Savage Lands

by Clare Clark

  ‘I am to go north again,’ he said when he was finished. He did not sit but stood and came over to where she was. ‘We ready the expedition tomorrow. We leave at dawn the day after.’

  Elisabeth nodded, her head bent over the dishes.

  ‘Oh, and the slave,’ he added offhandedly. ‘I mean to sell her. It is an inconvenience, I know, when you have her trained, but you must confess you have never liked her.’ Jean-Claude dropped a brisk kiss on his wife’s head and took his hat from its peg by the door. ‘Do not look so dismayed. I shall trade her for one younger, stronger. You shall not be inconvenienced.’

  Elisabeth did not know how long she sat there. Certainly it was quite dark when the banging came on the door. When the boy came in, the lantern caught the dirty dishes so that the dried scabs of gravy gleamed black on their pale sides.

  ‘Quickly,’ the boy shouted, and the lantern shook in his hand and made shadows jump wildly against the wall. ‘You must come quickly.’

  Elisabeth pressed her fingers to her brow. The boy was familiar and yet she could not imagine who he was.

  ‘It is Mme Conaud, she is at her time. You must hurry.’

  ‘Surely Mme le Bras–’

  ‘The midwife is already there. There is difficulty. She asks for you. Please, Madame, I beg you, come with me.’

  In the lamplight the boy’s face crumpled. Elisabeth looked at him and knew him for Anne Conaud’s son, whose father had died the summer past of the black vomit. She stood, reaching down her shawl and putting it about her shoulders.

  ‘Come then,’ she said. ‘Let us hurry.’

  It was late in the afternoon of the following day when Anne Conaud was finally delivered of a baby daughter. She was weak, for the infant had been required to be pulled from her by force and she had lost a great deal of blood, but she would live and the child also.

  ‘Go home,’ Guillemette le Bras urged Elisabeth. ‘Look at you. You are white with fatigue.’

  Elisabeth thought of the cabin and the dirty dishes stacked on the table and the kitchen hut with its door closed tight, and she shook her head.

  ‘You go,’ she said. ‘I shall remain here and make sure she does not sleep.’

  Guillemette protested, but she was dizzy with fatigue and Elisabeth was adamant.

  ‘At least go home and wash, change your clothes,’ Guillemette suggested. ‘I shall wait here until you return.’

  Elisabeth looked down at her bloodstained apron, her skirts smeared with the effusions of the lying-in bed, and she nodded. When she opened the door to the cabin, its orderliness was startling. The floor was swept, the table scoured, the dirty dishes washed and stacked neatly on the shelf. If it had not been for the basket of potatoes on the table, she might have thought the house unoccupied.

  The potatoes were whiskery, their flanks dark and spotted. They would not last long. She picked one up, feeling its cool weight in her hand, the spongy give of a bruise against the ball of her thumb, and the skin split, oozing wet flesh. She set it down, wiping her hand on her apron, and saw beneath the other potatoes in the basket the pale corner of a folded sheet of paper.

  When she had read it, she folded it again along the precise folds and set it back in the basket. She set the potatoes on top of it exactly as it had been. Then she washed her face and hands, changed her clothes and walked briskly back to the house of Anne Conaud, where Guillemette le Bras was waiting for her.

  THE GIRL RETURNED breathless.

  ‘The basket,’ he said. ‘You–?’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘You remembered, didn’t you, about the salt?’

  The girl blinked. She had a manner of blinking that squeezed her whole face tight, as though it had been pulled with a drawstring. Then she nodded again and, squatting down, set to gathering up the mess of dishes beside his bed. Though nothing had been said, it had become the way of things somehow, the slave in the cooking hut and the girl in the house.

  The questions rose in him like dough and he longed to seize the girl’s arm, to demand precisely the words spoken and the silences, the manner of her voice, the set of her face and tilt of her head, whether her hair escaped its pins. Instead he let his hands fall open on the rugs, palms upward. His fingers curled, holding nothing. It was set. There was nothing else to be done.

