Iron Lace #1

CHAPTER TWELVE

A urore Le Danois was gone. That morning, amid a flurry of goodbyes, she had boarded the merchant’s battered flat-bottomed steamer and disappeared up the bayou. Disappeared from C?te Boudreaux, perhaps, but not, étienne vowed, from his life.

étienne drove his last nail into the last board of the room he had agreed to build for Valcour’s neighbor. Nestor Johnson had been kind to him. He was old, with married sons who saw no need for another room on their father’s house, so Nestor had hired étienne. He needed a room, a quiet room away from the family that still lived at home, the garrulous wife, the son who wasn’t right in his head, the two daughters who had yet to marry. A room to think in. Did étienne understand?

étienne understood. Sometimes thinking was all a man had.

The basic structure was finished now. It still needed a roof, but Nestor thought his son could manage that. Shingles on a roof, one laid over another in rows, this was simple enough.

étienne put away his tools. Nestor was on the gallery, re pairing a fishing net on a bench in the shade. As always, when étienne saw someone at this simple task—one he himself had done many times—his insides knotted strangely.

“I’m done now.” He climbed the steps. “It’s all finished.”

“Even faster than I hoped.” Nestor jerked his head to the side. “The money’s in that can over there.”

étienne went to the corner, picked out a layer of fishing weights on the top and pocketed the amount they had agreed on. Then he buried the rest under the fishing weights again and set the can on the floor. “Where’d you get all this money, Nestor?”

“My wife’s egg money. I take a little here, a little there, she don’ notice. She’s the reason I need the room.” étienne held out his hand, and Nestor stood to shake it. “You going back home now, ’Tienne?”

“Going down the bayou first.”

“Far?”

“Far as I can go.”

“What’s to do down there? Nothing there anymore.”

“I was from there once. From the chénière. ”

“Nobody much left. Nobody but ghosts on the chénière. ”

“Maybe I’ll talk to those ghosts, find out some things.”

“You can take my skiff, you want.”

étienne considered the offer. He had his pirogue, hewn from a single cypress log. But Nestor’s skiff would get him to his destination quicker, before he could change his mind. “You sure?” he asked.

“What do I need with it? I’ve got a room now. Don’ need to go out on the water when I get tired of talk.”

“A room without a roof,” étienne reminded.

“It’s got a door and a lock?” Nestor asked.

“Yeah.”

“And windows?”

“No windows.”

Nestor sat down again and picked up his net. “Like I tol’ you, ’Tienne—me, I’ve got everything a man needs.”

The sun had started to sink before étienne reached his destination. The long trip had been tiring, even for a man used to navigating Lafourche’s waters.

The house he had come to see was smaller than he remembered. Where once it had been flanked by oaks, now it stood alone except for the tangled brush hiding the gallery foundation. Creeper edged along windows that had once been outlined by green shutters.

He remembered the shutters well. He remembered that they had been drawn the last time he stood in the shadows and stared at the house. It was strange, the things he remembered. Twisted oaks, green shutters and the face of a man. An angry face.

The house appeared to be deserted. The door hung from one hinge. A section of the roof was missing; étienne wondered what storm had sent it sailing. The storm that had killed his family? Or one of those that had come later, one of those that had driven more of the coastal residents up into the bayous? It hardly mattered. Whatever storm had torn at the house, uprooted its trees and taken its roof, that storm had done its job well enough.

Like the rest of the chénière, like the barren land that stretched to the water, this house was inhabited only by ghosts.

“Qui c’est là?” étienne had just turned away when the voice called after him. He whirled and faced the house again. A man stood on the gallery—not a tall man, though he had seemed that way to a small boy. “Fous le camp!”

étienne wondered if he should do as the man insisted, go away and never return. He could feel his future balanced between the choices expected of him and the choices he expected of himself. The man walked to the edge of the gallery and shaded his eyes with his hand. He was dressed in worn trousers. His hair, curly and streaked with silver, needed cutting.

