Free A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight Page B

The blue. Là-bas, on the river down, Bois Belle. Constance. Maison Blanche. La Pinière. And Auzenne place, Coeur Fort.”
    Land named for daughters or trees or wives or love.
    “North on the river up is Orange Grove. Les Palmiers.” She closed the shutter and whispered, “Besoin. What they need. You do your work, and they take you not far. Feet can get there.”
    I did know how it happened. The baby. It wasn't difficult to imagine as science. The passages of our body. The womb.
    But I refused to imagine it happening to me. Céphaline lay in her bed with my mother's clouds on the mosquito barre over her head. I lay on my narrow mattress, with my moss under me. My tignon was hot. I imagined my hair curling against the madras cloth and the moss curling against the mattress ticking and growing through the threads where the animal fat and wood ashes made soap to clean themselves from each other and my hair met the moss and curled together to make me sleep forever.
    Did Mamère still sleep in the chair? What did she wait for?
    No one would come for me there, in our room. No one would send a man here, where Céphaline breathed so hard and called for water, water.
    I stared at the picture on the wall. Céphaline painted as a baby. Her hand fat and pink as a starfish in her ocean book. Her face fat and rosy as a nectarine in her garden book.
    “The books of my childhood,” she said when I looked at them, as the days passed. “The only ones I can have now, with pictures. Hardly any words.”
    “Your eyes,” Madame said. “It is not healthy.”
    “My brain,” Céphaline said. “Put it in his jar.”
    Doctor Tom placed the leech on her temple every day. Large and pulsing black. The ants of her words she wrote smaller and smaller. Madame took away the paper. The whorls of hair in the brush.
    He gave her tablets: “Blue mass—mercury to balance the blood.”
    What was the name of her blood now?
    I sewed a tear in Céphaline's sleeve, trying to make my stitches like eyelashes. Fine as my mother's. Céphaline stared at my needle. Her face did not move.
    The plaster made her curse. Doctor Tom laid it along her neck, where it raised blood to her skin, and then the leech drank that poisoned blood.
    “Cheval blanc,” Céphaline said softly. “The more I look up at your face, the more it reminds me of your horse.”
    Doctor Tom winced. “The blood flows through the veins in the neck to the head—to the face,” he said to Madame. “This is what the surgeons in New Orleans say to try, before the injections. The blood carries waste and impurities to the skin, where they collect.”
    “Boutons,” Madame murmured. She was ashamed of the word. Of the face. Her own skin so smooth and white as a bowl, but the three lines on her forehead like threads now.
    I held Céphaline's mirror while she slept. Inside my eyes were the colors at the riverbank edge. Brown and black and gold silt.
    My mother's new prayer. Not far. Not far.
    Down the hall, Grandmère's thumping cane called Félonise to her again. The round glass showed my skin light as damp sand high on the riverbank. Not wet mud, not dry loam. My eyebrows were feathers of black. Who cared about our eyelashes and eyebrows? Did the men have to stare at our skin and eyelashes while they labored through the hair under our dresses?
    Céphaline's cheeks were pocked now as if a hummingbird had attacked her face. Hera's scars were raised and shining, Céphaline's dug deeper by her own nails. Her knives.
    The Auzennes came to help move Mademoiselle Lorcey to their place, because Céphaline couldn't study during the treatments. The smooth curves of Auzenne neck and cheek, placid foreheads and closed lips, excused the eyes dull as black leather or murky olives. A man wouldn't hesitate to put his lips on those cheeks or that brow, and the eyelids would be closed anyway.
    The Auzennes did not come upstairs.
    That night the clock sounded like a ghost tapping a tiny heel, the hallway murmuring