House of Rougeaux

by Jenny Jaeckel

  I am sorry to tell you now that your father died the same night after we received your letter. But he went on very happy, and he is with your mother, Olivie, now. Bless you Ayo. Bless your freedom and new family, as both will surely come to you.

  Love from Tata

  * * *

  Great changes would occur on their Island in the next years. In the year 1848 slavery was abolished at last. The people paraded in the streets of all the towns, singing, dancing, cheering, weeping, embracing....

  Now many children went to school houses and learned letters. And sometimes, those who could not go to school had a chance to learn anyway. Such as at the estate where Abeje still lived. Many mornings she sat with the children on a rise that overlooked the Sea. Young Miss came walking up the hill with books and a slate and pieces of chalk. She was the granddaughter of the Monsieur’s son, the one Abeje had helped to heal after the hurricane.

  Young Miss taught the children; she sang songs about letters. Each letter was a friend who danced. They captured the letters on the slate with chalk, and they made them into words, and these words spelled out their future.

  Freedom meant old Mémé could come and go as she pleased. She often went down to the bay, with her slow step and her walking cane. She went in the cool of evening, to sing and rest. One night she dreamt of her brother as a boy, a boy just becoming a man, with clear skin and hard white teeth and eyes black as wet stones. Her heart marveled at his beauty, and the sharpness of his mind. His young face floated before her, as he talked on all about the animals. The calves that followed him, and how he would not be outsmarted by that mean old nanny goat. He smiled and rolled his eyes at the admiration of the old woman, always his little sister, little Abeje.

  Just a few days later the Holy One brought a new boy to her, one marked by Spirit, sure enough. He arrived alone and asked to see her. She was outside her hut with a basin of water, washing roots dug from the Grove. He stood before her, small but robust, shirtless and barefoot, wearing torn sackcloth trousers.

  “I have a toothache,” he said. Abeje saw no swelling, nor any crick in his form that would belie pain. When she didn’t answer he tried again. “Well,” he said, “it’s my ankle. I turned it very badly.” He made a show of limping in a small circle.

  Abeje dried her hands on her skirt.

  “Tell me why you are really here,” she said.

  He shrugged, then pursed his lips to keep from smiling.

  “I just am,” he said.

  His name was Silas, but she called him Awon Okun, Iya’s name for sea turtle, because in his eyes she saw the tranquil Sea. He slept on a mat in her hut, ate from her cooking pot and learned very quickly. In time he was no longer a boy, but a man. A healing man, who didn’t need Mémé to teach him anymore. His song was strong and bright. And he was a kind man, just as her brother was, and helped old Mémé in most everything she did. When he learned from her she sang her song for him, her last apprentice. Then she gave him her story.

  * * *

  Now, on the rise overlooking the Sea, sits old Mémé Abeje, under the great tree, her skirts spread about her in a wheel. Her Awon Okun will be down below at his hut, taking care of ailing people, and Abeje can be at ease. She is the tree who spreads the canopy, and she is the one who sits beneath, as if she were her own mother, and her own child. And she just wonders.

  Children gather around her in a loose ring. Some lie with eyes closed, but she knows they are awake, ready to hear a story. The hot breeze carries the Sea, the scattered shadows of the leaves moving over their quiet forms.

  “There now, children,” she says, “let us take our rest.” Abeje breathes, her eyes travel to the horizon, to the beginning and end of the world, and then back to the children.

  “Now I will tell you the story of how my mother became a star. How she rose up on her wings into the Heavens.

  “Most stars rise and set together in pictures, you see–the Hunter, the Serpent, the Lion, and so on. But this star follows her own path. She is the one that we see sometimes in the evening and sometimes meeting the dawn. She is the brightest. The Waking Star, mother of us all.”

  Book II

  2

  Nelie and Azzie

  Philadelphia, 1949

  One o’clock on a sunny Sunday afternoon finds Cornelia Montgomery and Azalea Hubbard on their knees, bent over an early flower that has pushed its way up through a crack in the sidewalk. The clack of heels on the pavement and laughing voices surround them. Folks are still trickling out of church, shaking hands and paying respects, after the post-service social hour.

