A Million Nightingales

by Susan Straight

  Msieu Prudhomme. Widowed, his eyebrows gray as ash, but black hair combed forward over his forehead, as Msieu Borde-lon's had been so long ago. He dressed his hair with blacking, like Céphaline's.

  Pélagie said to me, “You will go to the garçonnière, to collect any coats that need repair, yes?”

  But I sat in the kitchen with Léonide.

  “Have to start breakfast in a while. Roast chicken, ham, tarts with strawberry and lemon. Oysters and shrimp.”

  “I'll do the shrimp.”

  “He look for you. The one with the blue coat.”

  I nodded.

  “Bright skin not a blessing.” Léonide's hands were still on her knees, a new burn on her wrist covered with a damp cloth, like a veil.

  The darkness was purple behind the pecan trees, just a faint breath of morning a few hours away. “My mother told me take but one candle to light her room.”

  I had never said those words aloud.

  Strawberry preserves in jars behind us. Lemon curd. Jars like those in Doctor Tom's office. The eye. The baby's brain. The womb.

  If all they needed was the passage, why not cut that from me and keep it in a jar? Preserved. Liquid to keep it soft. Then take it out when it was needed. Lay it on the coverlet or the earth. Sew it into a cloth doll. Close your eyes.

  “Open your eyes,” Léonide said softly.

  Msieu Ebrard wore a white shirt, bobbing up and down on the brick path in the distance. Not clothes on the line. Nowhere to hide.

  I wouldn't meet him or walk with him.

  Léonide sucked at her teeth. I slipped from the kitchen and then around the house, through the garden of white, I stopped at the pigeonnière where we had pulled the young birds through the holes to roast them. Their feathers were in a sack in the kitchen.

  I listened at the oleanders near the garçonnière. Both buildings shaped the same. What if a giant hand pulled out the men by their coattails and plucked off their sideburns?

  “Etienne,” he said. “Pélagie's slave has been summoned. You are fortunate.”

  “I don't see it that way.”

  “Then you are foolish.”

  “Not foolish, but not interested.”

  “Then maybe you learned nothing in Paris. Or you learned from the wrong men. The ones—”

  “I learned what was necessary in Paris. And it doesn't matter here. Nothing I do matters here.”

  “Etienne!” The third voice—the tan coat? “You have land. I have five older brothers. There's no land left for me.”

  Msieu Ebrard said, “Etienne should prove he isn't foolish. Or unnatural. You should prove it, too, Gustave. I have procured the medium of proof, but she is slow. Go find her, Etienne.”

  My shoulder went first inside the door. My eyes stayed on the desk. No letters. Cards and glasses of wine. I went up the narrow stairs to the beds.

  Etienne came first. He closed the door. He said, “Take off your dress,” very quietly, lower than the sounds of the bottles clinking and the slap of cards.

  He opened his trousers and left his shirt and shoes on. I imagined I was dead. Floating inside brown water. Smoke, sour wine, and then my own soap when his shirt became wet. He was inside a jar, moving. I was in the den with the smell of fox, sleeping.

  I didn't open my eyes.

  A mule. To carry things. Moving a man down a road. Just moving him. His elbow hitting me in the ribs like a man kicking the animal to make him move faster.

  I didn't have to move.

  He went down the stairs. Voices rose and fell. The door closed. A body sat on the bed. Something pinched hard, like a crab, on my inner arm, and I opened my eyes.

  The tan coat watched my face. He pinched me harder, the soft skin just inside the upper arm, and I cried, “You're hurting me, msieu.”

  He said nothing. He twisted. He had pinched, and been pinched, many times exactly this way.

  He twisted until I cried out. He kicked the bed a few times and then went down the stairs. A performance. Like the Indian woman Sally in the swamp.

  A long time later, Msieu Ebrard sat on the bed. He took off his cravat, the material that had pushed like a fist into my mouth the first time he lay on me. “Only one way to tell if they listened,” he said. He used his fingers first, as if examining a horse, but his breath lied. Then he took off his shoes.

  “You are from New Orleans.”

