Heaven in a Wildflower by Patricia Hagan Page A

hung loose about her heart-shaped face.
    That night was the beginning. She summoned him again and again, and before long, she was unbuttoning his shirt to dance her fingers across his chest and marvel over his muscular build—all the while teasing his mouth with her lips. He tried, even then, to tell her he shouldn’t be there, that they were courting trouble, but she swore her love and demanded avowal of his, and, bewitched, he didn’t hesitate to oblige.
    Then came the moonless night when there was no turning back. She asked him to come at midnight, when the world around them was sleeping. She wore only a thin nightgown and robe, which she boldly cast aside before lying on the gazebo floor and pulling him down beside her.
    Till then, that summer of his sixteenth year, Brett’s few sexual encounters had been with cheap prostitutes in Vicksburg, when he ventured into town on Saturday nights with his friends. The episodes were hurried and devoid of emotion. Margette Laubache was a different story. Wild and wanton, she showed him ways of making love he’d never dreamed about, leaving him spent, exhausted—and charged with a feeling he mistook for immortal love.
    As weeks turned into months, they met almost every night. Brett was worn out. Toiling all day in the sun, he had only a few hours to nap in the evening before sneaking into the gazebo to remain till nearly dawn.
    When grinding season began, he was forced to work eighteen hours a day. Fires under the boilers making sugar never went out, and laborers were assigned shifts, with three quarters of them constantly at their stations. No man got more than six hours of rest out of twenty-four, and Margette demanded those hours be spent with her.
    He was exhausted, and it showed. His mother thought he was out carousing with his friends and told him it had to stop. After that, he waited till she and his father were asleep before crawling out a window.
    She flew into a rage the night she caught him, screaming, “So! It is true, what I have heard. You are sneaking out to meet that girl.
    “Look at you,” she wailed, tears shining in the glow of the candle she held in her quivering hand. “Thin like a snake, shadows in your eyes. And I have heard the rumors. I know it is all because of the Laubache slut.”
    “She’s not a slut,” he defended.
    “Eh?” Her brows snapped together. “What you say? She is no slut? Well, what kind of lady sneaks out of her house in the night to meet a man? Slaves gossip, my son, and it is only a matter of time till Laubache hears, as I did. Then there be big trouble, for sure.”
    Brett decided he might as well tell her. “He’s going to hear, anyway, as soon as grinding season is over. That’s when she plans to tell him we’re going to get married.”
    At that, she gasped and cried, “You are a bigger fool than I thought if you believe her. Her kind marries her own kind, not a poor boy like you from the gutters of the world.”
    She began swaying, funny moaning sounds coming from deep in her throat. Afraid she was about to faint, Brett reached out to take the candle as he tried to reassure her, “It will work out. You’ll see. She does tell the truth—”
    She slapped him, and he cried out, not from pain, but astonishment. It was the first time in his life she had ever struck him.
    “Laubache would see you dead first. Never would he allow his daughter to marry a Cajun!”
    “She says it doesn’t matter,” he dared argue. “She swears nothing is going to stop us.”
    Mavaline Cody threw up her hands and offered a whispered prayer to God to make her son see that he had surely lost his mind. “Where would you take your bride, my son? Here? In the bayou? You think a girl like her would be happy as a Cajun wife?
    “Oh, my son, my son.” She cried even harder. “Did I raise you to be so blind and stupid?” She sank to the cot beneath the window, lowered her face to her hands, and began to cry.
    He had left her then, knowing he