The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Looting may be punished by death, I should warn you,” he said smoothly. “In the case of drunkenness on duty, there is flogging to consider.”

  “Vive la France!” The soldier rolled the bunghole of the cask to his lips; slightly choking as clear fluid spilled from both corners of his mouth. “Vive le Capitaine-Général! —and three cheers for the beautiful Pauline!”

  With that he loosed the cask from his hands and ran off. Daspir was on it almost before it hit the ground, tumbling it like a dog pawing a ball. Not much had spilled before he caught it up. It was only a small keg, perhaps a gallon. Daspir tilted it back with both hands and gasped at the syrupy burn of the new white rum.

  “Well ordered!” Cyprien said, his eyes alight with appreciation, if it were not merely the glitter of the surrounding fires. “Well executed too.”

  Daspir passed him the cask with a nod. His eyes were watering with the impact of the rum, but the burn in his belly heartened him. He looked down the street behind them, thinking of further foraging possibilities— in that direction the fires had been extinguished or had not completely taken hold, so there might be possibilities. Strangely, a handful of looters came bursting out of that block now, as if they’d been shot from a cannon.

  “Good God . . .” Cyprien tucked the cask under one elbow and made a quavering gesture with the other arm. “It cannot be.”

  Daspir wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist and saw a phalanx of silver-helmed cavalry come fuming toward him like a crew of ghosts out of the smoke. A phantasm from the long day’s fight. Surely this manifestation could not be real. At first they seemed to come silently; there was a lag before he heard the hoofbeat.

  “Form up the men!” Daspir looked wildly about and recognized no one of his own company. Captain-General Leclerc himself had jumped up from his camp stool by the steps of the burned church where the French had planted their battle flag, and stared at the charging horsemen with utter disbelief. Phantasmal no longer, the raiders had taken on a terrible concrete weight; they were cutting down confused and disordered soldiers all over the square.

  Daspir ran toward his commander, unsure of his purpose. Leclerc was staring fixedly, not directly at him, but over his shoulder. He drew a pistol and fired it, to what effect Daspir could not see. There was a rush of air behind him as Daspir reached the church steps, and he turned to the horse bearing down on him, so near he could see the color inside the flaring nostrils. The rider was without a helmet, head bound in a red cloth, his features coppery in the firelight. Rag-head Negro. The flying mane of the horse cut up the face into bright lines, as one arm reached for the flagstaff.

  Daspir caught hold of it with both his hands; for a moment they struggled for the flag. He didn’t know if it was the horse’s shoulder or the flat of a saber that sent him sprawling backward, his head recoiling from the corner of a step, hard enough that his vision broke up into whirls of golden motes. But he had not been knocked quite unconscious, and in another moment he was on his feet, shaking his head as he groped himself for damage; he seemed to have nothing worse than scrapes and bruises.

  Cyprien and a couple of other captains had formed the troops into a square. The raiders, seeing their moment had passed, were wheeling their horses around to retreat. That rag-head Negro reined his horse into a curvet, so that the captured French tricolor snapped smartly on its rod. It seemed to Daspir that the rider raised his hand to him. Then he was gone with the others, into the smoldering street they’d emerged from. The French troops fired a volley after them, but no one seemed minded to give chase.

  “One must grant them a certain flair, those riders.” The voice belonged to General Hardy, who’d come from somewhere to join Leclerc on the steps, behind Daspir. Leclerc’s only reply was muttered cursing. Those boots must cramp him now, Daspir thought, although with scant amusement. Behind the two generals, a few fire-blackened timbers of the burned church stuck up like ribs from a well-stripped carcass.

  He crossed the square toward Cyprien, stepping over bodies of the recently fallen. The raiders had done a lot of damage in a short time— Leclerc had reason to curse, Daspir supposed.

  “I thought you were finished,” Cyprien said. “But he held his hand at the last moment, that black dragoon who rode you down.”

  Daspir halted and rubbed at the sore point on the back of his head. Rag-head Negro. But the horse was not the same, nor yet the rider; he had been taller, more lithe-seeming, longer in the leg, and his face certainly a lighter hue beneath the headcloth. One eye was hidden, squinted shut, but still that face was known to him.

