Pamela Morsi (11 page)

Armand turned and walked away. Normally he
was a man of even temper, but he was fuming. Twenty years Father
Denis had lived here. Twenty years and he still did not understand
the first thing about them and their lives. The only thing that
mattered, the only thing that lasted, was the ties of family.

The invisible, unbreakable ties of
family.

Armand walked back to the cattle herd and
retrieved his horse. Most men were dismounted now, standing around
the cookstoves, eager for dinner. He spied his brother, laughing
and smiling, his talk animated and happy.

His conversant, once again, the lovely Aida
Gaudet.

Laron rolled over and immediately reached for
the woman beside him. The bedclothes were chilled. He opened his
eyes, surprised. The smell of breakfast was already in the air. It
was the middle of the week. He did not often visit her then, but
today was a special day and there was much work to be done.

Again last night they had waited and waited
for young Karl to go to sleep. When he finally had and they had
taken to bed themselves, their lovemaking had been strange and
strained. Something was wrong, very wrong. Karl was growing up and
being difficult. But there was more, much more. And Laron was loath
to face up to it.

As morning light filtered into the room, he
heard quick footsteps in the loft overhead. The children would be
down shortly. He jumped out of the warm comfortable bed and hurried
into his clothes. It was a bit of fiction that they portrayed, he
and Helga. They never allowed the children to see him in her bed.
And therefore they could pretend that the children would never know
that the two slept there together.

He was still shirtless and adjusting the knee
ties of his culotte as Karl appeared on the stairs.

The two looked at each other.

Laron nodded. "I hope you slept well," he
said. "There is lots of hard work to be done today."

The boy nodded, rubbing his neck as if it
ached.

Laron finished donning his clothing and
caught up to Helga at the fireplace. He leaned down to kiss her on
the cheek and then grabbed a basket for gathering eggs.

More footsteps sounded on the loft ladder as
Elsa and her baby brother hurried into the room.

"Good morning," she said to both of them. "It
looks to be another beautiful day. And a good one for rice, I
think. Much hard work today will make for full bellies this
winter."

The children looked upon the coming day's
work eagerly. They knew that they would be working, working very
hard. But working together as a family was much preferred over the
solitary chores that filled their everyday life.

Buckets and baskets were taken up all around
as the man and the children hurried to tend the hens and hogs and
the milking before breakfast. Young Elsa rushed to the outhouse
alone. The three males stopped in the weeds near the edge of the
yard to relieve themselves before beginning their chores.

The morning was a fair one. The chinaberry
tree at the north end of the house was already bright yellow,
foretelling a coming frost. The distant sky was bright with pink
clouds, pretty and predictable.

"It is going to rain tomorrow," Laron told
the boys.

He gestured toward the eastern horizon and
the boys noted the color.

"A bad storm? A hurricane?" Young Jakob
sounded almost excited.

They had reached the bank and as Laron bent
to fill his buckets he chuckled and shook his head.

"Just a rainstorm," he assured Jakob. "That
will be good to have now before cold weather sets in."

"Why?"

"If the grass is too dry when it gets a heavy
frost and then is thawed by warm rains it will rot," Laron
explained carefully and with respect. Karl and Jakob might be only
boys, but even boys, Laron thought, should expect to be spoken to
without condescension. "The pasture needs to be wet when it
freezes."

"But the cattle aren't even here," Karl
pointed out, his voice questioning and surly.

"They are around somewhere," Laron answered,
unconcerned. "And as long as there is grass they will not stray
far. Jakob, take this water to your mother. Karl and I will tend to
the chores."

The little fellow hurried back toward the
house, spilling nearly as much water as he managed to carry. An
inordinate amount of smoke was now drifting up from the chimney as
Helga started the fire.

She would warm the water for him to shave,
she would present clean clothes for him to wear, and she would fill
his belly with good hot food. She was like a wife. But she was not
his wife. She was his . . . his . . . even in thought he was
troubled by the word. She was his whore. The term stung him. She
was more to him, so much more.

He hadn't intended the relationship they had.
He was not raised to consider such unseemly conduct.

"A man's seed is not to be sown illicitly,"
his father had declared one long-ago afternoon as the two, along
with his brother three years his senior, set lines from their
pirogue.

"The marriage act outside of marriage is a
grievous sin and brings shame and ruination upon the man that
consummates it."

Laron had had very little understanding of
the marriage act or even how to consummate it. He was in fact a
little young for the talk being given, very near the age that Karl
was now. But his father, who was perhaps more rigid in his beliefs
than most, did not relish the necessary father/son discourse
required upon approaching manhood. On this occasion with his
youngest sons, he thought to let one talk do for the two.

"There may be temptations set before you," he
had told them. "But you must resist so that you would bring
yourself as clean and whole to your marriage bed as you would
expect of your bride."

"But if the women keep themselves pure, where
would these temptations come from?"

It was his brother who had asked the
question. Laron had had a similar thought, but was far too
embarrassed to voice the question.

"There are women, even among us, who can be
led into sin," his father answered. "A man intent upon a path of
evil can always find the way. You must resist the unsanctioned
desires of your body. Your reward will be much pleasure in marriage
without the guilt of sin."

Pleasure without guilt. That was a thing to
be sought after, Laron now knew.

Perhaps if his father had warned him about
German widows, but no. No warning could have prepared him for his
Helga.

The first time he'd seen up a woman's dress,
it had been hers. Of course, she'd been giving birth to little
Jakob at the time and truly there had been nothing sexual or
seductive about the sight.

Her screaming had literally terrified him. He
well understood the fear the little boy had shown when he'd coming
running toward him on the bank of the river. He hadn't understood
the boy's frightened words, but he'd recognized panic when he saw
it.

