CHAPTER TEN
G ranted, it was odd for the heiress to one of New Orleans’s finest steamship lines to travel to the bayou country on a caboteur, a peddler’s boat. Odder still was the way Aurore had paid her fare.
The brooch in the captain’s vest pocket had once belonged to Aurore’s Tante Lydia, a woman who so resembled Aurore’s father that feminine adornment of any sort had only emphasized the square jut of her jaw and the faint mustache brushing her perpetually clamped lips. Lydia had met her death two years ago, while crossing a Vieux Carré street. Sometimes a stiff neck and unswerving gaze were detriments, particularly when one of the new electric trolleys was only yards away.
Aurore had been ridding herself of her aunt’s jewelry since the day she inherited it. Lucien saw to Aurore’s needs. She had more clothes than she could fit into multiple armoires, more hats than she could wear in a month. But she did not have money to spend. Money, according to Lucien, was unnecessary for a young woman of good family. A Creole lady had only to ask for what she wanted—prettily, of course—and she would be rewarded with everything that was truly good for her.
The possibility that not having money could make it a consuming passion had never occurred to Lucien. Women in his social sphere had no consuming passions. They existed to embellish the lives of men. Since Aurore had never had the courage to openly dispute his views, she simply sold whatever she knew he wouldn’t miss, or, as in the case of the captain of the merchant boat, she bartered. A brooch, in exchange for passage to and from Ti’ Boo’s home on Bayou Lafourche, hadn’t seemed extravagant.
Now, as the levees glided slowly by, she leaned against the steamer’s rail and envisioned the days to come.
At long last, Ti’ Boo was getting married. At twenty-four, Ti’ Boo had believed herself to be an old maid, une vielle fille. At the more proper age of eighteen, there had been an offer for her hand, but the boy had been fat and lazy, and Ti’ Boo, envisioning a life of servitude, had refused him. Since then, there had been no more offers or opportunities to wangle them. Ti’ Boo’s mother had taken ill, and her care had fallen to Ti’ Boo.
Now Ti’ Boo’s mother was stronger, and Ti’ Boo’s sisters were older. The widower Jules Guilbeau, a man with two small sons and enough land along the bayou to plant a little sugarcane and a little cotton, wanted Ti’ Boo as his wife. And, despite the ten-year difference in their ages, Ti’ Boo had agreed to marry him.
Aurore knew all this from Ti’ Boo’s letters. She had last seen Ti’ Boo when she herself was only eleven and Ti’ Boo a grown-up seventeen. Lucien had been on one of his many trips abroad, and Tante Lydia, who had moved into the house on Esplanade some years before to care for Aurore, had been away for the afternoon.
Perhaps if they had been at home, they would have discouraged Ti’ Boo from visiting. The Acadian girl was, after all, nothing more than an unfortunate reminder of a summer Lucien wanted to forget. But Aurore had been the one to answer the door, and she had secretly treasured the afternoon.
Ti’ Boo hadn’t returned to New Orleans, but after that day, the two girls had corresponded. Their first letters had been carefully polite; then, later, as their confidence increased, the letters had turned emotional, filled with secret fears and longings. Over the years, Aurore and Ti’ Boo had grown from child and nursemaid into true friends.
Lucien had been only peripherally aware of their correspondence. A woman’s good breeding was most apparent in the precision of her penmanship and in her ability to gracefully turn a phrase. He encouraged Aurore to diligently practice the skills that would hasten her ascent into society. But when, after years of letters, Aurore asked permission to attend Ti’ Boo’s wedding, he had been astonished.
“A wedding in the bayous?” Lucien had risen from his favorite chair in the parlor, fingering the watch chain that stretched to his pocket. “You can’t mean you want to do more than send a small gift to Térèse?”
“I’d like to attend.” Aurore had not fidgeted. At seventeen, she knew the value of standing perfectly still when encountering her father. In many ways, Lucien was a mystery to her, but there was nothing mysterious about his ability to size up weakness. She didn’t want to fuel the fires of a tirade.
“But why?”
She gave the answer she had carefully rehearsed. “I think a change would do me good. A little air, a little sunshine, and I’ll be more eager for the next round of parties.”
“There are other, better ways to take fresh air.”
“But this would truly get me away from everything. Cleo could accompany me on the steamer, and once I’m there I’ll be thoroughly chaperoned. Ti’ Boo’s family is very old-fashioned.” She hazarded a smile. “The Acadians guard their daughters almost as closely as you guard yours.”
