The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “They say she’s had more lovers than hairs on her head,” Cyprien went on, still gazing at Isabelle’s supple back.

  “I take it you were not among them?” Daspir divined from the other’s tone that if he’d applied, he’d been rejected.

  Cyprien coughed and cleared his throat. “Maybe not all of them were white men either. Toussaint’s black so-called officers were frequent enough in her parlor at that time, if not in some chamber closer to her . . . well. The husband is a cipher, turns a blind eye to it all. Was mostly absent in the countryside—they have a plantation near Haut de Trou.”

  “Scandalous,” Daspir said. His voice emerged ironic, though what he felt was simple curiosity.

  Cyprien shot him a critical glance. “As for your Michel Arnaud, he was renowned for torturing his slaves to death, before the insurrection, and how he escaped being murdered by them afterward is a great mystery. They say his wife chopped off her own finger and gave it to the brigands—”

  “What, in exchange for his life?”

  “Who knows?” Cyprien said. “They say she participates in their savage rites. A madwoman.”

  “These are interesting people indeed,” Daspir said. “And what do you know of Doctor Hébert?”

  “The good doctor? He has a skill in native remedies, along with his European education. I’m told he’s saved a great many limbs that another sawbones might have hacked off and thrown to the dogs. His sister ran off with a notorious gunrunner, while her legal husband was still groaning on his deathbed, and since then they’ve been playing both sides of the game.”

  “And the doctor?”

  “Certainly he has been very thick with Toussaint,” Cyprien said. “Beyond that, I can tell you that he is not entirely what he seems to be—”

  At that, almost as if he’d overheard, the doctor twisted in the saddle and looked back at them, lowering a hand to balance his long gun across the pommel of his saddle. He did no more than give them a wide smile, whose mood was unintelligible because the reddening sunlight flashed from his spectacles and hid his eyes.

  Cyprien fell silent. They rode on. Long since they’d passed the city gate. On either side of the road they traveled, an expanse of devastation continued to unfurl. The air was heavy with the scent of scorched sugar. No human activity was anywhere to be seen; the charred landscape was utterly still except for occasional swirls of smoke, and carrion birds wheeling above certain points on the plain. Daspir glanced at the red orb of the sun, which was dropping rapidly toward the ridge line of the mountains to the west. He wondered how far it might be to their destination, but did not like to ask.

  For distraction, he turned his attention to Placide and Isaac, who rode on either side of their tutor. Now and again one of them pointed out some feature they were passing to Monsieur Coisnon, though how they could identify anything from what now remained of it, Daspir could not imagine. But both the youths looked more impressive horseback than shipboard. They were both good riders, erect in the saddle, holding their heads high. Isaac had perhaps the firmer seat, and certainly held a tighter rein, whereas Placide seemed to proceed from a natural sympathy with the animal.

  Now they were passing along a citrus hedge which did not seem to have been scorched at all. And then, between two grand gateposts, appeared a glimpse of tall cane trembling in the evening breeze. Placide reached between the horses to tap Isaac on the shoulder.

  “Bréda,” he said, and pointed to the gate.

  Isaac turned his head to look. To Daspir the unfamiliar word seemed fraught with some significance. Was this the hedge from which he’d plucked his orange yesterday? Or had that been nearer to Limbé? He could not tell, but would have gladly had another.

  The doctor reined up his horse and dropped back in the line to ride beside Daspir. “Habitation Bréda is also a property of the Comte de Noé,” he said. “Toussaint was coachman there, and commandeur, before he rose to his present estate. They called him Toussaint Bréda in those days. And of course the boys spent their early childhood there.”

  “Is it so?” Cyprien said carelessly.

  The doctor shrugged. “That Bréda has been preserved from the burning bodes well for our intention, I believe.” He gave his horse a flick of his heel and rode forward to rejoin Placide and Isaac.

  The sun was lost behind the mountains by the time they had reached the next intact citrus hedge, this one on the opposite side of the road from Bréda. A scrolled iron gate was closed between the posts. Cyprien rode up and rang the bars with the pommel of his saber.

