Deep Summer (8 page)

Judith couldn’t say anything. She wanted to cry. Her father took her hands gravely.

“You must pray the Lord to save you from pride, daughter,” he said, “living in such opulence as this.”

Judith was hurting all over with too much happiness. She could see herself mistress of this house, summoning her slaves with bells and queening it at that great table. That she could have come from the flatboat via the log cabin to this was too much to be borne. She snatched her baby out of the nurse’s arms and ran to the master bedroom and dropped on her knees by the bed. David was so soft and sweet in her arms; Philip had promised that her child would be lord of a kingdom, but she hadn’t been able to imagine anything like this. She tried without success to smother the sobs in her throat, and began to pray in broken little whispers.

“Please, God, help me to be good. Make me good enough to deserve everything—the big kitchen and slave-bells and glass in the windows. Make David a good boy and kind to poor people who haven’t got a palace like this to live in.”

Then she saw, crawling over the cypress floor as though they had as much right here as she did, a thin wavy line of ants. She shuddered and sprang up, and a grasshopper leaped out of a corner and watched her. She added another prayer.

“And please, Lord, help me not to call Louisiana a bug-hole where Philip can hear me.”

Before she had been in her new house a month Judith agreed with the proverb that the mistress of a plantation was the biggest slave on it.

She had to supervise the spinning, weaving and sewing, plan a flower-garden in front, and give dinners that were veritable banquets. Philip loved to entertain and by this time the circle of his friends had grown to include most of the important planters and business men on the Dalroy bluff. Judith had nine house-servants including Angelique, but they were never finished with what had to be done. Besides, the new ones spoke nothing but gumbo French and though she had picked up some French from Gervaise she was thankful to have Angelique as interpreter. But for Angelique, Judith wondered how she would ever have run her house. Angelique knew everything; how to dry bay leaves in the shade to make the powdered filé that seasoned okra gumbo, how to extract oil from pine to take out the sting of mosquito bites, and how to pile Judith’s hair over a frame to make the castle-like structures fashionable these days. Angelique showed her where to put piles of arsenic on the galleries to lessen the plague of grasshoppers attracted by the indigo around the house. It was Angelique too who advised that the beds be taken apart twice a year and the cracks painted with quicksilver beaten up with the white of egg.

“What’s that for?” Judith inquired.

“Bedbugs,” said Angelique succinctly.

“Oh my God,” said Judith. She wondered impatiently why decent people should try to live at all in Louisiana, which looked like such a paradise and wasn’t really a paradise for anything but bugs of one sort or another. But she painted the beds with frantic conscientiousness after that, and made the slaves in the quarters paint theirs so often that Philip said she was going to pauperize him with so much buying of quicksilver. The stuff was expensive, didn’t she know that—for it had to be imported from Europe, and since the American war started imports had doubled and tripled in price. To which Judith retorted tartly that if he’d stop spending so much money on French wines he’d have more to spend on keeping the house clean—did he want to wake up some morning and find vermin in David’s cradle? Philip asked if she wanted to serve nothing but domestic orange wine at her dinners, and nice people didn’t have bedbugs anyway, and Judith said that was because nice people took pains to keep them out, and Philip exclaimed that she was getting a little bit insane on the subject of bugs.

Judith, who was thoroughly angry by this time, snapped at him that if he had ever spent a night enduring not only childbirth but the added frightfulness of being eaten by ants and cockroaches he might be a little bit insane too. Philip went out and banged the door. She looked after him with a certain indignant satisfaction. That was a weapon she could always use against him. At that instant she was glad she had it.

But in the fall, when she found she was going to have another child, she remembered her first delivery with such horror that it was hard to make any pretense of bravery about facing another. She thought Philip was quite unsympathetic to be so frankly glad of it when she told him.

“What makes you so cross?” he asked her. “You don’t want to spend your life clucking over one baby, do you?”

They were in their room getting ready for supper. Judith twirled a little china snuff-box on the bureau with such force that she spilt some of the snuff. It blew up her nose and made her sneeze.

“I think you might at least say you’re sorry,” she retorted when she could speak again.

“But my dear sweetheart,” Philip exclaimed, “I’m not. I’m sorry having children is such a miserable business, but not half as sorry as I’d be if you were barren.”

“Oh, all right,” said Judith shortly. She replaced the cover of the snuff-box and added without looking up, “At least when this one is born I’ll have a roof over me.”

