by Lisa Wingate
But that don’t matter. No mystery what’ll happen if things get left up to Old Missus, and I hope we ain’t soon to find out that’s how it is. Tati wouldn’t have hurried me into the boys’ work clothes and sent me scurrying up here if there was any other way to discover what sort of ill wind has brought that girl in the hood cape sneaking up to Goswood Grove by the dark of midnight.
She might’ve meant for that cape to hide who she was, but Tati recognized it right off. Tati’s old fingers had worked late by the light of the bottle lamp, sewing up two capes just alike for last year’s Christmas—one to fit that high-yella woman Old Mister keeps in style down in New Orleans, and one for the fawn-pale daughter they made together, Juneau Jane. Old Mister likes to dress them the same, mother and daughter, and he knows Tati’s trustable to always keep her sewing work hid from Old Missus. All us know better than to even mention the names of that woman or that child round here. Be safer calling the name of the devil.
Juneau Jane coming to Goswood Grove ain’t a good sign. Old Mister hadn’t been seen at this plantation since day after Christmas, when the word come that Mister’s fine gentleman son had got hisself into another difficulty, this time in Texas. Been only two years since Mister sent the boy west to dodge a murder trial in Louisiana. The time spent on the Gossett lands in East Texas ain’t improved Young Mister Lyle’s behaviors, I guess.
Doubt anyplace could.
Four months ago that Old Mister left, and no word of him since. Either that little tawny-pale daughter of his knows what become of him or she’s here to find out.
Child’s a fool, coming to Goswood this way. The Ku Kluxers and White Camellias catch her on the road, they might not guess what she is just by looking, but no decent woman or girl goes about alone after dark. Too many carpetbaggers, road agents, and bushwhackers round in these years since the war. Too many young rowdies mad about the times, and the government, and the war, and the Louisiana constitution giving black folks the vote.
The kind of men that prowl these roads at night ain’t likely to care that the girl’s just fourteen.
Juneau Jane’s got courage, or else she’s desperate. Reason enough for me to sneak past the brick pillars that hold the Grand House’s first floor eight foot off the ground, and shinny through the coal trap into the basement. Years past, the boys used it to come snitch food, but I’m the only one of Tati’s strays still skinny enough to get in this way.
I don’t want one thing to do with this mess, or with Juneau Jane, but if she knows information, I got to find out. If Old Mister is gone from this world and this left-hand child of his is here seeking after his death papers, I’m bound to get my fingers on our cropper contract at the same time. Make myself into a thief, which I never been. Don’t have a choice about it, though. With no husband to stand in her way, Old Missus will burn them papers quick as she gets the news. Nothing the rich folk like better than to rid theirselves of a cropper right when the land contract’s coming due.
I take a few steps, light and careful, one at a time. At corn shuckings and circle plays, I got the dancing feet of a butterfly. Graceful, for a gangly thing, Tati says. I hope that holds out. Old Missus has Seddie sleeping in a little space off the china room, and that old woman’s got light ears, busy mouth. Seddie loves to tell tales to the Missus, cook up trouble, cast curses on folks, get somebody a swat with that riding bat Old Missus carries round. Seddie’ll slip a little poison on anybody that crosses her—put it in the water dipper or top of a corn pone cake—make them sick enough to die or wish they would. The woman’s a witch for sure. Even sees things when she’s sleeping, I think.
She won’t know me in this field hat, shirt, and britches. Not unless she gets a close look, and I’ll make definite sure that don’t happen. Seddie’s old and fat and slow. I’m quicker than a cane-cutter rabbit. Burn down the stubble. Stand at the edge of your field, you won’t have me in your stew pot. I’m too fast.
I tell myself them things while I cross the basement by the light of the moon through the window. Can’t use the nursery stairs to go up. The bottom steps squeak, and they’re too near Seddie’s room.
