Second Chance Sister

by Linda Kepner

  “Is this something that must be completed before the wedding?”

  “Non, non. He takes my word on this. Well, God is overseeing us all, I had best keep that word, hein?” Another mussel. “Rosary time every night until further notice, prayers from the little booklet he gave me; I think I am making up in one bundle all the prayer I have skipped for ten years.” He reached out, and clasped her hand for a moment. “But it is in a good cause.”

  “I am sorry to be more upset than you are.”

  “Pfah.” He shook his head again, and operated on another mussel. “You do not know what peace I felt this morning, with you beside me, in the church. As long as you are with me, ma Bishou, this is a very agreeable penance.”

  “Oh, surely, since I am the one who got upset.”

  Louis chuckled and ate another bite. “Your turn today, mine tomorrow.” That was an old gamblers’ saying, worthy of the tobacco auctions. “You are not yet sorry you said yes to me, are you? Do you now have the cold feet?”

  “No, I am committed.”

  He laughed and almost choked on his wine. “Yes, baby, you are committed. If you were to say, ‘Oh, no, Louis, it was all my mistake’ to me now, I would fling you over my shoulder and carry you to the church Friday.”

  “You just try it, that’s all,” Bishou told him. Her own appetite was recovering. “Now my only remaining battle is the dress I will wear.” She thought of Madame Nadine, the elegant local dressmaker, snarling, “I am not a dressmaker to American working girls, or rich Americans, nor will I be. The women of France and Reunion Island, these are for whom I make my fashions.”

  “If all else fails, wear this outfit. It’s nice.” He pointed toward what she wore, although the hat was now out in the car. “With the new little shoes.”

  “Oui, with the new little shoes,” she said with a smile.

  “Madame Nadine snorts that she will only serve réunionnaises, very well, you are becoming one. If she will not serve you, tant pis. There are plenty of other dressmakers throughout the world.” He spoke with the easy confidence of a millionaire.

  “What was she talking to you about?” Bishou wanted to know. When the dressmaker stood with Louis outside the shoe store, he had very evidently appeared to wish to be somewhere else.

  “Oh.” He reddened. “She did not know why I was waiting in the street, of course, so she came to pass the time of day with me. She is very intense. I think she would have — how did you say it — would have thrown me over her saddle and carried me off to rescue me, if she could.”

  Bishou smiled and leaned back in her seat. “Oh, then I was correct in that impression.” Now she had another question. “Louis — am I rescuing you?”

  Louis glanced at her. “Perhaps a little. But you know, it is not one-sided. You are not flinging me over your saddle. I am climbing up on the horse, pulling you up behind me and saying, ‘Oh please, Bishou, rescue me.’”

  She chuckled at the grain of truth. “As long as we know where we stand.”

  “Oui.” He reached out and clasped her hand again. “I have committed terrible crimes, Bishou. I know that.”

  “You didn’t know, Louis. How could you have known that the woman who came to marry you had killed another woman and taken her place?”

  “I know.” Louis sighed and frowned. “But you know, Celie’s sister, Adrienne, was adamant that I remain in prison, that I could never be forgiven for losing my heart to the wrong woman. Mon agent de liberation conditionnelle — I don’t know the English term — ”

  “Parole officer.”

  “Oui, parole officer — still receives letters from Adrienne, saying I have not been punished nearly enough for my sins.” A cloud passed over Louis’s expressive features. “From her point of view, that might be the truth. I did not murder Celie Bourjois, but I was a willing accessory.”

  “Who spent seven years at hard labor to atone for it.” Bishou rested her hand upon his. “Louis, if Père Reynaud — and God — can find it in their hearts to forgive you, what more do you need?”

  The cloud passed. Louis smiled and patted her hand, reassured. The manageress came over, and he paid their bill. Full of wine and mussels, they began their return journey, turning inland a bit. Louis took jungle roads he knew, and Bishou just enjoyed the ride. A riot of colors met her eyes. Once, in the far distance, she saw le Piton de la Fournaise, the volcano that had created the island.

