A Twisted Ladder (31 page)

Jacob said nothing.

Rémi looked back at her. She raised the new tupelo doll he’d carved for her and waved it at him. When Patrice had been a newborn babe in arms, he’d put his nose to her tiny head and drunk in the fontanel, recognized the scent like tupelo gum, so much like that of her mother. He vowed that Patrice would have a new doll carved from this wood every year as long as he lived.

“
Allons Patrice
,” Chloe called to her daughter.

Chloe’s face appeared from between two sheets, and little Patrice trotted toward her. Chloe looked up and saw the men watching. Her gaze lingered on Rémi for a long moment before she disappeared behind the washing again, and Rémi saw that Jacob took note of that too.

So be it.

Jacob cleared his throat. Rémi could see that he was going to ask him about Chloe and the little one. But Jacob did not express what was on his mind. Instead, he gestured the torch at the trees that stood between the house and the river.

“What’re all them glasses hanging in the trees?”

Rémi smiled at his brother-in-law’s avoidance of the subject. “They’re spirit jars. The people believe they capture evil spirits.”

The laundry snapped in the breeze, and all else seemed quiet from the woodland to the gardens. Nothing out of place. How long this small reprieve might last, he did not know, but he would not question why Ulysses was leaving him alone for the present. Perhaps the spirit jars had caught the river devil after all.

Jacob chewed his lip. “You’re real indulgent with’m. I heard you took Miss Chloe into New Orleans to visit the grave of Marie Laveau.”

Rémi’s eyes narrowed. “I see the gossip parlors are in full swing. Do you have a specific question for me,
mon frère
?”

Jacob colored. “No. I mean . . .” he cleared his throat again. “Reason I wanted to talk to you, we’re just wondering—my dad and I—whether it even makes sense for us to raise cane on over at Glory.”

“You don’t want to grow sugar?” Rémi’s attention sharpened.

Jacob raised the torch again. “We’re just giving it some second thoughts. We’ll probably grow it, I just wanted to get your take.”

The last of the mud daubers vacated the nest, and Rémi knocked it off, using the end of the broom to smash the cells into a rain of clumped mud.

“
Mon frère
, I think you are ill-suited to farming in general, not just of sugarcane. Plantation life is tremendous work.”

Jacob sniffed and said nothing. Rémi knew he was not a man who cared to dirty his hands. Certainly he counted himself among the rugged, chesty men of the country, but in reality he was more likely to share their song and drink than their physical toil. In this way, Jacob reminded Rémi of his brothers, Henri and Didier, who’d moved to New Orleans in order to lead a more fashionable city life.

Rémi asked him, “Why would you grow sugarcane to begin with? What do you hope to get out of it? Money?”

Jacob shrugged. They continued to the next mud dauber’s nest and flooded it with smoke.

Rémi said, “
Ecoutez
. In olden days, it was enough for a sugar farmer to produce raw cane and sell it. But now with modern technology, we have refineries all over the Delta. We used to just grow the sugar, but now we must refine it too, either in a Sugar Trust refinery or on the plantation.”

Rémi gestured with his chin toward the pecan allée. “At Terrefleurs, we used to refine our own sugar, but the process is no longer cost-worthy. This industry is eroding. We have had price wars and political problems.”

Jacob said, “It don’t sound like the Sugar Trust is doing its job.”

“The Sugar Trust was formed many years ago to save us, keep monopolies like Spreckels and C&H from squashing us. But now the Trust holds too much power.”

“Y’all seem to be doing fine,” Jacob said.

“Right now we are lucky. The beet sugar crops in Europe were destroyed by disease, so there is good demand for the cane sugar this year, but it will not last. Eventually the beet crop will recuperate.”

“You refine your cane through the Sugar Trust now?”

“Yes,
bien sûr
. The refinery here on River Road is owned by the Trust.” Rémi paused, watching the wasps fall and hover, then sidle away from the wooden structure. “They are having some trouble now with the government.”

“Our Trust refinery?”

“Yes, well, the Sugar Trust is having trouble. The government investigated them because now they are the monopoly. A politician from Puerto Rico runs it and they play games to get around import tariffs from the islands. Those tariffs were supposed to make things easier for us growing here. But the Trust sneaks around all that and makes their profits bigger.”

“I guess the government will put a stop to that,” Jacob said with a dip of his chin.

Rémi gave him a wan smile. “No, I do not think so,
mon ami
. Yes, the government investigated the Sugar Trust, but now the entire world is at war. And where did the investigation go? They stopped investigating. The government needs the Sugar Trust to keep things stable. Keep the money flowing and the sugar growing.”

Jacob frowned.

Rémi continued, “The smaller plantations in Louisiana, we try to hold on against all the price fluctuation. But it is hard to keep up. That is why so many sugar planters stop growing cane. Maybe they grow pecans, maybe they don’t grow at all, like at Glory.” Rémi nodded toward Jacob’s land downriver. “Before you bought it, the former owners stopped growing sugar there for a good reason: losing money. And for what? To grow sugar, because that is what they have always done? That would be
stupide
.”

Rémi cast a glance at Jacob over the cypress and Spanish moss torch, and could see lines creasing his brow as he squinted toward the fields.

“Why do
you
still grow?” Jacob asked.

Rémi sighed. “I have all the workers. Where would they go if I shut down? Sometimes I make a good profit, sometimes I lose money. But a plantation is not just a business. It is a living thing. You don’t just stop her. You must kill her. But I know one day it will all end.” He waved a hand toward the Mississippi. “Big companies will own all the sugar. I do not know what is going to happen to the workers when it is all over.”

