Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

survived the storm was now underwater, but she didn’t doubt Joe’s word. If he could find the weeds he sought, she trusted that she would feel better quite soon. And she did feel terrible. Fever, chills, nausea. Her thigh was so engorged that she’d had to slit her khakis to give it room to swell. She pulled at the hole in her pants, trying to see whether the famed red streak of blood poisoning was crawling up her leg. If she found such a streak what would it mean? Amputation? Lockjaw? Death? God only knew the consequences of dragging an open puncture wound through mud and muck and floodwater.
    “Douglass?” she asked, in a voice that sounded faraway even to her. “How do you think his necklace got in Abby’s grave? Cyril’s, I mean…Cedrick’s…whoever.”
    “I decked him. Didn’t I tell you?” The memory added strength to the wounded man’s voice. “After we dug the hole. Abby lay right there on the dirt while I did it.” He drew another labored breath. “Clipped him on the jaw. Knocked him down.” It hurt Faye to watch him cough and wheeze again before he went on. “Straddled him. Did my damndest to throttle him.”
    “You broke the chain while you were choking him.”
    “Prob’ly. Shoulda finished the job. Would have, ’cept for what he said.”
    Faye wanted Douglass to go on, but she was afraid. He was breathing in such tiny gasps.
    Douglass continued anyway. “Said if anybody come up right then—they’d see just two men and a dead body. Said, ‘Who they gonna to send to the chair? Me? Or you, nigger?’”
    Faye closed her eyes and watched two men lowering Abby’s limp form into her grave. Covering her with dirt. Riding together back to shore in Douglass’ tiny fishing boat, facing each other eyeball to eyeball, because each was afraid to turn his back on the other. Afraid for forty years to turn their backs on each other.
    Partly to get his mind off forty years of slow torture and partly to get her own mind off her leg, Faye peeled the damp plastic wrapping off William Whitehall’s journal.
    “Want to hear a story?” she asked him.
    Douglass shifted on the bed. “Want to hear a story, Faye,” he mumbled.
    Carefully unwrapping the journal, she arranged the clear plastic wrapping to protect its pages from her damp hands, her wet clothes, the sodden air. Her fever had risen to the near-delusional stage of garbled thinking and uncertain vision, but she needed to read for Douglass and for herself, so she pulled herself together and did it.
    ***
    Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton, recorded 1935
    Living in the Big House at Joyeuse after the hurricane and I killed the Master felt like I’d died and gone to heaven, but it didn’t make Mister Courtney happy. Sometimes, he sat at his desk and unlocked the drawer where he kept his papers. Then he laid bills of sale for all his people across the desk, calling them by name as he sorted through their papers.
    “Rufus. Sallie. Beau. Scipio. Ora.” Then he would set one paper to the side, away from the others, and say, “Cally.” After a minute, he’d go back to counting his people. There were plenty of them, because he inherited Joyeuse since the Master didn’t leave any children. Well, he left me, but I didn’t count.
    Mister Courtney’s Mama must have told him that his stepfather, the Master, was my daddy. Knowing that, a decent man like Mister Courtney couldn’t treat me like a slave. He gave me a room in the Big House and, even though he never asked me to run his household I did, because it needed doing and I knew how. Once he told me he wanted to set all his slaves free. When I caught my breath, I asked why he didn’t go ahead and do it. I can still hear what he said.
    “Because I’m afraid.” He fingered through the bills of sale laid across his desk and said, “I’m afraid of what will happen to them, and I’m afraid of what will happen to me.”
    It took a long time for the War to touch us at Joyeuse. Mister Courtney didn’t go away to fight, on account of his lame leg. Truth be told, I never noticed his limp until I came to live with him, because he carried himself like a prince. When he spoke, he fastened his blue eyes on you so direct that you hardly noticed whether the sun was shining. You certainly didn’t notice anything so paltry as a weak leg.
    I know you can tell that I was in love with him. In the seventy years since, I never met anyone who could hold a candle to him, so I’ve been alone,