“Are you Auguste Cantrelle?” étienne asked.

Auguste jumped off the gallery—the steps were missing. He approached étienne warily. “And if I am?”

“I’ve traveled from Lafourche just to find you.”

“So? For what purpose?”

“To send you to hell.”

Auguste stopped several yards away. “Who are you?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Whoever you are, go away. I want no company.”

“Not even that of your nephew?”

Auguste swallowed visibly, as if his throat had suddenly closed, but when he spoke, his voice betrayed no emotion. “I have no nephew,” he said. “I’m a man without family.”

“You’re a man who could have sheltered your family in this house. Instead, you left them to die.”

“I have no family! I had no family. I’m a man alone.”

“Non, Nonc Auguste. You are the same man who came to the swamps, who stood over a child’s bed when he was sick with fever. You’re the same man who told Faustin and Zelma Terrebonne that the child was étienne Lafont, and that you had buried his family after the storm, buried them with your own hands.”

Auguste narrowed his eyes. He moved closer, but he moved slowly, carefully, the way a man moves during a fight. “So, you are étienne Lafont. Oui, I buried your family. All but you. You and I have only that in common. Nothing more.”

étienne reached for his knife. He held it in front of him; then, without taking his eyes off Auguste, he touched it to his wrist without flinching. He could feel the blood flowing, warm and sticky against his skin. He held up his arm. “We have this in common, nonc. ”

“Go back from where you came, boy! There’s nothing here, no one here for you.”

“Why did you tell the Terrebonnes that I was étienne? Were you certain that he wouldn’t float in from some raft on the Gulf, like me? Did you bury him, too, Nonc Auguste?”

“You are étienne Lafont!”

“I am Raphael Cantrelle!” The words freed something inside him, something as powerful as hatred or love, something that resonated so sharply that for a moment he couldn’t breathe.

“Non! Raphael Cantrelle died in the hurricane. He was buried beside his mother and sister. I saw their grave with my own eyes before it was covered. A stranger from New Orleans buried my sister and her children, the man she flaunted before all the villagers like the whore she was!”

Raphael advanced slowly. For the first time since the storm, he could think of himself as Raphael, and for the first time he let himself feel the blood of his mother, his sister, flowing through his veins as surely as it flowed down his arm. “I have heard stories about you, nonc, even in Lafourche. You made my mother a whore, when you killed my father and left her with nothing!”

Auguste retreated. “Go back to the bayous! You are étienne Lafont. Raphael Cantrelle was the child of a whore and her lover. You are étienne Lafont, an orphan from a good family. The past matters not. Remember who you’ve become.”

“I have become a man without a soul.” Raphael advanced, the knife still carefully balanced in his hand. “Perhaps we have that in common, too?”

“I would not want to fight you. I would not want to kill you!”

“ Non? It was easy to kill my father, wasn’t it? And easy to sentence my mother and sister to death? I escaped your sentence once, but only by the grace of le bon Dieu. Now I’ve returned, Nonc Auguste.”

Auguste gave up all pretense. “Imbécile! When I learned that the Terrebonnes had found a boy that matched your description, I went to their camp to see for myself if you were still alive. The boy that was buried with your mother, there was no way to truly identify him. Others were sure, but I was not. When I saw you were still alive, I could have brought you back here and ended your life myself. But I didn’t. I told the Terrebonnes you were someone else, someone I was sure had died. I gave you new life!”

“But you see, nonc, unfortunately, I long for my old one.”

“ Non! Do you know what you are? You don’t, do you?” Auguste halted his retreat. Despite the knife in Raphael’s hand, he spat on the ground at his feet. “You are the bastard son of a mulatto, a man who believed he was good enough to bed my sister! You’re a quadroon, and the truth is written on your features for anyone who looks hard enough for it. You’ve only passed for white because I gave you a name that no one would question. No one would dare accuse the Lafonts of having tainted blood.”

