Savage Lands

by Clare Clark

  In La Rochelle the grey seas of France had hurled themselves against the land like capricious giant-children, one moment cradling a ship in the palm of one hand, the next snapping it carelessly in two. They demanded unceasing attention and applause, and their tempers set the tempers of those who lived alongside them just as the sun set the hour of the day.

  The river of the savages, which they called misi sipi, or big stream, was a different kind of monster altogether. It eased through the throttle of swamp and forest like a great yellow snake, languid and muscular, exhaling the thick reeks of fertility and decay. In La Rochelle the frontier between water and land was sharply drawn, marked out by the perpendiculars of cliff and castle wall. The savages’ river knew no such boundaries. It sprawled tideless in the sleeping waters of creeks and bayous and seeped into the swamps and forests, where its dark quiescence gave the illusion of solid earth. Everywhere a frenzy of vegetation erupted from its skin, propelled by a fierce and vulgar prodigiousness. Even in winter the curves and planes of the landscape disappeared beneath a dissipation of trees, bushes, vines, canes, mosses, ferns and flabby fungi. Roots and branches twisted over one another, coiling and clasping in a thousand sinuous embraces. Cypress knees pushed through mats of decaying leaves like thrusting cocks, while hanks of matted Spanish wig hung from the clefts of every tree limb, clothed only in the filmy veils of spiders’ webs. On warm days the wet air throbbed with the shameless fecundity of it.

  Auguste watched it all, as he had been instructed. He noted the visits of the neighbouring tribes, keeping count of them by a system of different coloured pebbles. He heard no whisper of enmity towards the French and no rumours of war. No Englishmen visited the village. In the early summer there was a brief skirmish with the Tunicas, who were the Oumas’ neighbour, when a warrior of that tribe seized two women of the Ouma as slaves, which brought a swift and violent reprisal from the Ouma warriors. Otherwise all was quiet.

  Auguste watched and he waited. Sometimes he even forgot to wait. Along with the other boys, he assisted in the fields, clearing and preparing them for the spring planting. Along with the other boys, he received instruction in the arts of running and of hunting, in the dressing of skins and the fashioning of weapons. The savage children were given their first bows and arrows and their first toy spears as soon as they could walk, and many were already skilled in their use. To test them one of the old men of the savages secured a clump of dried grass, twice the size of a fist, to a pole the height of a small tree. The first boy to bring down the hay would receive a prize. Auguste watched as the tallest of the boys, whose name was Tohto, drew and fired eight arrows into the air, setting them off so rapidly that the first one reached the ground only after the eighth was despatched. His friends whooped and cheered. The elder did not smile.

  ‘Hunting is not simply a matter of dexterity, my son,’ he said gravely. ‘To be a great hunter you must learn the virtues of endurance, of patience, of humility. And accuracy too,’ he added, his eyes bright in his lined face. ‘Look. You have lost eight arrows but the grass has lost not one hair from its head.’

  The guns brought to the village by the commandant remained in the chief’s hut, wrapped tightly in their skins. Auguste was clumsy with a bow and arrow, but his foot was noiseless and his eye was quick. Afraid of the forest, he swiftly learned the shape of it. In the forest silence was not an absence, a hole requiring the darn of chatter. It was hardly silence at all, alive as it was with the creak of frogs, the chatter of the birds, the shiftless slop and suck of the water, but beneath the clamour there was a breathlessness, a sense of suspense, of secrets hidden in the treacherous ground.

  Auguste grew skilful in the imitation of the calls of the forest birds so that they might be lured into the snares that the savages hung in the trees. He collected the insects of the forest and studied them, examining the tilt of their wings, the hinged fragility of their legs. Sometimes, if the creature was unfamiliar, he sketched the shape of it into the dust with a sharpened stick so that he might fix its particulars in his head. He observed the pitcher plants like cones of rolled paper, the achechy with its roots rich with red juice like chicken’s blood. It was the job of the women to gather the plants for dyes and medicines, and it caused them great merriment to observe Auguste upon his knees, digging with his fingers in the wet black soil.

