“It will be easier for me if I take it all in order.”
“But you will get to that?”
“I’ll get to everything. Eventually. If I ramble too much…be patient.”
He laughed. She liked the sound of it so much that she wished he would do it again.
He flipped through his notes. “Then why don’t you tell me what happened to you that night. Did you make it to Nonc Clebert’s house?”
“Yes. We made it, but my mother miscarried during the height of the storm. The cabin at the Krantz Place where my grandfather had remained collapsed, and Grand-père was killed. We would have died, as well, had we stayed.”
“I’m sorry.” He wrote for a moment; then he looked up. “Is everything you’ve told me so far to be included in this manuscript? Is this something you really want your son and
grandchild to know, or has it been background material? Something designed to show me the climate you grew up in?”
“It’s to be included. Every bit of it. You’ll see just why.”
“All right.” He looked down at his notes, riffling through them again, then up at her again. “It doesn’t matter what I ask you, does it? You’re going to tell this in your own way and time.”
“You already know me well.”
“Then shall we get to the next installment?”
She wished that he was less astute and that there had been more questions to cushion the moment when she had to begin again. She hadn’t slept well last night after relating the story of the hurricane to him. She was afraid she was never going to sleep well again.
“I suppose the next part of this begins about twelve years later. Ti’ Boo and I remained friends, you see, and I journeyed down Bayou Lafourche to see her married.” Aurore closed her eyes, and she could almost see the densely shadowed bayou, with its solemn stretches of waving grasses and majestic birds, its vast acreages of sugarcane. She could smell the sickly sweet scent of boiling sugar that still lingered in the air at the end of grinding season, hear the shouts from plantation and mill landings that had changed little since the Civil War.
She wished she were there again, and that she had her life to live over.
G
ranted, it was odd for the heiress to one of New Orleans’s finest steamship lines to travel to the bayou country on a
caboteur,
a peddler’s boat. Odder still was the way Aurore had paid her fare.
The brooch in the captain’s vest pocket had once belonged to Aurore’s Tante Lydia, a woman who so resembled Aurore’s father that feminine adornment of any sort had only emphasized the square jut of her jaw and the faint mustache brushing her perpetually clamped lips. Lydia had met her death two years ago, while crossing a Vieux Carré street. Sometimes a stiff neck and unswerving gaze were detriments, particularly when one of the new electric trolleys was only yards away.
Aurore had been ridding herself of her aunt’s jewelry since the day she inherited it. Lucien saw to Aurore’s needs. She had more clothes than she could fit into multiple armoires, more hats than she could wear in a month. But she did not have money to spend. Money, according to Lucien, was unnecessary for a young woman of good family. A Creole lady
had only to ask for what she wanted—prettily, of course—and she would be rewarded with everything that was truly good for her.
The possibility that not having money could make it a consuming passion had never occurred to Lucien. Women in his social sphere had no consuming passions. They existed to embellish the lives of men. Since Aurore had never had the courage to openly dispute his views, she simply sold whatever she knew he wouldn’t miss, or, as in the case of the captain of the merchant boat, she bartered. A brooch, in exchange for passage to and from Ti’ Boo’s home on Bayou Lafourche, hadn’t seemed extravagant.
Now, as the levees glided slowly by, she leaned against the steamer’s rail and envisioned the days to come.
At long last, Ti’ Boo was getting married. At twenty-four, Ti’ Boo had believed herself to be an old maid,
une vielle fille.
At the more proper age of eighteen, there had been an offer for her hand, but the boy had been fat and lazy, and Ti’ Boo, envisioning a life of servitude, had refused him. Since then, there had been no more offers or opportunities to wangle them. Ti’ Boo’s mother had taken ill, and her care had fallen to Ti’ Boo.
Now Ti’ Boo’s mother was stronger, and Ti’ Boo’s sisters were older. The widower Jules Guilbeau, a man with two small sons and enough land along the bayou to plant a little sugarcane and a little cotton, wanted Ti’ Boo as his wife. And, despite the ten-year difference in their ages, Ti’ Boo had agreed to marry him.
Aurore knew all this from Ti’ Boo’s letters. She had last seen Ti’ Boo when she herself was only eleven and Ti’ Boo a grown-up seventeen. Lucien had been on one of his many
trips abroad, and Tante Lydia, who had moved into the house on Esplanade some years before to care for Aurore, had been away for the afternoon.
Perhaps if they had been at home, they would have discouraged Ti’ Boo from visiting. The Acadian girl was, after all, nothing more than an unfortunate reminder of a summer Lucien wanted to forget. But Aurore had been the one to answer the door, and she had secretly treasured the afternoon.
Ti’ Boo hadn’t returned to New Orleans, but after that day, the two girls had corresponded. Their first letters had been carefully polite; then, later, as their confidence increased, the letters had turned emotional, filled with secret fears and longings. Over the years, Aurore and Ti’ Boo had grown from child and nursemaid into true friends.
