A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  “The books of my childhood,” she said when I looked at them, as the days passed. “The only ones I can have now, with pictures. Hardly any words.”

  “Your eyes,” Madame said. “It is not healthy.”

  “My brain,” Céphaline said. “Put it in his jar.”

  Doctor Tom placed the leech on her temple every day. Large and pulsing black. The ants of her words she wrote smaller and smaller. Madame took away the paper. The whorls of hair in the brush.

  He gave her tablets: “Blue mass—mercury to balance the blood.”

  What was the name of her blood now?

  I sewed a tear in Céphaline's sleeve, trying to make my stitches like eyelashes. Fine as my mother's. Céphaline stared at my needle. Her face did not move.

  The plaster made her curse. Doctor Tom laid it along her neck, where it raised blood to her skin, and then the leech drank that poisoned blood.

  “Cheval blanc,” Céphaline said softly. “The more I look up at your face, the more it reminds me of your horse.”

  Doctor Tom winced. “The blood flows through the veins in the neck to the head—to the face,” he said to Madame. “This is what the surgeons in New Orleans say to try, before the injections. The blood carries waste and impurities to the skin, where they collect.”

  “Boutons,” Madame murmured. She was ashamed of the word. Of the face. Her own skin so smooth and white as a bowl, but the three lines on her forehead like threads now.

  I held Céphaline's mirror while she slept. Inside my eyes were the colors at the riverbank edge. Brown and black and gold silt.

  My mother's new prayer. Not far. Not far.

  Down the hall, Grandmère's thumping cane called Félonise to her again. The round glass showed my skin light as damp sand high on the riverbank. Not wet mud, not dry loam. My eyebrows were feathers of black. Who cared about our eyelashes and eyebrows? Did the men have to stare at our skin and eyelashes while they labored through the hair under our dresses?

  Céphaline's cheeks were pocked now as if a hummingbird had attacked her face. Hera's scars were raised and shining, Céphaline's dug deeper by her own nails. Her knives.

  The Auzennes came to help move Mademoiselle Lorcey to their place, because Céphaline couldn't study during the treatments. The smooth curves of Auzenne neck and cheek, placid foreheads and closed lips, excused the eyes dull as black leather or murky olives. A man wouldn't hesitate to put his lips on those cheeks or that brow, and the eyelids would be closed anyway.

  The Auzennes did not come upstairs.

  That night the clock sounded like a ghost tapping a tiny heel, the hallway murmuring when someone came to check her.

  It was Msieu. The boots were smaller than Doctor Tom's.

  He sat next to her bed, his breath moving the mosquito barre. The barre pooled in milky folds beside his foot. I could open one eye and see.

  “How could we have known?” he murmured, the smell of his silvery liquored breath floating to my corner. “As enfant you were perfect.”

  He shifted his boots, and I heard clots of mud grinding underneath the heels. “But your face. Whose face is that? Your breeding from France—the goddamn English doctor knows nothing of France.”

  He stood up but one boot slipped. Stumbling. He crossed the floor, and I kept my breathing steady as sleep. The mud on his soles crumbled near my face—horse manure and river silt.

  He stopped at the altar. “I prayed. The Virgin didn't worry about her looks. She received the child without them. I wouldn't care if we stopped the damn medicine now.” He snorted the air twice, fast, and his heel twisted grit into the wood when he turned.

  I would see the sand in the morning, would sweep it from the grooved floorboards. He stood over me.

  “And this one with a good face and hair, but only to move the tail aside. Like the mare. Goddamn.”

  He went to the door, turned and said, “Dors bien, petite.” Céphaline's breath rasped like the nutmeg on a grater.

  The black shadows of his boots crossed the slice of light when he closed the door, and then he blew out his candle.

  I waited a long time. Then I felt my collarbone of clavicle, my kneecaps of patella. My nose of cartilage, my hair of something I didn't understand. My spine, and the hard knot above my buttocks. Muscles and fat, like the pig. Under our cloth.

  “You can't fix me,” Céphaline told her mother, who only left the chair beside the bed now when she slept. “Oui, petite, we can.”

