Little Gale Gumbo (9 page)

They circled close to see what lay beneath.

Josie squinted. “Is that . . . Canada?”

“It says Quebec,” announced Dahlia proudly, as if she had meant to choose it. “It's French.”

“French,” marveled Camille softly.

“Will there be Creoles there?” asked Josie, tugging her thick red braid over her shoulder and twisting the knotted end. “Like you, Momma?”

Camille felt certain of her answer. “I don't see why not.”

They returned to the courtyard to deliver the glorious news to Lionel and Roman, relieved and eager, imagining a place that would be just like home.

 

They would be quite disappointed. At least at first.

The farther north they went, the less color they saw, in both the people and the landscape. Stark white churches and modest homes, sprawling textile mills and open fields spotted with lumbering cows. Worst of all, the air grew increasingly chilled. Soon their breath bloomed in front of them when they stopped off at rest areas, their nostrils glued shut with every inhale.

Sitting in the bus station in Portland, Maine, waiting for the next leg of their journey, Camille wondered if Canada would be different. How could they hope to find anything as welcoming as the tropical richness of their home when the farther north they traveled, the chillier it grew? Already there was snow on the ground outside the station, pocked brown clumps of it.

They had dressed poorly, Camille realized, looking around at the other waiting passengers in their bulky layers. They may have looked cumbersome and clumsy, but they were warm. Much warmer than she and the girls in their thin jackets and thinner stockings.

They would have to amend their grand contract.

Camille gathered the girls together over hamburgers at the diner across the street and made an announcement.

“I think we should stay here,” she said. “If we go much farther, I don't know if we'll survive till spring. There could be this sort of weather year-round in Quebec, for all we know.”

The girls looked at each other, biting at their chapped lips.

“Where's here?” asked Josie.

“Portland,” said Dahlia. “Maine.”

“Not Canada?”

“Not quite.”

Back in the bus station, Camille found a display of brochures highlighting area attractions and picked up one for Little Gale Island. She brought it back to where the girls sat in the waiting area and presented it.

“It's not far,” she said. “A ferry ride across the bay. We could just try it. See if we like it.”

“Let's,” said Dahlia, rising to her feet and pulling her sister up with her.

Josie just nodded, her attention diverted suddenly by a pair of whispering old women who were gesturing to Camille's ankle-length painted velvet coat and her purple beret: Josie's first real proof that their assimilation might be tricky, no matter where they ended up.

 

Josie and Dahlia had taken the ferry plenty of times across the river to Algiers, but this ride was different. For one thing, it was cold. Freezing. The wind off the water cut through their cotton and scraped at their skin. Their toes prickled, nearly numb in their sneakers, their bare fingers pulled up inside their cuffs. If their mother felt the cold, she wasn't showing it. Camille stood calmly beside them, chin up, facing the frigid view, her fine features fixed in an expression of serenity and quiet determination, her hazel eyes flashing.

When they stepped off the ferry onto the town landing, the trio felt as if they'd landed on the moon. All around them, islanders marched head down against the icy evening air, wrapped like packed china in scarves and hats with earflaps, thick gloves, and boots fattened with woolly linings.

Even the smells of the island were different, Josie thought, drawing in a long, cold breath: smoky, salty air, burning wood, and gasoline. No curling vines of star jasmine with tiny white blossoms so fragrant you might walk off the curb from their scent. They would no longer hear the click of the streetcar, the wail of a jazz band spilling out of open bar doors into the humid night, or the electric whir of the cicadas in the oak trees. Cicadas couldn't possibly live in such a frigid, quiet place. Josie was certain of it.

But none of that mattered. This was their home now, they agreed silently as they climbed the steep trail of Ocean Avenue, arms linked to steady one another when they slid on the slick slush that dotted the street. They found an inn at the top of the hill where the wallpaper was spotted with sailboats and seashells, and they inquired about a room. They had some available, the proprietor admitted begrudgingly, forced to do so when a dozen room keys hung in plain view. But there was a three-night minimum, and housekeeping didn't come but twice a week, and, oh, yes, there was an extra charge for a third person. Camille smiled pleasantly and handed over enough to cover the next four days.

They unpacked their few belongings into a dresser with crooked drawers and left to explore the town, settling eventually on a restaurant with short red curtains and paintings of whaling ships on the wall. The waitress was young and cheerful and wore her hair parted down the middle. When Camille explained that they had only just arrived from New Orleans and were looking to stay, the girl remembered overhearing Ben Haskell in the restaurant just a few hours earlier, bemoaning his lack of a tenant. His vacancy had been going on two years, she said, and he was worried that the plumbing would fail if left unused too long. While the waitress wrote Ben's name and address on a napkin, she said something, almost too quietly but not quite, about how awful it was, the way that Midwestern woman had run off and left him with a young boy to raise on his own. Camille took the napkin, folded it neatly, and slipped it in her coat pocket.

Back in their room, bathed and warm and tucked in, the girls in the beds, their mother in a roll-away between them, Camille said they would pay a visit to Ben Haskell in the morning.

