Savage Lands

by Clare Clark

  ‘You are sure it was the commandant you saw?’

  Jean-Claude gave a muffled laugh, his mouth full of food.

  ‘We talked business,’ he said. ‘He was most interested in what I had to say.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘You should be. With a little managing it should prove extremely profitable.’

  ‘For the commandant?’

  ‘For all of us. I mean us to be rich, Elisabeth.’

  ‘Rich? Here?’

  ‘There are riches for those with the appetite, even in a place like this.’ Jean-Claude took a final mouthful and pushed his plate away, stretching his arms above his head. ‘I promise you, we shall not rot in this stink hole forever.’

  Elisabeth took the plate and placed it at the far end of the table. She swallowed.

  ‘Should you like apple pie? We baked too much for the baptism dinner.’

  When he nodded she placed a large slice before him. There was a scorch on the wooden tabletop where some months before she had distractedly set a scalding kettle. Elisabeth traced the half-circle of it with a finger.

  ‘It went off well today, don’t you think?’

  ‘Did it? The infant certainly displayed strong lungs.’

  ‘I thought it went off well. The joiner seemed pleased.’

  ‘When isn’t he? That man is pleased by a plank of wood.’

  She smiled, biting her lip. Then she took up the pitcher again.

  ‘Here, give me that. I should like to remain dry.’

  Elisabeth let him take the pitcher from her.

  ‘I was surprised to see the seamstress there,’ she said, watching the flow of water into the cup. ‘She is not a neighbour.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘It’s hardly a big town.’

  ‘You – I thought I saw you speak with her. Was she pleasant?’

  ‘She was amiable enough.’

  ‘Her daughters looked pretty creatures. I wonder at their ages.’

  Jean-Claude glanced up at her, his spoon aloft. There was a speck of pastry on his chin.

  ‘Why are you so interested in the seamstress all of a sudden?’

  Elisabeth coloured.

  ‘I – she’s new here. I was just curious. You have a crumb–’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘There. You have it.’

  Pushing back her chair, Elisabeth rose, taking up her husband’s empty plate. Gathering the other dirty dishes, she pushed the door open and set them with the others for washing on the stoop. When she came back into the cottage, the door slammed behind her, causing the lamp to gutter. Jean-Claude turned round, one eyebrow raised, stretching his arms above his head.

  ‘It’s the hinge,’ she said. ‘The leather’s rotted.’

  ‘I’ll get more.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He leaned forward on his elbows, regarding her over his steepled fingers. His eyes crinkled.

  ‘Jealousy becomes you, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Jealousy? What in heaven makes you think I–’

  ‘Young widows. It hardly matters if they are not comely, or if they drag a bevy of brats behind them like bad weather. They always put colour in a wife’s cheeks.’

  Elisabeth frowned. He laughed.

  ‘Don’t mistake me. I rather like it.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘See how fetching your eyes are when they flash. You she-wolf, you.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  He laughed again.

  ‘Come, Elisabeth. I only tease you a little. The seamstress is a plain Jane with a litter of squalling pups and the figure to prove it. I may be a dullard on occasion but I am not blind. Come here.’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Come here,’ he said again, a fraction more sharply. ‘And be glad there are no pups here to spoil our pleasure.’

  Slowly Elisabeth came round the table until she stood before him.

  ‘You think me foolish,’ she murmured.

  ‘Foolish and delightful.’

  Taking her head between his hands, he kissed her. The tips of his fingers were hot and urgent in her hair, his elbows tight against her ribs. He had not kissed her like that in many months. She closed her eyes and her head filled with the widow’s soft arms and creamy skin and her heart-shaped face tipped up in invitation, cramming her skull until she was seized with anger, anger at the widow and anger too at the miserable doggedness of her imagination. It quickened in her, hot and sharp as desire, and she lifted her skirts where she stood, forcing her mouth against his as though she meant to devour him.

