The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Plagued by mosquitoes and the throbbing of his wound, he was tottery, giddy, when he rose next day. Rochambeau would not wait for a cook fire. They chewed their moldy hardtack on the move. An hour’s march had settled Guizot into the rhythm. Midmorning, they struck friendly pickets who let them know Pamphile de Lacroix was established on a line to their left, while dead ahead the enemy had been trapped and mostly surrounded in a little fort. Rochambeau was too excited by this news to pause for an account of the earlier days’ engagements. Guizot had no objection to the haste of their advance; the images he’d so briefly glanced over at Chirry still burned behind his eyes.

  After another forty minutes’ march, he and Aloyse were sent forward to reconnoiter and saw through the trees that covered them a small redoubt on a little knoll, defended by fresh-dug earth supporting roughly pointed logs, occupied by something under two hundred men, by Guizot’s quick estimation. Beyond the redoubt and a little below it was the masonry wall of a more substantial fort, and beyond that a passage into the empty air; Guizot supposed that a bend in the river must lie below.

  In another moment, Rochambeau had come up from the rear to join them. From under cover of the trees, he studied the redoubt with a spyglass. Behind the earthworks, a black corporal looked up curiously. Perhaps a flash of sunlight had glinted from the lens, but he seemed uncertain of what he had seen, and Rochambeau quickly lowered his instrument.

  “Captain,” said Rochambeau, “I think it would be small trouble to you to sweep away that little emplacement.”

  “None at all,” Guizot replied. The blood beneath his infected wound pulsed like a drumbeat, and though he still felt somewhat dizzy, he could feel his anger hardening.

  “Good,” Rochambeau said. “Then let us set about it.”

  In the morning after that long day’s battle, Doctor Hébert woke to find that Magny’s effort to burn the bodies on the slope outside the fort had been less than completely successful. Yet the smoke from the fitfully smoldering fires had been enough to discourage the dogs, unless they’d been moved to retreat by the rising sun. The doctor turned from his embrasure and set about heating water for a change of bandages. Descourtilz and the musicians were still snoring on their mats. By the steps of the powder magazine, Dessalines was conferring with Magny and Lamartinière. He gestured toward the knoll above the fort, where the French had briefly appeared the day before, and Lamartinière nodded several times, snapping his heels together.

  Dessalines was leaving the fort on a mission to bring more powder from Plassac, the doctor overheard—if by chance that depot had survived. Below, they were opening the gate for the sortie, but Dessalines stopped on the threshold, and called out another order. Half a dozen men broke out of his small contingent and scooped the remains of the prisoners of the Ninth who’d been tortured to death the night before onto a square of canvas, dragged it through the gate, and tumbled its contents onto the slope beyond the ditches. The doctor could not quite restrain himself from watching the procedure. Some of the bodies were dismembered, as Descourtilz had reported; his eyes clung to a severed forearm fetched up against a stone, stiff fingers stretching upward from a bloody palm.

  During this operation, Dessalines seemed to think of something. He called Lamartinière to come to him, leaned down from his horse, and proffered his right hand, as if to be kissed. But instead he pointed to one of several heavy rings on his fingers. Lamartinière took note of it and nodded.

  A few scattered shots came from the French lines as Dessalines rode out. But the honor guard cavalry showed itself in force at the tree line opposite, and that was enough to discourage any serious pursuit. In a moment Dessalines’s little force had vanished in the trees.

  In two days’ time, Lamartinière had raised a tidy little redoubt on that knoll above the fort, buttressed with earthworks and bwa kampech. For want of proper tools, most of the digging and chopping was done with coutelas, but still it went quickly. Lamartinière manned the fort and installed four of the cannon from the fort, then settled in to wait, day after day. There was no attack upon them anywhere. The French could be seen maneuvering in the distance, well out of range of either battery. Apparently they were in for a rulebook siege.