“You find my devotion humorous?”
Aurore found nothing about her father humorous, but she would not demean him, as he had so often demeaned her. She was tied to Lucien by a myriad of emotions; that she didn’t understand him detracted not at all from those feelings.
“I’m only trying to reassure you,” she said. “I’ll be well looked after, and when I return, I’ll have stories to amuse you.”
But the lure of stories had not been strong enough for Lucien to give his permission. The Acadians were peasants, the bayous mosquito-ridden and teeming with dangerous reptilian life. When she pointed out that years ago she had spent entire summers in south Louisiana, his lips had tightened to a parody of the departed Lydia’s. The argument had been lost.
Now she was on her way to Ti’ Boo’s wedding, despite the fact that the trip had been forbidden. Lucien was on business in New York and Minnesota, and Cleo, the newest of a long line of housekeepers, had proved susceptible to bribery. If all went as planned, Aurore would arrive back in New Orleans before her father. If not, she would have to accept the consequences. There was little she truly wanted that Lucien could deny her as punishment. She only rarely had his attention, and never his love. How could he withdraw what he had never given her?
“Mademoiselle Le Danois?”
Aurore turned at the sound of the captain’s voice. As New Orleans waltzed gracefully into the twentieth century, customs had changed. Now English was the language of commerce and French was the garnish. Aurore dreamed in a mixture of both, but she had grown accustomed to speaking English. The people of the bayous, like the captain, who was still a comparatively young man, had not yet made that adjustment.
She answered in French. “Are we almost there?”
He pulled at his mustache. “It shouldn’t be much longer. The hyacinths make this trip slower each time I take it. Soon I’ll be riding a mule through the middle of the bayou.”
“How can anything so lovely be such a trial?”
His expression was frankly admiring. “To the contrary, anything lovely is always a trial, as I suspect your father has already learned.”
She turned back to the water. Hyacinths, their lavender flowers stretching toward the sunlight, blanketed the water along the bayou’s banks. They were invaders from the Orient, set free decades before by admirers who had never guessed the damage they might do. “Do you know my father, Captain Barker?”
“I know of him.”
“I hope you won’t make it a point to know him better.”
“What? And begin our acquaintance by telling him that I helped his daughter run away?”
“I’m not running away. At least, not for long.”
“I’m relieved. And I’ll be more relieved if you tell me it’s not a man you’re running to.”
She wondered if all men were so vain by nature that they assumed a woman would only run from the arms of one into those of another. “I’m going to a friend’s wedding.”
“This part of the bayou is remote, to say the least.”
“Blessedly so.”
“Then you’re prepared for it to be primitive?”
“It’s a shame you don’t know my father. You would find him most agreeable.” She listened to the sounds of the captain’s retreat. The vista was changing, and she watched with interest.
She had boarded the peddler boat yesterday at dawn, not far from the foot of Saint Louis Street, near the sugar landing. The route along the Mississippi had been familiar, but after the canal had come the bayou. She had passed the day studying plantation houses. Some were collapsing, victims of changing economies and the lasting effects of the War between the States. Others reigned proudly over the surrounding fields, as if the days of white-suited planters and their hoopskirted daughters had never vanished.
Between the plantations were settlements of modest houses, and these interested Aurore most of all, because they were like the ones Ti’ Boo had often described in her letters. She had been given plenty of time to examine them, since the boat stopped to trade at every one, which was why she had been forced to spend the night on a cot in one of its tiny cabins, under the shrewd watch of the captain’s wife.
The houses were close together, strung like pearls along the bayou banks. Cows and mules were tethered here and there on the levee, and children romped under the occasional tree at the water’s edge. These were the Acadian settlements, the homes of les petits habitants, the true heart of Bayou Lafourche.
Ti’ Boo lived in one such settlement, C?te Boudreaux, a cluster of homes at the south end of the bayou, on land divided and subdivided until little productive farmland along the levee was left for any one family.
But what did that matter? Ti’ Boo had asked in one of her letters. How much did one man need? Only enough to feed his loved ones, to grow a little cane to trade for things he couldn’t produce, to save a little extra to benefit the church.
A little extra. Aurore thought of all she possessed, and all she did not. Ti’ Boo’s life seemed as exotic as a Parsi’s or a Hottentot’s.
