Savage Lands (44 page)

Clattering three wooden plates onto the bench, the woman served them in silence, banging her spoon hard against each plate in turn. Three plates of thin stew and beans, three cups of Indian beer. Fuerst bent his head over his supper. He did not eat like a man but fastidiously, his mouth moving in neat circles. When he had eaten, he set the bowl of his spoon precisely at the centre of the plate and pushed the plate away.

‘That wasn’t half bad,’ he said quietly.

Vincente did not eat. Her face was pale, her eyes ringed with purple. When Auguste set down his spoon, she excused herself. He watched as she crossed the room, her head dropping forward with fatigue. Their cabin, Fuerst’s cabin, was small and bare but tolerably clean, the curtainless bed softened with a mattress of Spanish wig. It was not Paris, but then he was not exactly sure what it was about Paris that she might miss.

Auguste took out his pipe and motioned to the foreman to do the same. Fuerst took a twist of grass from his pocket and set it in the flame of the tallow light until it caught. He lit his master’s pipe first and then his own. Neither spoke.

‘I hope you shall be satisfied,’ Fuerst said at last, exhaling, and though there was deference in his voice, there was pride also. ‘We have done what we can.’

Auguste regarded the Rhinelander. He held his head low, bent forward from his muscular shoulders as though he meant to ram through life with the crown of his skull.

‘It will be a good crop?’ Auguste asked.

‘God willing.’

‘The men work hard?’

‘They know they must. It is indigo that will pay their wages.’

‘And the Chetimachas?’

‘A perpetual hazard. We fear attack daily.’

There was a silence. Both men smoked, their exhalations sketching idle curlicues in the thick air.

‘Where is your wife?’ Auguste asked, more abruptly than he had intended.

Fuerst was silent, contemplating the red glow in the bowl of his pipe.

‘I understood you had a wife,’ Auguste persisted.

‘I understood that also.’

‘And a slave. Is there not a slave?’

When still the Rhinelander did not reply, Auguste struck the table with his fist. The spoons jumped on their plates.

‘Answer me, damn it!’

Fuerst flinched. Then, leaning forward, he reached out to the plate in front of him and carefully straightened the crooked spoon.

‘The slave’s child was sick. I was obliged to send them away to the village of the Bayagoulas they called Puchiyoshuba, six leagues from here.’

‘And your wife? She is sick too?’

‘No.’

‘So where is she?’

‘I am told she is gone there also. To the village.’

‘You do not know?’

Fuerst’s mouth twisted.

‘I returned from the fields two days since to find her gone. She went with a savage to fetch back the slave, that was all that
dummkopf
of a woman could tell me. That a savage had come and she had gone with him.’

‘And you did not go after her? What if she were tricked, taken against her will?’

‘Go after her? It is harvest time, sir. Who shall gather the indigo if I am not here? Who shall manage the Negroes?’

‘It is six leagues, not six hundred!’

‘With respect, sir, I have put my sweat into this earth, my blood. I shall not be disgraced. As for my wife’s will–’

He broke off, staring at the table. For a while the two men sat in silence, sucking on their pipes. Between them, in a dish of pressed clay, the tallow lamp spat and sighed.

‘Anyone may be betrayed,’ Auguste said at last.

Fuerst said nothing, but only exhaled with a mirthless laugh, two plumes of smoke rushing from his nostrils. His mouth twisted as he laid his hands flat on the table, one on either side of the tallow lamp, and stretched out his thumb and forefinger like callipers, as though he measured it. He looked at the lamp for a long time, his eyes squinting against the smoke from the pipe clenched in his teeth. Then, impatiently he pushed it away. Where the lamp had been, there was a mark on the table, a half-moon scorch where once, long ago, someone had carelessly set a hot kettle.

‘She took my musket,’ Fuerst said, and he hunched his shoulders, the fibres in his neck tightening like ropes. ‘She shall defend herself.’

