Child of the Storm

by R. B. Stewart

  “So what’s going to happen now?” she said. “Mother doesn’t know, does she?”

  “It’s like when a storm is coming,” he said. “You can see the clouds a ways off.”

  It was like a storm had hit their lives, turning things inside out. While Bernard spent his days searching for work, farther and farther a-field which kept him away from home for some days at a time, walking or catching wagon rides where he could, Marie continued what sewing and mending she could find to do, and she taught Celeste to help. Celeste proved to have nimble and clever fingers for sewing, though she lacked the strength in them to work as long as Marie. Where Bernard looked out ahead to find a new path for them, Marie focused on each day as it came, taking nothing for granted, setting aside, paring down, stretching everything for a long dryness, like great trees do in a drought. She moved from one thing to the next, never pausing to let anything catch up with her—like the Sadness. Celeste remembered how Augustin had warned her about the mean dog across town. She should never look it in the eyes, because it would come after her. The Sadness might have been that way.

  Letters continued to come and go between them and Augustin, off in New York now. Even New Orleans hadn’t suited him for long. None of the letters mentioned Bernard’s bad turn of fortune. Only Odette was told, and she visited with them as often as she could and would spend long spells talking in whispers to Marie as she worked. Celeste sewed, stealing glances at her mother and great aunt when she could, and more than once pricking her finger when she should have been minding her work. Marie listened intently to the long lectures from Odette but would always shake her head at the end, wanting no part of Odette’s suggestion. At least not yet.

  Her father was home for Christmas but gone again the next morning. If something didn’t come through soon, it was his plan to go clear to New Orleans and find work there. He told this to Celeste but not to Marie, and Celeste was cautioned not to mention it. So, he was off again.

  Celeste woke from a dream about a woman with hair like the wings of a gull, a dress like a moonless night, and eyes like mirrors. She had fallen asleep on the floor at her mother’s feet where she too dozed, seated in her rocking chair. They had both been awakened by a sound outside and were looking, first at each other and then the front door. It had been the clopping step of a heavy mule that woke them, stopping out front before starting off again and moving away. Then clumsy steps on the front porch, but clumsy steps trying to be quiet. Silence, and then an awkward soft shoe back off the porch again. It was a still night and the walls of the house were thin enough to let in the sound of those footsteps fumbling their way into the back yard.

  There was only enough light to let them pick out the familiar shape of Bernard as he sagged down against the Climbing Oak. Marie took up the nearly spent candle and went outside, followed closely by Celeste. They’d tried to stay up for his return, but it was so much later than they thought it’d be, and now he was back from his long, job-begging trip to New Orleans—the last resort, and it looked to Celeste like he had come down with something bad.

  Celeste dropped down beside him on one side while Marie knelt on the other and took his face in her hands. The candle sat on the ground away from Celeste, and all she could see of her parents’ faces was a thin outline as if they were nothing more than drawings Celeste might do, but with dream light instead of pencil lead.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Think I’ve messed it all up. Messed everything up.”

  “Tell me,” Marie said.

  “I was thinking how wrong things are. Wrong about Augustin. Wrong about my job. Wrong for you and Celeste. The way things are is just wrong and nothing to do about it.”

  “We get by,” she said. She was trying to settle him down. Make him feel better and calm. Celeste could see that’s what she was trying to do, but it wasn’t making him feel better. She could see a tear run across his cheek in the light and then drop away like a falling star.

  “Some of us were drinking. Know I shouldn’t have but…” The rest of what he said fell away. “Me and some other men I met, looking for work too. One man told us about the war going on. How we should enlist. Looking for black men to enlist in the army. Started thinking about how that might make a difference.” His head fell forward then rose back up till he found the tree behind him and stopped with a bump that made Celeste flinch. “Get a job and make things better. Guess that’s what I thought.”

  “You’d have to go to war?” Celeste asked him, then asked her mother too. “Pappa’d have to go to war?”

  “Not the shooting part,” he said. “Won’t let us do that.”

  “You signed up?” Marie asked. “Did you really sign up, or just thinking about it?”

  “Signed up, so there’s no taking it back. Me and a few others, all together.” His brow wrinkled. “I’m torn Marie. If not for the two of you, and that you need me, I’d have no regrets at all. Terrible thing to say, but it’s so. Tired of the bottled up anger. Tired of watching everything I say and do in case it offends someone who can’t be pleased with anything about me. You know.”

  “I do know,” Marie said. The candle light dipped but came back up again.

  “’Course you do,” he said, almost too low for Celeste to hear. “Still, it’s done. Can’t take it back even if I wanted—and sitting here with you, that’s what I’d do.”

  “How long?” Celeste asked. “How long would you be away?”

  His head rocked back and forth a bit, maybe to say he didn’t know at all and was afraid to know that himself. “They say that the armies are locked together like tired out boxers. Neither with enough strength to knock out the other. We’d be the fresh strength to tip it the right way. It’s what they say, but I can’t know for sure. Maybe home before the year is out. Maybe longer. But at least they’d feed and shelter me, give me a new uniform and boots to wear, so I could send any pay home. You’d be provided for and maybe there would be a little left over. Things could change and be better. Guess that’s what I need to believe. Need to believe that those dreams of yours that brought me to you in the beginning—that brought us Augustin and Celeste - those dreams will get me home soon.”

