Wild Child and Other Stories Read online

  He had no memory of any of it, no memory of wandering and foraging until his blouse and crude pantaloons were torn, were mesh, were string, no memory at all. For him, there was only the moment, and in the moment he could catch things to feed his hunger, things that had no names and no qualities except their desire to escape him, frogs, salamanders, a mouse, a squirrel, nestling birds, the sweet and bitter sacs of the eggs themselves. He found berries, mushrooms, ate things that sickened him and at the same time sharpened his senses of gustation and olfaction so that he could distinguish what was edible from what was not. Was he lonely? Scared? Superstitious? No one can say. And he couldn’t have said himself, because he had no language, no ideas, no way of knowing he was alive or in what place he was alive or why. He was feral—a living, breathing atavism—and his life was no different from the life of any other creature of the forest.

  The smoke irritated his eyes, interrupted his breathing. Below him, the fire built and climbed and everything was obscured. When he fell, they caught him.

  2

  Fire he knew, remnants of the blazes the farmers made of last year’s stalks and the stubble of the fields, and he’d learned through trial that a potato in the ashes turns to meal, savory and fragrant, but the smoke of the woodcutters’ blaze overcame him so that the air was poisoned all around him and he fell into another state. Messier took him up and bound his limbs and the three men brought him back to the village of Lacaune. It was late in the afternoon, the night already gathering round the trunks of the trees and consolidating the leaves of the bushes as if they’d been tarred. All three were anxious to be home, to warm themselves at the hearth—it was cold for April and the sky spitting rain—but here was this marvel, this freak of nature, and the astonishment of what they’d done sustained them. Before they’d passed the first outlying houses, the boy flung comatose over Messier’s shoulder, the whole village knew they were coming. Père Fasquelle, the oldest man in Lacaune, whose memory stretched back to the bloodline of the dead king’s father’s father, was out in the street, his mouth hanging open, and every child danced away from courtyards and doorways to come running in a mob even as their parents put down hoes and ladles and stirring spoons to join them.

  They took the boy to the tavern—where else, but the church, and there was no sense in that, or not yet, anyway—and he seemed to come to life then, just as Messier was handing him through the door to DeFarge, the tavern keeper. The smith had a proprietary hold on the boy’s legs, supporting him at the small of the back, and DeFarge took possession of the shoulders and head in his soft white taverner’s hands. Behind them, Messier’s two companions and the surging crush of the village, children crying out, men and women alike jostling for position and everyone focused on the open door so that a stranger coming on the scene would have thought the mayor had declared a holiday and the drinks on the house. There was a moment suspended in time, the crowd pressing, the child caught between the outdoors and the interior of that fabricated structure, the feral and the civilized in balance. That was when the child’s black eyes flashed open and in a single savage movement he jerked his head forward and upward, clamping his teeth on the excess flesh beneath DeFarge’s chin.

  Sudden panic. DeFarge let out a scream and Messier tightened his grip even as the taverner let go in pain and terror and the child crashed to the floor, rending flesh, and those who saw it said it was just as if a swamp turtle, dredged out of the muck, had whipped round its viridian head and struck out blindly. The blood was there, instant, paralyzing, and within seconds the taverner’s beard flowered with it. Those already in the room jerked away from him while the crush at the door fell back precipitately and the child, Messier gone down with him, bucked and writhed in the doorway. There were shouts and cries and two or three of the women let out with fierce draining sobs that seemed to tear the heart out of the crowd—this was a wild thing amongst them, some beast or demon, and there it was at their feet, a twisting shape in the shadow of the doorway, blood on its snout. Startled, even Messier gave up his hold and jerked to his feet, his eyes staring as if he were the one who’d been attacked.

  “Stab it!” someone hissed. “Kill it!”

