Savage Lands

by Clare Clark

‘You shall not care for me so much,’ Marguerite said, her face averted as she dragged a recalcitrant branch from the tangle of the undergrowth. ‘When the baby comes.’

  ‘But of course I shall care for you.’

  Marguerite shook her head.

  ‘I shall not be the one you like best.’

  ‘A heart is not like a melon,’ Elisabeth said softly. ‘You shall not have a smaller slice because there are more to feed.’

  ‘You will like the baby better,’ Marguerite insisted. ‘Because it grew in you.’

  ‘As you do. Every single day.’

  Marguerite frowned.

  ‘You will not remember the new master’s garden in Mobile. You were only an infant then. But it was a fine sight, especially in spring. He loved plants. Everywhere he went, he gathered new ones to plant in his garden. Some he grew from seeds that hold the tiny plant all curled up inside their shell and have only to be planted in the earth like maize. But others he grew from cuttings, which were the limbs of plants already half grown. It made no difference. They flourished just the same.’

  ‘It does not hurt the plant, to take its limbs?’

  ‘Not at all. They grow another.’

  ‘The master cannot grow another arm.’

  ‘That is true.’

  Marguerite glared at Elisabeth.

  ‘So plants are not like people. Not like at all.’

  Something sharp rose up in Elisabeth then, burning the back of her throat. Marguerite’s shoulders squared, her frown deepening. Elisabeth thought of Jeanne, of her quiet endurance and her low voice and her strong hands like a cap around the child‘s head as she suckled. Bending down, she looped the hemp rope around the stack of wood and hoisted it onto her shoulder.

  ‘No,’ she agreed softly. ‘Plants are not like people. Unless they dally so long that they put down roots. Come now, my little chickweed, quickly, shake the earth from your feet. The sun is low and it is almost supper time.’

  The first pains came as she stood knee-deep in the river, the washboard between her knees. Elisabeth gasped and staggered backwards, slipping on the weed-slick stones so that the washboard fell with a splash into the water. The pain crept backwards as, whimpering, she gathered the half-rinsed laundry into her arms, then reached down to retrieve it. Beneath the slab of sodden linen, the skin of her stomach was hot and taut as a drum. She stumbled to the bank, hauling the washboard behind her. She knew enough of labour to know that she was not necessarily begun. Many times she and Guillemette had been called to a lying-in to find the child not yet descended and, though she was not certain, she did not think herself ready. A mother on the verge of giving birth complained of the weight of the child upon her bladder, while the readied head obliged her to walk with an awkward splay-legged gait. Elisabeth had not yet suffered such discomforts. And still she could not contain the fear that rose in her and the clamour, the voices and the shadows that she had swallowed for so long that she had grown accustomed to the ache of them always in her throat. They crowded in on her, the noise of them raucous in her ears, and she held onto the bank with both hands, winding the grass around her hands in hanks and pressing the roots of her fingers hard into the dirt.

  She did not know afterwards how long she had sat on the bank of the river, only that when the pains had passed and she dragged herself shakily back to the settlement, the mud had spread like a brown bruise across her bundle of wet clothes. Though she banged the pots together to drive it off, still the fear soured her breath, drying her mouth as she built up the fire and prepared supper, and the past was wild in her.

  Later that night, when Fuerst went out to check on the Negroes, she reached up to the shelf above the table and took down Montaigne. Like them, he too had aged. His covers were nibbled and frayed, marked with a waxy grease, and mould bubbled beneath the damp leather bindings, but the weight of the book was solid in her hands. She pressed the softened corners of the book against her belly, holding it close, her fingers moving over the familiar swirls and dimples pressed into its tooled cover. Then, tugging the bench closer to the fire, she opened the book and began to read.

  She could not reach him. His words were there, unchanged, dry and sharp and clear, but though she knew he stood before her as he always had, without dissemblage or disguise, she could not reach him. The print danced and blurred before her eyes, but even as she strained for it, it bore her away, a relentless crush of fear and recollection like a mudslide that stole the ground from beneath her feet and pulled her under. When she closed her eyes, pressing her fingers into their unyielding jelly, the book slipped from her lap and fell to the floor.