  “You said you didn’t believe in all that.” Her mother’s voice was soft, like she was talking to a child.

  “Guess I’m a believer now.” His eyes closed. “Best leave me to sleep out here tonight.”

  “What about the bears in the woods?” Celeste asked.

  Marie rose. The candle wick drowned in the pool of yellow wax. She held out her hand to Celeste. “The bears won’t trouble him tonight. They’ll sleep too.” She led Celeste in and took an old blanket back out to Bernard. Celeste watched her from the window as she covered him up to his shoulders, then stood for a while longer, looking into the tree or maybe at a star before coming in again to bed Celeste down beside her in Augustin’s old bed.

  Over the next days, her father worked from before sunrise until there was too little light to work by, fixing things that were broken or nearly so, stockpiling firewood, clearing away brush, readying the garden and Neighbor for a spring planting he wouldn’t see. For much of it, he had Celeste at his side. He explained the reason for everything he did.

  “There’ll be days when you’ll have to be older than your years,” he said to her as they sat together on the roof, looking for spots where rain might find its way in sooner or later. She handed him a nail even before he reached out for it.

  “I know how tired your mother will get and so do you. Watch her and watch for things that might need doing. Odette will come by I’m sure, and Sandrine promises to check in as she comes and goes from town. Most times it will just be the two of you. Don’t speak to strangers or let them in. Don’t wander far. And be strong and cheerful for your mother.”

  “’Specially if she gets tired or sad,” Celeste said.

  “And you know the signs. Stay close to her especially then.”

  “You’ll write to us.”

  “You kn
ow I will.”

  Before they climbed down again, her father stood on the roof and look about.

  “Looks different from up here.” He helped Celeste to her feet and held her hand to keep her steady on the pitch. “Same things. Different angle of seeing.”

  Celeste could see the Climbing Oak, Neighbor and the front yard with a turn of the head. She looked up and saw the sky. Things were all around her that were always there but she’d never noticed.

  “Learning something new always opens a door,” her father began. “Step through, and you find another world of things linked up with what you just learned.”

  Celeste nodded. That much she knew.

  Her father continued. “That can really stir you up and could scare you to death, because it challenges you so. But that’s the choice you have. Stick yourself in the mud, or accept a life that shakes you up. One or the other, but be careful about picking the first one. It’s the hardest in the long run. It can be mighty hard to get out of the mud once you’re sunk in too deep. And there will be plenty who want you buried up to your neck in the mud. Plenty who’ll help you stay that way.”

  Celeste wasn’t as clear on this other part.

  “Try to remember that, child.”

  Before the week was out, her father was gone.

  Scraps

  One day was much like the other. So much more the same than they had been before. A day would have rain or not, would be bright with the sun or veiled with the thin lazy clouds passing like cattle through a field. Spring was warmer than winter and summer hotter than spring, but it came on slowly and was no surprise.

  There was always much to do, but always the same things. Celeste sewed and cleaned for her mother. She tended the garden and drew her pictures for the letters back to her father. Only the letters brought any sense of change. The letters were sometimes short, dashed off in a free moment and in a longing for home. Other letters were long and filled with characters and strange things and stranger ways.

  By summer, Bernard was placed on a ship and sent across the ocean to where the war continued to grind hopelessly on. Once the ocean lay between them, word was not as frequent, which wore on Marie. Celeste’s eighth birthday came and went, but the war did not end.

  When there was news of the war, Celeste grasped what she could of it and passed that along to Neighbor since he was too occupied to follow the news for himself. She fed him with news as she kept his sleeves stuffed with corn shucks and silk as her brother had taught her to do. His silence was a sign to her that all was as it should be and the war would end soon—though he wouldn’t say when. She told him anything that came into her head since he was good with secrets and knew all about the weather, new growth and harvest, life and death. King of the seasons. New as morning. Old as dirt.

  What little money arrived from Bernard, Marie would draw off the least they would need to get by on, which was not much and grew less as the months went by, and she squeezed all she could from the garden, from the small amount she made from sewing, and from doing without. The rest she saved and put into the hands of Odette whenever she came around. They had an arrangement since Odette understood more about complexities and getting around obstacles.

  “I’ve few enough talents,” she said to Odette as Celeste sat with them at the table, drawing a pig from memory. “I don’t mean to just bury them while he’s away. Not if I can find a way to do more.”

  Odette looked at the money and at Marie. “You look thinner than last time. Just be sure you don’t waste his greatest treasure while storing up another.”

  “I’ll fatten up if I need to once I know he’s coming home.”

  Celeste labored over the hooves of her pig, licking her lips. “We can have bacon with our eggs,” she said without looking up. Only not from this pig, she thought. Not from one she knew.

  That evening, Marie worked on another paying quilt. Celeste sat at her feet beside the basket of scrap fabric.

  “Hand me that piece over at the side,” Marie said to her. “The yellow one.” She didn’t stop to point but continued with her stitching and merely nodded and cast a glance over her glasses at the basket.

