Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [346]
“Eat this,” the older women said, pressing a wedge of cassava into her hand. “Or only hold it in your mouth—it will do you good.” She folded the fingers of Isabelle’s other hand over the soaked rag. “And use the vinegar.” She pointed to one of the stoppered clay jars.
“Yes,” said Isabelle. “I’ll do as you say. And thank you.”
The firm hands squeezed her shoulders, then withdrew. Cautiously, Isabelle nibbled a corner of the cassava. Her stomach clenched, and she simply held the bread in her mouth, letting its faint sweetness dissolve. Monsieur Fortier muttered something to his mules, and the wagon wheels began to turn. Isabelle lay back, propped against one of the long bolts of cloth. They had stopped just short of a peak in the zig-zag trial, and as they passed into the descent, the wagon began to roll faster, with Monsieur Fortier grunting from time to time as he pulled back on the long bar of the brake. The barefoot women behind the wagon swung into a rhythmic trot to match the quicker pace, singing as they jogged along, words which Isabelle could not completely understand. If the nausea rose, a sniff of the vinegar rag seemed to quell it, and it was true that the cassava bread had put a more stable foundation beneath her stomach; without realizing it, she seemed to have eaten it all.
She became aware that Nanon was watching her with her usual air of self-enclosed composure, a moment before the other woman spoke.
“Is it always so with you?” she said. “When you are expecting a new child?”
“Not always,” said Isabelle. “With the first, but not the second.”
“Ah,” said Nanon. “Robert.” Her molasses tongue softened the name so wonderfully: Wobè . . . “I remember him well from the time when I first came to your house. And the second, Héloïse, was only a baby then.”
“Let us not speak of it.” Isabelle’s eyes were pricking; she turned her face away and looked out blurrily over the precipitous fall of jungled escarpments, down into the basin of Grande Rivière. She could still hear the strange singing of the women who trotted behind the wagon. Some language of Africa; it was not ordinary Creole. She felt a terrible loneliness that seemed to come from her own hollow core. The moment she’d shared with the black woman and her children by the river returned to her. It seemed to her now that never in her whole life had she been so free as that woman was, unless in her earliest childhood. Perhaps even then her sense of liberty had been illusion.
Then a shadow blocked the sun, and she felt Nanon’s warm weight settle against her side. The soft, rather heavy arm about her shoulders drew her in.
“When Paul was lost from me,” Nanon murmured, “I was sad two times each day. In the morning when I woke, and at night, before sleeping.”
“How terrible it is, sometimes.” Isabelle heard her own whisper, as if from a long, echoing distance, returned to her from the vertiginous valley below.
“At night was worse,” Nanon said. “But the morning was bad too.”
Isabelle stirred against her, drowsily. She felt herself beginning to drift. Long ago, a lifetime it seemed, she had had an intense romantic friendship with a colored girl of her father’s household in Haut de Trou. They had been permitted great intimacy, and had adventured considerably into one another’s bodies, before either of them had ever known a man. Isabelle did not know what had become of the girl afterward.
This was not that. But it was pleasant. A kind of mother comfort—how long since she’d known that? She let herself be cuddled, like a little cat, feeling Nanon’s fingers loosening her bonnet strings and walking the taut tendons of her neck. She let her head slip down to Nanon’s shoulder. Before she knew it, she was sleeping, so soundly that she did not wake until that evening as the wagon began to climb the rim of Haut de Trou.
Madame Fortier claimed the front bedchamber, which Nanon had formerly occupied with Choufleur, for herself and her husband to share. Nanon had no objection, while Isabelle was in no position to object. Nanon sensed this, though