The churning paddle wheels slowed as one of the floating bridges, pulled from bank to bank by a wire cable, passed in front of them. She looked ahead as a new group of houses, their long galleries whitewashed or painted in weathered pastels, came into view. There were people waving from the landing.
“C?te Boudreaux,” the captain said from behind her. “It looks as if you have friends here.”
Aurore waved back. Her reception committee was too far away for her to make out faces, but she guessed the woman in the very front, dressed in blue, must be Ti’ Boo.
Ti’ Boo. She swallowed an odd lump in her throat. She would never see her friend, or even receive a letter from her, without memories of the night in October, twelve years before, when Ti’ Boo’s uncle had swept her from the cabin at the Krantz Place to the safety of his home in a grove of ancient water oaks.
The sloshing of the paddle wheels slowly died, and the steamer drifted to the landing. Now Aurore could see Ti’ Boo’s face, framed by the old-fashioned cloth sunbonnet, or garde-soleil, she wore.
“Ro-Ro!”
Aurore went to the side and waited until she could disembark. Then she was in Ti’ Boo’s arms.
“You can’t be bigger than me!” Ti’ Boo thrust Aurore away to stare. “You can’t be!”
“Now I’ll have to nursemaid you.” Aurore stared at her friend, hungry for every small detail. Ti’ Boo was shorter than she was by several inches. She was no longer plump, but her figure was pleasingly feminine, and her skin was as smooth and rosy as it had been in her childhood.
“But you are so fashionable. Très chic,” Ti’ Boo said, shaking her head in awe.
Aurore had chosen to travel in her simplest linen suit, decorated with only the most modest braid trim. On her head she wore a plain straw sailor’s hat with trailing ribbons. But nothing she owned was as simple as Ti’ Boo’s jacket dress of Atakapas cottonade. “Too fashionable,” she said, fanning herself with her hand. “And forever uncomfortable.”
“I think you’re beautiful.”
For a moment, Aurore felt as shy as she had as a child.
Ti’ Boo grabbed Aurore’s hand and pulled her toward the people gathered at the edge of the dock. “Come meet my family. With the wedding so close, not all of them could come. I was working in the garden when I heard that the boat had been sighted.”
Aurore was quickly surrounded. She was introduced to Ti’ Boo’s father, Valcour, four of her younger brothers, and a sister, Minette, who was a taller, slimmer version of her older sibling.
Valcour ordered the boys to go on board and bring Aurore’s trunk and assorted luggage back to the house. With Ti’ Boo’s arm tucked lovingly around hers and Minette close at her heels, Aurore waved goodbye to the captain and his solemn-faced wife, who had joined him on deck.
A dirt road ran beside the levee. On the opposite side of the road sat houses spaced so closely together that a good shout from one of the wide front galleries would receive an answer from neighbors on either side. Hounds slept in the shadows, barely lifting their heads to acknowledge the parade of young ladies, but the galleries and yards teemed with humans who were not so oblivious.
Ti’ Boo stopped at every house, proudly introducing Aurore to cousins, aunts and uncles, godparents and ordinary neighbors whose place in the Boudreaux family hierarchy seemed as assured as any blood relatives. Over and over again Aurore was examined and pronounced acceptable in bayou French that wasn’t always clear to her.
What was clear was the excitement her visit had created. She was a city woman, a New Orleans Creole, who had come this distance to witness a friend’s wedding. Surely she was different somehow from the others of her class. Who among these bayou residents had heard of a woman like Aurore traveling this long, difficult distance without even a friend or relative to watch over her? Ti’ Boo must have been a good friend to have a good friend like this.
“My father doesn’t know I’ve come,” Aurore told Ti’ Boo, when they were between houses and nearing Ti’ Boo’s own. The parade had lengthened. A trail of giggling, barefooted girls in loose cotton smocks and bonnets followed several yards behind.
“Will he be angry when he discovers you’ve gone?”
“I hope he never discovers it.” Aurore threaded her fingers through Ti’ Boo’s. Her friend’s hands were rough, testifying to hours of scrubbing clothes and hoeing in the kitchen garden. “But if he does?” She shrugged. “He has no other children, and no hope of ever having more. Whatever else he sees when he looks at me, he also sees his only hope of immortality.”
“That’s no way to speak of your papa.” There was no force behind Ti’ Boo’s words; rather, she sounded sad that Aurore was compelled to say these things, things that were all too true.
