Sandra Hill - [Creole] (36 page)

My father
.

Thoroughly confused, he turned to Harriet in question.

She struggled out of the pirogue with the help of a hired hand he’d employed from down the bayou to row the boat. She’d actually believed he would let her, a woman, paddle the pirogue since he was incapacitated by his sling. As if he would sit in a boat with her wielding a paddle!

She shifted nervously from foot to foot, glancing everywhere but at him.

“Harriet?” he prodded.

Her face was a guilty shade of pink, and not from the sun that she’d been complaining about all morning.

“You! You’re responsible for this, aren’t you? You brought my father here,” he accused her savagely, taking her by the forearms and shaking her. When he saw that tears were brimming in her eyes, he dropped his hands and paced in front of her on the bank.

She’d been near tears for days, ever since she’d awakened in her own bed, alone, in the steamboat, where he’d deposited her sleeping form after their extraordinary night of lovemaking. She hadn’t been able to understand his resistance to sleeping with her again, and he’d refused to explain. Sometimes the fewer words said the better. But now she’d forced a reaction from him.

“This time your meddling has gone beyond the limits of human decency. How could you do this to me?”

“Etienne, I sent a letter to your father when I feared for your safety. I thought it was best. Can’t you see—”

“No! Can’t you see that I don’t want you meddling in my life? Can’t you see that I don’t want you in my life at all?”
I don’t mean it, I don’t mean it. I desperately want you in my life
, he said silently, but his tongue was too twisted with fury to let the sentiments escape.

She inhaled sharply and staggered backward, clutching her stomach.

There was no more time for words then. He would have to apologize later.

“Papa.” Saralee came running forward and threw herself into his arms. “We was so worried about you. Me and Blossom made all your favorite foods, every day this week. Abel ran away to Nawleans ’cause his mama was comin’. And, oh, I’m so happy you came home safe.” She gave him a big wet kiss on the mouth, then leaned over to give one to Harriet, too. Before he could blink, she skipped off with Lance trotting slowly behind. Was this the same shy daughter he’d first met less than a month ago?

“
Etienne!
” A young girl of about fifteen came barreling down the incline toward them, blond curls blowing askew, her green cambric gown billowing in her wake. Before he had a chance to digest that it was his sister Melanie, whom he hadn’t seen since she was five, she was hugging him warmly, mindful of his one arm in a sling.

It was hard for him to understand all her jabbering about school and suspensions and piano lessons and what a brute he was for never writing, because by now his other brothers and sisters surrounded him. Scarlett, a stunning brunette with creamy skin, wore a riding outfit that showed off a form that must drive the young men of California mad. She was equally exuberant in her welcome, but she chastised him for never inviting her to come visit him at Bayou Noir. “I’ve waited all these years to marry because I’ve wanted to meet a Southern gentleman,” she confessed. “Ah’ve even been practicin’ a So’then drahl.”

Then there was Rhett, twenty-four years old now and bearing a strong resemblance to his mother Selene, even with his dark mustache. Rhett shook his hand, then pulled Etienne into a bear hug from which he couldn’t escape if he’d wanted to. “Where’ve you been hidin’, you dumb son of a bitch?” He’d been fourteen when Etienne had left and was his closest friend, next to Cain and Abel. “It was real
nice of you to leave me at the ranch to help Papa while you went gallavantin’ all these years.”

The familial assault continued. A more somber Ashley, who at twenty was studying law at Harvard, came up then. He wore a staid suit and sharply pressed shirt. Etienne made the first move, looping an arm over his brother’s shoulders and squeezing him against his side. “You look as if you could use a little Loo-zee-anna sunshine to melt your starch, Ash,” he teased.

His brother grinned at him. “And you look as if you could use a little starch to iron out your rough edges.”

Tara, at nineteen and already the mother of two sons, wagged her finger in his face. “You are the most despicable beast to have stayed away so long. Make sure you don’t ever do it again.” Then she kissed him and introduced him to her husband Harrison Beech, a farmer, who nodded and quickly ran off after his rambunctious two-year-old twins, who were heading for the stream.

There was nothing left to do then but go up to the house. With a heavy heart, Etienne moved slowly upward, dragging one reluctant foot after the other.

At first, his father merely glared at him. Lord, how he remembered that glare! When he was five and bared his bottom at Selene. When he was nine and showed his private parts to Ellie Mae Morgan. When he was twelve and…

His father stepped off the porch and began to move toward him. The glare disappeared, replaced with a strange, vulnerable softness. If he didn’t know better, Etienne could swear there were tears in his father’s eyes. Or were the tears in his own eyes?

Halfway up the oak alley they both stopped, although there were still a good three paces between them. His father had aged these past ten years. Wrinkles bracketed his eyes and mouth. Dark shadows etched his eyes.

“You look like hell,” his father growled, taking in his cuts and bruises and broken arm.

