The Witch of the Isle

Chapter 1 - Lord Willing

I gained my freedom the same year that the American’s bought Louisiana from the French. I was only fifteen at the time, and nobody told me that freedom came with dark alleys and men with gnarled teeth and groping hands. Fourteen years later, I’d survived countless indignities to emerge with my own home—now that Old Toulouse wasn’t around to argue that it was his anymore. He still complained in my dreams, but I usually reminded him that I’m the Traiteur now and he’s dead.

The wind scraped the branches against the side of my tiny cabin, as though Old Toulouse had heard my thoughts and decided to remind me that he could still spook me sometimes. I wasn’t afraid, but I might be late. My sleepy-looking brown eyes, as my late mother would have said, shifted from where the sound of the scraping was loudest to the wall clock, which was just a pocket watch that Old Toulouse had lent me before he died. The dull metal device hung from a chain on a cut nail sunk halfway into the wall. The pocket-watch face read nearly tea time, and my new patient should be approaching soon. I bolted over to the door, almost tripping on the little wooden table that Old Toulouse had made from two planks of black birch wood.

I slid my fingers up the door to just below the wooden door latch that barred entry. I listened for an old man’s footsteps beyond. My fingers itched in anticipation as I filtered sounds out from the Cane River: white cattle egrets clucked along the bank probably seeking out crocodiles, and the sound of running water as the river wound through the trees. My breathing came hard and fast, and my heart kept pace. When I heard the shuffling of the man’s gout-stricken feet on the ground outside, I flipped the wooden latch up and pulled the door inward.

“Monsieur LeComte,” I said as I greeted him. He looked as though he might bolt into the woods. As much as it would have helped maintain that air of mystery to have him tell others how I knew him before he knew me, he would have to survive to do so, and bolting into the woods towards the Cane would be a sure way to find death. I interjected before he could react. “It’s okay, Monsieur. You’re welcome and safe in my home. Come in.”

As he passed, my eyes followed. They fell on the dingy, empty walls made with untreated wood marred with the cracks of time. When the wind blew, the house whistled. Beneath my clock rested rows and rows of bottles, each filled with a tincture or potion for some ailment or another. I turned my attention to him.

A bald spot graced the center of his head of gray poofy hair. That and gout could have meant he was an older man, or it could mean that he was a field hand, and had wasted his life away until the sun stole his youth. But I knew he was free. My vision had told me that much, but it didn’t tell me all the circumstances of his life.

“What seems to be bothering you?” I asked, careful to leave the door unlatched. The last time I latched it, a young woman fainted from stress. The rumors never seemed to stop and I’d long since stopped fighting them. The crazy woman in the woods can heal you, but be careful or she’ll eat your soul. Marguerite told me that was one of the rumors—that I eat souls. I don’t. “Monsieur?”

He had locked his vision to where I had the cot propped against the wall—the only seating space in my small cabin unless I decided to repurpose the table (as I sometimes did).

“Monsieur?”

He turned to me slowly and I could see the pain in his eyes. Monsieur LeComte crammed his hands into his armpits, taking on a protective stance. He’d definitely heard some good rumors, I was certain of it. But I could also tell from the sweat congealing between his eyes that he was in so much pain, even the rumors weren’t enough to stay him. That’s how I got customers, and there was always more pain in Isle Brevelle.

“My feet,” he muttered. I looked down.

“No shoes?”

“Can’t. It’s torture.”

I guessed he would know about torture, as would anyone who wasn’t a planter in the Isle. The lines on his knuckles gave away his age finally. He must have been nearly sixty based on those hard hands. I knew also that if I took his shirt off, I’d find rows of whip marks between his shoulderblades. There wasn’t much I didn’t know about the community and I was rapidly putting M. LeComte in his place. He shook on his feet, shifting his weight every few seconds, alternating pain from one foot to the other. I looked down at his deformed toes, warped and twisted and red. I realized why he’d been staring a the cot.

“It must have killed you to make that journey. Sit down, Monsieur, and lift those feet. I can help you.”

