The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  24

  Though he’d been offered a bed in the town of Petite Rivière, Doctor Hébert preferred to camp on the knoll above, where most of Toussaint’s wounded from Ravine à Couleuvre reposed within the walls of the old English fort. Fontelle and Paulette had found themselves a lodging below, but each morning they appeared to aid him in his nursing, walking slowly up the gentle grade which rose imperceptibly from the town. When they reached the fort, Fontelle immediately set to boiling water, but before they began the work of cleansing wounds and curing dressings, she cooked the doctor a fresh egg or a green plantain, or sometimes (if foraging had gone well) both together.

  The fort was rectangular, enclosing no more than a few hundred feet, with the main gate oriented toward the negligible slope to the town. Only when within the walls did one recognize the real height of the place. Below the long wall to the southwest, a cliff dropped off abruptly. Below, a dizzying distance below, the great river of the Artibonite made a slow muddy coil around the base of the hill.

  This peak, which the people of the region called La Crête à Pierrot, marked the beginning of the Cahos mountain range, which stretched eastward into the interior, toward Mirebalais and the Spanish border. Just to the west was a small bitasyon, with little cases and corn plantings quarried into the more steeply rising mountainsides in that direction. On the day of his arrival, the doctor had arranged for the people there to help raise some ajoupas for himself and the wounded men. The fort had been left unfinished when the English withdrew from the colony, and it was not in much state of defense. There was no garrison but for the wounded, and except for the powder magazine there was no shelter either.

  Yet the doctor found himself better here than in the town. The air was fresh and it was cool, chilly at night, in fact. The chill and the breezes sweeping the hill discouraged the mosquitoes. Sometimes he went down to the town to sup—there was a community of whites at Petite Rivière, and a couple of surgeons who lodged in the house of one Massicot, but he always returned to the hilltop to sleep. It was convenient to be near his patients, and in the worse case, if trouble erupted below, he might slip away east on the mountain paths.

  As for what had happened at Gonaives or Ennery, no news came for several days. The doctor tried not to fret about his family. He knew that Fontelle must be suppressing similar thoughts, and her people were more widely scattered. For the moment it was calm enough in the surrounds of Petite Rivière, and it looked riskier to leave than to remain. He thought it most likely that the inhabitants of Thibodet were still with Madame Louverture and her relations, but he could not know where they might have found their refuge. If he stayed where he was, surely Toussaint would come with some intelligence. Yet when the commotion of an arrival did begin, the people in the town and outlying bitasyons all began to cry, Dessalines! Dessalines k’ap vini! Dessalines is coming!

  The doctor straightened from his work and went to an embrasure where a rusting six-pound cannon tilted on a broken carriage. Below, the sluggish river reddened in the setting sun. Voices echoed up from the town, which was mostly hidden from him by a screen of trees, and he heard the weary tap of a drum and the whistling of a single fife. A bend of the road below the town brought the approaching column into his view. When he put his spyglass to his eye, he saw that a couple of hundred white civilians were limping along, pressed by Dessalines’s troops, their heads drooping like the heads of slaves in a coffle.

  He did not hurry the evening round, but when it was done he washed his face, put on the cleanest shirt at his disposal, and went down with Paulette and Fontelle to Petite Rivière. With them came one of Toussaint’s soldiers, Bienvenu. The doctor had been treating him, successfully so far, for wounds of mitraille in his right arm and shoulder. Bienvenu carried his right arm in a sling, but as he was glad to demonstrate, he could still aim a pistol and wield a coutelas or a bâton in his left. He’d assigned himself to the doctor’s protection, out of gratitude and old acquaintance; Bienvenu had joined Toussaint’s forces by the intercession of Riau, and from Riau the doctor knew that Bienvenu was a fugitive from Habitation Arnaud, whence he’d fled before the risings of ninety-one, though he didn’t know if Bienvenu knew he knew it. Glad as he was of the extra eyes and arm, he carried his own pistols too, hidden in his waistband under the loose tail of his shirt.

