Savage Lands (27 page)

‘Look at you,’ he said, and she stood and embraced him because the delight in his face was all hers. They laughed then, because her belly and his made too great a circumference to reach around, and he had bid her sit and she had waved away his solicitousness and she had called for Okatomih to bring out some of the beer that the slave brewed herself in the lean-to behind the kitchen hut.

It was then that she saw it, because he saw it too and his understanding was not slippery like hers but solid and alive, and it kicked out in the space between them, as blunt-boned and insistent as the infant in her belly. As the slave walked towards them, balancing the pitcher of beer, Elisabeth saw as the Jesuit saw, without evasion, the unmistakable indentations pressed into the air by the swell of the pitcher’s belly and beneath it the swell of the slave’s, round and neat and irrefutable as though it too had been fashioned from clay.

They did not speak as the slave bent down, setting the pitcher and the cups upon the floor. When she motioned to Elisabeth, offering to pour, it was the Jesuit who shook his head, who gestured at her to leave them. He sloshed the frothy liquid into two cups and, pushing one into her hand, raised his own to Elisabeth and, without speaking, tipped back his head and took a long, slow pull.

‘Damn, that stuff is good,’ he said, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

When Elisabeth did not reply, he bent down, picking up the book beside her chair and examining the spine.

‘Montaigne, eh?’ he said. ‘The great scourge of mendacity and humbug. This is yours?’

Elisabeth blinked. Then slowly she dragged her gaze up to the book in Rochon’s hand.

‘Mine? Yes. Yes, it is.’

‘Of course the name Michel comes from the Hebrew
Micha-el
meaning “he who is like God”. An ironic choice for a man whose maxim was “What do I know?”’ Rochon turned the book over in his hands. ‘An extraordinary man. Did you know that as a child Montaigne spoke neither Gascon nor French but Latin? His father arranged that he should hear nothing else for all his first years so that it might become his native tongue.’

‘Is that so?’ Elisabeth said faintly.

‘He never mastered the same fluency in Greek, though surely it was the School of Athens who influenced him most profoundly. Socrates, of course, but Plato too and Aristotle. It was from Aristotle that he understood that though the human soul may vary in quality, it does not change in nature. Though we may judge others and find them wanting, or ourselves for that matter, there is no human vice or virtue that is beyond the understanding of us all.’

Elisabeth closed her eyes, swaying a little so that the cup in her hand slopped.

‘
What a wonderful thing it is,
’ she murmured. ‘
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!
A wonderful thing indeed.’

‘Sit,’ the Jesuit instructed, taking her arm, and she obeyed, her knees buckling beneath her so that she half fell into the rocker. ‘Praise God that you are with child and near your time. Another’s situation cannot make it less so.’

He remained with her until the low sun slipped behind the trees and the air grew thin and chill. He had been in town some days, but he offered little explanation of his return except to say the commandant had called him back on business to do with the Chickasaw, who desired a mission set up among them. Instead he talked of Montaigne and the great Jansenist Pascal and of his time in the Jesuit seminary that had been both a prison and a vast new land. Elisabeth was grateful. The present tipped dizzyingly beneath her feet and she did not dare look down. Instead she rocked back and forth, her arms tight around her belly, and she held tight to her father who was dead and to the books she had read in Paris and the words piled a wall in her skull, to keep out the choke and hold her steady.

Rochon bid her goodnight regretfully, said he would come again. When he was gone, Elisabeth rocked a little but the chair hurt her back and her legs twitched and there was no stillness in her. She paced the cabin, picking things up and setting them back down. Several times she started towards the yard door only to turn away again after a few steps, her rush of resolve quite drained away.

When Jean-Claude returned for supper, it took all of her strength to stay her hands from shaking. She served him his meal in silence. She kept her eyes on the floor, unable to look into his face for fear that she would see him altered, a stranger, or, worse, that she would not. And still her agitation crackled in the darkening cabin, charging the air. She saw it in him, in the tautness of his back, the restiveness of his hands. Beneath the table his leg jigged up and down.

‘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.

T
he 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.’

‘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. Elsiabeth 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.’