Savage Lands

by Clare Clark

  For weeks after the priest’s departure, he worried that the missioner would find the burning glass missing and return for it. In preparation Auguste rehearsed a story about finding it in the mud by the bayou and keeping it safe. But, though he waited, the priest did not come back. The moon had begun to fatten again when he called the savages to witness a miracle.

  It was unusual for the boy to call attention to himself. Curious, several of the Ouma drew closer, making a ragged circle around him and his yellow dog. Placing some dry agaric upon a chip of wood, Auguste drew the stolen glass from one pocket and a small jar from the other. He raised his hand for silence. With a flourish he reached into the jar and sprinkled some of the contents over the glass. Then, drawing the focus of the glass upon the tinder, he bid the fire come. There was a pause and then the agaric began to smoke. Putting his mouth to it, Auguste blew. The flame burst forth, a brilliant orange flower.

  The savages could not contain their awe and astonishment. Like children they clamoured for him to make fire again. Auguste performed the same trick four times and each time the savages gaped and blinked, gazing from the glass to Auguste’s face and back again. When he held out the glass for their inspection they looked at it sideways, as if it might harm them.

  Later that same day, the chief of the Ouma called Auguste to him. He wished to obtain the glass. He offered generous terms, but Auguste refused him. The chief protested and then pleaded. If Auguste would only show him how the magic was performed, he might set whatever value he chose upon the instrument. The chief would see to it that the price was paid by all the families of the village.

  Auguste was silent for a long time. Then gravely he told the chief that what he asked was impossible. The glass had been his uncle’s, the only brother of his mother, who was long dead. For years Auguste had tried to bring fire from it but he had never succeeded. He had thought the contraption useless. Then, only a few nights ago, his uncle had come to him in a dream. In that dream, he had told Auguste of the secret of the glass. Then he had taken his nephew’s hands in his and bid him swear that he would never part with it. Auguste would not dishonour his uncle. He would keep the glass, but for as long as he remained in the village, he would use it to summon fire for the Ouma whenever they desired it. In return he wished for nothing but their continued kindness and their kinship.

  The burning glass altered forever Auguste’s standing among the savages. Possessed of mysterious powers and yet remote, reserved, frugal in his appetites, he was unlike any white man the savages had ever encountered. As a second winter passed and then a third, he came to be esteemed as a man of learning and of wisdom. He grew tall, though his body remained knobby and narrow, and his child’s voice cracked and split like the shell of a nut. His tendency to silence strengthened his reputation. And still the commandant did not return. Instead, when the thaw came and the trade on the river began once again to move, it was a Canadian ensign who came to the village, in search of a young Frenchman with a yellow dog of whom the Ouma were more than a little afraid.

  THE CHILD CAME in May. It was rainy season, the sky sagging above Mobile like a mouldy mattress, and behind the bluff, where the ground was low, all the houses were flooded. The damp jammed its fat fingers between the timbers of the cabins and paddled the mortar of clay and oyster shells that filled them. Nothing dried. In Elisabeth’s garden the pumpkins swelled, their leaves greasy with mud. The cabin smelled of rot. Jean-Claude had been gone from Mobile for nearly two months.

  She had only just begun to show. The sickness that had tormented her lingered for days afterwards, the bleeding much longer. There was a fever, some manner of poison in the blood brought on by the ceaseless rain, the unwholesome thickness of the air. She dreamed vivid, fevered dreams. In her dreams, over and over, she unwrapped the meat and opened the sacks of corn beneath the bed and stirred the stew in its pot over the fire and, pressing the food into her mouth with both hands, she ate and ate and ate, until her belly swelled, splitting the skin in two. When she woke, she saw them, the faces of the wives, pressed against the platille. The wives brought her crocks of peas and sagamity. When she refused them, they went away with pursed lips, muttering about the sin of false pride. Elisabeth only lay on her back and stared up at the rough palmetto stripes of the roof until they repeated themselves on her closed eyes.

