A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  I caught the tag of skin between my front teeth—like a rat— and pulled gently until blood welled. It didn't hurt, not along the nail where the skin was tough, but when the strip tugged into the corner, the skin resisted. I cut the base of the shred with my teeth.

  I chewed on the meat for a long time. I took it from my tongue and examined it—the dull skin had been dry and hard but now was translucent from my saliva. Saliva. Why do we have that? Céphaline used to ask Doctor Tom. All that liquid. Tears and perspiration and saliva and—excretions. I couldn't remember his answer.

  My skin—a splinter of hardtack, like the men had eaten on the boat that delivered me here. My skin was gold on my body, but now this sliver was white as bone. How did saliva take away the color? How did the river turn drowned bodies of slaves white, as Christophe had said, but all our washing did not?

  I swallowed the softened meat. Now it entered my stomach, my blood, and some of it went back to nourish my fingers.

  Our excretions were inside this cane. We pulled the long pieces from the matelas, the cane piled last year for seed, and then the men cut them into joints. We dropped the green bones into the furrows, so that we could eat the molasses we would make and drop our own leavings in another hole.

  Each field had a place for our leavings—one tree inside the edge of the woods, marked with a whitewash stripe. But I knew not to run from the fields. There would only be the ciprière, swamp and animals, and then more land, roads on which people would pass. I could never walk all the way to Azure. I would have to go by water. Find a boat and push my body down the bayou. South. Back to Barataria and trade my body for passage. I leaned against the tree. Just as it was at Azure—drop cane into the furrows, cover it over, wait for rain. Rain would fill up the bayous again, make them passable. Water from the sky to grow the grass. Then we would cut out the bad grass with the hoe, let the good grass grow. Grass from India. Grass from India, people from Africa, dishes from France. They came by ship, over the ocean and river and bayou. Anything that came one way could go back.

  I kept my hands down. I used my eyes and never my mouth unless someone asked me a question, and all my words—from Mamère and Céphaline, from Doctor Tom, from Tretite and Eveline, and the words I heard that night in the indigo woods—all those words—besoin, lime, dahlia, bagasse, scapula, womb, iris, octoroon and sacatra, ni and faro—stayed behind my breastbone. My heart was a small muscle. All the words swam around it inside my blood, but I knew my heart was only meat for another animal.

  One night, Sophia stayed awake long after she had sent me to the other room. The hooves passed. The door opened quickly, and feet slid along the wood floor. A bag dropped onto the table. No rattle—something soft inside the bag. A sharp intake of breath. The breath drawn inward the way someone does before blowing out onto the fire to redden the coals. But no breath huffing out.

  I slid around the wall to the doorway. Sophia's feet were small and bare, wide from each other, her knees like little faces just below her uplifted skirts. The man hid the rest of her from sight, moving against her, against the wall. But I recognized his back. Gervaise. His back, with bones like hatchets under the skin when he rowed the boat. The hatchets moved now when he steadied himself against Sophia and the wall, pushing, pushing.

  In the morning, when I made the fire, four small birds were roasted in the coals. Sophia came quickly, her eyes hard. She said, “Wait for I portion that. Don't you touch.”

  I didn't. She woke everyone and gave us each a small bird leg, then Fronie a breast. “Where you get these?” Fronie asked.

  Sophia looked outside at the still-dark sky. She knew people could smell meat in the smoke. “A man got traps, in the trees.”

  “What you give him?” Fantine smiled.

  Sophia didn't smile. “Got plenty for trade. Bowl, spoon, sew his shirt.” She put the wing bones on the hearth. I held the leg, the meat like a black pearl on the little bone. I knew she thought of the place in her head every day and every night. The place from before, wherever it was, even though she wouldn't name it.

  Moving up and down the canerows, Fronie followed her mother, waiting for her to turn, to touch her sometime during the day.

  I wanted to tell her that when I stood near my mother at the washpots and the ironing board, the smell of bluing and fig leaves rising around us from black crepe, sometimes I clapped my hand over my eye and told her a cinder had blown inside.