  Chapter 2

  They were almost home, driving along the road toward the cigarette factory, when Louis pulled over suddenly and abruptly to the roadside, yanked on the parking brake, and shut off the engine. He grabbed something from the door pocket, jumped out, and ran across a field where other men were working. In surprise, followed by alarm, Bishou realized he was carrying a machete. A second thought occurred to her — this was Sunday, the men shouldn’t be working. She saw them, half a field away, chopping, and thought: Tobacco rust. Pruning with the machete. Just as they had discussed at that workshop at East Virginia University, months ago, when she first met Louis Dessant.

  Louis was talking to a Creole, evidently a foreman, and took a few chops himself at a tobacco plant, lifted the leaves, and examined them. Machetes in hand, he and the foreman walked further back in the field and were lost to her sight. She waited patiently. This was a business crisis.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes passed before she saw them walking back toward the car. The foreman didn’t look worried; neither did Louis. Louis, however, looked determined. They walked right up to her car door.

  “Bishou, this is François Dellerand, my field foreman,” Louis introduced her. “François, ma fiancée Bishou.”

  “Bonjour, mam’selle.”

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” she replied courteously.

  Louis paid little attention to the amenities. “You don’t know how to send transoceanic cables, do you?”

  “Non, I don’t.”

  “Can you drive this voiture?” he asked, equally intently.

  “Yes,” she admitted. She always let him drive. As her brother Jean-Baptiste (Bat) often said, Driving is a man thing.

  “Have you got paper and pencil in your purse?” Bishou pulled them out. Louis wrote an address, then a name she recognized as an antibiotic. “You will go into Saint-Denis. This street is a right turn off Rue Marché, a few blocks before you reach the retail district. This is the address for Claire Aucoeur’s flat — she’s on the second floor. You will take her to the factory and she will send a cable to the Sorbonne, that we need this drug to Garros Airport by the first plane tomorrow morning, details please telephone us.”

  “Oui, monsieur.” Bishou slid over to the driver’s side. He had left the keys in the ignition. Quickly she turned the car around, and drove toward Saint-Denis.

  There was a dearth of street signs, but she made an educated guess and saw a three-story house before her. She breathed a sigh of relief, however, when she spotted Louis’s secretary standing before the building.

  Claire spotted her boss’s car at the same moment, and hurried to the curb. “Mademoiselle Bishou?!” she exclaimed.

  “Please, I am to take you to the factory to send a cable,” Bishou told her. “The tobacco has rust, and you are to request the antibiotic.”

  Claire simply dropped whatever she had been doing, and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Give me directions,” said Bishou, “this is all too new to me.”

  “Bien sûr,” said Claire, pointing her down a couple of side streets and out to the road again. Once underway, Bishou explained what happened.

  “It is good that Monsieur Dessant is with the workers,” Claire said. “There will be no panic or anxiety if he is there. His hand is steady. Monsieur Campard, sometimes he lets them see how worried he is. Not Monsieur Dessant.” This was probably more than the good secretary would admit within the walls of the factory.

  “I know,” said Bishou. “The crown has been jostled a bit, but he is still a king.”

  “Oui.�
� Claire smiled. “I am not telling you anything new, am I? This is good. If we telephoned Paris today, on a Sunday, we might get anyone, and they might say anything. If we are in a queue of Monday-morning cables, we have more of a chance of being taken seriously by the university. I will also be on the telephone to them Monday morning, believe me.”

  “I believe you.” Bishou drew up at the guards’ cubicle. That car, those women — the guard waved her through. They were at the main doors in a heartbeat, where another security man let them inside.

  The place was Sunday silent. It was queer to be in that still place, as it was to be walking purposefully down a corridor in her Sunday best with a secretary in capri pants, flats, and a sailor shirt.

  Claire cranked up the electricity on a console-sized teletype machine against a wall, made sure its roll of paper was in position, and pulled out some papers from her desk. Carefully she assembled and wrote down her text. “I don’t do this often enough to cable free-hand,” she admitted, “so I like to have things ready.” Next, she seated herself at the console, and began typing. There was clunky give and take, give and take, so the overseas communication device was functioning. At last, she started a long burst of typing, and nodded, satisfied, when she finished.

