by Clare Clark
‘Why?’ he cried out. ‘What is my crime?’
There was the slap and pull of leather as the door was fastened against him and then, for a moment, silence before the thunder exploded into the sky like a cannon.
He remained in the hut for two days. It rained incessantly, battering against the mud roof of the hut. No one came. Soon there was no more water. Time kinked and stretched. Sometimes he was very afraid. His imagination betrayed him and his bowel also. The damp seeped into his bones. He was very cold.
It was late on the third day when they came for him. When they hauled him out he stumbled, overcome with dizziness and the clean chill of the air. It had stopped raining and he had not heard it. He gulped the air like water and caught his own powerful animal stink. The men dragged him towards the minko’s hut. Smoke rose like flour in the darkness. He knew both men from the hunt. He thought of the deer swinging from the pole by its hooves, eyes rolled back in its sagging head, tongue slack. A skilled hunter could skin and gut a deer in four incisions. Again his bowel turned to water, and he whimpered in fear and disgust.
There were perhaps twelve of them gathered there, ranged in a half-circle around a pyramid of wood thatched with palmetto brush. The wood was wet and the fire hissed and spat. In the reluctant flames the men’s faces were polished copper. Pressing on his shoulders, Auguste’s guards forced him down into a squat. He blinked, gazing up into the circle.
From his place at its centre, the high minko regarded him expressionlessly. Then he nodded. Auguste felt his arms jerk from their sockets as his wrists were twisted behind his back and tied tightly with a strip of leather. When they released him he fell forward, striking his nose upon the ground. There was a rock embedded in the mud and the pain was flat and dull. He felt the gush of blood, tasted its metalled warmth and the cold mud upon his lips. Blearily he raised his head.
‘Raise him up,’ ordered the high minko’s speaker, for it was the custom that the chief himself remain silent when among his council. Auguste lurched forward as an arm hooked beneath his forearms and hauled him roughly to standing. Fingers twisted in his hair close to his scalp, forcing his head backwards. He imagined the slice of the knife around the base of his skull, flesh peeled expertly from bone. A warm rush of urine bloomed upon his thighs.
‘Witness the faithless deceiver. May vengeance be ours.’
The high minko raised his right hand. A warrior stepped in front of Auguste, a leather flog held aloft. There was a silence taut as a violin string and then a wild burning pain as the lash caught him, marking the crook of neck and shoulder in sudden scarlet.
‘The oath of kinship is a sacred pledge binding our nations together in the sight of our ancestors,’ intoned the speaker. ‘There is no greater offence beneath the sun than treachery.’
The lash came again. Auguste cried out.
‘The warrior who would harm those to whom he is contracted in friendship must be burned to ash and his spirits banished to drift alone and in great agony. What say you?’
Slowly the warrior raised the flog.
‘If your nation is betrayed,’ Auguste whispered, ‘then I am also. I know nothing of any treachery. I swear it.’
The lash bit. Scraps of thought rose from Auguste’s head like moths. Only the pain made sense.
‘You collect the thorn apple to dull our senses. You steal the likeness of every pale-faced stranger who passes through our village. But still you know nothing. Do you think our great nation eyeless, witless?’
Auguste swallowed, his tongue clumsy in his shrivelled mouth.
‘Honoured minko, the plants, the drawings – they are but amusements. They signify nothing.’
The lash came again, deeper this time. The ring of faces smeared and slid.
‘See the fire that burns for you, betrayer. Do you not think the time nigh for confession?’
Auguste’s eyes closed. A hand jerked back his head, so that his shoulder screamed.
‘What would you have me confess?’ he pleaded. ‘I know nothing.’
‘Then the burden of your heart’s treachery shall weigh your spirit to the earth forever to relive in ceaseless anguish the agony of your death. Men, prepare the fire.’
Auguste trembled as he raised his head.
‘Kill me,’ he whispered, ‘and you shall bring down upon your nation all the righteous rage and vengeance of my people, whose blood you foully and baselessly shed.’
