THE KNOCKING at her door early Thursday afternoon might have sounded angry to an ear unschooled in the difference between panic and a bad mood, but Marie Toussaint knew better.
The knocking hammered like a hailstorm against the sturdy door Marie Toussaint's husband had built with wood he'd salvaged from a black walnut tree knocked over in the mudslide. The mud's recent wrath had left their two-story house untouched, but sprays of buckshot fired at the house during cowardly moments, usually at night, had pocked and splintered the old door. The mere sight of the damaged door had always made her angry, and Marie Toussaint no longer trusted herself when she was angry.
From the ruckus at the door, there might be two or three people knocking at once. Before Marie could look up from the piano keys that had absorbed her while she tried to command her fingers through Beethoven's Sonate Pathétique, John swept past her, his thick hand wrapped around the butt of his shotgun. He kept his gun leaning up against the wall in the kitchen like a whisk broom, ready for finding.
"Get in the wine cellar. Latch the door," he said.
"Maybe it's Dominique, John."
"Hell it is."
She knew he was right. They had driven Dominique to the church an hour ago in the wagon. Her daughter would never walk back home by herself—and not just because of the mile's distance between their house and the church that had accepted Dominique for summer Bible classes in an unprecedented gesture of goodwill since the slide. Today, Dominique was at a special Independence Day class, where she was no doubt learning about how much God had blessed America. Marie had lectured Dominique on the dangers, though. She was a smart, obedient girl. If she walked home alone, she might become a target to those who disapproved of the church's decision to treat her like any other young citizen despite her brown skin.
These visitors had nothing to do with Dominique.
John crept like a cat near the door, as if he expected it to fly open despite its locks. Very few townspeople in Sacajawea locked their doors during daylight hours, or even at night, for the most part, but peace of mind was a luxury Marie and her husband could ill afford.
Watching her husband's caution, Marie felt knowledge bubble up inside of her. She sensed the ever-knowing voice of her guiding esprit, a voice she had first heard when she was six. That voice had guided Marie well in the twenty-five years since. Her esprit had led her from New Orleans to Daytona to San Francisco to Sacajawea, this riverfront town hidden in the Washington woodlands. As a girl, Marie had named her esprit Fleurette because that was Grandmère's name and therefore must contain some of her wisdom, she'd decided. And Fleurette was a wise one, indeed.
Fleurette did not want Marie to open the door. Her burning ears told her so.
"Who's there?" John called out in a big, barking voice that stopped the ruckus cold.
"That you, Red John?" a reedy man's voice came back through the door. Marie recognized Sheriff Kerr's voice, though he sounded unusually nervous and winded. The sheriff was neither friend nor protector to them, despite his tin star. Sheriff Kerr's rifle had fired most of the buckshot that had ruined their door, she was certain.
"Red John, you open this door. On my word, there's no shenanigans. We've got a sick child out here, and folks tell me your colored gal has some nurse training. They're sayin' she saved livestock hurt within an inch of their lives after the slide. God knows we need her now."
John glanced back at Marie, who had risen to her feet without realizing it. Her ears still burned, but Fleurette's voice was lost beneath the sudden, concerned beating of her heart.
"Who's sick?" she said, but John waved to shush her.
"The woman you call my 'colored gal,' she has a name. Speak of her proper," John said to the closed door, unmoved.
"Goddammit, Red John," the sheriff said, sounding more like his old self. "We've come for Mrs. T'saint. Is that what she wants to be called, you ornery injun? She can call herself King George of England, for all I care. I don't like this any more'n you do, but Hal's girl needs doctoring in a hurry, and we've got to put the past aside. I can't fathom any God-fearing woman who'd nurse pigs and goats at this house and not people. Would you have this girl die here on your stoop? Open this door before we break it down. I mean it, Red John."
"Please, Red John." Another voice came through, Hal Booth's. A sick child's father.
"Do it, John," Marie said, and only then did her husband unbolt the two locks. He did it on her word, not on the sheriff's or Hal Booth's. John made his position clear by the look he gave Marie with a stab of his deeply set brown eyes.