  “Placide,” Daspir pronounced.

  “What?”

  “It was Placide. Toussaint’s son—our charge on La Sirène. It was Placide who took the flag—I’d not mistake him.”

  “You hit your head on the church step,” Cyprien said.

  “I did,” Daspir admitted, “but not so badly.”

  “Well,” said Cyprien, looking doubtfully away. “I suppose it might have been . . .”

  Daspir averted his own eyes, which fell as by a miracle on the little rum keg, standing upright within the well’s curb, the bunghole at the top. He plucked at Cyprien’s coat sleeve.

  “Look there,” he said. “If that is our cask of rum unspilled, then you may trust me for the rest of it.”

  On the road beyond the cemetery, Morisset halted to reckon up his men. There were no losses from the last encounter; the surprise had been too sudden, too complete. In the midst of a compliment on the captured flag, Morisset did recognize Placide, headcloth or no. At first his face went hard.

  “Eh, boy,” he said. “Did you defy my order?”

  “Gadé, papa’l ta yé kontan anpil ak sa’k li fé.” The voice came from among the horsemen, before Placide could collect himself to reply. Look, his father will be very happy with what he has done.

  Morisset’s face broke toward a smile he masked with his hand before it was complete—this too his father’s gesture, Placide noted.

  “N’alé,” he said, and turned his horse. Placide, still carrying the flag, moved his own horse into the column. A couple of the other troopers reached out to brush his shoulders as they passed. The warmth of the contact ran down Placide’s spine.

  Once south of Granmorne, they slowed their horses from a trot to a walk. Morisset strung two men back to guard their rear, but there was not much threat; the land was still theirs at least as far south as Saint Marc. Placide dozed in the saddle, and sometimes sank completely into slumber, lulled by fatigue and the swing of his horse’s smooth gait, waking with a jolt whenever his head rolled to the far limit of his neck.

  They came to the camp at Pont d’Ester, bathed in the light of the midnight moon. It had rained here earlier; the river was high and the ground swampy underfoot. Placide found his father, sleeping at last for the first time in at least three days, wrapped in a cloak and lying on a piece of plank embedded in the mud. Guiaou and Guerrier watched over him with a worshipful air. Curled under the cloak, Toussaint’s body looked no bigger than a cat’s. Sometimes he coughed or murmured or shivered in his sleep; these motions made Placide uneasy. He took off the red headcloth and offered it back to Guiaou.

  “Kenbe’l,” Guiaou said. “Keep it. I will find another. It has been strong for you this day.” He grinned at the flag Placide had taken.

  “Thank you,” Placide said. He kept looking into Guiaou’s deeply scarred face as he folded the cloth to put into his pocket.

  “It is Mêt Agwé who dances in my head sometimes,” Guiaou said, as if replying to an unspoken question. “And you?” His eyes grew searching. For a moment it seemed that he might reach to cradle Placide’s head between his hands, but he did not. “I cannot say. You should go to the hûngan, maybe Quamba, if we go back to Ennery.”

  Placide nodded, though he scarcely understood. Yet a tingle of the charge still sustained him—that feeling he was moved by another force into the actions he had taken. He was tired now and could simply a
ccept it, whatever it was, along with his poor understanding of it.

  Isaac had just appeared at his elbow. “Brother,” he said. “They say you have distinguished yourself in the last raid.”

  “By the power of God,” Placide replied.

  Isaac let his eye linger on the French flag. “Come,” he said. “We have found a place to sleep which is not too wet.”

  Placide followed him, stumbling a little in his weariness, to a spot high on the river bank where the shelter of a mango tree had been augmented by a strip of canvas stretched tight. Suzanne and her sister and the Chancy girls slept beneath it, atop the lumpy bundles of their clothes. Isaac passed Placide a blanket, only slightly damp. Placide arranged himself on the gravel.

  The earth seemed to rock beneath him where he lay, repeating the motion of his horse, or even the longer sway of a ship across the waves. Placide sat up suddenly and turned his face to the lowering moon.

  “Isaac,” he said.

  “Hanh?” Isaac mumbled and rolled up on his shoulder.

  “I saw our Captain Daspir today. Him who guarded us on La Sirène.” Placide paused, recalling that smooth, rather soft olive face, with the eyes surprisingly cool and appraising.