But they had accused him. Raphael remembered too well. There had been taunts as he grew up with the bayou children, insults and innuendos. Ah, étienne, your skin is so dark, one would think you got tanned in the womb. Ah, étienne, your hair is so curly, it’s like the wool of that old nigger down on Cross Bayou.

“Does my blood look tainted to you?” Raphael asked. He thrust his arm in his uncle’s face. “Your blood, nonc, does it look any different than mine?”

“Why did you come here?”

“Why did you let me live?”

Auguste drew in a breath. Raphael could hear it wheeze through his lungs. Sweat dotted Auguste’s brow, even though evening was coming and, with it, cooler air. Raphael listened to him fight for another breath, then another. Up close he could see that his uncle’s skin had an unhealthy golden tinge. “Because there had been too much death,” Auguste said.

“Such grand sentiment.” Raphael gripped the knife harder.

“I will fight you,” Auguste said. “No matter what you see now, or think you see, I will fight you if you come closer.”

Raphael didn’t move. “Do you dream of Marcelite sometimes? Do you dream of your sister? Do you wonder if God is waiting for you to die so that he can punish you for your sins against her?”

“I have no dreams! The sin was not mine!”

Raphael looked deep in Auguste’s eyes and knew he lied. “Your dreams are full of her!” The knife was warm in his hand, slippery because his palm was sweating. “Which is worse, do you suppose, death or dreams?”

“Go home, Raphael. Be étienne Lafont and make a life for yourself. That was the best I could give your mother.”

“It was nothing!” Raphael stepped back. “Because I am not étienne Lafont. I am Raphael Cantrelle, the son of good parents, and the nephew of a man who will burn in hell for all eternity.”

Sweat dripped from Auguste’s brow. “Leave me in peace. I am a sick man. Leave me to die in peace.”

“Pray God it will be long and slow, so you will have time for a million prayers. Pray God the first things you see after you finally close your eyes are the smiling faces of my mother and father.”

Raphael took one step backward, then another, but his gaze never left Auguste’s. Finally, when Auguste’s gaze wavered, Raphael Cantrelle turned and walked away.

The marsh where Juan’s hut had stood twelve years before was deserted. Latanier and other brush grew in ragged clumps, obscuring any signs that the area had ever been inhabited. Raphael looked in vain for Juan’s well or the foundation of his mud oven. But the hurricane had destroyed all landmarks, and the memories of a seven-year-old boy could hardly be trusted.

He had brought corn bread and cold beans with him, and he settled down at the marsh’s edge to eat. Soon the mosquitoes would come, and although he had brought a mosquito bar, canvas and blankets, he knew the night would be a long one.

When the stars came out, he was still wide-awake. He had made a small fire, as much to drive away ghosts as insects and marsh creatures. The wind moaned through the three-cornered grass, and somewhere not far away a bull alligator called for a mate. The marsh was alive with melodious croaking, with the hoots of screech owls and the rustling of nocturnal predators.

The marsh was alive, but the chénière was dead. Only a few structures remained, and most of the valiant survivors who had tried to build again had finally gone away for good. He had visited the cemetery. The hurricane victims had been buried in mass graves, graves in a land where water lapped at bodies in the earth until one day the remains washed away. There had been no markers to tell where his mother and sister lay. He had knelt in the cemetery, even knowing that they were somewhere else, and choked out a prayer, because he knew that his mother would have wished it. But he had no faith that God had heard his voice.

Now he closed his eyes. He saw a woman’s face, but not his mother’s. The woman was younger, her hair the sleek, soft hue of a fox’s pelt, and her eyes were the lavender-blue of the water hyacinth. She smiled gently at him as he fell asleep, and it was Aurore’s face he saw again just before he awoke in the morning.

As the sun turned the chénière a rosy gold, he continued his search for signs of Juan’s hut. He ranged the marsh’s edge, aware that the tide could have changed the ground into marsh itself. Finally he pulled on the boots that he used when picking moss and waded at the water’s edge.

