Pamela Morsi (3 page)

"No good can come of your romantic
lingering," he'd warned her. "It is your duty to marry and bear
children. You hesitate over some foolish female notion; God is not
pleased."

What God truly thought, Aida did not know,
but she suspected that Father Denis had not been pleased with her
for some time.

"You are a vain, undutiful daughter," the
priest had charged. "You are selfish and spoiled!"

That's what Father Denis always said. And
Aida had to admit that it was the truth. She never suggested that
the good father was not absolutely right. She always made her
confessions and sorrowfully she did her penance, but she didn't
really reform.

How could she? She really wanted to be a
better woman, a better person. But could a person really not put
herself first? Could a person truly say, I only wish to do my duty
and I will find happiness in that? Perhaps another, a better person
could say that. Aida Gaudet could not.

Aida was not evil, but she knew that she was
not at all saintly. She also knew that beauty was not enough upon
which to base a marriage.

"Aida! Are you coming now?" her father called
out.

"Yes, Poppa, I'm coming," she lied.

Most Acadian farm girls began dreaming of
weddings and trousseaus while still dressed in pinafores. A
wedding was the pinnacle of a woman's life, the measure of her
success. Aida, too, had dreamed of a beautiful wedding, flowers and
ribbons and every eye upon her. And she had dreamed of a handsome
man standing beside her. She dreamed of love. She dreamed of being
loved by a husband. With a little shake of her head she remembered
a long-ago wedding when she'd gathered up some flower petals and
flotsam and made herself a love charm to ensure that happened.
Vaguely she wondered what had become of that silliness wrapped in a
handkerchief.

Aida was to marry Laron Boudreau. He was
handsome, kind, hardworking. Everyone in Prairie l'Acadie thought
the two of them a perfect match. The most beautiful woman on the
Vermilion River should be won by the most handsome man.

That's what people thought. Aida's choice, in
fact had nothing to do with Monsieur Boudreau's good looks. Laron
had not money or property to recommend him. To Aida his lack of
finances worked in his favor. She'd thought it all out carefully.
Laron would come live with her at her father's house. Though he
would be her husband, it would still be her father's house and he
would always work her father's land. For that he would, of
necessity, be grateful for his marriage. Gratitude was not love,
but it was closer than admiration. If he could need her, then he
could love her, her and not the most beautiful woman on the
Vermilion River.

Of course there was the German widow. Aida
tapped her teeth thoughtfully with her fingernail. She doubted that
Laron realized Aida knew about her. Aida wasn't hurt or worried
about that alliance. She wasn't even certain that she would object
to it continuing after they had wed.

The German widow was Laron's mistress. Aida
allowed the thought to flow over her like water, testing the feel
of it. It was not bothersome at all. Aida thought that it should
bother her, but it didn't. That he held another woman in his arms,
that he probably did with her unspeakably intimate things, was not
disturbing or hurtful, but merely a curiosity.

If Aida never acted as if she noticed, no one
would ever suspect that she knew. Surely he couldn't love the
German widow. Her brow furrowed unhappily at the suggestion. Aida
didn't mind Laron having a mistress, as long as he didn't love her.
When Monsieur Boudreau finally began to love, Aida wanted to be
the recipient.

She pushed away the troubling thoughts. She
was young and pretty, and tonight, just up the river, music was
playing. Somehow, some way, her husband would come to love her.
She was Aida Gaudet, young and beautiful and ready for a party.

"Aida!" her father called out impatiently
once more.

"Coming," she answered as she began looking
around for her fancy kid dancing slippers. She bit her lower lip,
worried. Where were they? It was one of the terrible realities of
her life; Aida was likely to lose things. Well, perhaps that wasn't
exactly true. She would simply forget where they had been put.

"She would forget her head, were it not
attached," the old women joked of her. Unfortunately, it was
probably true. Somehow she could not seem to recall what she was
supposed to do when. Where things were or why. Or even if she had
done what she was required to do.