There was a pause. “Any time you decide to stop talking about that,” said Philip, “I’ll be grateful.”

She turned around impulsively and went to him. “I’m sorry, darling. I really am. Philip, I’m truly not as horrid as I sound.”

“I know it,” he said, and laughed down at her. “You’re—let me see, how old are you?”

“Seventeen in November.”

“Do you think you can learn to hold your tongue by the time you’re twenty?”

She nodded seriously. “I’ll try.”

After that she made up her mind to keep her temper and pretend to be tranquil, though she did not always succeed. She had so much to do! Besides attending to her own house and getting clothes made for the baby she tried to keep a supervising eye on housekeeping arrangements at Silverwood. She knew her father and Caleb appreciated her interest, but when the winter rains came and turned the roads into streaks of marsh she was afraid to travel, and had to send Angelique in her place. Angelique reported that Mark and Caleb were living comfortably, and were talking of building a moss house as soon as the worst rains were over.

“I wish to heaven Caleb would get married,” said Judith. “There ought to be a woman at Silverwood.”

Angelique chuckled. “Mr. Caleb will get married when he’s good and ready and not before. If I were you I shouldn’t be trying to give him any advice.” Angelique’s English was improving fast, and she was careful to avoid the dialect of most of the slaves.

David’s mammy brought him in, and Judith pulled him to her and kissed the top of his golden head. “Do you suppose I can possibly have another baby as beautiful as this one?”

“That’ll be the Lord’s doing, Miss Judith.” Angelique reached into her dress and took out a rabbit’s foot. “One of the girls at Silverwood sent you this. It’s the left hind foot of a rabbit killed in a graveyard on a Friday midnight. She says put it under the mattress after the pains start and you’ll come to a good delivery.”

“Thanks.” Judith laughed in spite of herself as she took it. “Angelique, do you believe that?”

“Why, I don’t know. It doesn’t hurt any to try it. She says you should wear it inside your clothes till the time comes.”

“Very well.” Judith tucked the rabbit’s foot into the bosom of her dress. “But don’t tell Mr. Philip on me. He doesn’t believe in anything he can’t prove.”

But Philip would have let her drape herself with a hundred charms if she had wanted to. He was occupied with affairs of his own.

Everybody had been talking that year about the rebellion on the seacoast, wondering how long it would last and if it would make much difference in Louisiana. The first echo of the rebellion sounded when the Spanish governor of New Orleans, frankly American in his sympathies, decided to annoy the Tories up the river by curtailing their trade. He announced that increased port duties would be demanded of boats from the English plantations.

The order roused a storm among Creoles and Tories alike. Being patriotic was one thing, as Gervaise’s brother Michel wrote her from New Orleans, but conducting trade was something else again, and since Spain and England were technically at peace Governor Unzaga was a blockhead to try to put New Orleans and West Florida into a state of war. The Creole traders could not live without Tory merchandise and equally the planters could not survive without a market, and neither of them would submit to having commerce choked by taxes. Let the boats come down as usual and if the governor interfered he’d have a little private war of his own to deal with.

Philip observed that this line of reasoning was too obvious to require comment. But when he loaded seven boats with indigo and said he was going to smuggle them to New Orleans himself, Judith could not help protesting.

“Suppose you’re caught?” she exclaimed.

“I’ve taken worse risks than this, honey,” Philip reminded her. “You attend to your own business.”

He came back from New Orleans triumphant. Judith received him in tearful relief.

“What happened?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” said Philip. “We unloaded the boats at night and got the stuff into the warehouses before daybreak. It will go out in duty-free Spanish vessels. Governor Unzaga’s a lamebrain. We didn’t even pay the regular wharf duty. By the end of spring there’ll be so much smuggling down the river he won’t even collect enough to keep the wharfs in repair.” Philip grinned. “It was rather fun.”

Judith shook her head and sighed. Philip found everything fun, particularly if there was danger in it, and possible consequences to herself and David if he had got himself hanged for smuggling had not entered his happy head. She was thankful, however, that Philip’s recklessness had brought him enough money to pay for the land he had bought from Walter Purcell. She insisted on this, though Philip wanted to let Walter wait while he used the money to buy her some extra house-slaves. But Judith had been taught debts were shameful and should not be allowed to run.

He was right about trade; before spring was over everybody was smuggling and Governor Unzaga was in despair. Philip made three more trips to New Orleans, smuggling his produce gleefully, and Judith managed to pretend a calmness she did not feel. She reminded herself grimly that if she had wanted a stiff-minded husband like her father or her brother Caleb she could have had one, and the glittering carelessness of Philip’s that exasperated her was the same quality that made her love him.

