Like a Charm (3 page)

Spent, he could only lie there, his arms splayed to the side, angry welts festering on the tips of his fingers. Macon did not care. A startlingly clear calm washed over him, and he felt as much of the forest as he ever had; his body was one with the ground. Everything had sudden clarity: the creek gurgling in the background, the quiet noises of the forest, birds, insects, animals. He thought of his mother, the way she would wash her hair in the old iron tub then sit by the fire, brushing it out as it dried. He thought of his father sitting in his chair, whittling a toy for the brother or sister Macon would never have.

Without warning, the air changed again, becoming thicker, almost wet. Macon felt the brush of her skin, the silky hair on her legs mingling with his own. Slowly, she moved down, taking him into her mouth. Such was his tiredness that he could only lie there, eyes half shut, staring up at the sky. He was empty. There was nothing more he could give her.

He shuddered as she worked her tongue along his body, licking his stomach, chest and neck, then back down again. Like a dog with a bone, she lapped every inch of him with her silky, warm tongue as he lay there, faint from pleasure. He let out a small sigh even as the weight of her body grew, pressing him deeper into the ground. Macon felt the heat between them, the mingling of their hair, the soft scratch of her skin on his stomach as she leaned harder into him. He felt himself stirring again, throbbing from want. He arched his back, thrusting up into her, gasping as he opened his eyes to find the woman gone and a mighty black bear straddling him in her place.

He screamed in terror, his throat straining as if he had swallowed glass.

A mighty claw slashed across Macon's chest, tearing open the flesh. His brain exploded from the pain, his lungs lurching for air. Macon opened his mouth to scream again but the bear stilled him with a look, one paw resting lightly over Macon's heart. There was no question in her eyes this time and Macon knew it then – she had come to collect on the awful bargain he had made in the cave.

'Yes,' he had said. She could have anything she wanted so long as she kept touching him.

Without further hesitation, the bear reached into his chest, like a child reaching into a bag of candy. Macon's eyelids fluttered, and he saw his own heart glimmer in the sun as the bear offered it up to the heavens. Rays of light licked against the wet tissue like a burning flame. Blood dripped down the bear's arms and chest, splattering his hips, pooling at the joining point between them. The creature roared, and Macon saw the glint of a bracelet round the bear's surprisingly slender wrist just as she put Macon's still-beating heart into her open mouth and swallowed it whole.

VANITAS
Emma Donoghue

This afternoon I was so stone bored I wrote something on a scrap of paper and put it in a medicine bottle, sealed it up with the stub of a candle. I was sitting on the levee; I tossed the bottle as far as I could (since I throw better than girls should) and the Mississippi took it, lazily. If you got in a boat here by the Duparc-Locoul Plantation, and didn't even row or raise a sail, the current would take you down fifty miles of slow curves to New Orleans in the end. That's if you didn't get tangled up in weed.

What I wrote on the scrap was
Au secours!
Then I put the date,
3 juillet 1839.
The Americans if drowning or in other trouble call out
help,
which doesn't capture the attention near as much, it's more like a little sound a puppy would make. The bottle was green glass with
Poison
down one side. I wonder who'll fish it out of the brown water, and what will that man or woman or child make of my message? Or will the medicine bottle float right through the city, out into the Gulf of Mexico, and my scribble go unread till the end of time?

It was a foolish message, and a childish thing to do. I know that; I'm fifteen, which is old enough that I know when I'm being a child. But I ask you, how's a girl to pass an afternoon as long and scalding as this one? I stare at the river in hopes of seeing a boat go by, or a black gum tree with muddy roots. A week ago I saw a blue heron swallow down a wriggling snake. Once in a while a boat will have a letter for us, a boy attaches it to the line of a very long fishing rod and flicks it over to our pier. I'm supposed to call a nègre to untie the letter and bring it in; Maman hates it when I do it myself. She says I'm a gâteur de nègres, like Papa, we spoil them with soft handling. She always beats them when they steal things, which they call only
taking.

