by Clare Clark
‘Auguste, I have no idea what you are talking about.’
‘Don’t lie to me, you bastard. Not now. Not after all this.’
Babelon’s lips moved. His face twitched. His hands danced in front of him.
‘Auguste, such feverish imaginings, you surely cannot–’
‘Damn you, Babelon. Do you think me a fool? An Englishman pretending to be a French Canadian? A delightful notion but hardly necessary when you have a real French Canadian right there, ready to sell his country for a slice of the profit. A French Canadian with English muskets to trade.’
‘I really do not know–’
‘You do not know what? How it happened? How you managed to be tricked by an Englishman into betraying your country? Or how you got so greedy for profit you no longer cared?’
‘Auguste–’
‘Spare me.’ Auguste leaned back against the pillows, closed his eyes. Then he called for the girl. ‘Fetch the commandant here. Quickly. Tell him it cannot wait.’
‘For God’s sake, Auguste!’
Babelon’s shoulders dropped, the words fading into the silence like smoke. He pressed his knuckles to his lips, his face into a knot.
‘Please.’
Auguste hesitated. Then he held his hand up, staying the girl.
‘Don’t you see?’ Babelon hissed. ‘It wasn’t – I never meant for this to happen. That bastard betrayed me. He said it would be a simple matter. He would take the slaves with the plants. To trade in the Indies. He said no one would ever know. He–’
‘And you?’
‘I never meant – it was a business arrangement, nothing more. I never thought they would come after you.’
‘A business arrangement? Urging our enemies to a violent attack upon our allies?’
Babelon’s head jerked up. His face was ugly with fear and disdain, his eyes feverish bright.
‘Our allies? Damn it, Auguste, if you think those bloodthirsty barbarians understand the meaning of allegiance, you are as stupid as Bienville. Look at what they have done to you, for God’s sake. They have no concept of loyalty, no allegiance that cannot be simply bought. They defend their own interests, without consideration, as wild beasts do.’
‘As you do.’
‘Because I see that it is the only way to get anywhere in this godforsaken swamp. It is their rules that apply here, not ours. Our government, our petty alliances, our army of boys and halfwits, they are no more than a pitiful joke. Our countrymen have clung to this land for more than a decade and for what? Every spring our houses flood. Every summer we succumb to fever. Every winter we starve. That is what living as Frenchmen has done for us.’
‘So instead you sell us all for your own profit?’
‘I told you, the Englishman betrayed me. He set me up. I never meant – that bastard has traded plants with me for three years. I thought I could trust him. He told me he could get those slaves away and no one would be any the wiser. I did not know what would happen to you. Jesus, Auguste, if I had known–’
‘Then what?’
‘Then of course I would never have agreed to it. You know that.’
Auguste turned his face away.
‘Listen,’ Babelon urged. ‘Listen to me. The guns – I gave the Chickasaw only the first payment. A guarantee. I have more. We could go north, much further north, where they do not know us. We can trade up there. And we shall split the profits. Sixty–forty. What do you say?’
Auguste gaped at him.
‘Very well then, I am not about to quibble. Fifty–fifty, straight down the line. There is a fortune to be made out there if you only take it. I shall make you rich, Auguste, I swear it.’
Auguste did not reply.
‘Come on, Auguste, what do you say?’
‘You mean to pay me off?’
‘Handsomely. Call it making amends.’
‘And if I refuse?’
‘I do not think that would be wise.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Because you would leave me no choice but to inform the commandant that you were a part of the arrangements.’
‘He would not believe it.’
‘Oh, I think he would,’ Babelon shook his head sadly. ‘Is it not you who has traded for years with the Englishman, plants for piastres? You may hide away the money but I have the sketches you made, his notes. Perhaps it would have continued for many more years, but you wanted more. We both did. And when in due time the Englishman betrayed us to the Chickasaw, well, they took revenge.’
‘You would do that?’
‘Only most unwillingly. You know I love you like a brother.’