  But then they saw that it was only a child, measuring just over four and a half feet tall and weighing no more than seventy bone-lashed pounds, and two of the men covered his face with a rag so he couldn’t bite and pressed their weight into him until he stopped writhing and the claws of his hands, which had worked out of the knots, were secure again. “There’s nothing to fear,” Messier proclaimed. “It’s a human child, that’s all it is.” DeFarge was led away, cursing, to be treated, and no one—not yet—had thought of rabies, and they crowded in close then, poking at the bound-up child, the enfant sauvage stripped from the fastness of the forest. They saw that his skin was roughened and dark as an Arab’s, that the calluses of his feet were thick and horned and his teeth so yellowed they were like a goat’s. The hair was grease itself and protected them from the unflinching glare of his eyes where it fell across his face and the rough corners of the cloth jammed deep in his mouth. No one thought to cover his genitals, the genitals of a child, two acorns and a twig.

  The night wore on and nobody wanted to leave the room, the excess prowling round the open door, queuing up for a second and third look, the drink flowing, the darkness steeping in its post-winter chill, DeFarge’s wife throwing wood at the fire and every man, woman and child thinking they’d seen the miraculous, a sight more terrifying and wonderful than the birth of the two-headed calf at Mansard’s the year past or the adder that had borne a hundred adders just like it. They poked the child, prodded him with the toes of their sabots and boots—some of the more curious or courageous leaned in close to catch the scent of him, and every one of them pronounced it the smell of the wild, of the beast in its lair. At some point, the priest came to bless him, and though the wild Indians of America had been brought to the fold of God and the aborigines of Africa and Asia too, the priest thought better of it. “What’s the matter, Father?” someone asked. “Is he not human?”

  But the priest—a very young man with an angelic face and hardly a trace of beard—just shook his head and walked out the door.

  Later, when people grew tired of the spectacle and eyelids began to collapse and chins give way to gravity, Messier—the most vocal and possessive of the group—insisted that the prodigy be locked in the back room of the tavern overnight so that news of his capture could be spread throughout the province in the morning. They’d removed the gag to enable the child to eat and drink, and a number of people, women amongst them, had attempted to coax him to taste one thing or another—a heel of bread, a scrap of stewed hare, wine, broth—but he’d twisted and spat and would take nothing. Someone speculated that he’d been raised by wolves, like Romulus and Remus, and would consume only the milk of a she-wolf, and he was given a very small quantity of the nearest simulacrum—the deposit of one of the village bitches that had just given birth—and yet that too was rejected. As were offal, eggs, butter, boudin and cheese. After a while, and after half the citizens in the place had stood patiently over the bound and writhing form with one thing or another dangling from tentative fingertips, they gave up and went home to their beds, excited and gratified, but weary, very weary, and bloated with drink.

  Then it was quiet. Then it was dark. Traumatized, numb, the child lay there in a state between waking and sleeping. He was trembling, not from the cold because he was hardened to the weather, even to winter and the bitterest of days, but because of fear. He couldn’t feel his limbs, the cords so tightly wound they were like ligatures, cutting off circulation, and he was terrified of the strangeness of the place where he was confined, a place that was enclosed on six planes and gave no sign of the stars overhead and no scent of pine or juniper or water in its flight. Animals, bigger and more powerful than he, had taken him for their pleasure, for their prey, and he had no expectation but fear because he had no word for death and no way to conceptualize it.
He caught things, quick frightened things, and he killed them and ate them, but that was in a different place and a different time. Perhaps he made the connection, perhaps not. But at some point, when the moon rose and the thinnest sliver of light cut between the jointure of two stones in the near wall, he began to stir.

  He had no awareness of time. Flexing, rocking, pushing off with his flexible toes and scrabbling with his nails, he shifted in space and shifted again and again till the cords began to give up their grip. When they were loose, he tore them off as if they were strips of vegetation, the vines and tendrils and entangling branches that snatched at his wrists and ankles as he perambulated through the forest, and a moment later he was stalking the room. There were two doors, but he didn’t know what a door was and the rigidity of his terror had kept him from discovering its function when he was brought into this place and laid on the compacted floor in a scattering of straw. Nonetheless, he felt them, felt the wood as a texture to itself and a contrast to the stone, and thrust his weight into them. Nothing happened. The doors—the one leading back into the tavern, the other to the yard—were latched, and even if they weren’t he wouldn’t have been able to uncover the secret of their hinges or their method either. But above him was the roof, thatch over a frame of stripped poles laid close as fingers and toes. A single leap took him there, where he clung upside down like an oversized insect, and then it was a small thing to separate two poles and begin to dig upward toward the scent of the night.

