Savage Lands (37 page)

In the morning she was no more than herself and he was a man again, an ordinary stranger with a twisted arm and an unfamiliar face. The distaste was the same and the shame greater. The ordinary exchanges of the morning caused her to redden. As they had the previous day, they ate their breakfast in silence.

That night and the next night, he came to her again but it was not the same. Whatever enchantment he had placed on her had lifted, leaving only a faint impression of intoxication, like the memory of a dream. Two days later he left Mobile, despatched on a Company matter to a savage village several days’ journey from the town. Vincente listened to him as he explained the expedition and longed for him to be gone. And yet, when he had rounded the corner, she stood for a long time in the lane, looking after him, her hand sheltering her eyes from the slanting morning sun. It was only when Mme Driard threw her slops into the lane that she slowly let her hand fall to her side. She watched the water run through the dust, the stream narrowing to rivulets that spread across the lane like roots. Then, smoothing her hair from her brow, she went inside.

She was quite alone. The slave was in the kitchen hut and in the garden the boy worked, his back bent over. Outside the birds shrieked, their calls shrill and contemptuous, but in the cabin all was still. She thought of Blandine and Marie-Hélène whispering and giggling with their mother, the way they stopped when she entered a room, their lips pressed together and their eyes round, and the explosion of laughter when she blinked at them and turned away, and she felt a pang of something that was almost grief.

Hurriedly Vincente picked up her Bible, turning the fragile pages in search of a favourite passage, but the words blurred before her eyes. During the weeks at the schoolteacher’s cabin, she had gone half mad with the need for solitude. All day long the cabin clattered with a mismatch of ill-clad youngsters, both red and white, and several of them visibly a mixture of the two, to whom Mme de Boisrenaud gave elementary instruction. Vincente had been obliged to assist her. Afterwards, when the yearning for silence rose up in her like a scream, she was assigned her share of the household duties, during which the schoolteacher kept up an unceasing stream of complaints about her innumerable infirmities, to which she was devoted. At night they slept in the cabin’s only bedchamber in a pair of curtainless cots no more than an outstretched arm from one another. The rasp of the old woman’s snores rattled up and down Vincente’s spine and set her teeth to throbbing in her gums. It required considerable will not to throttle her but to lie quietly until she was certain she was quite asleep. Only her nighttime forays to the kitchen hut had kept her steady. Sometimes, as she knelt upon the dirt floor, her mouth and her fists frantic with food, she had thought she might weep with gratitude and relief.

In the cabin on the rue Dugué, there was nothing but silence, broken only by the ominous shrieks of the forest that pressed up against the town as though it meant to snatch back the land. Silences were all different, Vincente knew that well enough. In the Place Royale the silence had been all muffled rage and clamped-down expectation, while in the convent the cloistered stillness had gleamed like an undisturbed lake. In the convent the veils and loose grey habits obscured the awkward angularities of form and disposition and made everyone right. No one in the convent had ever raised their voice to her. They had not declared her tiresome or ugly or dull. Though she had visited almost daily, no one had ever ordered her away. When the abbess had taken Vincente’s bony hands in hers and counselled against the too-bright flame that burns itself out, she had done so gently and with a tender pity in her soft face, so that Vincente had thrown her arms around the old woman’s neck and clung to her, her face pressed against the old nun’s shoulder, inhaling her comforting dusty smell. The abbess had patted her back and blessed her, calling her
my child
.

‘I am your child,’ Vincente had whispered. ‘I am.’

‘Do you love me?’ she had asked later. ‘Do you think me good?’

‘The Lord loves all His children,’ the abbess had replied, and she had detached the girl’s arms from around her neck. ‘And you shall be a good girl if you say your confession and live according to His holy commandments.’

Vincente had announced her determination to take orders during a fierce quarrel with her mother. Mme le Vannes had struck the table with her fist and declaimed her as the most insufferable of daughters, and Vincente had been flooded with a fierce and bitter-tasting exultation. Her Father in Heaven had chosen her, Vincente le Vannes, for His handmaid and she would give herself to Him entirely, surrendering all that she was and all that she would ever be to a life of silent prayer and contemplation.

