A Rendezvous in Haiti

by Stephen Becker

  Dillingham said, “I learned a few words at the Naval Academy,” and even McAllister smiled.

  Healy asked, “How many have you, Father?”

  “Four, with the Latin; and a smattering of Italian.”

  “I just hope you talk Martel’s language,” McAllister said.

  “I did once,” Scarron said. “And a priest matters to Martel’s people.”

  “You may not matter to that white Caco,” Healy said.

  “Don’t you worry about him,” McAllister said. “Captain, I want to thank you. You’re laying a hell of a lot on the line for me.”

  “Not for you,” Healy said. “For your lady. You just fetch her safe and sound, hear?”

  “I’ll do that,” McAllister said, and to the priest, “Let’s move out, shall we?”

  Flanagan led their mounts to the dusty ground below the veranda. “These are my own horses,” McAllister told the priest. “As sturdy as any troopers anywhere.”

  “Huge brawny beasts they are,” Scarron said.

  Marines stood quietly in the baked company streets. The officers and priest shook hands all around. “Good luck,” Dillingham said. One of the men echoed them, “Good luck,” and others took up the cry, then subsided.

  Healy said, “God be with you.”

  “An invocation,” Scarron murmured. “Yes. Trust in the Lord.”

  “I trust in you,” McAllister said.

  And so the two mounted and started off, side by side, a wild light in McAllister’s eye, Father Scarron erect and confident in the saddle but doleful within.

  8

  Showers broke in mid-morning, and thickened to sheets of rain; the white Caco inverted his slung rifle, led their wagon off the trail and bedded it snugly among mahoganies. He wrapped the rifle in a spare shirt from his bedroll. Above them the rain snapped and danced on flat glossy leaves. He unhitched the mule and stripped his horse, wincing in the effort; he tethered both and offered water to Caroline. The brim of his sombrero was gently curled, and collected rain, and spilled it as he busied himself.

  Caroline said, “I’m cold and wet and hungry.”

  “Drink. It’s rum.” He tossed her a second canteen, uncased and shiny.

  She shivered. “Can we build a fire?”

  He did not speak, only continued housekeeping.

  The rum seared; she perked up in time to catch the saddle-cloth he flung at her. “Over your head,” he said, “like a Spanish woman.”

  “A fire would help,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to burn.”

  “Let me help,” she said. “Let me move, let me be warm.”

  “Be drier under the wagon,” he said.

  She drew the pistol from her waistband and waggled it.

  “Mon dieu, les poules,” he said. “I want to be dry, is all. If I lean back against the off fore wheel and you lean back against the near rear wheel we can be cozy and your maidenhead will be safe for a few minutes at least and you can talk your bloody head off.”

  “I’d like to kill you now,” she said. “I’d love to see you dead.”

  “That’s rude,” he said.

  Beneath the leafy canopy rain trickled and spattered. It must be a pelting rain in the open, but they were snug here. “You go in there first and settle,” she said, “and set food and drink between us.”

  “You give orders like your papa. Little lady colonel.”

  “You’re not human,” she said. “You speak French like a Frenchman but you can’t be French because you speak English like an American and you can’t be American because you speak Creole like a Haitian. You look like a Spanish bandit and you carry guns and knives and you’ll do anything for money. You came here so you could be a big shot and abuse the poor Haitians, and their women too. I suppose behind their backs you call them niggers.”

  “By Christ!” he whispered; he stood tall in the rain, he loomed, his blue eyes flamed. “What do you know about me? You don’t know the first fucking thing about me, or Haiti either!”

  The flung obscenity staggered her. She rallied: “I know you’re a brute.”

  “Where I come from,” he said, “I’m a nigger, and it’s not the United States.”

  “My God, you are mad.”

  “Christ, you’re a silly girl,” he said. “Put the pistol away and scoot under that wagon.”

  Discretion was now the better part of valor; Caroline scooted.

  For an hour they listened to the rain, and her anger floated between them like a mist; also a vague shame. She had not excelled in virtue. When he spoke it was sudden, and frightened her: “Going to leave the cart. You’ll ride muleback.”

