[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

"I didn't mean to give that impression," the woman replied.
When Ladice walked outside, the air was sunlit and cool and smelled of
burning leaves. A marching band was practicing beyond a grove of trees, the
notes of a martial song rising off the brass and silver instruments into a
hard blue sky. For some reason she could not explain, the expectation of
football games and Saturday-night dances and corsages made of chrysanthemums
and gin fizzes in the back of a coupe had become the province of others, one
she would not share in.
One month later the mail carrier told Ladice he had left a letter from
Southern University for her at the plantation post office. She walked down the
Page 31
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
dirt road in the dusk, between woods that smelled of pine sap and dust on the
leaves and fish heads that raccoons had strewn among the trunks. The sun
burned like a flare on a marshy horizon that was gray with winterkill.
She took the envelope from the hand of the postal clerk and walked back
to the garage apartment and put it on her breakfast table under a salt shaker
and lay down on her bed and went to sleep without opening the letter.
It was dark when she awoke. She turned on the kitchen light and washed
her face in the bathroom, then sat down at the table and read the two brief
paragraphs that had been written to her by the registrar. When she had
finished, she refolded the letter and placed it back in the envelope and
walked down to Julian LaSalle's front door, not the back, and knocked.
He was in slippers and a red silk bathrobe when he opened the door, his
reading glasses tilted down on his nose.
"Is something wrong?" he asked.
"My credits from plantation school ain't no good."
"Beg your pardon?"
"Southern will take my credits from St. Edward's. The ones from
plantation school don't count. You must have knowed that when you said you
would get me a scholarship to Southern. Did you know that, Mr. Julian?"
"We provide a free school on Poinciana. Most people would find that
generous. I'm not familiar with the accreditation system at Southern
University."
"I t'ink I'm gonna be moving back to the quarters."
"Now, listen," he said. He looked over his shoulder, up the curved stairs
that led to the second floor. "We'll talk about this tomorrow."
She wadded up the envelope and the letter and threw it over his shoulder
onto his living room rug.
The following Thursday, the one night he always spent playing gin rummy with
his wife, Mr. Julian drove to Ladice's house, where she now lived with her
mother on a dead-end, isolated road lined with slash pines. It was cold and
smoke from wood fires hung as thick as cotton in the trees. She watched him
through the front window as he studied her vegetable garden, thumb and
forefinger pinched on his chin, his eyes busy with thoughts that had nothing
to do with her garden.
When he entered the house, he removed his hat.
"There's a Catholic college for colored students in New Orleans. I had a
talk with the dean's office this morning. Would you be willing to take some
preparatory courses?" he said.
She had been ironing when he had driven up to the house, and she picked
up the iron from the pie pan it sat in and sprinkled a shirt with water from a
soda bottle and ran the iron hissing across the cloth. She hadn't bathed that
day, and she could smell her own odor in her clothes.
"If I take these courses, how I know I'm gonna get in?" she asked.
"You have my word," he replied.
She nodded and touched at the moisture on her forehead with her wrist.
She wanted to tell him to leave, to take his promises and manipulations and
mercurial moods back to his home, back to the wife whose cancer of the spirit
was greater than the disease that attacked her body. But she thought about New
Orleans, the streetcars clattering down the oak- and palm-lined avenues, the
parades during Mardi Gras, the music that rose from the French Quarter into
the sky at sunset
"You ain't fooling me, Mr. Julian?" she said.
Then she knew how weak she actually was, how much she wanted what he
could give her, and consequently, when all was said and done, how easily she
would always be used either by him or someone like him. She felt a sense of
shame about herself, her life, and most of all her self-delusion that she had
ever been in control of Julian LaSalle.
"I passed your mother and uncle on the road. Will they be back soon?" he
Page 32
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
said, and rubbed her arm with his palm.
"No. They gone to Lafayette," she said, wondering at how easy it was to
become complicitous in her own exploitation.
He removed the iron from her hand and put his arms around her and rubbed
his face in her hair and pressed her tightly against his body.
"I'm dirty. I been on my feet all day," she said.
"You're lovely anytime, Ladice," he said. He led her to her bedroom,
which was lit only by a bedside lamp, and pulled her T-shirt over her head and
pushed her jeans down over her hips.
"It's Thursday. You don't have a sitter for Miz LaSalle on Thursday
night," she said.
"She's taking a nap. She'll be fine," he replied. Then he was on top of
her, his body trembling, his lips on her breasts.
She fixed her eyes on the smoke in the slash pines outside, the fireflies
that lit like sparks in the limbs, the moon that was orange with dust from the
fields. She thought she heard a pickup truck clanking by on the road, but the
sound of its engine was absorbed by the distant whistle of a Southern Pacific
freight rumbling through the wetlands toward New Orleans. She closed her eyes
and thought of New Orleans, where the mornings always smelled of mint and
flowers and chicory coffee and beignets frying in someone's kitchen.
She felt his body constrict and tighten and his loins shudder, then his
weight left her and he was lying next to her, his breath short, his hair damp
against her cheek. After a moment he widened his eyes, like a man returning to
the world that constituted his ordinary life. He sat on the side of the
mattress, his pale back sweaty and etched by vertebrae.
Then he did something he had never done in the aftermath of their
lovemaking. He patted her on top of the hand and said, "In another time and
place we might have made quite a pair, you and I. You're an extraordinary
woman. Don't let anybody ever tell you otherwise."
The inside of the room seemed filled with mist or smoke, and the
fireflies in the tops of the trees seemed brighter than they should have been.
She wondered if she was coming down with a cold or if she had lost a part of
her soul and no longer knew who she was. She rose from the bed, still naked,
and went to the window.
"Turn out the light," she said.
He clicked off the lamp on the bedside table and the room dropped into
darkness. She looked out the window and realized it was too late in the year
for fireflies, that the red pinpoints of light in the pines were sparks
tumbling out of the sky.
But it was not the threat of fire to her own house that made her heart
stop. The narrow, grained face of Legion the overseer suddenly moved into her
vision, no more than three feet on the other side of the glass. His eyes raked
her nude body even as he was tipping his hat.
CHAPTER 6
The fire at the LaSalle home had started in the kitchen, probably by a dish
towel that had been left near an open flame. The fire climbed up the wall and
flattened on the ceiling, then spread through a hallway and was sucked by a
draft up the staircase onto the second story. Mr. Julian had removed the phone
from Mrs. LaSalle's bedroom long ago, after a judge in Opelousas and a U.S. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]