When the lash cracked the air, his legs buckled.
‘It is our vengeance you should fear, the vengeance of a blameless nation lured by treachery and false promises into certain slaughter at the hands of its old enemies,’ the minko’s speaker cried. ‘Did you truly think us so easily duped, that at your bidding we would walk obediently into the bloody ambush of the Choctaw and never smell the trickery of it?’
Auguste blinked in disbelief at the speaker, his drifting senses sharpened by shock.
‘See how the white man’s silence speaks more strongly than his denials.’
‘You are wrong. Your charges are baseless. We wish you for our allies.’
This time the lash came twice. The wound curled back its red lips to reveal a white gleam of bone.
‘Do you call our kinsmen liars, paleface?’
‘Not liars, sir,’ Auguste said with an effort. ‘But mistaken.’
‘Mistaken? Mistaken about the English trader who is not English but a brother of yours, bound in the pay of your own chief? Mistaken about the English musket he promises us for every Choctaw prisoner we bring him? Or mistaken about the false brother who eats of our meat only to despatch us to slaughter?’
A dreadful cold took hold of Auguste. He knew then that he would die. Summoning all that remained of his strength, he raised his head.
‘On all counts mistaken,’ he said again.
A man in a cloak of feathers moved in front of Auguste. It was Chulahuma. Above his head he held a stick the thickness of a man’s wrist. It gleamed wet in the firelight.
‘Why must you persist in your deceptions?’ the minko’s speaker shouted. ‘Your calumnies can but dishonour you further.’
Somewhere far off there were raised voices, the crack of a musket. A youth entered the circle at a run, a burning torch held aloft. Auguste saw how the sinews stood out on Chulahuma’s neck as he brought the stick down with all his strength. Something in Auguste’s shoulder exploded. There was a rushing slackness in Auguste’s limbs and he knew he would faint.
‘Can’t you see?’ he whispered as he began to fall. ‘My honour is all that is left of me.’
WHEN IT WAS winter Jean-Claude came back to Mobile. By then there was no disguising her condition. She turned as he pushed open the door and he looked at her and she smiled, willing him to smile too.
‘Look at you,’ he said, and he opened his eyes wide and shook his head and twisted up his mouth. She took his face in her hands. He was almost smiling.
‘You’re home,’ she said softly, and though she blinked the tears spilled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
‘Surely it is not so bad as all that,’ he replied.
And she laughed a choked-up laugh, feeling his beard coarse and unfamiliar against her palms.
‘You have been gone so long. I – thank God you are safe.’
He nodded, pulling away a little.
‘And you?’ he asked without looking at her.
‘As you see.’
‘How far along?’
‘Five months, maybe six.’ She smiled despite herself. ‘See how well it goes?’
‘You do look well.’
‘It is a boy, I’m sure of it. He kicks like a cavalryman.’
‘Does he now?’
‘A son,’ she breathed. ‘Oh, my love, imagine it. Our own son.’
Jean-Claude sighed. Then he turned away.
‘Just remember how it has always gone before,’ he said. ‘And spare us that.’
Some nights later she woke. He was not there. Throwing back
the rugs, she rose from her bed. In her belly the infant shifted sleepily. She put her hands on the swell of him, feeling the insistence of his knees beneath her skin.
‘Go back to sleep,’ she whispered.
The yard was quite still. Above the dark lace of the trees the moon was nearly full, its white gleam smeared with grey like dirty fingerprints. It cast sharp shadows on the hard earth and frosted the shingled roof of the kitchen hut. Elisabeth leaned against the splintery jamb of the doorway, rubbing the chill from her arms. Somewhere an owl hooted.
He had been restive ever since his return. She had expected it. Every winter he chafed against the fetters of convention and routine, of boredom and idleness. The petty hierarchies and trifling preoccupations of the town’s inhabitants provoked him to exasperation. Even the companionship of Auguste had proved small consolation for the miseries of the winter months. Without him, Jean-Claude’s imprisonment would weigh upon him unbearably.