“While I’m here, let’s just pretend I don’t have a father. Pretend I’m your…” Aurore cast around for the right concept. “Your sister.”
“Sister? Me, I already have sisters. Too many sisters. A cousin? From New Orleans?”
“A cousin.” Aurore smiled. “Your dearest cousin. So, cousin, when do I meet Jules Guilbeau?”
Ti’ Boo pulled her to the side to escape a passing wagon drawn by a team of sturdy horses. “He’s visiting tonight. You’ll meet him then.”
“Is he handsome? Truly handsome?”
“Handsome? Oh, so handsome! In truth, he has only a few faults. One leg is higher than the other, so he walks with a cane. He has no teeth of his own, but he’s promised to send to Donaldsonville for some before the wedding. His hair is too long, so he ties it on top of his head in a Chinaman’s knot to cover the bare patches.”
“Ti’ Boo!”
Ti’ Boo laughed and squeezed Aurore’s hand. “You will see for yourself, chère. ”
“He is the handsomest old man in the village,” Minette said.
Ti’ Boo slapped at her. “He is not old, merely well seasoned. The young men who court you are like gumbo without pepper or salt.”
“The young men who court me are too many to count.”
Aurore listened to the two sisters teasing each other as they approached the Boudreaux home. Although it was fall, and late afternoon, the sun devoured her shoulders and neck through the stiff cloth of her dress. Dust stirred by the wagon mingled with the steam of swampland and bayou so that the air felt gritty in her lungs. Even the short walk was beginning to tire her.
Minette lowered her voice. “Who’s that driving the wagon, Ti’ Boo?”
Aurore looked ahead. The wagon had stopped up the road at the house just beyond Ti’ Boo’s. As they watched, a young man leaped to the ground and secured the horses to a fence rail. An older man followed at a more measured pace.
The wagon was filled with lumber, rough-sawed boards that looked as if they had come straight from the mill. The young man shouldered several and slid them from the wagon; the older man grabbed the ends, and the two started through the gate.
“étienne Terrebonne,” Ti’ Boo said. “And his father, Faustin. Faustin has a mill in the swamps. étienne is his only child.”
“That’s étienne?” Minette’s eyes widened. “T’es s?r de la?”
“I’m certain,” Ti’ Boo said. “When you saw him last, you were still playing faire la statue on the levee with your friends. You weren’t interested in young men.”
Minette rolled her eyes. “Was there ever such a time?”
Aurore laughed along with Ti’ Boo. If she’d worried that coming here might not be worth the price of her father’s anger, that worry had nearly disappeared.
The laughter caught in her throat as Faustin Terrebonne stumbled and the boards that had been balanced on his shoulder swung toward the limb of a tree in the center of the yard. For a moment, there was only the slap of wood against the tree; then the air was filled with a fierce buzzing.
“A hornet’s nest.” Ti’ Boo pointed. “Look, he’s shaken up a hornet’s nest.”
Aurore gauged the distance. Already the hornets had targeted their closest victims. Faustin leaped from foot to foot, slapping and cursing. étienne, under attack himself, grabbed for his father’s hand, as if to pull him away.
The rest unfolded slowly, like a clock badly in need of winding. One of the horses reared, a new and captive target for the angry insects. His mate heaved from side to side. In their distress, they tore the fencepost from the ground, and it followed behind them, along with a portion of the fence, clanging against the wheels as the wagon plunged down the road toward the place where Aurore and the others stood.
“Quick! Out of the way!”
Instinctively Aurore leaped to one side, bringing Ti’ Boo with her. Behind them, Minette and two of the little girls who had been trailing them remained in the road, mesmerized by the sight of the approaching horses.
“Minette!” Ti’ Boo started back for her sister, but Minette, suddenly aware of the danger, made a dash for the side of the road. She collided with Aurore, who was shouting and running toward the little girls. For a moment they were a tangle of arms and legs; then Aurore freed herself and leaped toward the shrieking children.
Behind her she could hear more screams, the clanging of the fencepost against the wagon wheels, the harsh breathing of the horses and the wild sound of their hooves against the hard-packed earth. She despaired of reaching the little girls in time. They were incapable of movement, so frightened by the sight of the horses bearing down on them that they were rooted to their places.
Any moment she expected to be trampled to the ground. She couldn’t spare a second to see how close the horses were; she could only run faster, despite the impediment of her long skirt.