The island seemed like a pleasant place, Camille said, a safe place to stay through spring. As soon as they found an apartment, she'd phone the beauty parlor and tell them where to forward her last check. Besides, she had her cards and her candles and her oils. She could put an ad in the local paper, give readings and work spells like her mother used to. Make them some money, and by summer they could move on.

Of course, she would never leave.

Eight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ben Haskell leaned his head under the kitchen sink, squinted through his glasses at the hissing drainpipe, and cursed quietly. He loved the old house, but it never ceased to exhaust him. As a growing boy tracking mud through the maze of its cold, colorless rooms, he'd imagined its frame as stone, having been oblivious to the weekly battles his father had waged, and usually lost, with the cottage's decaying parts. When Ben had inherited the house sixteen years ago, he had never imagined the patchwork of repairs he'd find behind its plaster walls, but of course, he'd not been in a position to refuse it. He and Leslie had needed a home, and Matthew had been due any day.

But for years after Leslie had left them, Ben had wrestled with the useless belief that it was the house that had driven his wife away; that if only he'd given her a new house, with tidy electrical wires threaded through perfectly drilled studs, and gleaming new pipes tucked neatly under even floorboards, toilets that emptied after every flush and sinks that drained, then maybe she would have stayed, and for months afterward the house suffered the blame. Ben could still recall the time Matthew had toddled from his bed at three in the morning to find his father berating a loose stair spindle that had slipped from its joint for the umpteenth time. Thirteen years later, Ben finally understood that it wasn't the house's fault that Leslie was gone, that some wounds didn't close neatly or heal cleanly. Just like houses.

Climbing to his feet to find a wrench, Ben heard a knock on the front door. At first he wasn't entirely sure he'd heard anything other than the house's typical moans and creaks, but when it came again, sharp and clear, he wiped his hands on the sides of his work pants and walked to the foyer. A flurry of possible visitors rushed across his brain as he reached for the knob—salesmen, a neighbor, the mailman—but when he opened the door and saw the trio on his front porch, he blinked in surprise. The woman was slight in build under layers of brightly colored fabric, with a dome of tight brown coils and skin the color of coffee with milk. Of the two girls on either side of her, the older was clearly her child, with her equally buoyant curls and dark, almond-shaped eyes, but her frame was heftier, rounder. The younger girl was red haired and slender, with peachy freckled skin and ice blue eyes.

“Good morning,” the woman said.

Ben glanced at the two girls. The redhead smiled shyly. The darker one looked like she was sizing him up.

“Morning.” He straightened his glasses, leaving a thumbprint of grease on the edge of one lens. “Can I help you?”

“I do hope so. I'm looking for Benjamin Haskell.”

“I'm Ben.”

“Oh, wonderful.” The woman held out her hand, a chorus of bracelets colliding at her wrist, nearly lost under a fluttering sleeve. Ben took her hand carefully, her fingers like pussy-willow branches in his rough palm. “My name is Camille Bergeron and these are my daughters, Dahlia and Josephine. The waitress at the restaurant said you have an apartment for rent.”

“I do,” he said, his gaze moving between the three of them. “It's furnished, but it's small. Just one bedroom.”

“We're quite comfortable in small places, Mr. Haskell,” Camille said. “Unless you have some sort of occupancy code issue or some other reason why we can't rent it?”

Ben paused, uncertain. His last two tenants had been single people, young men. One had even owned a dog. Ben hadn't had a problem with that. Besides, an inquiry this late in the year was nothing short of a miracle. He wasn't about to turn away a prospective tenant. Especially not a single parent. Not that the woman's business was any of his concern. Ben had never made his tenants' business his own, and he wasn't about to start.

“No,” he said at last, “there's no issue of code.” He pointed behind them. “It's just up the stairs. I can show it to you if you'd like.”

She smiled. “Please.”

It would do just fine, Camille decided, running her fingertips over the dusty top of an empty dresser. No matter that the walls were as bleak as oatmeal and the rooms smelled of sour milk; the ceilings were high and the windows were tall and sunlight poured in. She could paint. She could bring in plants, paper lanterns, colorful tablecloths. She could light incense. She could make it feel like home.

“The stove can be tricky,” Ben said, twisting the knobs on the range. “The pilot goes out from time to time. The house is old and temperamental, but the water pressure is good and the heat works well enough.” He watched Camille wander around the perimeter of the apartment, the girls trailing close behind. “I did warn you it was small,” he said. “I'd understand if you've changed your mind, now that you've seen it.”

Camille stopped at the window and turned toward Ben, where he stood in the narrow opening between the kitchen and the living area, wondering for a moment whether Benjamin Haskell was of the same breed as the innkeeper, too clever to be outright discriminatory but not pleased with the idea of housing a Creole woman with two daughters.

Camille studied his eyes, a deep, soft brown behind his round glasses. He was really a pleasant-looking man, she thought. Not the sort who was so handsome you'd reel at first sight, but the kind whose nice looks revealed themselves over time. He had a kind face. Plenty of thick, sandy brown hair. A shapely nose. She guessed him in his late thirties, not much older than she was.