  “It was he who fought me for the flag at Gonaives,” Placide said.

  “Was it so,” Isaac muttered sleepily.

  “Yes,” said Placide. He wrapped his arms around his knees and shrugged the blanket higher on his shoulders. Across the river, a night bird called. “I might have killed him with my sword, but something held me from it.”

  Isaac turned onto his back and spoke more plainly. “It is well you did not kill him.”

  “Yes,” said Placide, “I am glad too.”

  Bazau and Gros-Jean lost their usual lazy manner in the descent of Granmorne—in fact both of them seemed wound as tight as watch springs. Tocquet felt the same tension hardening across his back. To be quit of the Louverture family was a relief in one way, in another way not. He still had a party of four women and eight children, if he’d counted them right, and some of them needed to be carried. Not the company he’d have chosen to slip invisibly through a war zone. Yet to the older children it was all a frolic. When Morisset’s squadron descended the adjacent trail in the dusk, Tocquet had pulled his party off into the trees. What could it mean, their going back toward Gonaives? He’d had to cuff Sophie, though but lightly, to keep her quiet, and might have died of the wounded look the girl fired at him. Only her feelings were really hurt; he’d scarcely ever struck her. Of course she was familiar with Toussaint’s honor guard, knew many of the men by name. They were often on the roads around Ennery and would touch their helmets to her when they passed, so she would not be thinking how some of them might love white children a little less today, especially when no one like Madame Louverture was in sight.

  When Morisset’s squadron was out of earshot, they walked on into the quickly thickening dark. Tocquet sent Bazau to bring up the rear, while he and Gros-Jean explored forward. Most of the time—there was nothing for it—Tocquet carried a drowsy, irritable child, his own Mireille, or one of Nanon’s twins. Sophie, sullen since the slap, trudged grimly along behind Robert and Paul. The lark seemed to go out of the excursion even for the older children when they were walking in the dark. They lacked for light, though the moon was near full, because Tocquet kept them well under cover of the trees. The sound of fresh fighting reached them from Gonaives, then faded as they turned further from the town.

  Elise and Isabelle had begun to bicker over something, most unusual for them. Nanon and Zabeth, meanwhile, walked in a graceful silence, as if in a dream. But after a couple of sour exchanges with Isabelle, Elise rushed forward to overtake Tocquet.

  “Can we not stop?” she hissed. “The children are exhausted, my feet are burning, I am so tired I could sleep on the ground right here, and Isabelle insists she cannot take another step—”

  “Isabelle could march us all into our graves, and well she knows it,” Tocquet turned his face away to cover his grim smile. “It’s no time to lie down on the trail,” he said. “We don’t know who is passing—the woods are full of fugitives from the town and probably deserters from both armies. There’s those who kissed your fingers yesterday who’d think your head would look well on a stake today.”

  “But—” Elise clipped off her phrase. “What is that—smoke?”

  At the same moment came to Tocquet’s nostrils the familiar sick-sweet smell of burning cane. There was a fire glow on the horizon, just to their north, where a tall stand of bamboo bounded the trail. Tocquet pulled himself into an almond tree and climbed a few branches till he could see out. On the far side of a shallow ravine, a great house was aflame in the midst of burning fields. French soldiers in ranks on the oval drive watched the conflagration calmly.

  Tocquet slipped down from the tree. Elise, Nanon, and Isabelle circled him expectantly. Tocquet passed around a few soft hulls of almonds he’d collected in the climb. “You might open these for the children,” he said.

  “Marvelous,” said Elise, “but what did you see?”

  “That is the grand’case of Sancey, if I am not mistaken.”

  “And burning?” Elise let her face fall in her hands.

  “We don’t know what that means to us—except that we’ve come farther than I knew. Wait here—” Tocquet cocked his head—he heard Gros-Jean’s voice, talking to someone unfamiliar further up the trail. He turned from the women and ran catfoot through the darkness—at the next bend he found Gros-Jean with the stranger.

  “Yo té brulé Sancey?” Gros-Jean said. Have they burned Sancey?

  “Yes,” came the stranger’s voice.

  “And Descahaux?”