Lucien had been only peripherally aware of their correspondence. A woman’s good breeding was most apparent in the precision of her penmanship and in her ability to gracefully turn a phrase. He encouraged Aurore to diligently practice the skills that would hasten her ascent into society. But when, after years of letters, Aurore asked permission to attend Ti’ Boo’s wedding, he had been astonished.
“A wedding in the bayous?” Lucien had risen from his favorite chair in the parlor, fingering the watch chain that stretched to his pocket. “You can’t mean you want to do more than send a small gift to Térèse?”
“I’d like to attend.” Aurore had not fidgeted. At seventeen, she knew the value of standing perfectly still when encountering her father. In many ways, Lucien was a mystery to her, but there was nothing mysterious about his ability to size up weakness. She didn’t want to fuel the fires of a tirade.
“But why?”
She gave the answer she had carefully rehearsed. “I think a change would do me good. A little air, a little sunshine, and I’ll be more eager for the next round of parties.”
“There are other, better ways to take fresh air.”
“But this would truly get me away from everything. Cleo could accompany me on the steamer, and once I’m there I’ll be thoroughly chaperoned. Ti’ Boo’s family is very old-fashioned.” She hazarded a smile. “The Acadians guard their daughters almost as closely as you guard yours.”
“You find my devotion humorous?”
Aurore found nothing about her father humorous, but she would not demean him, as he had so often demeaned her. She was tied to Lucien by a myriad of emotions; that she didn’t understand him detracted not at all from those feelings.
“I’m only trying to reassure you,” she said. “I’ll be well looked after, and when I return, I’ll have stories to amuse you.”
But the lure of stories had not been strong enough for Lucien to give his permission. The Acadians were peasants, the bayous mosquito-ridden and teeming with dangerous reptilian life. When she pointed out that years ago she had spent entire summers in south Louisiana, his lips had tightened to a parody of the departed Lydia’s. The argument had been lost.
Now she was on her way to Ti’ Boo’s wedding, despite the fact that the trip had been forbidden. Lucien was on business in New York and Minnesota, and Cleo, the newest of a long line of housekeepers, had proved susceptible to bribery. If all went as planned, Aurore would arrive back in New Orleans before her father. If not, she would have to accept the consequences. There was little she truly wanted that Lucien could deny her as punishment. She only rarely had his attention, and never his love. How could he withdraw what he had never given her?
“Mademoiselle Le Danois?”
Aurore turned at the sound of the captain’s voice. As New Orleans waltzed gracefully into the twentieth century, customs had changed. Now English was the language of commerce and French was the garnish. Aurore dreamed in a mixture of both, but she had grown accustomed to speaking English. The people of the bayous, like the captain, who was still a comparatively young man, had not yet made that adjustment.
She answered in French. “Are we almost there?”
He pulled at his mustache. “It shouldn’t be much longer. The hyacinths make this trip slower each time I take it. Soon I’ll be riding a mule through the middle of the bayou.”
“How can anything so lovely be such a trial?”
His expression was frankly admiring. “To the contrary, anything lovely is always a trial, as I suspect your father has already learned.”
She turned back to the water. Hyacinths, their lavender flowers stretching toward the sunlight, blanketed the water along the bayou’s banks. They were invaders from the Orient, set free decades before by admirers who had never guessed the damage they might do. “Do you know my father, Captain Barker?”
“I know of him.”
“I hope you won’t make it a point to know him better.”
“What? And begin our acquaintance by telling him that I helped his daughter run away?”
“I’m not running away. At least, not for long.”
“I’m relieved. And I’ll be more relieved if you tell me it’s not a man you’re running to.”
She wondered if all men were so vain by nature that they assumed a woman would only run from the arms of one into those of another. “I’m going to a friend’s wedding.”
“This part of the bayou is remote, to say the least.”
“Blessedly so.”
“Then you’re prepared for it to be primitive?”
“It’s a shame you don’t know my father. You would find him most agreeable.” She listened to the sounds of the captain’s retreat. The vista was changing, and she watched with interest.
She had boarded the peddler boat yesterday at dawn, not far from the foot of Saint Louis Street, near the sugar landing. The route along the Mississippi had been familiar, but after the canal had come the bayou. She had passed the day studying plantation houses. Some were collapsing, victims of changing economies and the lasting effects of the War between the States. Others reigned proudly over the surrounding fields, as if the days of white-suited planters and their hoopskirted daughters had never vanished.
Between the plantations were settlements of modest houses, and these interested Aurore most of all, because they were like the ones Ti’ Boo had often described in her letters. She had been given plenty of time to examine them, since the boat stopped to trade at every one, which was why she had been forced to spend the night on a cot in one of its tiny cabins, under the shrewd watch of the captain’s wife.