  The departure of Dessalines left Descourtilz more cheerful, though Doctor Hébert was not so much encouraged by it. Siege tedium weighed upon him drearily. Both food and water were running short. At first, some of the more daring black soldiers managed to slip to and from the river at night, but in a few days French maneuvers had closed that breach and the next water-foraging party did not return. With water rationing, the wounded did poorly; many had begun to die.

  Lamartinière had put his men to cutting brush around the redoubt. Their long knives hacked through the heat of the day, clearing broader fields of fire. Outside this new perimeter, the doctor was sometimes allowed to ramble, in search of healing herbs to replenish his stores. Sometimes Descourtilz went with him, and always Bienvenu and one other man from the black army, though this other man changed from one excursion to the next. Meanwhile, Lamartinière’s men had finished their clearing and turned to deepening the ditch around the redoubt. The doctor knew that Descourtilz’s mind was on escape, but there was no such possibility. Even Bienvenu would sound the alarm, and the second man was there in case Bienvenu should waver.

  The slope below the fort heaved with vultures’ wings from dawn to dusk, and a greasy black smoke bled into the air from the ravines below Petite Rivière. At dusk, sometimes the dogs returned, their heavy brindled shoulders hunching. Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière picked off a few of them with her long gun, until her husband told her to stop wasting ammunition. Thereafter she only stared at the dogs balefully, her two hands twitching on her hips.

  One afternoon the doctor was shocked out of his siesta by the crump of a single artillery piece from the direction of the town. With Descourtilz he hurried to the wall beside the gate, to see a heavy iron sphere loft into the air, fall short, and roll back down the slope, its fuse whipping and spitting sparks. When the shell went off, the nearby corpses jumped; a dozen vultures lumbered into the air and circled.

  The doctor snatched out the joints of his folding spyglass and brought it to his eye. In the lens’s round he could make out the figure of Pétion, lately returned from his exile in France, directing the adjustment of the obusier. When the match was lit, the doctor had a great impulse to flinch, though he knew there was no point. Descourtilz nudged his elbow, and the doctor passed him the glass. The second shell was flying over their heads; it landed squarely within the fort and spun with its fuse sizzling.

  Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière moved toward it as quickly as any of the men, but Magny caught her arm and held her back. A couple of horses whinnied nervously, edging against their tethers by the upper wall. The doctor watched, half frozen; it seemed to have been instantly understood by all that no water could be wasted on extinguishing this thing. Three men hauled it off the ground and began to carry it toward the nearest embrasure. There was a moment of awkwardness because a cannon was in the way. One man was blown to indecipherable bits when the shell went off, showering the bystanders with blood and ribbons of shredded flesh. A second, who’d lost his grip in falling over the gun carriage, was not hurt at all, while the third had his two hands hopelessly mangled. The doctor found his breath and ran to stanch the bleeding, almost colliding with Marie-Jeanne, who’d rushed in with the same purpose.

  Lamartinière’s redoubt was now returning fire, effectively enough to silence the obusier, at least temporarily. Pétion would doubtless be trying to move this gun to some more advantageous position. As for the shattered hands, there was no saving either one of them. He found his straw sack and retrieved his saw. It needed three men besides Bienvenu to hold the wounded man, and Magny ordered the musicians to strike up the liveliest air they knew, in hope of muffling his screams. Finished at last, the doctor left Bienvenu to bandage the stumps and crawled to stretch out on his mat. His stomach boiled, but he swallowed it
back and finally lost consciousness.

  When he woke, it was already dark; he lay motionless but for the blinking of his eyes. Bienvenu’s voice droned in the darkness, giving the news of the evening’s scout to the man who’d lost his hands that day. Apparently General Hardy had brought in a French column to join the siege line north of the fort. At his arrival, Morisset and Monpoint had withdrawn their cavalry and ridden off in search of Toussaint. “Papa Toussaint will come,” Bienvenu’s whisper kept assuring. “He will come to kill all these blancs and make us free.”

