The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

Ten paces into the cover he encountered Rochambeau, stamping his high boots and spitting with rage. “Captain, what do you mean by this dishonorable flight? Return your men to the assault!”

  Guizot, numb and breathless, had no thought but to obey. He turned in a half-circle, drawing wind to call an order, but before a word could leave his lips he saw he had no men to rally. Except for himself and Sergeant Aloyse, every last soldier of his command lay dead or crippled on the field.

  Rochambeau was arguing now with a cavalry major who’d just ridden up: a tall, raw-boned fellow with a graying mustache, his face and hands weatherbeaten to the color of old brick. Behind this man was Captain Daspir, right arm in a sling, who on sight of Guizot slipped down from his horse and came to him.

  The notorious Rochambeau cut no impressive figure in Maillart’s eyes. He was so short that his shako and boots seemed to account for a quarter of his height. His uniform fit sloppily on a pudgy body and the same doughiness was in his face, which wore the expression of a petulant child. At first, he did not want to hear the order Maillart brought, arguing that Pamphile de Lacroix was not his superior, while Maillart did his best to explain with due deference that for the moment Lacroix spoke for Captain-General Leclerc—and that in any case the folly of charging the entrenched redoubt was now more than evident on the field before them. But now General Lacroix had arrived himself. A short distance behind him came Pétion’s artillerymen, sweating and grunting as they hauled their guns and carriages up the hill—a maneuver which Rochambeau’s attack had finally made possible.

  “General, General,” Lacroix was saying. “What is this impetuosity? Did you not receive my order?”

  “What would you?” Rochambeau jerked his gloved hand toward the redoubt. “How many niggers can there be in that ant hill? A hundred? Two hundred? Would you imagine they could hold against my grenadiers?”

  Pamphile de Lacroix pressed his fingertips to his temples, with an odd delicacy, as if holding together a fractured skull. “Indeed,” he said in a low voice, “there cannot be more than twelve hundred men all told in that redoubt and the fort together. And we surround them with twelve thousand. They give us odds of ten to one and yet . . .” Lacroix turned to survey the field. “Include those men you’ve just sent to the slaughter, and they have cost us fifteen hundred men in pure losses.”

  Rochambeau looked ready for another hot reply, but Maillart interrupted, speaking to Lacroix. “Mon général, the message did not reach him,” he said. “Unfortunately, we arrived too late.”

  At that both Lacroix and Rochambeau subsided. It was quiet, except for the cry of a hawk wheeling high in the air above the blood-soaked field.

  The man who’d lost his hands to the shell had taken gangrene. Corruption climbed his forearms to the elbow and beyond. Without sufficient water there was little the doctor could do; he could not properly clean the wound or change bandages and dressings as often as required. He did not have the heart to take the arms off at the shoulder . . . which likely would only delay the outcome, in any case. And there was nothing at all for the pain. Yet the man was stoic, in his way; he did not cry out and seldom even whimpered, only stretched out his necrotic stumps to show to anyone who passed, as if he begged handlessly for charity. It really might have been best to shoot him, but the doctor could not uncover his weapons for that, and if he did Magny would not have allowed him to waste a shot.

  At last, on the morning before Rochambeau attacked the redoubt, the man died. In a dull silence, Bienvenu found men to help him roll the body through an embrasure and let it drop over the cliff above the river. As the body unfolded its limbs to fall free, the first cannon sounded above the redoubt.

  Descourtilz and the musicians crept to the wall to watch the action, but the doctor only squatted by the powder magazine, which offered him some protection against stray projectiles. If an odd shot chanced to blow up the powder, at least the end would be very quick. He brooded, his tongue rasping over dry lips, on the handless man who had just died. The action that had cost him his life deserved a more respectful burial, but they could not keep corpses in these walls.

  The guns went silent in the redoubt, followed by shouts and the tearing sound of volleying muskets. Crouched with arms wrapped around his knees, the doctor listened for Marie-Jeanne’s rifle, a clearer, truer note than any musket issued. That morning, the Amazon had gone to join her husband in the redoubt with her long gun, cartridge box, and a sword as long as one of her legs strapped to her waist on a belt of steel. Every time her rifle sounded, a French grenadier was certainly dead.

