Savage Lands

by Clare Clark

  ‘Yes. We are to take pirogues from New Orleans. I am afraid you shall find it uncomfortable.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a pause. Though Vincente had grown accustomed to them, the still and silent spaces when it seemed that her husband slipped out of his skin, they still disquieted her. Her mother’s disparaging voice echoed in her head, deriding his poor breeding and the unnaturalness of his conduct. Anyone, she sneered, would think he was not French at all. Vincente sighed, smiling up at him.

  ‘Shall we board?’ she suggested.

  Clasping her arm with his good hand, he steadied her as she stepped aboard. His grip was firm and, when he released her, the impression of it lingered on the fine stuff of her sleeve. She followed him towards the stern of the pettyaugre, noticing the way that his coat puckered over the warp of his maimed shoulder. She could not look at it, not in the light, but her fingers knew the jutting lumps where the bones had healed awkwardly, the waxy smoothness of his scars.

  ‘Are you truly not afraid?’ Gabrielle Borret had whispered the day before, when the wives came together to bid Vincente farewell. ‘So far from the town and the safety of the garrison, shall you not be terrified out of your wits?’

  The other women had hushed her then and talked of the ordinary business of the town, the rebuilding of the church and the seventh confinement of Germaine Vessaille. It was only as they came to leave that Vincente confessed to them that she was indeed afraid. They were kind to her then. They held her hands and patted her arm and told her that she was fortunate. Her husband spoke the savage tongues, knew the strangeness of their ways. He was a friend to them, as much one of them as it was possible for a white man to be. She would surely be safe with him.

  Vincente was grateful. She wept a little and clung to them and allowed herself to be comforted. It was only after they had gone that she remembered their reassurances and wept again. In the town her husband passed for a Frenchman. He ate like a Frenchman and dressed like a Frenchman and kept company with Frenchmen with as good a grace as he could muster. In the town she was a wife and he a husband, a white-skinned man who, for all his peculiarities, was not so very different from all the others. But among the savages? Who knew what kind of a savage he himself might become among the savages?

  The pettyaugre began slowly to pull away from the dock, the water rolling out from beneath its stern, the pilings of the dock easing away. The sails slapped. The clamour of the quayside grew fainter. In the marketplace the women would be greeting each other, exchanging the news of the day. Vincente held tightly to the bench with both hands. The prospect of the voyage appalled her and yet, now, as she stood watching the water stretch between her and all that was familiar, she knew why she had come. She thought of Auguste Guichard, who was hers in law, speaking in another language, walking over another land, smiling at a woman who was not his wife. Elisabeth Savaret. He had loved her. He had been no more than a boy, the wives had declared, but not one had said it was not true. Auguste was to go to the plantation where Elisabeth Savaret, whom he had loved, lived with her slave, who had been Auguste’s concubine, and with his bastard child, whose name was written in the parish records. What place would there be for her in such a ménage, who was only his wife?

  In the town, with the wives about her, she knew her fears groundless. She told herself that the threads of the past were gossamer-fine against the solid chains of matrimony, and she believed it to be true, in the town. Mobile was not Paris, but like Paris it was arranged in the French manner, a grid of lanes and hours and customs that might be depended upon to remain unaltered.

  Not in the wilderness. In the wilderness savages lurked in the shadows and the prodigious forest nosed and slid and crept and coiled upward without ceasing. The licentious suck of it rotted the roots of the trees and pushed blindly up through the decaying luxuriance of its half-digested self, an eruption of snaking coils and crude excrescences bursting from the thick black slime. Its fecundity was as grotesque as it was shameless. It throbbed in the ceaseless thrum of the cicadas, in the suck and gasp of the reed-choked bayou. It draped itself from the trees, smearing their trunks with velvet, hanging in gluttonous hanks from their branches and exploding into pale, fleshy mushrooms at their roots. There was no shape to the forest, no order. There was only ungovernable profusion, blotting out the light, gorging on the lush compost of the dead.

  ‘I wish to learn the savage language.’

  Auguste stood at the bow of the pettyaugre, his elbows on the rail.