  Muleback! For an instant she was the equestrienne, indignant; then she was grateful. Life was improving. Whatever befell them she would prefer muleback with a pistol to the bed of a cart, unarmed. “Thank you,” she said. “Not in this rain.”

  “It will let up in five minutes or so,” he said. “At that time I am going in the bushes, and you go too if you need to.”

  “Such gallantry,” she said. “Exquisite.”

  “Shut your goddam mouth,” he said.

  The noon sun shone, and to the east a pale moon was just rising; the sky was golden, but as they picked their way through the forest residual rain dripped from the trees, and tree frogs, refreshed, chorused and chimed their rhythmic thanks, a grand choir of croaks and peeps and snores. The man rode before, and Caroline admired his courage; she knew that she would not kill him, but he could not know it. Or could he? What did she know of him or Haiti?

  “I suppose it really doesn’t matter about the pistol,” she said.

  “I want you to have it,” he said. “And keep your eyes peeled. If some sniper kills me, you’ll have half a chance, and at the worst you can blow your own brains out.”

  A distant tambor chattered then, and another. “There they go,” he said.

  “What are they telling us?”

  “Never learned,” he said. “They don’t tell whole stories. They just say ‘traveler’, or ‘danger’, or ‘voodoo’, or ‘blanc’. They learned the beat from tree frogs. You heard, after the rain?”

  “Yes. It was just frogs.”

  “You listen again after the next rain,” he said. “Kee. Kee. Kee. Then some others come in a little higher, ba-dee, ba-dee, ba-dee. Then some big old grandpapas, ka-chungg. Then some little ones, ko-ko-ko-ko-ko-ko. Pretty soon they’re all at it together like some damn orchestra, and it works. They stay in rhythm, and the whole hillside makes music, and there’s nothing but the golden sunlight and the green hillside and the music. Can’t tell me where music came from. It came from tree frogs, that’s where. African tree frogs.”

  There was a note in his voice that she had not heard before: enthusiasm, a boyish pomposity. She cocked her head, curious and confused, but found no words.

  Soon they rode out of the forest, and he paused. “Hold up,” he said. She halted her mule, which seemed neither stubborn nor hostile, but mindless and contented.

  “We’ll ride just below the crests,” he said, “as quiet as we can. That little fellow is out there somewhere, and so are plenty of others, spies and hungry outlaws and just plain hired hands, and we had best head straight for Martel.”

  She nodded.

  “By God,” he said, “I shut you up. No advice? No complaints?” He shocked her by smiling. She could not deceive herself: it was a beautiful smile, healthy white teeth, tanned face, dark brows: she battled a powerful impulse to smile back. “My name is Blanchard,” he added, pronouncing it in the American manner, “Louis Paul Blanchard. Pleased to meet you, I’m sure, and thanks for the bandage.”

  “What—what a long speech,” she said.

  “I have plenty to say,” he told her.

  On the slopes were many copses, scrawny cedars or luxuriant raintrees bunched in hollows. Blanchard was following a trail of sorts: a goat-path, perhaps. He had dug out a pair of binoculars, and halted often to scan the hillsides. Caroline grew qui
ckly hot and tired, and was pleased when he too squinted uncomfortably at the high sun. “Those raintrees,” he said. “We’ll take cover and spread a fine luncheon. Oysters and a cool glass of Chablis.”

  Chablis. Well, God knew who or what he was; for the moment, rest and food mattered.

  He used the binoculars. “Nobody stirring,” he said. “Haitians are a naturally smart people. No busy-busy in the noonday sun. You notice the drums just quit? And way, way off there,” he pointed, “see that wisp of smoke? Lunchtime, like I said. All of Haiti shucking those oysters and pulling those corks.”

  They were well into the cool shaded grove when he halted. He pointed: a round platform only six inches or so off the ground, with gourds and shriveled sour apples and coconut husks and solid little unripe pawpaws lying jumbled, all somewhat eaten away by ants and birds and the ordained scavengers that kept nature clean.

  “A Caco shrine,” he said. “Look closer.”