All the same it startled her, the turbulence of his repressed vigour, the intensity of his distraction. It crackled in the air around him until he burned like a lamp. No part of him was still. He paced figures of eight in the cabin until she thought she would go mad with it. Even when she begged him to sit, his feet tapped and his fingers drummed the table so forcefully she felt the rattle of it in her teeth. And yet he was not ill-tempered. Sometimes, as she worked, he would steal up behind her and seize her by the waist, laughing as he spun her in a giddy gavotte. When, laughing too, she pulled away from him, he pressed his mouth on hers, his appetite for her as abrupt and immediate as it had been when they first were married.
Elisabeth was grateful. She remembered how he had been before, how he had recoiled from the swell of her, and she was glad of it. But she feared for the child. When he thrust himself inside her she was sure that he would damage the infant, dislodge him. She begged Jean-Claude to be gentle, but the fever was on him and he did not hear her. Afterwards she reached out for him so that she might soothe them both, but he twisted from her embrace, one leg already in his breeches.
He could not be still. And yet he sought no society. He did not go to the tavern. He drank brandy on the yard steps, staring out into the overgrown garden, his boots tapping out a ceaseless rhythm against the rickety boards. The liquor eased the frenzy in him. It helped him sleep.
A breeze stirred the trees, lifting the strings of Elisabeth’s undress. She shivered. Then she turned and went back into the house. The next morning, as she lit the fire for breakfast, he pushed open the door. His face was tight with triumph.
‘Is breakfast ready?’ he asked. ‘I am ravenous.’
Elisabeth set the pot of sagamity on the fire.
‘Soon,’ she said, and she did not look at him.
When he put his arms around her, he smelled of brandy and the brackish salt of the sea. She could feel the energy coming off him like heat. He wrenched at the strings that fastened her bodice, forcing his hand inside to close around her breast. She murmured protestingly, pulled away. When he caught her again, his arms were tighter, his fingers more insistent as he pressed his lips against the nape of her neck, his teeth, crushing her to him. She could feel the hardness of him against her buttocks.
Inside her belly the baby kicked.
‘Not now,’ she muttered, twisting from his embrace.
He held her tighter, his tongue insistent against her ear.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘The porridge will burn.’
His fingers closing like a vice around her jaw, he twisted her face to meet his, his mouth closing over hers, biting at her lips, her tongue. She could hardly breathe. The child turned inside her.
‘Please,’ she whimpered.
He let go of her jaw, moving fractionally away from her. She tried to put her hands to her face but his arm still held her, clamping her arms to her sides. With his free hand he ripped open his breeches, bundled up the loose skirt of her undress. Then, with his arms clasped tight around her ribcage, he drove himself hard inside her, twice, three times, a final juddering thrust. Then he let her go. She staggered forward, clutching at her skirts, at the swell of her belly.
‘There,’ he said. ‘The porridge is hardly yet hot.’
That night and the next she went early to bed, her knees drawn up, the curve of her belly safe inside them. The second night she woke and he was not there. As she had before, she rose and went again to the door. She did not know what drew her, only that she needed to see it, the unruffled still of the night, the silent kitchen hut.
She could not have sworn it was him, not with complete certainty. It was dark, the new moon a lightless bubble rimed with silver. There were other men of his build, his height. It might have been anyone.
She told herself to go back to bed. But she could not move, could not look away. Beside the kitchen hut the figures moved. Then they were still. The night was warm. It vibrated with the songs of the frogs and cicadas, histrionic as a Greek chorus. The figures divided, resolving themselves into two. Then they were gone.
Elisabeth remained there for a long time, staring out into the dark yard. When she breathed in and out, her breathing was almost steady, but there was a hole inside her that she could not fill with breath. She felt as though a part of her had been cut off. Her mind was gone, her heart too. There was no pain, only nothingness. The pain would come, she knew that. Till then, she could only stare into the darkness. She had no notion of what came next.
