The Promise (12 page)

‘No. Nor, I must say, am I accustomed to so much fish.’

‘What do you all mostly eat up there in Ohio? Only meat and ’tators?’

She clicked her tongue. ‘Yes. Meat and potatoes.’

She talked prissy in that Yankee voice of hers, her words coming fast and like she was talking through her nose. I went back to scrubbing the frying pan. I said, ‘My daddy’s a fisherman, flounder, redfish, and snapper mainly. He traps crab in the bay and rakes oysters. He carries them into the city when he’s of a mind to. He has his steady customers here, too, Mr Williams being one of them.’

‘Your father has customers on this end of the island? I haven’t seen any other houses. Where is everyone?’

I heard the insult in her questions like she thought this was the ends of the earth. People in the city most always thought that. But they didn’t know. Some of us liked having room to move about; we wanted to look out the windows and not see piles of buildings. I wouldn’t trade our end of the island for nothing. We had plenty of neighbors. Some of them were relations: aunts, uncles, and cousins by the handful. Mrs Williams would know that if Oscar had told her about tonight’s dance given in her honor. But if Oscar wanted to keep the dance a secret, that was his business. I wasn’t about to tell her. I’d seen how she’d looked at me when I’d told her about rattlers in the outhouse.

I said, ‘There’re all kinds of folks here, cattle ranchers mainly. The Fultons have a fine house; they’ve got China rugs and a room filled with books from top to bottom.’ Now I was the one showing off. I said, ‘Course there’re the nuns and orphans at St. Mary’s, and a few Italians way down by the pass.’

‘The pass?’

‘The western end of the island.’

‘And these people with the library, where is their home?’

‘Near the bay. A handful of miles on down the island. But they ain’t here right now. Mrs Fulton and her littlest children are in Colorado for the air.’

At that, she sank into herself, going quiet. We stayed quiet all morning. I washed her dishes and wiped down the top of the stove, then swept the kitchen floor. She just wandered about. First she went outside to the front veranda and then she came in and looked through Oscar’s red book about the stars. I never could see the need for that book of his, not when the stars were right overhead, night after night, easier to look at than all that bitty print in a book. But that was Oscar for you, he liked to read. Mrs Williams must be the same way because she took up shuffling through the newspapers that Oscar made Frank T. and Wiley buy when they were in the city. She told me she thought she’d look at them out on the porch.

‘You mean the veranda?’ I said.

She mashed that around in her mind for a short time. ‘It is a beautiful word, isn’t it?’ she said.

Well, for Pete’s sake, I thought. Who had time to sort through words and call them beautiful?

She fussed around the piano, too. She opened the keyboard cover but didn’t play a thing; she just sat there with her hands in her lap. When she got tired of that, she brought out an armload of books from the bedroom and put them on the parlor table. She propped them up with bookends made of pink marble, and that made me think, Well, how do you like that? They went with the clock on the mantle except these bookends were rough and unpolished. She didn’t put Oscar’s book with hers; she left it on top of the newspapers.

I’d never been around a woman that had so little to do. I wanted to say, ‘Here’s the broom, the veranda needs sweeping.’ Or, ‘How about lending a hand with dinner?’ Women up and down the beach, Mama one of them, were cooking for tonight’s dance and here was Mrs Williams with not one worthwhile thing to do. But I held my tongue. Leastways she knew enough to make her own bed. I had looked when she’d gone off to the outhouse, expecting to find it a rumpled mess. But it wasn’t. She had tucked the corners tight, pulled the quilt neat, and laid the pillows just so. Like how she held herself, I thought. Stiff-necked and cold.

A little later, I walked down the hall and came across her in Andre’s room. She was holding the photograph that Andre had on the table by his bed. It was a picture of Oscar and Bernadette, made on their wedding day. I had studied it myself more times than I could count. It helped me to remember Bernadette as an alive person. In the photograph, Oscar sat on a chair and Bernadette stood behind him with her hand on his shoulder. They were in their finest, him all handsome in his suit and her looking like somebody from a magazine in her white linen dress. The sisters at St. Mary’s had made it for her. Last October, Oscar buried Bernadette in that dress even though Mama told him it wouldn’t look right. ‘I’ll have to rip out the seams to get it to fit,’ she told him. ‘I’ll have to put in a panel of material in the back. Even then it won’t lay right.’