  Concealed in higher grass beside the small platform was a flat rock about a yard across. Caroline dismounted. On the rock were a handful of coffee beans, a snippet of red ribbon, a crude knife with a wooden haft, a goat’s skull, and a little human head molded of lead, with an aquiline nose and thin lips. It was unquestionably the head of a blanc, and the shrine proclaimed a desire to replace it with the genuine article.

  Much subdued, Caroline led her mule away.

  They chewed dried goat’s meat, mealy breadfruit, and plantain. Like a man-about-town Blanchard mixed her a rum-and-water in his canteen cup, and himself alternated swigs from the two canteens. He began tentatively but gathered speed and anger: “Cold! In winter Quebec is like an ice cap. Fields of snow and ice, a whole province of snow and ice and the sun no more help than a penny candle. Farmers go crazy and kill their wives and children. You slaughter hogs in the autumn because you won’t be able to feed ’em, and they hang on their hooks like marble. Can’t even butcher till May. So you go on up to Montreal, where you have half a chance, but half doesn’t seem enough so you go farther, you cross over to Ottawa, and then you’re really a nigger. A Frenchman can walk in and he’s a goddam prince and goes to every soirée in town, but a French Canadian swabs out the toilets in some government office.”

  “Even with two languages?” This was a picnic; she was drowsy. The pistol lay heavy in her lap.

  “Haw! Anybody else, people be glad to hire him. Not a French Canadian. Damn British! Damn Americans! Call us Canucks. Goddam Canada’d be another goddam Scottish desert without us, kirk and work and skinny women. Well.” He swigged deeper. “Maybe I would never have amounted to much. My father was a pig farmer and country butcher and I can read and write and figure but not much more, except kill. This is his knife. I can take a man’s head off with it. He gave it to me when I went to war.”

  “You were in France.”

  “Yeh. They told me I wouldn’t have to go overseas. That was September in fourteen. I was in England by October and France by February. You know what Wipers is?”

  “Yes. Ypres, the town in Belgium. The battles.”

  “Three of ’em. The first one was around October, November in fourteen so I missed that. But I am one of the few men alive who went through Wipers Two and Wipers Three, and I tell you we are doomed. I know that. Just about the time we finish dividing up the world, we’ll finish killing each other off. Some pygmies come along in about five hundred years and scratch their heads and wonder.”

  “But it’s over,” she said reasonably.

  “Oh boy,” he said. “Are you smart! These Haitians know: they don’t want any part of your boy friend.”

  “He was in France too.”

  “Oh yes. The Marines have landed. Did I ever tell you I met your father?”

  “You met my …”

  “Yeh. Goddam parade. Officers, a band.” He snorted, and his face fell sullen. He slugged at his clairin.

  Caroline said carefully, “I’ve heard your cough before. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re smarter than I thought,” he said. His eyes smoldered. “Yeh. I was with the Canadian Division. We were right in the middle of that Second Wipers. It was April fifteen. The bloody Hun, we were already calling him that, the bloody Hun used chlorine gas against the 2d and 3d Canadian brigades. We went crazy. We tried everything. Kerchiefs dipped in water. A lot of good that did. Smells like hell, thank God, so we had warning. We tried to hold our ground and some of us did but Christ that gas rolled in. There was a lot of Africans in the line too, I remember, Zouaves and maybe some Senegalese, three battalions I think, and they just looked around at each other and said ‘Jesus Christ, the white man’ and they ran, and it’s what I should have done too. Us niggers got to stick together. Those poor goddam exiles, left their women and their sunshine for a dollar a day to come and rot in the bloody rain in Belgium and this great thick smoke kills them by the barrel.”

  “It wasn’t only you.” Caroline was angry: Bobby was scarred, might have died. “There were thousands of brave men who didn’t quit the human race.”

  “Hell, yes!” he fired back. “You want figures? I’ll never forget ’em. Second Wipers: casualties: two thousand one hundred fifty officers, fifty-seven thousand other ranks. Dead: ten thousand five hundred. Just to go back and forth over a mile of useless ground and maybe level a few buildings seven or eight hundred years old. That’s not counting cattle and old women who got in the way. Those ten thousand five hundred sure quit the human race.”

