Celeste liked the feel of the rug. Touching it brought back that pleasant memory from childhood. A rug from the Orient, spun by worms then spun again by women, if she remembered right. She sang the old song she knew from childhood and one known by her mother and her mother’s mother in their childhood too. A passed down thing. She sang it to herself and any dear old ghost that might be listening.
“Falling star, Falling star,
Fall on me, Fall on me
Fall down once, Fall down twice,
Make me shine, Make me shine.”
By the time morning light had trickled down over the roofs of the city and pooled in the old courtyard behind the Library and through the tall windows there, Celeste’s eyes were open and the book lay closed in her lap. She rose from the chair, stiff, and took the Book of Odette out to the entry hall where she would remember to take it and one other she had picked out for Jonathan Hogue, leaving all the others behind.
When George arrived, he had his wife and daughters with him, and Nathan too—agreeable to helping only because he wanted to see inside the house. George’s eldest little daughter charged straight up the stairs because they presented a challenge. Having claimed the top tread as her own, she sat on the landing and looked down at Celeste.
“You like it up there?” Celeste asked her.
The child nodded, not budging a bit when Nathan strode up, two risers at a time to see what he was up against with the big dresser upstairs. He edged past her. Celeste heard him whistle a moment later.
Celeste took George aside. “Before you let yourself or Nathan damage yourself moving that thing down, I’ve got a suggestion.”
It would be two days before she would visit Aurore and confessed her decision on the disposition of Odette’s house. Aurore set the glass of ice tea on the little table next to Celeste’s chair on the front porch, and took her own seat. “Not many people would give up living in a nicer house than the one they have, just to put someone who works for them closer to the business. That’s especially generous when your own house flooded and Odette’s didn’t.”
Celeste had come clean with Aurore, telling her everything—the inheritance and her decision to put George in Odette’s house rather than take it herself. No point in having an advisor if you don’t give her all the facts. Well, everything except about her bear—her spirit guide, and she felt a bit guilty over that, given Aurore’s calling, but some things are better kept private. She ignored the suggestion that her own choice in the matter of living arrangements was questionable. “Remind me to serve you something special next time you come to visit at my little house. Makes me feel almost heartless just serving you water as I normally do.”
“Of course, it’s not about being close to work at all,” Aurore continued. “This is about staying in your own home where you feel your power lies. Am I right?”
“Maybe just a little bit,” Celeste admitted.
“I can tell you’ve still got it in mind to tackle a storm and keep from having to clean that house again.”
Celeste raised her eyebrows again, signaling that was precisely what she had in mind, and wondering just what the problem might be with that.
“Well, I wouldn’t be much of a Voodoo Queen if I didn’t put some stock in a gift like yours. And exorcising an aggressive old ghost during the peak of the storm…” She thrust out her open hands as if giving someone a shove. “She was standing in your way.”
“Shouldn’t have allowed her that hold for so long.”
Fabric
Celeste’s family only lived in memories. All of them gone from this branch, all but a scattering of once-thought-to-be-cousins she wasn’t close to. Still, like the quilt, memories of her family lingered in the fabric of the city itself—her home, set smack in the way of storms and set too low for its own good. She felt a responsibility to it, and all those she knew well or didn’t know at all, because she’d been born with a special way of seeing and sensing, and had built on that by intention and hard work.
As a child, she had imagined having a reaching web like that of the spider in her yard—a web of sensitivity that would let her stretch out far and wide to listen to the wind and rain, and maybe to speak back to it. She’d managed that, sufficient to fashion a cloud and conjure up a breath of wind. All well and good, but not enough to shift a storm. Aurore took an added interest in her efforts and helped wherever she could, drawing on her own resources.
When Celeste felt the need to listen into what the waters had to say, Aurore took her up to the shore of the Lake; a spot where Celeste could stand in the shallows, not quite up to her waist, and feel what the water could tell her. Not just that bit of water within reach of her outstretched fingers or her toes, but out and out, as far as her understanding of water would allow her to reach—beyond the Lake, beyond the Chandeleur Sound to the Gulf. Deep into the Gulf where currents whispered of flows and changes farther away. In time, all the way out into the dark Atlantic where the hurricanes might be born in the later months of the breeding season. She listened to those whispers, learned their subtle language, all the while measuring them for intentions, comparing what she gathered to what Betsy and Mr. Cooper had taught her.
As far off as she reached, she also felt the movements near at hand of the tiny fish around her ankles and the silent darting of the dragonflies as they hunted, and maybe kept the mosquitoes at bay. She listened to the great and distant voices, but also heard those smaller ones near at hand, because they were all linked together.
Aurore sat on the shore near the car and watched her friend stand for the better part of a morning, shaded by a broad hat, since it was the water she needed to hear from. Beside Aurore sat a young woman, her apprentice, brought along to learn as Aurore had learned in the company of her own mother.
