Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (best short novels .txt) 📗

when you were both at sea. But in the dark shed, you think of the gleam in Ella’s eye, and Ti Me’s quiet voice saying:

You know what a man is like.

It is no use to wish for something different.

It is not possible.

“Do you remember,” you say, “when you wooed me and told me that we were equals? That we would be companions?”

“Have we not been?”

“You did not tell me your family’s history.”

“I have always thought—” He stops, his voice strangled with tears. “I have always thought that I could be myself with you.”

“But your self belongs to this rottenness. Your self defends it.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Which self have you been? The one who wants a million sons to build a free nation? The one who lets his father corrupt a country with his lewdness and greed? The one who calls his sister mad until maybe she’s become it? The one who imagines doing all of this means he’s working toward freedom?”

In the dusk, you see how slight he is, again. How pale his skin is, and how it glows. You think of how much pleasure you took in his looks, how much you took pleasure in the pleasure others took in looking at him. You were Mrs. Doctor, Mrs. Emmanuel Chase, Mrs. Chase. Your genuine desire for him was all mixed up in knowing how much he desired you, and how much anyone—Ella seething in the sitting room, his father peering at you over his glasses, your mother, shocked and scared, the high yellow American women of the colony with their faces fixed in disbelief—how all of them could see it. It was so plain they couldn’t deny it.

How much it would hurt if all that certainty of who you were, at least to them, was gone.

“You are unfair, Libertie,” he says. He unbends his head. And for a moment, it is as it was when the two of you were in the mountains, in the pool, his hands holding you up, through the water, to the sky.

“I do not know what to do,” you say.

“There is nothing to do,” he says. “You are only upset and broody.”

“No,” you say. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Come back in the house, Libertie.”

“I think,” you say carefully, “I will stay out here for a little while longer.”

He sighs. Bends his head again.

And then he is gone.

The best part about living in the shed was being close to the fire. I no longer had to listen to the string of chicken move past Emmanuel’s father’s teeth, or his sister sip each teaspoon of her consommé. The only sound I missed was the fork up against my husband’s tongue.

I did not eat what the family ate. I ate what Ti Me did. Sometimes, we roasted plantains in the embers of the fire. Sometimes, she cracked two raw eggs in a cup and drank it, and I drank it, too. I did not have the nausea so many women have with pregnancy. Instead, I craved the scraps of Ti Me’s worktable. Sometimes, she had to slap the potato skins from my hands—she would catch me gathering them up and sucking each one as if it was honey.

“You best not start eating the dirt, mamselle,” she warned me. “You do that, and I’ll have Monsieur Emmanuel himself come and get you.”

It was true I had been tempted, but I took Ti Me at her word, though I kept a small handful of dust in my smock pocket, to lick at when she was asleep.

“Ti Me, do you love the younger Chases?”

“Non, mamselle.”

“No!” I laughed, surprised by how she’d said it without hesitation.

Her expression did not change. “They are kind. They were good to me when I came to them as a girl.”

“But you don’t love them?”

“What does any of that have to do with love?”

“You never loved Emmanuel and Ella, then?”

She snorted. “I never love Monsieur Emmanuel. Or Mamselle Ella. I care for them like they are my brother and sister. I care for them better than a mother. But I don’t love them. When I first saw them, they were so thin. And so pale. They got spots in the sun. They were so scared—scared of everything. Emmanuel told me they see their mama pass, right in front of them. Their brothers, too. Their papa, he would always pray. The children cry, and he would tell them to pray. They would cry on me at night. I have my mother—she still living, so I did not know what to do. She told me just to hold them. So I did.”

“You were not tired of them?”

“What do you mean?”

“When someone needs you that much, it doesn’t make you tired?”

“You are speaking nonsense.”

“I used to think that as a little girl. And I thought that was what was wonderful about Emmanuel. He wanted me without asking anything of me. I thought that at least. But now I think he asks too much.”

“He asks nothing of you.”

“He asks me to live with a bad man and a girl who pretends to be mad and does nothing all day.”

“But the bishop and Ella can’t help who they are.”

“Do you think they will ever change?”

“The bishop. What would you change? He wishes for a place he cannot return to. He does what any other man would do if they were him. It is no use trying to change him.”

“That’s what you always say, Ti Me. Nothing is ever of any use.”

“It would be cruel to try and change the bishop. You can only live beside him and turn away from him when you can. And Ella, she is still a child.”

“I am to stay here and take whatever the bishop says or tries to do to me?” I said.

“You want to know why you are so restless, causing all this family trouble?”

“It is Monsieur Emmanuel who’s caused the trouble.”

“Bah,” she said. “Men do what they do. They are like a plow, moving through dirt—they just make the