He almost missed the well. It had been built above the ground, a structure made from timber, mud and moss. The mud and moss had disintegrated with time, but a rotted timber crunched against his boots as he waded. He stooped and parted the grasses. The outline of the well was just visible. He calculated the position of Juan’s hut. It had been somewhere to his left, and behind it was the watery path to the ridge.

He was much taller now, but the water was still deeper than he remembered. He guessed where the house had been. Finally he gazed in the direction where the moss-draped oaks had once stood, and saw a nearly empty horizon. But the ridge, now almost level with the water, was still there. Shrubs that needed solid ground at their roots peeked above the sedge, and something—the broken trunk of a tree, perhaps—rose against the sky.

He tied his supplies on his back and started toward the ridge. The mud sucked at his boots and slowed his pace. He had never felt so alone. He knew the swamps around Faustin’s house, a ramshackle structure on stilts that had withstood generations of storms and rising waters. He knew those swamps and their attendant marshes, and even when he was trapping or running a trotline alone, he knew his absence would be noted if he didn’t return. But no one would ever guess he was here.

He wasn’t frightened. How could a man be frightened, when he had lived through the murderous fury of a hurricane? How could he ever be frightened again, when absolute terror had once filled every space in his body? He remembered the moment when he had lost his mother and sister, and the moment when the skiff had exploded into a hundred pieces. He remembered the instant when he could no longer cling to consciousness and the world had dissolved into darkness.

Less clear were the memories of waking with Zelma Terrebonne standing over him. At first he had believed her to be his mother. He had felt her stroking hand, cool against his forehead. He had smelled the strong odor of peppermint oil, used to combat fever, and tasted the sweetness of honey and elderberries against his lips. Then he had opened his eyes and known that his mother was dead.

He hadn’t been able to speak. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to, afraid of what he would be told if he asked questions. Perhaps the fever had thickened and slowed his tongue. When he next awoke, Auguste Cantrelle had been standing by his bedside, intoning his new name. He had known the truth. He hadn’t been strong enough to make himself understood, but his thoughts had been clear.

By the time the fever was gone and he was strong enough to speak, he had become étienne Lafont. Not in his mind. He had never forgotten his real identity. But outwardly he had become étienne, the laughing, bright-eyed friend of his childhood. He was no longer a child, and his friend was no longer alive. But he had pretended. He had known, without quite understanding why, that to be étienne was safe. To be Raphael Cantrelle, son of a woman scorned by her family, by an entire village and by the lover who had cut her adrift to die, was not safe at all.

The mud sucked at his boots, but he kept moving. Finally, the water deepened, and he half swam, half waded, to the ridge.

He rested on solid ground and stared at the splintered trunk of a tree that had once been a flourishing cypress. He was surprised that even this much of it had survived. Twelve years before, the tree had already been dead.

There had been two more trees, and now they were gone. In twelve years, much wind had blown, and at every high tide water had washed over the ridge. There was a good chance no sign of the other trees would ever be found, but he had hours to look for roots, for cypress knobs and suspicious depressions in the soft earth. He untied his pack and made a small fire from driftwood to roast a fish he had caught and cleaned the night before. Then, after a handful of shriveled grapes from a chénière vineyard gone wild, he began his search.

The sun had risen in the sky when he finally paused to reflect on what he had found. The tree that still stood was probably the middle one of the three. Beside it, far to the left, Raphael had found a honeycomb of roots and rootlets not far under the soil. The ground was spongier there, as if the small hollows around the roots had caused the earth to shift.

On the other side of the remaining tree, and far behind it, he had found cypress knobs. Cypress was as impervious as stone, and the knobs could have been left by a lumbering foray into the marsh a century ago. But they were important in helping him tell where to start his journey.

He sat back on his heels and watched the remaining trunk as the sun rose. The shadow was nearly twice as long as the trunk itself, distorted, but clearly defined. The shadow slanted far to the right. As the sun rose higher, it slanted still farther.