“Likewise.” he growled back.

The silence grew like a palpable presence between them.

Finally, Etienne started, “You shouldn’t have come—”

“I shouldn’t have come,” his father said at the same time.

More silence.

“Your…ah, friend…Harriet said I was too rigid in my ways,” his father said, clearing his throat and wiping the back of his hand across his eyes in a surreptitious sweep. “She had the temerity to say that I have a perfection complex.”

Etienne fought a grin. “She would say something like that.”

“But she’s wrong. Surely you never thought you had to earn my affection, as she suggested.”

“Papa, don’t do this,” Etienne protested, fearing where this conversation was headed.

His father put up a hand as if his words had to be said. “Surely, Etienne, even when we were at each other’s throats, you knew”—his voice broke—“you knew that I…that I loved you.”

“Damn!” Etienne muttered and scraped the toe of one boot in the dirt, unable to look his father in the eye. He really, really couldn’t handle this.
Damn you, Harriet! Damn you for your meddling! Damn you for backing me into a corner!

His father’s fingers dug into his upper arms, even the one in a sling, obliging him to make eye contact. “You didn’t know, did you?” his father cried. “Harriet was right. You didn’t know that I loved you unconditionally.”

Then his father hauled him into his arms. “You silly boy, how could you have ever doubted my love?”

Etienne couldn’t answer.
Because you doubted me
, he wanted to say, but it seemed, unbelievably, so unimportant now. Tears ran down his face, and he feared if he spoke, his words would come out as a sob. There was such a groundswell of emotion building and building inside him. One slip and the floodtide would come rushing out.

“Do you forgive me, Etienne?” his father asked finally, drawing back to study him.

“Me forgive you? Can you forgive me?” Moving backward, Etienne put a hand to his forehead and began to weep, loudly. His shoulders shook and he couldn’t control the trembling of his lips. Embarrassed, he tried to pull away from his father’s arms, which wrapped around him tightly. His father wouldn’t budge.

“No, my son, I will never, ever let you go now that I’ve found you again. Never.”

A short time later, they walked up to the house, arms hooked casually over each other’s shoulders. Selene and Reba and Rufus and Iris waited on the gallery to greet him, as well.

“How could two men be so dumb?” his father wondered aloud just before they arrived at the house.

Etienne shrugged, then chuckled. “Harriet would probably have a dumb-men joke to make at this point.”

“I already got one of her dumb-men jokes in her letter.”

“Well, be prepared. She has dozens of them. Dozens.”

Only then did he recall how furious he’d been with Harriet. And that he hadn’t seen her since that moment when he’d shaken her and told her he didn’t want her in his life. In a panic, he scanned the plantation grounds and the galleries of the house.

Harriet was gone.

On October 28, 1870, Harriet Ginoza sat in a private compartment of a New Orleans train bound for Chicago. For the first time ever, a person would be able to travel by rail from Louisiana to Illinois without interrupting the journey to take a steamboat. The passenger list had been filled days before. Outside on the railway platform, a brass band played in celebration of the momentous event.

Numb and beyond crying—she’d done more than enough of that the past nine days—Harriet stared straight ahead. Filled with an overwhelming sense of loss, Harriet was oblivious to the pomp surrounding her. She just wished the train would get started so that she could begin to get her life back in order again.

I don’t want you in my life at all
. Etienne’s words rang in her head and stabbed at her heart. She would never forget them.

There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that once the train passed onto the bridge…at the exact spot where her 1997 train had derailed…she’d be back in the future. Life
would go on for her in 1997, and for those she’d left behind in the past.

She felt only a slight twinge of guilt over her impromptu departure from Bayou Noir. After Etienne had issued his cruel declaration to her and been engulfed in the warmth of his reunited family, Harriet had exchanged a few quick words with Blossom, then asked the black man who’d rowed them from Morgan City to take her to New Orleans.

No one had even noticed her leaving.

And no one had come after her.

Harriet hadn’t gone to Simone’s when she reentered the Crescent City, although she knew that Abel was still there. Instead, she’d rented a room in a small hotel near the train depot, waiting for the days to pass in increasing misery.

She should be happy to have this nightmare end. She should be looking forward to all her modern conveniences. She should already be planning the new books that would practically write themselves.

If only he’d said he loved me. If only he’d asked me to stay
. She obsessed endlessly with this “if only” game, but the bottom line was that she truly didn’t know what she would have done in that circumstance. And it was a moot point because what he’d said, instead, was,
I don’t want you in my life at all
.

She’d left a letter for him at her hotel, to be mailed after her departure. Over and over, she’d rewritten the words, wanting them to be just right. In the end, she’d settled for a lighthearted message:

“All Aboard!” the conductor yelled as the steam engine blew clouds of black, sooty smoke all over the station area.

