The Taker Ch. 01

Louisiana, 1852

Michal Halda arrived in the sugar parish on a Tuesday in September, when the cane was tall enough to hide a man's whole body if he stood still, and the air was so thick with sweetness and rot that it felt like breathing syrup.

He had chosen the parish deliberately. Not New Orleans with its overabundance of Europeans there, excesses of society, and no dearth of men who would ask him where he was from and when. He wanted a place where a white man with a little money and no history could appear and simply be accepted, because the alternative was to be questioned, and Michal did not care to be questioned.

He rode in on a hired horse along the river road, past the levee, past the long white face of the Bellefontaine plantation house sitting above its rows like a landlord above a debt. The cane stretched away from it in every direction, green and rustling, and somewhere out in it he could hear the low animal rhythm of work; hoes, and voices, and the creak of carts.

He stopped at the edge of the field and watched.

He always watched first. This was his discipline. Before he took anything, he learned the shape of the local order: who belonged to whom, who was protected, who was already spoken for, and most importantly, who was not. Power was a map, and every map had blank spaces on it. Michal lived in the blank spaces.

Here, the blank spaces were obvious. The cane was worked by Black people, and the Black people were worked by the white family in the house, and the white family in the house was worked by debt and weather and reputation. It was a small machine, and it ran on one simple rule: some people were people, and some people were property, and the property could be used in any way the people found convenient.

He liked that rule very much.

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The overseer's name was Doyle, a squat Irishman with a sun-cracked face who disliked Michal on sight and could not say why. Michal introduced himself as a gentleman of independent means, recently returned from abroad, looking to winter in the parish. Doyle, who had never wintered anywhere but in this same mud, looked at him with the specific suspicion of a man who has to work for a living toward a man who does not.

"You'll want the Bellefontaine, then," Doyle said. "Mrs. Landry keeps a room for gentlemen."

"Does she."

"She's a widow. Keeps the place running. Mr. Landry's been dead two years."

Michal nodded slowly, as this was a fact he might use later. A widow running a plantation meant a woman in the seat of local power, which meant she would be eager to be seen as powerful, which meant she would be eager to have a gentleman guest who treated her as one. And a woman eager to be seen as powerful was usually too busy performing power to notice who was exercising it beneath her.

He thanked Doyle and rode up to the house.

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Mrs. Landry was forty-one and handsome in the way that widows in the provinces learn to be handsome: tightly laced, deliberately composed, with a laugh she deployed like a small weapon. She took one look at Michal's clean hands and good coat and decided he was a gentleman, which was all he needed.

"Mr. Halda. From where, may I ask?"

"Originally? Nowhere worth naming. I've been in the West Indies, and before that the Cape, and before that," he waved a hand, "the usual European tour."

"And now you've come to Louisiana."

"Now I've come to Louisiana," he agreed, and smiled, and she smiled back, and that was the entire negotiation. She gave him a room on the second floor facing the cane, with a view of the quarters where the enslaved people lived, and she gave him the run of the house, and she gave him the distance he needed to observe without being observed.

That first week, he did nothing. He ate with her at her table, he praised her cooking, he listened to her talk about the price of sugar and the difficulty of finding reliable overseers, and every night he stood at his window and watched the quarters go dark, and every morning he watched them go light again.

He learned their names by listening to the household talk, the way a man learns a new language; by absorption, by repetition, by watching which words came with which faces. There was Céleste, the house woman. There was Junie, a field girl who was often sent up to the house to carry water. There was a whole small nation of them out in the cane, and there was Old Mattie, who cooked, and who was treated by the household as furniture with a voice.

Michal filed them all away. He was not in a hurry.

He was never in a hurry. Hurry was for men who had only one life. Michal had many, or at least many chapters of one, and the pleasure of his arrangement was that he could wait for a woman to relax around him before he ever touched her. A woman who had relaxed was a woman who had decided what kind of man you were, and Michal liked to be misjudged. It made the correction sweeter.

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Céleste came to him first.

Not to him - she came to his room to turn down his bed and lay out his clothes, which was her duty, and which she performed with the flat competence of a woman who had decided long ago that white men were a weather condition. She was twenty-seven, or said she was, and she was the color of weak coffee with cream, and she moved like someone who had been in a big house long enough to have absorbed its postures without ever having been granted its ease.

Michal watched her from the doorway the first night she did it, and she knew he was watching, and she did not look up.

"You don't have to stand there, sir," she said. "I know my work."

"I'm sure you do," he said. "That's why I'm watching."

