Feast of All Saints (91 page)

And if she did not need me, if she did not need me, Marcel was walking fast through the corridor, if she did not need me, the tears welling in his eyes, if she did not need me, I would kill that man now! Damn you, damn you all to hell, all of you, he didn’t see the immense stairs before him, the great drifts of men and women moving under the rotunda, as his feet carried him down, faster and faster toward the front doors. That roar was rising in his throat, that roar escaping through his teeth. And she won’t even talk to me, won’t even see me, how can I tell her that I am here now, that I’ll care for her, she must let me see her, and Dolly says they can’t let her alone, that with a knife, with a scissors, with the splinter of a mirror…Marie, Marie! I’ll take care of you, I am here! He stopped in the very center of the immense lobby, the crowd blinding and confusing him, he did not know where he was. He could not see the doors. Dolly said maybe in a week, maybe in a month, she had screamed when Dolly said Marcel was there! Marie, Marie, he whispered, he was moving belligerently forward, he could smell the rain in the street, he felt the draft from the open doors. “Promise me you will not try to do anything,” Christophe had said. “What in the name of God,” he had answered, “can I do!” Marie, please! She had screamed when Dolly said his name.

He stopped suddenly. It was raining all around him, the street ran with mud, he was on the curb. And there was the undertaker’s shop across the street from him, the rain streaming down the windows, streaming over the carefully inscribed letters: LERMONTANT. She tried to cut her wrists, she tried to cut her throat, she broke a glass, a mirror, she screamed when she heard his name. “I won’t let her come to the slightest harm.”

“Are you going to bury my sister!” Marcel leered at those windows, eyes glazed, the street a lumbering procession of carts through which the letters flashed, LERMONTANT. “You were going to marry her, are you going to bury her!” He had moved forward without willing it,
“Promise me you will not do anything.” “What in the name of God can I do!”

“Are you going to bury her!” he shouted at the windows rising up before him, the black curtains on their gold rods. And suddenly he pitched forward, elbow, shoulder slamming into the glass, the glass shivered, then he heard the loud crack, the crash as it split and fell shattering around him, the giant heavy pieces coming down on him, slicing through the leather of his boots. “Are you going to bury her, bury her!” the roar came through his clenched teeth. The crowd was pressing on him, the wind whipping the black serge curtains, the door pulled back, its bell jangling, Placide rushing at him, “No, Michie, no Michie, Michie, don’t.” He had Marcel by the arms, Marcel reaching for the jagged pieces still stuck in the frame, while above at the window of his room in the St. Louis, Vincent Dazincourt stood behind the glass staring numbly down at Marcel in the street.

It was Felix who managed to get Marcel home. He had rushed down from the hotel and taken him quickly by means of an iron grip out of the thickening crowd. Placide had his hands full with the broken window and, to be sure, the police were on their way. But as they entered the stone-cold parlor of the little Ste. Marie cottage, Felix tightened his hold on Marcel. The place was deserted, had been deserted for days. A damp musty smell pervaded all as if doors or windows had been open to the rain, and as Felix’s eyes picked the indefinite shape of the furnishings out of the gloom, he saw the little shelves were barren of their bric-a-brac, the candles gone from the mantel. However, the scuttle still held coal. “Now, stop that, Michie!” he said to the young man whose slight frame stiffened in his grip. “I got to find something now to bind those hands.”

However, quite suddenly, he felt the boy’s struggling cease, and he saw the cause of it, that there was a woman sitting at the dining-room table in the icy gloom and she had risen, a silhouette against the dim rain on the panes.

“What’s the matter with those hands?” came the voice. It was that one, Michie Vince’s Anna Bella, well, thank God.

“Cut clear to the bone, that’s all,” Felix said. “Breaking down the undertaker’s window, and the glass like to cut clean through his boots, too.”

“You had better get out of here,” Marcel said thickly, sitting down heavily in a chair by the grate. “Go on, get out of here, before your white planter finds out you’re here.”

Anna Bella regarded him calmly. “Felix, you know there’s pillowcases back there somewhere, just tear one of those pillowcases up, don’t matter whether it’s a good one or not,” she said. “Let me see your hands, Marcel.” She dropped down on one knee in front of him.

“Anna Bella, go.”