The ladder to the butler’s pantry floor hatch is the means I choose, instead. Many’s the time my sister Epheme and me sneaked out and back in that way after Old Missus took us from Mama’s little saddleback cabin in the quarters and said we was to sleep on the floor under Baby Lavinia’s crib, and quieten her in the night if she fussed. I was just three and Epheme six, and both of us lonely for our folk and scared of Old Missus and Seddie. But a slave child ain’t given a choice in the matter. The new baby needed playthings, and that was us.
Missy Lavinia was a troublesome little bird from the start. Round and fat-cheeked and pale, with straw-brown hair so fine you could see right through it. She wasn’t the pretty child her mama wanted, or her daddy, either. That’s why he always liked his child with that colored Creole woman the best. That one is a pretty little thing. He’d even bring her to the Grand House when Old Missus and Missy Lavinia went away to visit Missus’s people down on cotton islands by the sea.
I always did wonder if him being so fond of Juneau Jane was the reason his children with Missus turned out so wrong.
I push up the hatch in the butler’s pantry, peek round the cabinet door, and listen out. The air’s so quiet I can hear Old Missus’s azalea bushes scratch at the window glass, like a hundred fingernails. A whip-poor-will calls in the dark. That’s a bad sign. Three times means death is bound to cross your path.
This one calls two.
Don’t know what two times means. Nothin’, I hope.
The window light in the dining room flickers with leaf shadow. I slip along to the ladies’ parlor, where before the war Old Missus entertained neighbor women over tea and needlework, and gave out lemon cakes and chocolates all the way from France. But that was when folks had money for such. My work, or my sister’s back then, was to stand with a big feather fan on a stick, swish it up and down to chase the heat off the ladies and the flies from the lemon cakes.
Sometimes we’d fan the sugar powder right onto the floor. Don’t ever taste it when you clean that up, the kitchen women told us children. Seddie sprinkles them lemon cakes with a poison if she feels like it. Some say that was what caused Missus to birth two blue babies after Young Mister Lyle and Missy Lavinia, and to finally end up weak enough to be confined to a invalid’s chair. Others say Old Missus’s trouble goes back to a curse on her family. A punishment to the Loaches for the mean ways they treated their slave people.
A shudder slips up my back, rattles every bone in my spine, when I come past the hall where Seddie sleeps in her little room. A gas lamp flickers and spits overhead, turned down low. The house sighs and settles, and Seddie grunts and snorts loud enough I hear it through the door.
I round the corner into the salon, then cross it quick, figuring Juneau Jane will try to get to the library, where Old Mister keeps his desk and papers and such. Outdoor sounds get louder the closer I come—trees rustling, bugs with their night noises, a bullfrog. That girl must’ve got a door or a window opened. How’d she manage that? Missus won’t allow windows raised on the first-floor gallery, no matter how miserable hot it gets. Too worried about thieving. Won’t let the windows open on the second floor, either. So fearish of the mosquitos, she makes the yard boys keep tar pots burning outside the house day and night in all the warm months. Whole place wears a coat of pitch smoke, and the house ain’t been aired in more years than I can remember.
Them windows been long painted shut, and Seddie minds all the door locks last thing at night, careful as a mama gator on a nest. Sleeps with the ring of keys tied on her neck. If Juneau Jane’s found a way in, somebody from the house helped her. Question is, who and when and for why? And how’d they get away with it?
When I peek round the opening, she’s sneaking in the window, so it must’ve took her a while to pry it up
. One little slipper touches down on the wood folding chair Old Mister likes to take out to the gardens to sit and read to the plants and the statues.
I back myself into the shadows and watch-wait to see what this girl’s about. Climbing off the chair, she stops, looks over to my hiding spot, but I don’t move. I tell myself I’m a piece of the house. You ever been a slave at Goswood, you learn how to turn yourself into wood and wallpaper.
Easy to see this girl knows nothing of that. She moves through the room like the place is hers, barely reasonable quiet while helping herself to her daddy’s big desk. Latches click as she opens parts of that desk I didn’t even know there was. Must be her papa showed her how, or told her.