  As they walked down, the velvet darkness settled over them, while above, the stars began to brighten. With all the bustle of the arriving troops, the feeling in the town was still and grim. No sign of the blancs Dessalines had marched in, and the doctor noticed that the only white face on the street was his own. He bade a quick good evening to Fontelle and Paulette (the mother seemed eager to get the daughter out of view of the new-arrived soldiers) and went on alone with Bienvenu.

  At Massicot’s house the door was barred and the shutters closed. The doctor forebore to knock loudly or long. When there was no reply to his first soft taps, he slipped around to the fenced yard in back and let himself in at the wooden gate, leaving Bienvenu outside. Fanfan, Massicot’s fattening hog, snorted and rolled a long-lashed eye at him, but did not move from her wallow in the fence corner. Presently the back door opened a crack and Massicot peered out.

  “Oh,” he hissed, beckoning the doctor in. “I did not know you—I thought it was Dessalines’s men come to steal my pig.”

  The doctor slipped sideways through the half-open door, which Massicot at once pressed shut and bolted. In the front room the surgeons sat in darkness, as no one would venture to strike a light.

  “What news?” the doctor said, yielding to the general impulse to whisper.

  “Gonaives is burned, and Saint Marc too,” Massicot croaked hoarsely. “Dessalines’s people have just been driven back from Port-au-Prince. Oh you’ll see, they are desperate men! They will certainly take my pig.”

  “And your life along with it, you old—” Someone shushed the surgeon who had blurted this reproach. If Massicot had heard, he did not seem to take offense.

  “Dessalines came with prisoners, I thought I saw,” the doctor said.

  “Many,” said Massicot. “Some from as far off as Gros Morne, but he has been sweeping them in all across the plain. Lucky they have not been massacred. There were hundreds killed at Verrettes, we have heard. They are all shut up in the old cotton warehouse, if it is not the brickworks.”

  “I had better go and see what can be done for them,” the doctor said. Massicot caught at his sleeve as he made for the back door, but did not follow him into the yard.

  Bienvenu hung over the fence, admiring Fanfan in the starlight, his good hand cupped over his navel. The doctor grunted to get his attention, and they went on together. It was only two blocks from Massicot’s to the square; Petite Rivière was a very small town, with no more than forty houses, though many of them were solidly built of brick or stone. Under the eyes of Dessalines’s soldiers, they crossed below the doors of the church. The doctor pulled his hat down over his face and put his hands into his pockets; he felt eyes on his back as they went by. His pistol barrels scraped against his pelvis as he walked. A block ahead, he made out the figure of Père Vidaut, the village priest, flanked by his two acolytes, and he picked up his pace to overtake them. Père Vidaut was vested as if for the mass, and his two black acolytes carried cross and candle.

  “Whom are you attending, Father?” the doctor said when he’d caught up.

  “Those unfortunates that Dessalines has herded into the old cotton warehouse,” the priest replied. “It is too close for so many in that place— they will suffer much, even by night, and if they are kept through the heat of the day . . .”

  “What chance have they to be released?”

  “I don’t know.” The priest dropped his shoulders. “Madame Dessalines has come as well, and she has a gentle heart. Maybe she’ll have some influence with her husband. But monsieur le général appears in an especially thunderous mood.”

  As the priest’s voice trailed away, they came along the wall of the
cotton warehouse, out of use since cotton planting had stopped with the wars and the desertion of the plantations. A familiar face popped up in a small, square window in the brickwork as the doctor passed.

  “A l’aide! Help us!”

  The doctor stopped, letting the priest go on. Framed in the window was the face of Bruno Pinchon, whom the doctor knew slightly from the region of Port-au-Prince.

  “You are far from your plantation,” the doctor said, somewhat reluctantly. He had never much liked Pinchon; the man feared ill fortune and seemed to attract it. “How do you come here?”

  “By mischance. I was visiting—”

  There was some turmoil inside the building, and Pinchon’s visage was replaced by that of the naturalist Descourtilz.