She glanced at him then, quick and flat, and he saw in that glance the exact thing he was looking for: she had decided what he was. A gentleman. A guest. Another white man who would look at her and see a *house* thing rather than a *field* thing, and therefore might, or might not, be the kind who used house women.

He let her finish and let her leave without saying anything else. Let her wonder.

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Junie came second, and by accident.

She was nineteen, or thereabouts: nobody kept records for field children, and the number was more a shape than a fact, and she had been sent up from the cane with a bucket of water for the kitchen. She was tall for her age and thin with the specific thinness of field work, all elbow and shoulder and long bare feet, and she was still new to it, still not yet worn down to the flat patience of the older hands. She moved like a foal. She looked at the house like a place she had been told about and had not quite believed.

Michal was on the back gallery, smoking, when she came up the steps with the bucket, and he said good morning to her, and she startled like a bird.

"Mornin', sir," she said, and kept walking, and he watched her go with the bucket sloshing a little at her side.

He asked Mattie about her that night, casually, over the kitchen table where he had taken to sitting with the staff because it was warmer than the parlor and because Mrs. Landry's conversation bored him after nine.

"Junie," Mattie said, and made a sound. "Field chile. Doyle's been workin' her. She ain't been up long."

"How long is long?"

"Long enough to know better, not long enough to do better," Mattie said, which Michal found a remarkably good summary of the human condition. She was forty, or claimed forty, a big soft woman with hands that had their own opinions, and she was the only one in the house who spoke to Michal as if he were a man and not a quality. He found it restful.

"You watchin' her," Mattie said. It was not a question.

"I watch everything," Michal said.

"Mm," Mattie said, and went back to her pots, and that was the end of it, and that was also the beginning.

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The opportunity came in the third week, when Mrs. Landry rode into town for three days to settle a matter with her sugar factor, and took the coachman and the cook's boy and left the house in the hands of a skeleton crew and Old Mattie, and left Michal with the run of everything.

He did not leap. He spent the first day reading in the parlor, in full view of the house staff, so that they would relax. He spent the second day walking the fields with Doyle, asking questions about cane and yield and labor, so that the men would relax. And on the third night, when the house was quiet and Mattie had gone to her pallet in the kitchen and the last lamp had been blown out in the quarters, he went down the back stairs and out into the dark.

The cane was taller than him now, and the moon was up, and the rows made corridors of green light and black shadow. He walked out along the headland - the strip of grass between the field and the quarters - until he came to the cabin where he knew Junie slept with two other field girls and an old woman.

He lifted the latch.

Inside, the fire was banked low, and the cabin smelled of smoke and sweat and sleep. Three pallets on the floor, one in the corner with the old woman who was not quite asleep and not quite awake. Junie lay on the middle pallet with another girl, both of them curled like dogs for warmth.

Michal stood in the doorway and let his eyes adjust. Then he stepped in, closed the door behind him, and crossed to the middle pallet.

He crouched and put his hand on Junie's shoulder. She woke the way field children wake, all at once, no confusion, already looking for the threat.

"Sir," she said.

"Come outside," he said. "I want to show you something."

She sat up. The other girl slept on. Junie looked at the old woman, who had opened one eye and closed it again, which Michal took to mean the girl is yours, do what you like.

Junie stood. She was wearing a thin cotton shift that came to her knees and nothing else, and her hair was tied back for sleep, and she had the specific dishevelment of a person pulled out of the middle of a dream. She followed him out into the yard without a word.

He walked her to the cane. She hesitated at the edge, as if the field were a different country at night, and he said, "It's the same cane," and she stepped in after him, and the green closed over them both.

He didn't stop until they were deep, four rows in, five, far enough that the house was only a pale shape through the stalks and the quarters were a rumour of firelight. The cane rose on either side of them like walls. The ground underfoot was soft with cut leaves and old stubble, and it gave under their feet, and the stalks leaned in and sprang back and leaned in again.

He turned her to face him.

She was breathing fast through her nose, not from the walk but from the idea of the walk, and she stood with her hands at her sides and her thin cotton shift hanging to her knees and her whole body saying what now, what now, what now.

He took the hem of the shift in both hands and pulled it up over her head in one motion. She lifted her arms to help, and then she was bare in the dark, and the moonlight came through the cane in strips and lay across her body in pale bands: across one shoulder, across her small hard breasts, across the flat of her belly, across the dark patch between her legs that she had not been able to see since she was a child.

She moved to cover herself and then stopped, because she didn't know which part to cover.

