Savage Lands

by Clare Clark

  ‘Elisabeth Savaret,’ he said quietly.

  She looked up and her arms fell slack and the shirt that she held reached out its white arms and wrapped itself like a shy child about her legs. The harsh light inked the lines on her face in black. He felt the pull of her on his heart like a memory of childhood, sharp and wistful. Then, briskly, she plunged the shirt into the water, rinsed it, wrung it and threw it on top of the other wet linens in the large basket.

  ‘What is it that you want?’ she asked, and there was no softness in it. The Rhinelander woman glanced at Elisabeth. Then, setting the washboard more firmly against her legs, she resumed her vigorous rubbing.

  The urge to walk away was overpowering. But he thought of Vincente and of the commissary and of the years stretching away into the forever, each one scrawled on and smudged with the spidery marks of his own hand, and he sucked saliva into his dry mouth and set upon his tongue the words he had so many times rehearsed.

  ‘I cannot do it, Elisabeth.’

  ‘You gave your word.’

  ‘I have tried to stay away, I swear it, but I cannot.’

  ‘I have nothing to offer you.’

  ‘I have no right to ask this, I know, but–’ He faltered, swallowed. ‘Elisabeth. I must know my future.’

  ‘Your future?’ She gave a choked little laugh. ‘I should have thought it plain.’

  ‘Then tell me. I do not want your forgiveness. I could not endure it. But I have to know.’

  ‘Your future.’ Elisabeth bent over, working the shirt roughly in the water. ‘You shall grow indigo. Unless the crop fails. In which case, you shall grow poor.’

  ‘You would grant me that?’

  ‘You are the master here. You may grow poor without my authority.’

  Auguste was silent. The Rhinelander woman sang tunelessly to herself as she ground the linen in her hands against the washboard.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Walk with me a while.’

  ‘I cannot. We shall never be done.’

  ‘Please.’

  Elisabeth hesitated. Then she sighed. Wiping her hands on her apron, she waded out of the water, unbundling her skirt so that it fell once more around her ankles.

  ‘Quickly, then,’ she said without smiling, and she untied her apron and slipped her feet into a pair of worn-out moccasins.

  They walked a little way along the bank to the place where the canes grew so thickly that a man could not pass.

  ‘You are pregnant,’ Auguste said. ‘I did not know.’

  Elisabeth did not reply. She held herself tightly across the chest, her sharp elbows aloft, staring out over the bayou. Auguste looked at the swell of her belly beneath her arms, and he felt again the echo of the old, familiar twist in his heart and he told himself that he was glad.

  ‘I cannot forgive you,’ she said at last.

  ‘I cannot forgive myself.’

  ‘Nor could I endure your forgiveness.’

  ‘Mine? What need have you of mine? If I had only–’

  ‘Don’t. I – don’t.’

  There was a tightness in his chest, as though she wrung water from his lungs. The frogs screamed. Above the forest the sky was white, the morning’s blueness quite bleached out. Elisabeth reached out, placing one hand on a stalk of cane, and he saw how the cane and her finger resembled one another, tough and fleshless with prominent knuckles, lined in brown.

  ‘I shall not stay,’ he said at last.

  Elisabeth’s face was shuttered, her eyes blank.

  ‘It is your plantation,’ she said.

  ‘I should not have come.’

  ‘You gave your word.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But then I suppose you are the master now,’ she said bitterly. ‘And the master does as he pleases, is that not so?’

  ‘No. You know that is not true.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘He does as you please.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  He heard the danger in her voice and the pain, but he did not heed them. He had nothing left to lose.

  ‘Don’t what? I cannot change what is, Elisabeth. You have the letter.’

  He watched her. She stood quite still, though there was a quiver beneath her skin like a deer.

  ‘The letter?’

  ‘I do not ask your clemency. I – I have no right to ask anything of you at all. I have no right to be here, standing here, before you. But I – I have a wife now who depends on me. For her sake, for mine, I must know. Shall you use it?’