Five people tumbled into the house with the stench of fear and summer perspiration, tracking red brick dust from the front porch into the foyer, onto the front rug already muddied beyond repair by the refugees who had crowded here the night of the slide. All of the arrivals were men except for Maddie Booth, who was sixteen, twice as old as Dominique. Maddie was limp in her father's arms. Maddie was a small-boned girl, but she weighed more than a hundred pounds, surely, so they must have suffered quite a climb up the twenty-one stone steps that led to Marie's house from the road below. The steps were steeply set apart.
Marie wouldn't have recognized Maddie except that they had named her, because her appearance was so changed. Her waxen blond hair was usually neatly braided, but today it was a hive of straw atop her head, matted and untamed. And her eyes! Marie could see only the rims of Maddie's gray irises, which were rolled up unnaturally high; the rest was just pink and bleary, sightless. Saliva streamed from the girl's mouth, dampening her rumpled dress in a large V across her breast. At the instant her dangling feet touched the red dust on the floor, the girl suddenly shuddered like someone who'd felt the lash of a horsewhip. It looked exactly like an epileptic's convulsive seizure, Marie thought. She had studied epilepsy at the Mary McLeod Hospital and Training School for Nurses in Florida, so she knew a few things about the brain disorder that would be a great help if Maddie's ailment were what it appeared to be.
But that was not so. Whatever was troubling this girl might look like epilepsy, but surely it was not. Fleurette's warning rose to a screech in Marie's head, as if trying to split her skull in two. Never, never had Fleurette carried on so. That was how Marie came to the terrible realization, although she'd suspected the truth from the mere sight of Maddie, especially after the girl's resistance to the red brick dust Marie had ground and freshened every morning to protect the house since the mudslide. To see how the girl's legs had jerked away! Marie had heard of such cases from Grandmère, but she had never seen one this pronounced with her own eyes.
And then there was the smell. Maddie Booth stank.
"Papa," Marie said, mute except for that word. She stopped in her tracks. What name was there for this? A baka had been brought to her house, in a flesh disguise.
"She's had a fit," Maddie's father said, his blue eyes imploring. "She's never before been sickly, not like this. But it started yesterday morning. Said her stomach was ailing her. Then this morning, she was out of her mind, talking senseless. Her skin's burning up one minute, cold as a block of ice the next. And her breathing…"
Yes, Marie could hear Maddie's breathing. The girl's chest heaved with her labored breaths, and the sound was like choked gurgling from a deep well. Unnatural. The intervals between her breaths were horrible in their length, nearly interminable. This girl was dying.
John's lean, rigid form stood tall over the other men, and Marie saw his eyes. He knew the truth, too. The lines of his jaw grew sharper as he locked his teeth.
"Help her, Mrs. T'saint," Hal Booth said, thrusting Maddie toward her like a sack of flour. "Please do something. She's our only girl, our baby. If something happens to her…"
Marie wiped her hands on the dustcloth she always carried in her apron pocket, not because her hands were dirty, but because her hands needed something to do. She must think. "Lay her down on the sofa in the parlor. Keep her head propped up so she's not choking. Watch her close," Marie said. "Wait for me."
Those sure-spoken words might as well have been someone else's, because Marie was not at all sure. Her hands felt like frail corn-shucks, drained of blood. Until now, today had been an ordinary day, she realized. She'd been about to soak her green beans and begin drying her herbs, like any other weekday. She'd had no telling dreams, no whispers from Fleurette to shake her from her sleep. The only odd thing about today had been John coming home from his logging camp twenty miles down the road because his back was hurting him—but even that wasn't so odd, because his back hurt from time to time when he forgot to drink his tea. She'd never taken John's backaches to signify anything special, and she'd been glad for his unexpected company.
Yet here she was, facing this thing. And in her own home. Where had her warning been?
Then, she remembered one of the first lessons Grandmère had taught her: There is a cost for all things, one mirroring the size of the other. Marie could hardly say she hadn't known to expect it. She had brought it here herself, as surely as if she'd called it.
Fleurette was in a frenzy in Marie's head. Marie's ears burned so badly now, she wished she could pull them clean off and be done with the pain. If she could heed Fleurette's soundless voice, she would run all of these intruders back out where they'd come from, even if it was at gunpoint. Then, she'd be wise to begin lighting candles right away, if it wasn't too late already.
