A Woman Clothed in Sun Read online

  The wilderness had grown up to the house, softening the peeling whitewash with ivy and honeysuckle and jasmine. Holly and yaupon thrust up beneath maples and oaks in a green leafy march on the clearing which had already overwhelmed the stables and outbuildings. The only place where Rachel contended for the soil was the garden, fenced off from old Bess, their mare, and the cow, Mollie. Tomatoes, cabbage, lettuce, green beans, carrots, okra, sweet potatoes, onions and peas grew in the small patch. There were hills of cucumbers, squash and watermelons. They were already having lettuce, and in a few more weeks there’d be new potatoes the size of marbles to cream with tiny peas. In the summer they ate mostly from the garden, supplementing their diet with fish from the lake. The woods yielded a fall harvest of persimmons and hickory nuts, and berries and mayhaws in the spring and summer.

  Papa’s one practical talent was making excellent wine from dandelions, blackberries, blueberries and tangy wild grapes. He traded this to Tante Aurore for ham and side meat. Since Tante kept pigs and chickens, she had enough fat to make soap. Every spring, during the waning moon so that the mixture wouldn’t boil over so rapidly, Rachel spent the day with her, carrying water to the ash-filled V-shaped hopper through which water leaked to drip strong alkali liquid into the wood trough below. When Tante could float an egg on the surface of the brown fluid, it was strong enough to pour over the grease and boil in the big black iron kettle till it was stringy. This soft soap was hardened into cakes by adding salt and pouring the mass into wooden molds. Rachel added dry rose petals or rosemary or lemon balm to the boiling mass to make a sweet scent.

  Tante was a dour wizened little woman who focused her affections on successive generations of calico cats. Etienne was used to her, but they were together by accident, not by love. Rachel sometimes wondered what people outside were like.

  Two or three times a year she rode pillion behind Papa to the town of Jefferson, thirty miles away, and they bought salt, thread, needles, an occasional pair of shoes, the few things they needed that couldn’t be homemade or improvised and a book or two for Papa. His periodicals and journals arrived sporadically in town, and he picked these up on his tutoring excursions as the trips were not, for him, the events they were for Rachel. She would be nervous about the curious, disapproving glances of women they saw, and even more disturbed by the way some men watched her, a sort of greed in their eyes that made her think of one of Tante’s cats stalking a bird. She was always glad to get home and to be back in her own world, the woods and lake and bayous, Papa and Etienne.

  But Etienne was changing. And perhaps she was, too, for when she started to ask Papa about not having babies blood rushed to her face, her tongue went clumsy, and she ended up asking if he wanted a cup of lemon verbena tea.

  Etienne loved her through April and May and early June, through dogwood and redwood, bluebonnet, paintbrush, the time of lilies, swamp mallow primroses and mistflowers. Fruit was setting, the air hummed with bees, birds fed their gaping young, and the fullness of life and the season was everywhere. But Etienne wasn’t happy. He would try not to take her in his arms, staying away for days or a week, but when he came, if they were alone, the sweet wild hunger between them could not be subdued.

  “I’m going to speak to your father,” he said one afternoon. His long dark eyelashes lay on his smooth cheek; he looked so young and beautiful in his exhaustion that it stabbed Rachel.

  “Please, Etienne,” she coaxed, stroking back his tangled hair. “Be happy—”

  “Happy?” He raised himself fiercely on one shoulder, watching her with such anger that she shrank from him. “Are you happy?” he demanded, gripping her wrists.

  “Y—yes, when you’re not—not like this. Oh, Etienne, can’t we just love each other and go on as we are?”

  “No, I’m not staying here.”

  She stared at him in shock. Oh, he had sometimes mentioned going to New Orleans but she had thought it was passing restlessness. He was part of the bayou. She couldn’t imagine him anywhere else, couldn’t imagine loving him anywhere else, out in the world of people where eyes would fix on them as did those of the people in town, prying, questioning, surmising. Even if they were married she’d hate having strangers know they made love, perhaps imagining the way it was. She felt soiled at the very thought.