  “We bring dispatches from the Captain-General Leclerc to Toussaint Louverture!”

  At that, two men clothed in a green livery appeared from behind the gateposts. Neither spoke, but one of them unlocked the gate with an enormous key, and together they dragged its two halves open. Cyprien sheathed his blade and led the party through.

  The long drive ran between cane fields on either side. These were lowlands, the most fertile part of the Northern Plain, and Daspir thought he could smell the rich loam beneath the green scent of the cane, which stood dense and well above man height. There was not the slightest hint of smoke.

  The drive was surfaced with a gravel so tightly compact that the horseshoes clacked as if on cobblestone. Their flag hung limp against its staff in the damp air. As they rode through the rapidly thickening twilight, Daspir became aware that large numbers of barefoot, bare-chested black men were filtering silently through the cane fields on either side of the drive, shadowing the movement of the riders. There seemed to be some hundreds of them, though it was difficult to estimate their numbers as they slipped in and out of the cane, and every man of them carried a long coutelas. Of course it was merely an implement of their work—these must be field hands, coming in from an ordinary day in the cane, and yet their silence was eerie. Daspir glanced over his shoulder and saw that the gate behind them was shut.

  The driveway terminated in a flat oval below the gallery of the Héricourt grand’case. The horsemen circled counterclockwise and, with a jingle of harness, halted below the steps. Though there was still a fair amount of light in the sky, servants were lighting the lamps on the gallery, whose rail was twined with purple bougainvillea. An amazingly tall and spindly black man appeared at the head of the stairs. The doctor hailed him.

  “Monchè Mars Plaisir!” he said. “We are looking for the Governor-General Toussaint.”

  The tall man spread his spidery hands. “L’ap soti,” he said.

  The doctor slipped down from his horse.

  “Who is that fellow?” Cyprien said, looking down on him.

  “Mars Plaisir? He is Toussaint’s personal valet.”

  “What does he say? Is Toussaint here?”

  “ ‘He has gone out,’ ” the doctor quoted. “That’s what he said.”

  “That’s useful,” said Cyprien.

  The doctor shrugged. “With time and patience we may learn more,” he said. “We’ll stop the night here, in any case.”

  Indeed, Mars Plaisir was already leading Placide and Isaac into the house, a long arm draped over each of their shoulders. Isabelle followed them, with her children, through the front door of the house. Daspir dismounted. Several grooms had appeared to take charge of the horses.

  “Come,” said the doctor. “Let us go into the garden.”

  Both Daspir and Cyprien followed him around the corner of the house. A flagstone path wound through a great luxuriance of closely planted trees and flowers, many of which Daspir did not recognize. He could pick out banana stalks, young coconut palms, some almond trees . . . The path had a number of forks, but the doctor seemed sure of his way. He led them to a corner of the wall where water trickled from a spout into a pool. A clay jug and a cup stood on a stone. The doctor poured water over his wrists and splashed his face, then filled the cup and drank. He passed the jug and cup to Daspir and, without a word, vanished around a turn of the garden path.

  Daspir drank and gave the cup to Cyprien. The water
went on whispering from the spout into the pool.

  “I saw him,” Daspir said abruptly.

  “Saw whom?” said Cyprien.

  “General Toussaint,” Daspir said. “Toussaint Louverture. He met us in the battle by Limbé. He was riding a tremendous white horse . . .” The image flashed behind Daspir’s eyes. Had it been yesterday? the day before? a year?

  “I wonder that you did not bring him in on a string,” Cyprien said.

  “Ah,” said Daspir, attempting a light tone. “There was a river between us.”

  “Do let me know if you see him again,” Cyprien said and abruptly started—a small winged thing had flickered between them.

  “It’s only a bat,” said the doctor’s voice. “It will not harm you.”

  Cyprien sniffed and turned away, heading for the lights of an open arcade that ran along the side of the house. An agreeable smell of cooking came from that direction. Daspir swallowed, ran his tongue around his hollow mouth. White petals from a tree he did not recognize came drifting down over the path that Cyprien had followed.