  “He was visiting me,” Descourtilz said, with a queasy smile the doctor could just make out in the starlight. “We were taken on the road from Habitation Rossignol-Desdunes to—well, it is no matter. In all the Artibonite there is no hiding place any more. Our color betrays us everywhere.”

  The doctor nodded, slightly chilled. Descourtilz was also a medical man, and they’d once dined together at Gonaives, pleasantly enough, discussing the anatomy of the local crocodile, of which Descourtilz had been making a study. Like Pinchon, Descourtilz had come out from France during a lull in the fighting, seeking to recover family property under Toussaint’s regime—most likely it was that common circumstance that threw them together. The doctor preferred Descourtilz to Pinchon, though both excited his sympathy now.

  “We have got to get out,” Descourtilz said flatly. “We are packed in so, no one can sit down, and if he did he’d suffocate.”

  “I understand you,” said the doctor. The porthole through which Descourtilz peered was one of only four in the long brick wall. “The priest has already gone around to the front. I’ll see what he thinks may be accomplished.”

  In front of the warehouse, Père Vidaut had met a dozen-odd femmes de couleur who had come bearing food and water for the prisoners. The guards had opened the door to admit them, but when the doctor made to follow, the priest motioned him away.

  “You may not get out again so easily,” he said. “Better to return by day.”

  “And yourself, Father?”

  The priest smiled thinly, one hand on his stole. “I will trust to my cloth,” he said. “And to God’s grace.”

  The doctor bowed and made his retreat. A stranger’s face hung in the window where Descourtilz’s had been. He went on without pausing, Bienvenu a pace behind. No one molested them on their climb to the fort, but the doctor was happier than ever to have Bienvenu’s company.

  Next morning the doctor jerked up from his mat at the sound of voices disputing and a loud clatter of metal on stone. He crawled out shirtless from beneath the palm fringe of his shelter. Bienvenu and a couple more of the walking wounded were arguing, beside the wall, with a platoon of Dessalines’s men who’d arrived with mattocks, shovels, and hoes. Behind them daylight bloomed quickly over the plain, and in the wooded mountains to the east all of the cocks were crowing, but it was still cool enough that the doctor’s bare chest and arms broke out in gooseflesh.

  One of Dessalines’s men shook a hoe at Bienvenu, who skipped out of reach, twisting to shield his wounded arm, then advanced again with coutelas drawn in his left hand.

  “Dousman,” the doctor said hastily, taking a step forward. The quarrel paused as both men turned toward him. “What is your trouble?”

  By the inner wall, Paulette was on her hands and knees, blowing up the flames of the fire Fontelle had just kindled beneath the iron kettle. A couple of Dessalines’s men stood near, watching the girl’s derrière and the egg and two plantains Fontelle had brought with roughly equal interest. The doctor glanced at that situation; then Bienvenu’s voice recalled him to the argument.

  “They want to knock down the walls of the fort!” Bienvenu said hotly. “They say, by order of General Dessalines they will do it, but here are all the wounded of Papa Toussaint.”

  Paulette straightened from the fire and moved toward the wall, swinging her skirt away from the men who watched her. One of them reached slyly for a plantain, but Fontelle knocked him away with an elbow, then backed him farther off with the hot iron spoon she held.

  The doctor looked for a captain of the crew. “What are your orders?” he said.

  “Tear down the fort, and retreat to Grand Cahos.”

  “A moment,” said the doctor. He walked to the open gate and looked out. Dessalines was coming up the slope from the town, in his general’s dress regalia, riding a big bay stallion. The doctor hurried back to his ajoupa and stooped in to find his shirt. At the same time he flipped over the mat he slept on to cover his long gun and two pistols. By the time he straightened, tucking his shirt, Dessalines had dismounted and stood beside his horse, squinting into his silver snuffbox.

  “General.” The doctor bowed. Dessalines stirred his tobacco thoughtfully with a fingertip, then closed the box without taking any.