  “Don’t look like that!” he said impatiently when she did not respond. “I’m going away. I’ve told you so. I wouldn’t have stayed this long if it hadn’t been for you.”

  If it hadn’t been for you.

  Those fatal, blaming words threaded through most human loves, attempting to forge bonds almost as threatening as those of marriage. Rachel controlled denials and accusations, keeping her spirit smooth and still to elude the chains that might catch and hold onto an angry phrase, an edge of guilt.

  “Maybe you’ll come back,” she said. “In a year or two. And I’ll be here for you, Etienne.”

  His jaw hardened. “It’ll take more than a few years to do what I mean to. I’m going to be rich and show those high-nosed uncles of mine. I won’t come back till I can buy Tristesse and make it grander than Gloryoak.” When she said nothing he gave her a shake. “You think I can’t do it. That’s why you won’t marry me! You think I’m just swamp Cajun and won’t amount to anything.”

  “I never thought about any of that, Etienne. I’m sure you can do whatever you want if you put your mind to it.”

  “You’d marry me if I owned Gloryoak.”

  “No, I wouldn’t!” Her temper was rising in spite of her resolve. “I don’t want to marry at all, but I certainly wouldn’t marry a rich man! He’d think he owned me! So if you mean to be wealthy, you really do need a different woman!”

  She tried to rise, but he swept her against him. “I want you, Rachel. You’re part of me. So you have to come.”

  “You’re part of me,” she said, trying to smile. “So you have to stay.”

  His mouth was cruel. For the first time, he forced her down, took her without the eager response. When he convulsed and groaned, leaving her body, she disengaged herself from his lax arms, a coldness in her like frost as she got to her feet, brushing the leaves and twigs from her hair and garments.

  His eyes opened. He lay as if wounded, somberly watching her. He sighed as she turned to go. “I’m sorry, little one. But when you won’t understand, it’s as if my hand refused to do what I willed.”

  “I’m not your hand, ’Tienne.” Though he had overpowered her, she felt more sorrow for him now than anger, but the strange chill kept her from touching him. “‘If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee,’” she quoted. “And if you go away, that’s what you must do with me.”

  They had never quarreled before. It made Rachel miserable. She was wretched, too, because the cold feeling persisted, a sort of icy shield, and she hated to feel that way toward Etienne. Early next morning she took her pirogue between the twin cypresses that guarded the slough with its shaky pier. An anhinga sunned its turkeylike feathers as it perched on an up-thrust cypress knee, a Lord-God bird drummed on a dead tree, and she caught a glimpse of its red crest and black wings. A blue heron speared a fish and, from a low-lying bough, a whole row of turtles dropped into the water at her approach. But this was not one of those mornings when she would drift for hours, watching her fellow creatures of the lake.

  She had never taken a bird for food, not even a duck, and she suspected the time was coming when Papa would have to do without the squirrels and rabbits she got with her slingshot. She found it increasingly difficult to ignore the change of a fleet furry body to a lump of stewing flesh, to know she had caused bright eyes to glaze against the leaves and sky, ended the rapid marvel of a beating heart. Poor Papa! It was going to be fish for him, though at least there was Tante’s ham and sidemeat.

  What would Tante think of her nephew’s ambition? Would she miss him? Rachel tried to picture life without her companion, found it as impossible as summoning up a vision of life in a city, or life a
nywhere else. She was sure Etienne meant what he said. He would be going.

  Rachel rowed for the broad water, the vast untroubled expanse of the lake where only an occasional cypress island hinted this was not a sea. She watched the luminous sunshine on the water, took in her oar and drifted, eased by the current toward what was called the Oxbow, till she was calm and unified within herself again, ready to send the pirogue back through the twin cypresses.

  How could Etienne want to leave? What would the city and wealth give him to match this? Even if he went, surely it wouldn’t take him long to discover the ground of his being was here.

  Papa wandered in while she was making corn bread and mixed greens for lunch. He expounded on the oil refinery being built at Titusville, Pennsylvania, where the first American oil wells had been drilled the year before in 1859, speculating on a time when petroleum would be used to power machinery instead of simply replacing whale oil for lighting.