Whether it was the rabbit’s foot or not her second confinement was surprisingly easy. She asked Philip if he would let her name the baby Christopher Columbus. “I feel like Columbus,” she said. “Finding out a lot of new things in a new world.”

Philip said no son of his was going to be named Columbus, but she could call him Christopher if she wanted to. He wasn’t sure what she meant when she said marrying him was like voyaging into a new world, but when she asked if she might name the baby he had been afraid she was about to suggest Melchisedek or some other Scriptural atrocity handed down in her family, and he was glad to make a compromise. The profits on his smuggled indigo had outdistanced his expectations and he was so pleased with his skill at evading the Spanish taxes that he would have given Judith almost any concession she had asked.

Chapter Six

T
hough Mark Sheramy said smuggling was dishonest and refused to engage in it, he calculated his costs so nicely that he was able to squeeze out a narrow profit in spite of the wharf duties, and he built a small but comfortable moss-plaster house at Silverwood. In the second spring of the rebellion, when Christopher was nearly a year old, Caleb told Judith he wanted to go down to New Orleans to buy another consignment of slaves. Philip arranged passage for him on a boat belonging to his friend Alan Durham, an American settler who instead of planting his land had become a boatbuilder and sold the river traders flatboats and pirogues made of timber cut from his grant of royal forest. Alan went down to extend his market to New Orleans via the good graces of his French father-in-law.

Caleb wandered through New Orleans in half bewildered fascination. Such an enticing town it was, with the river at its front and at its back a palisade to keep out Indians—not of much use now, with most of the neighboring tribes either bribed or coerced into harmlessness, but the wall had been put there sixty years before when New Orleans was a timid huddle of huts. Caleb liked the muddy streets that seemed never to get dry—for mud crept up even between the cobblestones; and he liked to watch the mantilla’d ladies stepping from their sedan-chairs upon the cathedral threshold so the mud would not soil their shoes; and the carriages flaunting armorial ciphers on their mud-splashed doors. He liked the slave-market with its medley of languages, the shops where French wines and muslins crowded for space against belts of wampum and uncured furs from the trapping country to the southwest, and even with his stern Protestant soul he could not help liking the cathedral with its bells ringing over the Place d’Armes the call to prayer. Alan Durham laughed at him for preferring the streets to the taprooms, but Alan did not understand that Caleb was already drunk enough with the sights and smells and noises of the town.

On the third morning after his arrival while Alan was sleeping off his merrymaking of the night before, Caleb stood leaning against a date-palm in the Place d’Armes, watching the sun come up and pinken the boats beyond the levee. The cathedral bells were ringing, and he fancied that even in the square he caught a drift of incense, though it was probably nothing but perfume from a thick-blooming magnolia tree. Over the levee top he could see boats from foreign parts in quest of indigo. The sun tipped them with red and gold, and shimmered over the water to light the forest mass on the other bank.

Behind him in the cathedral there was music, and pious folk passed him on the way to mass, fruit-women from the market on foot and great ladies and gentlemen in carriages, or sedan-chairs carried by slaves. A girl ran past him with a flutter of white skirts. A moment later he saw her climbing the levee.

She stopped by a lemon tree in flower and pulled off the printed silk shawl she had worn over her head. Her back to him, she stretched out both arms and took a long breath, the sun twinkling along the silk fringe of the shawl. She had black hair piled up under a high comb, and the wind rushing from the river showed him a slim-waisted corsage above billows of white muslin. She spread her shawl on the damp grass of the levee and flung herself upon it where the lemon tree shaded her from the sun. Caleb started toward her and began climbing the levee slope.

If he had stopped for ten seconds to think he would probably never have done it, he realized later, for Creole gentlemen sharpened their rapiers for men who spoke to their sisters and daughters without proper introductions. At the moment, however, he had forgotten everything but how enchanting was the sight of a woman under a lemon tree. Not until she saw him and started up did he remember that he had no right to address her.

At the same time he recalled that he had no words with which to do it. He had picked up a smattering of French for trading purposes, but her mantilla suggested that she was Spanish. So he simply stood there, smiling his admiration.