  That month she did not bleed. For ten days she waited for the cramps, twisting a rag between her legs, but they did not come. She rinsed the unstained rags and folded them and placed them back in the chest beneath the bed. When the tingling came in her breasts she pulled the strings of her bodice tight, fastening them at her waist with a fierce knot. She said nothing to Jean-Claude. Then one evening, as she prepared supper, the sickness came upon her so strongly that she barely had time to make it to the porch. When he came after her she was leaning on the splintered rail, doubled up with the force of it.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I – I am better now,’ she murmured. ‘Go back in. I shall be there directly.’

  He turned away. Then he turned back.

  ‘So you are with child again.’

  She was cold, her legs unsteady. She pressed a hand to her clammy forehead, pushing away the tendrils of hair, and looked up at him, her neck trembling slightly beneath the sudden weight of her head. He looked back at her, his arms crossed over his chest. He did not smile.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You are late?’

  She hesitated. Then she nodded.

  ‘How late?’

  ‘Three weeks. A month perhaps.’

  One hand clamped to his jaw, Jean-Claude stared out over the yard. She could hear the rasp of his fingers against his ill-shaved chin.

  ‘And so it begins again.’

  Elisabeth leaned into the rough rail of the porch, waiting for the dizziness to pass.

  ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘You expect me to dance for joy?’

  ‘I – perhaps this time–’

  ‘Why should this time be any different?’

  Elisabeth was silent. Beneath her, the weeds glinted with silver threads of bile.

  ‘We have been through enough,’ he said. ‘I cannot believe you want this any more than I do.’

  She felt the clatter of his boots on the porch in the palms of her hands, his warm hand on her shoulder. She did not look up.

  ‘Go to bed,’ he said more gently. ‘I can get supper in town.’

  She let him take her arm, lead her into the house. When he was gone she lay on the bed, her bodice still laced. The sickness was not yet passed. She could feel the oily swirl of it at the base of her throat, the dull ache in her belly. She closed her eyes, feeling the room tip queasily around her, but she could not banish the image of him, the frown between his brows, his eyes sharp with a fear that caused her heart to turn over.

  When dusk came the platille was streaked with pink like the inside of a shell before it faded to dusty grey and then to black. The room was very dark, though it thrummed with the night chorus of the frogs. Like being swallowed, Elisabeth thought, and unseen in the darkness she wept, the tears sliding into her ears.

  Some time later she rose and made her way unsteadily into the other room. The sickness threatened her but she stretched her neck away from it, breathing carefully and swallowing the curdle in her throat. The supper fire was all but burned out. Elisabeth pushed away the blackened wood, sending up pale spirals of ash, and blew on the dying embers, coaxing a tiny reluctant flame for the tallow lamp.

  The wick caught, sending shadows leaping against the wall. In the corner, by the table, was the basket containing the few necessities Guillemette considered indispensable for any midwife. Clean rags, bear grease as lubricant and emollien
t, flasks of syrup to purge and nourish the newborn infant. And tucked in beside them, in an earthenware jar, the tincture of belladonna to cleanse the womb and bring down a stubborn afterbirth.

  Setting the lamp on the table, Elisabeth took a cup from the shelf. Then she squatted down before the basket. The sickness and the shadows ducked and slipped about her and she put one hand to the floor to steady herself. On the table the lamp hissed. Slowly she reached in and took the jar from the basket, cradling it in both hands. The jar was savage-made, its mouth stopped with a bung of soft wood. When she held it to the light, she could see the shallow indentations in the earthenware made by the tips of the savage’s fingers and she slid her own fingers into them, feeling the fit of it. She thought of the story Jean-Claude had told her of the savage nation of the Taensas, whose temple had been struck by lightning during a great storm and had immediately burned with great force, reducing their idols to ashes. Making horrible cries and all the while invoking their Great Spirit to descend and extinguish the flames, the savages had seized their children and, strangling them, had cast them one after another into the fire. Ten infants were dead before Jean-Claude and the rest of the expedition were able to restrain them. Afterwards the chief had turned furiously upon the white men.

