T
he year drew to a close and still the baby held. Elisabeth grew large. Without Jeanne there was much work and little time for lessons. The slate grew dusty on the shelf and her own books beside it. When they were established at the new place, Elisabeth thought, they would begin again. There might be money then, a little. They would be working on their own account at last. In the spring the period of Fuerst’s indenture would come to an end, and in accordance with the terms of his contract, the Mississippi Company had granted him a five-
arpent
concession on the Bayou Saint-Jean on cleared land that had until recently been a savage village. The soil was rich and Fuerst would be permitted to purchase slaves from the Company on two years’ credit, though the scarcity of Negroes had pushed the price of them sky-high. The sun had burned a furrow between Fuerst’s eyebrows, but sometimes as he walked to the fields he hummed, very softly, under his breath, a song from the old country. This would be their last winter at Burnt-canes.
Meantime she kept Marguerite close. She showed her how to fashion cloth from the bark of the mulberry tree and buttons from the plates of armour beneath the alligator’s thick skin just as Jeanne had once showed her, how the sharp-toothed jawbone of a garfish made for the finest comb and the bones of choupic and patassa the best needles. And when the weight of memory pressed down too strongly upon her, she taught the child the colonist’s skills, the dipping of tallow lamps and the manufacture of soap and butter and soft cheese. It was Marguerite’s duty to milk the cow, and the girl had grown quickly and fiercely fond of the animal, giving her a name of her own in the custom and language of her own people. It had startled Elisabeth at first to hear the child calling out to the beast in the unfamiliar tongue. The child was so young and no one at the plantation spoke to her in Yasoux. She had thought the girl would have forgotten it.
She refused to think upon her own confinement. Fuerst did not speak of it, and on the few occasions that Marguerite pressed her on the subject, her answers were brief and discouraging. It was only when her time was very close that she summoned Nellie and explained to her the rudiments of midwifery. Nellie listened closely, her brow furrowed with the effort of it, repeating Elisabeth’s precepts after her as though she swore an oath.
‘But what if I forget?’ the Rhinelander asked several times, tugging anxiously on her fingers. ‘What if when it happens I forget?’
‘You shan’t,’ Elisabeth assured her. ‘And if you do, I shall be there to remind you. I do not intend to leave you there alone.’
Nellie laughed then, a frightened scrape of a giggle, and her red hands twisted into knots. She wore her own son in a hammock of cloth tied over one shoulder so that she might carry him with her while she worked. He stirred and Nellie placed a hand upon him, soothing him with a low, wordless chirrup. Elisabeth thought of the infant Marguerite then and of the other infants, the nameless wraiths like midnight shadows that darkened the darkest parts of her, and she put her hands upon her own belly and closed her eyes, so that she might collect herself.
Sometimes as she worked, Elisabeth heard the steady thump of Jeanne pounding corn, but when she looked up there was no one there. She looked at the covered mortar, the paddle propped idle against the wall, and she bent her head and counted the thumps of her own heart quiet in her chest. When evening came and the mosquitoes gathered in the darkening sky, the long shadows over the yard had the shape of her. Elisabeth watched Marguerite as she crooned to the cow, and she wondered what the child thought of and what she saw when she was all alone, but she did not speak of it. Sometimes she would look up from what she was doing to find the child looking at her from beneath the tangle of her hair and she would smile and hold her gaze until the child blinked and bit her lip, her own smile pressed tight into the corner of her mouth. It was enough. They had lived with scarcity as long as they could remember. The habit of hoarding was strong in all of them.
It startled Elisabeth, then, when the child spoke to her of the baby. They were gathering wood for tinder and, near her time, Elisabeth was required to pause frequently to catch her breath.
‘You shall not care for me so much,’ Marguerite said, her face averted as she dragged a recalcitrant branch from the tangle of the undergrowth. ‘When the baby comes.’
‘But of course I shall care for you.’
Marguerite shook her head.
‘I shall not be the one you like best.’
‘A heart is not like a melon,’ Elisabeth said softly. ‘You shall not have a smaller slice because there are more to feed.’
