Pride's Folly

by Fiona Harrowe

  “No.” He climbed the three wooden stairs.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “Your servant is related to mine.” He was the same Torg, unchanged, compact, the eyes not judging, merely assessing.

  “Won’t you sit down?”

  “I’m not here for a visit, Page. Only to give you a message.”

  “I see.” It had rained during the night. The eaves of the verandah dripped, and water lay in little pools along the broken brick path.

  “It’s your father. Page. I hear he’s in trouble.’’

  “Harry?” Guilt stabbed me. His face, with its sunburned nose, the crow’s-footed blue eyes, the merry grin, rose before me, a reproachful reminder of my neglect. “What sort of trouble?”

  “It’s not clear. But I thought you might want to know.”

  “Yes—God, yes!” I put my hand over my eyes. “I’ve not forgotten him. It’s just that ...”

  “No need to apologize. Page—whatever it is.”

  There was a long pause. Doves mourned in the mulberry tree. The sun broke through the foliage, a shaft touching the whirring wings of a hummingbird as it drank from a dew-enpearled cluster of blossoms.

  I watched the bird, trying to gather my scattered thoughts. My father was in trouble and I had to make a decision, yet cutting through to it, finding the words, seemed as difficult as wading through a surging sea.

  “Perhaps you ought to go up to Les Domaines,” Torg suggested.

  “Yes, of course.”

  But how could I leave Aurore? She would return to me in a few hours, Aurore, her glistening ripe body lying in my arms under the coolness of the nutmeg tree.

  “I’ll go with you. Page.” A gleam of sympathy lighted Torg’s young-old eyes. He knew; he understood my dilemma without a word passing between us. Had he once been faced with the same choice, the same terrible yet reluctant need to break out of a silken web?

  “We must leave without delay. Page. Now.”

  I stared at him, the struggle still going on: my father or Aurore, duty or desire?

  He waited a minute, two, then repeated gently, “Now, Page.”

  I went back into the bedroom, slipped into my shirt, my shoes, snatched a hat from a peg, and rammed a machete into my belt. Torg had horses, small mountain ponies bred to the island, tied to the wooden gate at the bottom of the garden. He must have counted on me, known I would come. He must have felt that my inborn sense of duty—handed down by a father who had marched off to war for a Georgia to whom he owed nothing, by a Falconer grandfather who had died at Gettysburg, and by a mother who, whatever she was, whatever she had done, had instilled in me a respect for honor and decency—would not fail. So with one last heart-wringing thought of Aurore I mounted the horse and followed him.

  If the first journey through the jungle had been terrible, this one proved a nightmare. The start of the rainy season had mired the paths, in some places turning the mud beneath to the consistency and pull of quicksand. In addition, the wet seemed to bring out the snakes, and we took care to keep the collars of our shirts buttoned tightly as we rode under the dripping, low-hanging lianas, which in the gloom sometimes appeared indistinguishable from vipers. The rivers we crossed were beginning to flood, and the one where we had our tussle with the crocodile looked mean, a raging torrent. We went considerably out of our way to find a shallower ford, splashing through it while a sudden shower drenched us to the skin. Night brought clouds of mosquitoes attacking with pincer-sharp bites. Torg, accustomed or immune to these ravenous insects, slept soundly. I hardly shut my eyes.

  More than once I was tempted to turn back. It was not the hardships I minded as much as the ache, the vacuum left by Aurore’s absence. Yet she seemed to be all around me, calling my name in the trill of an unseen bird, in the rush of a waterfall, in the sigh of the wind through the treetops. Her face appeared to me in fitful dreams, and sometimes it seemed she rode by my side, her scent in my nostrils, her soft hand reaching out to caress me. I wanted her, I yearned for her like a starveling yearns for a crust.

  Torg said very little. Only once did he discuss the state of my mind and then only obliquely.

  One afternoon we passed a large effigy, a male doll studded with nails, hanging from a tree.

  “Ouanga a mort,” Torg murmured, “a death curse.”

  “Are they effective?”