He looked at her for a long time. He wanted her to feel it - the looking - because being looked at was the first thing a field girl was never given, and it softened them faster than hands did.

Then he said, "Turn around."

She turned.

He looked at her back. The long ridge of her spine, the wings of her shoulder blades, the small tight buttocks, the backs of her thighs. The fine hairs at the nape of her neck. A field girl, made for standing and stooping and carrying, all of it built into her bones. She was nineteen and she had never been seen and now she was being seen by a white man in a cane field at night, and he could practically hear her mind trying to work out whether this was good or bad.

He stepped up behind her and put one hand flat on her stomach.

She jumped. Then held still.

He slid the hand down. Over the small swell of her belly, through the coarse hair, into the wet heat between her legs. She was already wet... not soaked, but slick and warm and open, and when his middle finger slid between her folds and found her entrance, she made a sound like a caught breath and her hips tipped forward an inch.

"Have you had fingers in you," he said against her ear.

"Yes, sir."

"Your own?"

"Yes, sir."

"Anyone else's?"

"No, sir."

He pushed his finger in.

She gasped - a real gasp, high and startled - and her hands came up and grabbed the cane stalk in front of her, and the stalk bent and shivered and sprang back. She was tight. Not resisting-tight, just narrow, a body built small and never opened. He worked the finger in to the second knuckle and felt the walls of her give and grip and give again.

He added a second finger.

She made a sound. Not pain. The sound a girl makes when she discovers that the space between her legs can hold more than one thing.

He worked her with two fingers, slow, curling up, and with his other hand he unfastened his trousers and pulled himself out. He was hard and the cool night air on him made it worse, and he stood there behind her and fingered her and looked down at the back of her head and the knobs of her spine and the way her knees had begun to soften.

"Bend," he said.

She bent. Braced her hands on the cane, spread her feet a little, and the shift of her weight pushed her backside out toward him and opened her. He spat in his palm and stroked it over himself and then set the head of his cock against her.

She looked back over her shoulder at him. Quick, nervous, trying to see.

"Look front," he said.

She looked front.

He pushed in.

________________________________________

It went in slow. He wanted it slow, because slow was where the girl was, and because he liked the way she kept making the small sounds and then catching them and swallowing them and then making them again. She was tight enough that he felt every inch of the passage, and he felt the exact place where her body decided, where it stopped expecting pain and started expecting something else.

Halfway in he stopped and held.

"Breathe," he said.

She breathed. Ragged, quick, but she breathed, and on the second breath her body gave a little and let him the rest of the way.

He was all the way in. She was small enough that he felt her walls wrapped tight around him from root to tip, and when he moved his hips an inch, he felt ALL of her move with it; her back, her shoulders, the cane she was holding.

He started to fuck her.

Slow first. Long strokes, pulling almost all the way out and pushing all the way back in, and she took it and took it and started to meet it a little, pushing back against him on the in-stroke, and he let her find the rhythm and then he broke it, because the moment a girl found a rhythm was the moment to take it away.

He sped up.

The cane bent and sprang. The leaves rustled. Her breath went to short hard little puffs, and then to a low steady moan that she couldn't keep down, and her hands slid on the cane stalk and found new grips, and her back arched and her buttocks pushed back against his hips and she was fucking him back now, without knowing she was doing it, all instinct, the oldest instinct, and Michal watched the small of her back shine with sweat in the moon-strips and felt her start to flutter and clench around him.

She came.

He felt it: the wave of it, the sudden tight grip, the way her whole body went rigid and then melted against the cane, and she made a noise that was almost a sob and her knees gave and he caught her by the hips and kept fucking her through it, hard now, no rhythm, just driving.

She was limp and gasping and still twitching when he finished. He pulled her all the way onto him and held her there and spent inside her, and she felt it; he knew she felt it, because she made one more small sound at the heat of it.

Then he stayed in her a moment. Just breathing. Feeling her breathe.

"That's the first time," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"You didn't say anything."

"I didn't know what to say, sir."

He laughed quietly and pulled out. She stayed bent over the cane for a second, then straightened slowly, and the shift was on the ground and she looked at it and then at him and then picked it up and pulled it on, and it stuck to the wet between her thighs, and she noticed and looked embarrassed, and he noticed her noticing and did not tell her it was fine.

He walked her back to the cabin. At the door she stopped.

"Am I..." she started, and then did not finish.

"You're fine," he said. "Go to sleep."