The houses were close together, strung like pearls along the bayou banks. Cows and mules were tethered here and there on the levee, and children romped under the occasional tree at the water’s edge. These were the Acadian settlements, the homes of
les petits habitants,
the true heart of Bayou Lafourche.
Ti’ Boo lived in one such settlement, Côte Boudreaux, a cluster of homes at the south end of the bayou, on land divided and subdivided until little productive farmland along the levee was left for any one family.
But what did that matter? Ti’ Boo had asked in one of her letters. How much did one man need? Only enough to feed his loved ones, to grow a little cane to trade for things he couldn’t produce, to save a little extra to benefit the church.
A little extra. Aurore thought of all she possessed, and all she did not. Ti’ Boo’s life seemed as exotic as a Parsi’s or a Hottentot’s.
The churning paddle wheels slowed as one of the floating bridges, pulled from bank to bank by a wire cable, passed in front of them. She looked ahead as a new group of houses, their long galleries whitewashed or painted in weathered pastels, came into view. There were people waving from the landing.
“Côte Boudreaux,” the captain said from behind her. “It looks as if you have friends here.”
Aurore waved back. Her reception committee was too far away for her to make out faces, but she guessed the woman in the very front, dressed in blue, must be Ti’ Boo.
Ti’ Boo. She swallowed an odd lump in her throat. She would never see her friend, or even receive a letter from her, without memories of the night in October, twelve years before, when Ti’ Boo’s uncle had swept her from the cabin at the Krantz Place to the safety of his home in a grove of ancient water oaks.
The sloshing of the paddle wheels slowly died, and the steamer drifted to the landing. Now Aurore could see Ti’ Boo’s face, framed by the old-fashioned cloth sunbonnet, or garde-soleil, she wore.
“Ro-Ro!”
Aurore went to the side and waited until she could disembark. Then she was in Ti’ Boo’s arms.
“You can’t be bigger than me!” Ti’ Boo thrust Aurore away to stare. “You can’t be!”
“Now I’ll have to nursemaid you.” Aurore stared at her friend, hungry for every small detail. Ti’ Boo was shorter than she was by several inches. She was no longer plump, but her figure was pleasingly feminine, and her skin was as smooth and rosy as it had been in her childhood.
“But you are so fashionable. Très chic,” Ti’ Boo said, shaking her head in awe.
Aurore had chosen to travel in her simplest linen suit, decorated with only the most modest braid trim. On her head she wore a plain straw sailor’s hat with trailing ribbons. But nothing she owned was as simple as Ti’ Boo’s jacket dress of Atakapas cottonade. “Too fashionable,” she said, fanning herself with her hand. “And forever uncomfortable.”
“I think you’re beautiful.”
For a moment, Aurore felt as shy as she had as a child.
Ti’ Boo grabbed Aurore’s hand and pulled her toward the people gathered at the edge of the dock. “Come meet my family. With the wedding so close, not all of them could come. I was working in the garden when I heard that the boat had been sighted.”
Aurore was quickly surrounded. She was introduced to Ti’ Boo’s father, Valcour, four of her younger brothers, and a sister, Minette, who was a taller, slimmer version of her older sibling.
Valcour ordered the boys to go on board and bring Aurore’s trunk and assorted luggage back to the house. With Ti’ Boo’s arm tucked lovingly around hers and Minette close at her heels, Aurore waved goodbye to the captain and his solemn-faced wife, who had joined him on deck.
A dirt road ran beside the levee. On the opposite side of the road sat houses spaced so closely together that a good shout from one of the wide front galleries would receive an answer
from neighbors on either side. Hounds slept in the shadows, barely lifting their heads to acknowledge the parade of young ladies, but the galleries and yards teemed with humans who were not so oblivious.
Ti’ Boo stopped at every house, proudly introducing Aurore to cousins, aunts and uncles, godparents and ordinary neighbors whose place in the Boudreaux family hierarchy seemed as assured as any blood relatives. Over and over again Aurore was examined and pronounced acceptable in bayou French that wasn’t always clear to her.
What was clear was the excitement her visit had created. She was a city woman, a New Orleans Creole, who had come this distance to witness a friend’s wedding. Surely she was different somehow from the others of her class. Who among these bayou residents had heard of a woman like Aurore traveling this long, difficult distance without even a friend or relative to watch over her? Ti’ Boo must have been a good friend to have a good friend like this.
“My father doesn’t know I’ve come,” Aurore told Ti’ Boo, when they were between houses and nearing Ti’ Boo’s own. The parade had lengthened. A trail of giggling, barefooted girls in loose cotton smocks and bonnets followed several yards behind.
“Will he be angry when he discovers you’ve gone?”
“I hope he never discovers it.” Aurore threaded her fingers through Ti’ Boo’s. Her friend’s hands were rough, testifying to hours of scrubbing clothes and hoeing in the kitchen garden. “But if he does?” She shrugged. “He has no other children, and no hope of ever having more. Whatever else he sees when he looks at me, he also sees his only hope of immortality.”