She ain’t happy with what she finds, and gives that desk a cussing in French before moving on to the tall hallway doors like she plans to push them closed. The hinges complain, low and soft. She stops. Listens. Looks into the hall.
I back my way tighter to the wall and closer to the outside door. If Seddie comes from her bed, I’ll hide behind the curtain, then climb out that window during the ruckus and get myself away from here.
The girl shuts the hall doors, all right, and I think to myself, Oh Lord! Ain’t no way Seddie didn’t hear that.
Every hair on my body stands up, but no one comes, and little Juneau Jane moves on with her business. This girl is either smart or the biggest fool I ever came upon, because next she takes her papa’s little pocket lantern from the desk, opens the tin case, strikes up a Lucifer, and lights the candle.
I can see her face clear then, lit up in that circle of yellow light. She ain’t a child anymore, but she ain’t a woman, either, someplace in-between. A strange creature with long, dark curls that circle her like angel hair and hang far down her back. That hair moves with life of its own. She’s still got that light skin, straight brows like Old Mister’s, and wide eyes that slant up at the corners, same’s my mama’s, same’s mine. But this girl’s are silvery bright. Unnatural. Witchy.
She sets the lantern ’neath the desk, just enough to give some light, and she commences to fetching out ledger books from the drawer, turning pages by the light, her thin, pointed finger tracing a line here and there. She can read, reckon. Them sons and daughters born in plaçage live high, boys sent to France to get educated, and the girls to convent schools.
She checks over every ledger book and slip of paper she can find, shakes her head, hisses through her teeth, not happy one bit. She lifts up boxes of powdered ink, pens, pencils, tobacco, pipes, holds them to the light and looks underneath.
Be a sure miracle if this girl don’t get caught. Child’s getting noisier and braver by the minute.
Or else just more desperate.
Holding up the candle lamp, she goes to the shelves that rise floor to ceiling against the walls, higher than three men could reach if they stood on shoulders. For a minute, she’s got the flame so close, I think it’s in her mind to burn the books and the Grand House to the ground.
There’s hired women and girls asleep at the attic. I can’t let Juneau Jane set that flame, if she tries to. I shift from behind the curtain, creep three steps ’cross the room, almost to the moonlight squares on the cherry wood floors.
But she don’t do it. She’s trying to make out what the books are. Lifts onto her toes and holds the lantern high as she can. The candle tin tips, wax funneling over onto her wrist. She gasps and drops the lamp, and it falls on the carpet, the flame drowned in a wax pool. She don’t even bother to go after it, just stands there with her hands on her waist, looking up at the high shelves. There’s no ladder to get up there. The house girls probably took it to use for cleaning someplace.
Ain’t two seconds before the cape is off that girl’s shoulders, and she’s testing the bottom shelf with one foot, and then climbing. Lucky thing she’s still in child’s skirts, just only halfway betwixt her knee and her silk slippers. She skitters her way up like a squirrel, the long hair trailing down her back making a big, fluffy tail.
Her toe slips near the top.
Careful, I want to say, but she rights herself and goes on, then grabs and sidesteps along the high shelves like the young boys traveling the rafters in the wagon shed.
The muscles in her arms and legs shake from the strain, and the shelf bows under her when she gets toward the middle. It’s a single book she’s after, one that’s thick and heavy and tall. She pulls it loose and scoots it along the wobbling wood and gets herself back to the edge where it’s stronger.
Down she comes, setting the book ahead of her, one shelf lower, one shelf lower.
The very last time she lays that book down, it pitches like somebody’s shoved it from behind, and off it topples. Seems like forever, it goes end over end through shadows and light, then hits the floor with a smack that rattles the room and races out the door.
There’s stirrings upstairs. “Sedd-ieeee?” Old Missus calls through the house, that screech cutting up my spine like a kitchen knife. “Seddie! Who is there? Is it you? Answer me this instant! One of you girls come lift me from this bed! Put me in my chair!”
