CHAPTER
twenty-eight

Anna was sitting on the bed next to Daisy, holding her friend’s hand. For two days now, Daisy had barely stirred. The feverish red of her cheeks would fade to white as her temperature climbed and dropped over and over again. That, at least, had stopped. Daisy was now breathing easy, and her long sleep appeared more restful than before.

“There’s something wrong, isn’t there, Reed? Why did she start running a fever again and sleeping all the time? And why are you checking her pulse so often? Please tell me.”

“I didn’t wanna scare you, but her wound abscessed.”

“What? When?”

“Two days ago. It was full of infection that had to be, well, removed. And the doctor was deliverin’ two babies when it happened. So I didn’t have any choice but to do it myself, or she could’ve—it just had to be done.”

“Why didn’t you call us?”

“You didn’t need to see that, Anna. Dr. Sesser brought over some antiseptic and antibiotics, and I’ve been changin’ her bandage and treatin’ her wound several times a day like he showed me. He wanted me to keep her on a higher dose o’ morphine till the pain settles down. That’s why I’m watchin’ her so close—to make sure I don’t give her too much.”

“You ought to be a doctor, do you know that?”

“Not me.”

“Yes, you. If Daisy gets through this, it’ll be because of you. You want to go get some breakfast while I sit with her?”

“I really don’t wanna leave her till the doctor gets here.”

“Then I’m bringing you a breakfast tray.”

As Anna left for the kitchen, Reed checked Daisy’s pulse one more time, just to be on the safe side.

“Are y’all plannin’ my funeral?”

“Daisy! You’re awake! Oh, thank goodness!” Anna was sitting at Daisy’s bedside, clutching her hand. All the women of Dolly’s house were circled around the bed.

“How . . . how long have I . . . been asleep?”

“Two days,” Dolly said.

“We were beginning to think a bucket of water might be required to awaken you,” Evelyn said. “Fortunately, it never came to that.”

“I’m . . . so crazy-headed,” Daisy said, blinking several times as if to clear the fog. “Am I still . . . at your house, Dolly?”

“Yes, honey, you’re still at my house, sleepin’ in Reed’s room.”

“Well . . . what about Ella?”

“Joe and Harry have taken good care of her,” Evelyn reported. “They check on her every morning and evening—and of course, Dolly has been sending her food.”

“Why have I been . . . sleepin’ so much?”

“Daisy, it was amazing,” Anna said. “We all can’t believe it. The wound on your ankle abscessed and had all kind of infection in it that needed to come out, but Dr. Sesser was delivering babies when it happened. So Reed did it. He did surgery on your foot to keep you—to get you well.”

“Surgery?”

“It’s true, honey,” Dolly said. “Without tellin’ a one of us, that brave boy operated on you. And the doctor said it looked like a trained surgeon at the hospital had done it. Said he couldn’a done no better hisself. And he said you’re gonna heal up just fine now. That’s the only way we were able to pry Reed away from you and make him go upstairs to sleep.”

Daisy slowly took in everything the women were saying, and then she began to cry.

“Oh, honey, don’t cry!” Dolly hurried to her side. “You’re gonna be fine now.”

“She’s right, Daisy,” Anna assured her. “Everything’s going to be alright. You’ll start getting better now.”

“It’s not—it’s not that,” Daisy said as Dolly handed her a handkerchief. “Don’t you see? I made him—go back there. Back to all those bleedin’ soldiers—an’ all his awful nightmares.”

“Maybe so, but you did something else,” Anna said. “You showed him that he can beat those nightmares. If he had let them take over, that infection could’ve taken you away from us, and he knew that. You gave him his fight back, Daisy.” She took the handkerchief and wiped Daisy’s tears away. “You’re the bravest person I know.”

“I don’t feel very brave.”

“Well, you are. You want some water?” Anna helped her sit up in bed and drink. “Are you in pain?”

“Not too bad.”

“The doctor gave Reed something to deaden your foot so you can start coming off the morphine,” Anna explained. “You think you could eat something?”

