Pelican Girls by Julia Malye

Author:Julia Malye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

8

THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY

MAY 1726

Geneviève

Geneviève’s daughter keeps talking on the path to the cemetery of Prairie du Rocher, asking out loud who these men are carrying her father, and if it wouldn’t be too dark for him under the oak wood. Since Pierre died three days ago, Geneviève’s mind too has been buzzing with questions—angrier ones that have little to do with the funeral and a lot more with its aftermath. She envies Mélanie’s simple sadness, the odd objects it latches on to. Her daughter is obsessed with the kind of tree that was used to make her father’s coffin. The day it was brought to their home—back when Geneviève still thought of the house as theirs: the clerk hadn’t come yet to tell her that Pierre had left it to Mélanie alone—the little girl was so upset about her father being put into a box that Geneviève came up with a story. A story in which the coffin would turn again into an oak after being buried, an invisible tree that would sprout from the ground and serve as a ladder to the heavens.

Now Geneviève regrets it. Oak forests are everywhere in the Illinois Country. On their way from the church to the cemetery, Mélanie wouldn’t stop pointing at their sturdy branches, begging Geneviève to help her climb. No, Geneviève kept saying. She didn’t remind the girl that her father was still—and would stay—in the wooden box; she didn’t try to make a more pious story in which Pierre wouldn’t need the help of a tree to rise to heaven. Mélanie will be four next month. Geneviève wonders how long her story will hold. Never long enough, she guesses.

Watching through her veil, she does her best to avoid roots and holes. The light is dimmed by the fabric, her daughter’s round face a grimmer shade, the sunny May morning flattened gray—the color everyone would want a widow’s world to be. Mélanie rustles in her arms, and Geneviève knows exactly to whom her daughter is waving: her sister-in-law and her husband, their five children. After the ceremony, Laure rested a motherly hand on Geneviève’s shoulder, fidgeted with the veil that she and her husband paid for along with all the other mourning attire. Geneviève’s dower isn’t even enough to provide her with these sad dresses. It’s maddening to her, satisfying to Laure, who, at thirty-four, enjoys treating Geneviève as if she were her senior by twenty years and not six. Laure does have more experience in some respects. Born and raised in Canada, she knows a lot more about the Illinois Country than Geneviève. She is as familiar as Pierre used to be with the thick forests, the horrific winters that spread south of Lake Michigan, all the way to the junction between the Kaskaskia River and the St. Louis River, where Fort de Chartres and Prairie du Rocher were built, the place they chose to call home.

On the other hand, Laure has never crossed an ocean, never traveled on the

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