Two months later they had sold her into marriage. Distraught, Vincente had gone to the abbess to beg her intercession, but the old nun had only shaken her head and advised her to accept the will of God. Vincente had not given up. Aboard the
Baleine
she had tried again, declaring her vocation to Sister Marie and pleading with her to accept her as a postulant. Sister Marie’s refusal had been quick and contemptuous. If Vincente cared to demonstrate her piety, she had said sharply, she could begin by teaching the godless Salpétrière girls their catechism. Vincente had managed just two awkward hours of lessons before the seasickness came, rolling through her in a terrible, unstoppable wave. When at last the sea calmed and the ship reached Havana, her dress hung loose from the knobs of her shoulders.

‘I was not sick,’ Sister Marie declared with satisfaction as Vincente stumbled onto dry land. ‘And the girls have their catechism despite you. The Lord is merciful.’

Past Havana there was no wind and the sea glared flat and smooth. During those long drifting weeks, Vincente spoke to no one. She had consoled herself with her Bible, which proved poor comfort, and with a great deal of milk and cheese and butter, which did not. Once or twice, half-heartedly, she put her fingers down her throat but, weary of its old convulsions, her body refused her.

Now she was plump. Her face was full, her breasts also. Her thighs nudged each other beneath her skirts, and she grew breathless when she walked. She hardly cared. She wore the supplementary flesh like an undergarment, without thinking it a part of her. She had never imagined it might hide pleasure in its yielding plush, such pure intensity of sensation that the sight of the tumbled bed was enough to sharpen her skin to gooseflesh.

The thought shamed her, and she shook herself briskly and went to her trunk, thinking to cheer the house a little with the linens she had brought from Paris. In the alcove, above the trunk, her husband’s clothes hung from crude wooden pegs, his expensive silk coat beside the brown tangle of garments sewn from deerskin and nettle-bark linen. The smell of the old clothes made her shudder. Carefully she lifted the silk coat off its peg, smoothing out its gleaming folds, and threads of remembered pleasure glittered like silver between her thighs.

‘And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite,’ she whispered, but there was no heat in it. Perhaps the abbess had been right. Perhaps the flame had indeed burned itself out, all the psalms and proverbs in her descending, with the last scraps of nourishment in her belly, to the bottom of the great wide ocean.

The day stretched ahead of her, empty and endless. For the sake of something to do, she turned and walked out into the yard. Smoke came from the chimney of the kitchen hut. Above the chattering of the birds, she could hear the slave pounding maize for bread. The slave’s name was Thérèse. Vincente leaned in the frame of the open door, watching her. The slave did not look up but continued to pound in slow thuds, the sinews straining in roped stripes along the bones of her forearms. Vincente knew that she should return to the house and the pile of mending that awaited her, but she remained where she was, watching the sliding movement as the tight, round fist of muscle at the top of the slave’s arm moved slick beneath her skin. Rough yellow cakes of cornbread cooled on the bench and something bubbled in the large iron pot on the fire. The bread of Louisiana tasted to Vincente like it was baked from greasy sawdust, but the soup smelled good, thick and meaty. Vincente felt the pull of saliva drawing up into her mouth.

‘It smells good,’ she said.

The slave glanced up and did not cease in her pounding. She did not smile. Vincente was not certain if she understood her. Auguste had told her that the slave was from the nation of the Colapissas and that though she had a French name, she knew only a few words of the French tongue.

‘The soup,’ Vincente persisted, pointing at the pot and rubbing her stomach with the flat of her hand. ‘Delicious.’

The slave Thérèse stopped pounding and wiped her hands on the broad apron she wore around her waist. Her brow was oily with perspiration. Reaching up to a shelf above her head, she took down a cloth and laid it over the pounded grain. Her head hung forward, too heavy for her thin stalk of a neck. Then slowly she turned towards the fire and squatted before it on her haunches, her apron falling between her thighs. Her upturned knees were as sharp as teeth. Taking up a ladle, she dipped it into the iron pot and brought it to her face, her nostrils wide as she inhaled. The smoke curled upward, spangling her eyebrows. Something about her stillness made Vincente think of Auguste. She wanted to ask if she might taste the soup.

Instead she watched as the slave returned the ladle to its place and took up a long spoon. Her plait fell over her shoulder as she stirred, and the ridged jut of her spine pushed pale against the curve of her brown neck. Beside her on its hook, the iron ladle glistened, its bowl speckled with flecks of meat. A bead of gravy slid unhurriedly from its rim and fell silently to the floor. Round and round, the slave stirred with her long spoon, pushing the fragrant smoke up into the air. She did not look up as Vincente jerked herself away from the door jamb, snatched up a cake of the still-hot cornbread and, tearing it into wads that burned her crammed mouth, walked back across the yard to the empty cabin.

