The Gilda Stories Read Free Page B

hard hours being what others imagined women should be. After running Woodard’s for fifteen years, Gilda loved her home and her girls. It had been a wonderfully comfortable and relatively tiny segment of the 300 years she’d lived. Her private rooms held the treasures of several lifetimes.
    She raised the lid of a chest and pulled out a towel and nightshirt. The Girl’s open stare brushed over her, nudging at the weight of the years on her shoulders. Under that puzzled gaze the years didn’t seem so grotesque. Gilda listened a moment to the throaty laughter floating up from the rooms below, where the musical entertainment had begun without her, and could just barely hear Bird introducing the evening in her deep voice. Woodard’s was the only house with an “Indian girl,” as her loyal patrons bragged. Although Bird now only helped to manage the house, many came just to see her, dressed in the soft cotton, sparely adorned dress that most of the women at Woodard’s wore. Thin strips of leather bearing beading or quill were sometimes braided into her hair or sewn onto her dress. Townsmen ranked her among their local curiosities.
    Gilda was laying out clothes when Macey entered the room lugging two buckets of water—one warm and one hot. While stealing glances at the Girl, she poured the water into a tin tub that sat in a corner of the room next to an ornate folding screen.
    Gilda said, “Take off those clothes and wash. Put those others on.” She spoke slowly, deliberately, knowing she was breaking through one reality into another. The words she did not speak were more important: Rest. Trust. Home.
    The Girl dropped her dusty, blood-encrusted clothes by the couch. Before climbing into the warm water, she looked up at Gilda, who gazed discreetly somewhere above her head. Gilda then picked up the clothes, ignoring the filth, and clasped them to her as she left the room. When the Girl emerged she dressed in the nightshirt and curled up on the settee, pulling a fringed shawl from its back down around her shoulders. She’d unbraided and washed the thickness of her hair and wrapped it tightly in the damp towel.
    Curling her legs underneath her to keep off the night chill, she listened to the piano below and stared into the still shadows cast by the lamp. Soon Gilda entered, with Macey following sullenly behind holding a tray of food. Gilda pulled a large, overstuffed chair close to the settee while Macey put the tray on a small table. She lit another lamp near them, glancing backward over her shoulder at the strange, thin black girl with the African look to her. Macey made it her business to mind her own business, particularly when it came to Miss Gilda, but she knew the look in Gilda’s eyes. It was something she saw too rarely: living in the present, or maybe just curiosity. Macey and the laundress, neither of whom lived in the house with the others, spoke many times of the anxious look weighing in Gilda’s eyes. It was as if she saw something that existed only in her own head. But Macey, who dealt mostly with Bernice and some with Bird, left her imagination at home. Besides, she had no belief in voodoo magic and just barely held on to her Catholicism.
    Of course there was talk around most dinner tables in the parish, especially after Bird had come to stay at the house. Macey was certain that if there was a faith Gilda held, it was not one she knew. The lively look that filled her employer’s eyes now usually only appeared when she and Bird spent their evenings talking and writing together.
    Some things were best not pondered, so Macey turned and hurried back down to her card game with Bernice, the cook. Gilda prepared a plate and poured from the decanter of red wine. The Girl looked furtively in her direction but was preoccupied with the cleanliness of the room and the spicy smell of the food. Her body relaxed while her mind still raced, filled with the unknowns: how far