  Throughout that endless day and the night that followed, Auguste lay among his tangled bedclothes, counting time in the pulses of his broken shoulder. The rotting walls of the cabin pressed in on him, sucking the air from his lungs. As the day faded he asked the girl to prop the door open so that he might see into the yard. The plants were shattered bones, slimed about with mud and dead black leaves, and above them the weatherless sky turned away from him, indifferent to the whispered urgency in a cabin on the rue d’Iberville, the humdrum ruination of small lives. Auguste knew the pettiness of his grief even as it cried out in him, the dreary cycle of betrayal and counter-betrayal that marked the human season, but knowing it was not consolation but another grief. Was it now that she opened the letter? Or now? Or did she at this moment take up her knife, the one with the fluted blade and the savage patterns burned into the handle, and take from the pile the first of the whiskery potatoes? On the back of her hand she had a pattern of freckles like the five on a die.

  He called for willow tea. It quietened neither his pain nor his imaginings. When he no longer could endure either, he had the girl bring him his notebook and a pencil and asked that she sit for him while he sketched her. Though he worked with a grim doggedness, it was a poor likeness. There was a folded-up quality about the girl on the page, a sulky flatness to her fierce black eyes so that she looked merely ill-tempered. When she asked if she might have it, he tore it out roughly, impatient to be rid of it.

  As the hours inched through the mangle of the night, he kept a light burning so that he might not lose the shape of himself in the darkness. Sometime before dawn it rained, and the rain thrummed on the roof of the cabin and slapped against the mud of the lane outside. He thought of the baire then, the leaking linen and the holes left in the wet earth when the tent was gone. Rain was a curse for the expeditioner. It dampened his gunpowder, rotted his meat, extinguished his fire, set mould to growing in his clothing. It stiffened his boots. As he waited for the night to end, he thought of the mornings that he too had risen before dawn in the chill grey smear of half-light, the rain whispering at his collar as the savages worked to stretch skins tight over the cargo of the pirogues to keep them dry.

  It shocked him to wake and find the morning already well advanced. The dawn expedition had departed while he slept. It was no longer raining. He could hear birds, a dog barking, the steady knock of the axe as the slave chopped wood. Somewhere someone shouted. It might have been an ordinary day.

  He did not know how long he lay there before the girl came in. When she saw he was awake she frowned.

  ‘I was waiting,’ she said. ‘You should have called me.’

  The slave brought willow tea, porridge, dressed his wounds. The girl washed his face and smoothed his rugs. Nobody spoke. It might have been an ordinary day.

  Several times during that morning, he thought to send the girl to the rue d’Iberville. There was nothing she could say, nothing she might reasonably ask, but the longing for particulars burned in him like desire, engulfing reason, and he called for her. When she did not come, his petulance shaded into anger and he shouted, jarring his shoulder so that for a moment he could not breathe. It was the slave who came then. The girl was not there, she said, and Auguste thanked her and sent her away, and the futility of his longing swelled inside him until it threatened to close his throat.

  It was a little before noon that the Jesuit came to the house. Auguste heard his voice on the stoop and the girl’s also. He called out, but there was no answer. He heard the Jesuit’s low laugh. Then the door opened.

  ‘You have yourself a fine guard dog there,’ Rochon said with a grin. ‘She tells me you had a poor night.’

&nb
sp; ‘It was not so bad.’

  ‘You certainly look a great deal better than you did. I doubt the Englishman shall do so well if they find him. Might I sit?’ Rochon pulled out a stool and set it across from Auguste’s bed, settling his bulk awkwardly upon it. ‘I was half tempted to go with them, you know. In the last days I have found to my consternation that there is a great deal more of the savage in me than I realised. I have yet to decide whether it is the company of the Nassitoches I should blame for it or the Old Testament.’

  ‘The expedition–’

  ‘Left this morning, apparently, though I suspect too late to be of much use. Bienville is hopeful, but then hopefulness is the principal duty of his position. I don’t suppose I might have something to drink?’

  Auguste listened numbly as the Jesuit talked idly of town politics and of the grumbling feud between the Catholic priests and the Jesuits over the rights to missionise the lower reaches of Louisiana. The questions itched at him like lice but he dared not ask them.