Daisy shook her head. She looked around the room as the fog in her brain began to clear and spotted Catherine’s journal on top of Reed’s chest of drawers. “Guess I missed the rest of the story.”

“You did not,” Evelyn said. “We all refused to read one word without you.”

“Really?” Daisy smiled.

“Really,” Anna said. “You just rest, and when you’re up to it, we’ll all read Catherine’s story together.”

It was pouring outside. Anna had just finished helping Daisy eat a bowl of chicken and dumplings when Evelyn and Dolly came in.

“Honey, does that feel like it’s gonna stay down?” Dolly asked.

“I think so,” Daisy answered. “Sure tastes good, Dolly.”

“Well, you haven’t eaten much o’ nothin’ since you got bit, honey. I ’magine anything would taste pretty good right about now.”

“Do you feel as if you might enjoy a story?” Evelyn asked Daisy.

“I think I’m ready for Catherine and Andre,” Daisy said.

“Okay, ladies, pull up your chairs.” Anna took Daisy’s empty bowl away and fetched the journal. She climbed onto the bed and fluffed the pillows behind Daisy’s back as Evelyn and Dolly pulled up two chairs. When everyone was situated, Anna began to read.

April 25, 1844

I must apologize, dear self, for all the interruptions. I have had little time to write. Obviously, my husband did not murder me in the woods, or I would not be writing to you now. What he did there was change me.

We walked silently along the Tanyard until it opened into the most beautiful little slough I’ve ever seen—a sunlit, glassy pool with grand oaks shading the banks. Andrew took both my hands, turned me to face him, and told me that he did indeed have secrets. A man where he came from was trying to do him in. But Andrew said he regretted nothing in his past, and he promised that no dark shadows of his would ever fall on me. Then he asked me whether I trusted him. I said yes—and I meant it.

Even so, there was something I had to know—was his name really Andrew Sinclair? It wasn’t, he said, but for both our sakes I should call him that. And then I asked the hardest question of all—was our marriage even legal if he had used a false name on the license he wrote for Father to sign? His answer astonished me. He had written his real name on the license but had made it so illegible that Father couldn’t tell what it said. My father held my husband’s unreadable identity in the great wooden cabinet where he kept all the church records in his office. Meanwhile I—Andrew’s wife—had no idea who he actually was.

He took a few steps away from me and said, “As long as we’re in the confessional, I should admit that I only dressed this way to impress your father, which I don’t see the need to do ever again.”

He took off his hat and sent it sailing into the slough. We watched it drift toward the creek as he removed his jacket, vest, and ascot, then tossed them into the water as well. He unbuttoned the collar of his white dress shirt, removed his cuff links and pitched them in the water, then rolled up his sleeves.

“Catherine, meet your husband,” he said.

“So that’s how his cuff link ended up in the belly of a catfish!” Dolly exclaimed. “Y’all, I just can’t believe this. Do you have any idea how many years this whole community has wondered what happened to this couple? Go back to that ‘meet your husband’ part, Anna.”

“Catherine, meet your husband,” he said.

“Hello, husband,” I said, which made him smile. I had to smile myself. I told him I’d introduce him to his wife if only I knew who she was.

“Would you like to find out?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I want to be a good wife.”

I’ll never forget what he said next: “I’d rather have a happy woman than a good wife.”

He asked me, to my surprise, if I liked my wedding frock—a high-collared, stiff gray linen dress with a frumpy topcoat. I told him it was a hand-me-down from Sister and that I suspected it would look like a potato sack were it not for the very tight lace collar. He moved very close to me. First he untied my bonnet and sent it sailing into the slough. Next he unbuttoned my topcoat, slipped it off my shoulders, and tossed it in as well. Then he unbuttoned the choking collar of my dress. After pausing to consider the result, he opened another button below it, and another. For a moment, I thought he might keep going all the way down my dress, but then he stopped and studied me—like a painter reviewing his work—and said, “You can breathe now, Catherine.” No, I couldn’t. I had stopped breathing the moment I felt his fingers brush against my throat.