  The midwife came frequently, impatient to justify the yearly stipend that the commandant had recently threatened to cut. A brisk woman with red knuckles and a sharp chin, Guillemette le Bras had assigned herself to the post when the colony’s first sage-femme had succumbed to a summer epidemic, but in two years she had been required to attend only five births. Nobody could be certain why so many of the women of the colony appeared barren. As with the corrupted flour and the sour wine that came from France, some said that it was the unwholesome climate of Louisiana that had spoiled them, others that the gallant minister responsible for their despatch had known them already rotten in Rochefort and had sent them all the same.

  The new priest came too, entering without ceremony and taking a stool at the foot of her bed. Rochon was a Canadian, arrived from the Jesuit seminary in Quebec, a man of rather greater girth than stature and an easy manner as yet undampened by the rains or the pinch-faced, limp-legged sternness of La Vente. He did not appear discomfited by Elisabeth’s silence. He clasped his hands beneath his round belly and regarded her thoughtfully.

  ‘So you are the scholar,’ he said and Elisabeth raised her head, stone-heavy with weariness, and looked at him because there was no mockery in his voice.

  ‘I am the unruly seminarian,’ he said, and she blinked and pressed her elbows into the emptiness in her belly because there was no mockery in that either and because his flat, inflected French was just like her husband’s.

  ‘No longer, surely,’ she murmured.

  ‘The categorisations of others have a way of sticking.’

  They were both silent then, caught in their own thoughts.

  ‘I think you are not much like the other women here,’ he said finally.

  ‘They do not like me.’ She swallowed. ‘I cannot blame them.’

  The Jesuit shrugged cheerfully.

  ‘The soldiers at the garrison dislike me also. Perhaps they shall come around to us in time.’ He smiled, looking around him at the cabin. ‘No books?’

  Elisabeth hesitated, then shook her head.

  ‘One day, I suppose, we may see books at Mobile. A hospital. A church. A decent pâtisserie, God help us. It is not easy to imagine.’

  His kindness was unbearable. She stared up at the palmetto roof as the Jesuit studied her, his stubby fingers steepled against his lips.

  ‘It would make no difference, you know,’ he said gently. ‘Well, a pâtisserie perhaps. But not a church. The mysteries of God’s purpose on earth are no plainer in carved pews. As for books, even the scholars among us see only darkly. Churches and books cannot substitute for faith. We must accept His will.’

  ‘And if we cannot?’

  ‘Then there is nothing for it but a glass of good wine.’

  Then it was June. Elisabeth grew stronger. As the flood waters receded so too did the blackness in her. There was food in the settlement again. No one wanted to remember winter. She scrubbed the cabin clean, replacing the planks that had rotted in the floods. From a trader in the settlement, she acquired a rough lime ground from seashells to whitewash the walls and fresh nettle-bark linen for the windows. She washed the dried slime from the inside of the jar covered with whorls and filled it with flowering grasses. In the garden she knelt in the drying mud, clearing the choke from the roots of the vegetables. When the first peas came she bottled them. Their grassy scent was very sweet.

  Rochon visited often and she was glad to see him. In the hot blue days of summer, loosed from the tyranny of fever, she slept easily once more. Many women in Louisiana lost children. The midwife had told her it was the unhealthy air that did it, the stench of the corrupted swamp, and Elisabeth knew
it to be true. Only a savage god would kill a child for punishment.

  She worked hard in the garden. When she parted the leaves of the Apalachean bean plant and saw the ripening beans hanging in shadowed clusters, or bent down to inspect the spreading stalk of the melon, the leaves as broad as her hand and, among them, the tight pale green fruits, something quickened within her, and she longed for Jean-Claude to come home so that she could show him what she had done. She did not show the Jesuit. But when he came she rose from her knees, wiping her hands on her apron, and sat with him as he ate the food she brought him. There was no one else in Mobile she did that for.