  “Very. Sorcery is a going business in Haiti. Most of your reputable hougans and Mamlois do not dabble in it, but a good many do. It is well to be aware.” He gave me a sidelong glance.

  Was Aurore a sorceress too? But I could not ask. I think I knew the answer.

  Once we left the jungle lowlands our way became easier. But the two electrically charged storms that overtook us were terrors to behold. Though they were of short duration, the lightning striking around us sent a giant maupou crashing to the ground, igniting it into a fiery pyre. It took all our skill to keep the ponies from bolting and dashing helter-skelter over the rim of a chasm.

  The last few miles seemed the longest. Torg was particularly silent. He rode ahead of me, his back ramrod-stiff, his shoulders tensed. When I pulled up to ask him how much farther we had to go, he said, “A half league, less. But they are watching us.”

  “Who? I’ve seen no one.” Indeed the few huts we passed appeared deserted. There hadn’t been a single peasant working in the fields.

  '“They’re here, all right. They’re all around us.”

  I looked at the rows of red-berried coffee bushes, the carefully tended plots of millet, melons, and cassavas, the tall grass waving in the breeze. A peaceful scene.

  “Are you sure?” I caught myself whispering. “Whose eyes are watching? Why?”

  “We’ll soon find out,” he said grimly.

  The chateau dozed in the sunlight. The chestnut trees were oddly in bloom as if the ticking of an inner clock had said: This is April in France, chestnut blossom time. I had a moment or two of flight when I thought perhaps we had come too late, but then Harry appeared in the doorway, waving to us with the same grin, the same straw hat set at its cocky, rakish angle.

  “Ain’t ever been so glad to see a white face,” he said, grasping our hands as we entered the house. He had been careful, I noticed, not to come outside to greet us.

  “We heard you were in trouble,” I said.

  “Well, yes—you might say so.”

  Harry had sent a note down with the cook’s son and it wasn’t until some time afterward that I learned the message had never reached Torg. But Torg had known through the grapevine—a mysterious linkage, the workings of which he was reluctant to explain—that the blanc at Les Domaines needed help.

  “They been tryin’ to do me in,” Harry said. “Can’t put my nose out but someone’s chunking a machete at me.”

  “Could you have provoked them in some way, Harry?” Torg asked mildly.

  “I did nothin’ but tell them black devils they was on my property. I wasn’t mean about it, Torg. I thought I was kinda polite.”

  “How have you been managing?” I asked.

  “Purty well, considerin’ the cook ran off. Didn’t matter. I’d lost my appetite anyway.”

  On closer inspection he looked wan. I recalled the effigy we had seen in the forest and a cold hand seemed to touch the back of my neck.

  “I’ve been thinkin’. Page,” he went on. “I had a long time to ponder on things up here. This really ain’t the place for me. Julie wouldn’t like it neither; and the kids, they’d hate it. To tell you the truth, I miss home.”

  We were sitting in a corner of the grande salon, which Harry had made into a fairly comfortable sanctum. Grouped about a battered but still sturdy oak table on which sat a tarnished brass candelabrum were a brocaded chair with the stuffing exposed, a wooden rocker, two rickety ladder-back chairs, and a weather-beaten bureau, its handles and hinges missing.

  “I ain’t sorry I came, you understand. I’d never have known ’less I did. But I ain’t comfortable here
, son. I’m hankerin’ after Bayetville.”

  “We’ll leave in the morning,” I said. I didn’t tell him that my wish to return to Port-au-Prince was as strong as his to get back to his home in Georgia. Port-au-Prince drew me even as I spoke to him; the house at the end of the lane, the passionflower vine, the pool under the nutmeg tree, my bronzeskinned Aurore. Oh, God, Aurore!

  We left the next morning, riding down the drive under the chestnut trees and out through the gates, taking the valley road. Harry talked cheerfully of his plans. With the income from his shares in the distillery he would be able to enlarge his store. “I aim to draw customers from miles away,” he said. “I’ll stock plows, mebbe even one or two of them newfangled harvesters they been buying in Atlanta. Mebbe I’ll go in for breeding good hunting hounds. Always was fond of hounds. Are you, son?”

