Savage Lands (10 page)

At the threshold of the chief’s dwelling, Auguste hesitated. Only the elders of the village were permitted to enter without the chief’s express summons. Cautiously he peeped in. In the centre of the hut a cane torch burned, as thick around as a child, exhaling its black breath towards the roof. The silver-haired priest sat stiffly upon a pallet, propped against his wooden box, a book upon his lap. Across from him, his companion sprawled upon his stomach, picking at his teeth with a sharpened stick. A callused heel poked through the hole in his stocking.

The pastor looked up from his book.

‘Ah,’ he said, nodding. ‘Come. Come in.’

After months of hearing only the savage language, the French words came as a surprise. Auguste did as he was bid. He saw that the missioner’s left ear was torn, his cheek scored with half-healed gashes, and that the cloth that wrapped his arm was rusty with dried blood.

‘Do you have a message for the garrison, boy?’ The priest moved his arm and the pain showed on his face. ‘Anything that the commandant should know?’

Auguste hesitated.

‘At first harvest, Tunica warriors seized two squaws and took them as slaves,’ he said slowly, fumbling for the words in French. ‘The Ouma raided their village and broke the men’s heads.’

‘The usual savage caper, then. And the English? You have seen a white man?’

‘No, sir. You are the first.’

‘Is that so?’ The priest considered Auguste thoughtfully. ‘Then let us talk together a while. I am Père Jouvet. Perhaps you know of me, of my mission at the Nassitoches?’

Again Auguste shook his head. The priest pressed his lips together in a line.

‘You do well here, boy? You make headway with the savages?’ Auguste shrugged.

‘A man of few words. But you have mastered their language, have you not?’

Though the priest’s tone remained courteous, Auguste noted the pale flare of his nostrils, the tightening of his fingers in his lap. It would serve no purpose to anger him.

‘I listen carefully,’ Auguste said slowly. ‘And I watch.’

‘Good, good. A man cannot hope to civilise the savage unless he knows what he is up against, knows their language, shares their food.’

‘I don’t mind the food. The food is good.’

The priest frowned. His hand now lay open on his lap, palm upward, the forefinger lightly circling the pad of the thumb.

‘Do you know how I came to be injured? A young warrior of my mission desired his uncle buried in our church, though the dead man had never once set foot across its threshold. When I refused him, the warrior set upon me with arrows. One struck me here upon the ear, another in the arm. I tried to pull it out, but the head was stuck fast in the sinew and the stem broke off in my hand. It is there still.’

Auguste thought of the deer he had butchered the previous week. Where the arrow had struck the beast’s shoulder, its bloody flesh had been stuck with tiny shards of bone, like fishes’ teeth.

‘Do you pray to God?’ the priest asked.

The boy hesitated, then shook his head.

‘No, Father,’ he answered. ‘There is no church here.’

‘Not yet perhaps,’ the pastor replied. ‘But there shall be. There shall be churches all across this God-starved land. Until then you must worship God in the church of your heart. In the wilds of the forest it is easy to stray from the path of virtue, but remember this. The white man who turns his back upon the light of the Lord is no better than the idolatrous savage. Learn from God and not from your fellow man.’

The priest broke off, his shoulders racked by a fit of coughing. He gestured at Auguste as he struggled to regain his composure.

‘Some water, if you please,’ he croaked. ‘On the floor. A bottle.’

The stubble upon his chin gleamed white against the grey of his skin. Auguste crouched, squatting in the savage way. By the missionary’s pallet, there was indeed a leather water bottle, its belly worn shiny with use. Beside it a leather pouch lay open, its dark throat glinting with treasures. The flame from the cane torch caught the dull burnish of tooled gold upon the spine of a battered-looking book and, a little deeper in, the precise glint of glass. The tips of Auguste’s fingers burned. With his two thumbs he eased the cork from the neck of the bottle and held it out to the priest who drank deeply, closing his eyes.

‘I have learned things from the Ouma,’ Auguste said quietly as he moved his arm as he had been taught to raise the bow, in a single smooth arc. ‘About animals and birds. About plants.’