“Seems like you haven’t heard then,” she said. “No, I guess you haven’t since I asked Michie Christophe not to tell you, and since I made Richard promise he wouldn’t tell you, and I never wrote to you and told you myself.” The cuts weren’t deep, but they were bleeding wildly. “Felix!” she cried out.

She couldn’t know that the slave was standing aghast in the wreck of the back bedroom, surveying the broken lamp, the kerosene that had sunk into the carpet and eaten the wax from the floor. The windowpane was broken out, the mirror cracked and dark smears of blood streaked the carpet’s gray flowers that writhed beneath the bed’s fancy skirts. He pulled the pillow from beneath the coverlet and brought the case to her. Women knew how to tear cloth better, they found some weak spot, nipped it with their teeth. And then…as he bent to shovel the coal in the grate he heard the sharp rip.

“I got to go now, Missie,” he said a moment later when he had the fire started, and he could see Marcel was sitting quietly as she bandaged his hand.

“Ah!” she let out a little groan as she climbed to her feet. The fire was quickening with the few sticks he had placed under the coals.

“Where you going, Felix,” she asked, “back up to the St. Louis Hotel?”

He nodded. That’s where he is, Missie, was what he knew he was saying.

“You tell your master one thing for me,” she said. “You tell him Anna Bella will be praying for him tomorrow, that she’s been praying for him all along.”

“I’ll tell him afterward, Missie,” he said. “So as not to worry him one way or the other.”

She smiled.

She saw him out and shut the door.

For a long time she merely watched Marcel who was sitting there with the palms of his hands wrapped in white. Then she came around again in front of him and dropped down slowly, sitting under her voluminous skirts on her heels.

“You want to hold on to me?” she whispered. “Just for a little while?”

He shook his head. But he was losing control again. “I want to kill them,” he was barely able to articulate. “I want to kill them all.”

There was nothing to do but wait. Perhaps there was food in the back kitchen, but it was bolted from the inside. And some bits of fruit which she had found, lovely hothouse peaches almost too ripe, he simply let lie there where she had cut them and arranged them on a plate. The bread was old, the wine as good as ever, and he drank a
little of that from time to time as he watched the fire, and the clock above it, its painted face showing the hour of six, then seven, and eight. Her breasts were heavy with milk, so now and then, secretly she pressed her arms against them, as if she were merely clasping her hands and stiffening, he would never guess. While meantime, back at her little house in the Rue St. Louis, Idabel, that sweet young slave girl she’d bought from the mart in the Rue Canal, was taking good care of little Martin with cow’s milk and a sugar tit.

It had been five months since she had seen Michi Vince, five months since he had walked out her door, and five months since his lawyers had come round to tell her she must put her affairs in their hands, that there would be regular deposits for her at the bank. But she had led an independent life from then on, managing her own money, thank you, Monsieur. And drawing on the small pension left to her by Old Captain and the remnants of her father’s property, she seldom touched the money Michie Vince left for her on account. Once it occurred to her to take it out, and redeposit it in her son’s name. But she had never brought herself to do that, and the fact was, as the months passed and the love for Michie Vince and the longing for Michie Vince were alchemized totally into pain, she didn’t think of little Martin as Michie Vince’s child anymore.

And it seemed at times when she woke in the night thinking of him, wanting him, that she clung to the misery of missing him because it shut another worse suffering out. If he was gone forever, if he was never coming back, then she would want Marcel again, Marcel, whose dreams had been shattered, Marcel, who was bitter and penniless and wouldn’t be Michie Rudolphe’s poor relation, and who would suffer again when he learned that his walk to
Bontemps
had forced Michie Vince out of her life. But he hadn’t done it, really. She had done it, the night she had not gone to Michie Vince when he stepped into that room. When he stood silently in her parlor waiting for the slightest word. Often, so often, she had thought of those moments, and one image only would illuminate for her the reason for her silence: it was that of the little baby in her arms.