‘You will like the baby better,’ Marguerite insisted. ‘Because it grew in you.’
‘As you do. Every single day.’
Marguerite frowned.
‘You will not remember the new master’s garden in Mobile. You were only an infant then. But it was a fine sight, especially in spring. He loved plants. Everywhere he went, he gathered new ones to plant in his garden. Some he grew from seeds that hold the tiny plant all curled up inside their shell and have only to be planted in the earth like maize. But others he grew from cuttings, which were the limbs of plants already half grown. It made no difference. They flourished just the same.’
‘It does not hurt the plant, to take its limbs?’
‘Not at all. They grow another.’
‘The master cannot grow another arm.’
‘That is true.’
Marguerite glared at Elisabeth.
‘So plants are not like people. Not like at all.’
Something sharp rose up in Elisabeth then, burning the back of her throat. Marguerite’s shoulders squared, her frown deepening. Elisabeth thought of Jeanne, of her quiet endurance and her low voice and her strong hands like a cap around the child‘s head as she suckled. Bending down, she looped the hemp rope around the stack of wood and hoisted it onto her shoulder.
‘No,’ she agreed softly. ‘Plants are not like people. Unless they dally so long that they put down roots. Come now, my little chickweed, quickly, shake the earth from your feet. The sun is low and it is almost supper time.’
The first pains came as she stood knee-deep in the river, the washboard between her knees. Elisabeth gasped and staggered backwards, slipping on the weed-slick stones so that the washboard fell with a splash into the water. The pain crept backwards as, whimpering, she gathered the half-rinsed laundry into her arms, then reached down to retrieve it. Beneath the slab of sodden linen, the skin of her stomach was hot and taut as a drum. She stumbled to the bank, hauling the washboard behind her. She knew enough of labour to know that she was not necessarily begun. Many times she and Guillemette had been called to a lying-in to find the child not yet descended and, though she was not certain, she did not think herself ready. A mother on the verge of giving birth complained of the weight of the child upon her bladder, while the readied head obliged her to walk with an awkward splay-legged gait. Elisabeth had not yet suffered such discomforts. And still she could not contain the fear that rose in her and the clamour, the voices and the shadows that she had swallowed for so long that she had grown accustomed to the ache of them always in her throat. They crowded in on her, the noise of them raucous in her ears, and she held onto the bank with both hands, winding the grass around her hands in hanks and pressing the roots of her fingers hard into the dirt.
She did not know afterwards how long she had sat on the bank of the river, only that when the pains had passed and she dragged herself shakily back to the settlement, the mud had spread like a brown bruise across her bundle of wet clothes. Though she banged the pots together to drive it off, still the fear soured her breath, drying her mouth as she built up the fire and prepared supper, and the past was wild in her.
Later that night, when Fuerst went out to check on the Negroes, she reached up to the shelf above the table and took down Montaigne. Like them, he too had aged. His covers were nibbled and frayed, marked with a waxy grease, and mould bubbled beneath the damp leather bindings, but the weight of the book was solid in her hands. She pressed the softened corners of the book against her belly, holding it close, her fingers moving over the familiar swirls and dimples pressed into its tooled cover. Then, tugging the bench closer to the fire, she opened the book and began to read.
She could not reach him. His words were there, unchanged, dry and sharp and clear, but though she knew he stood before her as he always had, without dissemblage or disguise, she could not reach him. The print danced and blurred before her eyes, but even as she strained for it, it bore her away, a relentless crush of fear and recollection like a mudslide that stole the ground from beneath her feet and pulled her under. When she closed her eyes, pressing her fingers into their unyielding jelly, the book slipped from her lap and fell to the floor.
When Fuerst returned to the cabin he found her hunched upon the bench, her arms around her shins, her thighs pressed into the swell of her belly. On the floor beside her sprawled a heavy volume, open and face down. He picked it up, smoothing out its crumpled pages, and set it on the table. He waited, observing his wife. She did not move. Gently he touched her shoulder.