The girl did not seem to be frightened. She supported herself with one hand while she regarded him with puzzled astonishment in her dark eyes. He observed that her narrow black eyebrows almost met over her nose, which was not beautiful, because it was dished and turned up a little at the end, but her mouth was warm and red like a strawberry and her complexion as flawless as a baby’s. Caleb caught himself wondering why when these Creoles were so careful to guard their women they let them wear dresses cut so provocatively low.

He said, “I beg your pardon, ma’am,” but he made no move to go.

The puzzlement did not leave her face, but she ventured hesitantly, “You—make—Angleesh, señor?”

“Why yes!” Caleb exclaimed in delight. “You speak English?” He sat down by her on the grass.

“Not so much good,” she said. She moved away an inch or two. “Who are you?” she asked.

“My name’s Caleb Sheramy.” He moved closer. “Honestly, I’m not going to bother you. But you were just so everlasting pretty—I couldn’t help speaking to you!”

She began to laugh. “Gracias. I mean thank you.”

“Please, can’t I stay just a couple of minutes and talk to you?” Caleb exclaimed. “I mean—well, I don’t live here, and I don’t know a soul in New Orleans.”

She laughed with more amusement than before, and looked him up and down appraisingly. Caleb was glad he had on his best black coat and a fluted linen stock. “You are so funny, you English,” she said. Her foreign accent was heavy but adorable, and when she laughed she puckered her mouth on one side so that all the laugh came out the other.

“We’re not funny really, not after you get used to us. Haven’t you ever known any English?”

“A few.”

“I’m not really English. I’m American. I come from Connecticut.”

“Where’s that?” she inquired. “Over the ocean?”

“No, up North.”

She turned her dark little head and looked, as though trying to see Connecticut along the current, and he observed that she was looking not up the river, but down.

“Not that way,” he said. “North.”

“But that’s North.” Then she laughed again. “You make like all strangers. They think we are crazy when we say the river goes the wrong way by New Orleans. It turns around.”

“It what? You mean it goes backwards?”

“No—so.” She made a mark with her finger in the folds of her shawl. “It makes—how you say—a bend.”

“Tell me what your name is,” said Caleb.

She looked down, playing with the fringe of her shawl.

“Dolores Bondio.”

“Spanish?”

“I was get born in Cuba.”

“You live here now?”

Dolores was braiding the strands of the fringe. “I live here since my mother and father die. I live with my aunt Juanita.”

“Is she strict? Would she get mad if she saw us talking?”

Dolores looked up. “She is most very strict,” she said confidingly. “She make me all the time stay by her. This morning I—I ran away. She is at mass. She think I am there too. I slip out. The morning is so beautiful and I do not like to be always go to church like a nun.”

Caleb scowled. “Do Catholics go to church every day?”

“The most pious Catholics. You are not Catholic?”

“No.”

“Who are you? Tell me about you. Where is Con—Con—I can’t say it.”

“It’s a long way off. It takes six or eight months to get there. But I don’t live there now. I live in West Florida.”

“Where is that?”

“It’s English Louisiana, on the east bank of the river above New Orleans. My father and I have a plantation.”

“Oh.” She smiled, the funny little puckery smile that put her mouth all on one side. “One of the English that got a piece of land from the king?”

He nodded.

“What makes you come to New Orleans? You are in this new American war?”

“No, I came down to get slaves. We haven’t enough to get the land clear.” He turned over on the grass, resting on his elbows and looking up at her piquant Spanish face. “Now tell me about you.”

There was a pause. Dolores turned up her hands with an eloquent Latin shrug.

“But I got so little to tell.” She looked down again, her lower lip thrust out ever so slightly, and it gave her face a petulant sadness. “I just live here—with my aunt and all my cousins.”

Her look of vague unhappiness made him suddenly sorry for her. “But aren’t they good to you, Miss Bondio?”

“They—Oh yes, they make good enough.” She laced her fingers in her lap and looked away from him, over the river.

Caleb impulsively covered her clasped hands with his. Dolores started and sprang up.

“I must go,” she said.

“No!” he cried. “Not yet!”

“Yes. My aunt will lock me up if she finds I was not at mass. Let me go. Please let me go,” she begged, for he was still holding her hands. “I must make a quick pass over the square and to the church to be there when she is done praying.”

He protested, but Dolores was drawing him down the slope. She had pulled one of her hands out of his and gathered up the shawl. “Please, señor, I must go!”

“But wait.” He held her at the foot of the levee. “I want to see you again. When can I see you again?”

“You must not.” She gave an apprehensive glance at the cathedral.