  3

  For two years and more he eluded capture, hovering like a cauchemar at the margins of people’s thoughts, and when the mistral raked the roofs and shrieked down the chimneys, they said he was stirring up the spirits of the forest. If a hen went missing, they blamed the enfant, though he’d never been seen to consume flesh or even to know what it was; if it rained too much or too little or if rust afflicted the grain or aphids the vines, people crossed themselves and cursed his name. He wasn’t a child. He was a spirit, a demon outcast like the rebel angels, mute and staring and mad. Peasants reported seeing him capering in moonlit meadows, swimming like a rat in the rivers, basking in the sun in summer and darting through the scabs of snow that lay on the winter hills, oblivious to the cold. They called him the Naked One. L’Animal. Or, simply, the Savage.

  For his part, he scraped and dug and followed his nose. On the primal level, he had only to feed himself, and if he raided the fields like any other creature of the forest, he took the same risks as they, to be trapped or shot or startled to immobility by the sudden flapping of a scarecrow’s rags. Still, his diet was barely adequate, as might be imagined, consisting almost entirely of vegetable matter, and in winter he suffered just as the birds did. But he survived. And he grew. Haunting the barnyards, the middens and granaries, he became bolder, quicker, stronger, and farmers took to setting the dogs on him, but he was cannier than any dog and too smart to go to tree. Did he somehow come to understand that people were his tribe in the way that a bear instinctually consorts with other bears rather than foxes or wolves or goats? Did he know he was human? He must have. He had no words to form the proposition, no way of thinking beyond the present moment, but as he grew he became less a creature of the forest and more of the pasture, the garden, the dim margin where the trees and the maquis give way to cultivation.

  Then came the winter of 1799, which was especially bitter. By this time, wary of the forest of La Bassine and wandering in search of the next trove of mushrooms or wild grapes or berries and the grubs he extracted from the pulp of decaying trees, he’d worked his way up over the mountains, across the plain between Lacaune and Roquecézière, and then down again along the bed of the Lavergne until he arrived in the environs of the village of Saint-Sernin. It was early January, just after the New Year, and the cold held a grip on everything. When night fell, he made himself a nest of pine branches, but slept fitfully because of his shivering and the hunger that clawed at his insides. At first light he was up and pawing through the scattered clods of a dormant field, looking for anything to feed into his mouth, tubers, onions, the chaff and scraps of crops long since harvested, when a ghostly drifting movement caught his eye: smoke, rising above the trees at the far end of the field. He was crouched on all fours, digging. The ground was wet. A crow mocked him from the trees. Without thinking, without knowing what he was doing or why, he rose and trotted toward the smoke and the cottage that gave rise to it.

  Inside was the village dyer, François Vidal, who’d just gotten out of bed and started up the fire to warm the place and make himself a bit of porridge for breakfast. He was childless, a widower, and he lived alone. From the rafters of his one-room cottage hung the drying herbs, flowers and marsh weeds he used in his receipts—he was the only man in the region who could produce a bon teint of royal purple in lamb’s wool, employing his own mixture and mordant, and he was of necessity extremely secretive. Did his competitors want his receipts? Yes, they did. Did they spy on him? He couldn’t have said for certain, but he wouldn’t have put it past them. At any rate, he went out to the yard, to the crude shed in which he kept his cow, so that he could feed and milk her, thinking to skim off the cream to complement his porridge. That was when he saw something—the dark streak of an animal—moving upright against the dun earth and the stripped backdrop of the trees.

