Savage Lands (7 page)

It was late when at last she persuaded him to leave. The storm had passed and the white moon was bandaged in gauzy cloud. She had held his hand with both of hers and he had kissed her, covering her mouth with his and pressing her up against the splintery boards of the cabin. The freshly washed darkness was soft and fleshy, alive with the shriek of cicadas and the throaty calls of frogs. She had not resisted him. The recollection of it caused her skin to flush. They might so easily have been discovered. There might have been snakes or alligators or poisonous scorpions in the long grass. Her feet had been bare, her shoes kicked off in the darkness. When they were spent, they had leaned against the cabin, their heads together and their fingers entwined, and listened to the men’s laughter and the sawed-out fiddle strains of the gavotte until the fever came upon them again and they ran home together, the taste of each other sharp upon their tongues. Early the next morning, when dawn came, she had returned for her shoes. When she found them, they were soaking wet and frosted all over with the glistening trails of slugs.

Occasionally she wondered if any of the chickens felt as she did. Perhaps little Renée Gilbert, whose husband was a cannoneer almost twice her height. There was something in the set of her mouth when she gazed up at him that Elisabeth recognised. She thought sometimes that she would like to say something to her, but she never did. It was better to hug it close, where she could keep it safe.

Besides, she never saw Renée alone. Though they lived with their husbands and were burdened with the duties and responsibilities of marriage, the chickens were as much in each other’s company as they ever had been. And still they strained to assimilate Elisabeth into their sorority. It baffled her and stirred her also, their refusal to be rebuffed. She thought now that perhaps it was her anger that drew them to her, the hope that its sharp edges might be pressed into the service of their dissatisfactions, of which there were many. Perrine had made it clear that they thought Elisabeth’s indifference to their poor circumstances a betrayal of their guild. By consenting to survive on bread made from savage corn or, worse still, sagamity, a kind of savage porridge made from the same coarse grain, Elisabeth made it easier for the commandant to order the rest of them to follow suit.

‘But what is it you object to so?’ Elisabeth protested. ‘The savage bread is not what we are accustomed to, but then what here is?’

Her answer had provoked Perrine, but Elisabeth knew that it was not really about the bread. It was the pleasure she took in her husband that truly offended them and her refusal to conceal it. They considered the extravagance of her delight not only ill-suited to the harshness of their situation but an affront to the rest of them. They frowned when they saw her with him, and whispered among themselves. It was some time before Elisabeth understood that they were frightened of her. She unbalanced things. The narrow slice of swamp that lay between them and the precipice of the world was already treacherous enough.

Of course they grew accustomed to it in time. There was little else they could do. As for marriage, there were only two girls that remained to be accounted for. Just yesterday Elisabeth had seen Marie-Françoise by the garrison, pale as paper after her illness, the lines around her mouth scratched on in black ink. The dark hair of which she had been vain had clung to her scalp, coarse and provisional, and she had walked tentatively, as though afraid of the ground.

Still, she lived. The man to whom she had, to her great satisfaction, contrived to become engaged had not proved so fortunate. Late in September, with their marriage less than seven days away, he had succumbed to delirium. His decline was rapid. Two days later Marie-Françoise had stood pale and bewildered as his household effects were sold at auction, the proceeds shared between his mother in Quebec and his brother at Versailles. The other girls had made sure to visit her, taking with them trifles to lift her spirits, but Elisabeth had declined to accompany them. She knew they thought her heartless and she was sorry for it, but still she would not go. Her bliss was new and fragile and she was afraid. Misfortune was contagious. These days when she saw Marie-Françoise in the settlement, she had to fight the impulse to cover her eyes. Misery swarmed about the Governess’s shoulders like a cloud of flies.