  ‘If we might only establish a school, we might have the savages missionise themselves. Elisabeth Savaret does what she can in their cabin but I should like to see her in charge of a proper school. I meant to propose it to her when I saw her this morning, but she looked so completely exhausted that I thought I would be better biding my time.’

  ‘She is not unwell, I hope?’ Auguste asked, struggling to keep his voice steady.

  ‘No, no, though she shall make herself ill if she continues in this way. The Conaud woman has been labouring since Sunday, though, praise God, she was delivered this morning of a baby girl. When I passed Elisabeth on my way here, she was pale as milk and hardly able to speak for fatigue. The poor creature had not been home in two days.’

  Auguste felt the bottom of his stomach drop away.

  ‘Two days.’

  ‘It does not sound much and yet it is always startling to me, how quickly sleeplessness disorders body and mind. King Perseus of Macedonia, of course, was murdered in Rome simply by being prevented from sleeping. Elisabeth was not so unfortunate, I grant you, but still she was almost insensible. I had to insist upon accompanying her home. Four times on the way there, she asked that I tell her husband she was come home and, though I told her as many times he was already departed, moments later she would ask again, as though I had not spoken.’ He shook his head. ‘Still, we must be glad that sleep restores reason at least as swiftly as its lack would steal it away. She will be recovered presently.’

  Auguste said nothing.

  ‘Is he a decent man, her Babelon?’ Rochon asked after a while. ‘His disregard for men of the cloth might be construed with equal reason as brute ignorance or an unconscionable good sense.’

  ‘He – I–’ Auguste broke off, pressing his fingers into the sockets of his eyes. The questions swarmed across his skin, biting into his flesh. The torment of them was unbearable. ‘The potatoes. Did she get the potatoes?’

  ‘Potatoes?’ Rochon looked baffled.

  ‘I sent potatoes. Did she get the potatoes?’

  ‘Now that you mention it there was, I think, a basket of potatoes on the table. Or apples perhaps. Something sweet-smelling, certainly, and slightly rotten. You sent them? So you are no longer a secret?’

  ‘I – no. Not any more.’ Auguste was silent. Then he closed his eyes. ‘I wonder if you might come back another time? I am rather tired myself.’

  Rochon smiled.

  ‘I would ill wish the fate of King Perseus of Macedonia upon you, my friend. Sleep soundly. I shall come again tomorrow.’

  As soon as the Jesuit was gone, Auguste called the slave and, asking her loudly for tea, bid her in a whisper to help him dress. He did not have the strength for the girl’s fierce gaze. When at last he was in his breeches, the sweat stood out from his forehead and his head swam with silver.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said to the slave and, with painful slowness, they made their way through the mud-choked yard and out into the rue Pontchartrain. Each step required the summoning of all of his strength, the shock of the earth sending jagged spasms of pain like lightning down the side of his broken body. The lanes stretched away from him, tilting and swinging so that he lurched forward, losing his footing. Only the strong hands of the slave on his good arm stopped him from falling. On the rue d’Iberville, several passers-by stopped and called out to him, astonishment sharpening their greetings, but he hardly heard then. Fixing all his resolve upon the toes of his boots, he stumbled on.

  When at last they reached the Babelon house, Auguste was a deathly grey, his breath coming in ragged snatches. Half leaning on the wall, his legs slackening beneath him, he closed his fist and banged on the door. The slave Okatomih opened it.

  ‘She sleeps,’ she said in Mobilian.

  ‘The potatoes,’ Auguste rasped in her own language. ‘Bring me the potatoes.’

  Okatomih’s expression did not change. Turning, she went back into the house. Auguste closed his eyes, releasing himself into the embrace of the splintery wall. His legs no longer obeyed him. He was very cold and hollow too, so that the air roared through him, filling his skull with noise.

  ‘Monsieur?’

  Auguste opened his eyes. The slave held out an earthenware pot. Inside it the peeled potatoes huddled together, like fledglings in a nest. He shook his head violently.

  ‘No!’ he cried and he seized the rim of the pot and shook it so that the potatoes rattled. ‘The basket, where is the basket–?’