When Auguste did not reply, Babelon knelt at the side of the bed, taking Auguste’s good hand and pressing it in his.
‘Listen to me, Auguste. There has been enough treachery already, enough pain. Must we betray each other too, spill each other’s blood? You are my brother, as I am yours. Let us save each other.’
Auguste said nothing for a long time. When he spoke again it was to accept his friend’s terms. He winced as Babelon embraced him, jarring his shoulder.
Their plan was a simple one. Auguste was too weak to travel. He needed time to heal his broken bones, to regain his strength. Babelon would therefore take his order from the commandant and, two days hence, he would travel north as instructed, towards the Chickasaw. Once as far as the Choctaw nation, however, he would pretend illness and take refuge there, for the Choctaw had no reason to suspect him. After a suitable time, he would take his leave of the Choctaw and return to Mobile. He would bring with him the greetings of his Chickasaw hosts and a full description of the English agent who had traded with their warriors and of the English plant trader too. He would furnish the commandant with all manner of information, including a number of contradictory reports as to their whereabouts and their allies among the savages. Bienville would suspect nothing. With Auguste recovered, he would once again despatch them to the savages in search of food.
This time they would not come back.
It was much later, when night had fallen and the settlement slept, that Auguste sent the girl to the house of the commandant. He came secretly, as he had before, and as before he stayed with Auguste for perhaps an hour. They did not light a lamp. When at last he left, Auguste lay sleepless and exhausted among his tangled bed rugs. Though he longed for rest, his mind ground out old memories like a street organ. He thought of the long evenings at the rue d’Iberville, of Babelon dancing with Elisabeth, spinning her around until they arrived breathless and laughing before him, offering themselves to him like a present. Babelon had grinned and bowed but Elisabeth had turned her face away, half hiding it in her husband’s sleeve, and Auguste had known why because, even as he laughed in his turn, he put his hands up to his face too, his splayed fingers making a cage to cover his eyes. It was not Babelon they sought to hide from but each other, the blatancy of the other’s happiness, the terrible defencelessness of it.
He thought of Babelon rising from the fireside in the native villages and walking silently away towards a hut that was not his. They had neither of them ever spoken of it. It was not the way, between men. But Auguste had watched him go and, though he had tried not to, he had always thought of Elisabeth then, her rapturous face turned into her husband’s sleeve where he could not see it, and his heart had tightened and he had told himself that he pitied her, because the flames of love between a man and a woman burn with a wild fever that, seeking satiety in the body, must in time be satiated and fall to ash, while the love between men grows stronger, the years binding them in a fellowship of minds, of spirits undulled by the drear of the quotidian life, the fickle appetites of the flesh.
‘You know, of course, that his wife is with child?’
The words had struck Auguste like a blow.
‘No,’ he said, and he shook his head, shook it over and over, and though the movement pained him he did not stop. ‘No. No. She – she cannot. She – it shall not hold.’
‘On
the contrary, they tell me she is well advanced.’ Bienville sighed. ‘Some kind of accommodation shall have to be made.’
Shaking his own head, Bienville did not observe Auguste’s sudden stillness, the squeezed-up expression congealing on his face, or perhaps he did, because when the silence had stretched long enough the commandant exhaled a dismal laugh, snuffing it out in his nostrils.
‘Unless you seek a wife for yourself, Guichard,’ he said, and in the darkness his eyes held pinpoints of light as though the inside of his skull was illuminated. ‘By way of reparation.’
Auguste did not answer. He thought of Elisabeth holding a child. Holding her husband’s child. She had lost so many. The familiar pattern had repeated itself until it had become the shape of them, the two of them and him and the not-yet-infants, the slithers of slick flesh that bled out of her, screwing her body into twists. He had sat quietly in the creases of space they left when they were gone, laying his silence against her like a dressing, a shield against her husband’s disappointment, his impatience. He had thought it would go on the way it always had because that was the way it had always been, because those were the foundations that held them steady. The lingering choke of a husband’s passion grown cold. The true and enduring love between men. The attachment to another man’s wife that snarled like fishing line around his heart.
