While they waited for Tessier’s return, Narcisse and Ferrier talked of the storm. Honor between planters prevented direct words about the events of the day, but Narcisse felt an uncomfortable judgment in Ferrier’s eyes on him.
Tessier returned before long, smiling broadly. “It appears everything has righted itself. The boat was found in fairly good condition, considering. The bearskins and Clement’s clothes and shoes were soaked through, but still wedged under the corners of the tarp that held.”
“I assume that lessens your claim on Clement,” Ferrier said to Narcisse. “But my offer still holds if you’re willing to sell, Monsieur Tessier.”
Narcisse nodded, unwilling to push any further today.
“It’s settled, then,” Tessier said. “The bearskins go to Narcisse, and Ferrier and I can make arrangements for a loan to be paid off over time.”
Before the month was out Clement moved in with Suzette and Philomene and the twins, into the small cabin around the back of the main house on Ferrier’s farm.
16
S tormy March gave way to balmy April and turned to late spring. Clement got up before daybreak each morning except for Sunday and headed off to the field. When Ferrier ordered it, Philomene joined him there.
One early Saturday evening Suzette went to the Fredieu plantation to stay overnight with Elisabeth, and Philomene and Clement had the cabin alone with the twins. It was a rare moment for them to be just the four, and rarer still that both babies were asleep and peaceful at the same time.
Philomene came close to drowsing in the moonlight chair, holding and rocking Bet, letting the motion lull her. The chair produced a flat swishing sound and a slight squeak that Clement had never managed to fix. Philomene looked at Clement across the room from her, holding Thany. The arms of her chair curved around her stiffly, arms that had sustained her until Clement came to live with them on Ferrier’s farm. The care he had taken to make the chair, and the risk he had taken to bring it to her, made her love Clement all the more. But there were times, when one of them used the chair to rock the babies to sleep or just to rest at the end of a long day, when she would have to fight off a cruel fluttering in the pit of her stomach, a shadow she could not shake.
An owl’s hollow hooting outside the cabin roused Philomene, and she looked across the room at Clement holding Thany.
“This is the picture, Clement. This is what I saw long ago.” The trembling in Philomene’s hushed voice betrayed her excitement. “I told you then I knew we’d be together, how I saw the wedding first and then the two babies.” Her voice rose over the whisper that she intended. “The picture was clear. It was this exact moment, with us starting our own family, you and me together.”
She had begun to question the truth of the old unrealized visions, wondering if they would unfold as she had seen them. There had not been a single new glimpsing in over three years.
“Did you believe me then, all those years ago, when I first told you about what I saw?” Philomene asked, admiring the features of Bet’s coffee-colored face arranged in sleep. She often asked this question of Clement, whenever she needed to hear the answer he always gave. He didn’t disappoint her.
“How could I not believe in something I wanted so much to happen?” he said.
* * *
Some weeks the farm was like a remote island, and there seemed to be only the monotony of the work. There were often visitors, but the pace was slow and steady. Narcisse came most frequently, and Philomene was convinced that he was slightly afraid of her, or at least in awe. She was hopeful that his reverence for her glimpsings would continue to keep him at a safe distance. Philomene was of two minds when she heard the Fredieu buggy approach instead of the clipping horse’s hooves of Narcisse’s mare. The buggy signaled that he came with wife in tow. He had married again, a sharp-faced woman with a tongue to match, not at all tentative the way the first wife had been. Madame Arsine was particularly disdainful with Philomene, ordering her about with a bossy arrogance. Both her mother and Clement slipped deeper into their big house masks when she was around, full of rounded backs and the soft rhythm of slurry Creole words, but Philomene turned sullen and silent.
As much as she disliked Madame Arsine, a part of Philomene was relieved. With his wife present, Narcisse refrained from watching her so boldly.