He'd followed Karl back to the cabin and
discovered the woman about to give birth. He had known about the
German who had lived there. He had seen the man a few times and
knew that he had a family. But it was said that the man had left
for points downriver. It had never occurred to Laron that he might
have left his wife and children behind.

He had been beside her while she gave birth.
He couldn't say that he'd helped her. He'd mostly just wiped the
perspiration from her brow and whispered coaxing endearments to
calm her screaming. When the child had arrived in his arms, it was
a miracle he could not believe. Perhaps he had begun to love her
right then.

He hoped that it was his concern for his
fellow human being and the hungry mouths of two innocent children
that had kept him coming back to that cabin. He hoped that that was
what it had been and not the occasional glimpse of pale female
flesh when Helga took the baby to nurse.

He had never allowed himself to touch her,
not even to brush against her accidentally. He just wanted to be
near her. And he believed that she needed him. He could hardly stay
away. Several days a week he headed up her bayou bearing stores and
game and meat.

He remembered the evening he'd brought her
the first of her guinea hens. He'd traded one of his brothers a
half-cured deer hide for the pair of them. If his brother had
wondered about his need for guineas he hadn't asked. Laron had
loaded the two in separate sacks as if they were fighting roosters
and carried them on the pirogue.

She had been delighted. Oooing and giggling
over them as if they were satin shoes or hair ribbons.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," she'd said
to him. It was the first French she had ever spoken, obviously
taught to her by her children.

He had been pleased to hear the sounds made
uneasily by her pretty lips.

She'd fixed him a wonderful meal. That was
one of the first things he had learned about her, that she was a
marvelous cook. He could bring her anything, woodcock, squirrel,
even possum and she could turn the meal into a dinner more luscious
than wild turkey and sweet potatoes. That night she'd fixed a soup
of fish with very strange but tasty bread. He'd never had such a
thing to eat, but he decided that he liked it. He liked it a
lot.

He had brought her coffee, but she knew very
little about it and made it more like a tea. He brewed it for her
as she got Karl and Elsa up to bed. The baby slept peacefully in
the basket she'd woven for him from salt-soaked reeds.

Later as they'd savored the dark rich coffee,
she suddenly seemed distracted and ill at ease.

Why should she not be? he had thought. The
little ones were all asleep. It was if they were completely alone
in the cabin. And it was not at all the thing for a woman to be
alone with a man who was not her husband.

He should go, he decided. But he lingered one
more minute. It was one minute too long.

"Thank you, thank you," she said again.

He shrugged as if it were nothing.

She couldn't sit still and got up to pace
before him momentarily, wringing her hands.

Her distress was evident. It was clear that
he should go.

"Madame Shotz—" he began.

She dropped to her knees in front of him. He
was startled. Was she going to pray? Was this some kind of homage,
kneeling to him to express her gratitude. It was not necessary. He
wanted to tell her that. He did tell her that. But of course, she
couldn't understand his French.

She moved closer to him, her teeth biting
down on her upper lip as if steeling herself for something painful.
With no warning she reached into his lap.

"Madame!" he'd said, rising to his feet in
shock.

Her hands were on him then, on the front of
his pants. Touching him there, there where he was already growing
to fit her hand.

And afterward they knelt together on the
cabin floor, his arms around her, laughing together.

And then he kissed her. She tasted of him and
herself and of the sin they had committed. It was a better taste
than even her cooking.

Laron smiled to himself as the tender memory
washed over him. He held the curtain aside and allowed Karl to
precede him into the cabin. They carried eggs and milk and were
hungry as bears.

Elsa and Jakob were helping their mother. Or
at least Elsa was; Jakob seemed to be more employed in laughing and
scampering about the room.

He and Karl emptied their buckets and poured
the milk through a straining cloth. Laron leaned more closely to
dip himself water from the big black pot that hung on the firehook.
Then using the punch on the end of the poker, he eased the hook
over the flames.

Helga was setting breakfast on the table. She
had already washed with last night's water, her hair carefully
braided and once more atop her head. She looked tidy and neat, and
Laron wanted to walk across the room and kiss her. But it was full
daylight and the children were there, so he did not.

"Beignets!" Jakob called out as if it were a
battle cry.

Helga had learned to fry the sweet Acadian
treat to please Laron, but her children enjoyed the hot, sugary
cakes as well.

"And eggs, too," his mother answered. "The
guinea hens have laid four this morning. That seems much abundance
for this family to share."

The word family caught momentarily in her
throat and Laron could not help but notice it. Something was wrong.
Something was very wrong.

"It is a wonderful day outside," little Jakob
announced to anyone who had not heard already. "A storm is coming.
Oh I wish, how I wish that after breakfast we could go fishing in
your pirogue?"

Laron shook his head. "Not today," he
answered. "Today we harvest that providence rice down in the swampy
bog. We've left it almost too long already. It's going to turn cold
soon and we might lose it altogether before I return."

Jakob nodded, not wholly disappointed.

But surprisingly Karl turned surly. "I don't
want to work in the rice," he complained. "I work here all week
every week, while you come and go as you please. It's your rice;
you should harvest it yourself."

The boy's attitude was more than
disagreeable; it was disrespectful, and Laron opened his mouth to
tell the boy just that. To his surprise, Helga unexpectedly
interceded.

"Perhaps Karl can borrow your pirogue and
catch us a big fish while we cut and stack the grain," she said.
"With me and the children helping, you should be able to get the
rice in without him."

Stunned almost speechless, Laron hesitated to
reply, giving Helga a long curious look before he nodded and
answered. "Of course," he said. "We can do it ourselves."

Karl puffed up like a toad fish and gave
Laron a look that was positively defiant.

"You want to go fishing with me, squirt?"
Karl asked his brother, one eye on Laron, almost daring him to
speak.