And Yet
A baby has arrived in the main house, and unrest now hangs in the air like wet summer heat. The girl can hear his wails sifting through the trees, shuddering and mournful—this dark child so intent on misery, born with some terrible knowledge of the future lodged in his bones.
She is sitting on her cot, knees folded to her chest; the child’s father is in her cabin again, and he has wedged the cot into the space between the door and table to keep others from coming inside. He reaches for her and she shrinks back, a learned lessening, but he barely touches her as he presses a halved walnut into the cup of her hand.
She stares down at his offering, weighing this act of kindness in her open palm, then digs at the nut nestled inside, the flat open wings of it loosening and dislodging between her fingers. She lifts it to her lips and the wet meat is sweet on her tongue. He lifts her chin with his finger so that she is looking up at him, and his eyes are dark and mirthless.
She knows, of course, what this will cost her. Her body knows the math of it, understands the taking of one thing for the relinquishment of another. He pulls a second walnut from his pocket and cracks it open like a memory: his hands snapping the necks of hares, of chickens; the snap of a whip in his hand as it comes down hard and fast. He shakes the nut loose from its shell and slips it between her parted lips, then lowers himself down beside her.
She lies back, searching for the splintered seam above her where the wall meets the roof. She finds her favorite spot, the whorl of knotted wood that curls and twists like what she imagines the body of a hurricane might look like, what her own heart might look like: the tight red fist of it kneading inside her, stubborn to the forces that have tried to still it. She imagines that it is her actual heart nested in the wood above her, a dark burl that can beat outside her body until it’s safe to return. This soothes her against the urgent rock of him: his collection of her bottomless debt.
He’s gentle this afternoon, the drink on his breath a balm rather than a poison, and when he falls asleep, his breathing is steady and calm. His peacefulness is a wonder to her when she witnesses it; Monsieur Aubigny is himself a hurricane, a knot of anger unspooling into brutality, and she is grateful for the slim mercy of a few tender hours.
In the dim light of the cabin his skin is the color of sun-baked clay—dark against her own, which is fair as buttercream and dotted with freckles—and she’s reminded of the lore that hangs heavy here like its own circling hurricane. But the mythology of L’Abri has not weakened over time like the will of a storm, instead gathering strength as new questions form about this strange, foreign master, as truths bend with the years and a whispered oral history continues taking shape.
The arrival of the Aubigny baby in the main house had felt to her like a held breath, weeks suspended in waiting as the newborn plumped into a milk-fat infant, his puckered skin smoothing, his features crystallizing. The mother, Aubigny’s young wife, was silly with love, in awe of this little creature in the blind way of new mothers, but the other inhabitants of L’Abri searched the child’s face for a legend to help them decipher the past and prophesy the future. They stole glances when his nursemaid walked him around the garden in her arms, pointing out the waxy pink buds on spring trees and the push of crocuses at her feet. The grounds of L’Abri exploded with color in the springtime, an eerie contrast to the main house, which was meticulously maintained and yet somehow wholly inhospitable. The estate was surrounded by indigo fields, neat blue rows shouldering the bayou that lurked on the edge of Aubigny’s land, a patchwork of beauty and peril. The nurse murmured to the child as she walked, whispering to him the names of flowers: d’échinacée, des tulipes, d’asclépiade. The child peered up at her from the folds of blanket with a ferocious intensity, his face a creamy brown against the pale muslin, a dark stigma emerging from a wreath of clean white petals.
Aubigny stirs beside the girl and she stiffens. She feels him push closer to her, his breath hot on her neck. “La Blanche,” he murmurs into her hair, his voice hoarse from sleep. His fingers graze her bare stomach, trace the sharp rise of her hip bones. And then: “The white one.”
He has said this to her before—the meaning of her name in English, chosen for her by the woman who delivered her here in this cabin the night her mother fainted from the strain of childbirth and never awoke. The girl had been born so pale she was nearly blue, her skin translucent and her body sapped of oxygen by the cord wrapped tight around her throat. Sometimes she wonders if perhaps her mother would have lived if she herself had died that night; if perhaps there is a simple and just equation to survival, a finite well of humanity, and her mother had simply tipped her own life into La Blanche’s cup. A first and last act of devotion.
Aubigny ladders his fingers up the pale stretch of her inner arm. La Blanche’s skin had darkened only slightly over the years, the papery white of it a story told to her in fragments and variations: her father had likely been a friend of the Aubignys, visiting from a nearby plantation; or perhaps he’d come to L’Abri on business and taken a liking to the pretty young girl working in the main house; maybe he had been a distant relative, staying at L’Abri after the death of his wife, after the blight of his crops, after the destruction of his estate in a fire, in a hurricane, in an uprising. Stories flowed here like the wild weave of a river.
“The white one,” Aubigny whispers again, slowly, as if to savor the sound of it. And then in his native French: “C’est vrai. Très blanche.” His fingers pause at the base of her neck where her hair is damp with sweat. His smile is menacing, joyless. “Et pourtant.” And yet.