  ‘Sickness passed?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘Good.’

  They stood together in silence as the boat slid through the yellow water. Vincente fixed her gaze upon the dense brakes of cane that sprawled half submerged along the banks of the river. There was no way of telling where the water ended and land began.

  ‘I should like you to teach me,’ she said. ‘We could begin directly.’

  ‘There is no need of haste. You shall pick up the rudiments soon enough.’

  Vincente shook her head.

  ‘I shall require more than the rudiments,’ she said, and the certainty was bright and shiny in her.

  ‘In German perhaps. The men are mostly Rhinelanders.’

  ‘You misunderstand me. How else may I school the savages, if I cannot speak with them?’

  ‘School them?’

  ‘The children,’ she said tightly. ‘There are children on the plantation, are there not?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What?’ she cried. ‘Why do you look at me that way? Do you think me unable to do it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘The old crone schooled all the children of Mobile, red as well as white. They learned their catechisms, to write their alphabet, to count. Even the ones that were not half-French.’

  Auguste said nothing.

  ‘The savages are God’s creatures too, for all their ignorance,’ she said. ‘For as long as I am among them, it is my duty to bring them into His light. There are women at the plantation, are there not? Wives of the men. They shall help me. We shall make a school of it, you wait and see.’

  ‘I do not doubt it.’

  ‘Then why do you frown like that?’

  ‘I do not. I – it is unexpected, that is all.’

  ‘Unexpected?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not folly.’

  ‘No. Not folly.’

  They were silent, side by side. A sail cracked.

  ‘I thought you might help me,’ Vincente said, and without looking at her husband, she extended her arm and touched his sleeve.

  There was a long pause. Auguste sighed, stretching out his arms. Awkwardly Vincente took her hand away.

  ‘We run ahead of ourselves,’ he said, gripping the rail with both hands, and though his lips smiled, his eyes did not. ‘There is a great deal to be done before then.’

  THEY REACHED THE plantation in late afternoon. The sun was low and, in the rush-choked shallows, the bullfrogs sang a chorus harsh enough to split trees in two.

  ‘This is it?’ Vincente said faintly as the guides secured the pirogue.

  ‘This is it,’ said Auguste.

  He clambered from the canoe and stared up at the bluff, where a few ramshackle huts clustered together. There was a lightness in his head, a dizzy blend of apprehension and disbelief and a kind of exultation at his own recklessness.

  ‘But there is nothing here,’ Vincente said, and it was not the desolation in her voice but the calmness that caused him to stop and turn around. She sat in the pirogue, her arms about her, her head put back, taking in the forest, the rotting cabins, the crumbling bluff. The pirogue rocked slightly from side to side.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

  ‘The other plantations. They are like this one?’

  ‘One or two have mills, I think.’

  She bit her lip.

  ‘It is not like Paris,’ she said.

  He looked at her. His wi
fe. Her hair was unkempt, her face blotchy with insect bites. Since New Orleans the journey had been arduous and uncomfortable, and yet she had not once complained. She had said little, crouched in the prow of the pirogue with her skirts gathered tight around her, her hands clamped between her knees, her face shut tight against the secret terrors of the swamp.

  ‘I have never been to Paris,’ he replied softly.

  She blinked at him and looked away. At night she smuggled food into her baire and ate it alone, frantically, as though she might never eat again. He did not ask her why. She thought he did not know.

  They had lodged in the dilapidated old cabin in New Orleans that had belonged to de Chesse while they waited for the pirogue that was to take them north. It had been six months since Auguste’s last visit and already Bienville’s little town on the curve of the river was losing its struggle against the wilderness. Fearing inundation by flood, Bienville had had a ditch dug about the entire settlement and further ditches on all four sides of each and every lot. When spring came and the waters rose, the town had become an archipelago of tiny isles, each one with its own frail hut of cypress board, fenced all about with wild copses of weeds and stranded in a black and stagnant sea. The slimy ditches slithered with snakes and alligators, and at dusk swarms of mosquitoes rose from their slumbers to cast shadows against the violet sky. The aspect of the whole place was wretched.