  “No.”

  “You really haven't learned there?”

  I didn't answer.

  “Les mulâtresses from New Orleans are famous.”

  I didn't answer.

  “There are women who could teach you. Then you wouldn't cry.”

  I wasn't crying.

  Move the white clothes up and down the washboard. Sew the buttons back on. Push the needle into the linen until my finger-pads split.

  Lie on the pallet when the tasks were finished, and the work washed from my body, my fingers and muscles shivering and then finally still. Bluing and cane dust gone.

  But now, on my pallet while the women breathed behind their doors, inside me the passage burned and fluid trickled out hours later onto my legs. The formation of a baby. My task would never be finished. Breed. Fingers. Saliva dropped onto my clavicle. I couldn't wash it off. I couldn't reach inside myself to wash it off.

  He had left the cravat. I found it coiled like a white whirlpool under the bed. In the dark hallway, I lit a candle and cut the cravat into twenty small pieces of fabric, then sewed them back together, with blue thread. For good luck. For indigo breath. A mosaic of cloth that looked like nothing else, like twenty small ponds of water.

  Ribbon scraps from Pélagie's basket made a red collar. The back of the blouse was stained napkins, two sewn together, and the sleeves two more. I could not sew like my mother. But I walked down to le quartier and gave the blouse to Fantine.

  His cravat, to choke the words down into his throat, held up to Fantine's collarbone like bubbles.

  Etienne didn't look at me when I served dinner on Monday, after the last guests had finally gone. He said to Pélagie, “Paul Ebrard wants to buy your maid from my father.”

  My task was not to speak.

  He pinched the skin between his brows and looked down the road. Pélagie only laughed. “But Moinette belongs to me now. In truth, we are expecting Monsieur Prudhomme's offer, and then your father will sign her over to me. At present, she is not for sale.”

  I reached deep inside the large pot to scour the bottom. The cast iron released its smell, damp and black, into my face.

  I would go with Pélagie. New Orleans. New York. One window.

  When I dressed her hair, for her trip to Opelousas to see the Prudhommes for the marriage contract, she said, “You are part of my dowry now.”

  “What is a dowry?”

  She closed her mouth while I curled the last two sections. She didn't like to move at all when I held the tongs. Lise was careless, and flung herself about while I dressed her, but Pélagie concentrated on every move.

  “A dowry is what the woman brings.”

  She said nothing else. Why explain? I would never have a dowry. But I heard the negotiations during the engagement. Marriage contracts were complicated. Céphaline would have brought land to her marriage instead of beauty. Pélagie had beauty and social standing, but no property in France. Msieu de la Rosière wanted to write to Bordeaux and Lyon, to their relatives, but she shook her head.

  “I will be Louisianan now. I want a wedding party with all our family here. I don't want to be married like a widow. I want to be married like a new bride. Not damaged goods,” she said in a low voice to Msieu. “I want you to give me away like my father didn't.”

  “I forgot his age when you were born.”

  “Sixty-seven,” she hissed. “Monsieur Prudhomme is fifty-nine. Don't write to Bordeaux. I have nothing there. Everything is gone.”

  She had her jewels, her land here, and me.

  I was part of her wedding gift, along with the child form
ing itself inside me.

  Six CODE

  Cadeau. And cadeau-mère.

  I hated the thing inside me. How did it reach up into my throat to push out my coffee and biscuit? Did it not want food? Did it want to kill me?

  When it swelled and began to twitch inside me, I pictured the shriveled white organ inside Doctor Tom's jar. Grapeskin. The womb. What if the womb split, and I died? I hated the gift even more then, because I would never see my own mother again.

  Had she hated me unseen, a heaviness that pressed down on her other organs, a burden that made bones shift and ache? How did a baby move my bones? The soft form inside me pushed against my backbone. Vertebrae. Back then, Céphaline chanted the names of the bones and organs as if knowing what we were made of would save us.

  In August, the swelling could no longer be hidden by my apron. “You a mother,” Léonide said, when I reached for her pots on the wall.

  Not a mother. An animal.