  Cautiously the doctor rolled back a corner of his mat and pushed his fingers into the dirt until they stopped on cloth-wrapped steel. The touch of his octagon rifle barrel scarcely reassured him. He withdrew his hand and let the mat fall into place, wondering whom he’d fire on when the end came, if he fired at all.

  To the right of General Lacroix’s line, two hundred cadavers of white civilians slain by Dessalines for many days had been stiffening, then deliquescing, in their clotted blood. The stench grew more unbearable every day, and every day there were more flies. Lacroix put Major Maillart in charge of burning the corpses. It proved to have been a bad idea, for the bodies burned sluggishly, incompletely, and blanketed the area with a stinking black smoke that choked the men all across their lines. The cloth Maillart tied across his nose and mouth did little good. At least he had the advantage of light cotton clothing. Most of the men, Lacroix included, had come out wearing woolen uniforms, and the foul miasma sank deep in the wool, and seemed like it would linger forever.

  Lacroix was the senior surviving officer, after Leclerc, whose dangerously bruised groin kept him mostly confined to his tent. For an hour a day the Captain-General would tour the developing siege positions, moving on foot as he could not possibly bestride a horse, biting his lips to hide his pain. Then he’d disappear into his convalescence. The task of encirclement thus fell to Lacroix.

  To Maillart, Lacroix made the observation that in war as in agriculture, it was foolish to try to tear out a huge boulder all in one piece; better to use patience to chip away at it and carry it off by shards. Toward that end, Lacroix detached General Bourke to cross the river and block the ford southwest of the fort. By this passage the rebels had got reinforcement on that one day of pitched battle which had been so disastrous for the French. With Bourke in place, they could no longer even fetch water from the river, much less cross into the open country beyond. Bourke held the position without much difficulty, though lightly harassed, mostly at night, by the troops of Charles Belair, who still maintained an elusive presence south of the Artibonite. When General Hardy’s division arrived to flush the honor guard cavalry out of the woods above the town, it seemed that the net must soon draw tight.

  Maillart spent his days riding from post to post—his familiarity with the terrain made him valuable. Lacroix had put the captains Paltre, Cyprien, and Daspir mostly in his charge, to be instructed in the lie of the land. Maillart observed the junior officers with a degree of ironic distance. There seemed to be some rivalry among them, though he could not quite devine its source. Paltre and Cyprien he remembered from the season the mission of Hédouville in 1798. He had distinctly disliked both of them then, for an unseasoned pair of wastrels, arrogant without cause and overly given to the vices of women, rum, and gambling (and for Maillart to register such a reproach was in itself extraordinary). These weeks of real and terrible warfare seemed to have embittered Paltre, to judge from his dour muttering through his broken nose, while Cyprien seemed simply to have hardened. Daspir looked a little less touched by it all. There was a softness in his cheeks and mouth, a concupiscent expression that reminded Maillart of Michel Arnaud as a younger man, ten years ago, before the slaves revolted. Yet in Daspir’s eyes there was a cool steeliness of regard that ill matched the rest of his expression. Puzzling, but Maillart liked him best of the three. Despite his sprained shoulder he rode the lines willingly, managing his horse with his left hand—and he was an excellent horseman.

  They kept their movements comfortably out of range of the fort, though still within view of it. It was a glad thing to ride away from the pestilent smoke of the corpses smoldering in the ravine below Petite Rivière. From within the fort a couple of horns and a drum regaled them with the popular airs of the French Revolution; if he listened closely Maillart thought he could make out the thin whine of a violin as well. Cyprien and Paltre seemed positively offended by this choice of music, while Daspir was merely perplexed. The three of them, guided by Maillart, spent much of their time scouting for a better position for Pétion’s guns. Lacroix was resolved that a steady bombardment would be the best solution to the siege, but the most opportune spots from which to launch shells were all covered by the small new earthwork the defenders had hastily erected. Though the blacks in the larger fort were conserving ammunition, fire from the little redoubt was extremely vigorous whenever a French uniform came within range. With a borrowed spyglass, Maillart studied the work and reported to Lacroix that it had been well surrounded by trenches, in the same style as the main fort.

