Chapter 12: Paid in Full

The sale was set for the courthouse steps at noon on the fourteenth day.

House, barn, forty acres, river landing.

Minimum bid, four thousand dollars.

Aurore read it out loud in a flat voice, then took Papa's claw hammer and pulled the nail out of our door.

"I'm keeping the nail," she said. "For Odile."

I went out again that afternoon with the ledger under my arm.

The jeweler's wife bought share number two in her own parlor with the door shut, out of a hatbox.

"He'll never notice," she said. "He doesn't know the hatbox is there."

Old Madame from the sugar house bought number three on her gallery, in front of her three sons.

They tried to stop her.

She told them she'd buried two husbands and could manage a race.

A young widow from the Breaux Bridge road bought number four with her husband's burial money.

"He'd want it to go on a horse," she said. "It's the only thing he ever liked better than me."

Five, six and seven came from the ladies' altar society.

They held a vote in the church hall while I waited in the vestibule.

It was four to three.

The priest pretended not to hear.

Number eight was the schoolteacher, who paid in coins from a jar.

Number nine was a woman I didn't know at all.

She stopped me on Main Street on the twelfth day and put four hundred dollars in my hand.

Then she walked off before I could write her receipt.

I ran after her.

"Mademoiselle Odile told my sister she was a fool for marrying a fisherman," she said over her shoulder. "In 1870. In front of the whole wedding."

That night I sat at Papa's desk and added it up three times.

Three thousand six hundred dollars.

Nine women.

I was four hundred short with two days left.

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