Pamela Morsi (37 page)

"Helmut took what he wanted from me; I never
gave anything," she said. "If you had been more knowledgeable, more
demanding, perhaps I could not have given to you, either."

"I am more knowledgeable now, am I not?"
Laron asked her.

She huffed irreverently. "You are far too
clever a pupil for this teacher," she told him. "You have learned
your lessons so quickly and so well, did I not know better I would
think you were having a tutor on the side."

He pinched her backside playfully. "Careful,
Madame Shotz," he said. "A woman making unfounded accusations may
well find herself across my knee."

"Oh please non, monsieur," she said, her
voice tiny and theatrically pleading. "My big derriere is still
stinging from the last time!"

He laughed heartily and then pulled her close
to look into her eyes. The mood sobered.

"What I intended to tell you," he whispered,
"before you teasingly changed the subject, is that you should never
believe that somehow you are responsible for the failure of your
marriage with Helmut. It was not that he was domineering and that
you needed to control. It was not that he was powerful and that you
wanted that power for yourself. It was not that you required a
lesser partner. Never, never think that. Now I am knowledgeable and
I am demanding. Yet you still give to me fully and unhesitatingly.
The difference, my Helga, is that while I take from you, I give
also. That is the way it should be. So that one partner need never
fear to end up empty."

"Empty," she repeated the word like an echo
on her breath. "That is what I most fear about the years ahead.
That without you they will be empty."

"You will have Karl and Elsa and Jakob," he
told her. "And you will have the certainty that I have loved you
truly and as God surely intended. And that love will be with us
always though we never touch again."

"Perhaps when the children are gone, in our
old age maybe—"

Laron placed a silencing finger against her
lips.

"It is too dangerous to wait, to hope. Know
that if heaven grants that I can be with you, I will. And I will
know that if you ever feel that you are free, you will seek me
out."

She kissed him then. And he held her tightly
in his arms. The vaguest gray light of dawn was lightening the
eastern sky. Their time together was almost a thing of the past.
They clung to it and to each other, in their hearts both praying
for a miracle.

Armand awakened slowly. He was cold, gritty,
exhausted. The ground beneath him was harder than rock and every
muscle in his body ached from misuse. He had never felt better.

In his arms lay the lovely Aida Gaudet, now
Aida Sonnier. There was a strange rhythmic sound coming from her
throat and he listened to it critically and grinned. The most
beautiful woman on the Vermilion River was snoring.

Her hair was everywhere. Those long dark
locks that he had never before seen completely loosened were upon
him like silken ties, binding him to her forever.

The sun's warm glow had not yet reached the
place where they lay, but it was morning nonetheless. The first
morning of their married life.

She had been right, of course. He'd thought
to remain chaste until they were in more suitable surroundings. He
dreamed of her, loving her for the first time, atop a warm
overstuffed mattress, on fresh cotton sheets strewn with herbs and
the glow of one candle lit at the bedside.

Yes, that would have been nice. It still
would be nice. He wanted to have her there. And he would. He would
have her there. And he would have her on the floor in front of the
fireplace. He would have her in the hayrick. Upon the kitchen
table. In a prairie field. Could such a thing be done in a pirogue?
If it could, they would.

The nature of his wicked thoughts was
tightening the front of his trousers. She was sleeping so soundly.
He disengaged himself from her embrace and moved away, careful to
tuck the blanket in around her so she would not be chilled. He
hesitated only long enough to place a gentle kiss upon her
brow.

"Rest yourself, my love," he whispered.
"You're going to need it."

He walked toward the shoreline, dusting the
sand from his clothes as he went. She had been right. He had
already been worried that her desire for him would have faded with
the charm. Waiting another day or perhaps two would have made him
far more pessimistic and unsure.

Perhaps it was that she had lived so long
without confidence that she knew so well how to shore it up for
others. He had never consciously worried about his ability with
women. But she was no ordinary woman. And he wanted her to find him
as no ordinary husband.

He had only meant to touch her, hold her. But
when he had seen her passion and watched her reach fulfillment with
only the caress of his own hand, he had felt a power and a
certainty that transformed him. In a flash of an instant as her
body clenched against his hand he had changed from hesitant
bridegroom to insatiable lover. It was a conversion that they could
both appreciate.

Love. Sexual union. Procreation.
Eternity.

Armand sighed with appreciation as he stared
out at the waves rolling into Vermilion Bay and pondered their
meaning. The sea was good for that. Good for pondering. And for men
such as the Sonniers the sea was truly a link with life itself.

Far to the north in a place that existed now
only in - the memories passed down, Acadians had built their lives,
their culture, on the Bay of Fundy. The sea had been their source
of strength and hope and survival. The lands they had farmed had
been culled from it. The ships sailing upon its surface gathered
fish and lobster and crab. Their ways and seasons were prescribed
by the tides. They were a seafaring people.

Even now, though they had been land-living,
prairie people for two generations, the terms and phrases that
flowed from their tongues were spawned from the sea. The prairie
itself was like a sea of grass, slow-rolling like waves. They were
creatures of the sea and it would always be with them, even if only
in their hearts.

Armand stared out at the rolling water before
him. Waves rose and broke and receded to rise once more. So much
like life, he thought. The deceptive appearance of changelessness
while change was constant.

He thought of Laron and Helga. His heart
ached for them. He had been sympathetic to his friend before. He
had felt sadness, but he had not been able to comprehend the agony.
Now, knowing love, knowing the oneness of a man and his mate, he
understood fully for the first time the harrowing pain of this
parting. If only there were something that he could do.

His brow furrowed in thought. Aida had been
right about their first night together. Perhaps she was also right
about the vision. There was no question in his mind of what she had
seen. And why would she have seen it if it meant nothing? Maybe
there was some answer within it.