  Rochon was unlike any priest she had ever known. He did not speak in sermons. When seeking to propound the wisdom of others, he was more likely to quote the words of poets than the letters of St Paul. His religion was generous, forbearing towards the faults of others, while scrupulously confessing of its own, and his laughter, which began as a rumble within the barrel of his belly and foamed upward to spill from his mouth, was infectious.

  Mobile oppressed him. He pushed to be granted a mission among the savages, but so far Bienville had refused him, insisting that he could not be spared. Confined to the settlement, he chafed in his traces, restrained on one side by the petty impieties of the town’s inhabitants, on the other by the thunderous religiosity of his superior. His only satisfaction was a small school for the children of savage slaves, where for one hour a day when their duties were complete, he taught the children to speak French, which he had convinced the commandant would increase their utility and enhance their value.

  ‘At least you are safe here,’ Elisabeth said.

  ‘A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are for.’

  ‘You are fortunate. To know your purpose.’

  ‘I only know that I must leave Mobile if I am not to rot from the bottom up.’

  Elisabeth was silent.

  ‘Do you know Rabelais’ book, The Abbey of Thélème?’ Rochon asked softly. ‘His order of Thelemites had only one rule: do what thou wilt. A joke, of course, but at the same time, absolutely serious. Rabelais was convinced that the free man possessed a natural instinct for virtue and aversion to vice. It was when he was subjected to the unnatural enslavement of statutes and laws that he was turned aside from that noble disposition, for it is in man’s nature to desire those things that are denied him.’

  ‘Is that why you seek a mission? Because you are denied one?’

  ‘Not precisely my point. But yes, that is possible.’

  ‘And when you have one, what then?’

  Rochon smiled.

  ‘Then I suppose I shall be free most virtuously to regret it.’

  ‘And the savage children?’

  ‘They will not be abandoned. I have found my successor.’

  ‘La Vente? Poor children.’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Me? But–’

  ‘Waiting is not enough occupation for any of us.’

  After that, in the late afternoon three days each week, Elisabeth taught the children of the savages the rudiments of the French language. She conducted the lessons in the cabin on the rue d’Iberville, the infants squatting in two obedient rows on either side of the room, girls to the left and boys to the right. She did not ask their names, but she learned their faces, the way one boy rubbed his ear against his shoulder when he was thinking, the resolve of the smallest of the girls to speak a little sooner and louder than the rest. She brought household items from the kitchen hut and borrowed others from her neighbours, pointing at each one and saying the word for it in French. They were eager pupils, several of them quick. They learned to say yes, no, thank you, forgive me. They learned to count. At night sometimes she dreamed of them, their faces turned upward like two rows of cabbages. When they chorused the words after her, their voices were high and clear.

  Sometimes, after the lesson, she gave them apple cider to drink and pieces of cornbread. It pleased her to see the eagerness of their appetites, the glances and whispers that darted between them when they thought she was not looking, but she was glad when they were gone. Then she went out onto the stoop, watching the evening shadows settle in the high trees, so that in the house the silence might unfurl undisturbed, stretching its limbs like a lover across the hard dirt floor, ready for his return.

  He came back when the ground was dry and Elisabeth as good as healed. He was in high spirits, lifting her off her feet and spinning her giddily around as sunlight spilled through the open front door and warmed the hard dirt floor. She laughed with him and wrapped her arms tightly around his neck, the exquisite ache of his embrace like unshed tears at the base of her throat. When the savage children came for their lesson, she sent them away. It was only much later, as they lay pressed together beneath the sea-green quilt, that she told him about the baby.

  ‘But you are not to concern yourself about me,’ she murmured, her lips against his. ‘There is time. And I am quite well again, as you can see.’

  ‘As I can feel.’ His tongue flickered against hers, his hand sliding down over the curve of her belly. ‘Then let us hope you do not succumb again too quickly. There is a great deal more to be said for the manufacture of children than there is for the raising of them.’