Now all such personal considerations had left her. They had been obliterated in her for days. She thought of nothing so simple and so self-serving as she sat still in the little dining room, her hands clasped, watching the tall man by the fire, this man whose height had so astonished her when Felix had brought him in, this man whom Marcel had become. And who was the boy, Marcel, very much still. She was thinking listlessly and morbidly, rather, of Marie Ste. Marie shivering and sobbing they said with Dolly Rose behind closed doors. And lamps everywhere in Dolly’s room burning all night long because Marie couldn’t endure the dark, Marie who just kept crying and wouldn’t eat
the slightest morsel of food. She had driven her hand right down into the water pitcher, feeling all around, before she would even trust the clear water which she then held to the light. Marie who at the sound of her brother’s name had put her hands over her ears and begun to scream.

And Richard, she was thinking of Richard, too, locked in that attic bedroom with its barred windows on the roof, trying again and again to break that cypress door. “Did you hear,” Marie Anais that pretty quadroon had said, “they tried to go in last night, he knocked his father to the floor. Took all three of the Lermontant men to hold him, even the old grandpère, but they got him locked up again.”

And Michie Vince, what about Michie Vince, who just might get killed at dawn? Yesterday she had been crying over all of it, bawling, her rosary beads in her hands. And at some indeterminate hour—she had never thought to look at the clock—she had felt a dread so palpable, so sudden, and so abysmal that she had cried out. She had risen, frozen for a moment, staring into the air. And then rushing to little Martin’s crib, grabbed him up in her arms. But he was all right, little Martin, sleepy, glad to be against her breast. Yet the sense of danger was all about her, hovering like a presence unseen. And three hours had passed before they came to tell her, her neighbor, Madame Lucy, and then pretty Marie Anais from the cottage across the street: Michie Vince had just fought a duel with Alcee LeMaitre, the son of a wealthy planter of the same parish as himself, and it was LeMaitre who had fired the first shot, singeing the hair right from Michie Vince’s temple; then Michie Vince had taken his turn. Only then had that sense of danger dissipated, and only then had Anna Bella known that as glad as she was for Michie Vince, she was trembling with relief that this dread that had so gripped her had not signaled a threat to Marcel.

Now what was there to say to him? What was there to do? He might sit all night as he was sitting now, could she persuade him perhaps to come with her to her own house in the Rue St. Louis, or was it best just to stay here at his side?

She rose now wearily but quickly, and commenced to straighten the rear rooms. She swept up broken glass with the torn pillowcase, and brought a lighted lamp back with her to the parlor where she found him unchanged.

But just when her heart was sinking and she was not sure he wanted her there, he put his hand out and slipped it into hers. She looked at the bandage which was white still, clean. And resolved to sit there for as long as he needed her, even if it were the whole night.

There was a knock at the door. It opened before she could even rise, and Christophe came, without a word, into the room. Marcel’s eyes never moved from the fire.

“Did you talk to her?” he asked quietly.

“She won’t see me. It’s too soon,” Christophe said. “It’s just too soon.”

Marcel merely sighed.

“And you,
ma chère
, how are you?” Christophe said gently. And reaching out took Anna Bella by the shoulders. He kissed her on both cheeks. “I’m very glad to see you here.”

“Michie Christophe, this boy’s got to eat something, I figure, though you’d never get him to allow that, if you just help me get that kitchen open, I’m sure there’s yams or something inside.”

Christophe nodded.

Neither of them took note of Marcel’s slight alteration of expression. The bolt on the outside of the kitchen was simple, you could lift it with one hand.

“That shouldn’t be any problem,” Christophe said, and having started to peel off his leather gloves, he put them back on.

“No, it’s locked from the inside, we’ve got to pry it, get a fence post…” Anna Bella explained. She had already started for the back door.

“Locked from the inside?” Marcel murmured. “Locked from the inside?”

“You just sit there, rest yourself, don’t start those hands to bleeding…” Anna Bella said.

“But you can’t lock it from the inside unless you’re in it,” Marcel said. And the three of them were struck suddenly and silently by the same thought.

Marcel rose. His eyes narrowed, his jaw set.

“Now, don’t…don’t do anything wild or crazy!” Anna Bella whispered. “If she’s in there, she’s drunk.”

“She’s in there!” he said and started for the back door.

They had caught up with him before he reached the kitchen and it was true, the heavy rough-hewn wooden door was shut tight. Rain was coming down in silver needles all around them, blown directionless by the wind. Christophe drew a knife from his pocket and popped open a long blade. He was able to pry the wood loose just enough to get a good grip on it with his hand.