  One day one of the women approached him and quietly suggested that he cultivate a garden alongside the village vegetable plots. Her words caused the sharp wings of his shoulder blades to jut fiercely from his back. After that he ventured further into the forest where the women could not see him.

  As for fishing, the savage boys whittled rods and painted plugs and spinners in much the same way that the boys had done in France, but Auguste preferred the method of the elders, sliding one hand into the stream and waiting for a fish to nudge it. He learned to set all of his attentiveness into his fingers while his eyes followed the dragonflies above the water, cutting the air into slices like slivers of coloured glass.

  He had grown accustomed to his solitude by the time the dog took him as its companion. It was a yellow pup with a foxy face and a slouching gait, and when it sniffed about him its brow wrinkled suspiciously. Its ribs protruded from beneath its rough coat. Wild dogs were common in the village, some of them so accustomed to human proximity that they were almost tame, and Auguste paid the creature little heed, expecting it to tire of him and wander away. It did not. It made three neat turns and settled beside him, its nose tucked beneath its hind leg. When at last Auguste rose from the riverbank, the dog rose too, its tail pressed down between its haunches. When Auguste turned to look at it, it looked away, as though pretending its presence was an accident, but when he took a few steps towards the village, the dog followed several paces behind.

  It reminded Auguste of a game his sisters had liked to play. Several times he swung round without warning, and each time he turned the dog was quite still, its white-whiskered muzzle lifted in a posture of alert disinterest. When they reached the village Auguste begged Issiokhena for a little deer meat and held it out to the dog. The dog frowned and did not come closer. Auguste was obliged to throw the meat into the dust at the dog’s feet. The dog snatched it up and fled into the shadows. Auguste waited as the shadows lengthened and thickened, but it did not come back.

  That night Auguste dreamed of Jean and of his sisters. He woke with a heaviness in his chest, listening to the light breathing of the savage children on their skins beside him, and when dawn broke he rose and went out.

  He was almost at the palisades when he sensed that someone was following him. He turned. The dog looked away. Auguste hesitated. Then he thrust his hands in his pockets and walked towards the forest, his tuneless whistle snagging in the rising chorus of songs and shrieks that heralded the day.

  SHE DREAMED ABOUT it when he was gone, the images in bright fragments like shards of broken glass catching the light. His gold-flecked eyes in a plump infant face. His long fingers in dimpled fists. A lean, sunburned face and a creamy new one, cheek to cheek, like a slippage in time. His secret smile tucked into the corner of a puckered baby mouth. Plump arms twisted round their necks, making of them a three-headed whole. Alone, night after night, she picked over the pieces, cutting her fingers on their sharp edges, and the wonder of it was as sharp in her as remembered desire. But when at last he came back to her and they lay tangled together beneath the sea-green quilt, his fingers tracing the undulations of breast and belly, she said nothing. She wrapped her arms around him and her legs too, sealing his skin against hers and forcing out the spaces between them. Sometimes, when he slept, she gazed at him, seeking in his man’s face the child that he had once been, and it grieved her, the years that she had lost.

  As the months passed and the other women grew peevish and then fretful, sharing confidences and herbal infusions that might be relied upon to stimulate the womb, she received the first ghostly spasms of her monthlies with a slackening in her belly that she knew for g
ratitude. To the bewilderment of the other women, she had refused the acquisition of a native slave, declaring it an unnecessary expenditure while there were no children. Now she prayed nightly that she might be spared the trial of conception. For all that they had been married a full year, the prospect of sharing her husband with another remained unendurable.

  She knew better than to speak of this with him. He declared her tough, fearless, stubborn to the point of pigheadedness, and he relished the perversity of her. Her refusal of a slave delighted him as much as he claimed it infuriating, not least because the King had not paid the army in two years. He called her his tigress, his little alligator, and laughed gleefully when she complained of the foolishness of the other men’s wives.

  ‘It’s little wonder they distrust you,’ he crowed, his hands circling her waist. ‘Those doxies cling to one another like drowning rats on a raft. It is a reproach to them all when you manage quite well all by yourself.’