  THE NEXT TIME she went longer. The sickness persisted and the exhaustion. Her breasts hardened and swelled, and her back ached. At night the child moved like a fish inside her, slipping between her nerve-strings as though through weed and setting the waters inside her to vibrating. She placed her hands upon her belly and it rippled, soft ridges moving in waves across the tautening flesh. A darkening line ran from her belly button into the hair between her thighs, dividing her in two.

  It was winter again and he was once more at the settlement. She pushed herself wearily through the work of each day, cutting short her lessons with the savage children so that she might have time to prepare his evening meal. Mild weather meant that food was not so scarce as it had been in previous years but, though she ached for sleep, still she blew out the lamp and put the blanket across the window so that they might eat in the old way, secretly, before the fire. But it was not the same. However hard she tried, she could not make it the same. Her fatigue sapped the vigour from the room. The hours passed sluggishly. When they sat together he grew restless. She thought to suggest she read aloud but she feared his mockery or, worse, his disdain. When supper was finished, he took his hat and went out. He said that walking aided his digestion.

  There was a new uneasiness between them. Often they started to speak at the same time, apologising and gesturing at the other to continue before lapsing once more into silence. She watched him as he moved around the cabin, and he shrugged his shoulders at her and frowned, as though the weight of her gaze oppressed him. He did not look up to observe her unclothed as she stepped out of her ragged petticoats as he once had. Instead he busied himself with his boots. Though they lay together still, from time to time, his efforts were straining and brief, his eyes closed and his face furrowed and folded in on itself as though she was not there.

  She did not want him. She could hardly bear to acknowledge it to herself but she did not want him. The smell of him, the musk of his sweat and skin and breath, overpowered her. When he touched her, her flesh was reluctant, stupid, determined upon its own boundaries. He set his tongue in her mouth, his fingers between her thighs, he entered her, and yet she remained apart from him, the core of her untouched. Desire, the melting hunger for him that had coursed in her like blood, eluded her. She closed her eyes so that he might not see the truth in her, and waited for him to be spent.

  ‘Promise me it will be as it was,’ she wanted to beg him. ‘Promise me that, when the baby comes, it will be as it was.’

  But she did not dare. It was too frightening, too unalterable, to speak of such things out loud. Besides, her anxiety provoked him. He was short-tempered, bored from too much time in the settlement and impatient for spring, but he was not cruel nor was he cold. When she
put her arms around him and held him against her, swallowing the tears that rose too easily in her throat, he patted her back and brushed his lips across the top of her head. He was a good husband.

  But sometimes, when she stood apart from him, watching him when he did not know it, she saw that his eyes slid over her without catching, the way they had at the dock that very first day. They snagged instead on other women’s necks, other women’s breasts. She saw it and something at the centre of her fell away. At night, when the moon was bright and round and threw sharp shadows on the cottage floor, she lay awake, the infant curling sinuously inside her, and watched him sleep. He looked exactly as he always had, contented and contained, complete within his skin. She could no longer sleep wrapped in his arms as she had always done. The swell of her belly did not permit it.

  It came in March. Longer than the first but still too soon. The midwife rubbed it with bear oil and dribbled brandy between its lips but the breath was too weak in it and it did not last the night. As dawn streaked the sky, the midwife sprinkled water over the baby and baptised it with the name Joseph, for her own father. Later she called for the Jesuit to perform the proper burial rites.

  Neither of Joseph’s parents were present at the brief ceremony. Elisabeth was too weak to leave her bed. The afterbirth had crumbled during its expulsion, and the midwife was required to bring it out, piece by piece, by means of an instrument shaped like a crochet hook. The pain was severe and there was a great deal of blood. Afterwards, Elisabeth lay with her knees pressed up against her chest and her eyes fixed on the wall and the grief cramped inside her like the contractions of labour.

  As for Jean-Claude, matters of business required his urgent departure. The infant had been dead less than twelve hours when he bid his wife farewell. She did not weep. The emptiness in her yawned black, vaster by far than the husk of bones that contained it. He stood by the side of the bed, his arms hanging limp at his sides, and it seemed to her that he was slighter than usual, less substantial.