  ‘Use it?’

  ‘I should not blame you. It is what I should do, I think. If I were you.’

  Elisabeth raised her head, her face crooked with shock and grief.

  ‘Did you, oh, God, Auguste,’ she cried. ‘Did you think that I would keep it?’

  Auguste stared at her.

  ‘I–’

  ‘When the paper caught it – it rose into the air. As if it were alive. The flame was green.’

  She closed her arms around herself. So that the pointed teeth of her spine rose beneath her dress. She was silent a long time. Then she raised her head.

  ‘It does not matter what happens next, don’t you see? He is dead because of me.’

  ‘You know that is not so. By the time – it was too late.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There was nothing you could have done. My letter – you weren’t there. How could you have stopped him if you weren’t there?’

  Elisabeth’s fingers pressed into the dents between her ribs.

  ‘You promised you would not come,’ she whispered. ‘You gave me your word.’

  ‘Oh, Elisabeth, I am so very sorry.’

  His fingers reached out to her before he could stop them, and she recoiled as though he burned her, turning her back to him.

  ‘Goodbye, Elisabeth,’ he said. ‘We shall not meet again, I swear it.’

  She did not turn. He plaited his fingers together, pressing down hard upon his knuckles.

  ‘Forgive me. I should not have come.’

  ‘You may do as you wish,’ she said dully. ‘The plantation is yours.’

  ‘It is my wife’s. And she prefers the town.’

  He waited. Still Elisabeth did not turn.

  ‘We shall leave tomorrow. The situation with the Chetimacha shall hold. I have a little money and fair credit. I shall send more slaves. And when your husband’s indenture is complete, I shall help him secure his own grant. He is a good man and a hard worker.’

  The evenness of the words, the expediency of them, steadied him.

  ‘It shall be a good crop,’ he said. ‘I am indebted to you both.’

  He had lived many years among the savages. Silence was a habit with him. And still the words flooded his mouth like spit.

  ‘Your own farm. There shall be profit in it,’ he said. ‘A future. For you. For your child. Perhaps at last we shall learn to belong here.’

  He looked out over the bayou into the tangled thickets of reeds where the snakes coiled and the black earth sucked at a man’s legs to pull him under, and he thought of Vincente, who had eaten from his fingers and had learned to milk a cow.

  ‘It is not Paris,’ he murmured.

  Elisabeth closed her eyes, her hands upon her belly.

  ‘It is endurable if you are quiet,’ she said. ‘If you stay still.’

  Auguste was filled with pity and a powerful desire to be gone from her.

  ‘The girl,’ he said. ‘The look of her.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t know how you endure it.’

  ‘Do you imagine that without her I would forget?’

  ‘Perhaps if we purchased her, took her with us? So that you–’

  ‘No. She wants to stay.’

  ‘And you? What do you want?’

  Elisabeth shook her head, her lips pressed into a tight twist of a smile.

  ‘I thought she was my punishment.’

  Auguste was silent.

  ‘It was done,’ he sa
id at last. ‘Before I wrote the letter, it was done. I should never have – you could not have stopped it.’

  ‘I could have made him stay.’

  ‘How, when the letter came too late?’

  ‘But it didn’t.’ Her face tightened, her jaw white as an alligator bone. ‘I went home that day. I got your letter. I knew. And I let him go.’

  Auguste stared at her. She stared back.

  ‘I thought–’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Neither spoke for a long time. Beyond the canebrake the river sighed.

  ‘I never should have sent it,’ he said finally. ‘There was nothing you could have done. He betrayed the colony. They would not have let him live.’

  She stared at him with pity and a kind of weary contempt.

  ‘Does that comfort you?’

  ‘He betrayed you. He betrayed us all.’

  ‘And we him.’

  ‘We had to.’

  ‘Did we?’

  Auguste did not answer. The frogs clamoured, filling his head with noise. Elisabeth turned away from him, smoothing her apron over her swollen belly, and suddenly the breath caught in his throat like a bone. He thought of another white day, when Elisabeth had stood before him on his threshold. She had moved her hands like that then, tracing the curve of an infant.