The priest lowered the bottle, belched quietly and, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, gestured to Auguste to return it to its place. Unhurriedly Auguste drew his hands from his pockets. The bottle was warm. Pushing the cork hard into the neck with his thumbs, Auguste thrust it into the open pouch and closed the flap.

‘The men of the Nassitoches worship symbols of the male phallus,’ the priest said. ‘But it is not the savage who grieves the Lord most deeply. The savage is rude and heathen, but there remains in him the grace of God’s creation, when man was naked and knew it not. Not so the white man, who knows the Lord’s commandments and breaks them daily with his drinking and his gambling and his abominable lechery. Why do you squat like that? Stand up like a man so that I can see you.’

Auguste scrambled to his feet, his fists deep in his pockets.

‘Your counsel is wise, Father,’ he murmured.

‘And your coat is too small. You have become a man since you came here.’

Auguste shrugged. The priest let his hand drop back into his lap.

‘The warrior who wounded me did so because he could not countenance his uncle’s exclusion from the blessed kingdom of Heaven,’ the priest said quietly. ‘There is not one among the Canadian
coureurs
who would think of it. Now do you wish me to hear your confession?’

Auguste cast a wistful glance towards the door where the dog waited for him, its whiskered muzzle pale in the gloom. Then, withdrawing his hands very carefully from his pockets, he bowed his head and mumbled something about speaking ill of another and drinking brandy. When he had given the boy his penance, the priest lifted his hand, marking out a cross in the air with two raised fingers.

‘Lord, bless this Your humble servant. Make a sword of his will, that it might cut the sin like a canker from his heart, and set the shield of virtue in his hand, so that he might serve all his days as a valiant foot soldier in the service of Thy great name. Amen.’

Many moons were to pass before news reached the Ouma that the priest with the arrowhead in his arm had perished at Mobile. Auguste received the news with fleeting pity and not a little relief. The Ouma made fire with a dry stick spun briskly between the palms inside a hollowed branch of wood, as though they whipped milk for chocolate. He had feared that it would not be long before talk reached the mission at Nassitoches of the French boy who could call down fire from the sun at his pleasure.

For weeks after the priest’s departure, he worried that the missioner would find the burning glass missing and return for it. In preparation Auguste rehearsed a story about finding it in the mud by the bayou and keeping it safe. But, though he waited, the priest did not come back. The moon had begun to fatten again when he called the savages to witness a miracle.

It was unusual for the boy to call attention to himself. Curious, several of the Ouma drew closer, making a ragged circle around him and his yellow dog. Placing some dry agaric upon a chip of wood, Auguste drew the stolen glass from one pocket and a small jar from the other. He raised his hand for silence. With a flourish he reached into the jar and sprinkled some of the contents over the glass. Then, drawing the focus of the glass upon the tinder, he bid the fire come. There was a pause and then the agaric began to smoke. Putting his mouth to it, Auguste blew. The flame burst forth, a brilliant orange flower.

The savages could not contain their awe and astonishment. Like children they clamoured for him to make fire again. Auguste performed the same trick four times and each time the savages gaped and blinked, gazing from the glass to Auguste’s face and back again. When he held out the glass for their inspection they looked at it sideways, as if it might harm them.

Later that same day, the chief of the Ouma called Auguste to him. He wished to obtain the glass. He offered generous terms, but Auguste refused him. The chief protested and then pleaded. If Auguste would only show him how the magic was performed, he might set whatever value he chose upon the instrument. The chief would see to it that the price was paid by all the families of the village.

Auguste was silent for a long time. Then gravely he told the chief that what he asked was impossible. The glass had been his uncle’s, the only brother of his mother, who was long dead. For years Auguste had tried to bring fire from it but he had never succeeded. He had thought the contraption useless. Then, only a few nights ago, his uncle had come to him in a dream. In that dream, he had told Auguste of the secret of the glass. Then he had taken his nephew’s hands in his and bid him swear that he would never part with it. Auguste would not dishonour his uncle. He would keep the glass, but for as long as he remained in the village, he would use it to summon fire for the Ouma whenever they desired it. In return he wished for nothing but their continued kindness and their kinship.