‘It was her favorite,’ he’d said.

‘But, Oscar, to take it apart? Would she want that?’

Oscar’s jaw firmed up.

‘You’re one bull-headed man,’ she’d said. So Mama did what was needed to make the dress fit around Bernadette’s swelled-up belly. At the funeral, folks remarked on it. ‘Bernadette looks good laid out in her dress,’ they’d said. ‘So pretty.’ None of that was true. She was dead, and there weren’t nothing good or pretty about that.

It would hurt Andre hard if he knew Mrs Williams held the photograph of his mama, but I didn’t say so. I just nodded to her from the hallway and kept on with my chores.

It was the piano that broke the quiet. I was tidying up the washroom when I heard the first note, then the second and the third. She went at it slow, like her fingers were trying to find their way on the keys. She added more notes and picked up speed as she went up and down the keyboard, the notes going from deep to high-pitched. Warming up, I thought. She was getting a feel for it like how I did with my fiddle. I tried not to listen as I cleaned the washroom floor, sweeping sand and dirt into the dustpan. Music was for evenings when chores were finished, not for mornings when things needed doing. When she stopped and everything went quiet, I thought, There. That was all she knew. I heard her come down the hall and go into Oscar’s room. Something metal sprang open. The clasp on one of her black leather traveling trunks, I figured. Then she came out with some papers and walked past the washroom. Before I knew it, she was playing again but this time it had a melody. This time it was music, each note clear and deep and pretty and sorrowful.

It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. This music clutched at my heart; it made everything around me fall away. Without knowing how I got there, I found myself in the parlor but off to the side. Mrs Williams sat on the bench, there were sheets of paper spread out on the front of the piano. She played, leaning into the music, swaying a little. Each note bore down. Each note pulled at me and stirred up everything I thought I was done with – the boys I had intended to marry, the loss of Bernadette, and the wanting of Oscar.

He stood in the doorway, I hadn’t heard the door open. Andre was with him, his little eyes wide with surprise. The music, carried by the breeze, must have found Oscar in the barnyard, the notes must have pulled him, too. He watched her, this new wife of his, her fingers casting a spell, the muscles tugging around his mouth.

Mrs Williams played on and on, laying bare the thing that hurt the most: Oscar picking a woman so different from me. I had my hands to my chest; my heart was near to busting wide open. Then she played the last two chords, deep and somber. The music hung in the air before it slipped away, overcome by the low crashing sound of the surf. Mrs Williams put her hands on her lap and folded them, that graceful neck of hers bowed.

‘Catherine,’ Oscar said after a while.

She turned around on the bench. Her face was wet.

He said, ‘You used to play that. When I delivered coal.’

‘I remember.’

‘I’d stand outside your window and listen. When I left Ohio, I figured I’d never hear it again.’ He paused. ‘I never knew what it was called.’

‘“Moonlight Sonata.” Beethoven.’

Oscar’s eyes were fixed on Mrs Williams. Like hers were fixed on him. He said, ‘It’s graver than I recalled.’

‘Are you disappointed?’

‘No.’

A small smile played around her lips and that was when I backed away and went into the washroom, latching the door behind me. Something had passed between them just now. It was like there wasn’t nobody else in the world but them two. It wasn’t love, this thing between them. It looked too unsettled for that. It was a wanting. Him wanting to carry her off but too awestruck to do it. Her wanting to be carried off but too stiff-necked to give way to it.

I leaned over the wash basin, a heavy feeling in my belly. Nobody had ever looked at me like Oscar had looked at Mrs Williams. Not Oakley Hill, not Joe Pete Conley. Not nobody.

The heavy feeling stayed with me for the rest of day. It made me wish I could quit all this housework and go sit in the shade of the sand hills so I could watch the push and the pull of the tide. Doing that would clear my mind of what had passed between Oscar and Mrs Williams. It’d get rid of that music of hers, that mournful tune about the moonlight that kept playing over and over in my head. But a person didn’t sit in the shade when there were things needed doing. Unless that person was Mrs Williams.