  When Fuerst returned to the cabin he found her hunched upon the bench, her arms around her shins, her thighs pressed into the swell of her belly. On the floor beside her sprawled a heavy volume, open and face down. He picked it up, smoothing out its crumpled pages, and set it on the table. He waited, observing his wife. She did not move. Gently he touched her shoulder.

  ‘Come to bed,’ he said.

  She lifted her head, staring dazedly at her husband.

  ‘The baby,’ he asked. ‘Is it coming?’

  She shook her head, then let it fall onto her knees. The fire was almost out.

  ‘Then come to bed.’

  He patted her awkwardly and turned away. Elisabeth closed her eyes and the darkness was splashed red, livid with the coals of the dying fire. Behind her, her husband dropped his boots to the ground, one thud and then another.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she whispered, and the words hung in the silence like smoke.

  ‘You are afraid,’ Fuerst said quietly. ‘It is to be expected. But we have worked hard and you are strong. God shall be merciful.’

  Elisabeth pressed her hands against her face.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said again into the cup of her fingers, and in the stretched-out scream in her chest the words closed round her heart like a noose.

  The tallow lamp spat and guttered, coughing scrawls of black. Elisabeth pinched it out, the red eye of the wick sharp against her thumb. It was a dark night, the moon no more than a slit in the sky. As the fire paled to ash, Fuerst’s breathing slowed and deepened, the rasp of it scoring the darkness. He was a wary man and cautious, but there was no fear in him. Already he was of this place, his feet growing down into the earth. She might try to pull him out just to see the torn-out hole he left, but she could not uproot him.

  She breathed in, filling herself with his exhalations, but still the child moved in her, and the fear, and she did not know which was the stronger. When the dreams came, she hardly knew herself asleep. A part of her watched them from the other side of wakefulness so that she thought always that she might wake, that she could make herself wake, but she did not. She could not stop them. They came like contractions, iron hoops around the barrel of her to drive the memories from her, each one stark and sudden as though lit by lightning, outlined in black, the colour all bleached out, and there was no pity in them.

  When the news of his death had reached Mobile, the commandant had come himself to break it to her. She had opened the door and seen the solemnity in his thin, boyish face, and she had held on to the jamb of the door with both hands and told him she could not see him. She had thought that if he did not say it–

  He was dead. She had watched him go and she had said nothing. The loss of him stole her balance from her, filling and filling her with a bitter black brine that rose up to choke her, roaring in her ears. Day after day, in the room with the stain the shape of France beneath the window, she had crouched over the swell of her belly, holding in her arms the child, oyster-pale, that stirred inside her, the child whose faithless father was dead and whose sibling at that moment curled like a reflection in another woman’s womb.

  And then, one heat-clogged afternoon, the click of Perrine Roussel’s tongue against the roof of her mouth. Elisabeth tried to twist her mind away from the pursed lips, the pale peel of potato from her rough red hands, but the words came clearly, nails bang
ed into wood. After all you have done for that boy. At least he has honoured his obligations and has not tried to deny his part.

  Auguste standing in his doorway, his grave eyes, the defeated sag of his shoulders. The weight of the child like a bruise on her spine.

  Jean-Claude is innocent. The slave’s child is mine.

  The impossibility of it, stuck like a scream in her throat. He had gone north and she had said nothing. The trap is set. She had watched him go and she had known, and she had said nothing.

  The pain in her side as she ran, the slash of breath in her throat. Okatomih’s child was not his. Guillemette’s words in her head all the comfort she could summon. Belladonna is a poison, of course. An excess of it will kill a man.