  It’s a tiny thing with velvety red petals and an interesting yellow sprout in the middle, made all the more curious that, despite the sun, it is not yet spring. But here comes an adult voice, Cornelia’s mother to be exact, saying Get on up, because they aren’t little girls anymore, and their mothers (who are sisters) didn’t wear out their fingers stitching those Sunday coats and dresses so they could ruin them playing on the ground.

  Between them Nelie and Azzie have a passel of brothers and sisters, but none are as close as they. Now they stand brushing off their hands on their skirts, one pink and one mint green, smiling slyly at each other and saying, Yes ma’am.

  Azzie’s little brother Junior sidles up to them, holding a piece of cake in a napkin. It’s his curse to need eyeglasses, in thick black frames, frequently askew as they are now, having been knocked to the side by a squeezed-past elbow or handbag. The girls reach out as one to straighten them.

  Nelie and Azzie skip to school each morning with their arms linked. They trade dolls and candy and hair ribbons. They whisper secrets, make up rhymes, find the same things funny and suffer the other’s indignities as their own. Azzie is a little bolder, Nelie’s singing voice is a little better and her coloring is lighter and decorated with a few of her father’s freckles. But not much disturbs their harmony. It is said that, like twins, the two share a soul.

  * * *

  After supper Edwin Montgomery relaxes into the brown brocade sofa, his well-muscled arm on the rest, sipping a cup of his evening coffee with chicory. His stomach bulges a little now with age, starting to go soft in the middle. The four children sit scattered to his left, glued to the radio set, Nelie with her eyes fixed on the dark sky beyond the street light out the window.

  He rests his eyes on her, this daughter he sometimes thinks is both closest to his heart and most out of his reach. Come on back from the moon now, Baby, he says to her as he often does. And she turns to him with that pressed-lip smile, the same as his wife’s, that says, it’s you that’s being foolish.

  Violet Montgomery is finishing up her work in the kitchen, putting leftover potatoes and the remains of her famous roast chicken with rosemary away into the icebox. There is a sudden knock and a voice calling her name. She pulls the latch and opens the door to see her brother-in-law, his face a knot of anxiety, in the dim yellow light of the hall. It’s Azzie, she’s taken sick, fainted right at the supper table and he’s got to run around to the drug store to ring Dr. Leventhal, and please come quick.

  Violet grabs her coat and calls out to her family, who have already collected behind her. She steadies her voice, giving instructions to the wide-eyed children, there’s school tomorrow. She locks eyes for a moment with her husband, before running out into the cold night; she already knows it’s bad.

  * * *

  Dr. Leventhal is a white man, but a kind one, not heartless, like some others, as the adults are heard to say. He came to Nelie’s house once when her mother was ill after her youngest sister was born. He’d removed his hat and spoken in low tones, always careful to say mister and missus.

  Nelie imagines a heart like a little valentine, pinned to the inside of his lapel, red paper with white lace edges, hidden so that he looks like other white men on the outside. Like the owner of the Five-and-Dime, for instance, whose icy blue eyes make the back of her neck prickle. Mr. Ainsworth is one of those who hasn’t got a heart, but rather
something like a lump of coal rattling around inside an old coffee can. Nelie and Azzie refer to him in this way, Old Coffee Can.

  It is a penchant of Nelie’s, this seeing into the interiors of people. These perceptions she whispers to Azzie, who, without a second thought, takes them on as her own. It’s not just Old Coffee Can who has a secret nickname, but a whole community of neighbors and schoolmates whom Nelie has at one time or another observed. There is Mrs. Snowflake, called for the thing inside her that is like the snowfall inside a globe, ever since her husband passed on, and her grown children moved far away.

  There’s a boy in Azzie’s class whom all the girls adore, with a ringing laugh and a flashing smile. He has a sun inside, young and strong like himself. Also in the neighborhood live a shy mouse and a sticky box of half-melted candy, a book with hard edges, a razor-strop, a barrel of lemons, the curlicue beside a line of notes on sheet music, a sad hat, a bloody nose, a green forest, a chessboard knight, lost money, lost time.

