Free Eden Burning by Belva Plain Page A

coming, until it filled the sky”—in the three-quarter dark Patrick could see that she was leaning forward and gesturing with her arm—“filled the sky all purple and red as blood, a fearful, ugly thing. It made you think of hell…. Then the ash came, falling hard as rain. It smelled like rotten eggs. Sulfur, they said. We closed the shutters tight, but the ash got in anyway and covered the floors. And centipedes got into the house, a foot long some ofthem, trying to get away from the ash upriver. We poured boiling water on them. I was a maid at the Mauriers’ then, my first position. I was hardly more than a child, but it was good working there, better than being a porteuse, I can tell you.”
    “What’s a porteuse?”
    “You know, the girls who load the ships, carrying the coal or rum or sugar on their heads. They worked twelve hours a day, then, got four dollars a month…. So I was well off at the Mauriers’. We kept right on working, everyone did in St. Pierre. The mountain stopped rumbling after a few more days and so we thought the ash would soon stop falling. But the country people kept coming in. They thought St. Pierre would be safe. Farther up the mountain, they said, the hot mud was rolling still, choking the rivers, and the ash so thick on everything that the birds were dying in the trees. Then suddenly in our yard the birds began to die, too.”
    “Why didn’t you go away?” He sat up now, so interested that he had forgotten the storm.
    “Well, Mr. Maurier took his wife to Fort-de-France, but the servants had to stay and guard the house. The city was full of thieves, people sleeping in the streets, stealing from the shops and fighting. It was terrible, terrible.” She paused. “Then came La Veretta, the smallpox. So many died, they ran out of coffins. It’s funny,” Agnes reflected, “how people think that nothing can ever happen to them. Not brave, I think, only stupid. Leon, the butler, had such a nice room in the Mauriers’ house, he didn’t want to leave! Just sat there with a bottle of the best wine from the cellar. ‘Sit tight,’ he said. ‘It’ll pass.’ But I wasn’t so sure. Fires were breaking out all over town. Leon sent me in to buy things;
he
wouldn’t go on account of La Veretta! It’s good he sent me, otherwise I wouldn’t have seen the mud coming. I saw it sliding down the mountain and I knew as well as I know my name that that was the end of St. Pierre. So I found a man with a fishing boat and I gave him the five dollars Leon had given me. Itold him to get me away, anyplace, I didn’t care where, but get away.
    “We were just out of the harbor when the mud wall hit the sugar factory. You would have to see it to believe it, Patrick! It covered the factory—and that was a big place, let me tell you—covered it up. It was gone in a minute, gone with all the people in it. Oh, God! And the mud kept rolling into the harbor, driving the sea away. When the water came rushing back, it lifted the ships in the harbor like chips of wood and drowned them, drowned the whole city before it pulled back into the bay. Behind the city the cane fields burned and I knew the Mauriers’ house was gone, too, with Leon drinking wine in his nice room. The sky was black as night. I never saw St. Pierre again,” she finished, very quietly.
    “Don’t you ever want to?”
    “I could go. I’ve got a piece of land there, family land that was given to us when the slaves were freed. My cousins live on it, but I’ve got the right to go back any time I want, of course—I’m family. I don’t want to, though.”
    “Why? Was it a bad place?” Patrick liked this talk. It was grown-up talk and he wished it would go on.
    “Oh, they say it was a wicked city, the theater and dancing and all that. They say it was like Paris. But that’s not true. I’ve been in both places and I know. Ah, but it was a grand life! Sundays when the family went calling, Madame Maurier wore her diamond bracelets