Chapter Twenty

twenty

FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS after the séance, Jemma slept at Magdalene's, or even in the old washhouse with Dennis and Inès. Her mother went back to the big house to cook and clean, but no longer slept in her room off the kitchen. At first, Jemma had been afraid the Duchons would abuse her, but it seemed an uneasy truce had been struck. From what little Dennis could gather, it appeared the family was afraid of what Inès might do, knowing that her child's father had been murdered in the house while she gave birth and had then been buried on the grounds.

But Inès had no will to do anything more than move robotically between her duties.

"Would you poison them, just slip it into their food?" Jemma had asked as Inès left to prepare breakfast one morning. "They deserve it."

But Inès's eyes were as empty as the rest of her. Jemma's mother was a shell, perhaps had seen the terrible effects of past vengeance and was unwilling to do something so awful ever again.

"Just leave her be," Dennis said, joining Jemma in the doorway, both of them watching Inès walk back to the house where she'd grown up. "She don't have it in her to do anything else to them. They've done enough to each other."

When Jemma told Magdalene what the Duchons had done, that it was her father the woman saw buried the day Jemma was born, instead of cursing the family as she'd done before, she told Jemma to follow her outside of the cabin. There, they gathered chicory flowers and ironweed, dandelions and asters. They walked to the old slave cemetery, slipping between two broken fence posts and making their way to a spot near the back.

"He's got to be right around here," Magdalene said.

They spied a bunch of long-stemmed irises tied in a white bow. So Inès had already been there. They laid their small bouquet next to hers.

"I'm surprised you haven't seen his spirit," Magdalene said, her eyes flicking over the small area full of leaning wooden crosses, their inscriptions long faded under the weight of seasons. "If anyone should rest uneasy around here, it should be him."

"I think they're all resting uneasy. But I don't know why. They talk, but not really clear, like they're talking in riddles."

"You still scared of them?"

"A little," Jemma admitted. "I spent my whole life running from them. That's what my mama—my adoptive mama—taught me. She was terrified that I could see them, so she tried to get me to ignore them, hoping they'd leave me alone. They mostly did, but when I came down here, it's like something woke up. I started seeing them more and more. I'm not as scared as I was, but I don't know if I want to break the curse. If I even could."

"So you're going to stay angry forever, take the risk of dying? What about Inès? What about your brother and Fosette?"

"They're the only ones that make me want to try. But I hate the rest of them like I've never hated anyone or anything in my life."

It took a moment for Jemma to realize that Magdalene hadn't spoken for a while, so lost was Jemma in her own thoughts. The older woman rested against the slanting fence, her arms folded in front of her.

"Maybe…maybe things would've turned out different…if I could've kept you," Magdalene whispered.

Jemma didn't know what she was talking about, wasn't sure she'd heard correctly. "What?"

"I wanted to keep you, when we took you out the house."

"You? But why?"

A sheepish expression stole over Magdalene's face, looking completely out of place on the normally assured surface. A soft sigh escaped her lips, and when she spoke, the way the words came from her mouth—unsure, hesitant—let Jemma know this was a story the woman had never told before.

"I had a daughter, before you were born. If she had lived, she'd be thirty-two now. But when she was still little, not a crib baby anymore but a little older, she got a fever. Nothing I did worked; nothing the conjure women did worked. You can't imagine how hard it is to sit by, not able to do anything, and just watch a part of you die. And then here you come, a few years later. I knew, as soon as I saw you, the family wasn't going to like it. You were darker than your brother, even as a newborn, and your eyes weren't light like the rest of them. So when your mama said to take you away, my heart filled right up. But in her next breath, she said, ‘Take her far from here. Give her to some people who are gonna love her, but get her as far from here as you can.' Well, where was I going to go? My baby's buried here. I couldn't leave. And then Dennis told me he knew some people who wanted a baby, people who were moving north. I argued with him because I wanted you to stay here, even though I'd promised your mama different. In the end, he said I had to give you up. I cussed him, called him all kinds of names. I was so angry because I wanted what I wanted, even if it wasn't right. And I guess he was mad right back at me. But there hasn't been a day that's gone by that I don't curse whatever god took my child. For a long time, I was angry at her for leaving me. Ain't that something? Like it was her fault. But you can't tell someone how to grieve or when to stop being angry, can you?"

"No, I guess you can't."

"Just like you can't blame your mama for what she did. She had to be out her mind with grief thinking your father left her, knowing she had to give you up if she wanted you to live. She did the only thing she felt like she could do. And we're all just human. We do plenty of things that don't make a lick of sense—"

Something Magdalene had just said stirred a thought in Jemma. "Wait," she said, holding up a hand, cutting off Magdalene's words. "You said my mother did the only thing she felt she could do." Jemma's mind strained, reaching for something. What was it?

And then it came to her. Honorine's words from the séance—Inès's curse.

I curse all the Duchon blood. From this day forth, I bind the family to this house. I bind them forever.

Nowhere in that was a wish for death, the seven-year cycle the family suffered. Was that really all Inès had said? Was that truly the extent of her curse?

It didn't seem that she put a death curse on them at all.

So why did they die every seven years?

"What is it? What's wrong?" Magdalene asked, grabbing Jemma's wrist.

"I don't think…my mother…I don't…She didn't curse us like they think. She bound us to the house, but she didn't want anyone to die." Jemma looked up, the clear sky a contrast to her chaotic thoughts. "Oh God, what does this mean?" She thought of Inès, of how the family blamed her for everything, of how she'd blamed her.

What if they'd been wrong about her all these years? They'd accused her of something much more awful than she'd tried to do.

Jemma wondered why her mother had never tried to explain that to her family, that although she'd cursed them, she'd never meant for the curse to go so far as to kill them.

To find that out meant staying alive.

Despite her anger toward the Duchons, it seemed whatever she did to help herself and her mother would help the rest of the family, too.