  “We’ll wait for the acknowledgement,” she said. “It will probably take a few minutes, especially on a Sunday.” Claire smiled at Bishou, who sat anxiously in the other chair. “Welcome to the tobacco-man’s world, mademoiselle.”

  Bishou nodded. “Sick plants and machetes, balanced by his name on a box.”

  Claire laughed. “Oui. And those of us who do what we can, to keep the miracle going.”

  This time, Bishou laughed. “It does get in one’s blood, doesn’t it?”

  “Certainly it does. This is the best job I could ever have.” Her smile faded. “But I admit I was hired upon his return.”

  “That was probably good, that you were new then.”

  “Oui. I think so. So many people said, ‘I remember when,’ and I was free to say, ‘But I was not here. I need the here-and-now.’” Tentatively, she added, “Perhaps you are like that, too.”

  Bishou nodded. “I think so. You and I, tobacco-women together.” She gazed at a photo of Louis on the wall. “Was that for a promotional advertisement, that picture?”

  “Oui. You have none?”

  “No, not a photo of him. I don’t think he has one of me, either.”

  “He has one, because I saw it.”

  Bishou stared. “Really?”

  “Oui, he showed it when he first came back from America.”

  “The World Tobacco Conference at my university? I remember! The East Virginia University photographers took group photographs. I never got any, though, just the members of the conference.” No, her only images of the quiet French widower were in her memory, but they had been enough to make her want to find him again. She did not need a photograph to see those brown eyes, that dark, wavy hair, that shy smile.

  Claire smiled again, and was about to speak when the hammering of the terminal interrupted her. She read the notice. “Ah. Acknowledgement of receipt by the Sorbonne. We don’t have a reply yet, but we know they received it. There is nothing more we can do today.” She stood. Bishou followed suit. “And I promised I would take care of my nieces this afternoon.”

  “I’ll take you back.” Bishou nodded.

  “Many thanks, Mademoiselle Bishou — ” she laughed, “ — not Mademoiselle for much longer, though!”

  Bishou took Claire back to her street, and then found her way down the roads to the field where she had left the men. She knew for certain where she was only by a suit jacket, left hanging on a tree near the road. She pulled the car over, shut off the ignition, climbed out, and began to walk into the field.

  The men were much further back now, no longer near the road. Louis, shirt sleeves rolled up, was chopping as determinedly and competently as the men around him. François saw Bishou approaching, and spoke to Louis. He straightened up, and they walked toward her.

  Several men stopped working and gathered around them. “Mademoiselle Aucoeur has sent a request to the Sorbonne for the medicine,” Bishou reported. “We know they have received the message, but, of course, no one will respond until tomorrow morning. She will telephone them in the morning as well.”

  “Good.” Louis wiped his brow with his sleeve. “We’ll keep doing as I said, François, just cut out the worst, and leave the mild rust in that back field to try the antibiotic on. I’d rather save it than destroy it, but above all, we must not let the rust spread.”

  “Oui. And we’ll use different shovels for the different fields, too,” said François. “I never thought about that, contagious like a cold.” Apparently, Louis was even managing to teach some of his new findings to his crew.

  “Do you need me here, or have you got men enough?”

  “Non, monsieur, if we’re not going to take out the back field, I’ve got enough men, but merci. You know, there are not many tobacco-men that can take it from the telephone to the machete.”

  “Both are business tools at Dessant,” joked Louis, and all the men laughed.

  Then one of the men said, “Best wishes to you both, Monsieur et Madame — tobacco-man and tobacco-man’s wife.” Other deep male voices muttered agreement.

  Louis smiled down at Bishou as she replied, “Thank you for your good wishes, gentlemen.” Then they returned to the car.

  He picked up his suit coat from the tree. “I was afraid you would not be able to find us.”

  “I was glad your jacket was there.”

