The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Doctor Hébert lay spooned with Nanon, a little wakeful in the last hours of the night. He pushed his nose into the fragrant mass of hair at the nape of her neck, never mind the tickling. She stirred a little, did not wake. The doctor listened to rain driving down on the roof. As the rain began to taper off, he slept, then woke with a terrible start, his heart throbbing at the top of his throat, it seemed. Now the rain had stopped completely; there was a trace of sunlight beyond the jalousies. The sound that had roused him was not thunder, then, but cannon fire, somewhere away in the mountains. Nanon caught his wrist as he jumped out of the bed.

  “Stay.” Her eyes were large and liquid with concern.

  “You had better get up yourself, and get the children dressed and fed.” The doctor kissed her fingers as he peeled them away. “Find my sister, and Madame Cigny. Make ready.”

  “Where must we go, then?” Nanon swung up to the edge of the bed, arching her back as she shook her hair down.

  Her question was a step ahead of the doctor; he had no idea of an answer. He yanked on his trousers, shrugged into a shirt, stuffed his feet into his boots. At the door he paused to take his pistols from their pegs and check their priming before he stuck them in his belt. The house was quiet except for his own bootheels thumping down the hall. He trotted down the gallery steps and across the yard toward the stable.

  The cannon had stopped, but he could still hear small arms fire beyond the ridges to the north. In the musty dim of the stable he bridled a mule, then led it out and swung astride, bareback, clutching the mane. The reversed pistol grips gouged him in the belly as he moved. Paulette had come yawning out onto the gallery and stood there blinking at him curiously. The doctor clucked to the mule and slapped the reins against its neck and rode at a fast walk out of the yard, through a few spindly, neglected ratoons of cane, and up into the coffee terraces.

  The field hands were moving among the coffee trees, but slowly, hesitantly, without song. In their silence their ears were doubtless cocked to the noise of musketry above. But in these folds of mountain, all sounds were deceiving; the ear could not reliably tell what was near or what was far. The doctor rode past Caco, standing on the fifth terrace to gape at him, his basket dangling. He wished that Riau or Guiaou was on the plantation now; Riau, especially, would be likely to know something about what that gunfire meant. Or Tocquet—it suddenly struck the doctor that Tocquet had not appeared at last night’s supper table, nor had he seen him at all the previous day.

  Above the coffee terraces veins of provisions twined among the cliffs, and a few long-eared black pigs were foraging. Strayed from their keeper, they’d begun to root up yams, but when the mule approached they scattered snorting into the brush. The doctor leaned low into the mule’s neck to encourage it up a slope just barely short of vertical. He’d learned this technique watching Toussaint’s horsemanship, though he couldn’t have managed it here with a horse instead of a mule. Shale whizzed out from under the hooves, and twice the mule stumbled, slipped sideways, but finally came scrambling out onto the remains of the old Indian road that ran northeast along the ridges toward Marmelade and Dondon.

  The doctor straightened, and glanced to the west. On a neighboring peak, a man was standing next to the tall flagpole of the hûnfor, shading his eyes to look for something in the distance. Quamba, the doctor thought. He squeezed the mule into a trot, for the going was relatively easy here. In a quarter-mile he came upon men of the Second Demibrigade, tattered and muddy and hollow around the eyes, hurriedly digging trenches or dragging deadfall timber to block the road. So occupied and exhausted they were that they did not seem to notice that the doctor had come on the scene. He halted for the mule to get its breath. By some trick of the mountain acoustics the musket fire sounded farther off now, though it must be approaching; this was clearly a retreat. There was an unobstructed view for several hundred yards to the east, and there where the road curved was some movement. The doctor patted himself for his folding spyglass, but he’d left it in the house. He flattened a hand above his brows, against the sun still low on the peaks. That figure in the general’s bicorne was certainly Christophe; he recognized the silhouette. The antlike movement resolved itself into men bearing litters of the wounded toward him, with Christophe directing them, calling hoarse orders behind.