  Then my mother would bring my face close to hers, frame my temples with her damp fingers, pull the skin softly around my eyes to look for the cinder, her breath soft on my forehead, her shining black eyes so close to mine, I could see my face swimming in her tears. The tears we always have. The ones that don't fall, just hold our eyes in place.

  But I couldn't say anything to Fronie. A hard knot blocked my throat. Like a pecan lodged there, where the words should come out. My eyes stayed on the end of my row, where the trees began and the bayou ran silent.

  Two pirogues had floated past us, with bearded men poling the small boats loaded with skins. Flattened animals with their flesh removed. They must be trapping somewhere farther up the bayou and taking the skins to the landing to sell.

  A boat would tie up here someday. And I would take it or trade for it. If I had to sell my skin to get back to my mother, I would.

  Athénaïse ran. He disappeared from the ciprière where they'd been cutting trees in waist-deep water. The other men said it was as if he swam underwater to a place where no one could see him anymore. They had to cut his wood by torchlight, long into the night, and they wouldn't have meat for a month.

  Fantine told the other women when we stood in line to grind corn. “He disappear. Like a spirit. Msieu get them dogs from over to Opelousas. They run him down, when they find him.”

  Their elbows were a line of wings, the way they waited and held their corn. Their voices moved past one another's shoulders.

  Where was Athénaïse going? What was his real name? Was he running back to Lafitte's place, for one of the women with scars that matched his own—the wreath of dashes along his forehead?

  He was running to the swamp where we heard runaways made maroon camps. Maybe he was running just to be somewhere else.

  “Them dogs,” another woman said.

  Wherever we were, someone would always have dogs. Animals like we were animals, always eager to find something. Searching for a smell.

  When I ran, I would have a plan. I would go by water, as my mother wanted me to. Water would leave no tracks, no scent. Water gods would protect me.

  After we'd eaten, Fantine kept looking out into the purple evening. “Who tell you Msieu get the dogs?” Sophia asked.

  “Basile.”

  “Where you see Basile?”

  Fantine lifted her hands, as if she didn't remember.

  “You fifteen. You got a year. Madame rules.”

  “I know.”

  Fantine smiled toward the door. Sophia argued with her all the time—she wasn't allowed to marry until sixteen. Madame's rules were about the church, but Msieu's rules were in his book, about the place. Too young to breed, and he would lose money and time from dead babies. Sixteen, marry, get a fireplace and bed.

  Fantine said, “Love don't care about the time.”

  Fireplace and bed meant baby. The only purpose of marriage. Céphaline and the Auzennes wore silk dresses and stockings and corsets laced tightly. Fantine wore the same brown dress I did. The Auzennes danced and played the piano. Fantine put her forefinger up to Basile's cheek and brushed away a cinder, and let the finger trail down his jaw.

  A baby was only stock. Fifty dollars. Five sets of dishes.

  Athénaïse had been a baby. Who said his real name now? His mother. Every day, wherever she was, she said his name, the real name, and prayed.

  Or she was dead. And he was dead.

  Mamère held my name inside her mouth every day with the coffee bean. I knew it. I had been gone for many weeks, but she said my name only to Treti
te. Maybe to Hera. Maybe Phrodite was in her own room, if now, with a man, her indigo dress in the corner. A baby.

  Why have a baby when someone would sell it? Or it died? Madame Bordelon slept in her room all day and night waiting to die and see Céphaline again.

  I slept on Mamère's tongue, in the little cradle of the back teeth where she cracked things.

  When Athénaïse had been gone three weeks, and the dogs had not found him, and Baillo stopped following people to the tree where they relieved themselves, looking away but hearing the stream against the bark, I began to collect corn.

  Fantine led the way to the fields. My breath streamed like smoke past my cheeks. Was Athénaïse swimming down the bayou, without a boat, all the way to Barataria and the ocean? Did he think he would swim to Africa? Or kill someone for a boat?

  I waited for a boat.

  If I saw him on the bayou, would he kill me? Or help me? Someday a boat would be left unattended at the tiny landing on the bayou. Trappers stopped here to sell skins, or rum they made in the woods, and a wandering trader came in a small boat to see if Madame wanted needles, candles, or spoons.