She went in. He stood in the yard for a while afterward, listening to the frogs and the far-off river, and he thought about how simple it was here. In other places he had had to argue for a woman. Here, the argument had been decided long before he arrived. The law said she was property, and the custom said property could be used, and the two together meant he could take a girl out of her bed in the middle of the night and put her back an hour later and no one in the world would think it remarkable.

He found that enormously peaceful. It was the whole reason he had come.

________________________________________

Mrs. Landry returned the next afternoon, sunburned and pleased with herself, and over supper she told Michal all about her factor and her sugar and her plans for the coming season, and Michal listened and nodded and said the right things, and all the while his mind was out in the cane with Junie, and he was already planning the next time.

The next time was two nights later. The time after that was four nights later. He was careful about it. He did not want to make it regular, because regular meant expected, and expected meant that the girl might start to think of him as a fixture rather than an event. He wanted to stay an event.

But he also wanted more than one.

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Céleste was the harder one, and therefore the more interesting.

She had been the master's woman - not officially, nothing was official here - but the household knew it, and she knew it, and she carried herself with the small tight dignity of a woman who had been chosen, and had not forgotten it. Mr. Landry had used her, and possibly had loved her, and had certainly not freed her, and now he was dead and she was still in the house, still turning down beds, and the new arrangement was a widow who did not quite know what to do with her.

Michal watched this for a week before he acted. He watched Céleste and Mrs. Landry circle each other in the kitchen doorway, one of them the legal mistress and one of them the practical one, and he understood the exact shape of the gap between them.

He chose a night when Mrs. Landry had taken a sleeping draught for her nerves and would not stir. He waited until the house was still. Then he went down to the kitchen, where Céleste slept on a pallet behind the pantry, and he stood in the dark and said her name.

She woke fast, like Junie, but she did not sit up. She lay there and looked at him.

"What do you want," she said. Not sir. Not a question.

"You," Michal said.

She considered this for a moment. Then she said, "And what about the field girl."

Michal was genuinely surprised. "You noticed."

"Everybody noticed. Junie walks different. And you smell like the cane when you come back at night."

"So, you've been keeping track."

"I keep track of everything in this house," Céleste said. "It's how I stay in it."

Michal crouched down beside her pallet. "Then you know why I'm here."

"I know why you say you're here."

He smiled in the dark. "Then tell me what I'm actually here for."

She looked up at him.

________________________________________

He pulled her pallet out from behind the pantry and onto the kitchen floor and laid her down on it. She let him. She lay back with her arms loose at her sides and watched him the whole time: watched him unbutton, watched him kneel, watched him look at her, and the watching was the whole point, the point he had not had with Junie.

He pulled her shift up over her hips and she lifted her backside to let him take it off entirely, and then she was naked on the pallet on the kitchen floor, and she still did not look away.

He put his mouth on her.

She was surprised - he felt her startle - because the field girl had not had a mouth on her and neither, apparently, had she. Mr. Landry had been a straight-up man. So Michal put his mouth on her and she made a low, flat, disbelieving sound, like a person tasting something they can't place.

He worked her with his tongue. Slow at first, long flat strokes up the whole length of her, because she needed to be told what was happening before she could enjoy it. She was already wet: had been wet before he touched her, he suspected, from the waiting, from knowing he was coming, and her taste was sharp and clean and a little sweet, and he put his whole face into her, nose against the mound, tongue through the folds, and she made a noise and her hands came down and found his hair.

She gripped it. Hard. A woman who did not know she was going to grip.

He sucked her clit into his mouth and worked it with his tongue and pushed two fingers into her at the same time, and she arched up off the pallet with a sound that was almost angry, and her thighs came up and clamped around his ears, and her heels dug into his back, and she held him there and rode his mouth with a confidence that Junie had not had.

She came fast. Two, three minutes, and she came hard. He felt the whole thing, the flutter and then the clamp, the way she bucked and then went rigid and then shook, and she made a long low sound that went on and on and finally broke into a breath.

He lifted his head. His chin was soaked. He looked up her body at her face, and she was looking back at him with her eyes half-closed and her mouth open and her chest heaving, and the look on her face was not gratitude. It was assessment.

"Where'd you learn that," she said.

"Places."

"Places," she repeated, and then she reached down and grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him up her body and kissed him, hard, tasting herself on his mouth, and he had not expected the kiss at all and it undid something in him.

He got his trousers open and pushed into her while they were still kissing.

She was wet and open and easy: the opposite of Junie, no resistance, just a long slick give all the way in, and she made a sound into his mouth and wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him deeper, and he was all the way inside her before either of them came up for air.

He fucked her.