A dab of tincture on the tongue and some praying would fix most things. Old Toulouse, who I guess wasn’t that old—and wasn’t from Toulouse even though people used to say he was—taught me that and most of the other stuff I know about healing that didn’t come naturally. He always said that faith was the most important part of faith healing. I’m strong in both faith and talent. That’s what he bet on when he took a former slave girl under his wing.

There was barely enough circulation, despite the creaky old wooden frame, to carry the smell of the man’s sweat out as I smeared ointment over his red, puffy ankles. Part of my vision had told me that this older man didn’t have but a couple of years left to him. It doesn’t make a difference to me. A Traiteur doesn’t have a choice in who they treat. They treat everyone who enters the cabin.

As a cruel mockery of the universe, a young boy walked in through the unlatched door. He was dark black, the color of that giant piano that used to sit in the room off the entryway down in the Pecanier Plantation big house. I’d seen it when visiting Luc and Francois, mon frères, on the rare Sunday when they didn’t have to work. Then the boy talked, and his words stuck together like molasses.

“Master Metoyer sent me to fetch you, Lizzy,” the boy said, dropping his eyes because he was probably afraid of me. My name’s Lysiane, not Lizzy. It used to be Lizzy when I was thirteen, then fourteen, and part of the way through my fifteenth year. On the streets and unattended, I’d lost my name then. The next year, I still couldn’t find it. Only Lysiane remained.

“If he wants me, he can come himself,” I told him. I may have had to treat everyone who entered my cabin, but I didn’t have to do house calls. And I’ve never been in the habit of catering to the person who broke up my family.

When ma mère passed ten years before, her life savings amounted to $1,265, about half in Mexican-milled silver, a third in colonial silver, and the rest paper—her life’s worth after seventy years of living on God’s Earth. She’d been saving that money so she could free us. I remember the tear-stained note we found under her bed the day she died, alongside that money. She couldn’t barely write, having not been taught, and to this day I don’t know who scribbled down her words for her.

Some girls would have cost a lot more than what ma mère offered for my freedom. But I was useless. Ma mère knew it, and M. Metoyer knew it too. Hence the price was just fine by him.

The boy didn’t leave. He was probably afraid of what old Metoyer would do to him if he went back without the answer that his master sought.

“Never mind,” I told the boy, as I could see more sweat gathering on his brow and the tension in his tiny cheeks. “I’ll tell him. You just tell him that I’m treating someone right now and I’ll discuss things with him directly. Do you know what he wants?”

The old man seemed to get nervous at that and began to sit up. I held my hand up, palm down, telling him to stop. In my shack, all were equal, and the planter Metoyer would just have to wait until I finished with the freed man of color, Monsieur LeComte.

“It’s gone,” he told me, showing his foot and wiggling one little toe. His toes still looked like grapes on a twisted vine. There wasn’t much I could do about that part of it. The pain answered me though, every time.

“The Lord wills,” I said, handing him a bottle of the tincture I’d used. “One drop, no more, when the pain comes back. If it gets so one drop won’t do it, you make your way down to New Orleans and find a real doctor.”

“Bless you, child,” the man said, and it seemed that he saw my home for the first time now that the pain had lifted the veil from his eyes. “My goodness!”

Now I have never been embarrassed by much, but the way he said that and lifted his hand to his heart like a maiden made me do a double take myself.

My cabin, or Old Toulouse’s cabin, or Madame Roi’s cabin before him, was about the size of a one-room schoolhouse. The tin roof was nearly rusted through in places, and I still had pots out from the last rain. The floor sank in a bit in the front area under where my bed was. In the treating space, there was just the one small cot that the man was on and holes in the wall near the floor from when I had to go after a rat nearly the size of my arm. Got the rat, but still haven’t got back to patching the holes.

“What do I owe you, ma’am?”

They were always real careful to call me ma’am. Sometimes I liked it, especially when it was the planters doing it. This man, though, something about him said that he had suffered enough. A man who had been through what he had shouldn’t have to call anyone ma’am.”

“Lysiane, not ma’am. And you don’t owe me a thing, sir. The Lord’s work is His, and I am only a vessel.”