Elisabeth sighed and, stretching, pushed herself up to sit. The morning was almost gone. His good boots stood by the door, their heels worn down at the backs, and his laced hat hung on a peg, its brim ghost-marked with dried sweat.
We are all waiting
, she thought,
for you to come back and occupy us
. Perhaps even at this very moment he was climbing out of the tilting pirogue, his boots sliding on the rush-slippy mud of the dock. The pirogues would be laden with food for the colony, and he would have to stay a while with the other officers to oversee the unloading of the provisions into the warehouse. Left alone, the men were careless and inclined to steal. She could see the two notches between his eyebrows that deepened when he was conducting business. It was the only time he was solemn. She wanted to reach out and smooth the furrows away with her finger, to place her lips lightly upon that place so that she might feel his breath hot against her chin, and then, slowly, very slowly, to draw her lips down the bridge of his nose and across the unshaved bristle of his upper lip to his mouth. He would pull her to him then and she would feel him firm and solid in her arms, and the parts of her that without him were rough and broken off and shameful would once again become smooth and whole and true.

Hurry home
, she whispered, and beyond the blind window the birds screamed, their throats raw with longing.

M
any weeks were to pass before the boy was able to approach the bayou without straining for a glimpse of the expedition. Then winter came. There would be few travellers in winter, the savages told him. In winter the big river froze in the north and the white men waited by their firesides. He was not hungry. The harvests had been good and much food stored for the lean months. Besides, the savage hunters were skilful. There was always meat.

The boy grew taller. The bones of his face sharpened and his red hands hung from the poles of his arms like flags. To put on his boots became an agony. Though he endured the torture of them for as long as he was able, he was at last obliged to abandon them for shoes of the savage style that they called moccasins, fashioned from deerskin and ornamented with a pattern of tiny coloured beads. The moccasins were warm and well-fitting, but he hacked off the beads with the tip of his knife. As for his coat, he refused to give it up, though the pinch of it pulled at his shoulders and chafed the skin beneath his arms. The cuffs kinked, pale stripes marking the old seams. Even then they hardly grazed his wrists.

He lodged with a warrior and his wife, a quiet round-faced creature who treated him with the same glancing affection that she accorded her own half-grown litter of infants. A quick study, it was not long before he had picked up the rudiments of their tongue but, favouring the isolation accorded to the uncomprehending, he spoke little. In La Rochelle as a boy, he had lain for hours upon his stomach when it rained, watching the insects with whom he shared his quarters. He had observed that the spider held her silk upon a reel inside her own body and that she lived not upon her web but in a silken tunnel that she spun alongside it and in which she ate her prey; that in the winter, when the ice came, the flies by his pallet grew feeble and could barely crawl, but those close to the fire remained vigorous, rubbing their hands together like conspirators. The cold ones were easy to catch. The boy had peered at them through the cracks in his fingers, noting the great red eyes, the transparent wings, the four black stripes on their backs, and then he had crushed them, pressing the tips of his fingers hard into his palm.

Now the boy watched the savages, and he saw that many things that the men had told him were true. He saw that the Ouma men wore bracelets and necklaces of bone and feathers in their hair as if they were women and that some even carried fans. He saw that they ate untidily and seldom used spoons, that they worshipped fire and water and trees, that they feared owls above all creatures, for their cries foretold the death of a child. He saw how they made magic with the straw-filled corpse of a dead otter and listened to their dreams, for they believed that their guardian spirits came to them in visions to advise and warn them of danger. He saw that not one among them, not even the chief, thought it possible that a man might capture words in his hands and fix them to a page. Not for the first time the boy wished he knew how writing was done.

He saw all these things, and his scorn tasted pleasantly sharp upon his tongue. But the boy’s eyes were sharp and he saw other things too, things that no one had troubled to tell him. He saw that the greatest possible care was bestowed upon the children of the savages by their mothers. He saw how those with surplus wealth were expected to distribute it generously. He saw that far from being raised as warlike, boys were taught never to fight among themselves and those that breached this commandment were banished as punishment to a hut some distance from the village, as persons unworthy to live among their kinsfolk. Most startling of all, he saw that it was a boy’s mother, not his father, who owned the hut in which they lived and all the utensils and chattels contained within it. It was his mother to whom he looked for instruction and guidance, the mother’s brothers who disciplined him when he transgressed.