  At once the doctor turned his mule off the road into the brush. If he met with Christophe now, the black general would certainly impress him to care for his injured men, and while he would not ordinarily object to that duty, he wanted to see his family safe—if that were possible. If the French pursuit were fast and vigorous, it seemed to him likely that the hasty defenses he’d seen would soon be swept away. Then the retreat would pour down on Habitation Thibodet with all its damages.

  He rode the mule down the coffee terraces and pulled to a stop in front of the cane mill. There was commotion on the gallery, first Elise, then Isabelle appearing and then dashing back inside. A tall mulatto woman in a high blue turban came riding around the corner of the mill from the direction of the drive. The doctor recognized Fontelle and raised a hand to her.

  “Monsieur le médecin!” Fontelle beamed at him, revealing the crooked teeth in her long jaws. Unhurriedly she dismounted and unstrapped a bulging pannier. “I have brought you mangoes, look.”

  Unconsciously the doctor accepted in each hand a small fragrant mango from the crossroads of Ennery. “Where have you come from?” he asked Fontelle.

  “Just now from Ennery,” Fontelle said. “This morning from Pilboreau. Yesterday from Plaisance, and the day before, Acul and Habitation Arnaud. There I stayed—”

  “Did you pass through the fighting?” the doctor cut in.

  “No,” said Fontelle. “But the French soldiers were coming down from Le Cap, they say. I did not see them. Last night we could hear shooting from Pilboreau.”

  “The soldiers from Le Cap.”

  “No,” said Fontelle. “They say it is other soldiers from Dondon and Marmelade. We did not see them either but we could hear their guns.”

  Paulette came galloping down the gallery steps and caught her mother in an embrace that rocked her where she stood. The doctor sucked in a breath, then dashed into the cane mill. In the last few months the small office behind the machinery had become Tocquet’s retreat; he kept cards and a chessboard there, along with the plantation’s neglected ledgers, rum, brandy if it could be found, tobacco. Sometimes he slept there, in an Indian hammock strung from corner to corner of the room, if he were on the outs with Elise, as he seemed frequently to be of late. But this morning the room was empty, air stale with the smell of old tobacco smoke. The doctor turned on his heels, watching motes of the dust he had raised turn in the shaft of sunlight through the shuttered window. The hammock was gone; Tocquet sometimes took it with him when he traveled. In an earlier time Toussaint had used this place for a headquarters, and where was Toussaint now?

  The doctor heard Paul’s voice shouting through the shuttered window and he ran outside to see what was the matter. Left unhitched, the mule had wandered toward a gap in the hedges, but Paul had caught the reins and was leading it back.

  “Well done,” the doctor called. “Just hold him there.” Elise had reappeared on the gallery and he trotted up the steps to meet her there.

  “Have you seen Xavier?” he panted.

  “Xavier has abandoned us,” Elise said dourly. “He thought there would be trouble here.”

  “Good God,” said the doctor. “You might have mentioned it. When? Where has he gone?” Elise was staring at his hands and he realized he was still holding the mangoes.

  “Fontelle brought them.” He waved a mango at Fontelle, still clutched by Paulette in the yard, the donkey snuffling the dust beside them. The skin of the mango he was gesturing with had split in his grip, and now he noticed the juice of it sticky on his palm. A couple of fruit flies hovered over it. The doctor offered the undamaged mango to Elise, and when she shook her head he shrugged and laid it on the table. H
e wiped the other mango with his loose shirttail and took a bite. The taste of it was sharp and sweet; it was just at the point of perfect ripeness.

  “What kind of trouble?” he said, when he had swallowed. “When is he coming back?”

  “How should I know?” Elise said bitterly. “He wanted us all to go with him across the Spanish border, but I was certain we would be safer here, so long as Suzanne Louverture remained. And you just stand there, chewing mango!”

  The doctor took a final bite and fired the pulpy seed out into the yard. “I don’t know where Madame Louverture may be,” he said. “But there seem to be two French columns converging on this area. That is Christophe falling back before one of them—” He pointed to the ridge. “And as much as I was able to see, he is hard pressed.”