  Celeste drew out the piece of fabric and laid it on her mother’s knee. She smoothed it out, over and over, feeling the fabric—feeling deep into it, deep into the memory it held for her.

  “This was from that dress you used to wear when I was only little,” Celeste said.

  “You remember it?”

  Celeste said she did, and pointed to the table set in the middle of the room where Bernard would do his reading and she did some of her indoor drawings. “Round and round the table. It’s like I can still see you two dancing.” She continued to look, her eyes tracking the memory around the table as her hand touched the fabric. When she looked back to her mother, she had stopped her work and was looking at the piece of cloth. She drew it out from under Celeste’s hand.

  “Maybe this isn’t the piece I need for this quilt.” She set it aside and looked into the basket. “How about that piece peaking out there. The sort of cream colored one with the little stain. Maybe I can clip that part out and make it do.”

  Celeste picked out the fabric and handed it to her mother.

  Marie considered it. “Should be able to make that work, don’t you think?”

  Celeste shrugged. “You want me to put that other back in the basket?”

  “No, I’ll hold onto it here a while. Need to make up my mind what to do with it first. But why don’t you fish through the basket and see what else you find with a memory stitched into it. That was nice how you found one just now. So see what else you find in there while I give my fingers a rest. Never known of a child to have such a powerful memory for things, and to be so tiny. We’ll have to watch that your head doesn’t pop from so many stored up memories as you get older.”

  “Don’t think I keep them all locked up in my head,” Celeste said. “Mostly they’re just out there in this or that. All I do is read them. Sort of like a story.”

  So for the next little while, Celeste fished through the basket and found a few that spoke to her. She told her mother about each one, and not one of those bits of fabric went back into the basket, or into any paying quilt.

  Outside

  Celeste had dozed off, face down on the half finished quilt she’d been helping with; dozed off while only meaning to rest her eyes for a moment since the light was dim in the room without a lamp burning. It was a day when rain came in great torrents only to drift off to rain on someone else for a while; a busy rain. It was more than a rainy day though. It was building toward being a stormy one. The biggest sort.

  Celeste stood at the window watching as a deer dashed across the back yard, chased by nothing but the pressing weather. Marie slept deeply under the Sadness and the house was quiet except for the muffled rush of the wind. It was too dark inside to do any more sewing, so Celeste dragged a chair up to the window to watch the rain and see if the deer might return.

  The deer did not return and birds of all kinds followed the path it took, some briefly pausing in the branches of the Climbing Oak to rest or get their bearings before striking off again, driven by the wind. Time passed and the birds stopped flying by. The rain trailed off again and the wind eased. It was very warm in the house and she grew drowsy again. She rested her forehead against one of the panes of glass and her chin on the window sill. Puddles dotted the back yard and water dripped from the oak leaves. Neighbor would be wet through and silk tousled.

  Something caught her eye off to the right and she tilted her head to see what it was. Her eyes widened. A black bear came into view. A black bear in her backyard again, and she held her breath. She had been warned by her parents and Augustin that bears were dangerous, or could be, but this bear didn’t look dangerous at all. She looked confused and frightened. The bear moved cautiously into the back yard, pausing to look at the house and even at the window where Celeste sat, and for a moment their eyes seemed to meet. There was something
in the way the bear walked that made Celeste think that she might be injured, but not badly. The bear turned its head away and looked at the oak, looked into its high branches. And then there were more bears. At some signal from their mother, two cubs came bounding into view and were at her side in an instant, looking curious, but less frightened. The three circled round the tree and then the two cubs went swarming up the low branches and the trunk, one cub climbing faster than the other. For a while, the mother roamed around the base of the tree, casting an eye to the woods ahead, to the house and back the way she had come with her cubs, which would have brought her across the muddy road from who-knows-where. She looked to the window where Celeste sat, and then up to the tree to her cubs before she set off into the woods beyond, as the deer had done.

  Celeste waited for the cubs to come down, but they did not, so she went out to the tree and stood beneath it, looking up at the cub that had stopped among the lower branches while the other continued to climb. It was quiet now except for the dripping of the tree and the scratching sounds from the climbing cub. It was dreamlike under the oak, and Celeste wouldn’t have been the least surprised to see the ghost of the teacher come stalking out of the woods or rising up out of the soggy ground. But that would have been the wrong thing to see in this magic place that was so familiar but also very changed.

  The cub in the lower branches was watching her, inviting her to come up, she thought. So Celeste began to climb, and was glad she was wearing her work dress with its stains and well-worn seams. She left her shoes at the base of the tree on a spot that was almost dry and climbed slowly, picking a path that let her keep an eye on the cub as it kept a careful eye on her.

  The cub was waiting. Celeste had always seen things others missed and learned things, important things, from all the things she saw. This would be like that, she told herself. This would be like gifts at Christmas, like mysterious angels or waking dreams. She slowly drew up level with the cub, and settled in the joint of two branches within reach of it—if she had dared reach out to touch it. Magical or not, it was still a bear, and she knew nothing of bears except for the warnings. The cub’s small but sharp claws gripped the bark, and its rounded ears were tipped toward Celeste.