“We deal in the mysteries,” she whispered to the young woman. “Mysteries great and small, immortal and so very mortal. Anyone passing by and looking out there might only see a skinny woman standing in the water, maybe a bit touched by the heat or some malady of the mind. But I’ll tell you this. No one I’ve ever met in life or learning has such a force inside as she has. There’s no telling what she might manage, and all unsung.”
Most evenings, that question Aurore asked before the fall of Betsy would come to mind. What if she were to set a hurricane onto others that hadn’t been in its original path? If such a day came again, she’d have a true sense of what words she could use, and worry then about whether to open her mouth or keep her peace. Four years would pass before she’d need to worry in earnest.
Ghédé
The ‘60s had been turbulent. Lots of turmoil, lots of change—an admission of rights set in the books, at long last. Lots of learning too, and good times with good folk near at hand. But turbulent times. So when 1969 rolled in, Celeste felt a bit more worn than she was accustomed to feeling. Part of that had to do with her age, she told herself. Coming up on sixty, and though she felt fit and saw no reason to give up doing what she loved, there was a little something inside, some whispering voice that wasn’t the bear’s, saying she needed to remember she couldn’t go on like this forever; that her days were as numbered as anyone’s.
Sometimes her dreams let these tired and anxious feelings shine through. Summer came on and the Gulf warmed, and hurricane season came around again, Celeste was sensitive to its coming, and dreamed a dream like no other before.
Chug-chug-chug-sputter-chug.
A familiar sound. She had dozed, and the sound stirred her out of lesser sleep. Her eyes were dazzled. Her hands were gripping metal; the bright edge of the boat she was riding in, right at the front where she had been charged with keeping watch.
When she looked up, she wished she hadn’t, but she couldn’t look away. What she first took to be a flat and soupy marsh pricked with stumps and the naked trunks of drowned trees wasn’t that at all. It was a littered lake, fouled with every sort of debris. And there were bodies. Not the imagined lone and ghostly face sliding past below the wa
ter’s surface, but bodies floating so great in number and thickly packed together that a dog or even a small child might have walked far across them, provided they had their sea legs on them. People of all sort and stages of life were mixed together, rich and poor, old and young, black and white. All dead and all together.
“That’s how it goes,” said a voice from behind her in the boat.
Celeste turned. The man seated at the back of the flat bottomed boat appeared curiously un-distressed by the sight of all the dead about him, though he was not oblivious to them either. He was dressed in black; nicely and formally dressed given the circumstances, though one trouser leg was rolled up as if he had been testing the waters, and one lens of his dark glasses was missing. Not much harm to have taken from such a catastrophe as this. He looked mysterious and amused. At his feet huddled a little group of very young children; mere babies most of them, and she assumed he had plucked them out of the flood. All were alive and well, if wet.
She thought first of Neighbor, but a field was his venue, not a boat on water, and not surrounded by a sea of the dead. “Who are you,” Celeste asked. It was the obvious place to start.
“Let’s just say I’m your Guide through this,” he said, laughing.
“And where is this place. It’s dreadful.”
“Strikes me as peaceful,” he said. “But how is it you don’t recognize it? It’s New Orleans.”
Celeste almost choked. “This can’t be New Orleans!”
“And why not?”
But Celeste couldn’t say why not, and didn’t.
“It was bound to happen sometime,” he continued. “Just too big a thing to ask of mystères, year on year on year, to keep it from being swallowed up by a hungry storm. Year on year the gunner of god takes aim, and some years his aim’s not so good; some years it’s better. Looks to me like this time he had his sights Dead on.” He nodded at the sea of bodies. “All those lost souls need rounding up and sending off to where they should be.”
“What about all their poor bodies,” Celeste asked. She braved another look out across the choked waters.
“That’s for the Living to sort out, and a mighty big task it looks to be.” His one visible eye twinkled at her. “Let’s say you had a bull knock down your door and turn your house inside out. Maybe that bull sticks you through and through with his horns until you’re inside out. Last thing you might think is, why didn’t I have a bull proof door instead of one only fit to keep out a goat!” He cackled and snorted as if it was the height of humor.
“Feet of clay.”
He clapped his hands together. “Feet of clay indeed! And a head or more too short! The gunner gets his aim right and, voila! Round shot straight down the parade route and through the back door” He stuck his toe over the edge and tapped one of the bodies, which bobbed like an apple. “Pomme de Mere,” he mused. “But look on the bright side. Someone saved some money, though I can’t say I saw any of it. No one made a proper offering to me! You don’t happen to have anything to eat on you? I hear you are a baker of high repute—though where you’ll bake now, I can’t imagine. Fuel looks a bit wet. The flour ruined.”
“Who’ll clean up the bodies indeed?” he added. “Who’s left to take care of these little lost ones?” He patted the heads of the children nearest him. “Who’ll be there for you Miss Dubois now that Miss Aurore and George and Annie and all the others are dead and gone?” He pointed near and far as he spoke. Pointing at those he named—those she’d lost. “These babies aren’t dead and neither are you Miss Dubois. Fond as I am of you all, my business is elsewhere and this is where you get off.”