  Elisabeth twisted away, turning her face from the press of memory, but it was upon her now and the force of it too strong for her. The yard, wide as a windless sea. The squint of the sun. The heat-swollen latch of the wood store that stuck. The frenzy in her, stronger than fear, stronger even than grief. The rush of saliva into her mouth, the hunger and the smell of cypress. The tilt of stacked wood beneath her feet, the frantic clatter of the logs that covered the wide-open mouth of the barrel. There had been so many. The weight of them and her clumsiness, the splinters beneath her fingernails, her groping fingers closing on air. The clawing off of the rags, the prising out of the stopper. And then the clatter of the earthenware jar against her teeth. Its thick rough lip, like scouring sand. The blessed sticky rush of the liquid down her chin. The rough texture of linen against her greedy tongue.

  The images slowed, fragments now, stretched and misshapen. The cold of the cabin floor. The convulsions. Blood spreading in a black pool. The cold spreading through her, and the pain emptying her, scouring her. The light fading, leaching out colour. The table, the chest, the basket vague and flat, like smudged charcoal sketches. Then darkness. Such darkness, filling eyes, ears, mouth, closing over her like a frozen sea. Down, down, into the abyss. Terror like the table in the darkness, there but not there, but for now a desperate, blessed numbness that was almost peace.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Sinners to everlasting damnation. The end.

  Thanks be to God.

  Then at the end of darkness a wash of grey light behind her eyelids like dirty water, and birdsong. A dog barking. The ordinariness of it, as though death were no different from what had gone before. Except for the fear. The fear spreading through her, and the cold. So cold. The convulsion of shivering that set the pain to screaming in her. The sickening flutter of her heart in her chest. The draught of sour breath in her mouth, the gluey stick of her throat as she swallowed. Through the fringed slit of her eyelids the familiar shapes of the table, the chest and the basket.

  She lived. Oh, God, she still lived.

  After that, only the fainting agony of movement and the meaty grey-blue string between her legs and at the end of it, of her, the tiny grey shape. Blood-blacked, empty, fingers stiffened into bird feet and bones hollow light, wrapped around with skin.

  A girl.

  Perhaps she screamed. The echo of it seemed to hang in the darkness as, wrenching herself from sleep, Elisabeth pulled her legs from the bed and sat up. She hunched over, stiff and very cold, waiting for the sobs to slow. Then, stumbling a little, she rose to her feet and crossed the cabin to the door. It was not yet dawn. The starless night pressed black against the porch, matted with shapes and shadows. She closed the door and leaned against it, rubbing her arms with her hands. On the other side of the cabin, swaddled in a twist of rugs, Fuerst sighed and turned over.

  Afterwards, from pity or perhaps as punishment, Perrine had told her that they had found her in the street. She was half naked and covered in blood and in her arms she held the dead child, its birth string still uncut. She would not let it go. When they took it from her, she screamed as though the Devil himself was in her.

  The delirium had persisted for days. Some of the women took it in turns to sit with her, but they could not quieten her. She tore at her sheets, clawed her body, bit her lips and fingers till they bled. She raved and screamed, pleading with Death not to abandon her. Childbed fever, they said, and they had sucked their teeth and waited for her to die.

  She had not died. On the seventh day the fever broke. Anne Conaud called it a miracle from God. Most of the other wives shared the opinion of Renée Gilbert that there was strength in madness. But they could not abandon her. There were too few of them for that.

  Around the edges of the night, the darkness was beginning to fade. In the grainy light of early morning, the ordinary outlines of the cabin gathered themselves together. The bench, the chest, the scrubbed wood table. There was something on the table, a dark, square shape. Slowly Elisabeth crossed the room. She did not pick the book up but she set her hands upon it. Then she placed them on her belly and closed her eyes.

  Whether offering or blind error, the thrum of life had persisted in her. It was no longer hers alone. She carried in her womb a child whose father was a good man. Though it was six years since she had read them, the words returned to her then and the face of the man who spoke them, who was a good man also. What a wonderful thing it is that drop of seed, from which we are produced, bears in itself the impressions, not only of the bodily shape, but of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers!

  Picking up the book as gently as if it were a child, Elisabeth closed her eyes, touching her lips gently to the greasy leather. Then, setting it carefully on the table, she knelt before the fire, readying herself for the new day.