  Sometimes the things are fearful and Nelie would prefer not to see. Azzie will grab her by the hand and they’ll get going a game of fast hopscotch, or skip rope and sing all the songs they know, or make some kind of race or contest until they are out of breath and laughing.

  One day they spent all afternoon making a picture with their Crayolas and shiny paper saved from last Christmas, of two magical birds perched on the branch of a cherry tree, whose elegant necks bent together and whose black eyes sparkled. They wrote their names at the bottom in their child’s cursive and decided at last to hang it on the wall above Nelie’s bed.

  * * *

  That night Nelie floats in a yawning darkness greater than the night itself. She is deaf to her father’s assurances that whatever it is their cousin has, Azzie will be just fine. His steady hands on their shoulders as he shepherds them off to bed, his efforts to smile and joke placate the others, but not Nelie. A fear has struck her like nothing she’s ever known.

  Azzie is no longer safe at home, in her own bed, as she is, but in another place. By morning, Nelie half asleep under the crocheted coverlet and their two magical birds, sees the strange, high white walls, and something tiny and sinister up inside Azzie’s throat, a scattering of yellow pin-points bubbling up, like the thick, wet yolks of raw eggs.

  Her mother is home again. Nelie is the first up and finds her at the kitchen table still in yesterday’s clothes, eyes red, she hasn’t slept. Violet Montgomery enfolds her daughter in her arms and explains that Azzie has been taken to the hospital. She pronounces the name of a disease, and the names of the good doctors and nurses who are caring for her. Aunt Virginia is there, and they can maybe go visit in a few days when Azzie is settled.

  Settled.

  Nelie feels a battle underway in her cousin. It has to do with those minuscule, evil, yellow yolks. Nausea claims her insides. But she nods to her mother, keeping her mouth shut, and everything to herself.

  * * *

  An ache sits with Nelie at her school desk, the shadows of the day are the most noticeable things. Beneath a windowsill, behind a door, thin lines where wall and ceiling meet, the black spaces seep together like ink. Miss Carmine knows her as a dreamy child, but today catches something in her eye that has her let Nelie alone. She will know what that something is presently, since by noon all the teachers will have been notified, that one of the Hubbard girls is gravely ill, and all should be aware, it is after all contagious, and they must keep a close eye on their pupils.

  The day is interminable, or so it seems. After the final bell has rung, the shadows follow Nelie along the bricks and pavements home. Her mother has her watch some of the younger children, and Nelie sits hugging her knees on the stoop until it’s time to come in.

  In the Montgomery apartment, a card table has been added to the usual supper table to accommodate the Hubbard children. When supper is served Edwin says grace and Violet adds a prayer for Azzie, that God help her to get better quick and come home, and Rosalie, the baby, bursts into tears. She carries on so that Violet takes her into the next room and rocks her little niece until she is calm enough to eat. What would normally be a boisterous meal is naturally subdued.

  The next afternoon Nelie’s mother has devised to keep her busy with errands. Nelie has spent the day again with the shadows. The ticking of the clock has taunted her, the round face an adversary lording over her with a threatening hand.

  Nelie presses her mother’s list into the pocket of her dress and buttons her coat. A box of soda is needed, a quart of dry beans, some green thread from the Five-and-Dime, a bread pudding is to be delivered to Mrs. Snowflake who is having difficulty with her rheumatism.

  Nelie shifts the warm parcel in its wax paper into the crook of her elbow and knocks on the heavy, brown-painted door. The aged woman has been resting on the sofa by the window in the front room. The apartment has a similar plan to Nelie’s home, but differs in most every other way. She feels suddenly suffocated by the smell of mothballs.

  Mrs. Snowflake has heard about Azalea, what her poor mother must be going through. Have mercy. She tugs at an earlobe, an ancient habit that reaches as far back as her own girlhood, way back to a sunny meadow when a boy cousin had tickled her with a feather.