  Sugarcane grew from joints in the stalk. Seeds grew with a sprout that ruptured the shell. This thing bloated my whole body, my legs and breasts and even my hair, so wild and thick under my tignon that my head hurt.

  I ate little, but that didn't stop it from growing, and finally everyone could see what was under my dress. Lise looked embarrassed, but Pélagie only sighed.

  Pélagie said, “We have so much sewing and preparation for the wedding, Moinette.” When Lise went down the hall, Pélagie studied the pile of napkins we had been embroidering. “Monsieur Ebrard, oui?”

  If I said I didn't know? It was proper for her to conduct me to Msieu Ebrard, but to know about other men was not pleasant. And if it was Etienne—

  Who would know? Francine was Fantine and Basile's baby, but she didn't truly look like either of them. Sophia's baby, Amadou, had Gervaise for a father but looked like Sophia.

  Did I look like my father? Maybe Mamère had never even seen him; maybe she kept her eyes closed, as I had; maybe during that week he was on Azure, he came every night in the dark.

  And then he died on a boat.

  This baby would have the blood of Mamère and of that blond man. What if this baby had blond hair? The eyes of someone dead and no one alive? How would I know who the father was?

  I didn't answer Pélagie. She didn't care about the father. The baby would belong to Pélagie, unless the father bought it.

  A girl would grow up to breed, like me. A boy—

  No use for a boy.

  In the afternoons, during the September heat, Pélagie and Lise slept in their shifts, and I lay on my side on the hallway floor. Once a hand or foot tapped the wood through my skin and made me sit up and hit my head against the wall.

  Etienne glanced at me one afternoon while I put clean clothes in the garçonnière, and he looked away quickly, as if someone pulled a string attached to his ear. He hadn't been in the house all summer. He and his father oversaw the repair of irrigation ditches from the flood, and planting the new fields, and the road to Washington had to be cleared again as well.

  In November, when the harvest began, I was big enough to have difficulty moving. The pain came during daytime, and when I went down to Philippine's, she and Firmin were among the few people not in the fields. After midnight, when Sophia and Fantine were done in the sugarhouse, the burned-sweet smell clinging to their eyelashes and hair when they bent over me, the pain grew to rings that belted my back and belly. Hot rings. The ring of pain inside the passage, from the men, then moved up to circle my body now.

  What would she say to me now? Mamère? Besoin. The need. What did I need? The three passages. Your ni. The dya who waits for the next life to be born. But whose dya? A white man dead— my blood—had no dya? Sang mêlé. Whose blood mixed with hers and mine?

  All the animals under trees and in caves and bushes, lying on their sides, with infants pushing down the passages.

  I cried for my mother, not for the pain. If I died now, as so many women did, as Pélagie's mother had, I would never see her again.

  Water and blood poured onto the cloths they had laid under me. How would I live? How did that much liquid leave my body, and what remained to make milk? The blood left me in pulses, lifting me up as if the rags were a raft and we swirled away down my own river.

  But then the blood trickled, and the baby made sounds that tore through the smell.

  A boy.

  He had no bones. He was a shapeless, colorless bundle in my arms. He was a mouth, attached to me so hard it hurt. He was a passage where black excretions left immediately after he drank. I cleaned both passages. He had only two.

  But he had no bones. He was curled like a frog, legs soft and useless, his eyes barely open, only a glint of murky purple like dusk.

  He was the first baby. The person who chewed the grass and tasted sugar. The person who tasted a wild nut and found it sweet.

  We were truly animals now. He had fur on his shoulders that Philippine said would rub away. He was mewling and blind, his fingers soft worms, his fingernails—our claws, our only weapons aside from teeth and brains, and this baby had no teeth, and who knew what was in his skull?—his fingernails like paper.

  What if I dropped him? What if the cold December air seeped into his ears and nose and mouth and his insides froze? What if his pale skin wasn't as hardy as Francine's, plump and strong, her hair tied into strings?

  He was pale as almond shells, with down sparse and black on the back of his skull, and eyebrows like ant trails across his forehead.