  “No, Descahaux is not burned yet.”

  “And Thibodet?”

  “Pa konnen,” the stranger said. I don’t know.

  Gros-Jean turned to Tocquet in the moonlight. “You heard?” he said. “There is a lakou just above where we can rest.”

  Tocquet nodded and went back to the others. “How far?” was Elise’s first response, echoed by Sophie in a still more plaintive tone, but Tocquet did not trouble to invent an answer. They went on climbing doggedly. In fact it was not very long before the stranger led them through a break in a cactus fence into a cluster of small clay-walled houses. A little dog yapped once or twice before someone picked it up and hushed it.

  Silhouettes of two women emerged from one of the small, square houses, one young and one old to judge by the shape of their shadows. Their faces were featureless in the dark, their voices soft and warm as chocolate. After some murmuring back and forth, the white women and the children stepped carefully over the sill, one by one, inside. The cloth was dropped across the doorway. Through it, Tocquet could hear the rustle of their settling: a bump, a shuffle, a child’s complaint, then Nanon’s soothing, shushing voice.

  He squatted by the corner of the cabin. The donkeys they’d managed not to lose in the days of flight were tethered outside the cactus barrier. Bazau and Gros-Jean had gone off somewhere. From somewhere higher up the ravine came the desultory tap of a single drum. Tocquet crossed his legs, half closed his eyes, was scarcely aware that he was waiting until Bazau and Gros-Jean had returned.

  The sinking moon threw their long shadows toward the mud sill of the case. Bazau unplugged a gourd bottle and with a seemingly careless motion spilled a little on the ground before he drank. Gros-Jean did the same when the gourd was passed to him. Tocquet held his eyes aside. He knew they meant to thank their spirits, that they’d been guided safely through the dangers of this day.

  What would it hurt? He spilled a little rum himself before he drank. All through the day he had been wishing for Antoine Hébert—another man, and one who could shoot. They were safe now, though; Tocquet could feel it. Tonight this lakou was as peaceful a place as he’d ever known. He could only wish the doctor had found as good a sanctuary. Let all the invisible ones protect him.

  Tocquet lit one of his cheroot
s and let it go around their circle. When it was done, he slept a little, sitting with his back against the wall. At dawn he woke to the sound of cock crow moving over a steady bass tone: a woman grinding corn with a pole twice her own height, in a mortar made of a hollow stump still rooted to the packed earth of the lakou. She grinned at Tocquet, toothlessly though she was not old, as he got up and dusted off his trousers. He returned her smile and went down into the bushes to pee.

  When he came back, Sophie had just come out of the case, blinking and rubbing her eyes with her wrists. She sulked a little when she first caught sight of Tocquet, then gave it up and came to wrap her arms around his waist. They stood side by side, still touching lightly, looking down the green valley.

  “Where are we, Papa?” Sophie said.

  “Descahaux. It is one of Toussaint’s places. You see, the grand’case is still there.” Tocquet pointed across the ravine, to a house more modest than the grand’case of Sancey. He did not bother to indicate the smudge of smoke where the latter building had stood, toward the bottom of the valley. On the horizon, a denser, heavier pall of smoke hung over Gonaives.

  Nanon and Zabeth emerged from the house and led the women and girls for rudimentary ablutions in the stream. When they came back, the women of the lakou had made ready for them a deep gamelle of maïs moulin and another full of small white sweet potatoes. The white people ate silently, reverently, as the truly famished do. Today no one reproved the children for eating with their fingers. Tocquet found a coin to offer the women of the lakou before they started on their way.

  As if electrified by their first real meal in twenty-four hours, Paul and Caco raced ahead of the others down the zigzag trail. Robert ran after them, somewhat less recklessly, while Sophie hung back with the adults today. A girl’s conservatism, Tocquet thought, or maybe she remembered better than the boys how Saint-Jean had been overtaken by the French advance.

  When they reached the bottom of the valley, Paul and Caco came tumbling back over them, Paul crying, “Soldiers! Soldiers!” and Caco adding, “Soldat blanc!” Elise halted, turning to Isabelle with a worried air, but Tocquet encouraged them to go on. “They are French soldiers, after all,” he said, with barely detectable irony, “our countrymen.”