  ‘What if ten is not enough?’ he had demanded. ‘Shall you protect us then against the wrath of the Great Spirit?’

  The tincture was black with a dark vegetable odour. Elisabeth’s hand shook as she poured a measure into the cup and carefully placed the sealed jar back in the basket. Somewhere in the darkness beyond the cabin a dog barked. It was late. Soon Jean-Claude would be home. He would slip into bed beside her, bringing with him the tavern smells of meat and tobacco and cheap brandy, and he would fall asleep and the room would be silent but for their exhalations, as quietly he breathed in her air and she his. Her hands were tight around the cup, her fingers stiff. She swallowed, forcing down the knot in her throat, not troubling to wipe away the tears that spilled from her eyes.

  Then, very quickly, she raised the cup to her lips and drank.

  THAT WINTER, WHEN the birds were silent and the mist-veiled air hung in chill swathes over the canebrakes, the dog died. It died in the night, unexpectedly. In the morning Auguste discovered it curled in its habitual pose, nose under its haunch, but when he tried to rouse it, its body was cold and stiff. He buried it in the forest by a weed-choked bayou where the soil was soft and the worms curled like bruised fingers in its black crumb. He did not mark the place. When Issiokhena gave him deer meat, he shook his head and told her the dog had run away. She said nothing, but the pity in her face made him want to hit her.

  When winter was over and the thaw come, Babelon came once more to the Ouma village. When Auguste returned from the fields, he saw the ensign leaning on the palisades, a pipe clamped between his teeth. He smiled, and Auguste smiled too and the tightness in his chest shifted a little. Babelon jerked his head towards the boy’s ankles.

  ‘No dog?’

  Auguste shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Babelon said gently, and he put one hand on Auguste’s shoulder.

  ‘Yes,’ Auguste replied, and he stood very still as the shape of the ensign’s hand burned through his shirt and into his skin.

  That night Babelon showed him a letter he had brought from the commandant. It requested that Auguste accompany him upriver to the villages of other savage tribes north of the Ouma in order to assist in matters of translation.

  ‘Pitiful, I know, but for all that I have lived alongside savages since childhood, I have never mastered their languages.’

  ‘You speak some Mobilian.’

  ‘What I have mastered might be covered quite as well with hand signals. It is strange. I had grown accustomed to that dog.’

  Auguste shrugged, scouring his prickling nose with the back of his arm. He was not surprised by Babelon’s failure to master other languages. Accustomed to shuffling words like playing cards, the ensign would abhor the tongue-tied awkwardness of ignorance. More than that, he was too much himself, his lines too decisively drawn. He lacked the unformed elasticity of self that expands to accommodate the patterns and peculiarities of another’s tongue. More than once he had declared Auguste’s fluency manifestly unnatural. If Auguste was damp clay, Babelon was a pot, glazed, fired and finished. He could no more bend himself to a new language than a pot could fold itself in two.

  The primary purposes of the expedition were to negotiate with the savages for corn and other foodstuffs and, where possible, to acquire slaves who might profitably be traded with the settlers in Mobile. In addition Auguste assisted in the commerce of those goods that the ensign brought from Mobile on the commandant’s private account. These were dealt with separately and the skins taken in their payment stored in a separate pirogue.

  Auguste asked no questions. It was his job to translate the words, not to make them. The matter was none of his business. But when Babelon had returned south and he was once more alone among the Ouma, he could not shake the persistent mosquito-whine of suspicion that sang in his ear. It was not the commandant’s ethics that troubled him. Auguste was no magistrate and cared little for the law. The Sieur might do what pleased him. It was Babelon’s duplicity he feared, the gnawing fear that his unquestioning collaboration was exactly what the ensign had counted upon. It tormented him that Babelon might have seen the weakness in him and seized upon it. He had begun to trust in the possibility that the ensign was his friend.