I held my breath. This was the trickiest part of the business of Traiteur. I can’t ask him for anything, being that the Lord did the actual work. But what I needed was some more bottles, or it would be nice to have a good meal in the city. Or, Lord willing, another piece of eight to add to my anemic stash that I gathered in the hopes of buying my siblings free. I crossed my heart on impulse.

“Here, Lysiane,” he told me as he reached out his hand to deposit something I couldn’t see from within his closed fist.

“He sick,” the boy interrupted, finally answering my question. I extended my hand to catch the man’s gift while eyeing the child.

“You’re still here. So? Everyone’s dying.”

“Dying now, everyone thinks,” the child pushed the words at me as though the death of one more planter should bother me at all. I tried not to react when I felt the coinage land in my palm.

“You’re too generous,” I suggested, doing my best to ignore the boy.

“It’s what I can give,” Lecomte said to me, raising up to his feet to leave. “Thank you.”

“Glory to the Lord.”

“Glory.”

The man pushed past the boy, bumping him roughly in the process, but the boy still didn’t take the hint.

“Dying of what?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Consumption?”

I eyed my potions.

“Mal du roi?”

The boy shook his head.

“Aint seen it yet. But he got the cough.”

I didn’t have anything to treat consumption. That one only the Lord and strength of faith could heal—or a real hospital. Nasty business, if that’s what he had. But not everyone with a cough had consumption. It served him right, though, breaking up my family the way he had.

“He said he freed you and you owe him,” the boy persisted.

I couldn’t help smiling at the audacity.

“He said that, did he?” Now I knew I would never treat the man. “I told you what to say. Why are you still here?”

“He said he could pay you.”

Even if I could accept payment, which I couldn’t, it was far too late for that.

“Go on then. Tell him what I told you to, that I’ll be along.”

“But will you?”

“Listen, boy,” I said, now losing my patience. “Whether I do or whether I don’t is up to me, isn’t it? You tell him what I told you and maybe you’ll avoid a beating.”

“You gonna beat me?”

I laughed.

“Not at my hand, child. Go on.”

His eyes furrowed up in confusion, but he knew wiser than to ask me more questions. Instead, he did turn to go.

“He’s gonna ask when,” the boy whispered. “When you gonna to come. He’s gonna ask that.”

“Tell him next week.”

“Why can’t you come now? There ain’t nobody here.”

“Things.”

“You don’t like him, do you, on account of Luc. And Francois.”

And Genevieve. They always leave out Genevieve when they try to console me or convince me like her life didn’t really matter. I couldn’t stop my jaw from clenching at the mention of mon frères.

It was Metoyer who read ma mère’s will. He took the money from ma mère and set me free with a bag of food and a handful of nothing. Then, a week later, he sold Luc and Francois both down to Pecanier Plantation, and a week after that, rid himself of Genevieve by sending her down to Mangrove. I didn’t hear about any of that for another month on account of the fact that I was too busy starving to death or servicing lonely men in back alleys for food.

The boy must have sensed my hostility because he backed toward the door. Who knows what thoughts went through that tiny head, or how much bravery he screwed up to not run screaming into the woods.

“Yes, if you have to know. On account of Luc, Francois, and Genevieve.”

“You know how much money he got, Lizzy. He’ll pay whatever you ask. I seen him. He look like death. You can get them back.”

“It don’t work that way, boy.” I felt at a disadvantage not knowing his name, but he didn’t offer it so I didn’t ask. They can be superstitious sometimes about me knowing too much about them.

“Cause of you being a Traiteur? I could ask him for you. Their freedom could be a gift.”

“Why do you care? Besides, it wouldn’t be right for me to treat the man who broke up my family and left me to die.”

“You got to give sometimes, Lysiane. It ain’t all the world like what you think.”

“Go away,” I growled at him. When he finally left, I wondered then what I would do if Metoyer showed up himself on my doorstep. I’d have had to treat him, according to the rules. I growled at myself this time. No damn way. Traiteur or not, there are some things the Lord will just have to forgive.