I go up the pecan alley towards the Maison, and through the gate in the high fence that's meant to keep the animals out. Passers-by always know a Creole house by the yellow and red, not like the glaring white American ones. Everything on our plantation is yellow and red – not just the houses but the stables, the hospital, and the seventy slave cabins that stretch back like a village for three miles, with their vegetable gardens and chicken pens.

I go in the Maison now, not because I want to, just to get away from the bam-bam-bam of the sun on the back of my neck. I step quietly past Tante Fanny's room, because if she hears me she might call me in for some more lessons. My parents are away in New Orleans doing business; they never bring me. I've never been anywhere, truth to tell. My brother Emile has been in the Lycée Militaire in Bordeaux for five years already, and when he graduates, Maman says perhaps we will all go on a voyage to France. By all I don't mean Tante Fanny, because she never leaves her room, nor her husband Oncle Louis who lives in New Orleans and does business for us, nor Oncle Flagy and Tante Marcelite, quiet sorts who prefer to stay here always and see to the nègres, the field ones and the house ones. It will be just Maman and Papa and I who go to meet Emile in France. Maman is the head of the Famille ever since Grandmère Nannette Prud'Homme retired; we Creoles hand the reins to the smartest child, male or female (unlike the Americans, whose women are too feeble to run things). But Maman never really wanted to oversee the family enterprise; she says if her brothers Louis and Flagy were more useful she and Papa could have gone back to la belle France and stayed there. And then I would have been born a French mademoiselle. Creole means born of French stock, here in Louisiana, but Maman prefers to call us French. She says France is like nowhere else in the world, it's all things gracious and fine and civilized, and no sacrés nègres about the place.

I pass Millie on the stairs, she's my maid and sleeps on the floor of my room but she has to help with everything else as well. She's one of Pa Philippe's children, he's very old (for a nègre), and has VPD branded on both cheeks from when he used to run away, that stands for Veuve Prud'Homme Duparc. It makes me shudder a little to look at the marks. Pa Philippe can whittle anything out of cypress with his little knife: spoons, needles, pipes. Since Maman started our breeding programme we have more small nègres than we know what to do with, but Millie's the only one as old as me. 'Allô, Millie,' I say, and she says 'Mam'zelle Aimée,' and grins back but forgets to curtsey.

Aimée means beloved. I've never liked it as a name. It seems it should belong to a different kind of girl.

Where I am bound today is the attic. Though it's hotter than the cellars, it's the one place nobody else goes. I can lie on the floor and chew my nails and fall into a sort of dream. But today the dust keeps making me sneeze. I'm restless, I can't settle. I try a trick my brother Emile once taught me, to make yourself faint. You breathe in and out very fast while you count to a hundred, then stand against the wall and press as hard as you can between your ribs. Today I do it twice, and I feel odd, but that's all; I've never managed to faint as girls do in novels.

I poke through some wooden boxes, but they hold nothing but old letters, tedious details of imports and taxes and engagements and deaths of people I never heard of. At the back there's an old-fashioned sheepskin trunk, I've tried to open it before. Today I give it a real wrench and the top comes up. Ah, now here's something worth looking at. Real silk, I'd say, as yellow as butter, with layers of tulle underneath, and an embroidered girdle. The sleeves are huge and puffy, like sacks of rice. I slip off my dull blue frock and try it on over my shift. The skirt hovers, the sleeves bear me up so I seem to float over the splinters and dust of the floorboards. If only I had a looking glass up here. I know I'm short and homely, with a fat throat, and my hands and feet are too big, but in this sun-coloured dress I feel halfway to beautiful. Grandmère Nannette, who lives in her Maison de Reprise across the yard and is descended from Louis XV's own physician, once said that like her I was pas jolie but at least we had our skin, un teint de roses. Maman turns furious if I go out without my sunhat or a parasol; she says if I get freckled like some Cajun farm girl how is she supposed to find me a good match? My stomach gets tight at the thought of a husband, but it won't happen before I'm sixteen, at least. I haven't even become a woman yet, Maman says, though I'm not sure what she means.