I
t was late afternoon. The shadows were lengthening and the bats swooped, scattering snipped-out scraps of black across the pink-gold sky. The men and the Negroes would soon return from their work. The women in the lower compound were cooking. Smoke drifted over the sun-baked ground, and the air was greasy with the smell of roasting meat.

Elisabeth sat upon her bench, her hands desolate in her lap, and let her head fall back against the rough plank wall. Fuerst had been adamant. He had seen it before, he said, in the Rhineland and knew how it would be. The venomous quality of the child’s sick body was volatile as liquor and would quickly putrefy her breath and infect the outward air. Like a garment that retains the smell of sweat or of fire smoke, the air would bear the pestilence to the rest of them, insinuating itself through the tiny holes in the skin to corrupt the spirits and the humours within. The venom threatened them all, but Elisabeth, being with child and unnaturally inflamed with heat, would be most susceptible. When she had protested, he had simply shaken his head. The child must go.

It was very quiet. Jeanne’s corn paddle idled against the wall of the cooking hut, and the mortar was closed, covered with a piece of wood weighted down with a rock. Her fire circle was cold, muffled with ash. Since the slave’s departure, the wife of the man they called Karl-zu-klein, who was near to her time and little use for outdoor work, had ground their corn and brought supper to the cabin. Her flour was coarse, her sagamity lumpy and indigestible. Fuerst made no remark of it, but only ate more fastidiously than usual, swallowing his mouthfuls with water.

For years they had worked alongside one another, slave and mistress, bound by exile and by silence and by the child who had known no life but her own and could not mourn what was lost, their days as distinct and as appended as the oak and the cow byre. With Jeanne gone, the wind blew through Elisabeth and made her shiver. It seemed to her that the shadowed forest played a child’s game with her, creeping a little closer every time she turned away from it.

She worked ferociously, making candles from tallow and scrubbing the cabin with sand till her hands were raw, but steadiness eluded her. Without Jeanne the silence was different. Elisabeth did not know who watched here when the slave did not. Quietly, when she had thought her mistress not looking, Jeanne had pulled the stray hairs from Elisabeth’s comb and buried them, and her nail clippings too. It was the savage belief that the bad spirits made powerful magic with such plunder. The previous morning, as she had combed her hair, Elisabeth had wrenched a knot from it. When she returned to the cabin in the evening it was still there. She had stared it at a long time. Then, pulling the tangle of hairs from the comb, she had walked down to the lower compound where the Rhinelander woman prepared the fire for dinner, and thrown it into the flames. The women had watched her warily, clumped together around their pots and kettles. The smell of burning hair had been powerful and unpleasant.

In their pen beside the live oak, the cows shifted, swinging their bone-boxed flanks. In the hurricane months, when the wind whipped up from the river and tore across the bluff, the beasts pressed up against the tree as though the oak was a cow also, and the lichened bark striped their hides with green. They wanted milking. Marguerite liked to watch her while she worked, swinging from the rough bars of the pen. Often she got splinters in the palms of her hand and Elisabeth was obliged to work them out with a needle so that they might not become corrupted. In Burnt-canes, even scratches were slow to heal.

Once an alligator had ventured from the bayou all the way into the yard and, when the child cried out, Elisabeth had turned on her stool to see it staring at the fire as though transfixed. It was a young creature, perhaps six feet in length, but its appearance was as ancient and appalling as the monsters of antiquity. Hissing at the child to stay quite still, Elisabeth stood very slowly and backed away towards the rear of the pen before slipping between the bars. The creature did not move as she ran to the cabin to fetch the musket, but it seemed to her that it watched not the fire but the child. She seized the gun, cocking it and raising it to her shoulder as Fuerst had taught her, but before she could shoot, she saw that Jeanne had taken up her corn paddle and was striking the alligator with great force upon the head. She lowered the gun, her arms shaking, but Jeanne only issued a final blow to the alligator, who sprawled senseless in the dust, and, smiling at her round-eyed daughter, carried the paddle to the bayou so that she could rinse it clean.