Frantically she began searching the room,
sorting through the worn old sea chest, searching through the
unstraightened bedclothes, kneeling to look under the bed. By
complete chance she spotted them. The slippers of aged buckskin
dyed with poke salet berries were hanging from the rafters. The
rains had been bad last week and she had feared the damp floors
would ruin them.

She climbed up on a chair and brought them
down, grateful for their safety. Brushing them lightly to assure
herself they were not dusty, she slipped them into her sleeve for
safekeeping. She grabbed her guinea feather fan and hurried from
her room, through her father's, and into the main part of the
house.

Her wooden sabots sat next to the door and
she slipped her bare feet into them. They clomped against the porch
boards as she made her way noisily outside.

The dancing slippers could not be risked to
the damp dangers of water travel. If a shoe became muddy or lost in
the water, it should be a wooden one, easily replaced.

"Coming, Poppa," she called out to the
gray-haired man waiting rather impatiently at the end of the
dock.

The Gaudet house, like most on the Prairie
l'Acadie, was built on the natural rise of land beside the water.
The stream facilitated travel, whether for visiting neighbors or
for transporting goods to market. Water access meant
prosperity.

But water could also mean flood. The whole
area was low and wet. Good for game and crops, but people and their
possessions needed to be high and dry. As if God understood this
wet paradox, all along the bayous and rivers, thousands of years of
sediment deposit built up along the banks, making the areas near
the water the safest in time of flood. So even with huge areas of
open space behind them, the residents of Prairie l'Acadie lived
bunched together on the natural levees in close proximity to the
river and its tiny tributaries.

Jesper Gaudet was wearing his best cottonade
culotte tied just below the knee and his striped blue chemise. His
face was shaded from the last of the afternoon sun by a
wide-brimmed hat woven of palmetto.

"We're going to miss everything," he
complained as he helped Aida into the long narrow boat known in the
bayous as a pirogue. She ignored his words and settled herself
comfortably in the narrow, seatless hull, her cherry-striped skirt
billowing around her like a frothy soufflé, as her father pushed
off from the dock and began the slow, laborious task of poling the
pirogue upstream.

"They've been playing and singing for seems
like half a day already," Jesper continued to fuss. "All the good
food is likely gone."

"Oh, I'm not hungry," Aida told him
lightly.

"Well, I certainly am," the old man
complained.

With a little O of surprise and shame, Aida
covered her mouth. She had forgotten once more to fix Poppa any
supper.

It was near sunset. The light was low and
filtered through the thick line of aging cypress and tupelos on
either side of the broad expanse of water. The outstretched
branches of the trees were draped and weeping with Spanish moss.
And the quiet serenity of coming evening was disturbed only by the
call of crickets and the buzz of mosquitoes.

The loud hungry squawk of a heron caught
Aida's attention and she watched the bird's smooth graceful flight
just above the water as it searched for prey. It was beautiful. She
admired beautiful things.

The pirogue cut a neat swath through the
bright green duckweed, so thick and verdant, it looked as if a
person could simply walk across it to the distant banks where the
knobby knees of the trees were visible above the water. The river
was light and color and beauty. It was home.

They came around a bend in the waterway, and
the sounds of song and merriment grew more distinct. Up ahead the
glow of lanterns was visible in the distance. Aida sighed happily.
This was life, this was what life was meant to be, joie de
vivre.

The whine of bowed fiddles and the pounding
of dancing feet against cypress planking filled the air, mixing
with the smells of boiled shrimp, gumbo fevi, and fresh baked
miches. It was Saturday night and for Acadians that meant dancing
and laughing and fun.

Fais-dodo was what the people had jokingly
begun to call these community outings. The term, meaning "go to
sleep," was coined from the practice of putting all the babies
together in a bed at the back of the house. Children, typically
much beloved and coddled, found suddenly that the parents who
normally were content to converse with them for hours on end now
only had one phrase to say: "Go to sleep!"

It was a phrase that Armand Sonnier himself
uttered as he helped his sister-in-law get her three children
tucked into the Marchand family's low-slung four-poster. A
half-dozen children already reclined there, boys and girls alike
wearing the traditional shapeless knee-length gown.