He had secured her the savage medicine, had smuggled it to her not because he thought it would work, but because she had come to him and he could not refuse her.
Now she bore Babelon’s child and Babelon had said nothing. In all of their planning, he had not once mentioned Elisabeth and Auguste had been glad of it. Now he thought of her dear pale face, the way her gaze followed Babelon about the room, matching the arcs and swoops of him as though he were a kite and she the paper tail, and the pain of it overwhelmed him, that she carried the child of the man she loved, whom he loved also, and the grief sprang from the centre of his bones and massed in swollen wens against the underside of his cheekbones until his face ached and the longing to weep was a wild scream inside him and still his eyes were raw and dry, as though they had been scoured with sand.
When he called out in the night, the girl came to him and stood beside him, the opossum in her arms. He had her light a lamp, set it by his bedside. She set the opossum on his lap, rubbing the sleep from her eyes with the back of her wrists as she tugged at the wrinkles in his rugs, settling them more comfortably around him. He watched as the smoke pulled itself from the bright flame, smearing a sooty stripe against the wall. There were damp patches on the lime plaster. In several places it had dropped away. The walls of the cabin had grown fat and weak on the wet ground. Soon the house would fall down. All the houses in this quarter would fall. The bayou was too close, its banks too easily breached. It was how it had always been.
The girl arranged his arm gently, her tangled hair draping it like weed. Then she lifted the dripping dipper of water to his lips and he closed his eyes and drank and, as the water slid down his neck, he knew that Babelon was right, that in Louisiana it was not just houses and ships that rotted, but men.
It was dawn when Auguste bid the girl bring him pencil and his notebook.
‘Tear me out a page.’
‘This one?’
The page she held out was blank but for a small sketch in the top right-hand corner, a quick likeness of the pungently sweet herb that they called spiked head, much used in cooking by the Chickasaw. Auguste had a sudden vivid sense of himself squatting in a slice of evening light, the triangular pull between eyes, plant and pencil as he drew, and the smell of stewing meat drawing the saliva into his mouth. The simple symmetry of exactness and appetite.
He nodded. Then he asked that she fetch him a handful of whiskery sweet potatoes from the store hut and put them into basket. He told her to select the most bruised among them, those with the first white sprinklings of rot. When the girl was gone out he began to write. It is decided. The trap is set. He pressed the rough pencil hard into paper, his fingers white-tipped, his gaze shrivelled to the black point of the lead. If you love him. When he was finished, he folded the paper once, and then again, and once more, sealing the words inside. When the girl returned, he set it beneath the potatoes in the basket.
‘Take these to the ensign’s wife,’ he told her. ‘Make sure to tell her they must be cooked today or they shall rot.’
The girl said nothing but scraped the floor with her toe, her black brows pressed low over her dark eyes.
‘It must be tonight, you hear me? And tell her–’
The girl waited, the frown easing a little as she turned her face up to look at him, and Auguste turned his own face away so that she might not see the tears that filled his eyes.
‘There is salt,’ he said. ‘In the basket. Tell her to look for the salt.’
SHE COULD NOT have said exactly when she knew that the slave was with child. She knew only that, when at last she saw it clearly, she saw too that she had known it from the start.
It was a mild day, warm enough to sit outside in the weak sunshine. Weary, for she no longer slept well, she took a rug to the chair on the front stoop and tried to read there, but the words made trails of ants across the bright page and she could not hold the sense of them. So she put the book down and closed her eyes and rocked the chair, quieting herself and the infant with the rhythmic creak of it. It was only when the shadow fell across her face that she opened them and saw the Jesuit, his hands knitted across the comfort of his belly, and his face split open like a melon.