  “Your orders are?” the doctor asked.

  “Destroy the fort so that the blancs cannot use it,” Dessalines pronounced.

  “But these wounded are here by order of the Governor-General.”

  Dessalines’s eye bore down on the doctor. “Toussaint ordered you to bring them to the fort?”

  The doctor swallowed. “To Petite Rivière.”

  “Well, ti blan, little white man, I give you time to move these wounded while my men tear down the walls.”

  “And your orders for the town?”

  “N’ap boulé tout kay yo,” Dessalines said carelessly, glancing toward the screen of trees below the gate. He clicked a fingernail on the snuffbox lid. We will burn all the houses.

  The doctor spread his empty hands in the air. His mouth opened, but no words came. The image of Descourtilz’s face, caught in the small bricked window of the cotton warehouse, flicked across his memory. Fontelle approached, with the boiled egg and two steaming plantains arranged on a banana leaf, but the doctor’s appetite had fled. He dropped his hands and nodded in the direction of Dessalines.

  “No, better that you offer it to the general.”

  But Dessalines shrugged off the food. At his gesture, his captain stepped up and took the boiled egg from the leaf, then broke off half a plantain. The rest was divided bite by bite among the men who held the mattocks. The last man sailed the empty leaf over the parapet. Bienvenu, who stood quietly with his coutelas hanging behind his left thigh, watched the leaf go fluttering down over the river.

  Someone raised a pick and brought it down. The point drew sparks from the stone, but dislodged only a few shreds of mortar. The man who’d struck looked disconsolately down at his jolted arms. Dessalines shifted his stance and cocked his head. The doctor’s ears strained for whatever sound he heard: horses. Dessalines dropped the snuffbox into his coat pocket. A moment later, the first horseman was pulling his mount up sharply within the gate. “Look out, the Governor is coming!”

  The doctor recognized Guiaou, holding one of Toussaint’s pennants on a whipping bamboo staff. Then Toussaint rode in himself, flanked by Placide and Morisset, and followed by two dozen riders of his guard.

  At once the doctor was washed in relief. But when Toussaint slipped down from Bel Argent, he crumpled against the saddle skirt—only his grip on the stirrup leather held him up. Dessalines watched, his posture emptied of all intention, his face entirely blank. Finally Toussaint pulled himself upright and took a shaky step away from the white stallion. He was pouring sweat, but his face was bloodless.

  “Sir, I see you are taken with fever—” the doctor began, but Toussaint passed him stiffly, unheeding. The doctor glanced up at Placide, whose grave face hung above his horse’s head.

  “What is this work?” Toussaint demanded.

  Dessalines repeated what he had told the doctor.

  “No,” said Toussaint, “no.” He fisted a hand, then opened it, then wet a forefinger with his tongue an
d raised it to the wind. He turned on his heels, holding the raised finger to the points of the compass. When he’d completed the revolution, he was again facing Dessalines. The movement seemed to strengthen him a little, or at any rate when he next spoke, his voice no longer quavered.

  “Let them deepen the ditches around the fort,” he said, gesturing at the men with their mattocks. “Shore up these walls, within. I have brought a few more cannon. We will stand here, and let the blancs shatter themselves against this mountain.” His voice was low and tight on those last words, but then he smiled, unexpectedly, moving his hand quickly to wipe away the smile. He moved a step toward Dessalines and put a hand under his elbow.

  “Come,” he said, drawing the taller man toward the powder magazine. “Let me tell you how it will be done.”

  Most of that day the doctor spent shifting his wounded to new shelters hastily raised on the slopes of the bitasyon behind the fort, for Toussaint confirmed the order that all of them should be moved. That was more easily accomplished than to get them all down to the town, and despite Toussaint’s arrival the doctor could still picture Petite Rivière burning, given what Dessalines had said. For the moment, he left his own bivouac within the walls where it had been. Bienvenu, without saying anything, unrolled his own sleeping mat beside the doctor’s.