Finally the sun was in the correct place in the sky. He rose and realized that his hands were trembling. He went to stand in a direct line with the shadow, but far from its end, where he thought the shadow of the entire tree would have ended. Then he took eight steps forward. Eight steps. He remembered the number clearly. It had mattered so much to him that Juan be pleased.

He turned, and his shoulder faced the emaciated tree trunk. He took eight more steps. Here the shadows of the two trees would merge—if the trees still existed. Using the trunk as a guide, he tried to imagine a tree growing where he had found the roots. He adjusted his position a little; then he turned again and stared at the horizon. Once there had been a gap in a line of trees in the distance. Now all the trees were gone.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the horizon as it had once been. Desolation filled him. Missing the right spot by an inch was as bad as missing it by a mile. He could dig and dig and never find a thing. And what was he looking for? The memories of a man who had probably perished in the storm? Items that might have had meaning for Juan, but would be useless to him?

He searched his own memory, imagining the horizon. The gap had been to the left. He opened his eyes and adjusted his position again; then he paced off eight more steps. He marked the spot with driftwood and went back for his shovel. It sank willingly into the shell-studded soil, until there was a sizable hole, several feet deep and wide.

Juan had not told him how deep to dig, but Raphael imagined that whatever he was looking for was neither too deep nor too near the surface. The ground was still firm at this level, but if he dug much farther he would find water. He dug another foot, then sat back on his heels to consider his next move.

He decided to pace off the distance again. He followed the same plan as before, calculating feet and angles with the help of the tree trunk. This time he ended up a short distance from his first hole. A new hole brought the same result as the first. He spent the rest of the afternoon carving a ditch between them. By the time it was clear there was nothing to be found, he was exhausted, and disappointment was a heavy weight inside him.

There could be many reasons for his failure. His calculations could be wrong; his memory could be faulty. Crazy old Juan might never have buried anything here in the first place. Or Juan might have survived the hurricane, come back for his treasure and sailed away, never to return to the chénière. What, after all, had been left for him to return to?

Raphael rested beside the ditch, his head on his knees. Gulls cawed in the distance, and the salt-tinged air was nostalgia in his lungs. He was hungry, and if he wanted to eat tonight he had to forage for food. He could dig for weeks, and even if something lay waiting for him beneath the earth, he could still miss it. He gazed at the tree trunk, then pivoted and gazed at the horizon, where trees had once stood.

He shook his head. Perhaps there had never been trees there. Perhaps Juan’s treasure was a childhood dream, one he had held on to for comfort in the years after his mother’s death. Hadn’t he held on to others? He had told himself that life here had been good. That if his mother had lived, she would have made a comfortable place for them here, that people would have seen that he was a good boy and learned to be kind to him.

Now he knew what a dream that had been. No one who knew his father’s race would ever be kind to him. He had been set apart. He had been destined, like all people of mixed blood, to belong nowhere. Either he lived a lie as étienne Terrebonne, or he doomed himself to a future of isolation, misfortune and bigotry. And was he any different from what he had been yesterday? Wasn’t he the same man, no matter what the race of his father?

There were colored men on the bayous, men who spoke French with Acadian accents, men who fished and trapped and went to the dances, the fais-dodos, in their own communities, just like their white neighbors. They were accepted—in their place. If they didn’t get ideas about being better than they were supposed to be, if they didn’t look at white women or act surly with white men, if they understood their lot and kept to themselves.

But he would never be accepted. He had lived as a white man, danced with white women. He had been educated by his adoptive mother, who had wanted something more for him than life in the swamps. He had overstepped all bounds. Now, if he ever told the truth, he might not have a future at all.

But even if he stayed silent, the truth might be told. Auguste had said it was written on his features. Zelma had explained the swarthy hue of his skin as chénière blood. The mix of nationalities here had been more varied than on the bayous. Surely étienne had Italian blood, or Portuguese. Perhaps someone in his family had come from the Canary Islands, like the many who lived in Saint Bernard Parish. But Zelma was no longer alive to fend off questions, and Faustin did not care enough.