  Daspir reversed himself and stood beside the doctor, looking into the heart of the garden. There were still some dusty rose reflections from the clouds above the wall. The sound of water murmured, at their left. He wondered where Guizot was at this moment, if he were still alive and unhurt. Then for some reason his mind returned to the black men with their long knives, drifting dark as ghosts through the cane.

  “The field hands here have just recently been mustered out of the army,” the doctor said. “It’s Toussaint’s system. You may be sure they have their firearms near at hand.”

  Daspir glanced at him, then looked back into the leaves. There was a movement of the air, stirring the feathery shoots of the cocotiers, shivering the round leaves of the almonds. All the garden seemed to contract with an inhalation. Then release.

  “He has been here, has he not?” Daspir said. “Not long ago.”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “I think he has.”

  “But how can you know?”

  “Sa nou pa wé yo,” the doctor said. “In this country, your knowledge comes to you out of the invisible. Or at least at this hour, when all of the garden breathes at one time, what you don’t see means more than what you do.”

  In the quiet that ensued, Daspir felt the garden draw in its breath once more and let it go. The doctor touched him very lightly on his sleeve.

  “Come,” he said. “Let us go in.”

  13

  From the clifftop retreat Arnaud had prepared, Claudine could still sense the curve of the earth below, though most of the horizon was blotted out by smoke. She sat on a stone with her ankles crossed, looking out beyond the gate of Habitation Arnaud, over the charcoal expanse of the Plaine du Nord. The light sound of water running from the spring purled on, behind and to her left. The crossing of her ankles brought her lean shanks wide, stretching the fabric of her skirt and framing the lower loop of a long chain of blue beads, which wrapped twice around her neck before releasing its last length to her kneecaps. The beads were a deep, dense blue, and very shiny and hard, like polished stone, or pottery fiercely fired and glazed; she did not know which.

  She shuttled them across her lap with her fingers, one by one, with little clicks. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessèd art thou among women . . . And there she stuck, her mind refusing to advance the words of the prayer. She did not know where the beads had come from, or knew it only by hearsay. By hearsay and by her fatigue and the marks on her body she knew that two days before, when the fighting began on the road from Limbé, a spirit had mounted into her head and ridden her down to the front gate of Habitation Arnaud. In the open gateway she had danced and shouted and gibbered and torn great chunks of earth from the ground to smear into the scratches she’d clawed on her cheeks. Then the serviteurs must have brought the beads, to adorn the spirit manifest in her.

  She had been hard ridden that day, she thought. For a night and a day and another night, she’d lain abed, entranced at first, and later sleeping from exhaustion. This morning before dawn she’d risen, herself again, and slipped from the house to climb the cliff wall, still attired as she had been two days before and wearing the beads to complement that clothing.

  Through the smoke, the rising sun appeared like an egg yolk scorching in a neglected skillet. Since yesterday the fires had died, but the smoke still roiled. Yet Habitation Arnaud remained green to the gateway where she had stood, and the gate itself, though built of wood, was still intact. The soldiers’ fight had rolled away down the road toward Le Cap, never entering here, and the revolting field hands who were burning all the cane had stopped at the hedges that marked Arnaud’s borders.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessèd art thou among women . . .

  Claudine stood up and moved toward the path, the longest loop of the bead chain swinging low to knock against her shins. As she began her descent, the boys Etienne and Dieufait appeared, fore and aft of her. Etienne led a little brown kid on a string behind him, and Dieufait skipped backward ahead of her, smiling, beckoning, gesturing toward various rocks and roots that might have tripped her as she went down.

  As she emerged on the level ground behind the grand’case, she caught sight of Cléo, who had just finished sweeping out the back gallery and was throwing out some grain to the hens that had gathered expectantly on the packed dirt. Cléo noticed her too and called out that coffee was served on the front gallery and that Claudine must come and take some nourishment, but Claudine simply shook her head and walked around the house. She glanced back once and saw Fontelle’s face above the gallery rail and felt just slightly disconcerted; when had Fontelle come?