  Something has stolen her gaze now outside the window, the few stark trees and the white sky. Nelie perceives anew the snowfall, somewhere behind the milky eyes, or at the glass that divides the sitting room and the street outside, somewhere between now and a long time ago.

  * * *

  Wednesday afternoon: Nelie rides the streetcar with her mother, on their way to the hospital with several shopping bags for Aunt Ginny. Nelie is carefully transporting a large, rolled-up piece of paper tied with a string, the picture of the magical birds that she has just before unpinned from the wall above her bed.

  Azzie’s room is at the far end of a soap-green corridor. A starched nurse leads them there and Nelie is not permitted inside. She sits on a small bench opposite the door after her mother disappears into the room with the nurse and the shopping bags and the rolled-up picture.

  The door opens again a few minutes later when the nurse comes out, and just before it closes Nelie glimpses something she wishes she hadn’t. It’s only Azzie’s arm, just from the elbow down, visible from behind the half-drawn curtain and lying atop the white sheet. But the color is wrong, ashen where it is usually rich and warm, and worse, as Nelie’s mother and aunt are just moving her upward in the bed, the arm slightly jiggles, as if there is no resistance, no life in it at all.

  Nelie stifles a scream with both hands, and keeps it down during this one time that she will sit on this bench, in this green corridor, as far away from Azzie as she has ever been. She keeps it in all the way home, until she can’t hold on anymore. Her mother gets her up off the floor and onto her lap, big as she is, sobbing like little Rosalie, but more terribly, because she is too old to be that innocent.

  For a time. For a time.

  Finally, Nelie is lulled by the faint smell of lavender, her mother’s cheek against her braids. Her mother says, Remember that day at the shore?

  Nelie recalls the long, hot train ride two summers ago, the children bouncing on the seats between the adults and the picnic baskets, clear down to Atlantic City. The ocean was a marvel of sand and shells and darting fish, and way out beyond, of fishing boats and soaring gulls. She and Azzie had waded out along a sandbar, so far it seemed they might cross the whole Atlantic. Most marvelous was the refraction of the sun on the water, on the small waves and in the air as the children splashed and screamed. Azzie was a laughing silhouette amid all that glitter.

  Let’s remember that day, says her mother, it was an especially happy day. There’s going to be a lot more. Don’t forget.

  Thursday morning Nelie awakens from a dream of refracted light. A glint of sun pierces the edge of the curtain, ringing from the windowsill. This is the change Nelie notices all day, a light coming in and sucking the ink from the dark places. All day at school she floats,
subsumed in a dry bubble that muffles the raucous voices around her to a distant murmur. What is loud is the light. She almost can’t tell the time above the classroom door, the numbers are so faded from a glare over the clock face. It is neither cold nor warm, but expectant, so that she has begun to jump at small movements, turning quickly to see what has flickered at the corner of her eye.

  By Friday the gleam has grown in intensity and spread. White surfaces seem powdered with glitter dust, a passing automobile burns hot, even though the white sky is still clouded over. There is a bare branch that scrapes an insistent finger against a classroom windowpane.

  Nelie sits still at her desk, gripping the metal ring on the end of her pencil. One might think her tense attention is for the arithmetic lesson, intent on the blackboard floating before her in its white ether, but it is not. She is waiting.

  It comes.

  A movement outside the window. She whips her head around, her heart pounds. It was there, she is sure, the flash of an iridescent wing, silver, blue and purple feathers. She doesn’t know if it is joy or terror she feels.

  Nelie runs toward home, walks, circles, with her book bag hitting at her ankles, through the streets searching every tree and rooftop, every light pole, fence post and patch of sky. She might see a squirrel, a brown or black bird, an alley cat. These are no more than loose leaves or gravel. Her ears hear nothing. She finds nothing.

  Friday changes to Saturday. Someone has filled Nelie’s ears with cotton wool. The shadows and even the light have somehow given over to it, the muffled sounds become an almost soundless world.