  Every day, I took ten kernels of dried corn before we ground it for dinner and put them in a bag made from my old apron, pulling the drawstring tight, touching the grease stains that had altered the threads.

  In the beginning, I hid the bag inside my dress, because I had nothing. No tin box or wooden barrel, no washpot or lamp.

  Fantine collected small things Basile brought her—feathers woven into a strange brooch, carved wood combs, even two nails heated and formed into a cross for a necklace. Sophia gathered her pots and salt Amanthe brought her from the house. Tiny crystals of coarse salt she kept in a metal can.

  Collecting something meant I planned to stay here.

  I needed something for water. I stayed at the edge of the people one Sunday, while Madame read from the Bible. The kitchen was down the brick path. They had built an arbor to shelter the path from the rain, so the cook could bring the food hot inside the dining room, Amanthe said.

  Léonide, the cook, was listening to the verses. I waited until the food was collected in front, and the people were lining up, and slipped down the path to the kitchen.

  A jar of something red on the table. It slid easily into my coat before my feet turned back toward the yard.

  In the evening, we helped Philippine, who lived in the room beside us. We sewed summer shifts for the women. Her daughter Amanthe, the housemaid, brought chicken legs she'd hidden in a bag. A feast for April, given by Madame for her friends from Opelousas and Washington.

  “L’Africain en la ciprière,” Philippine said.

  “He ain't close by,” Sophia said, biting off thread. “Them Attakapas Indian wouldn't help an African.”

  Attakapas—the name of the Indians meant Flesh-Eater, everyone whispered. They liked to char their captives, chewing on the thighs.

  But the old man Firmin shook his head and said something low. Philippine smiled. “Say his mother Attakapas. Say she never ate him. Only birds.”

  Amanthe said, “Msieu de la Rosière told about the runaway at dinner, and someone said runaway is a crime against God.”

  Firmin spat into the fire. While we sewed, he wove baskets from split rush. But tonight his hands, knuckles swollen and black as burned almonds on his thin fingers, were still.

  “C'est crime à Dieu, to die,” he said. He didn't look at us. He stared into the fire.

  But he didn't speak again. Philippine spoke for him. “His father Bambara. Mother Attakapas. Her people sell her when her mother die. Sell her to the French. They work near the fort, for the soldier. Every day his mother leave him with an old woman. Tie him to a chair so can't follow. Every day he stay in the chair, look out the door to see his father and mother work.”

  The needle made a deep line in my fingertips when I pushed it through the cloth. Firmin spat again into the fire. Flames turned orange where his saliva hissed.

  “Soldiers drunk all the time. They fight with the Indians, and one day Attakapas man kill his mother, cut her in front of the soldier. His father cry and cry. He hang in his cabin that night.”

  Sophia said, “By his hand?”

  Firmin nodded.

  Philippine said, “Soldier take the father body to the fort. To the judge. Judge say kill yourself crime against God, must be punish. Tie him to a cart and drag him through the street. His face down. They pass the open door where Firmin tie to the chair. Waiting for them.”

  I tasted salt in my throat. His waist tied, but his hands free, to reach for the air in the doorway?

  “Take the body back to the fort and hang him again. Two days. They bring Firmin to see. Then they throw the body in the river.”

  Firmin stood up, paused in the doorway. “Say then Dieu satisfy.” He went outside.

  Philippine's hands had never stopped moving, but her stitches were very slow. She said, “He tell me that story before. When someone say life too hard, time to dead himself. That African— Athénaïse?—he don't dead himself. Too mean. He still run.”

  I ate the jar of stewed tomatoes, the soft, salty flesh sliding down my throat while I stood in the privy. A splinter of silver from the moon, on the wooden floor. I washed the jar quickly with water from the gourd outside, smearing my shoe over the smell that lingered in the ground. Sophia would smell it. Food. Anything.

  In the night, I pushed the jar of dried corn into the nest of my cape and laid my arm over the lump.

  A crime against God, to run, to die. Where was she, my mother? She believed in her own gods.