  In the dooryard of the little case beside the chapel, Marie-Noelle was stirring up small sweet potatoes in a chaudière above a small charcoal fire, the baby gurgling, propped on a board by the doorsill. The curtain was tied back from the door, so that Claudine could see that Moustique was not inside. Briefly she returned Marie-Noelle’s smile and went on, around toward the rear of the chapel. Etienne and Dieufait were capering more widely around her now that they had more room. Etienne’s kid got away from him, but he pursued and arrested it by stamping his bare foot on the trailing string.

  In former times the central compound here had been clear and bare to the hedges, but since it had first been laid to waste in ninety-one, a growth of bamboo had encroached along the path of a shallow ditch toward the back side of the chapel, and Claudine had prevailed upon Arnaud to let it stand. Now the tall stalks of bamboo had been bowed and bound to form a tonnelle, a greenly arbored passageway of such a height that Claudine scarcely had to lower her head to enter it. The little boys stopped outside; they were shy of this place, on ordinary days, when the drums did not invite all comers inside it. Distantly Claudine heard the voice of Marie-Noelle calling Dieufait to come back to the cookfire. She went on, deeper into the green shade.

  After a dozen yards, the arboreal space widened, like a bulb, and in its center opened to the sky. A little cairn of stones stood by the entrance. Round the edges were hung gourds and bottles and bundles of herbs, and several thatched shelters covered small shrines containing vases and bowls or small plaster figures of saints or, in one, a playing card pinned to a tree.

  Moustique was here, moving with quiet delicacy in the shadows, serving one altar and another with flowers, crushing sweet herbs into a bowl of water. Claudine passed him, without speaking, and went directly to a niche devoted to the Mater Dolorosa, roughly painted on a scrap of board. For a moment she hesitated, regarding the sorrowful blue madonna, whose weak hand clasped the blade of an enormous sword blade, the point driven deep into her open heart. Then she unwound the beads from her neck and carefully coiled them around a white candle, affixed by its own wax to a flat rock before the icon.

  “That necklace was offered to Erzulie Jé Rouge.” Moustique had slipped up silently behind her, near enough she thought she felt his warm brea
th on her neck.

  “So it may have been,” Claudine said. “But it is I who give it to Erzulie Fréda.”

  She turned to face him. Moustique was the taller—still a tall and gangly youth, who bent on her a child’s expression of puzzlement.

  “Was it Erzulie Jé Rouge who turned the war from our gate?” she asked him.

  “It was she who danced in your head that day, Madame,” Moustique said.

  “Yes,” said Claudine. “But in the spirit of peace and harmony, I offer the beads to Fréda now.”

  She trailed her fingers through the bowl of water, and let a few drops fall on the cairn as she went out. A few steps into the tonnelle, she turned.

  “Your mother is here, this morning.”

  “Yes,” Moustique said. From his face Claudine could see that this was no news to him. Fontelle must have been here for a day or more, then. The force of Claudine’s possession had done away with her memory of that arrival.

  The Lord is with thee. Blessèd art thou among women, and blessèd is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us . . .

  At the outer mouth of the tonnelle she stopped. A black bore hole of pain had opened in the spot between her navel and her pubes. She waited, swallowing spasmodically, until it passed, and then stepped out into the light. Dieufait and Etienne were waiting for her there, each chewing a small, round sweet potato in its skin.

  “N’alé lekol,” Dieufait said. We are going to school.

  “We are,” Claudine said, and led them to the arbor by the church.

  Near two dozen children waited for her in that shade, most too small for field work, with a few older ones for whom Claudine had obtained special dispensation, because of their aptitude for learning. She had devised a reading and writing lesson based on the first few verses of the twentieth chapter of John, where Mary Magdalen discovers the stone rolled away and the cave empty where the body of Jesus had lain. She had meant to push her students forward to the moment of joy, but the children’s reading went haltingly and their writing wanted more correction than ever, so that at the end of their time Claudine was left stranded with the Magdalen, weeping over the empty sepulcher, and lost to herself at that moment. When she raised her head, she saw the children looking at her kindly. They felt her pain, though without understanding it; could they know how the one hollow echoed the other?