  In New Orleans Auguste had dreamed he waited for Elisabeth in a canebrake. There was a river close by; he could hear the tumble and churn of it as it raced away. The cane shifted and snapped, bright with hidden eyes, but though he strained to see, he could see nothing. Beneath his feet the ground was swampy and treacherous. He wore no boots. The cold mud squelched between his toes. He stepped backwards, away from the sound of the river, but the mud grew deeper. It swallowed his feet, pulling him down. Auguste thrashed frantically but the mud was stronger. It closed over his knees, his thighs, his waist, his chest, crushing and squeezing, as muscular as a snake. It closed over his shoulders. There was mud in his mouth, his ears, his nostrils, the sockets of his eyes. He could see nothing but mud. Mud and the white gleam of the distant moon. And then the moon grew closer and it was not the moon but skulls, hundreds of them, thousands, constellations of skulls in an endless mud sky.

  ‘Monsieur?’ the savage guide murmured. ‘We unload?’

  The bayou whispered and sighed, its surface dappled gold by the tree-sieved sun. Auguste thought of a day many years ago when he stood upon the banks of another bayou and watched as the yellow water bore away the only world he knew. Somewhere on the bluff, Elisabeth was waiting for him. Slowly, the savage guide beside him, he walked back towards the pirogue. When he held out his hand to his wife, the ground was firm beneath his feet. Their land, for better or worse.

  ‘We are arrived,’ he said quietly. ‘Welcome home.’

  The sloping path led up the bluff into a dusty square of cleared ground. Auguste walked towards the largest of the cabins, whose wide roof offered some shade from the relentless sun. In a dilapidated pen at the far corner of the yard, a heat-stunned cow swayed, its mouth slack. There was no one about. Silence hung in the air, turning slowly in the sunlight. Auguste imagined her crossing the yard, her hair escaping its pins, her arms heavy with water or wood. So many times, backwards and forwards, the curve of her path worn into the earth. There was a bench against the wall of the largest hut, a plank bench like the one at the cabin on rue d’Iberville where she had liked to sit in the evenings, a knife in her hand, peeling vegetables as the evening shadows lengthened.

  She liked to see them before they saw her, she told him once, and after that he could never turn the corner without hoping for a glimpse of her as she was without him, without either of them, alone and unawares. For a time Babelon had taken to whistling to her, as if he summoned a dog. It amused him, perhaps her too. One evening when he whistled, she had leaped so eagerly from the bench to greet them that she had upset the basket and the vegetables had spilled onto the ground. She had laughed. She had kissed her husband and leaned into him, her shoulder against his arm, and as Auguste bent down to retrieve the scattered vegetables, he had been pierced by a loneliness that stripped the years from his bones and made a boy of him again.

  A lifetime ago.

  The Rhinelander was a good man, they said. A hard worker. He rapped with his knuckles upon the door of the largest cabin.

  ‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Hello?’

  No one came.

  ‘It is nearly harvest time,’ he called to Vincente. ‘They must all be in the fields. Wait here in the shade. I shall be back directly.’

  He walked across the yard that sloped away towards the forest. They had been a long time in the pirogue and his legs were unsteady. On the lower ground, he could see an enclosure of cypress, its door open, and, across the way, a second hustle of makeshift cabins. There was the burned circle of a fireplace, a broken palmetto broom, a blackened kettle hung from the forked branch of a twisted locust tree. Spread on bushes, a few scraps of linen dried in the sun. Close by, beneath the shade of a machonchi, which the settlers called the vinegar-tree, a woman snored, her head tumbled back, her legs and her mouth sprawled open.

  Not Elisabeth.

  He walked slowly down towards the sleeping woman. She was big with child, so big that her distended belly was like a great stone pinning her down. Her skirts were crumpled about her knees and her swollen ankles spilled from her shoes like rising dough. The shoes were worn-out moccasins, savage-made shoes, soft as butter and decorated with a pattern of tiny shells. He had wanted to procure some for Vincente, to replace the old and battered slippers she wore every day, but he did not know the size she wore and he had not known how to ask.