His niece and two nephews were healthy,
rowdy, and active, much too much for his sister-in-law to handle
alone.

Felicite Sonnier was heavily pregnant again.
Her once pink, pretty face was round as a plate and splotched with
the faint brown mask of childbearing. Her formerly lustrous brown
curls were dull and limp and wound rather untidily about her head.
And below the hem of her skirt her feet were so swollen no shoes
would fit her and it appeared she had no ankles at all. Her best
dress hung around her massive body like a tent, the shoulder
stained with baby spit-up. Felicite Sonnier was tired. Armand knew
by the sounds of her sighs that she was very tired.

"You rabbits get down in your den," Armand
told the three curly-headed children. "And I don't want to hear a
one of you calling out for Maman."

"I'm too big to go to sleep," four-year-old
Gaston complained with a yawn.

"Me, too," his three-year-old sister chimed
in. Little Marie's words were hard to make out as her thumb was
already tucked firmly in her tiny little mouth.

"You two must lie here with Pierre," their
uncle explained to them with great seriousness. "The baby needs his
rest and you must watch over him."

Ten-month-old Pierre, wide-eyed, gurgling
happily, and as fat as a sausage, seemed the only one of the three
who wasn't really sleepy.

"All right," Gaston agreed with a sigh as he
snuggled down into the bed. "I'll lie here and take care of
Pierre."

"Me, too," Marie echoed.

Armand kissed all three and waited beside the
bed as he watched Felicite do the same. The two older children were
already dozing off as he took his sister-in-law's arm and urged her away from the
sleeping room.

"We must find you a place to sit," he said.
"You are so near your last gasp, I really should carry you."

Felicite giggled. She was a head taller than
he and outweighed him by half again as much.

"I'm just fine, Armand. You'll spoil me with
this treatment. It reminds me of your brother when we were
expecting our first."

"A little spoiling wouldn't hurt you," Armand
insisted.

She laughed. "Truly, I am getting used to my
delicate condition. I've been having a baby, just had a baby, or
having another baby for years now." She leaned forward as if to
whisper conspiratorially. "It seems to be something that I'm good
at."

Armand grinned back at her. "Along with
cooking, cleaning, sewing, and sister-in-lawing. Let's find you a
place to sit and rest awhile and I'll bring you something to
eat."

Jean Baptiste had been tying up the pirogue
and was still standing at the end of the dock, engaged in a deep
discussion with Emile Marchand. Armand didn't mind fending for
Felicite. As a single man in her household, he was routinely
provided good cooking, clean clothes, and a tranquil home life.
Armand was grateful to her for those things. He also simply liked
her ready wit and empathy for others. They were fine qualities in a
woman, qualities he someday hoped to find in the woman he chose for
his own bride.

An empty chair was finally located on the
north side of the house next to Madame Hebert. The woman, a close
friend of Felicite's, welcomed her eagerly, ready to talk. She was
one of Laron's many sisters and had his handsome good looks, plus
ten years.

"Doesn't he look slicked and pressed?" Madame
Hebert said to Felicite as she pointed in Armand's direction. "Must
be a lady on his mind."

Felicite nodded in agreement. "Yes, Yvonne, I
have to agree. When a man combs back his hair and puts on a clean
shirt of his own volition, there must be a woman on his mind."

Armand laughed and shook his head. "I only
dress for Saturday night, mesdames," he assured them. Unlike most
of the men present in their knee-length culottes, Armand wore
trousers. He thought that the longer pants made him appear taller.
"Even the most careless swamper shines up for Saturday night."

"So you have no interest in women?" Madame
Hebert asked, disbelieving. "My husband has a cousin in St.
Martinville. She is just turned fifteen and very petite I
hear."

Armand smiled broadly at her. "Perhaps I must
find an excuse to visit St. Martinville this winter," he said.

"He is planning a house," Felicite whispered
excitedly.

Madame Hebert's eyes widened and Armand would
have gladly stuck a stocking in his sister-in- law's mouth.