  And now he had begun, there was no end to it. They rode on; he talked away. “All the smart ones died. The smart tommies because they didn’t know a damn thing about war, and the smart lieutenants because it was the honorable thing to do when you had family and were supposed to run the world.” They were riding from copse to copse, and in the valleys more smoke rose, and they saw a river; time quickened. And still he talked, his voice low. “Everybody good got killed. They made a feast for the rats—fat, slimy rats and those beady eyes shining at you in the rain. That’s what tore my guts out, that and the gas. All the strong ones and all the smart ones, and who the hell is left in charge? Millions, lady! Ten fucking million! You understand me? On both sides; blow off their heads and they all look alike. Canadians, English, French, Russians, Italians, and Austria-Hungary or whatever and those Serbos, and Aussies and New Zealanders and Gurkhas—Gurkhas, the best fucking fighters in the world but there is no way to use even a Gurkha when machine guns can crossfire. That’s why the Haitians have won. It may take a generation but they’ve already won. They won it in Europe. And the Chinese and the Japanese and the Hindus have won. And I’m on their side. You understand now?”

  For a moment she simply could not speak. “My father—”

  “Yeh! Your father!”

  “—once said that it was as if we were sorry we ever gave up human sacrifice; as if we were afraid we’d offended the gods, and had to revive it every few years to be sure who we were.”

  “Your father said that?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s pretty good,” he said. “I sure sacrificed my share. Anyway they put me in hospital and let me cough for a while, and fed me up. I was still dizzy and still coughing when they reclassified me for light duty, so I was an officer’s batman in 1916, and he was stitched across so they gave me to another one, but I knew what ‘light duty’ meant: it meant that when they ran short of meat they’d send me up to the line. Which they did in the spring of seventeen. I was a corporal then. And the first thing that happened was, we won a great battle. It was someplace called Messines and the generals were all laughing and popping champagne, and we took seven thousand prisoners. I was guarding a line of them, scrawniest goddam Boche you ever saw, and one of them started to cough and for all I know he’s still coughing, and that started me to coughing and we just looked at each other, we knew what it was all right, and we didn’t say a word but we were asking each other, this German just about my age, skinny as a rail, we were asking each other why we let these fuckers do it to us. H
e had crown princes and dukes sitting in clubs, his Wilhelms and Ottos, and I had French and Haig, generals and field marshals. All leather chairs and tobacco pipes, and britches and shiny boots, and us poor sons of bitches—Jesus Christ, woman! The whole goddam Europe is gone, you understand? Your boy friend won’t win here because he can’t. The white man is finished, and he finished himself.”

  His saddle creaked, and horse and mule reeked pleasantly in the humid afternoon air. Caroline was calm, a nurse again: some of this she had heard before, some of it she had understood. And now she wondered if her world had in truth vanished, if Bobby’s career and her father’s conference, if horse farms and shipyards, if famine in China and the women’s vote, were only illusory scraps and remnants, grace notes to stave off, for a few bars more, the end of the great dance of history; if they were all plunging even now down time’s chute into a black void.

  And yet as he railed he became more human; she wanted to embrace him like a sister and to murmur, “It will all end well.” She turned in the saddle to see his face. His eyes were not cold now, but burned; he was glaring in fury at his past. Abruptly they went blank, and he whispered, “Hush! Stop!”

  They drew rein; she listened.

  “Into the trees! Quick!”

  They sought the densest scrub, dismounted, tethered the horse and mule. “You stay by me and do what I say,” he whispered.

  She had seen nothing, heard only the hot sigh and crackle of a tropical forest.

  He led her forward until the brush thinned. They lay side by side looking out over the slope and the trail they had just left, and now she saw: perhaps half a mile to the south, rounding the morne, a small parade, a line of men, only four but their gait oddly regular. Field hands did not march in close order; for an insane moment her mind said patrol!, and for another insane moment she was sorry.

  Not four: five. The four were marching in lock step like men shackled together. Each had laid a hand on the shoulder of the man before him; only the leader’s arms dangled. Ambling along behind was a foreman in white trousers, and now she heard what Blanchard must have heard long before: the foreman seemed to be singing, or counting cadence.