Rémi shook his head. “I try to turn the new ones away when they come, but they all need work and they need a place to live. Some get on the train and go north to New York City or Chicago, but most of these people only know how to work the fields.”

Rémi suspected Jacob’s family had never paid much heed to the private lives of the workers. At Terrefleurs, the workers were weary and poor, but their lives were very much interwoven with those in the main house.

They heard a child’s laughter, and saw that Patrice and Chloe had moved to the kitchen garden. No longer obscured by the hanging linens, Chloe stood in full view, and also in full view was her belly, swollen in late term pregnancy. Jacob’s jaw went slack.

Rémi smiled at his scandalized expression, but at the same time, he knew the world would react in the same way. Even worse. A white man taking a black woman as a mistress was not so uncommon, but that didn’t mean it was accepted.

Rémi walked inside the carriage barn, clouds forming in the dirt floor behind his footfalls, and rested the broom on a hook. Jacob still refrained from asking about Chloe. Rémi supposed his brother-in-law felt it wasn’t his business, and he was right.

“Come,
mon frère
, time for a little cherry bounce on the gallery.”

“Should we get them other ones?” Jacob said with a nod toward the wasp nests among the trees.

“Leave them. They will keep the black widows down.”

Jacob nodded, and then stood in thought for a moment, the torch crackling. “I appreciate your advice, Rémi. About the sugarcane I mean. All the same, just so you know, we’re gonna probably stick to our plans. Everything’s set up for growin cane.” He shrugged. “I know that ain’t what you want to hear—you’re riskin your own hide for us, and we’re much obliged. So, I do promise to talk it over with my father. We might change our minds, but I gotta say, I doubt it. My father thinks since we got everything in order, we might as well plant the damn sugarcane, and quite frankly I agree with him.”

NEW ORLEANS, 2009

A
NOTHER HEADACHE. IT HAD
played at Madeleine’s temples when she’d awoken that morning and it lingered on as she and Sam spent the day sorting through Marc’s documents at the Special Collections Division of Tulane’s Howard-Tilton Library. Listening to Sam, Madeleine sat and ran her fingers back and forth across her mémée’s diary.

Sam was on her feet, leaning against the table. “Madeleine.”

“Mm?” Madeleine blinked at her.

“Did you even hear a single word I said?”

“Yes. You said . . . well, no. I guess my mind was somewhere else.”

Sam pointed at her legal pad on the broad wooden table. “I was saying, I’ve gone back as far as 1846, and Terrefleurs was still listed with LeBlanc ownership. Can’t figure out when the family bought it, exactly, but it definitely pre-dates 1846.”

“Wow, I had no idea.”

Sam said, “Your eyes are bloodshot. You OK?”

Madeleine shrugged.

“Worried about your father?”

Madeleine looked toward the rows of books and didn’t answer. Daddy, yes, for starters, but in truth she couldn’t get Ethan out of her mind. Her gaze slipped to her grandmother’s diary, which she had pushed aside, and the screen saver on her laptop had long since kicked in to a starfield tunnel.

“Well, I found out a lot about my great-grandfather, so that’s good. Sounds like he, too, suffered from cognitive schizophrenia. Kind of blows a hole in my theory about street drugs causing the condition in Daddy. But aside from that, I can’t make much sense of what Mémée wrote.”

She nudged the diary toward Sam. “You’ve made far better progress than I have.”

“Don’t look at me, I don’t speak Creole.”

Madeleine sighed. “I thought I did, but it’s different from what I’m used to.”

“You figured out enough to find out about your great-grandfather’s condition.”

“Yeah. I do get some other stuff too. Mémée mentions
Compère Lapin
, which is Briar Rabbit. She used to tell us those stories when Marc and I were little, so
that
I understand. And she writes about her father carving dolls to keep the bad spirits away. But there’s this whole other part. Something about pigeons.”

Sam said, “Well, you mentioned there was a pigeon house at Terrefleurs.”

Madeleine said, “Yeah, but I just don’t get what she was trying to say. Best I can figure out, she was writing about pigeon games. Her mother—Chloe—made her do some kind of exercise, but she and her sister didn’t like it. Something about stacking pigeons. Whatever that means. Probably just my shoddy translation skills.”

Sam thought about this. “Were they cooking?”

“Pigeons?”

Sam shrugged. “You know, squab. I hear pigeons is good eatin. Stack em up and eat em up.”

Madeleine smiled, and then chuckled. And then suddenly she was quaking with laughter to the point that tears were blurring her vision. One of the students at another table frowned.

Sam grinned and whispered, “Was it really that funny?”

Madeleine shook her head. “I guess I just needed to laugh.”

Sam settled into the chair next to her. “Tell me what’s on your mind. Is it your father?”

“He is slipping. Definitely slipping. And I haven’t seen him in a few days. Not since we went to Bayou Black.”

Sam eyed her. “But that’s not it. It’s Ethan, isn’t it?”

Suddenly, Madeleine’s eyes filled again and tears spilled over to her cheeks.

“Hey,” Sam whispered, slipping an arm around her shoulders. “Oh, sweetie. It’s all right.”

Madeleine shook her head and dashed the tears away. “No, ignore me. It’s just tension. I have a headache and it’s getting to me.”

Sam lifted a brow and gave a humorless laugh. “What? Who in God’s green Earth do you think you’re kidding, Maddy? Tension?”

Madeleine looked at her.