Joseph

Eight

The Women Who Hold Fire in Their Hands

The new house is no friend to secrets; within its bone-white stucco walls and behind the narrow shuttered windows talk is misdirected and projected into rooms as if by tympanum, so that Joseph can be (as he is now) upstairs in his bare bedroom, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, and without straining hear—if not the substance, then the tone and the occasional word of—his mother’s conversation with the man downstairs. At first he thought it was the doctor, went downstairs to see, and found instead his mother greeting a man she, after a moment’s hesitation, introduced as M. Armand. A smile on his weathered sunburnt face, cherry-colored nose and ears gleaming with some ointment, Armand said hello and abruptly announced that he’d been a fellow inmate on Ship Island. When Joseph asked what M. Armand had done to be sent there, his mother cut him a glare and told him to go back upstairs. Muttering curses, he did.

Now their voices are forced upon him by the house’s design.

In recent days the cold has retreated to the tips of Joseph’s fingers and toes, in paradox with the worsening winter. He flicks them now, absentminded.

The downstairs voices drop to a murmur. Besides the women of the old neighborhood this Armand is the first visitor his mother has had. The doctor hasn’t been by since the day they moved in, nor has his mother resumed her nighttime errands. So he has gone from the house that held the spirit of his father to the mansion inhabited by the doctor’s dead wife, to still yet another house and a different kind of haunt.

His mother keeps the lamps low—the maid is always bumping into things—and spends most days asleep, or working at some household project: sewing new black clothes or instructing the cook. She sleeps in her room, in her chair in the parlor, and he has even found her curled on one of the sofas. These slumbers are deep and seem to him not due to exhaustion from her ordeal, but rather the gathering of strength for some great feat. The way cats laze and curl only to suddenly spring up all fang and claw when something weaker happens by.

Her focus is inward, this sleek dark thing his mother has become; she withholds herself from him, speaking rarely. Christmas is a week away and there has been no talk of gifts or parties, none of the excitement he recalls. Her behavior as mysterious as Marina’s, who has become a hard thing to handle. Morose, difficult, and so very easy to hurt. Every word from his mouth sets her askew, sends her stomping off. No longer the pirate witch, she has packed away her play and they haven’t so much as held hands in the few times they’ve been together since his mother’s return. The woman-governed world has him entrapped, a tangle of lace and strange tempers.

Downstairs the door shuts, and going to his window Joseph sees the man, Armand, heading out into the street named for the devisor of torments.

Upon his arrival in New Orleans, so the doctor told, Governor Kerlerec held a grand fete. The dances and plays and feasts and music were inaugurated by Mme Kerlerec, who loosed a pair of tar-doused doves set afire. The sparks from the flaming doves ignited fireworks that rained over the city for three days.

Joseph wonders what Mme Kerlerec must have looked like, imagines a petite Frenchwoman, bewigged and powdered in the fashion of those times. It is dark—dark in the way that candle-lit world, the world before gaslight, could only have been. Shadowed, she cups the blackened doves in her hands and, impossibly, keeps them even as the taper is put to their feathers and they alight. The fire-doves jab and squirm and the flames flutter through the gaps in her fingers as she holds them up, and in the light of singed feathers her face is that of his mother, of Mlle Pichon, of Marina. Womanhood nascent or attained, ablaze with promise and threat.