She heard a shout. The air behind her seemed to thicken with the strong smell and heat of horseflesh. She dived for the two children, her arms spread wide, and knocked them sprawling into the ditch along the roadside. Only then did she have time to scream.
She was gasping for another breath, another scream, when arms encircled her.
“Ro-Ro, are you all right?”
She was. She realized it in that moment. She didn’t know why, and she didn’t know how, but she was all right. And the two little girls sobbing in the ditch beside her were all right, too.
She sat up and scanned the road. étienne Terrebonne was hanging like an anchor from the harnesses of the horses. Their eyes were wild, but as Aurore stood, the horses calmed as étienne muttered to them in deep, unintelligible French.
“étienne grabbed them,” Ti’ Boo confirmed. “I’ve never seen anyone move faster, except maybe you.”
A woman sprinted up the road, her long white apron billowing to the side. She grabbed one of the little girls and kissed her on the cheeks and forehead before she hauled the child to her feet to shake her. Another woman appeared to repeat much the same drama with the other child. Then, after several excited renditions of the story, profuse thank-yous to Aurore and to étienne, who was still anchoring the horses, the mothers dragged their bawling daughters away.
Aurore dusted off her dress and retrieved her hat, which had flown from her head. Her hands weren’t quite steady. Only minutes into her stay in the village, and she was already a heroine. In the retelling, her simple act had already assumed mythic proportions. She had risked her life for the two little girls. Assured of death and yet unafraid, she had thrown herself on top of the children.
étienne turned. The horses were now completely under the spell of his voice. Sweat gleamed on his forehead, and an angry welt on his cheek confirmed his encounter with the hornets.
“You’re all right, then?” he asked.
“Fine. What about you?”
He smiled, as if he found the question amusing. His teeth were white against his tanned skin, and his dark eyes flashed with humor. “A runaway horse is a small thing here. Two? Two small things.”
His voice was resonant, a musical baritone. Aurore was accustomed to listening to the voices of young men; she wasn’t accustomed to finding them so pleasing.
She smiled, too. “Well, it’s no small thing anywhere to dive at them and risk your life. I don’t know if I would have gotten out of the way in time if you hadn’t stopped them.”
“It would have been a shame to see such a lovely young woman trampled.”
Ti’ Boo stepped forward. “étienne, you haven’t even been introduced. T’as du go?t. ”
The phrase was a bayou one, unfamiliar to Aurore. But she knew enough to understand that étienne had been chastised for being too forward. “I think our introduction is only missing a name or two,” Aurore said. She extended her hand. “I’m Aurore Le Danois, from New Orleans.” She waited for his response.
There was the briefest hesitation. She guessed that his hands were dirty and he didn’t want to dirty hers. “étienne Terrebonne,” he said, clasping her hand, then dropping it quickly. “From New Orleans?”
“I’ve come for Ti’ Boo’s wedding.”
“She’s known Ti’ Boo since she was a child,” Minette said, insinuating herself into the conversation. “And have we been introduced?”
étienne turned politely. “Maybe not. I don’t often come this way.” He made a quick, old-world bow.
A rapid-fire explosion of French cut off more conversation. Faustin, limping and muttering, joined them. He looked nothing like his son, who was tall and lithe. Faustin was a small man, stocky and bent from years of hard labor. “Them bees have settled down. Let’s get rid of this wood so I can go, étienne.”
étienne frowned and touched a series of welts on his father’s neck, but Faustin slapped his hand away. “Come on, let’s get this done.”
étienne gave another quick bow, then began to turn the horses. The women stepped out of the way of the wagon and watched from the side of the road until étienne and his father were busy setting the fencepost and rails back in place.
“You can get the stars out of your eyes right now,” Ti’ Boo told her sister. “Maman would never let you go to a man from the back of Lafourche, especially not étienne. He and his father live alone, and they have little.”
“It would almost be worth living in the swamps.”
Aurore knew only vaguely of swamps or of the kind of poverty that Ti’ Boo was hinting about. But after even a brief introduction to étienne, she thought that Minette might be right. At seventeen, Aurore was already much sought after by the young men of New Orleans society. She was a rare combination of pure Creole bloodlines and substantial wealth that appealed to both the impoverished Creole gentry and the canny American opportunists.
But never in her forays into society had she come across a man quite like étienne Terrebonne, a man who balanced charm and strength as easily as he balanced cypress boards from his father’s mill.