  FROM THE PLANTATION they took the pirogue south as far as New Orleans, where they would find a pettyaugre to take them the rest of the way. When they reached the settlement, there were several small craft tied up at the muddy dock and, beyond the bluff heaped with the carcasses of cypress trees, the mud-slick hulk of a new embankment.

  They walked up to the place together. At the rear of the square, a makeshift market had been set up where savages laid out deerskins to display their wares. Above them a faint breeze toyed with the flag of the House of Bourbon, three golden lilies on a white ground.

  ‘Business is good?’ Auguste asked one of the traders.

  The savage shrugged. She had a dark streak pricked across her nose and another down the middle of her chin, and she wore several necklaces of kernel stones, so highly polished that they resembled porcelain.

  ‘White men come,’ she said. ‘Our village is moved to the shores of the lake so that they may have land to cultivate.’

  When they had bought bread, they picked their way to the de Chesse cabin. The storms had come late this year, bringing down cabins and flooding all of the lower part of town. The ditches that surrounded the cabins, dug for drainage, were dark with stagnant water that gave off a powerful and noxious stink. Even the lanes were criss-crossed with planks to prevent the unwary walker from sinking to their knees in the mire. Where the cleared area ended, on rue de Conti, the marshy cypress groves pressed forward, shrubs and saplings like foot soldiers advancing across the narrow trenches. It was too wet, too densely wooded, for grazing. Instead, the settlement’s animals roamed the town, as aimless and excitable as the men who, late at night, staggered from the illegal drink shops that pushed up like weeds across the settlement, insinuating themselves into the cracks of sheds and stables.

  Close to the de Chesse cabin, they were obliged to wait their turn while a large pig idled between the ramshackle dwellings, his chin bearded with mud.

  ‘And yet the town seems a little less wretched than I remember it,’ Vincente said, looking about her at the sloping cabins propped in their plots of slimy weeds.

  Auguste smiled.

  ‘The savages say it is impossible to return to a place, even after a short absence, and find it quite unchanged,’ he said. ‘They say that time alters the shape of a man’s eyes.’

  Later that day he went in search of news. The taverner, a red-faced man with unsteady hands and eyes like sucked bonbons, poured Auguste a pot of
beer, and slopping it a little as he set it on the splintery counter, assured him that despite the season sloops continued to run between New Orleans and Mobile.

  ‘Bringing up the commandant’s favourites, aren’t they?’ he said sagely. ‘Not to mention materials. You should see the house he’s building himself here. Never saw nothing like it.’

  ‘The commandant is here often?’

  ‘Most always. Happened by him just yesterday, in fact. Though naturally I keeps my head down. Not what you might call a martinet, is he, the commandant, but all the same, best not to stick your neck out, if you knows what I mean.’

  The next day Auguste arranged their passage on to Mobile. He was not fool enough to hope that his brief presence in New Orleans would pass unremarked but, like the taverner, he had no wish to summon attention to it. Besides, his wife was eager to return home. He watched her as she stood at the bow of the pettyaugre, straining forward over the yellow river like a horse in a harness, and it pleased him to oblige her.

  A week later they were settled once more in the house on rue Dugué, their arrival so swiftly effected that no word of it preceded them. At the marketplace on the first day, Vincente saw them near the baker’s shop, their heads bent together as they awaited its opening, and the anticipation in her swelled like a bubble as she hastened towards them. She waited until she was almost upon them before calling out to them, and it was only when they turned, their mouths pulled wide with pleasure and astonishment, that she saw the stranger among them and the smile on her face and the swell of anticipation in her shrivelled, as though they had been sprinkled with salt.

  The wives gathered round her, bombarding her with questions, and though Vincente did her best to answer, she could think only of the stranger in their midst. She was young, younger perhaps than Vincente, and her grey dress was faded and worn. As the women talked, her eyes flickered from one face to another, as though she would pull them to her with the force of her concentration. But when she looked at Vincente, her eyes were narrow, her mouth pinched.