  “Yes. And horses.” I had almost forgotten the horses.

  “Well, damn my soul! I’ll cut you into my profits, son. You’re my eldest, ain’t you?”

  Then it happened.

  I was never quite able to sort out the sequence of events. Did the caroming sound of the shot come first or the startled look on Harry’s face? But I remember clearly how the echoing bang went on and on across the valley, how that one moment seemed suspended in an eternity before Harry fell forward.

  He had been shot through the chest. I lifted him from the stirrups and set him on the ground. Tearing my shirt off, crouching beside him, I pressed it to the wound, trying to staunch the flow of blood. I had no thought of my own safety, no care. But strangely—perhaps not so strangely—no other shot was fired.

  Leaning over his pale, drawn face, my throat tight, I said, “It will be all right, all right, Papa.’’

  He smiled. God in heaven, I shall never forget that smile if I live to be a thousand. I had called him Papa.

  “Son . . . he said, and died.

  We buried him on the mountain in the shadow of Les Domaines des Étoiles, the Dominion of the Stars. There was nothing else we could do in that climate. We put a cross over his grave, more a marker than a religious symbol. On it I carved: HERE LIES HARRY PAGE BELOVED FATHER DIED APRIL 20, 1887. I never knew the date of his birth.

  “It was cold-blooded murder,’’ I said to Torg as he stood at the foot of the raw burial mound, a breeze ruffling his lank hair. “I want to find the man who did this.’’

  “It wasn’t one man,’’ Torg said. “It was all of them, a village of men. Harry Page was a threat.”

  “A threat! He was leaving!”

  “They didn’t understand.” He gazed across the green valley to the blue mountains beyond. “No more than Harry Page did. That is the tragedy of this country, an inability to understand. Noir against mulâtre, blanc against noir and mulâtre, color against color. They’re divided by stone barriers of hate, bricks built with the blood of vengeance and violence.”

  “And so you suggest we should just leave?”

  “If you tried anything, Page, you wouldn’t be able to leave at all.”

  Of course, he was right. And how much of the blame was mine? I should never have left Harry alone at Les Domaines; but having done so, I should have returned sooner. Much sooner.

  I didn’t look back as we rode away. They let us go. No one shot at us, no one barred our path. The coffee bushes, the cultivated plots, the huts, the same quiet picturesque scene passed before our eyes as the ponies picked their way across the plateau. Torg did not speak. I couldn’t. Tears burned behind my eyes. I had lost a father I’d been unable to acknowledge until the last moment. Papa—oh, Papa, please forgive me. I wept bitter, silent tears, but they did not make me feel better.

  We had been riding some time when we passed a tree similar to the one from which the effigy had hung. Perhaps it was the same tree. Nothing was there now.

  “The ouanga a mort,” I said, “was that for my father?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Then why did they have to shoot him?”

  “Because the curse—like any charm—only works if you believe in it.”

  My father hadn’t believed, had known nothing of the ouanga. Perhaps even if he had known he would have dismissed it as a “bullbat” notion. The power of suggestion had failed, so they’d taken a gun to him.

  It only works if you believe.

  And suddenly it came to me. It was as if the shot that had killed my father had also cleared the enchanted fog from my brain. Aurore’s fascination was an ouanga, one that had given her control over me because I believed in her ability to cast a spell. But now I saw her as she was, not the fascinating, alluring, sultry temptress sinuously moving to the throb of drums, but a half-crazed, scheming woman who needed to manipulate and control. “Being Mamloi gives me a goddesslike majesty,” she had said. She did not love me. She needed me to feed her ego, her self-esteem, her sense of power. She was like the huge, voracious pitcher plant of the jungle that devoured in order to live.

  Jogging down the mountainside toward the dense steamy forest, I was suddenly seized with an unbearable nostalgia. I wanted to go home. I wanted to see Virginia again, Wildoak, the piney woods, the flowing river, the house set back from a green lawn. I wanted to hear the drawl of Richmonders, sane, civilized voices. And Sabrina—God help me—Sabrina. I saw her face clearly now, the blue eyes, the wide brow, the perfect nose, a face remembered and loved. I would find her again, beg her forgiveness, tell her I finally understood why a sense of honor and loyalty to her parents had kept her from running away with me. I would convince her that I still loved her, that I always had.