* * *
Even with the onset of the hot, sticky summer, the warmth of Clement’s body as he lay beside Philomene in their bed was welcome. They were five in the cabin. Philomene sometimes woke in the night, straining against the darkness long after the banked fire gave off enough light to see, turning toward each distinctive pattern of breathing in the household, and she felt thankful. But she also respected how a jealous God might want to take such fullness away.
Three generations under one roof fortified her. Even Elisabeth was only a short walk through the woods, although her grandmother still grieved openly over the separation from Gerasíme. Philomene did housework, fieldwork, gardening, whatever needed to be done, in addition to the care of Oreline’s children as well as her own twins. The days were hard, repetitive, and never-ending, but they weren’t beaten; they had their own cabin, enough to eat, and an ally in Oreline Derbanne.
And she had Clement, whose delicious brown skin seemed actually to crackle whenever it came into contact with her own. She had seen women take up with men, willingly and unwillingly, eagerly and with resignation. She had seen men take up with women, aggressively and passively, with single-minded intent or carelessly. But she didn’t believe any to be as matched as she and Clement. They built to a fine luster together, like the silver she polished for first the Derbannes and then the Ferriers, when it was passed down to Oreline.
Clement made Philomene better. She was sure she made him better, too, and together they could produce beautiful babies. She didn’t need a glimpsing to tell her that.
17
M osquitoes and flies invaded Oreline’s household at the height of the summer of 1857. The rains came early and overstayed, leaving stilled pools of water everywhere within clear sight of the house. Oreline stayed indoors as much as possible, but the stink of the outside air penetrated the farmhouse. Cane River had been plagued with yellow fever each of the prior two summers, and Ferrier had taken to having Clement burn patches of tar around the house once a week. The smoke rose in thick, noxious clouds, and no matter how many times she had her mulatto girl scrub down the walls, the smell lingered.
Oreline sat quietly in the front room one stifling afternoon, both she and her daughter, Josephina, hunched over their needlework, lost in thought, but she was roused when she heard a loud smack on bare flesh. Across the room at the table where she sat, Philomene slapped again absently at her arm, brushing away the dead insect before she went back to polishing the silver.
There was a commotion outside, someone calling her name, and then the heavy pounding of feet on the wooden gallery of the farmhouse.
“Madame Oreline!”
Philomene jumped up to swing open the front door, and Clement struggled in through the doorway with Ferrier in his arms.
“He just fell down, Madame, in the middle of the corn,” Clement said to Oreline, his straw hat sitting crookedly on his head, sweat pouring from him. “One minute we were hoeing and he was complaining of the heat, and the next he couldn’t get up. I carried him straight here.”
Ferrier let out a small disoriented moan.
“Take him to the bedroom, put him on the bed,” Oreline instructed, following closely behind Clement down the hallway. “Philomene, bring some clean rags and get more water.”
Clement carried Ferrier to the back of the farmhouse and deposited him on the bed. Ferrier shuddered, big droplets of strange-smelling sweat pouring from his body.
“It is too cold,” Ferrier said hoarsely, his teeth chattering so loudly that Oreline could hear the sound from across the room.
Oreline rushed to his side. Her husband threw off enough heat for her to feel the burning int
ensity before she was even close enough to touch his face. She covered him with a blanket anyway and began to sponge him off with cool water.
“Clement, thank you for bringing him in,” Oreline said. “Go on back to the field. Philomene, keep the children out, and send in Suzette.”
They nursed him through the night, and by the second day they all knew it was yellow fever. Only Oreline and Suzette were allowed in the back room.
“Let me help you sit up,” Oreline said to Ferrier. “You have to try to eat.”
“I can’t,” Ferrier groaned, “it hurts.”
“Where? Where does it hurt?”
“Pain in my head, my legs, my back,” he said as racking heaves tore through him. “Bring the slop jar, quick.”
Oreline and Suzette took turns taking care of Ferrier over the next few days, as they had so often tended to the sick together before.