I dig in the trunk. A handful of books; the collected poetry of Lord Byron, and a novel by Victor Hugo called
Notre Dame de Paris.
More dresses – a light violet, a pale peach – and light shawls like spiders' webs, and, in a heavy travelling case, some strings of pearls, with rings rolled up in a piece of black velvet. The bottom of the case lifts up, and there I find the strangest thing. It doesn't look French, somehow; perhaps Oncle Louis got it for Eliza on one of his trips to Savannah? It's a sort of bracelet – a thin gold chain – with trinkets dangling from it. I've never seen such perfect little oddities. There's a tiny gold locket that refuses to open; a gold cross; a monkey (grimacing); a minute kneeling angel; a pair of ballet slippers. A tiny tower of some sort; a crouching tiger (I recognize his toothy roar from the encyclopaedia); and a machine with miniature wheels that go round and round; I think this must be a locomotive, like we use to haul cane to our sugarmill. But the one I like best, I don't know why, is a gold key. It's so tiny, I can't imagine what door or drawer or box in the world it might open.

Through the window I see the shadows are getting longer; I must go down and show myself, or there'll be a fuss. I pack the dresses back into the trunk, but I can't bear to give up the bracelet. I manage to open its narrow catch and fasten the chain around my left arm above the elbow, where no one will see it under my sleeve. I mustn't show it off, but I'll know it's there; I can feel the little charms moving against my skin, pricking me.

'Vanitas,' says Tante Fanny. 'The Latin word for?'

'Vanity,' I guess.

'A word with two meanings. Can you supply them?'

'A . . . a desire to be pretty or finely dressed,' I begin.

She nods, but corrects me: 'Self-conceit. The holding of too high an opinion of one's beauty, charms or talents. But it also means futility,' she says, very crisp. 'Worthlessness. What is done
in vain.
Vanitas paintings illustrate the vanity of all human wishes. Are you familiar with Ecclesiastes, chapter one, verse two?'

I hesitate. I scratch my arm through my sleeve, to feel the little gold charms.

My aunt purses her wide mouth. Though she is past fifty now, with the sallow look of someone who never sees the sun and always wears black, you can tell that she was once a beauty.
'Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities,'
she quotes;
'all is vanity.'

That's Cousine Eliza on the wall behind her mother's chair, in dark oils. In the picture she looks much older than sixteen to me. She is sitting in a chair with something in her left hand, I think perhaps a handkerchief; has she been crying? Her white dress has enormous sleeves, like clouds; above them, her shoulders slope prettily. Her face is creamy and perfectly oval, her eyes are dark, her hair is coiled on top of her head like a strange plum cake. Her lips are together; it's a perfect mouth, but it looks so sad. Why does she look so sad?

'In this print here,' says Tante Fanny, tapping the portfolio in her lap with one long nail (I don't believe she ever cuts them), 'what does the hourglass represent?'

I bend to look at it again. A grim man in seventeenth-century robes, his desk piled with objects. 'Time?' I hazard.

'And the skull?'

'Death.'

'Très bien, Aimée.'

I was only eight when my uncle and aunt came back from France, with – among their copious baggage – Cousine Eliza in a lead coffin. She'd died of a fever. Papa came back from Paris right away, with the bad news, but the girl's parents stayed on till the end of the year, which I thought strange. I was not allowed to go to the funeral, though the cemetery of St James is only ten miles upriver. After the funeral was the last time I saw my Oncle Louis. He's never come back to the plantation since, and for seven years Tante Fanny hasn't left her room. She's shut up like a saint; she spends hours kneeling at her little prie-dieu, clutching her beads, thumping her chest. Millie brings all her meals on trays, covered to keep off the rain or the flies. Tante Fanny also sews and writes to her old friends and relations in France and Germany. And, of course, she teaches me. Art and music, French literature and handwriting, religion and etiquette (or, as she calls it, les convenances and comme il faut). She can't supervise my piano practice, as the instrument is in the salon at the other end of the house, but she leaves her door open, when I'm playing, and strains her ears to catch my mistakes.