Feet scramble and doors open overhead. A housemaid runs down the attic steps and along the second-floor hall. Good thing Missus can’t get up from that bed on her own. Seddie’s a whole other matter, though. She’s probably grabbing the old breechloader rifle right now, fixing to lay somebody under with it.
“Mother?” It’s Missy Lavinia’s voice comes then. What’s she doing home? Ain’t yet the end of spring term at the Melrose Female School in New Orleans. Ain’t even close.
Juneau Jane grabs that book and she’s out the window so quick, she don’t even remember to get her cloak. She don’t close the window, either, and that’s good because I’m bound to get out of here, same way she did. Can’t leave that cloak there, though. If Missus sees it, she’ll know Tati’s stitching and come asking us about it. If I can get it and close that window, kick the travel lantern under the desk, the rest might be all right. This library’s the last place they’d think of a thief coming. Folks steal food or silver goods, not books. Any luck, a few days might pass before the candle wax on the carpet gets noticed. Even better luck, the house help will clean it up without saying a word.
I stuff the cloak down my shirt, nudge that candle lamp with my foot, glance at the mess on the rug, think, Oh Lord. Lord, Lord, cover me over. I want to live some more years before I die. Marry a good man. Have babies. Own that land.
The house gets like a battleground. People running, voices hollering, doors slamming, commotion all over. Hadn’t heard that much racket since the Yankee gunboats first come up the river, shelling everyplace and sending us scurrying to the woods to hide.
Before I can get on the folding chair and jump through the window, Missy Lavinia’s right outside the library door. She’s the last one needs to find me here. That girl purely delights in the taste of trouble, which is the reason her papa sent her off to the girls’ deportment school in the first place.
I run back through the dining room, right past every door, because Missus’s latest manservant is coming up the gallery outside. I get all the way to the butler’s pantry, but there’s no time to open the little hatch to the ladder, so I just crawl in the cabinet on my hands and knees and pull the doors and huddle there like a rabbit in the grass. Somebody’s bound to root me out before long. By now, Missy Lavinia has spotted that open library window and maybe the wax on the carpet, too. They won’t stop looking till they find out who’s in here.
But after the noise dies down a bit, it’s Missy Lavinia I hear say, “Mother, for the sake of all, may we return to bed now? And please leave old Seddie to her rest. Don’t punish her for not waking. I troubled her already with my late arrival last evening. I’d left a book on the night table, and it’s fallen, that’s all. The noise only sounded to be coming from downstairs.”
Can’t guess how Missy don’t see, or
smell, or feel the air from that window left open. Can’t guess how Seddie’s slept through all this, but I count it as a blessing and close my eyes, rest my head on the backs of my hands and say my thanks. I might live awhile longer yet, if they’d just all go back to bed.
But Old Missus is boiling hot, still. Can’t make out all the words that’re said after, just that there’s heavy discussing and carrying on awhile. Time it’s over, my body is cramped and aching so bad, I’m chewing on my knuckles to keep from moving and pushing on the doors. A manservant gets left up to keep watch, so it’s a long time before I gather together the courage to slip from my place, open the hatch under me, and go down the ladder to the basement. With the man still prowling the yard and the galleries, I don’t dare try to get out till day breaks and Seddie unlocks the doors out to the lawn. I just hunker down, knowing Tati’s probably in a fit of worry, and come morning, she’ll wake Jason and John and tell them what we done. Jason will be bad troubled over it. He don’t like anything out of place from one day to the next. All things the same, day after day, is his comfort.
Curled up in the dark, I wonder about the book Juneau Jane stole. That book got Old Mister’s papers in it? No way to know, so finally I rest my head on the soft cloak and let myself sleep and wake. I dream of climbing up the bookshelves myself, and taking one of them books from up top and getting my hands on our land contract. All our troubles will be no more.