Read Online A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight - Free Book Online Page A

of gunshot. They cut open the skull with a saw and took out the brain to examine it.”
    “He said that?” Doctor Tom told me when he first came that the brain was from a black baby found by the road. He'd said, “And your mother loves you, and didn't leave you by the road, so you should do everything she says, isn't that right?”
    She walked past her father's office, where the huge desk and ledger book faced the gallery doors and the river, and then into the guest room next door. “Céphaline,” I said. “We shouldn't—”
    “Look.” She whirled around, pointing to the big jar with the floating brain. “It is still perfect because he was shot in the heart. But something is making my head hurt. The curling tongs and all the combing. I can't swallow sometimes. The smell of your paste.”
    Her eyes were fierce on me. Could I contradict her? “It is Zer-line's paste,” I said softly. “The skull—the heat cannot enter bone, no? Just your scalp hurts.”
    “No. My brain.” She twisted the jar until the brain swam. “Inside the bones is marrow. Like a cow's bones. But the only thing wholly encased by bone is the brain.”
    What was I allowed to say? That I hated touching her? “I wish I didn't have to curl your hair.”
    “But that is your lesson. My lesson is to learn foolish things and forget important things.” She put her hands on her temples. “My eyes are not the same as anyone's. But whose brain did I receive? Not my parents’. And Grandmère Bordelon knows nothing but herself and the parts of her body. Her mouth and stomach and feet.”
    I never knew whether to answer or listen. Tell the truth or lie. I didn't know what Céphaline wanted. No one knew what she wanted.
    “I must have inherited a brain from someone in France. A man. Or maybe I am not from these people. Do you know where it is formed?” Her voice was faster.
    “The brain?” My cloth moved slowly over the low table with the curling legs.
    “The baby.”
    Should I say that in another jar, the womb was a white fist angry and clenched, and Doctor Tom had said behind me, “When the womb is alive, it is red with blood and stretched around an infant so tightly that it splits like a grapeskin when cut”?
    Besoin. What you need?
    Céphaline said, “You aren't required to know. Only to perform.”
    With her palms, she flattened her hair against her temples. Her eyes were not sky. They were not flowers. No cousin would say such.
    “You mustn't look offended,” she whispered. “I am required to perform as well. I am making no distinction between our tasks.”
    Her eyes were not azure.
    In the dish near her elbow, the child's teeth were gray as old chalk. Her hair smelled of metal and oil and perfume. The curls limp, her scalp red and flaking. A cap of pain—worse than the heat of my tignon each night when I tried to sleep and the sweat crawled on my own scalp? Madame saw me take it off the first night, and she said, “The law! You are to keep your head covered!”
    I used to tear off the cloth as soon as night came, the air on my head where Mamère said the skull was once soft—when I was a new baby.
    Céphaline could not take off her scalp. She lifted her eyes to mine. “Say it.”
    “What?”
    “What you are holding in your mouth.”
    I said carefully, “A new baby has a soft place on the head.”
    She stood up quickly. “But you don't know how it is formed.”
    I wouldn't talk to her of what my mother had said. The four lips. Their passage.
    “I am not meant to know,” she said. “Only to produce a mammal. A son. My mother couldn't. And you are meant to produce girl mammals. Monsieur Lemoyne always said girls like you are worth more than boys.”
    My shoulder blades were not angel wings. They were bones. Cold. What did she know about animals like me?
    She pulled my arm, took me to her father's desk. “I am making no distinction between us. I am supposed to meet the Lemoyne cousin, the Auzenne nephew, and mate with someone.