  Presently the shooting stopped and Descourtilz joined the doctor, his face drawn and gray.

  “The idiots tried to charge the trenches,” he reported. “You can’t imagine the destruction.”

  I don’t want to imagine it, the doctor thought, but said instead, “How many?”

  Descourtilz shrugged. “See for yourself.”

  But the doctor remained sitting where he was, perhaps for as long as half an hour. In that time there was no shooting. One could even hear birdsong from the wooded areas, with now and then a human voice calling some instruction. At last the doctor went to join Descourtilz and Bienvenu, who stood peering from opposite corners of one of the embrasures. The redoubt was still; no man showed himself above the earthworks. Over the dead and dying men a cloud of yellow butterflies was settling, drifting down like flower petals, like the snow the doctor hadn’t seen these last ten years. Among the powdery yellow wings were a few white ones, picked out with small crimson dots.

  “How strange,” Descourtilz exhaled.

  “It’s the blood.” The doctor’s voice was harsh in his dry throat. “I don’t know why, but it’s the blood that brings them.”

  There came an explosive crump and a whistling rush of air, then a shell dropped out of the sky square into the redoubt, throwing up dirt and splinters when it blew. Descourtilz and the doctor ducked reflexively behind the wall, but the next shell fell in the main fort, blasting iron in all directions, shattering the forequarters of a horse.

  “Pétion!” came a shout from down by the gate. “There is Pétion!”

  Bienvenu was on the screaming horse in a flash, letting the blood from its throat with his coutelas. Several other men ran up to help him skin and dress the meat. Descourtilz and the doctor still huddled by the wall. Now and then another shell landed in the fort, but the main bombardment was directed at the redoubt. The doctor dared not lift his head to see, but the damage must certainly have been dreadful. And the butterflies, driven from the field, were streaming west like a plume of yellow smoke.

  All afternoon the shelling continued; it ended only after dark. Two hours after nightfall, Lamartinière crept in with the remnant of the two hundred men who’d manned the redoubt, now too shattered to be held any longer. Lamartinière looked sick with exhaustion; Marie-Jeanne seemed a little brighter, though her dress was torn and bloody and her face was streaked with dirt. They dined that night on horseflesh half roasted, half dried over small hot fires, and after this repast, Magny ordered the musicians to strike up the “Marseillaise.”

  At dawn they saw that the French had used the cover of darkness to occupy the redoubt Lamartinière had left. The earthworks had even been a little reconstructed, to form a semicircular battery bearing down on the main fort. The doctor felt his stomach drop before the first shell fired.

  “Pétion! Gare Pétion!” The cries from the defenders were half rage, half respect and grudging admiration for a dangerous adversary. Lamartinière and Pétion were both mulattoes, though Lamartinière had remained loyal to Toussaint when Pétion threw in his lot with Rigaud. With Magny, Lamartinière now supervised return fire from the cannons of the fort, but Pétion’s guns were too well emplaced to be dislodged.

  All day the bombardment went on and on. It was too dubious to try to throw the shells out of the fort before they blew. A new system developed, as if spontaneously. When each shell landed, one man rushed at it crying, “M’a
lé nan Ginen!” and covered it with his body. I am going to Africa! The doctor couldn’t say where these men went for certain, but when the shells exploded very little of them remained in the fort.

  One shell, one man. There were now some nine hundred defenders surviving. No man who covered a shell in this fashion lived, except in rare cases where the shell did not explode, but the injuries to others tended to be less than fatal. Still, the doctor felt too demoralized to treat these lighter injuries at first. There seemed to be no point; the scope of the problem surrounding him was too large for his mind to contain a solution to it. It was Marie-Jeanne, who’d laid down her rifle for a bandage roll, who by example and her urging got him to return to his work. Bienvenu and Descourtilz also worked tirelessly through the day, bandaging and when necessary sawing. Without water, without sufficient nourishment, these men would almost surely die, but there was nothing to do but move against that probability, keep on swimming against the tide. Deafened by the roar of shelling, the doctor did his duties automatically. He’d fallen into a kind of trance, almost as comforting as drunkenness, though his small reserve of rum had been exhausted long ago.