  “You smile at my fancies.” Bradford Delys’ fine gray eyes were framed in crow’s-feet that came from laughter as he glanced keenly at his daughter. She thought fondly that he was very like Chaucer’s clerk who would rather have by his bed books of Aristotle than the richest of robes.

  “As Darwin says,” Bradford continued, “man is the descendant of a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, but he is a good deal more. He has a hand adapted to making and using tools. Through language, he can share and pass on knowledge. It’s a miracle, my child! Those who live now profit from discoveries made in the caves. We can know Chaucer and Shakespeare, Sappho and Plato and Homer, have them on the shelf along with the latest wort of Dickens. Tennyson, Emerson, Thackeray, the Brontës and Sand. Man will run engine with petroleum, and one day he will harness the power of the sun.” With a comic look of consternation, he leaped to his feet. “Meanwhile, the wood box is empty!”

  He returned with an armload of wood and dusted off his frayed black coat.

  “My dear,” he said, angling his balding head to one side as he did when perplexed. “I was visited this morning by young Etienne, who has asked me to intercede for him. He says you have repeatedly refused his offer of marriage.”

  “He did?” Rachel was indignant. “Well, that’s true.”

  Her father continued to watch her. “But I thought you were exceedingly fond of him, Rachel? You’ve been inseparable since you were children. It seems you’ve inspired him to want to better himself.”

  “Is that what he calls it?” Rachel asked grimly.

  Bradford sighed. “I’m still thinking of you as a child, I’m afraid. Etienne made me realize how selfish I’ve been You have my blessing, Rachel.”

  “But I don’t want it!” Why would no one believe she didn’t need a husband? Was she mad or were they?

  Her father blinked. “You don’t love him? He led me to believe that you did.”

  “Of course I love him, Papa. But—” she broke off, exasperated. How could she make him understand? “Do you remember the huntress in Chaucer, where she speaks to Diana?

  ‘I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,

  A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,

  And for to walken in the wodes wilde,

  And noght to been a wyf, and be with childe.’

  “That’s it, Papa! I want to walk in the woods, free and strong. I don’t want to keep house all day and have babies.”

  “But my dear! You’re fated to be a woman.”

  “A woman doesn’t have to marry.”

  Bradford watched her with furrowed brows.

  “You’ve always been my delight, sharing my books and thoughts. Rachel, I shall be wretched if I’ve made you unsuited for a happy life in your own home.”

  “Papa, I’m happy as I am.”

  “Maybe you need to meet someone different. Like Harry Bourne, who’s a gentleman and fond of books for all he manages Gloryoak. Tom, the young one, is wild, but my favorite was Matt. If you knew him—”

  “Well, he’s off with the Army, and even if he weren’t, he wouldn’t marry anyone who couldn’t flirt her fan and shine at a ball.”

  “Matthew’s not like that. You have no brothers, no family. Who will look after you when I die?”

  “You’ll live for years, Papa! But I shall die of hunger if we don’t eat. Would you pour the buttermilk while I get the corn bread?”

  Etienne wasn’t so easily diverted. When she refused again to marry him and go to New Orleans, they had a furious quarrel.

  Her father fell sick the night following their discussion, shaking with fever and chills. The teas and remedies Rachel used didn’t help, but she was afraid to leave him to go for a doctor. When Etienne came to tell her good-bye, she begged him to ride to Jefferson. That night her father died in her arms, thinking she was her mother, hours before Etienne hurried back with Dr. Martin, a plump frizzy-haired English-educated physician who said he couldn’t have helped her father anyway, and declined payment. He offered to send out the Presbyterian minister from town, but Rachel knew Bradford would have considered that an intrusion.

  She and Etienne buried her father on the slope beside her mother and Désirée, the rich black earth a raw patch that would soon grow grass over like the mounds next to it, which were overgrown with red roses. Rachel managed to trail some of the ramblers over the fresh grave. It was placing the sweetness of her mother about her father. Only when that was done could she weep.