For a long time the boy puzzled over this. He studied Issiokhena, with whom he lodged, and Baiyilah, her husband, and the kinsfolk who came in and out of their hut as though it were their own. His ears squinted with the effort of listening, of understanding. And so he learned that when a savage boy spoke of his brothers and sisters, he spoke of his cousins. His mother’s brothers he called not uncle but father. It was to be several months before he grasped that the savages had arranged matters the wrong way round so that a savage child reckoned his descent through not his father’s but his mother’s line. The father was regarded fondly enough but was granted little respect and no authority. At night the boy lay in his bed of skins, turning this over and over in his mind. It was an uncommon mistake. In France, and in all civilised nations, a boy’s father was, for better or worse, the key to him.

The boy’s father’s name had been Auguste Guichard. It was the boy’s name also but no one in the village used it. Though he repeated it many times, the French sounds were slippery in the savages’ mouths and they could not keep hold of them. Instead, in the first months, his fellows called him
Nani
, which in their language meant fish. They said it was for the paleness of his skin, but the boy knew that they made fun of him. From the first he had shown himself a poor swimmer.

When they called him
Nani
, Auguste’s mouth tightened and he refused to answer. The name endured a little while before it withered and died. No new one grew in its place. When it was necessary to refer to the boy by some kind of name, they called him only
Ullailah
, or boy by himself.

The savage boys stopped gesturing at the boy to join in their games before he had readied himself to accept. He watched from the shadow of the palisades as they tossed wooden dice or threw spears at rolling stones to see who could come closest to the place where the stone would finally stop. He thought of Jean. It was not difficult to imagine Jean squatting among them, his sharp knees poking holes in his breeches as he coached them in the rudiments of
mia
and hazard. Ever since Auguste could remember, his cousin had always been in the middle of everything. There was something about Jean that drew boys to him like lice. When he ran, he never troubled to glance over his shoulder. He knew they would follow.

Auguste had watched him and watched him but, though he had tried to copy his cousin, he had never caught the trick of it. He could only observe that in La Rochelle there was a shape to the air that fitted around Jean exactly. It was not the same for Auguste. The air inside him did not match the air outside. When he breathed out the other boys could smell it.

Once he had found a wasps’ nest beneath the eaves of his mother’s cottage. He had watched it for almost an entire afternoon and he had seen that though most of the wasps came and went unmolested, one wasp seeking entrance to the nest was set upon by the others and stung to death. When they were gone, Auguste picked the dead wasp up by its wings and studied it closely. He could see nothing about it that was different from all the other wasps.

In La Rochelle the grey seas of France had hurled themselves against the land like capricious giant-children, one moment cradling a ship in the palm of one hand, the next snapping it carelessly in two. They demanded unceasing attention and applause, and their tempers set the tempers of those who lived alongside them just as the sun set the hour of the day.

The river of the savages, which they called
misi sipi
, or big stream, was a different kind of monster altogether. It eased through the throttle of swamp and forest like a great yellow snake, languid and muscular, exhaling the thick reeks of fertility and decay. In La Rochelle the frontier between water and land was sharply drawn, marked out by the perpendiculars of cliff and castle wall. The savages’ river knew no such boundaries. It sprawled tideless in the sleeping waters of creeks and bayous and seeped into the swamps and forests, where its dark quiescence gave the illusion of solid earth. Everywhere a frenzy of vegetation erupted from its skin, propelled by a fierce and vulgar prodigiousness. Even in winter the curves and planes of the landscape disappeared beneath a dissipation of trees, bushes, vines, canes, mosses, ferns and flabby fungi. Roots and branches twisted over one another, coiling and clasping in a thousand sinuous embraces. Cypress knees pushed through mats of decaying leaves like thrusting cocks, while hanks of matted Spanish wig hung from the clefts of every tree limb, clothed only in the filmy veils of spiders’ webs. On warm days the wet air throbbed with the shameless fecundity of it.