew. He had told her before.
He jostled the coals and they hissed. “The fire.” He raised his hammer. “Me.” He touched the anvil with the hammer. “And my little black companion here.”
They watched him until Augustin said it was time to go. Augustin checked his long stride to allow her to keep pace with him, but also to give himself time to think. Occasionally he would stop to consider, and she would pause beside him to wait. He stopped once to read a posted sign, tracing the lines of small type with a finger and occasionally whispering unintelligibly to himself before huffing and moving on again with Celeste beside him.
Near the middle of town, her brother drew up in front of a window and looked in. It was Mr. Jeffers’ store, where you could get just about anything you needed, even if it had to be ordered special. Augustin scuffed the sole of his left foot slowly forward and back again. He was deep in thought, wrestling with something and a bit nervous. She could read all of his little habits.
Across the street, some kids were coming out of the schoolhouse her brother had wanted to attend when he was younger. It bothered him passing it, even now, especially if there were kids around, kids who went to school there. White kids who knew he wasn’t allowed to. Because of this, she didn’t like the look of the building even though it wasn’t much different than any of the others on the street. Peeling white boards, lapped one over the other and well dusted.
His left foot came down squarely beside the right and she looked up at him, waiting for word. “Stay here,” he said.
“Where’re you going?” Somehow she expected him to say the school, and it would lead to something.
“In here. Just for a few minutes. Just don’t go too far, okay?”
He stepped into the shop and she saw him walk off toward the back until she couldn’t see him. Then she looked back to the school. The door stood open but there were no kids to be seen. No one was around, so she crossed the street and paused outside the door, listening before she went inside. She imagined she heard voices. Then she heard a woman’s cough from further in.
Celeste walked through the next set of doors, through the outer vestibule and into the schoolroom proper. There were desks and two unhappy looking kids sitting there, one on one side of the room and one clear across at the other, each bent over book work as a woman with a face like an axe watched them and looked just as unhappy as they did. And then the woman noticed Celeste, and the two kids turned and looked at her too.
“Yes?” she asked, and Celeste felt a cold chill.
The kids stared at her. One smirked and the other looked blank, confused.
“You have a message? Did someone send you to tell me something?” the teacher asked.
“No, ma’am.” Then she thought of her brother and bumped up her courage. “My brother asked to come to school here and you told him he couldn’t. You were mean about it.”
“Well that can’t be helped,” the teacher said and gave a sharp nod to the two kids, signaling them to put their noses to their work. “Your brother can’t attend here, and he knew that when he marched in. I’m not likely to forget that. I know who he is and I know who you are.”
Celeste didn’t know what she expected the teacher to say, but it wasn’t that. It struck her as mean and her face grew hot. Her toes curled up in her shoes like hidden fists. Soon, she knew she would turn and run out. She could always feel an angry run coming on, but she would have time to get in her parting shot before she left.
“Someday, I hope someone’ll hurt you, worse than you hurt him.” She spoke through clenched teeth. Her words rang out in the little room like a curse.
The kids looked up, but not at her. They were looking at the teacher and waiting for her reaction. It came quickly and was totally unexpected. Her own face had gone red and she drew herself up like a snake preparing to strike a field mouse. And she coughed. It came by surprise and she barely brought her hand up in time to cover it. There, on her knuckle, was a drop of blood perched like a jewel. She held her hand farther out, the better to focus, and smeared the drop across the top of her finger, studying it.
Celeste took a step backward and the movement drew the teacher’s focus back on her again. With frightening speed, she surged from behind her desk and bore down on Celeste, who backed into the wall, aiming for the way out. The teacher’s pale hand snatched Celeste’s arm at the wrist as she brought her arm up to ward of an expected slap. The blood smeared finger was right there at eye level. It was all she could see.
“Speak to me that way, girl? You get out!” the teacher hissed, “and don’t you ever set foot in my classroom again! I’ll know if you do. I’ll have an eye out for you, girl. As long as it takes.”
She released Celeste’s arm and straightened, glaring down at her. Celeste took a breath, nearly a gasp and the teacher mistook it for something else. She snatched Celeste by the upper arm and drove her stumbling back into the vestibule, out of sight of the two students, then cast a glance at the open door to the street. Seeing no one, she crouched down, eye to eye with Celeste.
“Don’t go following in your brother’s footsteps, girl. Think what you like, but I did him a favor sending him away in no uncertain terms. Behavior like his will get him cross-wise with the wrong people and dangling from a tree. You understand?”
Celeste understood enough to hold her tongue this time. She slipped the teacher’s grip and spun to her left, slipping out the door and across the street, back to the spot where her brother had left her. She peered in through the window but saw only her reflection. Dark and frightened eyes stared back from inches away. Her brother was nowhere to be seen so she entered the shop and waited just inside the door where she couldn’t be spotted from the street. No one saw her and she peaked across the street toward the school. In a little while, the two kids came shuffling out and headed away in different directions. The door remained open but there was no sign of the teacher, which was fine with Celeste. It was strangely quiet and she could hear her own rapid breathing and see her breath fogging the glass.
“You okay?” her brother asked from right behind her.
It startled her and she turned wide eyed to look up at him. “Where were you?”
“I’ve bee
n talking to Mr. Jeffers about a job working here.”
“Why?” she shot back.
“You’re shaking. What’s wrong?”
“Maybe I’m cold.” She turned her back on him and looked out the window again. There was still no sign of the teacher, but the door was now closed. Celeste scanned what she could see of the street, but there was no one to see.
“It’s a hot day Celeste. What happened? Did someone say something to you?”
“No.”
“You ready to head home then?”
She swept out the door, again glancing up and down the street and at the school. He followed her and they walked home without speaking and nothing was said at home. But at night, the dream brought it all back.
Her feet couldn’t reach the floor but she didn’t dare swing them back and forth. Not in this place. Flies buzzed around the room and she could hear the whispers and giggles of the kids behind her. Celeste was seated at the front of the class, in a desk in a row of its own.
The teacher rose from her own great desk and walked a dreadful path. All of the whispering from the other kids stopped. The teacher continued her slow walk and slower drone of disapproval and disgust over something Celeste couldn’t follow, but somehow knew was about her. And then she was standing before Celeste. “Look at me girl,” she said.
Celeste tensed and turned her eyes up where she could see the woman’s face. There was no anger there. Just the look of someone regarding something they didn’t want or need.
“Open your book and read aloud, so we can all hear.”
More giggling from somewhere in the back of the room. Celeste opened the book. She flipped the first empty pages slowly, until she reached the beginning of the story. She placed a finger under the very first word and tapped the page nervously. Seconds passed.
Child of the Storm Page 2