  When the next coureurs-de-bois passed through the village, Auguste made sure to ask about the commandant and his trade with the savages. Though their accounts differed in some details, the thrust of the story was always the same. Since the founding of the colony there had been allegations of corruption, rumours that the commandant sold Crown supplies for his own profit. But some years ago there had been an investigation, a most rigorous investigation. Many of the settlers had been required to give evidence. The commandant had been tried before a new commissary despatched for the purpose from France and exonerated in every particular.

  Generally it was agreed that this brought to a just conclusion what had been a sorry affair. Even among those who suspected that he still contrived to skim for himself a little of the colony’s sparse cream, there was a grudging acceptance that Bienville was at least as good a commandant as any other and likely better. With a force of fewer than one hundred men, he had held the territory firm against the twin perils of savage and Englishman. He might feather his own nest a little, as men were inclined to when the opportunity arose, but his devotion to the colony of Louisiana was beyond reproach.

  As for Babelon, he was thought to be a decent fellow. He could hold his liquor and he was not a bore or a killjoy like some of his senior officers. Beyond that nobody knew much about him. He was a man who kept himself to himself, they said. Then, tired of the subject, they ran on with their usual tales as Auguste drank from their proffered flasks of brandy and tried not to hope.

  The leaves were black underfoot when Babelon returned to the Ouma village, the end of the season’s trading. Babelon stood beside the pirogue, regarding Auguste with a smile twisted up into the corners of his mouth into which he pressed his forefinger and thumb, as though he meant to trap it there.

  ‘I understand you have been conducting something of an investigation.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Really?’

  Auguste kicked at the ground with his toe.

  ‘I needed to be sure,’ he muttered.

  ‘And are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The smile escaped Babelon’s fingers and carved deep grooves of amusement in his cheeks.

  ‘Vierge, Auguste, who would have known you were such a suspicious little bastard? It is good to see you again, my friend.’

  Auguste nodded. His ears burned.

  ‘Here, help me with these. And careful with that one. The
re is something for you in it.’

  Auguste frowned.

  ‘I am not a savage to be bribed with favours,’ he said sharply. ‘I have said yes, have I not?’

  Babelon glanced up at him, one eyebrow raised.

  ‘For the love of peace, Auguste, I do not seek to buy your favour,’ he said. ‘As my friend I trust you give it freely. Go on then. Open it.’

  The basket had a lid secured with a leather strap. The boy hesitated. Then he knelt down and unknotted the strap. Inside was a curled ball of grey-white fur.

  ‘You can touch it. It’s quite tame.’

  Carefully Auguste reached out with one finger. The creature raised its pointed slender face, its pink nose twitching, and stretched. Two little pink hands reached up to take hold of the edge of the basket.

  ‘For me?’

  ‘For you.’

  ‘You brought me an opossum.’

  ‘I thought you Frenchmen called them woodrats.’

  ‘I like the Ouma word better.’

  ‘Well, I know you are interested in animals. You can study it or make a pet of it or eat it if you wish to. It is all the same to me.’

  Auguste swallowed but still his throat felt very full.

  ‘I cannot accept it,’ he said at last.

  ‘But of course you can. What use do I have for a woodrat? I was tricked into taking it, frankly. It didn’t cost me a sou.’

  Babelon stayed for four days. On the last night they sat in their usual places before the fire, the opossum a warm, dense weight in Auguste’s lap. It was a frolicsome creature and much favoured by the savage children. They would be disappointed when he gave it back.

  ‘Shall it be difficult for you to leave here?’ Babelon asked when the fire was almost gone.

  ‘Leave?’

  ‘You cannot stay here forever. You are too useful to the commandant.’

  Auguste thought of the forest at dawn, when the early sun caught in the spiders’ webs, and butterflies hung in the air like coloured thoughts, and he wrapped his arms around his chest, pressing tight against the squeeze of his ribs. I was born by these waters, the chief of the Ouma had said to him once, when he was first come. The trees of the forest are my bones, and the creeks and gullies that run between them bear my blood, which is the blood of my nation. It seemed a long time ago now, when he was still a child.