The boat bumped against something. Celeste turned to see the roof of her own home peaking out of the water though no other roofs could be seen.
“Out you get,” said the man in black.
“How will we get to land?”
One by one he gently picked up each child and passed it over the side onto the roof of her porch.
“Another problem for the Living. Maybe you could get the Sovereign of the Sea to find a safe passage for you now that this is sea again. Or is it lake? Not sure it matters to him, but it might. Goodbye Miss Dubois. I expect I’ll see you again someday, but no time soon, officially!”
Celeste woke, but the dream remained and she didn’t have long to wait for its significance. The hurricane season arrived and Celeste, and probably everyone else in the city who had any sense, kept an ear tuned to the weather reports. Three years had passed since Betsy and nothing had come after them, so maybe it would remain somebody else’s turn for another year at least. But the Gulf attracts storms like a harbor attracts ships.
She listened in on the winds’ travelers tales, and did the same with the waters. A voice called out again from the far away desert and stirred the winds over the warm ocean. She sensed the convergence of flows—the birth of a hurricane.
They were three storms into the season when the name Camille came out of the hat, and Celeste went to see her friend for insight.
“An amazing dream,” said Aurore. “Given what’s out there.”
Celeste sat in one of her friend’s comfortable and elegant parlor chairs and watched Aurore scratch her index finger with the nail of her thumb. There was no itch there. It was a nervous thing. One of those little tell tale signs a person gives when they are anxious, even when all other signs are hidden. Enough days had passed for news of Camille to be out, so her dream felt significant enough to mention. “A very strange dream.”
“The man in the boat was no ordinary man,” said Aurore. “Not a man at all.”
“I thought as much.”
“Did you recognize him? Ghédé Nébo,” said Aurore. “By your description of his looks and behavior, that’s who I’d say it was. I told you about him years ago. Do you recall?”
“Guess I must have.”
“Yes, that would be it most likely.” But her friend was still scratching at her finger with her thumb. Seemed she wasn’t so sure.
“A mystère,” Celeste said. “A lord of death, or some such thing.”
“Yes, one of a few.”
“He said it’s up to the Living to keep that sort of thing from happening. At least to give it a good try and not just hope for the best.” Celeste said no more and waited.
“Do you think you can move this storm?” Aurore said after a bit more scratching.
“I mean to try.”
Camille
George was ever her source of information on newsworthy things because he had a radio and a television to help him keep on top of events, and the coming of any great storm into the Gulf was the biggest of news to Celeste.
“I’ve been paying attention to this one especially,” he told her one heat-packed day in mid August. “I’ve followed it as it came across the Atlantic.”
Born out of that desert like Betsy was, Celeste thought.
“She only became a hurricane yesterday morning. Before that, she came sneaking in below Cuba and the other islands, steering clear of them like she was saving her strength for something else. Now she’s in the Gulf and last I heard this morning, she’s turned north.”
“And what would that mean?”
“Can’t say, but she has plenty of room to run. She’s taking her time and building her strength for something.”
“As strong as Betsy?” She thought she already knew the answer. She could feel it.
“Stronger. But she’s kind of small and compact. It’s like she’d rather clobber someplace especially hard than spread it around. They say she could wipe someone off the map.”
“Who?”
“They can’t tell for sure. But they’re guessing Fort Walton or Pensacola or someplace like that on the panhandle.”
“They guess that?”
“That’s what they guess for now, but Mr. Cooper said she could come this way.”
“I guess he’d know.”
“I sure would feel better knowing my house would still be standing come next week
. I’d feel a whole lot better if there was someone who could do more than just guess.”
“And do what?”
“Like maybe send her off another way if she set her sights on us.”
“Well that would be a useful something. Can anybody out there do that nowadays?”
He was silent, then he mumbled something that might have been “Not sure.”
“You talking to someone other than me?” she asked, prodding him.
“No, ma’am.”
“Good. So when would she reach land?”
“Tomorrow night, the seventeenth. Maybe late night or early the next morning.”
“Thank you George. I can always count on you. Looks like we may be closing a little early today. You know how that goes. Anyone who can get out of the city until this passes should do it and that includes you.”
“Yes ma’am, and the same should go for you too.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
By later that afternoon, Celeste sent Nathan on his way with thanks for his help in boarding up her house. She ate nothing for fear it would interfere with her thinking, and she sat for an hour or so on the front porch, just reading the air before going inside.
“If there’s something of this sort to do, it’s just as well to get on with it,” she said to herself. She went to her room and looked down on her picturous quilt. She poured her attention over it, square by square, touching every bit of fabric and sparing a thought for the one it signified. Then she gathered it up and took it back to the kitchen table. She sat before her tools and draped the quilt over her shoulders. It was much too warm to be draped with a heavy quilt, but she needed it to be this way, like a proper ritual, and the heat was less of a burden to her than to most. She sat for a good long time, breathing in the charged air and considering.
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