Pamela Morsi Read Online Free

house and he
would always work her father's land. For that he would, of
necessity, be grateful for his marriage. Gratitude was not love,
but it was closer than admiration. If he could need her, then he
could love her, her and not the most beautiful woman on the
Vermilion River.
    Of course there was the German widow. Aida
tapped her teeth thoughtfully with her fingernail. She doubted that
Laron realized Aida knew about her. Aida wasn't hurt or worried
about that alliance. She wasn't even certain that she would object
to it continuing after they had wed.
    The German widow was Laron's mistress. Aida
allowed the thought to flow over her like water, testing the feel
of it. It was not bothersome at all. Aida thought that it should
bother her, but it didn't. That he held another woman in his arms,
that he probably did with her unspeakably intimate things, was not
disturbing or hurtful, but merely a curiosity.
    If Aida never acted as if she noticed, no one
would ever suspect that she knew. Surely he couldn't love the
German widow. Her brow furrowed unhappily at the suggestion. Aida
didn't mind Laron having a mistress, as long as he didn't love her.
When Monsieur Boudreau finally began to love, Aida wanted to be
the recipient.
    She pushed away the troubling thoughts. She
was young and pretty, and tonight, just up the river, music was
playing. Somehow, some way, her husband would come to love her.
She was Aida Gaudet, young and beautiful and ready for a party.
    "Aida!" her father called out impatiently
once more.
    "Coming," she answered as she began looking
around for her fancy kid dancing slippers. She bit her lower lip,
worried. Where were they? It was one of the terrible realities of
her life; Aida was likely to lose things. Well, perhaps that wasn't
exactly true. She would simply forget where they had been put.
    "She would forget her head, were it not
attached," the old women joked of her. Unfortunately, it was
probably true. Somehow she could not seem to recall what she was
supposed to do when. Where things were or why. Or even if she had
done what she was required to do.
    Frantically she began searching the room,
sorting through the worn old sea chest, searching through the
unstraightened bedclothes, kneeling to look under the bed. By
complete chance she spotted them. The slippers of aged buckskin
dyed with poke salet berries were hanging from the rafters. The
rains had been bad last week and she had feared the damp floors
would ruin them.
    She climbed up on a chair and brought them
down, grateful for their safety. Brushing them lightly to assure
herself they were not dusty, she slipped them into her sleeve for
safekeeping. She grabbed her guinea feather fan and hurried from
her room, through her father's, and into the main part of the
house.
    Her wooden sabots sat next to the door and
she slipped her bare feet into them. They clomped against the porch
boards as she made her way noisily outside.
    The dancing slippers could not be risked to
the damp dangers of water travel. If a shoe became muddy or lost in
the water, it should be a wooden one, easily replaced.
    "Coming, Poppa," she called out to the
gray-haired man waiting rather impatiently at the end of the
dock.
    The Gaudet house, like most on the Prairie
l'Acadie, was built on the natural rise of land beside the water.
The stream facilitated travel, whether for visiting neighbors or
for transporting goods to market. Water access meant
prosperity.
    But water could also mean flood. The whole
area was low and wet. Good for game and crops, but people and their
possessions needed to be high and dry. As if God understood this
wet paradox, all along the bayous and rivers, thousands of years of
sediment deposit built up along the banks, making the areas near
the water the safest in time of flood. So even with huge areas of
open space behind them, the residents of Prairie l'Acadie lived
bunched together on the natural levees in close proximity to the
river and its tiny