  Upon my return to Port-au-Prince I booked passage on an American steamer scheduled to depart for Newport News the following week. This would give me just enough time to wind up my affairs. Going back to the bungalow off the Rue Turgenau only to collect the few possessions I had brought there—some books, a suit of clothes, a pair of boots already gone green with mold—I looked at it through different eyes. The place held no allure for me now; it was just a sad, almost forlorn, little house with rain dripping from the thatched eaves and broken shutters hanging crookedly from their rusted hinges.

  At the distillery I said good-bye to M. Duval, explaining how my father had been killed.

  Such a tragedy!

  He offered to buy out Harry’s Internationale shares at a price I felt sure was far above its worth and send the proceeds to Harry’s widow and children.

  “You must come to supper,” he urged. “I’m sure the family would like to tender their adieus also.”

  ‘‘Thank you,” I said.

  Later, when I told Torg of the invitation, he advised against accepting it.

  “You will be seeing Mademoiselle,” he said. I had confessed almost everything about Aurore to him, sparing only the more shameful details. “She is volatile, passionate. She may try to keep you.”

  “But she cannot,” I said, feeling strong.

  He shrugged. “Do as you wish, of course. But I have some experience in such matters.”

  “You too had a woman put a love ouanga on you?” I asked audaciously.

  “Love does not need an ouanga, does it?” he countered after a slight pause, not really answering my question. “It haunts us without spells, even after death.”

  Was that what kept him in Haiti? A spell? “She died—this woman?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But I don’t want you to think I’ve remained in Haiti against my will. I knew from the moment I came ashore that this was my home. Some places are like that. But you—you don’t belong here any more than your father did. This is an unhappy country. Even now there is talk in the back rooms of cafés and taverns of a coup. They say Salomon’s days are numbered. And when the end comes it will be bloody.”

  “Aurore cannot harm me now,” I said.

  We were sitting on Torg’s verandah, sipping lemon gins. We decided to have our supper there on a round wooden table. Bowls of steaming chicken stew were brought over from the kitchen, a separate little building, but not by Torg�
��s regular cook. It seems she’d been called away to attend the birth of a grandchild and the woman serving our meal, kindly filling in for Celeste, was her cousin.

  I had picked up the spoon and was digging into the aromatic stew when Torg grabbed my wrist. “Wait,” he said..

  He whistled between his teeth, and the gardener’s little dog who was hovering hopefully close by the stairs came running. Torg placed the bowl on the floor and the dog began to lap hungrily at its contents. A half minute later it faltered. Raising its head, it let out a series of pitiful yelps before a convulsion threw it over on its side. The dog’s furry spine arched, the muzzle opened in a hideous grin, and then it was still.

  I watched in horror, transfixed by the sickening knowledge that but for the staying of Torg’s hand I, instead of that little dog, would have been lying on the floor rigid with death.

  Torg jumped to his feet and rushed down the stairs to the kitchen. He came back a few minutes later. “Gone,” he said. The “cousin” had vanished.

  “Aurore?” I asked.

  Torg shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Look, Page, don’t wait. Leave now, tonight.”

  “But that’s cowardly.”

  “Do you want to see Virginia again?”

  Two hours later I was aboard a French trawler bound for New Orleans. As we sailed out of the harbor I looked back and for a long, turbulent moment I had the terrible urge to throw myself overboard and swim back to shore. But the moment passed and I turned my face to the open sea and home.

  Chapter 26

  It was late spring when I returned to Wildoak. The last of the peach blossoms had fallen from the trees in the orchard, leafy branched now, hung with green, marble-sized fruit. Behind the house in the hedged garden, roses lifted their perfumed faces to the sun. Ox daisies grew among the tall grass of the lower meadow, and blue weed ran riot along the riverbank.

  I was home. And the peace of it, the sight of the red brick walls shaded by oak and cedar, the wisteria and honeysuckle climbing over the verandah roof, soothed my heart like a balm.