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘Madame?’

  The woman sucked on her teeth, twitching her face as though bothered by flies, but she did not wake. He stepped closer.

  ‘Madame?’

  The woman started. Clutching her huge belly, she cracked open one reluctant eye, her face pulled tight against the afternoon sun, and muttered something in an unfamiliar tongue. Auguste shook his head.

  ‘Parlez-vous français?’ he asked. ‘Or Mobilian, perhaps?’

  The woman yawned widely. Her teeth were large and uneven. Then she pointed, jabbing the air with her finger as though to pop the bubble of each spat-out word. Auguste heard the name of Fuerst.

  ‘Mme Savaret?’ he asked.

  ‘Frau Savaret?’

  The woman puffed out her lips, grumbling to herself as she dragged herself to her feet. Auguste thought of the Ouma chief who had told him once that there was no purpose in learning the white man’s tongue when every white man he had ever met wore his meaning clear upon his brow. As the woman shuffled splay-legged towards the woodpile, he turned and walked slowly back up the slope to Vincente.

  Fuerst was a small man, thickset, with tufted sandy hair and a frown burned into his brow. Alerted by one of Auguste’s savage guides of his new master’s arrival, he had hurried back from the fields to greet him. His face was red and smeared with dust.

  ‘Welcome, sir, madame, to your plantation,’ he had said in careful French. ‘I am only sorry there was no one here to greet you. You come at a busy time.’

  Soon afterwards, awkwardly but without apology, Fuerst had returned to the fields. The sun had already slipped down behind the trees when at last he brought the men in. Auguste waited, listening, still as a hunter. The men’s voices lent a bass note to the insect shrill of the forest. It reverberated in the soles of his feet and in the churn of his stomach. Below, in the lower camp, a fire smeared the gold hem of the sky with smoke. There was the sound of shouts, the bang of kettles. In their pen the cows lowed, impatient for evening milking.

  And still Auguste waited. It was some time before Fuerst appeared. Behind him limped the pregnant woman, a pot of food against her swollen belly.

  ‘You and your wife,’ Auguste said, keeping his voice steady. ‘
I hope you will eat with us?’

  ‘I shall, sir. But this is not my wife.’

  Clattering three wooden plates onto the bench, the woman served them in silence, banging her spoon hard against each plate in turn. Three plates of thin stew and beans, three cups of Indian beer. Fuerst bent his head over his supper. He did not eat like a man but fastidiously, his mouth moving in neat circles. When he had eaten, he set the bowl of his spoon precisely at the centre of the plate and pushed the plate away.

  ‘That wasn’t half bad,’ he said quietly.

  Vincente did not eat. Her face was pale, her eyes ringed with purple. When Auguste set down his spoon, she excused herself. He watched as she crossed the room, her head dropping forward with fatigue. Their cabin, Fuerst’s cabin, was small and bare but tolerably clean, the curtainless bed softened with a mattress of Spanish wig. It was not Paris, but then he was not exactly sure what it was about Paris that she might miss.

  Auguste took out his pipe and motioned to the foreman to do the same. Fuerst took a twist of grass from his pocket and set it in the flame of the tallow light until it caught. He lit his master’s pipe first and then his own. Neither spoke.

  ‘I hope you shall be satisfied,’ Fuerst said at last, exhaling, and though there was deference in his voice, there was pride also. ‘We have done what we can.’

  Auguste regarded the Rhinelander. He held his head low, bent forward from his muscular shoulders as though he meant to ram through life with the crown of his skull.

  ‘It will be a good crop?’ Auguste asked.

  ‘God willing.’

  ‘The men work hard?’

  ‘They know they must. It is indigo that will pay their wages.’

  ‘And the Chetimachas?’

  ‘A perpetual hazard. We fear attack daily.’

  There was a silence. Both men smoked, their exhalations sketching idle curlicues in the thick air.

  ‘Where is your wife?’ Auguste asked, more abruptly than he had intended.

  Fuerst was silent, contemplating the red glow in the bowl of his pipe.

  ‘I understood you had a wife,’ Auguste persisted.