  I slept in Philippine's bed, and she sat up all night holding the baby. She said, “My Amanthe find a man when she back from Paris. She wait for that Autin, and he die. She never love someone here. But she find one, and she have a baby, too. A sweet smell. A bundle.”

  When he cried for me, she said, “He smell you. Can't see. But they smell the mother.”

  So if we were in the wild, lying in the damp nest of covers, the last of my blood sliding into the rags tied to my hips, he would know me when I came back from hunting?

  But my task was to sew and wash and curl and powder.

  After four days, I had to return to the house, and I left him with Philippine, the way mothers left their children when they went to the fields. The babies slept on pallets beside her feet, waiting for the times we came to nurse them at dawn, at noon, and at night. Firmin made a wooden box for my son.

  The fourth day, Msieu asked me about the baby.

  He wrote in his book: Infant, quadroon, b. 29 décembre 1813. Jean-Paul.

  Pélagie did not mention the baby. Msieu and Etienne left before dawn for the harvest, one in the fields, one at the sugarhouse, where the grinding went on past midnight now and left the air black with falling sweet ash.

  I woke before dawn, too, and walked past the kitchen, where Léonide had already stoked the fire for their coffee. Her doorway was outlined in glow.

  Le quartier seemed so far. That first day, I had only reached the barn when his crying echoed from the road. A desperate bird, caught in a branch. My breasts stung, and then my dressfront was wet.

  He drank as if it didn't matter how I smelled or whose animal I was. “Look how he know you,” Philippine said, trying to reassure me.

  Yes, because he's only an animal. Blind. Rooting.

  It would have been hard to kill him when he was inside me, without knowing what to drink or do, but watching him mewling and his legs drawn up helplessly to his chest, his eyes unseeing when they tried to focus on my face, I understood what some women did.

  Just don't make them live.

  My bones were so tired, from the pain that lingered between my legs and in my back.

  Every dark morning, I was alone on the road. I had hardly walked alone since Azure, my head thrown up to look at branches and late stars and smudges of dark fur or feathers moving through the brush. The other animals, finding food. Here, it was always assumed I would run again.

  Now that this child lay waiting for me, it was assumed that his body would bind me to this path,
that my feet would never turn of their own accord toward the bayou or the road.

  Past the barn, past the work bell, toward the ragged scarf of smoke from Philippine's chimney—making those clinking sounds at her hearth as when I was first here, when I was still a child.

  My child was screaming for me. For my milk. His cries flew with the smoke.

  Three times a day, he stared at me while he drank, seeming smaller than when he was born. I couldn't wish for him not to live. By the third week, he cried constantly. He woke everyone on the street. He was desperate, and Fantine shook her head. “Francine never woke anyone?” I asked, angrily.

  Fantine said, “She sleep side me, and I wake up and feed her before she know she hungry.”

  “You don't sleep in a hallway,” I said. I didn't want her to feel so superior, even though she had touched my hair and my clothespins and thought she knew about me. Still, no one truly knew.

  But Fantine said, “I give him milk from one side if he cry. Till you get here.” She put her hand on my shoulder, and I could only lean my cheek down toward her knuckles.

  One morning, near the trees before dawn, a cart came toward me, wheels creaking loud. The horse's breath streamed out like smoke, and a man's breath streamed out like steam as they came nearer. Then Hervé Richard said, “Joli fantôme. A beautiful spirit in the woods.”

  He was delivering a cypress chest carved with delicate filigree, for Pélagie's linens. He said, “You haunt the road so early?”

  He kept his eyes on me as though I would run. He got down from the cart and stood close enough that I smelled tobacco. His eyelids quivered. Did he smell milk?

  He said, “I wait all this time to see you.”

  “You don't know me.”

  “You just like me.” His hair glittered with dew. His hair uncovered.

  “I am not like you.”

  He put his hands gently on my wrists, and I pulled away so hard my breasts shook. They hurt. He said, “Don't be afraid. I just want to touch your skin. All this time, I think about you. You waiting to run. You run before. Blacksmith—he tell me.”