As she turned toward the stairs, Marie began whispering prayers she had never uttered.
"Marie?" John said, taking long strides to follow her.
"A girl so young…," Marie muttered, and her hands trembled. She could still smell Maddie even here, at the staircase, and the stench nearly turned her stomach. If any of the rest of them had the ability to smell it as she did, they would not be able to bring themselves to touch that child, she thought. She wondered how she could touch Maddie herself, when the time came. "C'est tragique, John. C'est sinistre."
"This is not your fight." John had never been a whisperer, and Marie was sure everyone in the house heard him when he spoke, his low-pitched voice bouncing across the walls. He followed her as she took the wooden stairs two at a time.
"Help me find the blankets. We'll need an armload. What if that were Dominique?"
"What if it was?" John said, and for the first time she heard something in his voice that was not borne of their bitter time in Sacajawea. He took her shoulders and roughly turned her around, forcing her to look at his face, which was nearly hidden in the long, loose strands of his jet-black hair. But his eyes were not hidden. John's eyes spoke his heart, and his heart was not filled with the anger that had consumed him for the past three years—his eyes told her that his heart was sad and scared. She was not accustomed to seeing fear in John's eyes.
"Don't do it, Marie. Send them away. We'll say prayers for them. Or if you must be stubborn, take them to the woods, to the grounds. Not here. This is where we live."
"She would be dead before we get out there. You see how far gone she is."
"Then let it have her. It's not our place. Don't let pride—"
Marie had never once wanted to hit John in the three years since she had allowed him to move into her house as her devoted student with the privileges of a husband. A ritual by his grandmother, one of his Chinook tribe's last remaining elders, bound them together—not any white man's certificate or covenant, as their neighbors had never failed to notice. The unconventional nature of their union had only fueled their neighbors' resentment toward the colored woman and red man who shared such a grand house in their town. John was now both husband and student to her, respectful most times and utterly insolent others. His unfinished accusation stung her heart. Pride! Did he really think that little of her?
"Yes, that's right," John said. "Pride, I said. And guilt besides, I think. But you weren't wrong for what you did. They had that coming and worse."
"You hush," Marie said, hating to hear him even speak of it. They had agreed to forget the events of that night, and it was dangerous to give the memory language. Speaking of past events kept them alive, and he knew that as well as anyone. By now, the trembling of Marie's hands was nearly violent. She couldn't say if it was because she suddenly understood the truth of John's warning or because of the child waiting for her downstairs. She had rescued a Chinaman in San Francisco in '21, but that had been different. That visiteur had been weaker, not nearly so dangerous. And she'd had no role in rousing it, not like this time.
John was right. And so was Fleurette, clanging in her head like a hundred fire-bells. But the child was dying, and Marie had no more choice in this than she did the rhythms of her heart.
"Get the blankets, John. Light candles. I'm going to fill the tub and fetch Grandmère's ring," Marie said. That was how she told him it was decided.
"You have great skills, Marie…but luck is a creek that often runs dry. Don't expect to draw your water there day after day," John said, his face so pained that he seemed to blurt the words against his will. "Don't take this on, Marie. I'm begging, woman. Do you hear? You know I beg for nothing." To make his point, he repeated his plea in his Chinook language, holding her face between his large palms. "Yaka humm. Wake okoke skookum deaub. Wake alta." She could feel his meaning more keenly when she didn't recognize his words, watching his emotions light his face while the foreign speech washed over her. She had to look away.
"I have to do it, John. I am responsible."
John sighed, leaning closer to her until their foreheads touched. She enjoyed the current of his warm breath, just as she relished the wisps of his feather-light hair brushing her brow. Tears smarted in her eyes. She shook her head gently, nudging him away. "I must, John. This is the cost that has been decided for me. Can you understand? Marie Toussaint cannot turn away a child to die on her front stoop. Not at my own house. Anything but that, you see?"
"My wife, I know you well. Your enemy, I see, also knows you well. This is a well-laid trap for you," John said, and she heard in his voice a grudging admiration for the visiteur, the baka with no name. He kissed her forehead lightly. John's next words, although they broke Marie's heart, came from a place more gentle than the place of whispers.
"I will do as you ask," her husband said. "But we both know it has already won."
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