Pamela Morsi Read Online Free Page A

tributaries.
    Jesper Gaudet was wearing his best cottonade
culotte tied just below the knee and his striped blue chemise. His
face was shaded from the last of the afternoon sun by a
wide-brimmed hat woven of palmetto.
    "We're going to miss everything," he
complained as he helped Aida into the long narrow boat known in the
bayous as a pirogue. She ignored his words and settled herself
comfortably in the narrow, seatless hull, her cherry-striped skirt
billowing around her like a frothy soufflé, as her father pushed
off from the dock and began the slow, laborious task of poling the
pirogue upstream.
    "They've been playing and singing for seems
like half a day already," Jesper continued to fuss. "All the good
food is likely gone."
    "Oh, I'm not hungry," Aida told him
lightly.
    "Well, I certainly am," the old man
complained.
    With a little O of surprise and shame, Aida
covered her mouth. She had forgotten once more to fix Poppa any
supper.
    It was near sunset. The light was low and
filtered through the thick line of aging cypress and tupelos on
either side of the broad expanse of water. The outstretched
branches of the trees were draped and weeping with Spanish moss.
And the quiet serenity of coming evening was disturbed only by the
call of crickets and the buzz of mosquitoes.
    The loud hungry squawk of a heron caught
Aida's attention and she watched the bird's smooth graceful flight
just above the water as it searched for prey. It was beautiful. She
admired beautiful things.
    The pirogue cut a neat swath through the
bright green duckweed, so thick and verdant, it looked as if a
person could simply walk across it to the distant banks where the
knobby knees of the trees were visible above the water. The river
was light and color and beauty. It was home.
    They came around a bend in the waterway, and
the sounds of song and merriment grew more distinct. Up ahead the
glow of lanterns was visible in the distance. Aida sighed happily.
This was life, this was what life was meant to be, joie de
vivre.

Chapter 2

    The whine of bowed fiddles and the pounding
of dancing feet against cypress planking filled the air, mixing
with the smells of boiled shrimp, gumbo fevi, and fresh baked
miches. It was Saturday night and for Acadians that meant dancing
and laughing and fun.
    Fais-dodo was what the people had jokingly
begun to call these community outings. The term, meaning "go to
sleep," was coined from the practice of putting all the babies
together in a bed at the back of the house. Children, typically
much beloved and coddled, found suddenly that the parents who
normally were content to converse with them for hours on end now
only had one phrase to say: "Go to sleep!"
    It was a phrase that Armand Sonnier himself
uttered as he helped his sister-in-law get her three children
tucked into the Marchand family's low-slung four-poster. A
half-dozen children already reclined there, boys and girls alike
wearing the traditional shapeless knee-length gown.
    His niece and two nephews were healthy,
rowdy, and active, much too much for his sister-in-law to handle
alone.
    Felicite Sonnier was heavily pregnant again.
Her once pink, pretty face was round as a plate and splotched with
the faint brown mask of childbearing. Her formerly lustrous brown
curls were dull and limp and wound rather untidily about her head.
And below the hem of her skirt her feet were so swollen no shoes
would fit her and it appeared she had no ankles at all. Her best
dress hung around her massive body like a tent, the shoulder
stained with baby spit-up. Felicite Sonnier was tired. Armand knew
by the sounds of her sighs that she was very tired.
    "You rabbits get down in your den," Armand
told the three curly-headed children. "And I don't want to hear a
one of you calling out for Maman."
    "I'm too big to go to sleep," four-year-old
Gaston complained with a yawn.
    "Me, too," his three-year-old sister chimed
in. Little Marie's words were hard to make out as her thumb was
already tucked