  He had no prejudices. He hadn’t heard the rumors from Lacaune or even from the next village over. And when his eyes adjusted and registered the image in his brain, he saw that this was no animal, but a human child, a boy, filthy, naked to the elements and in need. He held out his hand.

  What ensued was a test of wills. When the boy didn’t respond, Vidal extended both his hands, palms up, to show he was unarmed, and he spoke to him in soft, coaxing tones, but the boy didn’t seem to understand or even to hear. As a child, Vidal had a half-sister who was deaf, and the family had evolved its own home signs to communicate with her, though the rest of the village shunned her as a freak; it was these signs that began to come back to him as he stood there in the cold, contemplating the naked child. If the boy was a deaf-mute, as it appeared, then perhaps he would respond to the signs. The dyer’s hands, stained with the residue of his trade, spoke in quick elegant patterns, but to no avail. The boy stood rooted, his eyes flitting past the dyer’s face to the house, the shed, the smoke that flattened and billowed against the sky. Finally, fearful of driving him off, Vidal backed slowly to the house, made a welcoming gesture at the door, and then stepped inside, leaving the door open wide in invitation.

  Eventually, with the dyer bent over the hearth and the cow—Rousa—unmilked and lowing with a sound that was like the distant intermittent report of a meteorological event in the hills, the boy came to the open door and Vidal was able to get a good look at him. Whose child was this, he wondered, to be allowed to run wild like an animal, the filth of the woods ingrained in the very pores of his skin, his hair matted with twigs and burrs and leaf mold and his knees callused like the soles of his feet? Who was he? Had he been abandoned? And then he saw the scar at the child’s throat and knew the answer. When he gestured toward the fire, toward the blackened pot and the wheat porridge congealing within it, he was thinking of his dead sister.

  Cautiously, one tentative step at a time, the boy was drawn to the fire. And just as cautiously, because he was afraid that any sudden movement would chase him through the door and back out into the fields, Vidal laid sticks on the hearth till the fire leapt up and he had to remove the pot, which he set on the fender to cool. The door stood open. The cow lowed. Using his hands to speak, the dyer offered the boy a bowl of porridge, fragrant with the steam rising from it, and he meant to fetch milk and pull the door shut, once he had his trust. But the boy showed no interest whatever in the food. He was in constant motion, rocking back and forth on his feet, his eyes fixed on the fire. It came to Vidal that he didn’t know what porridge was, didn’t know a bowl or a spoon or their function either. And so he made gestures, pantomiming the act of eating in the way of
a parent with an infant, bringing the spoon to his lips and tasting the porridge, making a show of masticating and swallowing and even going so far as to rub his abdomen in a circular fashion and smiling in satisfaction.

  The boy was unmoved. He simply stood there, rocking, fascinated by the fire, and the two of them might have stayed in position all day long if it weren’t for an inspiration that suddenly came to the old man. Perhaps there were simpler, ruder foods, he reasoned, foods of the forest and fields, that the child would take without prejudice, nuts and the like. He looked round him—he had no nuts. Nuts were out of season. But in a basket against the far wall there was a small quantity of potatoes he’d brought up from the root cellar to fry in lard with his evening meal. Very slowly, communicating with his body and his hands so as not to alarm the child, he got to his feet, and slowly—so slowly he might have been a child himself playing a game of statues—crossed the room to the basket. He lifted the straw lid, and still pantomiming, held up the basket to display its contents.

  That was all it took. In an instant the child was there, inches away, the wild odor rising from him like musk, his hands scrabbling in the basket till he was clutching every last potato in his arms—a dozen or more—and then he was at the fire, throwing them into the flames in a single motion. His face was animated, his eyes leaping. Short, blunted, inarticulate cries escaped his lips. Within seconds, in the space of time it took Vidal to move to the door and pull it closed, the boy had reached into the coals to extract one of the uncooked potatoes, burning his fingers in the process. Immediately, as if he had no concept of what cookery involved, he began gnawing at it. When it was gone, he reached for another and then another and the same sequence of events played out, only now the potatoes were blackened on the outside and hard within and his fingers visibly scarred.