The horizon didn’t change as he stared at it. No trees grew there, not even in his imagination. He saw a blank stretch of sky, the sun moving slowly toward the water. Soon it would be night. There was nothing more he could do here today.

He was standing to go when something caught his eye. In this direction, there were trees. Not as many as he remembered, but trees. And between two clumps of them was a noticeable gap. He frowned and stared, trying desperately to remember, to recall a day twelve years before when he had been frightened of ghost trees and shrouds of Spanish moss. If this was the direction he had been told to face, then somehow he had forgotten Juan’s instructions. He tensed, trying to force a different memory, but he could remember only the instructions he had repeated to himself every night for the past twelve years.

Perhaps the problem was not the instructions, or his memories of them. He spun to peer at the tree trunk, then the patch of soft earth where another tree had stood. His calculations had been based on the trunk serving as the middle tree, but maybe the cypress knobs had not belonged to the third tree. Maybe the third tree was to the left, not the right, and the trunk was not the middle tree at all.

He was excited now. He walked toward the area where the third tree could have been. The ground was marshy. The third tree had stood on solid ground when he came here with Juan, but land and water frequently changed places. Hadn’t he found Juan’s well in the water? He waded in his bare feet, moving only inches farther out every time he turned. Just when he was certain the search was futile, he stumbled. Something snagged at his toes. He knelt and felt the ground with his hands. He found the almost imperceptible stump of a tree.

He stood and imagined the angle of this tree’s shadow. Once it had been a tall, stately cypress. Just past noon, its shadow would have extended back toward solid ground. He imagined the place where the shadow of the other tree might have ended. He marked the stump with a branch. Then he returned to the place where the shadows might have touched. He turned toward the gap in the trees on the horizon and took eight careful steps.

He was standing twenty yards from the ditch he had dug. He was almost at the water’s edge now. He remembered that the water had been much farther away when he was seven. But so much had changed. So very much.

He marked the place, then went back for his shovel. He had just enough time to dig one hole before he would be forced to return to his camp. He dug a hole one foot wide and one foot deep. The sun continued its descent. He gauged that he had one more hour until dark, and dug faster. Now he was forced to choose between breadth and depth. There would be time tomorrow for both, but not tonight.

He chose breadth, assuming that the tides had carved away some of the soil on top of the ridge. Whatever Juan had buried would be closer to the surface now. His shovel dipped, and he lifted and tossed the dirt behind him. The rhythm of digging no longer soothed him. He was tired, discouraged, aching. He wanted only to eat, to sleep, to forget. But he thrust the shovel into the widening hole again and again.

The shovel hit something solid.

He was so exhausted that for a moment he thought only that he had hit a root, a chunk of buried driftwood, a portion of someone’s wind-tossed skiff or lugger. He thrust the shovel into the hole again, and again it wouldn’t penetrate.

This time he knelt and dug away what dirt he could with his fingers. He followed the outline of the object. It was flat and square. He scrubbed the top until his fingertips were raw. Then, standing, he wedged the shovel in the side of the hole and pried.

The object was a metal box, about one foot square and deep. He removed it from the hole with trembling hands. Juan had hidden something, and he hadn’t lived to come back for it. He felt a stab of sympathy for the old man who had befriended him, a man who had known his father and spoken well of him. Juan had indeed sailed away forever.

He wiped the box with his shirttail. A rusted padlock hung from one side, sealing the box tightly shut. With the aid of the shovel and a piece of iron-hard driftwood, it was a small matter to force it apart.

He sprawled on the ground with the box on his lap. It wasn’t often that a man held dreams in his hands. He could open the box and find nothing more than letters or photographs, another man’s dreams.

Or he could open it and find his own.

The sun was nearly gone before he pried open the rusted lid.

The flaming colors of sunset revealed dreams that were too splendid for a man awake.