The burning glass altered forever Auguste’s standing among the savages. Possessed of mysterious powers and yet remote, reserved, frugal in his appetites, he was unlike any white man the savages had ever encountered. As a second winter passed and then a third, he came to be esteemed as a man of learning and of wisdom. He grew tall, though his body remained knobby and narrow, and his child’s voice cracked and split like the shell of a nut. His tendency to silence strengthened his reputation. And still the commandant did not return. Instead, when the thaw came and the trade on the river began once again to move, it was a Canadian ensign who came to the village, in search of a young Frenchman with a yellow dog of whom the Ouma were more than a little afraid.

T
he child came in May. It was rainy season, the sky sagging above Mobile like a mouldy mattress, and behind the bluff, where the ground was low, all the houses were flooded. The damp jammed its fat fingers between the timbers of the cabins and paddled the mortar of clay and oyster shells that filled them. Nothing dried. In Elisabeth’s garden the pumpkins swelled, their leaves greasy with mud. The cabin smelled of rot. Jean-Claude had been gone from Mobile for nearly two months.

She had only just begun to show. The sickness that had tormented her lingered for days afterwards, the bleeding much longer. There was a fever, some manner of poison in the blood brought on by the ceaseless rain, the unwholesome thickness of the air. She dreamed vivid, fevered dreams. In her dreams, over and over, she unwrapped the meat and opened the sacks of corn beneath the bed and stirred the stew in its pot over the fire and, pressing the food into her mouth with both hands, she ate and ate and ate, until her belly swelled, splitting the skin in two. When she woke, she saw them, the faces of the wives, pressed against the
platille
. The wives brought her crocks of peas and sagamity. When she refused them, they went away with pursed lips, muttering about the sin of false pride. Elisabeth only lay on her back and stared up at the rough palmetto stripes of the roof until they repeated themselves on her closed eyes.

The midwife came frequently, impatient to justify the yearly stipend that the commandant had recently threatened to cut. A brisk woman with red knuckles and a sharp chin, Guillemette le Bras had assigned herself to the post when the colony’s first
sage-femme
had succumbed to a summer epidemic, but in two years she had been required to attend only five births. Nobody could be certain why so many of the women of the colony appeared barren. As with the corrupted flour and the sour wine that came from France, some said that it was the unwholesome climate of Louisiana that had spoiled them, others that the gallant minister responsible for their despatch had known them already rotten in Rochefort and had sent them all the same.

The new priest came too, entering without ceremony and taking a stool at the foot of her bed. Rochon was a Canadian, arrived from the Jesuit seminary in Quebec, a man of rather greater girth than stature and an easy manner as yet undampened by the rains or the pinch-faced, limp-legged sternness of La Vente. He did not appear discomfited by Elisabeth’s silence. He clasped his hands beneath his round belly and regarded her thoughtfully.

‘So you are the scholar,’ he said and Elisabeth raised her head, stone-heavy with weariness, and looked at him because there was no mockery in his voice.

‘I am the unruly seminarian,’ he said, and she blinked and pressed her elbows into the emptiness in her belly because there was no mockery in that either and because his flat, inflected French was just like her husband’s.

‘No longer, surely,’ she murmured.

‘The categorisations of others have a way of sticking.’

They were both silent then, caught in their own thoughts.

‘I think you are not much like the other women here,’ he said finally.

‘They do not like me.’ She swallowed. ‘I cannot blame them.’

The Jesuit shrugged cheerfully.

‘The soldiers at the garrison dislike me also. Perhaps they shall come around to us in time.’ He smiled, looking around him at the cabin. ‘No books?’

Elisabeth hesitated, then shook her head.

‘One day, I suppose, we may see books at Mobile. A hospital. A church. A decent pâtisserie, God help us. It is not easy to imagine.’

His kindness was unbearable. She stared up at the palmetto roof as the Jesuit studied her, his stubby fingers steepled against his lips.

‘It would make no difference, you know,’ he said gently. ‘Well, a pâtisserie perhaps. But not a church. The mysteries of God’s purpose on earth are no plainer in carved pews. As for books, even the scholars among us see only darkly. Churches and books cannot substitute for faith. We must accept His will.’