Not slow. She had not asked for slow. He fucked her hard and flat, the way you fuck a woman who knows what she wants, driving into her with his whole weight and letting her take it, and she took it and gave it back, hips rising to meet every stroke, and she watched him the whole time. She watched him the whole time. He would look down and her eyes would be open, and on his face, studying him, reading him, seeing exactly how much he was enjoying it and filing it away.

He fucked her like that until his arms shook and her breath was ragged and the sweat was running down between her breasts, and then he put his hand flat on her lower belly, pressing down over where he was inside her, and she made a sharp sound and clenched around him and came again.

He felt it and it took him over the edge and he spent inside her with a grunt, three, four hard pulses, and she held him in with her legs and did not let him pull out.

They lay there. Both breathing hard. Her hand was on the back of his neck.

After a while she said, in a flat voice, "You're here because there's nobody to stop you."

He lifted his head and looked at her.

"Yes," he said. "That's exactly why."

________________________________________

She was also, he understood, dangerous. Not in the sense that she could hurt him. In the sense that she could see him. Junie saw a white man who came at night. Céleste saw a man who came at night because he wanted to, and who had chosen this house, this parish, this arrangement, out of all the arrangements in the world.

One night, after, she said, "Where are you from."

"Nowhere in particular."

"That's not a place."

"It is if you say it enough."

She propped herself on one elbow and looked at him. "You're not like the others."

"The others?"

"White men. Guests. They come here and they act like this house is a foreign country. Like they're visiting. You act like you live here."

"I do live here," Michal said. "For now."

"For now," she repeated, and lay back down, and Michal understood that she had just done something no one else in the parish had managed: she had noticed that he was temporary, and she had not been reassured by it.

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Old Mattie was the third, and she was the most surprising, because she was the least chose.

Michal had not planned to have her. He had planned Junie for the field and Céleste for the house, and Mattie was the cook, and cooks were mothers, and mothers were not usually the point. But one night he was sitting at the kitchen table late, and Mattie was there, and the fire was low, and she poured him a cup of coffee without being asked, and he looked at her and thought, why not.

She caught him looking. "What," she said.

"You."

She snorted. "Me."

"Why not you."

"Because I'm old," she said. "And because I cook, and men don't look at the cook."

"I'm looking at the cook."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she put the pot down on the table and untied her apron, slowly, and let it drop.

She was forty, or claimed forty, and she was big; broad through the shoulders and the hips, soft in the belly, heavy in the breasts, with the thick strong arms of a woman who had lifted pots and children and sacks of flour her whole life. Her skin was dark, darker than Céleste, and there was silver starting at her temples, and her body had the specific dignity of a body that had stopped being looked at years ago and had made its peace with it.

She did not undress further. She just stood there with her hands on her hips and said, "Well. All right then."

He stood and took her by the waist and turned her around and bent her over the end of the kitchen table.

She braced her hands on the tabletop. He pulled her skirt and shift up over her backside and gathered them at her waist, and then she was bare from the waist down, and her backside was big and round and soft, and her thighs were thick, and she looked over her shoulder at him once and then looked front and settled her weight.

He ran a hand over her. She was warm - so much warmer than the others, a body with it's own furnace - and when his fingers slid between her legs she was already wet and she did not pretend otherwise.

"Not your first time at this table," he said.

"No," Mattie said. "And you're not the first at it either."

He pushed into her.

She was full. There was no resistance at all; a woman in her forties who had borne children and been had on this table by more than one man, and she took him all the way in on the first stroke and made a low huh sound, like she had just confirmed something.

He fucked her over the table.

It was different from both the others. With Junie he had been teaching; with Céleste he had been competing; with Mattie he was just working, the way you work, the way a man fucks a woman who has been fucked a hundred times and knows exactly what she is doing. She met every stroke. She rocked back into him. She had a rhythm of her own and she imposed it on him, and he let her, because it was a good rhythm and because there was something almost restful about being handled by a woman who knew what she wanted and was not going to pretend otherwise.

The table creaked. The pots on the shelf rang a little.

He reached around her and put his hand on her belly and pulled her back onto him, and she grunted and sped up, and he felt her start to clench, and then she came with a long low hum, not a scream, not a shout, a hum, like a woman settling a pot, and it was one of the most adult sounds he had ever heard a woman make.

He came with her, gripping her hips, and spent in her, and stayed bent over her back with his forehead against her spine and her shoulder blade under his cheek.

After, she straightened up and pulled her skirt down and retied her apron, and looked at him, and said, "Huh."

"Just huh?"