  ‘The child,’ he stammered, and he shook his head, his lips clumsy. ‘The slave’s child. That day, the day you came to me, the day you asked me, asked me straight out–’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘You knew the child was his and I lied. Oh, my God, Elisabeth, if I had not lied–’

  ‘No!’

  Her knuckles were white, her face tight. He stared at the water, the shock opening slowly inside him.

  ‘I must get back,’ she said finally. ‘The laundry.’

  She walked ahead of him. His legs were unsteady and several times he stumbled on the rough ground. The strings of her apron were frayed, the skirt patched. Strands of hair escaped from the loose knot pinned at the back of her head and clung damply to the nape of her neck. Above her collar the skin was burned brown from the sun.

  When they were almost at the laundry place, he reached out, catching her arm.

  ‘Elisabeth. Please.’

  She twisted away from him, her back arched with reluctance.

  ‘I – when I – if I had known–’ The words burned his throat.

  ‘Let me go,’ she said softly.

  He hesitated. Then he released her and she walked away. Above the frayed strings of her apron, an oval of sweat darkened the stuff between her shoulder blades. She did not turn back.

  THE NEXT DAY, when the sun was up, he took Vincente away. He did not explain why they were leaving so suddenly. He said only that he had done what he had come for, and that while the Rhinelanders were there to manage the concession, there was no requirement for them to stay. At Vincente’s request, they rolled up the carpet with the pink flowers and wrapped the looking glass and the walnut table in skins so that they might not be damaged and packed up the boxes of linens and stored them all in the bottom of the pirogue.

  When it was almost time to go, Vincente walked down to the lower settlement. Nellie held the infant up for her to kiss and Vincente took the heavy child into her arms and held him close, feeling the sticky dampness of his cheek against her neck. By the smoking ash pit, Elisabeth rinsed beans. Vincente handed back the child to Nellie and walked across the yard. The water in the crock was grey, leprous with bubbles.

  ‘I came to say goodbye,’ she said.

  Elisabeth nodded and wiped her forehead on her sleeve.

  ‘Shall you manage here all right?’ Vincente asked. ‘With the child coming?’

  ‘I have Nellie.’

  ‘All the same–?’

  ‘We shall manage. There is peace with the Chetimacha, at least.’

  ‘If it holds.’

  Elisabeth gave her a look Vincente did not understand.

  ‘My husband thinks that the English shall not cease in their troublemaking, not now so many people come,’ Vincente said. ‘He thinks they shall do all they can to stir up the savages against us.’

  Taking up a stick, Elisabeth poked the ash pit, her eyes narrowed against the stinging smoke.

  ‘Should you have come here,’ she asked quietly, ‘if you had known?’

  Vincente watched as Elisabeth set a lid upon the crock and, squatting, lowered it into the smouldering pit. White flecks of ash clung to her skirts like tiny butterflies.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘I know well from what it is I flee but not what it is that I seek,’ Elisabeth said softly.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘They say that in Paris fathers tell their incorrigible children, “One word more and I shall send you to the Mississippi!”’

  ‘When I left Paris everyone was to be a millionaire. Shopkeepers took seats at the opera and coachmen bought chateaux and their own equipages.’ Vincente shrugged. ‘It is only another kind of madness.’

  The two women were silent, gazing at the submerged pot.

  ‘I should go,’ Vincente said at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps – if you are ever in the town?’

  Elisabeth nodded. Briskly she wiped her hands on her apron.

  ‘Marguerite?’ she called, and her voice cracked a little. ‘Marguerite, come here! It is time to bid the mistress farewell.’

  The child did not answer.

  ‘Goodbye then,’ Vincente said, and she held out her hand.

  Elisabeth hesitated. Then she took it.

  ‘Godspeed. May the Lord keep you safe.’

  ‘And you also.’