He wraps a curl of her hair around his finger and she feels a buried memory rise to the surface, unbidden: her hair held in his closed fist; the crack of bones as his boot kicks at her face, at the telling swell of her abdomen; her body dragged limp and broken back to the steps of her cabin in the middle of the night. He first began coming for her when she was barely twelve, and she has pushed four lives into the world since then. Her children were born a breathing currency, owed as soon as her sons’ limbs had shed their childish softness and her daughters’ hands had learned the tidy rhythm of women’s work. Twice La Blanche caught herself in time, recognized the roiling nausea and the firm round of her belly before it was too late; her sister Josèphine knows Louisiana’s roots and herbs, understands the precious alchemies that make things happen, that make things not happen. In a few years, La Blanche’s girls will be netted by the phases of the moon and her own place at L’Abri will shift: her body will learn new uses as their young bodies learn to disappear under the weight of force, as their hearts travel to safe hidden spaces outside of themselves. Sometimes the impossible truth of this burns so hot in her gut that her only salve is the thought of her sister’s hands: snipping leaves from angry red plants, unearthing leathery mushrooms from soil, crumbling these deadly treasures into a stone mortar. La Blanche pictures a blanket of powder dusted over Aubigny’s Sunday dinner or into his glass of whiskey. She imagines herself sprinkling poisons into his open, sleeping mouth, and the lump of furious sorrow softens enough for her to go on living.
La Blanche had not lost the baby the night Aubigny attacked her, though there had been a moment when she’d been certain both she and her unborn child would not survive his drunken fury. L’Abri had seen disappearances before, women perhaps sold off but likely swallowed by the bayou after committing invisible sins against him. These women were swept into the lore of the place, woven into the story of how the plantation had come to be this way: purchased by a kind, older master who named the estate—L’Abri, the shelter—and who demanded nothing but a calm and genial order; the man’s mysterious Parisian wife who was never seen but around whom a branch of story grew; the confounding portrait of a beautiful, brown-skinned woman, hung in the library and then quickly removed; and finally the couple’s dark, troubled son—this younger Aubigny—arriving from France after his mother’s death in Paris, tyranny coursing like blood through his veins.
The girl can hear the faraway cries of the new baby in the main house, low and plaintive at first and then rising to a piercing crescendo. Aubigny curses under his breath, a flicker of rage sparking, settling, and then he rises from the cot and pulls his pants from around his ankles, snapping his suspenders up over his broad shoulders. She pictures the child’s nurse blowing cool air onto the baby’s round cheeks, tickling the pads of his feet with her fingertips, buttoning and unbuttoning his layette to warm him up, to cool him down.
She notices Aubigny watching her and his expression is grim and unreadable. Without warning, he reaches down and grabs one of her breasts, his ragged nails digging into her skin to dispel any suggestion of tenderness. She bites down on her lip to keep from crying out, pictures the angry bruise that will soon bloom there. His fingers pinch hungrily at her nipple, but his eyes are lustless. “Nasty woman,” he mutters, and then he yanks the cot away from the door so there’s space enough for him to pass. “Putain.”
And then he’s gone. She watches his retreating figure through the cracked door, the dying sunlight silhouetting him until he’s nothing but a smudge of black in the distance. This is the way he always leaves her—with some hateful valediction so she never mistakes his taking for giving. So she knows that in this taking he has diminished her, and that the day will come when he will whittle her down to nothing.
*
Weeks later, word spreads that Aubigny’s wife and baby have disappeared from L’Abri. The child’s nurse is blank with grief and offers no explanations for their departure, only shakes her head and stares down at the empty bowl of her arms, folded to her stomach as if the baby were lifted from them only a moment before. The cook says they’ve gone to live with the woman’s mother; she pinches at the brown skin of her forearm, whispers that Monsieur Aubigny banished them both from the house. “Il ne tolérera pas un enfant comme ça.” He’ll not tolerate a child like that.
But then, a second tale begins to simmer beneath this one: some men in the fields saw the woman holding her baby the day she vanished from L’Abri, saw her standing at the base of the path leading from the plantation back toward her family home. She wore only a thin chemise and her hair hung loose, long and coppery, as if she’d just risen from sleep. These men say they saw the woman turn away from the path and walk into the tall grasses, the baby clutched to her chest. They say they watched her disappear into the copse of trees that led out into the mouth of the bayou but that they didn’t dare follow her, the crime of abandoned work met with its own horrors.
For a time, La Blanche still expects the mother and child to reappear in the main house. She knows the tides of Aubigny’s moods, knows how the crash of his anger can recede into the gentle pull of something almost like atonement. But as weeks pass without their return, an understanding settles over the plantation that their place here was only ever temporary, their life at L’Abri a failed experiment stricken from its history. La Blanche thinks of what the men in the fields saw, and of the way the slow-churning water beyond the plantation laps at the roots of trees, devours the slender trunks of tupelos and chews away at the thick, ropy bark of cypresses. She cannot fathom the woman walking her baby into such an abyss, and so she allows herself to imagine them back at the woman’s family home—away from the bayou and Aubigny—though perhaps some stifled part of her knows they have succumbed to both monsters.