"That's all you get," Mattie said, and picked up the coffee pot and poured herself a cup.

He laughed. He sat on the kitchen floor with his back against the wall and laughed, and she stood over him and drank her coffee and looked at him with an expression that was almost fond.

"You're not like the others," she said.

"So I've been told."

"By who."

He didn't answer. She didn't press. She finished her coffee and put the cup in the basin and went to her pallet in the kitchen corner and lay down, and Michal sat there for a while longer in the dark.

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The three weeks ran together after that, and Michal began to lose track of the nights, which he had not expected. Usually he kept a clean ledger. Here the ledger was blurring: Junie in the cane, Céleste behind the pantry, Mattie in the kitchen, and Mrs. Landry in the parlor talking about sugar the whole time, never suspecting that her house was being used as a larder.

He wrote in his journal on the last night of the month.

September. Louisiana. Three. C. the house woman. J. the field girl. M. the cook. C. is the one to watch.

He underlined C. twice. He wasn't sure yet why.

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The answer came the following week, and it came because of a small thing, which was how the important things usually came.

Mrs. Landry decided to sell someone.

It was not a dramatic decision. It was a household decision: the sugar factor had squeezed her, the season had been mediocre, and she needed cash by Christmas. She had a woman in the quarters who was too old for field work and too slow for the house, and she had a girl who was too young to be worth feeding, and she had, she decided, one too many mouths. So, she was going to sell two down to a trader in New Orleans, and she announced it at supper the way she announced everything, as if it were an item of gossip rather than a rearrangement of human lives.

Michal listened with half an ear until she said the names.

"Not Junie," he said.

Mrs. Landry looked up, surprised. "You know the girl?"

"I've seen her. She's young."

"She's young, but she's not useful yet, and I need the money now, not in three years. And the trader pays for youth."

Michal put down his fork and thought. He had not intended to buy anyone. Owning a person had always seemed to him like a lot of paperwork. But the thought of Junie being sold downriver, out of reach, before he was done with her... that bothered him in a way he had not anticipated.

"How much," he said.

"For Junie? Four hundred."

"I'll give you four fifty."

Mrs. Landry put down her own fork. "Mr. Halda. You want to buy her."

"I want to keep her where she is," Michal said. "And I want to be able to do as I like with her without asking you first. Buying seems simplest."

Mrs. Landry looked at him for a long moment, and something moved behind her eyes, the small recalculation of a woman who has just realized her guest is not merely a guest. "Four fifty," she said. "And you'll still pay for your room."

"Of course."

"Then it's done."

And that was how Michal Halda became, for the first time in any of his lives, a slaveholder. He found the title faintly absurd. He had owned nothing for most of his existence and now he owned a nineteen-year-old girl, and the girl was delighted, because being owned by one white man was better than being owned by a plantation, and the plantation was better than the trader, and the trader was better than the river.

Junie came to his room that night without being fetched. She stood in the doorway with her hands folded, and she said, "Sir," and she said it differently than she had before, and Michal understood that the difference was relief.

"You're mine now," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"Does that please you?"

She thought about it, honestly, which he liked. "It pleases me better than the alternative, sir."

"That's the best anyone can say about anything," Michal said.

________________________________________

The week after that, he began to lose interest in Junie, which he had not expected, and which was instructive.

She was still young and still new and still made the small, surprised sounds in the cane. But she had become known, and known meant predictable, which meant that Michal's attention began to drift. This was the pattern he recognized in himself. It was why he never stayed anywhere long. It was also why he had a journal with hundreds of names in it and no addresses.

He drifted back to Céleste.

And Céleste, who had been watching all of it, said one night in the pantry, "You're bored of her."

"Not bored."

"Bored," Céleste said. "You've got the look. Mr. Landry used to get it."

"And what did Mr. Landry do about it?"

"He bought more," Céleste said. "And then he got bored of them too, and then he got bored of me, and then he died."

Michal laughed. "Is that the order of things?"

"That's the order of men," she said. "You're no different. You just move faster."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "You really do see me."

"I told you. It's how I stay in the house."

"You're not in the house," Michal said. "You're in the pantry."

He had meant it as a jab. Céleste took it as a fact, and nodded, and said, "Yes. Because the house belongs to her, and the pantry belongs to me, and you belong to neither. You're a visitor, Mr. Halda. I said it before. You're a visitor who acts like he lives here."

"And that's dangerous."

"To who?"

Michal did not answer, because he was not sure.

________________________________________

It happened on a night in October, and it was not planned.