‘Come to bed,’ he said.
She lifted her head, staring dazedly at her husband.
‘The baby,’ he asked. ‘Is it coming?’
She shook her head, then let it fall onto her knees. The fire was almost out.
‘Then come to bed.’
He patted her awkwardly and turned away. Elisabeth closed her eyes and the darkness was splashed red, livid with the coals of the dying fire. Behind her, her husband dropped his boots to the ground, one thud and then another.
‘Forgive me,’ she whispered, and the words hung in the silence like smoke.
‘You are afraid,’ Fuerst said quietly. ‘It is to be expected. But we have worked hard and you are strong. God shall be merciful.’
Elisabeth pressed her hands against her face.
‘Forgive me,’ she said again into the cup of her fingers, and in the stretched-out scream in her chest the words closed round her heart like a noose.
The tallow lamp spat and guttered, coughing scrawls of black. Elisabeth pinched it out, the red eye of the wick sharp against her thumb. It was a dark night, the moon no more than a slit in the sky. As the fire paled to ash, Fuerst’s breathing slowed and deepened, the rasp of it scoring the darkness. He was a wary man and cautious, but there was no fear in him. Already he was of this place, his feet growing down into the earth. She might try to pull him out just to see the torn-out hole he left, but she could not uproot him.
She breathed in, filling herself with his exhalations, but still the child moved in her, and the fear, and she did not know which was the stronger. When the dreams came, she hardly knew herself asleep. A part of her watched them from the other side of wakefulness so that she thought always that she might wake, that she could make herself wake, but she did not. She could not stop them. They came like contractions, iron hoops around the barrel of her to drive the memories from her, each one stark and sudden as though lit by lightning, outlined in black, the colour all bleached out, and there was no pity in them.
When the news of his death had reached Mobile, the commandant had come himself to break it to her. She had opened the door and seen the solemnity in his thin, boyish face, and she had held on to the jamb of the door with both hands and told him she could not see him. She had thought that if he did not say it–
He was dead. She had watched him go and she had said nothing. The loss of him stole her balance from her, filling and filling her with a bitter black brine that rose up to choke her, roaring in her ears. Day after day, in the room with the stain the shape of France beneath the window, she had crouched over the swell of her belly, holding in her arms the child, oyster-pale, that stirred inside her, the child whose faithless father was dead and whose sibling at that moment curled like a reflection in another woman’s womb.
And then, one heat-clogged afternoon, the click of Perrine Roussel’s tongue against the roof of her mouth. Elisabeth tried to twist her mind away from the pursed lips, the pale peel of potato from her rough red hands, but the words came clearly, nails banged into wood.
After all you have done for that boy. At least he has honoured his obligations and has not tried to deny his part
.
Auguste standing in his doorway, his grave eyes, the defeated sag of his shoulders. The weight of the child like a bruise on her spine.
Jean-Claude is innocent. The slave’s child is mine.
The impossibility of it, stuck like a scream in her throat. He had gone north and she had said nothing.
The trap is set
. She had watched him go and she had known, and she had said nothing.
The pain in her side as she ran, the slash of breath in her throat. Okatomih’s child was not his. Guillemette’s words in her head all the comfort she could summon.
Belladonna is a poison, of course. An excess of it will kill a man
.
Elisabeth twisted away, turning her face from the press of memory, but it was upon her now and the force of it too strong for her. The yard, wide as a windless sea. The squint of the sun. The heat-swollen latch of the wood store that stuck. The frenzy in her, stronger than fear, stronger even than grief. The rush of saliva into her mouth, the hunger and the smell of cypress. The tilt of stacked wood beneath her feet, the frantic clatter of the logs that covered the wide-open mouth of the barrel. There had been so many. The weight of them and her clumsiness, the splinters beneath her fingernails, her groping fingers closing on air. The clawing off of the rags, the prising out of the stopper. And then the clatter of the earthenware jar against her teeth. Its thick rough lip, like scouring sand. The blessed sticky rush of the liquid down her chin. The rough texture of linen against her greedy tongue.