A
messenger had brought back the slate. He was not the same one who had come before. The slate had been wiped clean. The clay pencil dangled from its strip of leather, but the hairpin was gone. He stood before her, his head bowed, his chest rising and falling, and her heart closed, and she held tight to the slate, to the last breathless moments of not knowing. In the late-morning drowse, the birds sang, and the frogs. A pale blue butterfly blinked its wings. In their pen the cows dozed and flicked their tails against the flies. The savage’s copper skin shone with grease and perspiration. When he had recovered his breath, he raised his head. His brow was creased, his eyes grave.

‘I bring bad news,’ he said.

Elisabeth shook her head, her hands tightening on the slate.

‘The fever spirits. They take her.’

‘No.’ She shook her head frantically. ‘She was better. They said she was better.’

‘We bury her according to her customs, but the elders are not satisfied. Others among us are now sick.’

‘No.’ Elisabeth wheeled around, her hands clenched, fighting the breathlessness that threatened to overwhelm her. ‘No.’

‘Still we hope. The child is young, but she is steadfast. She wails over the turned earth and does not cease in her vigil. She brings honour to her ancestors.’

Elisabeth froze. Her lips moved but no words came.

‘The dead woman is not of our nation. We mark her passing and provision her for her journey. Some of the women, they cry also, from respect and from fear of the spirits. But only the child mourns.’

There was a long silence.

‘Jeanne,’ Elisabeth whispered. ‘Jeanne is dead.’

‘Yes.’

Elisabeth closed her eyes, and the sadness rose from her belly in a violent gush and streamed down her cheeks. The savage waited quietly, his leathery feet set apart in the dust, and said nothing. When the tears ceased, Elisabeth set down the slate and wiped her face upon her apron. She smoothed back her hair.

‘She should have been buried here,’ she said quietly.

The savage shook his head.

‘She may find peace only among her own people.’

Elisabeth was silent. Then she walked slowly to the cabin and took down a cup from the shelf. She filled it with water from the pitcher and brought it to the savage.

‘Forgive me,’ she said, holding out the cup. ‘You must be thirsty.’

The savage took the cup and drank. Elisabeth went back into the cabin. Kneeling before her trunk, she lifted the lid and rummaged beneath the small pile of folded aprons and woollen stockings. Her fingers brushed a yellowing fold of lawn and lace, and for a moment she paused, searching with her fingertip for the hard scab of a darn beneath one tiny sleeve. Then she pulled from the trunk a moth-holed shawl and closed the lid. On the table, in a covered dish, there was cold porridge cut into slices and one half of a roasted wood pigeon. She put a little on a plate. The rest she wrapped in the shawl.

‘How far to your village?’ she asked the savage as he squatted to eat.

‘From dawn to the third part of the day.’

‘You return directly?’

‘Yes.’

‘Take me with you.’

The savage sat back on his heels, his eyes averted.

‘My village is a good village and friend to your nation,’ he said slowly. ‘We desire your allegiance. We do not take from you what is yours.’

‘Take me with you, I beg you. If we hurry we could be there by nightfall.’

‘I cannot.’

‘The child is mine. My kin. I must mourn with her.’

The savage was silent.

‘You cannot stop me,’ Elisabeth persisted. ‘If you refuse I shall only follow you.’

‘The unskilled hunter does not see the deer.’

Elisabeth hesitated. Then she went back into the cabin and, on her hands and knees, reached under the bed. The musket was loaded, the cock twisted, ready for the Chetimachas if they dared venture so close. Months ago, when the troubles had started, Fuerst had taken her out into the yard and shown her how to use it. She could feel the shock of it still in the curve of her shoulder.

The savage stood as she came out. He eyed the musket, his fingers reflexively seeking out the knife that hung from the band that he wore about his waist.

‘Take me with you,’ she said, and she held out the gun to him. He stepped forward, sliding a hand over the barrel as though it were a frightened animal. Elisabeth pulled it away.

‘When we get there,’ she said. ‘You may have it when we get there.’

The savage walked silently and with a swift grace, careless of the uneven ground, the tangling undergrowth. He carried her bundle slung easily over his shoulder. Elisabeth stumbled behind him, the musket bumping against her back, unable to match his long stride. Her eyes smarted, raw with heat and perspiration, and the strap of the heavy firearm bit into her neck. Her back ached.