‘Look at you,’ he said, and she stood and embraced him because the delight in his face was all hers. They laughed then, because her belly and his made too great a circumference to reach around, and he had bid her sit and she had waved away his solicitousness and she had called for Okatomih to bring out some of the beer that the slave brewed herself in the lean-to behind the kitchen hut.
It was then that she saw it, because he saw it too and his understanding was not slippery like hers but solid and alive, and it kicked out in the space between them, as blunt-boned and insistent as the infant in her belly. As the slave walked towards them, balancing the pitcher of beer, Elisabeth saw as the Jesuit saw, without evasion, the unmistakable indentations pressed into the air by the swell of the pitcher’s belly and beneath it the swell of the slave’s, round and neat and irrefutable as though it too had been fashioned from clay.
They did not speak as the slave bent down, setting the pitcher and the cups upon the floor. When she motioned to Elisabeth, offering to pour, it was the Jesuit who shook his head, who gestured at her to leave them. He sloshed the frothy liquid into two cups and, pushing one into her hand, raised his own to Elisabeth and, without speaking, tipped back his head and took a long, slow pull.
‘Damn, that stuff is good,’ he said, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
When Elisabeth did not reply, he bent down, picking up the book beside her chair and examining the spine.
‘Montaigne, eh?’ he said. ‘The great scourge of mendacity and humbug. This is yours?’
Elisabeth blinked. Then slowly she dragged her gaze up to the book in Rochon’s hand.
‘Mine? Yes. Yes, it is.’
‘Of course the name Michel comes from the Hebrew Micha-el meaning “he who is like God”. An ironic choice for a man whose maxim was “What do I know?”’ Rochon turned the book over in his hands. ‘An extraordinary man. Did you know that as a child Montaigne spoke neither Gascon nor French but Latin? His father arranged that he should hear nothing else for all his first years so that it might become his native tongue.’
‘Is that so?’ Elisabeth said faintly.
‘He never mastered the same fluency in Greek, though surely it was the School of Athens who influenced him most profoundly. Socrates, of course, but Plato too and Aristotle. It was from Aristotle that he understood that though the human soul may vary in quality, it does not change in nature. Though we may judge others and find them wanting, or ou
rselves for that matter, there is no human vice or virtue that is beyond the understanding of us all.’
Elisabeth closed her eyes, swaying a little so that the cup in her hand slopped.
‘What a wonderful thing it is,’ she murmured. ‘That drop of seed, from which we are produced, bears in itself the impressions, not only of the bodily shape, but of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers! A wonderful thing indeed.’
‘Sit,’ the Jesuit instructed, taking her arm, and she obeyed, her knees buckling beneath her so that she half fell into the rocker. ‘Praise God that you are with child and near your time. Another’s situation cannot make it less so.’
He remained with her until the low sun slipped behind the trees and the air grew thin and chill. He had been in town some days, but he offered little explanation of his return except to say the commandant had called him back on business to do with the Chickasaw, who desired a mission set up among them. Instead he talked of Montaigne and the great Jansenist Pascal and of his time in the Jesuit seminary that had been both a prison and a vast new land. Elisabeth was grateful. The present tipped dizzyingly beneath her feet and she did not dare look down. Instead she rocked back and forth, her arms tight around her belly, and she held tight to her father who was dead and to the books she had read in Paris and the words piled a wall in her skull, to keep out the choke and hold her steady.
Rochon bid her goodnight regretfully, said he would come again. When he was gone, Elisabeth rocked a little but the chair hurt her back and her legs twitched and there was no stillness in her. She paced the cabin, picking things up and setting them back down. Several times she started towards the yard door only to turn away again after a few steps, her rush of resolve quite drained away.
When Jean-Claude returned for supper, it took all of her strength to stay her hands from shaking. She served him his meal in silence. She kept her eyes on the floor, unable to look into his face for fear that she would see him altered, a stranger, or, worse, that she would not. And still her agitation crackled in the darkening cabin, charging the air. She saw it in him, in the tautness of his back, the restiveness of his hands. Beneath the table his leg jigged up and down.