  Etienne left her by the graves. After sobbing out her grief. Rachel slept in exhaustion, for she had only napped during the five nights and four days of Bradford’s illness.

  She awoke in her own bed and when she sat up, wondering for a moment why she was still in her dress, Etienne got up from the window seat and brought her bread and milk, feeding her and holding the cup to her lips.

  “You’re very tired, cherie. When you’ve eaten, you should bathe, put on your nightdress and sleep again.”

  “But Etienne, you were leaving!”

  He stroked her hair and kissed her eyes. “New Orleans will wait. When you’re rested and not quite so sad, we shall talk.”

  But no peace came of their talking, though he waited several days till Rachel was physically restored before he began to urge her to come with him.

  “You can’t live here alone,” he argued one morning after breakfast. “And Uncle Harry’s bound to ride out sometime to discuss your tenancy. Will you pay him as Désirée paid his father?”

  “From what Papa said about Mr. Harry Bourne, I doubt he’d dream of such a thing,” Rachel said in a cold tone that she hoped concealed how much the gibe had hurt. “I—I’m sorry to have kept you from your journey, Etienne. Please don’t let me delay you further.”

  The veins in his temples swelled, and the curve of his nostrils showed pale. “You must come with me, Rachel! Damn you, I can’t leave you here alone!”

  He pulled her to him, kissed her on the mouth for the first time since her father’s death, all gentleness and restraint gone as he tore the gown from her shoulders. Rachel struggled with this strange and terrifying Etienne. She froze along with him at a drawling voice from the door.

  “Say, Cajun, if it’ll ease your mind before you travel, we can promise this sweet little lady won’t be alone. That right, boys?”

  II

  Gasping, trying to cover herself, Rachel stared from a husky masked yellow-haired young man in the door to a lean dark one behind him and a third whose red beard stuck out from beneath a black cloth mask. He laughed, and even at that distance, she smelled his wine-sour breath.

  “Don’t let us keep you from your journey, friend!” He lurched forward, grinning at Rachel. “’Course if you’d like to share this filly once we tame her down, we ain’t pigs. You can have her last.”

  Etienne lunged forward. The redbeard stuck out his foot. As Etienne tripped, the stocky man hit him on the side of the head with a pistol. Etienne cried out, fell limp on the floor. Rachel bent over him, but the lean man dr
agged her backward while the red-beard grasped her ankles. She wrenched her body with all her might, and sank her teeth into the blond man’s hand as he forced her down.

  She tasted blood. He swore. A blow to the head dazed her. She dimly felt the brutal suddenness of his thrusting, but her mind had gone hazy. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t happening …

  Then a weight rolled off her, the pinioning hands were gone and someone said, “Hey, Tom, this Cajun’s dead!”

  “And the girl looks close to it. Let’s go. I don’t like this!”

  “Ain’t had my turn.”

  “We’ll find some live meat. Come on. Sure didn’t think I hit that fellow so hard.”

  “Reckon we should finish the girl? She could describe us some even if we are wearing masks.”

  “She don’t look like she’ll be describing anything, but if she does, who’ll care? Let’s get out of here!”

  Who’ll care? Who’ll care? echoed in Rachel’s confused mind as boots clumped from the house.

  Etienne … dead? Head throbbing as she raised herself, Rachel went to Etienne. There was not much blood from the contusion at the back of his head, but there was no flutter of breathing. He lay terribly still. Pressing her ear to his heart, she heard nothing. She touched his hand. It hung limp, the fingers that had loved and comforted her as lifeless as her father’s had been.

  “’Tienne! ’Tienne!” she breathed, cradling him against her, oblivious to her own aching violated body. “Please, ’Tienne—”

  He could not hear. He could not speak. He would never laugh or love or dream again, never outgrow or fulfill his need to make the Bournes aware and proud of him.

  “Who’ll care?” The callous words reverberated in her head. She’d make somebody care! She’d carry the body to town and force the sheriff to hunt for the killers. She’d even ride to Gloryoak, if she had to, and ask Harry Bourne to avenge his nephew’s death. He’d care that a young man was killed for trying to protect a woman.