“I saw it close up last summer,” Oreline said to Suzette as Ferrier dozed on the third day. “He has a good chance to recover. I attended a cousin upriver, and he came through it. We have to pray that his skin does not get a yellowish tinge. That would be jaundice. If that happens, later can come the bleeding and, if it turns to the black vomit, death.”
“It is good you have experience,” Suzette said. “They say up in Natchitoches they counted off over a hundred deaths this summer already. Yellow jack, black vomit, stranger’s disease, all the same thing.”
Despite Oreline’s optimism, Ferrier’s fever showed no sign of easing, day after day. They kept him as cool as they could with wet rags, tried to feed him, and gave him quinine. Mostly they waited, and Oreline ordered Clement to keep the tar burning directly outside his sickroom every day until the entire farm had the diseased smell of sulfuric desperation to it. There was nothing more a doctor would have done, even if they had been able to get one, short of letting blood.
By the end of the first week Ferrier’s skin sagged all over his body. He could barely eat, and what he did get down he could not hold on to. He had lost a tremendous amount of fluid. Looking into Ferrier’s face was like looking at a dried apple, all of his distinguishing facial features shrunken except for his eyeballs, which were swollen far beyond any natural size and seemed to stare fixedly. The whites of his eyes had turned an antique yellow, moist and glistening. His chin and forehead had turned almost the color of a rotting pumpkin, but the sides of his face were dusky red, as if he were a vain young woman who had pinched her cheeks too vigorously to get the color to bloom.
Oreline was not prepared for the husband of so many unexpected colors decomposing before her eyes. Ferrier was restless and jittery, his motions jerky, and he seemed to speed up the second week, as if he had just remembered that he had somewhere urgent he needed to be. He slipped through the later stages quickly. His skin had become so thin and ghostly that it didn’t seem so shocking when the blood began to ooze from his eyes and nose and mouth, as if his skin could no longer prevent the leakage. The black vomit followed, as if on cue, and Oreline knew there was no stopping the march of the disease then. Ferrier began to throw up what looked like black coffee grounds, stinking piles of his own insides.
At the very end, Suzette woke Oreline from where she dozed in her chair beside Ferrier. Ferrier waved his arms frantically, with more energy than he had shown for almost two weeks. His tongue was thick, his yellowed eyes wild, and he thrashed in the bed without logic. Oreline grabbed hold of his hand. His body jerked twice, and he lapsed into a brief coma. He never recovered.
“We’ve been here together too many times before,” Oreline said to Suzette as they prepared his body for burial. “Together in the death of others.”
Ferrier had not reached his thirty-fifth birthday. Oreline missed him desperately, but emotional reflections would have to wait. Practical considerations had to come first. Joseph Ferrier was dead, and the death of a master always triggered some change for both wives and slaves, usually for the worse.
* * *
Ferrier’s debts were as much of a surprise as his sudden death.
Oreline sent for Narcisse Fredieu, and he came around to the farmhouse immediately.
“Death is no stranger to me, Narcisse,” Oreline said, sitting on the gallery while they were served coffee. “I was content with Monsieur Ferrier, but how could he not tell me we were one step removed from being tenants? That this land was not his, but his mother’s? He took risks with my money, and they tell me now that there is nothing left. Nothing but debt, for tools and for buying Clement. His mother has told me I must move in ninety days. This land is her only income.” Oreline twisted a small embroidered handkerchief in her hands. “I am thirty-two years old with three young children. What am I to do?”
Narcisse looked sympathetic and leaned over to take her hand in his. “You can count on me, cousin. You have two problems, and they can both be solved. On the one hand, you need a husband, and on the other, enough money to relieve your debt.”
Narcisse leaned back into his chair and took up his coffee cup. “I know of a man, older, who was also just made a widower by the fever, in need of a wife for his three children. He is a respectable Frenchman who lives upriver, a small farmer and schoolteacher. His name is Valery Houbre. You must know beforehand that he has no land, and very little property, but if you follow my advice, a hasty marriage could benefit you both.”
“I do not know him,” Oreline said, “but I value your council. And the debt?”