*
It’s a cool autumn evening when Aubigny tells the men to build a bonfire behind the main house. La Blanche stands with her daughters on the edge of the clearing and watches her eldest, Mathieu, gathering kindling from beneath the tall oaks. He looks like both a child and a man: his face is round and smooth, his eyes the color of wildflower honey and bright with life, but his body has the hollowed, sinewy contours of someone roughened by time. La Blanche has watched this gradual lessening of men through the years, has seen over and over all the ways this place carves away at them too. Soon, she knows, the light in her child’s eyes will begin to dwindle, and the sweet bell of his voice will harden, and this ebbing will be its own kind of death.
The fire starts small, a circle of flames hardly large enough to roast meat on a spit. After a while, Aubigny appears in the back doorway carrying a wide wicker basket piled high with bright, silky fabrics, and La Blanche’s other son, her youngest child, is standing behind him. It isn’t until Aubigny places the basket in the doorway and walks back into the house that she sees what her son is holding, and her breath catches in her throat as she watches him walk solemnly toward the bonfire. He places the willow cradle into the center of the flames with such earnest ceremony that it’s as if the baby is still asleep inside, a sacrifice laid out on the pyre. And then the wicker basket is carried over to the fire as well, and the rest of Aubigny’s grisly offerings are set ablaze: the child’s tiny white layette, the mother’s dresses and petticoats, her evening gloves and hats and the soft linen frocks she’d worn to accommodate the rise of her stomach before the baby was born. La Blanche turns away when she sees Mathieu toss an embroidered quilt onto the pile, remembering how the nursemaid had bundled the child into it right after he was born, walked him proudly around the grounds as if he were her own perfect creation.
La Blanche, relegated to the gardens and the quiet dark of her cabin, had known little of Monsieur Aubigny’s life inside the main house. She had recognized the strange dissonance of his marriage—his wife pure and lovely, Aubigny a deep well of cruelty—and had appreciated the woman’s wide smile, ever-present for over a year and then simply gone: a candle blown out. She’d known the child’s inconsolable cries and accepted them as a kind of wisdom, an understanding of the atrocities he’d been born into. But she had not known this mother and child. She couldn’t conjure the sound of the woman’s voice in her memory, or recall the exact shade of the baby’s eyes. And yet their erasure gnaws at her now, weeks of buried dread rising like bile in her throat. The woman is dead; the child is dead. She understands these truths with a sudden, bitter certainty, just as she understands that her own survival has been owed only to chance. Because the world had tried to choke the life out of her the moment she crowned into it; Aubigny had nearly beaten two lives from her body the night he’d chosen her as his prey; and all the while, the bayou has stirred lazily in the distance, bubbling and hungry, a whispered threat. She knows that she could be wiped clean from this place without ceremony, an offering made to the murky waters without even the glint of a candle flame to announce her end. She understands the precarious mercy of her children waking with the sun each day and surviving past its setting.
By midnight, the bonfire has died out almost completely, fed its final scraps just past dusk and then abandoned. La Blanche had watched it for hours, mirrored in the large bay windows at the back of the house, wild and warped by the panes of glass where Aubigny stood surveying the scene—the refracted firelight a hellish wreath around him, a devil engulfed in flames.
She’d allowed herself to imagine these flames bending with the wind, hot tongues licking at the shutters of the house, crawling across the low-hanging eaves, wrapping outstretched fingers around the thick columns of the terrace. She’d thought of the bookshelves lining the walls of the library, the burnished wood of Aubigny’s gleaming dining table, the stacks of firewood placed beside the hearth in the parlor. Kindling poised for an errant spark. A blameless crime of nature.
But this fire had been built expertly, tidily, far enough from the main house that it could thrash and flail without disaster: a beast contained and sated, the scorched remains of all it had devoured now a pile of bones sucked dry. Barely burning coals crackle in the wreckage and La Blanche recognizes the blackened husk of the child’s cradle, the braided willow a delicate ribcage with an ember glowing feebly at its center. She thinks of the tight burl of wood in her cabin, her nested heart sheltered in the planks. She pictures the curl and flare of it—perhaps less a hurricane and more a flame.
The ember pulses hot beneath the char, the stubborn beat of a heart in the ruins. She stares down at it, this angry bead of fire, then looks up at the main house, at its wide open windows, thick curtains billowing in the breeze. Surely something so diminished as a smoldering coal would be too weak to set such a place ablaze. Surely a fire that has been so nearly extinguished has no will left to spread.
And yet.
La Blanche reaches down and scoops up a handful of dirt and ash, red radiating at its center. She walks slowly toward the open window, blows gently on this living thing intent on surviving, watches it breathe in her hands. Marvels at all that it can still do.
Shelagh Johnson: I teach English and Creative Writing at Bowie State University and am the faculty editor of our university’s literary magazine, The Torch. I received my MFA in Fiction from American University’s Creative Writing program and am currently working on my PhD in English. My work has previously appeared in Portland Review, Night Train, The Plentitudes, and Ghost Parachute, among others. My debut short story collection, A History of Existing Life, is coming out this August. You can view my TEDxTalk, “Creative Writing: A Transformational Practice,” on YouTube and find me at www.shelaghjohnson.com.