I cooked noon dinner and got through eating with them two and Andre, the air nearly snapping with things not said, that feeling between them jumping like sudden flashes of lightning. The thought of tonight’s dance sunk me even lower. Everybody was going to fuss over Mrs Williams, and I didn’t want no part of it. But if I didn’t go, Mama would look at me funny, speculating. If I didn’t go, neighbors would likely talk, saying it was peculiar since I worked for Oscar. So, I hung my apron on the nail by the icebox, went home, and got myself ready. Late afternoon, I climbed up on our wagon with Mama and Daddy, and we took off for the pavilion. I carried something with me, though, and not just the three baskets filled up with all of the food Mama had cooked. I had my fiddle.

Me showing up with my fiddle turned Biff McCartey and Camp Lawrence narrow-eyed with surprise. ‘What’s this?’ Biff said, pointing at it, those wiry brows of his all scrunched together.

‘Thought maybe I’d try my hand,’ I said. ‘Maybe play the first waltz, if you all don’t much mind.’

‘Ain’t I been saying it all along?’ he said. He had his mandolin. ‘Ain’t that so, Camp?’

‘That’s surely so,’ Camp said. His face was pitted with deep scars. He most usually didn’t have much to say for himself, but he played the fiddle good. Those fingers of his traveled up and down the neck like nothing I’d ever seen before.

Biff and Camp had been after me to play with them at dances ever since word got out that I was done with courting and all that went with it. Biff ran cattle on down the island and Camp was one of his hands, even though he was older than Biff. They had a habit of coming by our house now and again on a Friday evening with their wives, Alice and Nelly, along with their packs of children. Biff and Alice had the most with seven, the oldest a fourteen-year-old girl. Camp and Nelly had a married daughter but they still had four children at home. The youngest was a baby. Sometimes my aunt Mattie and uncle Lew came by. We’d all sit on our front veranda, the bayou before us.

Me and Camp fiddled, and Biff played his mandolin as he sang some of the tunes. Everyone tapped their toes while the children danced like they were all grown up. Before Bernadette took sick, her, Oscar, and Andre would drift over. We played everybody’s favorites as the night sky turned a blue-black color, the moon throwing long shadows over the land. Daddy always wanted ‘Clementine’ and Bernadette would say ‘Nan, play “Jolie Blon.” Please.’

‘I’m mighty sorry you taught Nan that old Cajun song,’ Biff would say to her but I played it anyway. We all liked it even if it was swamp music. We liked the shine on Bernadette’s face as she sang in French, taking her back to when she lived in Louisiana.

When Biff and Camp took up pestering me about playing at dances, I shushed away the idea. ‘Ain’t seemly,’ I said to them. ‘A woman sitting before folks with a fiddle pressed to her chin.’ It was my granny, Mama’s mama, that told me that. She’d taught me how to play and when she passed her fiddle on to me before she died, she’d said, ‘Never play music for money. It ain’t becoming.’

Hearing Mrs Williams play the piano changed that. She had brought Ohio into Oscar’s house. She’d brought city ways with her fine clothes and her high-handed manners. This here was Texas. This was down the island, miles from the city. I wanted her to see where she was. Our ways were different. But mostly, for reasons I couldn’t put shape to, I brought my fiddle to the dance to show Oscar’s new wife that when the dishes were washed and put away, when I took off my apron, there was something else to me.

The pavilion was next to St. Mary’s, it being a place for the orphans to play out of the sun. It was just on the other side of the sand hills, and the surf was loud here. I sat on a stool by myself in the cleared-off place where Biff and Camp usually played. Wagons and buggies, the horses hitched to them, were parked by the inland side of the pavilion. I fixed my brown skirt, laying it so my ankles didn’t show overly much. I had on my Sunday best, my shirtwaist wasn’t fancy like Mrs Williams’, but it was what I had.

I settled the fiddle on my shoulder. Folks milled about, the men going off toward the hills to pass the whiskey bottle while the women calmed fussy babies and put away the food that was still on the long tables. Boys had lit the kerosene lamps on the tables, getting ready for dark. Sweat rolled down my sides even though the sun was sinking fast, the pavilion didn’t have walls, and the breeze stirred the air. I had never played before so many; there must be two hundred people, maybe more, a fair number kin. The aunts and uncles were here, so were all the cousins, leastways the ones that lived in Galveston. There were the ranchers and their wives, the ranch hands, too, some of them with the women they courted, them women strangers to me for the most part. They were from the city, I thought, and that added to my nerves.