  Gathering up her skirts, Vincente hastened away up the bluff. Behind her Elisabeth stood amid the broken-down shacks, her hands upon her belly, and called out again and again for the savage girl and, in the shade, roused by her cries, a yellow dog put back its head and howled into the thickening day.

  THE YEAR DREW to a close and still the baby held. Elisabeth grew large. Without Jeanne there was much work and little time for lessons. The slate grew dusty on the shelf and her own books beside it. When they were established at the new place, Elisabeth thought, they would begin again. There might be money then, a little. They would be working on their own account at last. In the spring the period of Fuerst’s indenture would come to an end, and in accordance with the terms of his contract, the Mississippi Company had granted him a five-arpent concession on the Bayou Saint-Jean on cleared land that had until recently been a savage village. The soil was rich and Fuerst would be permitted to purchase slaves from the Company on two years’ credit, though the scarcity of Negroes had pushed the price of them sky-high. The sun had burned a furrow between Fuerst’s eyebrows, but sometimes as he walked to the fields he hummed, very softly, under his breath, a song from the old country. This would be their last winter at Burnt-canes.

  Meantime she kept Marguerite close. She showed her how to fashion cloth from the bark of the mulberry tree and buttons from the plates of armour beneath the alligator’s thick skin just as Jeanne had once showed her, how the sharp-toothed jawbone of a garfish made for the finest comb and the bones of choupic and patassa the best needles. And when the weight of memory pressed down too strongly upon her, she taught the child the colonist’s skills, the dipping of tallow lamps and the manufacture of soap and butter and soft cheese. It was Marguerite’s duty to milk the cow, and the girl had grown quickly and fiercely fond of the animal, giving her a name of her own in the custom and language of her own people. It had startled Elisabeth at first to hear the child calling out to the beast in the unfamiliar tongue. The child was so young and no one at the plantation spoke to her in Yasoux. She had thought the girl would have forgotten it.

  She refused to think upon her own confinement. Fuerst did not speak of it, and on the few occasions that Marguerite pressed her on the subject, her answer
s were brief and discouraging. It was only when her time was very close that she summoned Nellie and explained to her the rudiments of midwifery. Nellie listened closely, her brow furrowed with the effort of it, repeating Elisabeth’s precepts after her as though she swore an oath.

  ‘But what if I forget?’ the Rhinelander asked several times, tugging anxiously on her fingers. ‘What if when it happens I forget?’

  ‘You shan’t,’ Elisabeth assured her. ‘And if you do, I shall be there to remind you. I do not intend to leave you there alone.’

  Nellie laughed then, a frightened scrape of a giggle, and her red hands twisted into knots. She wore her own son in a hammock of cloth tied over one shoulder so that she might carry him with her while she worked. He stirred and Nellie placed a hand upon him, soothing him with a low, wordless chirrup. Elisabeth thought of the infant Marguerite then and of the other infants, the nameless wraiths like midnight shadows that darkened the darkest parts of her, and she put her hands upon her own belly and closed her eyes, so that she might collect herself.

  Sometimes as she worked, Elisabeth heard the steady thump of Jeanne pounding corn, but when she looked up there was no one there. She looked at the covered mortar, the paddle propped idle against the wall, and she bent her head and counted the thumps of her own heart quiet in her chest. When evening came and the mosquitoes gathered in the darkening sky, the long shadows over the yard had the shape of her. Elisabeth watched Marguerite as she crooned to the cow, and she wondered what the child thought of and what she saw when she was all alone, but she did not speak of it. Sometimes she would look up from what she was doing to find the child looking at her from beneath the tangle of her hair and she would smile and hold her gaze until the child blinked and bit her lip, her own smile pressed tight into the corner of her mouth. It was enough. They had lived with scarcity as long as they could remember. The habit of hoarding was strong in all of them.

  It startled Elisabeth, then, when the child spoke to her of the baby. They were gathering wood for tinder and, near her time, Elisabeth was required to pause frequently to catch her breath.