  I saw her face, her lips folded upon themselves, her brows glistening with sweat like tiny jewels where the moisture caught in the small hairs. I laid the green bones of seed cane in the rows, all day. A thousand thighbones. I pushed the earth over them with the hoe and followed the cart back to the matelas for more cane. The square pile of seed cane was like a raft, floating in the first field, where the men had piled it during the harvest last year.

  The cane in my hands was so hard, like a femur, that I couldn't imagine how it would grow. But each joint was already swollen, where the new stalk would sprout. Grass. Sugar. Blood. Bones. I was dizzy when I bent and moved down the row. The sun stayed out longer and longer, and we planted more in the extra daylight. But it rained now, too, and when we walked back from the fields in the rain, our dresses slapping our legs, the bayou rose black and swift.

  They said it flowed backward sometimes, depending on storms, tides, or magic. But now that the water moved, now that leaves covered the trees and the cane grew already knee-high, I was nearly ready.

  An Indian brought Athénaïse back to Rosière. We saw the back of Athénaïse's head first, as if his face had been erased in the woods. His elbows were bound together by a length of leather while he walked backward into le quartier.

  Msieu de la Rosière did not come down to the street. Athé-naïse was tied to the oak tree near the bell tower. Baillo and Mirande branded him on the left shoulder with the fleur-de-lis. The law, they shouted loud so we could hear. First time you run, fleur-de-lis on the left shoulder. Second time, hamstring, and fleur-de-lis on the right shoulder. Third time, die. Crime against God.

  Ham. String. Doctor Tom had told me it meant the tendon was cut, to hobble someone. Maybe a pig. But this was a man.

  What was the name for our meat? Did we have hams?

  We stood in front of our doors, as we were told. We looked at the catalpa trees. We could smell the burning meat. Athénaïse said nothing. He stayed at the tree all night, and in the morning, when I looked through the crack in the shutters, he was curled on his side, sleeping, like a child.

  ———

  When his scar was a shining worm on his skin, he ran again.

  This time, he didn't come back. No Indian found him, no dogs.

  The small Msieu shouted as we lined up on Sunday that Athé-naïse should be a lesson, that he'd been eaten by alligators and garfish for certain, his
body reduced to chunks of meat.

  “God watches,” he said. “God punishes.”

  I lay awake listening to the hooves, but I could hear the wind. In Céphaline's Bible, she had loved only one line. The wind does what it wants, comes from nowhere, and brings the news over the mountains.

  The messenger wind.

  My mother heard it, too. It moved from south to north, rustling all the leaves, making scudding sounds across the road.

  She wouldn't have given up.

  I had a jar full of dried corn and a gourd for my water. I prayed that no rats chewed through the cloth to find the food.

  Maybe Sophia didn't love Fronie the same way my mother loved me, but her finger didn't hesitate to push the best piece of meat into Fronie's mouth.

  Madame Bordelon would die in her bedroom, waiting for her time again with Céphaline. In their là-bas. What if she killed herself? I thought suddenly. Was that a crime against God? Would her body be hung for punishment? Or because she belonged to herself, was she allowed to choose her time to die?

  I knew Mamère had not chosen her time. I had been gone five months. I knew south and north from the sun and the moving water. Athénaïse had run on foot. I would take a boat.

  Twice when we had come back from the far field past the bayou and bridge, I saw footprints in the mud near the bank, where a boat had been moored. The litter of discarded feathers meant someone had brought geese.

  Every day, ashes trembled black near my hoe. We moved them into the earth once they were still and cool. When it rained, our dresses were spattered with mud and ash. We took off the cloth and sat near the fire in our blankets, and when the mud dried, we scraped it off in clots onto the floor. We pushed it outside, where the rainwater melted it into a pool under the house, and I imagined the earth rising higher and higher until the wooden floor oozed mud between the cracks.

  The rainwater collected in barrels under our eaves. The water moved inside my brain. The water left me. I rinsed the earth from our clothes. The particles left the threads.

  The wash water held the earth from our feet and hems, and we threw it outside, where it dried and joined us again in the morning.