They did not stop. They walked through forest dank with cypress and through thick brakes of cane. Several times they crossed narrow creeks, the savage holding his knife aloft as he waded through the slow water. Elisabeth knotted her skirts about her thighs and lurched after him, one hand beneath the swell of her belly and the other on the gun in case of alligators. Jeanne was dead. She was sick with grief and fatigue.

And yet she derived a kind of solace from the setting of each spent foot before the other. All her life she had waited as a woman must and left the living to others. In the confines of the settlement and then of the concession, she had succumbed without objection to incarceration in a few square
arpents
of cleared land, the limits of her world set into the earth like palisades, the ceaseless course of her footprints around its perimeter like the circles worn into the hard dirt of a gaoler’s yard. In that way Louisiana had proved no different to Paris.

The sun flattened to a bronze disc and slid into the earth. The dusk thickened and still the savage walked on. The forest thinned. Elisabeth trudged behind him as they skirted tall fields of corn, the tasselled heads nudging the darkening horizon. Her hair, escaped from its pins, clung to her face and fell in damp tendrils about her neck. It bewildered her now, the simple ease with which she had swallowed the certainties of her gender. A woman could not work her own land, but she could choose to let it lie fallow. She could not propose marriage, but she could decline it. She had thought it a rule, that a woman’s power to act lay only in refusal, in the craven treachery of omission.

By now Fuerst would be returned from the fields. By now he would know of her unauthorised departure. He would know that she spoke halting but quite comprehensible German. When she returned, and she would have to return, there would be consequences. Things would be different because she had made them so. The thought of it tightened around her heart and spurred on her weary legs.

The moon was high by the time they reached the village of Puchiyoshuba, and it spilled its white light on the hive-shaped huts of the savages. Between the huts a great fire licked at the fringe of the sky, bleaching it to ochre. There was the sound of music, the beat of drums and gourds and calling voices and, above them, like a faint breeze, the ghostly keen of a cane flute. Dogs barked in quarrelsome cacophony and the faithful frogs and cicadas continued their ceaseless chants. But though Elisabeth strained her ears, she could not hear the cries of a child.

When they were almost at the village, the savage stopped and held out his hand.

‘Gun,’ he said.

‘Take me to the girl. Then you may have it.’

‘Gun first.’

‘No.’

The savage regarded her, his eyes gleaming in the darkness.

‘Please. She is the place I seek. Take me to her.’

Very slowly he let his hand drop. Then, without speaking, he led her past the village and down the shallow slope of a meadow, rough with tangled grass and flowering weeds. Their shadows splashed across the pasture like ink and the grasses whispered into her skirts, pressing their faces against the ragged stuff.

Above them the sky was huge with stars. Mostly their patterns were pricked out with perfect precision, but across the centre of the sky there were so many that they smudged together in a swirl of greyish powder like the face of a much-used writing slate.

And then she heard it. The wailing came like the muffled shriek of a distant owl borne upon the night breeze, discordant and eerie, tracing the arc of the night sky. Elisabeth had never heard a cry like it. It pierced her with a sadness that was as old as the stars and as uncontainable. As the sadness in her own breast rose to receive it, she began to run, the barrel of the musket hard against her back and the sorrow streaming out behind her like a banner.

There were several of them, kneeling in a close circle around the heaped-up grave. One was very small. They held blankets over their heads as they wailed in solemn disharmony, the cries undulating in waves that rose up to meet the vaulting sky before falling away to mingle with the freshly turned earth. Close by, a group of young children played together and their gleeful shouts caught in the dirge and made a kind of music of it.

Quietly Elisabeth turned to the savage and gave him the musket. He bent his head and handed her her bundle.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured.

Taking the bundle in her arms, she walked round the circle until she stood behind the smallest mourner. As the raw cry began to rise once more, she set her bundle on the ground and tipped its contents out onto the ground. Then she draped the shawl over her head. Behind her, intent upon a game of chase, the savage children squealed with delight.