  “My apologies for testing you by fire.” Louis saw her into the passenger seat, then seated himself in the driver’s. He slid the machete back in the door pocket. “It would have been quite different if you could not drive this car.”

  “I know. But I could.”

  “François said to me, ‘The lady cannot wait while you help us, monsieur.’ I said, ‘She understands tobacco.’ And he replied, ‘God bless you and may you both be happy in a tobacco-man’s life.’” Louis kept his eyes on the road as he drove away, but his voice caught in his throat. “I think that blessing meant more to me than any I shall ever get from a church.”

  “And well it should,” she agreed.

  Louis pulled up at last in front of Pension Étoile, turned, and kissed her. “I needed that exercise. I think I will sleep well tonight, perhaps even this afternoon. We accomplished everything we intended, and then some, did we not?”

  “Oui.” Bishou kissed him again.

  “Mm,” he said, well pleased. “We still have the dress problem to consider, hm?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I like this church dress of yours. If all else fails, wear that. I wouldn’t care if you wore a white djibbah with those nice high heels, truthfully. It is all réunionnais. Don’t let it worry you. Sleep, ma cherie.”

  Louis escorted her to the door and kissed her yet again, like the lovers they were, before he said farewell. Inside the lobby, she sighed and felt the full force of her day’s adventures.

  Marie was on duty. She said, “You look tired, Mademoiselle Bishou.”

  “I am exhausted. What a day. And it is not yet two o’clock. I am going to sleep, Marie. Don’t worry about noise. Nothing will wake me.”

  Chapter 3

  Bishou slept through the night. The first noise she heard was the horn of the ferry Mauritius Pride, at nine o’clock the following morning. She rolled over and yawned.

  Bishou had slept soundly. Perhaps every day will not be like yesterday, she thought, but I know I can measure up to it. So does Louis.

  She staggered out of bed and down the hall to the bathroom, not worried about her looks or other travelers at nine o’clock in the morning. She brushed her teeth and hair, washed her face, and found her way back to her room.

  Inside, she changed to her academic clothes because this would be a university day. She needed to go to the university library and research
material for her Wednesday talk. Dressed but stocking-footed, she heard the tap-tap on the door and assumed it was Marie or Eliane. “Entrez!”

  The tap-tap was repeated. Puzzled, Bishou opened the door.

  A large drawing pad met her sight. The illustrated woman on it could have been Bishou. She wore a little white hat and veil much like Bishou’s Sunday hat, and a white dress with a high collar, but otherwise much like the elegant blue dress Bishou had admired in the local dress shop the other day, before she left in anger over Nadine’s scornful words. The dress had lace bunched up in back, probably ready to be released as a lightweight train. She wore the shoes Bishou had purchased.

  Bishou looked up from the illustration to the face above the board. “‘Great talent demolishes all barriers,’” she quoted.

  Madame Nadine smiled. The hatchet was buried. “May I come in, Professor?”

  “Please.” Bishou motioned her inside.

  “My apologies for my words to you Saturday. I am afraid we started off on the wrong footing.”

  “Ah, madame, let me apologize as well,” Bishou replied. She could be noble, too. “I am trying to accomplish so much, in such a hurry. It is a very stressful time for me, and my temper grows too short.”

  Nadine sat down in the only chair, and glanced around her. Naturally, the open wardrobe door caught her attention. “Ah! What is that robe?”

  “My doctoral gown.” Bishou pulled it down for her to touch. “It was wrinkled in the package. Everything I brought with me was either in packages, or in my backpack. I came with nothing else.”

  Nadine stared. “And nothing else? To your wedding?”

  “No, to my job. My work here was planned. My marriage was not.”

  “But you knew Monsieur Dessant before, I heard. You did not simply encounter him on a pleasure trip to Île de la Réunion.”

  “I was his translator at East Virginia University, when he came to a conference there. He fell ill, and I corresponded with the Campards to assist him. So, I came here, to see how he fared and to meet the Campards.” Bishou sat on an edge of the bed and regarded her guest. “You have researched me, Mme. Nadine.”