He asked whether I was happy with my hair, which Father insisted that I wear pulled back into a fat braid wound tightly and pinned against the nape of my neck, with a heavy black crocheted net to cover it. Father found blonde hair offensive. I shook my head in response. Andrew asked if he might take it down. I turned my back to him and felt him begin removing pins from my hair, taking care not to hurt me as he freed me of my confines. He threw the net into the slough and continued sliding pin after pin away until I felt the heavy, loosed braid fall down my back. And then his hands were in my hair, unwinding it from every constricting hold till it was completely unbound.

Slowly I turned around to face him. He twirled a strand through his fingers. Then he laid his free hand against the opening he had made in my dress, against my bare throat.

I thought he was about to kiss me again as he had in the church—in fact, I hoped he would—but instead, he sighed, shook his head, and let his hands fall to his sides. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m getting ahead of myself.”

“Holy mackerel!” Daisy said.

“I might need me a Liberty National fan if we keep readin’ this,” Dolly said.

“Ladies,” Evelyn said, “we must not interrupt the narrative flow. Do continue, Anna. We will try to keep quiet till you finish.”

Andrew asked if he might show me his favorite spot on the creek and held my hand as he led me there. We leisurely followed the Tanyard farther into the woods, around one bend and then another, until we came to the loveliest little waterfall, where the creek deepened on its way to the river. The pines towered above. All around this length of the creek, the ground was carpeted with emerald moss so thick that it felt like a cushion beneath my feet.

We sat down next to each other on a black wrought-iron bench that looked as if it belonged in drawings I had seen of New Orleans. There beside the falls, we remained quiet together, listening to the water flow over the rocks and rhythmically plunge into the deepening channel below.

Finally, Andrew said, “You think I know everything about you, so why don’t you tell me something I don’t know?”

“I believe I’m the one most entitled to ask that question,” I said, which made him laugh.

And then he offered me a bit of new information: until a year ago, he had made his living on the water.

I was intrigued. How?

But he shook his head and refused to tell me anything else until I reciprocated. He had the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t look at it without smiling back.

“Tell me, Catherine,” he demanded, “have you robbed the collection plate, daydreamed about stowing away on a riverboat during your Father’s sermons—anything scurrilous like that?”

“Much worse,” I said. I told him about all the poetry I had read—all secular and some of it romantic in nature.

“Ha!” he said with that gleaming smile. “Good for you! Which devil poets have you dallied with?”

I reported that I had devoted most of my reading to Tennyson, Byron, and Mr. Edgar Allan Poe.

“No Coleridge?” he asked. And then he looked into my eyes and recited in his velvet voice, ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.’”

I realized, as those exquisite words flowed out of him and into me, that this was as intimate as I had ever been with another human being. But it wasn’t close enough. The blackness of my solitary past seemed as if it might devour me, like a great wave swelling ever higher till it rose above my head and crashed over me, pulling me down to the depths and pinning me there.

As he had done before, Andrew seemed to read my thoughts. “Catherine,” he said, laying his hand against my face. My own hand was drawn to the open collar of his shirt, and I laid it against his bare skin as he had laid his on mine.

Suddenly, like a crack of lightning, a shot rang out from somewhere across the creek. Andrew, as startled as I was, looked up to see if he could judge where it came from. He told me we must hurry, and he put his arm around me to help me through the woods as we ran back to the carriage.

The horses seemed to sense our urgency and wasted no time making their way along the creek to another new road through the woods, where the way was clear for them to gallop. Andrew kept an arm around me as we sped through the pines. We stopped abruptly when the woods opened onto a lawn and the most beautiful house I had ever seen—graceful and grand, with double porches and lovely scrolled bannisters. It took my breath away.

On the front porch stood a woman. She looked old from where we sat, though I couldn’t really tell from the carriage. She was holding something at her side. Andrew stared at her, his lips slightly parted as if he couldn’t decide whether to speak. She motioned for him to come. He gave the horses another of his strange commands, and they delivered us to the front steps, where Andrew helped me down.