  “I am not broken.”

  “No. You are perfect. Just the—”

  “I am not a plate dropped on the floor.”

  “No.”

  “I am stained like a damn tablecloth.” She laughed.

  “No. Simple to erase them. We will erase them.”

  In the threads, the bluing turns red—blood or wine or berry juice—to white. But in the body? The indigo went inside the skin and breath of my grandmère. How did it penetrate? The liquid of coffee went inside the blood of my mother, made her stay awake night after night in her own chair, waiting for me.

  Doctor Tom's bottles lined her dresser. My mother's bottles lined our chest. The wash on the line like people flying. The mosquito barre she had mended, clouds hidden in the folds. The medicine from Paris in a small jar. Doctor Tom said, “This is the particular order sent by Valréas, in Paris. We met in London last year, and he told me this was the newest medication for the skin. A powder that can be mixed not only for application on the face but for injection.”

  Céphaline said nothing. Her own face, her portrait as a child, watched her from the wall.

  He pushed the needle into her arm. I applied the paste to her cheeks, forehead, chin. Madame held her fingers. Grandmère called from her bedroom, and I was sent to tell her that now the medicine was inside and outside.

  Msieu came in with sugar smoke on his clothes. When he left, I smelled the sweeter breath rising from Céphaline's bed. Her mouth was open like a new moon, her teeth dry as the moon's chalky glow.

  Then Madame went to her room, after midnight. Céphaline's feet moved under her coverlet. White fish swimming side to side.

  Madame had told Doctor Tom that morning, “We have only a short time to ready her for the season. My husband will be angry if the treatment continues to fail. You haven't seen his true anger. He wants her to be happy, in an arrangement.”

  Msieu rode at Petit Clair all night, because frost had descended in halos over the fields and the cane cutters had to work through dark. Doctor Tom sat in the hallway, in case Céphaline called. The pages of his journal stopped rubbing against one another, so he must have slept.

  I lay on my pallet, listening. I took my sewing needle now and pricked my forehead. Blood. I waited for it to harden and tasted the small button. Salt and copper. The same as always. But blood couldn't flow into my hair. Céphaline's medicine, in her blood, flowed into the boutons and would erase them.

  Her feet rustled again, swimming on the sheet. Then there was no sound. I tasted the salt in my throat. My own blood. I was afraid to get up and look at Céphaline. She had not spoken for hours.

  No sound. Was she was not breathing?

  Did she hate us all now? Did she hate me for walking freely, for my face without a single mark except for a white scar like a grain of rice at my chin, where Christophe had once shoved me onto a rock?

  Did she hate her mother for not having a son? “You say every day you love me, you love me. But you didn't make the right mammal, and now you are sorry. Drown me and begin again.”

  Was she breathing? She hated Doctor Tom. She would not call him if she were hurting. She would not call me. She would call no one. I couldn't move, because if I stood over her, they would think I had touched her. I might have helped her stop breathing. But if I lay here when they found her in the morning, it could be my fault. Like Nonnie. Tretite said someone must always be blamed.

  She was not breathing. If air was not moving in her lungs, was her blood not moving either? Her heart. The musc
le. Was it too tired? What if the medicine had stopped her heart?

  But I was the only one here.

  Pretend to sleep. Nothing on my hands but my own blood, and I removed that with my tongue. Mamère—tell me the word. Sweat on my forehead. Salt. No tears. No.

  Dry. Mattress cover dry. I rubbed my face with my sleeve so no one would see tears and know that I knew she was dead. I knew nothing. But what of her spirit? The old people believed in spirits. What if her spirit was hovering here, waiting for help?

  “Cheval blanc,” I called, high and hard like her.

  He would know it was her voice. How could that be me? I would never say those words on pain of the lash.

  My face to the wall, my mouth buried in my moss. Dead black spirals. Threads of hair.

  The door opened. “Mademoiselle?” English voice rolling harsh on his tongue. Tongue not in a jar.

  Sleep. Don't move. Breathe.

  Don't hear.

  The lamp moved. His air so hissing pulled against his big teeth. The eyes in the jar. Mine are not open.