Calmly, deliberately, he seated himself on
the edge of the water. Like a man mesmerized he stared out on the
breaking waves and forced himself to think. He had to think. He
simply had to think harder.

Deliberately in his mind he went over what
Aida had seen again. Looking critically at each piece of the
strange puzzle. Laron had been trying to cut grain that was already
cut. Armand had gone to stop him. But Armand did not point out to
him that the grain was lying in windrows around him. For some
reason it was not possible for Laron to see that. But Armand could
see it. Armand could see it plainly, or at least he could have if
he had looked.

"Well now I am looking," he whispered quietly
to himself. "Now I am looking as carefully and as fully as I have
ever done in my life."

Armand leaned forward thoughtfully, elbow on
his knee, chin in his hand.

A careless word—Madame Landry's voice
lingered in memory. Careless words were everywhere, he realized.
Careless words had set everything in motion and careless words
might well be the key to setting it right again. It was all there
in careless words. And careless words were all around him.

Laron: I want to kill him.

Helga: We cannot live in sin.

Aida: There must be some other way.

Madame Landry: Something must be done and
soon.

Helga: I do wish he was dead.

Aida: You are the answer, Armand.

Laron: He had fled to Texas.

Himself: A widow has rights over her
husband's property.

Laron: I want to kill him.

Helga: I wish he were dead.

Aida: There must be some other way.

Madame Landry: You, mon fils, are the center
of it.

Laron: There is a price on his head. He won't
be back.

Helga: I would marry you in a moment.

Laron: I want to kill him.

Helga: I wish he were dead.

Aida: Armand, you are the answer.

Madame Landry: They call you the veuve
allemande, the German widow.

Armand sat up immediately; he held himself
still a long moment, thinking, waiting. Madame Landry was not one
to speak careless words.

"I have told no lies about my marital
status," Helga had answered her.

"It was I who first called you the German
widow," the old woman replied.

Armand's eyes narrowed. She'd said something
else. Something else important. Something that day, that very day
she had said something else.

Armand strained his memory trying to recall.
They were still sitting at the fire. They were drinking the badly
brewed coffee and chatting about the house and Madame Landry had
said . . . she'd said . . .

"No one knows what happened to him. The
syndic, the judge we had then, had to declare him dead."

"The Spaniard," Armand whispered to
himself.

He'd moved on or was killed in a drunken
brawl. His belt buckle was found in a gator's belly.

Armand sat there, still, silent, waiting,
waiting for a long, long moment. Then he jumped to his feet and
whooped for joy.

"Armand?"

He heard Aida call to him and he turned in
her direction. She was sitting up wrapped in the blanket, looking
sleepy disheveled, and incredibly desirable.

"Armand, what is it?"

"I've figured it out!" he hollered, running
toward her. "I understand the vision!"

Felicite had finally given in to sleep. And
the new baby, the one his wife had decided to call Jeanette, for
him, was tucked in and sleeping soundly in the little reed-woven
creche that had cradled her brothers and sister in their first
weeks of life. Jean Baptiste had done what he had to do. He had
cleaned up the baby, then his wife and the bed. He had taken the
afterbirth and buried it in the fence row. He had fired off two
rounds to announce to the neighbors that they had a new child, and
it was a girl. He had done all this between frequent and hurried
trips to the outhouse. The "love charm" that had been so unkind to
his stomach intended, it seemed, to be equally unpleasant to his
bowel.

"Are you still not feeling well?" his wife
had asked him.

"I am fine," he told her, leaning down to
brush her cheek. "I am as fine as any man can be."

"She's a pretty baby, isn't she?"

He nodded. "Oh yes, all our babies are."

"But she is especially so," Felicite
insisted.

"She will always hold a special place in my
heart," he said.

She smiled at him and her brow furrowed
slightly. "I know that you were not happy about another baby so
soon."

"I never said—"

"You don't have to say things, Jean Baptiste.
I am your wife in all ways. I can sense how you feel."

"Well, I was wrong," he told her.

"I promise that we won't have another so
soon."

"I don't recall that you are solely
responsible for these children," he said. "And unless you wish to
live apart from me I don't know how we are to stop them from
arriving."

Felicite lowered her voice to a whisper, as
if she feared the baby might hear. "Madame Landry says that I will
not get pregnant if you pull yourself out before you expel the
semen."

Jean Baptiste gave a wry shake of his head.
"I begin to think that old woman doesn't like me much."

Felicite's expression registered surprise.
"Why would you say that?"

"Never mind. I ... I was aware that a man can
. . . withdraw his seed ... to spare a woman childbearing. Father
Denis, of course, speaks against it. But when a wife is weak or ill
. . . well, Acadian men say, what does a priest know of
marriage?"

"I am not weak or ill," Felicite
admitted.

"Do you want more children?"

"I want what you want."

"No Felicite, speak plain; you did so when
you were in labor with our Jeanette. Speak plain to me now."

She swallowed hard and then looked him in the
eye. "I love you, Jean Baptiste. I want you as my husband and I
will do whatever it takes to keep you." She looked down at the tiny
child she held in her arms. "I love babies. I love to hold them and
touch them, they smell so good and smile so sweet. I would
willingly have a dozen. But I can be content with these four if I
have you in my arms."

He looked at her for a long, long moment. She
was his Felicite. The girl that he had loved when they were too
young to love. Yet she was not. She had become a woman. When he
hadn't been watching, she had become a woman. If no other lesson
was learned this night, he had understood at least that. She was a
woman. And until now he had remained a boy.

He looked back over the last months, the last
years, as time had left him untouched. He had longed for the warmth
and security of marriage, but had grumbled under the weight of its
responsibilities. He had relished the pleasure of having a wife and
whined about the burden of keeping one. Not anymore.