  “Christophe!” Isabelle walked onto the gallery, setting down a small portmanteau to fasten the buttons of a traveling duster up her delicate throat. “That for your General Christophe—” She turned her head and spat with a surprising lack of inhibition across the rail into the bougainvillea vines.

  “What is your plan?” the doctor said, as he took in her costume.

  “To fly,” said Isabelle succinctly.

  But where? the doctor would have asked; hoofbeats on the drive distracted him. He whipped his head around, expecting perhaps to see an advance guard of French cavalry, though only two horses entered the yard, with Bel Argent, Toussaint’s white stallion, in the lead. With a start the doctor realized that Placide, instead of Toussaint, was riding the big warhorse.

  He ran down the steps to greet Placide. The second horseman, he saw with some degree of reassurance, was Guiaou. But where was Toussaint? He never allowed any other man to ride Bel Argent. If Toussaint were dead, or out of the action, would there be peace or a bloodier war?

  “Doctor Hébert,” Placide said a little breathlessly, checking the white stallion as it made to rear. “My father wants you. That is—the Governor-General asked me to come for you.”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “Very well, but where?”

  “The battle.” Placide pointed to the south.

  The doctor felt the blood drain from his face. Here was exactly what Tocquet had been predicting—a French encirclement that would trap Toussaint with his back to the sea. The force to the south might be Boudet, then, marching up from Port-au-Prince.

  “Where is this battle?” he asked Placide.

  “The battle has not yet been joined,” said Placide, “but you must go and bring with you medicines and bandages.”

  “What of the women and children here?” the doctor said. “Where is your mother, and your brothers?” He took hold of Placide’s stirrup and drew himself against Bel Argent’s warm flank.

  “At Sancey,” Placide said.

  “They can’t stay there.” The doctor waved his free arm toward the ridge. “Christophe is being driven back, just there—you cannot count on him to hold.”

  Placide cocked his head to the gunfire. “I thought Christophe was at Morne à Boispins.”

  “No longer.”

  Placide glanced between the doctor and Guiaou, hesitating. Guiaou, meanwhile, had seen Merbillay coming into the yard with her youngest child swung to her hip, and he steered his horse in her direction.

  “Let your women and children go to the grand’case of Sancey,” Placide said finally. “My mother and brothers are still there, and Morisset is with them, the commander of my father’s guard. If they must leave Sancey, they will be taken to a place of safety. But you must go yourself to find my father at the headquarters in Gonaives.”

  “Well said, Placide.” The doctor let go of the stirrup, reached for a quick clasp of Placide’s hand. “I’ll want Guiaou with me, to help me with the wounded.” He turned as he spoke to see Guiaou bending at the waist from the saddle to kiss Merbillay’s cheek and spread a hand on the head of the child she carried.

  “No,” Placide smiled faintly as he shook his head. “I must keep Guiaou with me.” With that he beckoned Guiaou to follow and with a press of his knees moved Bel Argent into a smooth canter up the terraces toward the height of the ridge.

  The women had not wasted their time since they woke, and in twenty minutes more they had set out for Sancey: Elise, Isabelle, Nanon, Zabeth, and all the children except for Paul, who insisted that, at nearly ten, he was old enough to see the fighting. The doctor finally gave in to him, unsure of his own reasons—in the turmoil, he simply didn’t want to be separated from his son. He took Caco with him also, since he was Paul’s best companion, and Paulette, whose nursing skill he knew. Since Fontelle had just come to see Paulette, she also joined their party. Twenty minutes sufficed for the doctor to add his American rifle to his armaments and pack enough bandages and dried herbs from the Thibodet infirmary to load a donkey. The muskets were still firing on the ridge above the plantation as they left it to set out for Gonaives.

  With just a little varnishing of the plainest truth, Captain Guizot had made a determined effort to turn Tocquet’s escape to his own credit. He’d given an energetic pursuit, after all, had struggled hand to hand with the fugitive, and had light injuries to show for it: the goose-egg bruise beside his temple, and the less obvious but more sinister scratch beneath his jaw. Rochambeau grumbled, but did no more than reprimand the captain, though the sentry who’d been sleeping on his feet was tied to a wagon wheel and whipped.