  Then, around noon on March 22, another still, hot day of siege, a cannon barrage erupted from the woods east of the redoubt. Lacroix jumped out from under the square of canvas where he’d been sheltering from the midday sun, and shaded his eyes to stare toward the fort.

  “We have no troops in that direction,” he said and turned to Maillart and Daspir, who were standing by. “What did you see up there this morning?”

  “Nothing,” said Maillart, who had indeed seen nothing unusual when he’d reconnoitered the area a little after dawn. But in less than five minutes a rider came pounding in to announce the arrival of General Rochambeau.

  At this news, Lacroix grinned at first. “Why, if he can silence the cannon they’ve got there—” Then his face changed. “No, but he will try to rush the trenches. I know him.” He turned to Maillart. “Go and stop him.”

  In seconds Maillart and Daspir were in the saddle, bearing orders for Rochambeau to sustain his cannonade but not to risk an infantry assault. Maillart had got the idea right away. Twice already the French had fallen into just this trap, and tales of Rochambeau’s recklessness had percolated all through the army; some grumbled that if he’d been more temperate at Fort Liberté, the burning of Le Cap would have been avoided.

  But now as they rode too hastily across Hardy’s front lines, the main fort did open fire on them, so they were forced to take a longish detour under cover of the woods. The horses were slowed almost to a walk to weave a way between the trees, and yet the cover seemed too thin, with grapeshot snapping branches all around them. From further off the artillery battle continued to resound, then suddenly fell silent. Maillart and Daspir broke cover and cantered the last quarter-mile in a dread whistling silence. With all that they arrived too late; Rochambeau had already launched his charge.

  Guizot was crouching in the undergrowth, shoulder to shoulder with Sergeant Aloyse, trembling like a terrier from excitement, anger, and nerves. After a closer look at the enemy’s armament, Rochambeau had countermanded his first order and decided to commence with his own artillery. It took some time to bring the seven cannon they’d dragged across the Cahos mountain range to bear, and Guizot had trouble restraining his men, all hot to avenge the civilian massacres they’d seen on the march from Mirebalais.

  As for Guizot, he felt much the same. Who might command the fort he faced no longer interested him. The slight, small figure of Toussaint Louverture had become abstract, the cloth that bound his murderous head shrunken smaller than a red pinpoint, deep in Guizot’s mind. Before him was only the enemy and the only thing to do was kill. As the cannon bellowed all around him and the gunners shouted encouragement to one another, he held his eyes fixed on Rochambeau’s black shako. Then at last the barrage ceased; the guns of the redoubt had stopped returning fire. Rochambeau swept his gloved hand forward, and Guizot nudged Aloyse as he lunged to his feet and into the open.

  He charged at the
head of his grenadiers, stumbling over stubs of recently cut brush. Thirty yards away, the redoubt did not look impressive: an earthwork hastily shoveled up and studded with crudely pointed logs bristling outward. An outer ring of loosely molded dirt was scarcely knee high, and the whole thing looked practically undefended. Guizot’s excitement rose; from a distance he heard his own voice howling. Then, when they’d closed half the distance, the ground sprouted rows of musketeers like dragon’s teeth. Completely covered by the trench, their barrels braced on that insignificant ring of dirt, they fired with a fine precision.

  The first shock passed over Guizot like a wave, washing him in a nausea like that of his first days at sea. Yards short of the trench, the charge had broken and he himself seemed the only man still upright in what had become a field of bleeding casualties. Except Aloyse, who clawed at him, eyes ringed with white, shouting hoarsely, “Turn back, turn back!” Guizot’s ears were ringing; bullets were still whistling by. The men behind the higher earthwork had loosed a volley while those in the trench reloaded. Guizot turned and scrambled after the sergeant’s bouncing pigtail. He was stumbling over corpses now, and it seemed to take him years to reach the trees.