Wild Child (30 page)
During the first hard rain of autumn, when the leaves lay like currency at the feet of the trees and the branches shone black against a diminished sky, a party of hunters from the village of Lacaune, in the Languedoc region of France, returning cold and damp and without anything tangible to show for their efforts, spotted a human figure in the gloom ahead. The figure appeared to be that of a child, a boy, and he was entirely naked, indifferent to the cold and the rain.
He was preoccupied with something—cracking acorns between two rocks, as it turned out—and didn’t at first see them coming. But then one of the party—Messier, the village smith, whose hands and forearms had been rendered the color of a red Indian’s with the hard use of his trade—stepped in a hole and lost his balance, lurching into the boy’s field of vision. It was that sudden movement that spooked him. One moment he was there, crouched over his store of raw acorns, and the next he was gone, vanishing into the undergrowth with the hypersensitivity of a stoat or weasel. None of them could be sure—the encounter had been so brief, a matter of seconds—but they unanimously claimed that the figure had fled on all fours.
A week later, the boy was spotted again, this time at the verge of a farmer’s fields, digging potatoes from the ground and bolting them as they were, without benefit of cooking or even rinsing. The farmer’s instinct was to chase him off, but he restrained himself—he’d heard the reports of a wild child, a child of the forest, un enfant sauvage, and he crept closer to better observe the phenomenon before him. He saw that the child was very young indeed, eight or nine years old, if that, and that he used only his bare hands and broken nails to dig in the sodden earth, like a dog. To all outward appearances, the child seemed normal, having the fluid use of his limbs and hands, but his emaciation was alarming and his movements were swift and autonomous—at some point, after the farmer had approached to within twenty yards of him, the child reared his head and made eye contact. It was difficult to see the child’s face because of the unbarbered thatch of his hair and the way it masked his features. Nothing moved, not the flock on the hill, nor the clouds in the sky. The countryside seemed preternaturally silent, the birds in the hedgerows holding their breath, the wind stilled, the very insects mute underfoot. That look—the unblinking eyes, black as coffee poured straight from the pot, the tightening of the mouth around discolored canines—was the look of a thing out of Spiritus Mundi, deranged, alien, hateful. It was the farmer who had to turn away.
That was how it began, the legend brewing, stewing, simmering in every pot throughout the district through the fall of 1797, in the fifth year of the new French Republic, and into the year that succeeded it. The Terror was over, the King was dead, life—especially in the provinces—returning to normal. People needed a mystery to sustain them, a belief in the arcane and the miraculous, and any number of them—mushroom gatherers and truffle diggers, squirrel hunters, peasants bent under the weight of faggots or baskets of turnips and onions, kept watch in the woods, but it wasn’t until the following spring that the boy was sighted again, this time by a party of three woodcutters, led by Messier, the smith, and this time they gave chase. They chased the boy without thinking, without reason, chased him because he ran from them, and they might have been chasing anything, a cat, a hind, a boar.
Eventually, they ran him to tree, where he hissed and flailed the branches, flinging things down on them. Each time one of them attempted to mount into the branches and snatch for the boy’s callused foot, he was pummeled and bitten, until finally they decided to smoke him out. A fire was built beneath the tree, the boy all the while watching these three bipeds, these shagged and violent and strangely habited and gibbering animals, out of the deep retreat of his eyes. Picture him there, crouched in the highest branches, his skin so nicked and abraded it was like a hide haphazardly tanned, the scar at his throat a bleached white tear visible even from the ground, his feet dangling, arms limp, as the smoke rose about him.
Picture him, because he wasn’t able to picture himself. He knew nothing but the immediate, felt only what his senses transmitted to him. When he was a child of five, small and undernourished, the stubborn thirteenth child of a stubborn peasant family, his mind lax and pre-lingual, he was taken out into the forest of La Bassine by a woman he hardly knew or acknowledged, his father’s second wife, and she didn’t have the strength to do what she had to do, and so when she took him by the hair and twisted his head to expose the taut flesh of his throat she shut her eyes fast and the kitchen knife missed its stroke. Still, it was enough. His blood drew steam from the leaves and he lay there in a shrunken, skeletal nest, night coming down and the woman already receding into the trees.
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.
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. Pere 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.