  It rained all through that night and the next day; no movement of the troops was possible in the soup. Guizot moped under the canvas of his makeshift tent, nursing his cold, which had worsened. His head hurt also from the blow, and the tumble in the mud had done his arrow wound no good, though it seemed better after the solicitous Sergeant Aloyse had cleaned it thoroughly with scalding water. And the rum they’d salvaged from Saint Michel was a quiet comfort to both of them after dark.

  In the small hours of that night the rain finally stopped, and the next day dawned clear and bright. They moved out in the middle of the morning, down the road Guizot had earlier explored, through mud still deep enough to slow them down considerably. By midday the weight of the sun was crushing, but the mud scarcely dried; it went on sucking at their boots and the wheels of the caissons. Guizot plodded onward, at the head of his men, with Sergeant Aloyse always at his back. His mind looped aimlessly, softening like butter in the heat. He thought of his companions on La Sirène, and Toussaint’s sons—where were they now? That episode seemed to belong to some other life.

  There were rumors among Rochambeau’s men that Hardy had overrun Marmelade, and that Boudet was coming up the coast from Port-au-Prince to surround Toussaint at Gonaives. But where were Daspir and Cyprien and Paltre? Guizot lurched forward awkwardly, his balance unsettled by the wounded arm, clumsily riding in its sling. At moments he thought he felt Tocquet’s tobacco breath on his face again, with the knife point pressed into his gullet. If he had had the fortitude to pursue, even after he’d been dropped sprawling half-stunned in the mud . . . he had the queer, unsupported conviction that Tocquet might have led him quite near to the man they sought. The words of the wager he’d made with the other three captains were hanging, always the same distance ahead of him, above the mountains that bounded the western horizon. The mountains seemed to grow no nearer, no matter how they struggled through the mud.

  The rain had made the night completely lightless; to move through it was like drowning in a cave. Tocquet knew every way across the high savanna as well as the lines in his own palm, but the night of his evasion from Rochambeau’s camp was so smothered in darkness that they did not find their way to the passes of the Savane Carrée before dawn. They’d abandoned the roads to cut across the grassland, where their horses were less likely to be engulfed in the mud, but still they were obliged to go very slowly, with direction almost impossible to determine in the rain. Tocquet had little fear of pursuit, but all the same he chafed at their poor progress. They’d left their pack animals, with their goods, to Rochambeau, and this loss also irritated him as they
picked their way along.

  The downpour was so heavy that daybreak brought no more than a vague, pearly gray illumination. It was not possible to conjecture the time, but after a period of riding through rain that felt like a waterfall, they finally reached a cavern on the slopes of Morne Basile. An overhang of the cliff provided partial shelter for their horses, and in the deeper recesses a store of dry wood had been laid by for just such emergencies as this one. Bazau built a fire and lit it; Gros-Jean dug a ration of dried beef from the bottom of a saddlebag. All three of them stripped off their clothing and laid it to dry on the rocks by the fire. They chewed the hardened strips of beef contemplatively; it took some time to get one down. Now and then one of them would walk to the cave mouth to confirm that the rain had not abated.

  Tocquet was certain enough that no troops would advance through this flood. The three of them stayed in the cave through the night, rotating a watch, though probably it was unnecessary. Tocquet woke spontaneously the moment the rain stopped, though cascades of run-off still roared all around their shelter. Gros-Jean was watching at the mouth of the cave. They roused Bazau and set out in the velvet dark. Presently their way was lit by a moon the parting clouds disclosed.

  At dawn there was gunfire in the hills and Tocquet had to lead them on less familiar, more difficult paths to avoid Christophe’s retreat from Marmelade. Their going was all the more difficult for the rainwater that still ran down every available channel. More often than not they had to go on foot, leading the horses, coaxing or whipping them up the twisted ascents and steep defiles.