“This is the best course, Cousin Oreline, and the debt is easily discharged. What you no longer need, what you can no longer afford to keep under the circumstances, are all of the slaves.”
Oreline began to twist the handkerchief again. “How could I possibly?” she said. “They are like family.”
“It must be done,” Narcisse insisted. “There is no other way. The creditors will not wait. You must sell while the price is high, and before fever has a chance to strike again. You do this as much for them as for yourself. The first to go must be Clement. I know where a quick and profitable sale can be made. Not here on Cane River, but to a distant relative of mine in Virginia.”
“But I cannot sell Suzette and Philomene, or the babies,” Oreline said forcefully. “I cannot.”
“You must, of course, keep at least one. You are a lady. Philomene can go with you, she and the babies. I can arrange a place for Suzette with my brother, where she will be treated well.”
“But Philomene will lose Clement and her mother,” Oreline said.
“She won’t be alone,” Narcisse said. “She still has her girls.”
* * *
14 February 1855
Natchitoches Parish
Succession of Joseph Ferrier. Petition filed by Marie Oréline Derbanne, widow, and tutrix of the minors Florentine, Joseph, and Josephine, issue of her marriage to said Joseph Ferrier. Petitioner respectfully shows that she contemplates contracting marriage with Valery Oubré of Natchitoches Parish and desires to retain tutorship of the said minor children. Whereupon she prays for the convocation of a family meeting to decide upon the question if she shall be retained as tutrix, and that the members of the family meeting and Narcisse Fredieu, the under tutor, be notified to attend, / s/A. H. Pierson, attorney for petitioner.
Succession of Joseph Ferrier.
* * *
Oreline called Suzette and Philomene in to her in the front room of the farmhouse, and when they stood before her she willed herself to speak. “We are forced to make difficult changes now that Monsieur Ferrier is gone.”
Philomene slipped her arm through her mother’s and held tight. The two women leaned on one another.
“Oui, Madame.” Philomene talked for both of them. Suzette was clearly dazed, the way she sometimes got, but Philomene was not as easy to read. Oreline had to admit to a trace of fear in what the strong-willed young slave woman was capable of.
“I am to be married again, soon, and must move off this farm. Philomene and the children will come with me.”
; “What is to become of my mother and husband?”
“Places have been found, good places. Suzette, you will go to Augustine Fredieu, not so far away.”
“And Clement, Madame. What becomes of Clement? Back to M’sieu Tessier?” The edgy tremor in Philomene’s voice made Oreline uneasy. She wished Narcisse were by her side, but he was on his way to the dock, had left with Clement over an hour before.
“Clement is already gone, on his way to a good home in Virginia.”
Oreline expected tears, or pleading, or both, and she had steeled herself for them. But she wasn’t prepared for what Philomene did next. Philomene began to scratch at her own face, digging her short fingernails deep enough to draw blood, pulling away strips of raw skin.
“What have you done?” Philomene’s voice had become a hiss. The tips of her fingers were slick with crimson. “Where is he? He can’t be gone. I have to talk to him.”
Oreline was not exactly sure what would have happened if Suzette had not held on to Philomene. Philomene tore at the fabric of her own dress and at her hair while Suzette tried to rock her quiet.
“We had to act quickly, to get him on the last steamer of the month,” Oreline said, uncertain whether Philomene even heard her.
Long moments passed before Philomene finally regained herself, but still Suzette did not let her go. “How could you?” Philomene said directly to Oreline, her red-rimmed eyes giving off a frenzied brightness. “My mother, and then my husband?”
“You had better watch your tongue,” Oreline said stiffly, trying not to show how much Philomene in this condition frightened her. Suzette’s daughter had always been unpredictable. “You have been with me a long time, you and your mother both, but do not forget yourself to me.”
Oreline watched the struggle on Philomene’s face, and it was with relief that she saw her bow her head slightly at last.
“Oui, Madame,” Philomene said. “I have no more to say.”