“You’ve got to let me see you again. Can’t you slip out? Tonight maybe?”

“Oh no! I can’t. Please—”

“Yes, say you can slip out. I like you so much—they can’t keep you locked up all the time.”

Dolores stopped trying to get away. She looked at the cathedral spires and back at him. “Would American girl do that?” she asked fearfully.

“Oh yes,” said Caleb with assurance.

“At sunset,” she whispered. “I will try to come for evening prayer. By the cathedral steps. Now let me go.”

She broke away from him and ran across the Place d’Armes, throwing her shawl over her head. Caleb watched her till she had disappeared in the shadows beyond the font of holy water.

He was waiting for her there long before sunset. She took so long to come he was afraid her aunt had looked back from prayers that morning to see them together on the levee, but as the last rays struck the spires he saw her come out of the alley between the cathedral and the Cabildo house where the government assembly met. Dolores came slowly, looking around as if she were afraid somebody she knew would see her. She was holding a black lace mantilla close as though to hide her face. Out of the alley behind her came a black woman in a red plaid dress.

He rushed to meet her. She turned and spoke to her attendant in Spanish and the woman went inside the church. Dolores looked up at Caleb, her eyes shaded by her mantilla.

“What do we make do now?”

“Can’t we go over to the square?” He took her arm. With her other hand she pulled the lace over her mouth and chin.

“No, no,” she whispered through it. “It is still light—if a friend of my uncle’s saw me in the Place d’Armes alone with a man—” she drew him back, under the arches of the Cabildo. “Here. Now we can make talk.”

They sat down on a wrought-iron bench by one of the gates to the building. The heavy columned arches hung over them, shutting out the sunset. Dolores let her black lace fall. In the dusk her face was pale like old ivory.

“Concepcion—she will make stay in the slave seats in yonder a long time—she is good,” Dolores whispered. She giggled. “My aunt Juanita, she say for why am I so pious all of a sudden like. I say I feel troubled about my sins.”

Caleb gave a little laugh. He held both her hands.

“I don’t believe you ever committed a sin in your life.”

“Oh, but I have,” she assured him. “Envy of my cousins with good dowries, rebellion in the heart against the good God for taking my father into heaven and leaving me poor, rebellion against my uncle for think he have found me a right husband—”

“A husband?” Caleb was unreasonably frightened. “Are you going to be married?”

Dolores nodded. “I must make marry or go in a convent. You see they got in me an extra girl.”

“A what?”

“It mean—well, my uncle and aunt got daughters, too many to make a dowry for me. So they find me a husband who will take me with small dowry—and I do not want him! He is old—he have bury three wife and he have already eight children but my uncle say he will be good to me and I will have a carriage. But I—” her voice had a little catch in it. “I do not want to make marry with old man that have three dead wife and eight live children!” Her words tumbled out fast, and her accent was so thick he could hardly understand her. “But I never make talk by myself with young man before this morning—or maybe you think I am not good girl because I run out on the levee with no duenna?”

And all of a sudden, as the sun vanished and the dark rushed up under the Cabildo pillars, Caleb found that he was holding her in his arms and kissing her, to his own delightful amazement. Dolores yielded for an instant, then she pushed herself out of his arms and sprang up, holding her mantilla tight with both hands.

“Madre de Dios! I should know what you would think—I am not like that!”

She had started to run away from him, but he caught her and held her.

“Dolores, you poor darling, I didn’t think anything of the sort! It’s just that you’re so lovely and so unhappy—please come back and tell me everything. Didn’t anybody ever kiss you before?”

She looked down. “No,” she said in a low voice.

“Please come back and sit down. Concepcion or whatever her name is, she won’t tell on us.”

After a moment she returned to the wrought-iron bench. For awhile she had very little to say, and though she was so luscious in the dark that he ached to kiss her again he did not dare. But at last she began to talk as though she trusted him. She told him her father had been sent to Havana by the king of Spain before she was born. They lived in a big house where they entertained diplomats from the three countries that were perpetually quarreling about the river valley and the islands beyond, and it was from them she had learned English and French besides her native Spanish. “But they say my English is much bad,” she apologized smiling.

“It’s adorable,” said Caleb. “Go on.”

Her father had died, she said, three years ago, and she had been sent to New Orleans where her uncle was a member of the Spanish Cabildo. He thought he was doing right by marrying her to an old man who would be kind to her, for what else could be expected for a poverty-stricken girl unless she went to the Ursulines?