Savage Lands by Clare Clark

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