Time passed. He did not return. The moon was a blur of tarnished silver behind the clouds, the wood store a dark shape like a threat. Something in her chest stretched, tender as an old bruise. Elisabeth straightened up, setting her spine stiff as a broom handle. When she took down a rush light and lit it, her hands were steady. She cupped the flame with her hand, so that the draught would not extinguish it. Then she walked across the yard to the kitchen hut.
The door stuck. Elisabeth had to kick it hard to open it. As greasy yellow light splashed around the hut, Okatomih scrambled groggily to her feet, the deerskin clutched about her. Her face was smudged with sleep. Elisabeth bent down so that the light flared in the hidden area beneath the cooking ledge. The pots were stacked as they always were, covered with a weighted cloth against snakes and venomous spiders. The space was not large enough to serve as a hiding place.
She turned round. The girl watched her. She said nothing. Elisabeth stepped close to her, holding the light up to the girl’s face so that she blinked against the smoke of it. She did not step back. For one wild moment Elisabeth imagined what it might be like to dash the dish of burning oil into that imperious face, the hair shrivelling back from the high brow, filling the air with its acrid stink, the flesh sliding from the blades of her cheekbones. She held the lamp higher. The girl blinked again but did not move. Elisabeth stared into the flame. A plume of black smoke twisted from its frayed yellow tip. She breathed in the meaty smell of the molten fat, the heat of it sharp upon her skin. Then she blew out the light.
Hardly knowing what she was doing, she reached out and closed one hand around the girl’s throat. The slave did not struggle, though her pulse beat like a bird against Elisabeth’s palm. Elisabeth squeezed her fingers, watching the twist in the girl’s face, the bulge of her eyes. A far-off part of her mind wondered if she might be going mad.
‘If you ever so much as look at my husband again, I’ll kill you,’ she said. ‘Do you understand me?’
The girl did not reply. Elisabeth pushed her backwards. The itch in her fingers was overwhelmingly strong. She bit down on her lip, her fingertips pressing down into the pliant muscle, and the stirring in her belly was a kind of lust. A stripe of moonlight lit the slave’s face, her wide-open eyes. There was no fear in them, only a dull resignation. They were the eyes of someone already dead.
‘What am I doing?’ Elisabeth said, and the burst of laughter that broke from her was shrill and sharp. ‘You don’t understand, do you, whore? Not a single fucking word!’
With a disgusted thrust she p
ushed the girl away. The slave stumbled backwards, striking her head hard against the wall of the hut. Elisabeth snatched up a pot, holding it like a weapon before her, but the slave did not rouse herself in attack. Half crumpled against the wall, she closed her eyes and waited, her only defence one brown hand held up against her bruised neck and one brown forearm like a strap over the curve of her belly.
When at last he came to bed, Elisabeth pretended she was sleeping. He was clumsy from drink, dropping his boots and stumbling over them on his way to bed. When he climbed in beside her, he smelled of liquor and tobacco, of men. He slept heavily, sprawled on his back with his mouth open, one arm thrown wide.
Elisabeth did not sleep.
Later, in that dislocated stretched-out hour when night unhitches itself from time and day is unimaginable, she reached out with her left hand and set it upon his neck. The skin was looser on the muscle than the girl’s, and harsh with stubble. She closed her hand, pressing her fingers into each side of his neck. He did not stir. Her fingers tightened. She could feel the tendons as they shifted and slipped. Then she let go.
It grew light eventually, the first fingers of dawn powdering the darkness a dusty grey. Murmuring in his sleep, he turned towards her. His cheek was crumpled, marked with creases by the tumbled rugs. He looked both very old and very young, like a turtle turned out of its shell. Tears pricked her throat.
Setting her head beside his, she matched the tip of her nose to his, the backs of her fingers light upon his lined cheek. She could hardly bear for him to wake. She might have done it. A little more pressure, just a little more, and she could have held things steady. She could have rewound time. She could have forced back the hands. She might have arranged it right, so that the clock showed always a day in November a little before dawn, when she was his and he was hers, for all eternity.