  Don't see.

  His own breathing was light and hissing as water thrown on a fire. Then the blankets rustled. He was touching her arms, for the pulse, like he always did, then her heart, like he always did.

  He kept body parts in the jars. Was he touching her face now? How could he keep boutons in a dish? I'd brushed a bouton when I pulled back her hair that day—a hard little crust of powder fell off the red bump, and I saw it like a ruby and realized it glowed bright as her mother's ring.

  I thought about rubies to keep myself from screaming. Because how could anyone be sleeping with this noise? His hissing breath. He had killed her. They had killed her.

  He went out to the hallway. Would he get on his horse? Where could he go? He didn't know the bayous, and if he rode for New Orleans, someone would see him. If he rode south, he would end up in the sea, where the boats entered the mouth of the river. Where everyone came—from France or Africa.

  He knocked on Madame's door.

  She came into Céphaline's room and began to scream, short and hard twists of sound until he put his hand over her mouth and said, “You'll wake the slave here and all the others. The medicine is unknown. The dosage—”

  She pushed him away and said, “Go get my husband.”

  She covered Céphaline with her whole body when she sobbed. “Petite. Petite. My baby.”

  I breathed as if sleeping, as if small clouds went inside my mouth and outside my mouth. Grandmère shouted from her room, her bulk falling from her bed onto the floor, the lamp trembling with the vibration. She was trying to get to the screams.

  If I ran, I was guilty. If I was not here, I wasn't watching. But I was sleeping. How would I be blamed?

  Doctor Tom pushed my body with his boot. “Moinette. Wake up. Run to the stables and get the groom. Tell him to find Monsieur Bordelon in the sugarhouse.” I rose and rubbed my eyes. Grandmère was moving down the hallway now, her hand scraping the wall. She was crawling.

  I pressed myself against the wall, waiting until Grandmère twisted through the door and over to the bed, so she wouldn't see me slip away.

  Tretite's shutters were dark. The moon was fuller now, lopsided and staring over the barn.

  “Nonc Pierre,” I whispered, at the door of his room off the stables. “Nonc. Wake up.”

  He opened the top half, his fog of hair crushed on one side from sleep.

  “Madame says go get Msieu from Petit Clair. Céphaline's sick.”

  He bit his lips so hard they disappeared below his scars.

  I couldn't say it. She's dead. What if someone asked him whether I knew? I could only tell Mamère, and I couldn't go there because they would look for me.

  When he'd ridden away, I ran into the cane.

  The fields were mostly stubble, ice and sharp fibers cutting my feet like razors. I ran toward the path my mother had taken me down. There was nowhere to go. Just like the doctor. The river would drown me, and in the swamp, the dogs would find me.

  One day. No one would remember me for a day. Then Tretite could tell me what words were said.

  On the headland road near Msieu Lemoyne's place, the last of the canestalks whipped the side of my neck, cutting like fingernails. I jumped down into the irrigation ditch and pushed through the frost-stiff weeds the way Mamère had taken me.

  The path into the ciprière was still marked by our footprints and no one else's. I ran, my back stinging with sweat, like stars pricked my spine. At the indigo vats, an animal moved in the brush. I climbed over the brick walls and dropped inside the lower vat.

  I sat in the corner with my dress over my knees. My kneebones under my cheek. Nothing in our faces where our cheeks were. No cartilage, no real muscle.

  The sternum protects the heart.

  Was her mother still lying on top of her, to protect her from— from what? Herself? Would her mother die now, too, to be with Céphaline—where? Would les blancs go to the same place we would?

  Mamère. Did she hear shouting now? Was she preparing herself to go where I went: là-bas or into the ciprière or—

  Where would I go? The air settled more frost onto my head, my shoulders, the bricks. All the women here in the vat, dresses tucked up at their waists like rolls of extra skin. Their faces, when they tried not to breathe. I tried not to breathe.

  My grandmère. Four scars on each cheek, her teeth showing when she drew air through her mouth, trying to escape the stench that rose from the water.

  How could she have escaped from the very air? And how would I run through the water?