“What has happened, Appolline?” he asked. The woman standing before us on the porch had skin the color of cocoa and very pale blue eyes. She looked older than my parents—perhaps in her seventies. At her side, she held a pistol.

“This the woman?” she asked in an accent similar to Andrew’s but much heavier.

Andrew introduced us, and I said, “How do you do,” or something equally stupid under the circumstances. The woman said nothing but looked me up and down.

Andrew asked her again—what had happened?

She said something that sounded like “say-fin-ee.”

“Alright, I’m breaking my own rule,” Evelyn said. “C’est fini is French for ‘It’s finished’ or ‘It’s done.’ French would make sense for a man from Louisiana, would it not?”

“You speak French, Evelyn?” Dolly asked. “Why, honey, you’re just as smart as a whip, do you know that?”

“Thank you, Dolly. I’ll hush now. Go ahead, Anna.”

Andrew and Appolline spoke briefly in words I didn’t understand. He occasionally glanced at me, and Appolline nodded agreement to whatever he was saying.

Finally, Andrew turned to me and said he needed for me to trust him right now. We had to get Appolline out of Blackberry Springs quickly, but he promised to explain everything as soon as we were safe.

Then he kissed me—quickly but softly—and told me Appolline would help me get ready while he attended to her troubles.

Before I had a chance to say another word, Andrew disappeared behind the house, and Appolline motioned for me to follow her inside. I paused for just a moment before the sweeping staircase. From the entryway with its soaring ceiling, I could see a music room to my right, a parlor to my left, and a grand dining room straight ahead. It was incredible—like something out of a poem.

Appolline motioned for me to follow her into an elegant bedroom with a tester bed. Spread over it were the loveliest dresses and underthings I had ever seen—all of them silk, satin, lace, and fine cotton. There was even a pair of breeches with a white blouse and riding boots. Appolline pointed to them and said what sounded like ‘poor voo.’”

Anna paused and all the women looked at Evelyn.

“Pour vous means ‘for you,’” she said. “Go on, Anna.”

Women around Blackberry Springs never wore breeches.

“Best for now,” Appolline said. Then she showed me a skirt that unfastened at the waist and opened up like a cape. “For when people might see,” she said. She folded the skirt and put it into a small grip. Then she told me to change while she packed for me.

I stepped behind a silk screen and hurried out of my very Presbyterian clothes. Appolline brought me some of the fine underclothes, along with the breeches, blouse, and riding boots. When I was dressed and stepped from behind the screen, she paused from her work to study me, walking around me in a circle and looking me up and down. She said, “Bébé chose well,” and resumed her packing.

None of the fine dresses were going into the grip she was packing. “What about those?” I asked.

She told me I couldn’t wear them where we were going and promised that “Bébé” would buy me more. She said we had to think only of life right now.

I followed her back to the carriage and climbed in behind her. Giving the horses the same kind of foreign command Andrew had spoken, Appolline sent us on our way up a dirt road away from the house and across a cotton field to a small shotgun cottage at the edge of the woods. She climbed down and began tugging at my trunk, trying to get it down.

She looked surprised when I offered to help. The two of us carried the trunk onto the front porch and then slid it inside the house. Appolline opened it and told me I would never see it again. She asked what I wanted to take with me.

I looked down at the frumpy clothes, all handed down from my sister and none of them even belonging to me. I thought of my poetry disguised as philosophy. Surely there would be no way to carry books with me wherever we were going. I considered my journal, which would be impossible to hide with the three of us traveling together. I would die of embarrassment if Andrew should read any of it. I removed the two blank journals from the trunk.

“Nothing else,” I said. “I don’t want any of it.”

Appolline picked up a rug in the kitchen and opened a small trapdoor beneath it. “No one will look here,” she said. I helped her slide everything I owned down the wooden steps of her root cellar. Covering the trapdoor with the rug, she said again, “Say-fin-ee.”

“I just can’t believe this landed on our doorstep,” Anna said, looking at Daisy. “Hey, what’s the matter?”

“I don’t feel so good,” she said.