Harriet planned to lie down and sleep once the train was on its way. When she awakened, she fully expected to be back in her century. But first, she took one last look out the window at 1870 New Orleans.

Then she did a double take.

Lined up along the platform, waving and sobbing, were James and Selene Baptiste, all of Etienne’s brothers and sisters, Cain and Abel and Simone, even Blossom. Oh, my God! How did Blossom get to New Orleans in her condition? Everyone was waving at her and yelling, “Good-bye,” the men with tears glistening in their eyes, the women crying openly.

For me?
Harriet questioned with confusion. Then she began to cry, too. And once she let one whimper out, the floodtide of sorrow broke loose.

“Well, Lordy, darlin’, is that how you greet your husband-to-be?”

Harriet jerked upright and saw Etienne leaning against the frame of her open compartment door. He wore a dark
suit, crisp white linen shirt, and new spit-shined leather boots—“widow-bait” clothes, Abel would call an outfit like this. His dark hair had been recently trimmed and parted down the center. On his nose was perched a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles.

He grinned roguishly at her inspection.

At his side stood Saralee, equally dolled up in a blue calico gown with tons and tons of white lace ruffles, white stockings and black patent-leather shoes. A huge blue bow tied her hair back off her face. With one hand, Saralee held tightly to her father’s hand, and with the other hand, a basket that undoubtedly contained Lance.

“Tsk-tsk, Harriet,” Etienne clucked at her. “Were you really going to leave without saying good-bye?” There was an odd vulnerability in his clear gaze that Harriet didn’t understand.

“I…I left a letter for you,” she stammered.

“I got it.” He patted his breast pocket. “The mail packet was just leaving when we arrived this morning.” He leaned forward, and she thought he was going to whisper something to her. Instead, he blew in her ear and said, “Whoo-whoo!”

She arched a brow at him.

“I was fresh out of snakes.”

“Etienne, what’s going on?”

“Papa says we’re takin’ an adventure ride with you,” Saralee blurted out, then glanced up at her father for approval.

He nodded.

Harriet’s pulse quickened. She put her fingertips to her lips to stop their quivering.

“We’re coming with you,” he said simply.

With those words, Harriet realized why Etienne’s family was crowded outside on the platform, weeping. He was leaving them, never to return.

“For me?” she choked out.

“For you.”

She stared at him incredulously, her heart in her throat. “You would give up everything you know…family and friends…for me? Why?” The enormity of his sacrifice staggered her.

The slow smile that crept across Etienne’s lips was glorious. Then he shrugged. “I love you, stupid.”

Harriet put her face in her hands and began to wail. Rocking from side to side, she let out all the pent-up emotion she’d been bottling up for days
…no, years
, she amended.

“Shh, don’t cry,
chérie
,” Etienne soothed, dropping down onto the bench seat next to her. “We won’t come with you if you’d rather we didn’t. I just wanted you to know…I just wanted you to know that you mean more to me than anything else.”

“You big dope!” she sputtered out between sobs as she threw herself into his arms and kissed his cheeks and mouth and forehead and hair. In between kisses, she kept berating him, “Dumb, dumb, dumb…he waits till I’m on the train…dumb, dumb, dumb…”

“Well, actually, honey, I did a dumb thing. I decided to go to Washington to demand my money from President Grant, and halfway there…well, I hit myself on the head and said something like, ‘You big dope! You’ve got somethin’ worth lots more than money about to slip through your fingers. So I hightailed it back here.”

“Oh, Etienne,” she said and began to sob and kiss him and sob and kiss him again.

“You’re steamin’ up my glasses, honey,” he told her, then chuckled. “Do you want me to take them off?”

“Last call! All aboard who’s comin’ aboard! Last call fer Memphis, St. Loo-ie and Chi-ca-go!”

Harriet’s heart thundered as she stood abruptly and grabbed Etienne’s hand. “Hurry!” She took Saralee’s hand as well.

“Wh-what?” Etienne asked as she ran down the corridor, pulling them with her.

Just before the conductor was about to draw up the foldaway steps at the end of the train, she said, “Etienne, let’s go home…to Bayou Noir.”

He blinked hard against the wetness that instantly filled his blue eyes. “Are you sure?”

“Etienne,” she said softly, cupping his cheek with one hand, “if you’re willing to give up everything for me, it’s the least I can do for you. And do you know something, honey? It’s no sacrifice at all.”

Saralee let out a little whoop of joy.

Then, as Etienne hauled her against one side and Saralee against the other, they jumped off the train, which was already chugging into motion. They were immediately enfolded in the rejoicing embrace of Etienne’s family, but not before Harriet murmured a silent prayer.

Thank you, God, for sending me this man to love. He’s a savage, to be sure, but sweet, sweet, sweet
. Then she smiled up at Etienne—her sweeter, savage love.

Sometimes fantasies, like prayers, did come true.