  Then I heard horses. Faint snorting and rattling, hooves ringing on the trail through the trees. LeBrun from Bontemps—dogs for nègres—was he out looking for me already?

  No dogs. Only men, talking low. Not calling me, or anyone else.

  No one had taken this trail for months, my mother had said. Did she know where I'd come? Did they have her on a horse, holding her up to make her look for me?

  I climbed out of the vat, slipping once so brick took the skin from my wrist, and fell in the clearing.

  Msieu's voice cut through the woods like cane slivers. “Did you lash him tight? He's slipping.”

  A fox den—I remembered the smell from when my mother brought me here. I pushed through the vines toward the musky scent, praying the fox was out hunting now, or gone forever. The scent was strongest in a heap of branches and leaves. I slid into the fox den, my shoulders and head still outside, and laid my cheek flat on the crackling cold leaves.

  Only flashes of movement showed through the tree trunks, and I prayed no one could see me, my black dress and dark tignon like burned wood, my right cheek turned up to the moon like a stone.

  “Get him off the horse. He's not dead yet, but he won't wake up. I hit him too hard. Get the horse in there, too.”

  Nonc Pierre's voice. “Msieu, pardon, but no horse go in there.”

  “Then you take the horse to the river. No knife or bullet. Hit the damn horse in the head and throw him in so when he washes up south, it looks like the doctor drowned.”

  The leaves warmed to my cheek, or my cheek cooled to the earth. Msieu had killed Doctor Tom. Would he remember I had been there, too?

  Michel spoke now. “Msieu—we have to cover the man up?”

  Nonc Pierre said, “Horse didn't hurt nobody.”

  Msieu said nothing. Something was dropped, in a heap, and then a gunshot, so loud it was as if the bullet went through my own ears into my skull. My brain.

  But when the ringing ceased, only silence. No one else would have heard, not across all the cane.

  The horses snorted, reared up, and thundered hooves on the earth. Dampness on my skirt, and on my cheek. My heart hit the long, flat bone that protected it like a door.

  “Cover him up. I will bring lime. Make certain it is permanent.” Msieu turned his horse; the creaking of leather. Then he rode through the brush.

  The men were silent until Nonc Pierre
rode the white horse away. Then they began to dig.

  “All this dirt don't look strange, someone come?” Christophe said. “Best get the dirt from the woods, not right here.”

  My tears slipped into my right ear, and the ringing shovels were underwater. Now they would find me, and Christophe would make me lift my dress before Msieu killed me, too.

  No one would look for me except Mamère. And she would look forever.

  I turned my head slowly, so that my silver cheek wouldn't show, but my mud-covered one. Dark like the night, the leaves, the soil.

  Michel said, “Nobody come down here. I never hunt here. Have to find something heavy for him, so nothing dig him up. Wrong to leave him like this.” His voice broke. He was nearly as afraid as I was.

  The mud was colder and colder on my cheek. My legs were asleep. The men didn't speak.

  Msieu's horse came back through the woods. He said, “Wait.”

  Glass shattered on the floor of the vat, against the bricks, again and again. The doctor's jars. Then pages fluttering, books landing.

  “Michel—start on the bricks. You got that hammer.”

  When the horse had left again, Christophe said, “That a eye down there?”

  Michel said, “Quiet.”

  Christophe said, “Damn. All them clothes. Bury now.”

  “I said quiet.”

  They dug, and the rhythm of the shovels was my breath.

  Then they began to throw in everything they could find—scrap wood, fallen branches—what if they needed the very pile I lay under? But they knocked bricks from the walls and collapsed the second pool.

  The warmth of my eyelids was like tiny blankets.

  When the thudding stopped, Christophe finally said, “Say a prayer?”

  Michel said, “Say a prayer no one ask question and you cutting cane tomorrow.”

  Then they walked back through the woods, and when I finally opened my eyes, the moon had fallen from the edge of the earth.

  Nowhere to run. No one knew what I had seen, but if I didn't get home to my mother and clean myself, someone might guess. And if Msieu knew the slave sent for Nonc Pierre had never come back, he would think me guilty of something.