  And so she did, almost. She was thankful to be free of the trifling gossip of the women, their sour faces and constant complaints. They took comfort in each other’s miseries, bemoaning always the dearth of things, their dissatisfaction sucking the vigour from the air around them until Elisabeth could hardly breathe. They traded boils and blisters, raw hands and aching backs, poor slaves and poorer husbands. When occasionally one among them contrived a kind of jest, their laughter was disagreeable, grudging, wrung from them like water from laundry.

  In her own cabin Elisabeth could close her eyes and smile and know herself quite happy. All the same it was lonely turning always from the chickens’ companionship, and it grew lonelier still when in time they ceased to offer it. Jean-Claude was absent from the settlement a great deal. Despite the small gardens that the wives had begun resentfully to cultivate, the settlement continued to produce almost nothing for itself, and it was his job to ensure that there would be sufficient food to see the colonists through the winter months. To this end he travelled not only to the neighbouring tribes but sometimes even to the Spanish fort at Pensacola.

  At first Elisabeth did nothing during his long absences. She walked dreamily around the town, along the river, or she simply lay in bed, her limbs sprawled, luxuriant with recollection. Once she took from her trunk a book of poetry and tried to read it, but her eyes raced ahead of the words, her belly warm with poetry of its own, and she closed the covers and knew that Jean-Claude was right, that books were the solace of those who did not live.

  But the days were long and idleness loosely woven. She grew restless, the longing for him fidgeting in her fingers. One afternoon as she slept, the fear crept upon her and in the helpless space between waking and sleeping she saw him sicken, his pale face glazed with sweat; she saw him set upon by savages, his red blood pooling in the dark shadows of the canebrake, leaking into the thick yellow water of the river.

  She rose then and, though it was the hottest part of the day, she built a fire and lit it and set the iron on it to heat while she gathered all his shirts and his neckcloths that were piled together in a basket. They smelled of air and the leaves of the bush where they had been spread to dry and, very faintly, of him. Quickly she set the pressing board on the table and, wrapping a cloth around it, laid the first shirt out on its surface. Then, seizing the hot iron, she leaned down upon it with all her strength, forcing the nose of it into the rough seams. Her hair clung to her brow and dark circles spread beneath her arms as she moved between the pressing board and the fire, hardly able to wait for the iron to grow hot again. That evening, when dusk came and with it a little coolness, she placed her hand upon the pile of his clothes, and for the first time in days she felt him close to her. She knew then that he would come home.

  After that it became her habit to prepare daily for his return. She swept the hut fastidiously and scoured the table with sand. She turned the dried-moss mattress and spread the sea-green quilt. She gathered branches of the flowering plants that flourished on the perimeters of the settlement and arranged them in a savage jar decorated all over with loops and whorls. She begged, bought and bartered for cuttings and seeds and cultivated their garden, her knees dark with dirt as she plucked out the weeds and tucked the dampened soil carefully around the growing plants. She went early to the market, when it was hardly light, and in a clumsy pantomime of gestures she had the savage women show her how their beans might be crocked, their tough meat stewed until it was tender enough to be cut with a spoon. She traded a lace collar for baskets of peaches and plums and wild apples and the whortleberries that he loved, and she busied herself with canning and preserving, sealing the jars with wax from the candleberry tree.

  She made lamps with the wax too, boiling the berries with hot water in the kettle until the pale green wax rose to the surface and filled the cabin with its sweet smell. It was a kind of drudgery, but more than that it was a hex. Each bottle that she filled for him, each lamp that she set upon the shelf, was a link in the chain that joined her to him, and with each link the chain grew stronger, pulling him home.

  That expedition took Jean-Claude away for many weeks together. When at last he returned, thundering upon the door with both fists and calling out to her to show herself to him, she almost wept with relief and the shock of him. She had forgotten his face a little.