Mrs. Landry threw a small dinner for the neighboring planters, the kind of dinner that was really a business meeting with wine, and Michal was seated as the gentleman guest, and all evening he was charming and praised and asked his opinions on cotton and sugar and the coming war that everyone said was coming but nobody believed would actually come.

He watched the room. He watched the planters look at their wives and then look at the house women who served, and he watched the wives notice, and he watched the whole machine turn.

And at the end of the evening, when the guests had gone and Mrs. Landry had taken her draught and the house was quiet, he went down to the pantry and found Céleste waiting for him, not asleep, and he understood that she had been waiting for him all evening, and had known he would come. They had fucked the way they always fucked: her on her back on the pallet on the pantry floor, her legs around him, her eyes open and on his face the whole time, watching.

He was inside her when he did it.

He didn't decide. He had been looking down at her, and she had been looking up at him, and her eyes had been doing the thing they always did - the seeing - and he had thought, in the middle of a stroke, if she sees me, she has to go, and he had reached down and put his hand over her mouth.

She didn't startle. She had been expecting something. She looked up at him over his own hand with those wide, calm, watching eyes, and she let him keep fucking her.

He kept going. Slow, deep, watching her.

Her breathing came through her nose. Short, regular. Fine.

He fucked her harder. Her hips rose to meet him. Her eyes stayed open. Still fine.

He put more weight on the hand.

Her eyes stayed on his. She was beginning to know; he could see it, the flicker, the small reassessment, and her breath came faster and shallower through her nose, and her hands came up and found his forearm and held it, not pulling, just holding, and she was still watching him, still seeing him, right to the end.

Her breath got thin. Her eyes stayed open. Her hips kept moving under him, meeting his strokes, because she was still there, still in it, still being fucked and still watching, and then the hips slowed.

And the eyes did something he had yet to see before. They stopped seeing.

Not closed. They stayed open. But the seeing went out of them, like a lamp being turned down, and Céleste was still looking at him and was no longer looking at anything, and her body went slack under him and her hands slid off his forearm and her legs loosened around his hips.

She was gone. And he was still inside her.

He did not stop.

He fucked her harder. Her body was still warm, warmer now, actually, because the last tension had let go, and she was soft in a way she had never been while she was alive, all the resistance and the assessment and the watching drained out of her and nothing left but a warm wet hole that was his to use. He pulled her hips up to meet him and drove into her, and the dead weight of her was different, heavier, looser, and it was better, and it was better, and he fucked her with his hand still over her mouth and his eyes on her open blank eyes.

Her arms flopped with the motion. Her breasts moved. Her head lolled a little with each thrust because her neck was loose now. He fucked her like that for two, three, four minutes, and the whole time she stared up at him with her mouth open under his palm and her eyes shining and empty, and it was the best fuck of his life.

He came.

He drove in hard and held and spent in her, and the pulsing of his own cock was the only living motion left in the two of them, and he felt his spend go into her warm slack body and he felt her body take it, and he held himself there for a long moment afterward, forehead down, breathing hard, hand still over her mouth.

Then he took his hand away.

Her mouth stayed open. A little air moved out of it.

And then...

Her chest moved.

Michal froze.

He watched her chest. Nothing. Nothing. And then it moved again; a shallow rise, a slow fall. Her throat worked once. Her lips moved without sound.

Alive.

He lay there over her, still inside her, and watched her breathe.

"Fuck," he said out loud, softly, to the dark pantry.

________________________________________

He pulled out of her slowly and sat back on his heels and just looked at her.

She was lying exactly as he had left her, legs apart, shift rucked up, chest moving in slow shallow rises, eyes half-open and seeing again... No, not seeing. Not yet. The lamp was coming back on, but dim, flickering, and he could tell she was not yet in her body. She was somewhere else. She was swimming back.

He watched her come back.

It took a few minutes. Her breathing deepened. Her color came back a little--not much, but a little, into her lips and her cheeks. Her fingers moved, closed, opened. She swallowed once and her throat worked, and then her eyes focused, slowly, on his face, and stayed there.

She looked at him. He looked at her.

"You killed me," she said. Her voice was a rasp, barely there.

"Almost."

"Almost," she repeated, and her mouth did something that was almost a smile. "How almost?"

"You stopped breathing," Michal said. "You stopped moving. Your eyes went out. You were gone for a minute, maybe more."

"And then?"

"And then you came back."