  Silently the slave reached inside the door.

  There was nothing in the basket but some crumbs of mud and, on the rim, a hardening smear of rotten potato. ‘What about the letter?’ he demanded. ‘There was a letter here, in the basket. What did you do with the letter?’

  The slave shrugged.

  ‘No letter.’

  ‘A fold of paper, here in the basket–’

  Again the slave shrugged.

  ‘Maybe the mistress took?’ she said.

  Auguste closed his eyes. The roaring rose up about him like water until he was cold as clay and the dead weight of him drew him down into the darkness until the roaring closed over his head.

  IT WAS SOME weeks later when the body of a French soldier was found by a Canadian coureur by the name of François Maurichon. Tangled in the thick reeds that fringed the wide plain of the Mississippi River, it bobbed gently, face down, outspread fingers stirring small circles in the yellow water. Maurichon was wary of alligators, and he cursed under his breath as he pushed through the waist-high water to retrieve the body.

  It was no small matter to wrestle it through the undergrowth. Even before he had managed to pull it to shore, Maurichon could see that the dead man was much mutilated. There were deep cuts to his back and shoulders and above the slimy collar of his coat his fleshless skull gleamed pale. It was the savage way to pass a knife around the heads of their dead enemies, slicing around the ears and peeling back the skin of the scalp by the hair. Maurichon hauled the body onto the bank and turned it over. The dead man’s head fell back, his throat gaping like a toothless white mouth.

  The coureur shuddered. Hacking a few fronds from a nearby palmetto bush, he hastily covered the body and retreated to the bluff to smoke and consider his options. A little later he made a search of the reeds. Tethered to a low tree, he found an abandoned pirogue and the man’s pack, sliced open like a belly. Maurichon was not afraid. His musket was oiled and loaded, though the savages would be long gone by now. He thought of the bloated body, the eyes eaten from the eye sockets by fish. It had plainly been in the water many days.

  All the same there was no mistaking the dead man. There was not a man in Louisiana who did not know Ensign Jean-Claude Babelon.

  1719

  After

  The Kingdom of Louisiana is larger than the one of France. The climate is very mild and temperate. One inhales good air and can enjoy a perpetual spring, which contributes to the fertility of the soil of this country which abounds in everything.

 
; In the upper part of the Mississippi one can see mountains filled with gold, silver, copper, lead and mercury which facilitate commerce. The savages have been domesticated by the French settlers, and they treat in good faith and without restraint, having nothing to fear from one another. As gold and silver are very common, and as the savages do not know their value, they exchange pieces of gold or silver for the European merchandise such as a knife made of steel, a steel axe to cut wood, often for a small mirror, a little dash of brandy or other things similar to their tastes.

  Plans have been made for a new city which will be the capital of Louisiana. They call it New Orleans. There are already more than 600 houses which are practical for those that inhabit them. Its port is magnificent, of such great length and proportion that it will conveniently enclose vessels which come from all parts of the world.

  The Catholic religion is making great progress through the tireless zeal of the missionaries. The frequent instruction given to the catechumens, in addition to the good example of the recent converts, attracts the idolatrous Indians (and unbelievers) to the joys of Jesus Christ and they ask in earnest to receive baptism.

  Great care is given to the education of children, and good order reigns everywhere due to the attention and care of the principal officers of the Company.

  – EXTRACT FROM A PAMPHLET DISTRIBUTED

  AMONG INVESTORS IN PARIS, c.1719

  AS WAS CUSTOMARY, the ship docked first at Dauphin Island. As they eased slowly into the small harbour, the sun was low, slanting into their eyes. The sea was a dark green, the island no more than a humped black rock against the fading sky. By the time that the anchor was set and the sails brought down, night had fallen. They did not go ashore. In the previous months, as the trickle of colonists had become a stream, Dauphin Island was become something of a shanty town, a tumble of temporary cabins thrown up for the new arrivals. Some had waited months for boats that might take them to their concessions. In the morning a sloop would take them to Mobile. Until then, they would be safer to remain aboard the Baleine.