  Later she curled herself against him, her hands spread wide upon his chest, and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply to draw the smell of him into the depleted parts of her as he talked of the places he had visited, the strange savage customs he had witnessed. He told her of the Pasagoulas’s love of brandy and of the Tunicas, whose chief wore always a silver medal on a blue ribbon and carried a gold-topped cane that had been sent to him by the King of France. The Tunicas, he said, raised fowls aplenty but would not eat them, so that when he had proposed their purchase, he had been obliged to pretend to their chief that he wanted them as pets.

  ‘Perhaps, I should keep my word,’ he suggested, his lips so close to hers that she could hardly keep from licking them. ‘Bring them to live here. After all, I know how you love to be surrounded by chickens.’

  Elisabeth laughed, twining her arms about him.

  ‘Oh, I have missed you so,’ she murmured.

  ‘You sweet-tongued deceiver.’ He kissed her on the forehead, his beard tickling her nose. ‘I would wager you do not think of me once from the moment I leave until I am back here in your bed.’

  ‘True,’ Elisabeth conceded. ‘Thank heaven the wood store is not full. Where else could I have hidden old Grapalière and his discarded breeches when you came back so unexpectedly?’

  Jean-Claude laughed, and he pressed his face against her neck, shifting his weight so that she could feel him hardening against her. It amused and aroused him to be teased in such a way. Elisabeth was glad he did not tease her back. Somehow the fear was always with her, clinging to the soles of her feet like a shadow. She could not shake it. Sometimes she longed for him to be afraid too.

  Raising his head, he parted her lips with his tongue and kissed her. She closed her eyes, melting against the warmth of him. When the kiss was over, he raised himself on his elbow to look at her, one hand upon her belly. She smiled up at him dazedly, memorising all over again the flecks of gold in his grey-green eyes. He touched his mouth lightly to her forehead. Then, abruptly, he sat and swung his legs round to the side of the bed. The air was chill against her bare skin as he reached for his breeches, the first smoky breath of winter visible as he sighed and stood.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said.

  ‘Now? But you are only just come home.’

  He shrugged, his back to her as he pulled his shirt over his head.

  ‘I have business at the tavern.’

  ‘Tonight?’ She tried to laugh. ‘They shall surely not expect you tonight?’

  ‘On the contrary, I was supposed to have gone there directly. Now where are my boots?’ Still fumbling with the buttons of his breeches, he leaned over to kiss her briefly on the mouth. ‘Do not wait supper for
me. I shall eat there.’

  ‘But I have meat for you. And whortleberries.’

  ‘They’ll keep.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ she pleaded, no longer troubling to conceal her dismay, and she reached up to caress his neck. She felt the twitch of his muscles beneath her fingers as he leaned past her to retrieve his discarded neckcloth. ‘Please. Not tonight.’

  ‘Come now,’ he said, with a wry smile, pulling away from her embrace as he straightened up to arrange the cloth around his neck. ‘For weeks you have been spared the affliction of a stinking husband clogging up the place. You expect me to believe you are not a little bit glum that I am come home?’

  Her eyes flew open.

  ‘How can you be so cruel? I have done nothing but long for your return. Without you I am – I am nothing.’

  His fingers stilled. He looked at her and his smile contracted to a twist that caused her skin to shrivel.

  ‘I am going to the tavern, Elisabeth,’ he said coldly. ‘Not New France.’

  ‘I – forgive me.’ She attempted a smile. ‘I have spent too much time with the other wives. I have learned to be a scold.’

  Jean-Claude shook his head at her, rolling his eyes. Her heart unclenched.

  ‘Then unlearn it forthwith or, God help me, I shall go back up the St Louis this very night and take refuge with the savages.’ He laughed softly through his nose, touching his lips to her forehead. ‘Believe me, a man can suffer no greater misery than a shrewish wife.’

  THE FIRST DAYS of November blew in on a flurry of wind and spitting rain. Elisabeth was entirely happy. In the winter the upper reaches of the river froze and the men no longer made their long expeditions north. The winter months were devoted instead to repairs around the settlement, to planning and preparing, to waiting for spring. The cabin was full of him, the scatter of his discarded coat and boots, the greasy smears of breakfast on an abandoned wooden plate, the dent of his head in the moss pillow on their disordered bed. It astounded her, the delight she took in caring for him.