She was quiet for a long time. Her chest rose and fell. She did not sit up. She just lay there under him and looked at him, and Michal watched her think it through, and he saw the exact moment she understood the whole thing; that he had put his hand over her mouth on purpose, that he had fucked her while she was dead, that he had finished inside her dead body.

"You couldn't control yourself, or you wanted to know what it was like?" she asked.

"The latter."

"And?"

"It was better," Michal said.

She made a small hoarse sound that was almost a laugh. "That's a terrible thing to tell a woman."

"I know."

"Say it again tomorrow and see if I believe it."

"You won't be here tomorrow," Michal said. "You'll be in the pantry. And you'll know."

"I'll know," she repeated, and closed her eyes, and lay there breathing, and Michal sat back on his heels and watched her chest move and felt, for the first time in years, interest.

Because he had not killed her.

He had almost killed her. And there was a difference. She had come back with the same eyes and the same flat voice and the same habit of watching him, and now she had something new - she had died and returned - and Michal had a specific and unusual reaction to that, which was that he did not want to leave her.

He had been planning to leave in the spring. He was still planning to leave in the spring. But for a moment he was going to leave her dead, and now he was going to leave her alive. Alive meant she would be here when he was gone, she would remember, and if he ever came back to this parish, to this house, to this pantry, there would be one woman in it who knew exactly what he was.

That was not something he had ever had before. In all his lives. Someone who had been inside the room, and had lived, and would remember.

He decided, sitting there on the pantry floor, that he would let her live.

But he also decided, immediately after, that he could never come back.

________________________________________

He lay down beside her. Not to fuck her. Just to lie there. Her breathing was steady now. She had opened her eyes again and was watching the ceiling, and he was watching the ceiling with her.

After a while she said, "What are you?"

"Tired," he said.

"That's not what I asked."

"I know."

She turned her head and looked at him. The lamp was all the way back on now; her eyes were clear, her face was its usual composed self, and she was studying him again, but differently. Deeper. Slower. The way you study something you have just found out is not what you thought.

"You're not from here," she said.

"No."

"You're not from anywhere."

Michal did not answer.

"Say something," she said. And then, "You'll soon be leaving."

"Yes."

"Where?"

"The Raj, I think," he said, which was true, and which he had not told anyone, and which he could not have explained if she had asked.

"The Raj," she said, as if testing the word. "Where's that."

"Far. Across the sea. A place where the same thing is happening, but to different women."

She lay there a moment. Then she said, "You go where the women are already broken."

Michal turned his head and looked at her. "Yes," he said. "That's exactly what I do."

She nodded slowly. And then she said, "Come back through here. When you're done. Come back and see if I'm still alive."

"I might," he lied.

"You might," she said. "That's more than Mr. Landry ever gave me."

________________________________________

The next night, Junie came to his room.

She had been told, presumably, that she was to be trained to be his house woman, because Mrs. Landry needed extra hands to turn down beds and lay out clothes and the obvious candidate was the girl Michal already owned. Junie stood in the doorway and looked at him with the same expression she'd had the first night in the cane: not fear, not gratitude, that in-between thing.

"Sir," she said.

"Yes."

"Are you going to keep me?"

"Yes."

"For how long?"

Michal considered this. It was a good question, and no one had asked it before, and he decided to answer honestly.

"I don't know," he said. "Longer than you think. Shorter than you hope."

Junie nodded slowly, as if this were the most sensible thing anyone had ever said to her.

Then she came into the room and closed the door behind her and stood at the foot of the bed with her hands folded, and Michal looked at her.

"Come here," he said.

She came.

________________________________________

He stayed in the parish through the winter, and he left in the spring.

The leaving was easier than it should have been. He had bought Junie for four hundred and fifty dollars, and he sold her back to Mrs. Landry in April for three hundred, because a year had passed and she was older and the market had softened, and Mrs. Landry - who had, by then, half-convinced herself that she was in love with him - took the deal eagerly and asked him when he would return.

"Perhaps never," Michal said.

"That's a terrible thing to say."

"It's a true thing," he said. "You'll find that's rarer."

He kissed her hand, and rode out along the river road, and did not look back at the house, and did not look back at Junie standing on the back gallery with a bucket, and did not look back at the bedroom windows, where Céleste was standing, seeing.

He rode until the cane was out of sight, and then he stopped at a crossroads inn, and that night he took out his journal and wrote:

April. Louisiana. Three used, none dead. One of them, she saw me. She was the only one who saw me. If they see you, they have to go. Have I fucked up?

He underlined one of them. Then he closed the book and put it away, and the next morning he rode on, and by the time he reached the next parish he had already stopped thinking about them.