Savage Lands by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

The girl returned breathless.

‘The basket,’ he said. ‘You–?’

The girl nodded.

‘You remembered, didn’t you, about the salt?’

The girl blinked. She had a manner of blinking that squeezed her whole face tight, as though it had been pulled with a drawstring. Then she nodded again and, squatting down, set to gathering up the mess of dishes beside his bed. Though nothing had been said, it had become the way of things somehow, the slave in the cooking hut and the girl in the house.

The questions rose in him like dough and he longed to seize the girl’s arm, to demand precisely the words spoken and the silences, the manner of her voice, the set of her face and tilt of her head, whether her hair escaped its pins. Instead he let his hands fall open on the rugs, palms upward. His fingers curled, holding nothing. It was set. There was nothing else to be done.

Throughout that endless day and the night that followed, Auguste lay among his tangled bedclothes, counting time in the pulses of his broken shoulder. The rotting walls of the cabin pressed in on him, sucking the air from his lungs. As the day faded he asked the girl to prop the door open so that he might see into the yard. The plants were shattered bones, slimed about with mud and dead black leaves, and above them the weatherless sky turned away from him, indifferent to the whispered urgency in a cabin on the rue d’Iberville, the humdrum ruination of small lives. Auguste knew the pettiness of his grief even as it cried out in him, the dreary cycle of betrayal and counter-betrayal that marked the human season, but knowing it was not consolation but another grief. Was it now that she opened the letter? Or now? Or did she at this moment take up her knife, the one with the fluted blade and the savage patterns burned into the handle, and take from the pile the first of the whiskery potatoes? On the back of her hand she had a pattern of freckles like the five on a die.

He called for willow tea. It quietened neither his pain nor his imaginings. When he no longer could endure either, he had the girl bring him his notebook and a pencil and asked that she sit for him while he sketched her. Though he worked with a grim doggedness, it was a poor likeness. There was a folded-up quality about the girl on the page, a sulky flatness to her fierce black eyes so that she looked merely ill-tempered. When she asked if she might have it, he tore it out roughly, impatient to be rid of it.

As the hours inched through the mangle of the night, he kept a light burning so that he might not lose the shape of himself in the darkness. Sometime before dawn it rained, and the rain thrummed on the roof of the cabin and slapped against the mud of the lane outside.

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