  At night when the shelling had finally stopped, they ate the balance of the horsemeat and sang French patriotic songs till they were hoarse. The doctor stretched out, thinking he would never sleep, and woke from a tomb of black unconsciousness with Descourtilz’s sour breath in his ear.

  “Come on. We’re going over the wall.”

  The doctor sat up cautiously. Behind Descourtilz he could just make out the figure of one of the trumpet players. Bienvenu was asleep, or pretending to be, on his mat nearby. The doctor scrabbled in the dirt for his rifle, then thought better of it.

  “No,” he said. “I’m staying.”

  “You’re mad, then,” Descourtilz hissed. “No one will survive another day of this—it’s not so far to the French lines.”

  “But I’m engaged here,” the doctor said. For some reason he pictured Tocquet riding off down the river, the dwindling back of his son Paul.

  “With what?” Descourtilz’s barely audible whisper still managed to convey exasperation.

  “With this.” The doctor stroked his hands over the velvety darkness surrounding them. “With all of it.” He didn’t know himself what he meant. “Go on, then.” He took Descourtilz’s hand for a moment. “N’a wé,” he said, not sure if the naturalist would understand the Creole. “Si Dyé vlé.” If God wants it, we’ll meet again.

  Descourtilz slipped off without saying anything more. There was some rustling, a choked breath, one thump, then another, outside the wall. No one had sounded any alarm. The doctor lowered his head to the mat.

  In dream he met the man who’d lost his hands but now there was no gangrene; the stumps had healed and the man displayed them only to demand the doctor’s witness. He saw that these were no battle wounds but a punishment dating from slavery time. In dream the shock of this spectacle set him to weeping, but when he woke to the slate-gray light of dawn, his mind was clear and he felt calmer than he had for many days. He sat crosslegged in the shadow of his ajoupa, wishing distantly for a cup of coffee, a tot of rum, or best of all a glass of cool, clear water. Yet none of these wishes seemed so important now, and though he wondered whether Descourtilz and his companion had been killed either by black sentries or the French, that did not seem to matter so much either. He listened to the liquid calling of the crows in the trees beyond the redoubt, and as the morning mist began to lift and fade into the bluing sky, he watched the men Lamartinière had sent to raise red flags on every corner of the fort.

  Now that Guizot had completed the quartet of captains, Maillart learned for the first time what had been their relation on the voyage out. After nightfall had stopped the shelling, they all sat around the embers of the fire that had warmed their evening rations, sharing a bottle of clairin and telling their war stories. Maillart clucked to himself in quiet astonishment as the story of their bet emerged. That these four pups should have thought themselves capable of capturing Toussaint Louverture— well, but he supposed he must have been as young as that himself one time, if it were a long time ago. The rum warmed him to a certain sympathy with the four captains, though he felt distinctly more in common with Sergeant Aloyse, who was nearer to his own age and experience. But the sergeant was not at all convivial; he sat glum and silent beside his pack, nursing his drink, his beaked profile harsh in the starlight. Maillart had been given to understand that he’d lost the last of his old companions in that foolhardy assault on the redoubt.

  Daspir twirled a finger through the bullet hole in his hat. “At least I can claim to have seen him first,” he said. “Though I did not get my grip on him.”

  “But we were the closest to bringing him in, you and I,” Cyprien said. “At Gonaives—as you said yourself. We might have had him.”

  “But you didn’t,” Paltre snuffled sourly. By the luck of his billeting to Port-au-Prince he’d got no glimpse of the quarry at all, and seemed to resent it.

  “And I?” Guizot put in, with a drunken giddiness. “I touched him, with these hands.” Only his right hand lifted when he made to raise them both; the left slipped from his lap and dangled. The other three looked at him doubtfully. That one had better stop drinking, Maillart thought.

  “What nonsense,” Paltre said. “We have none of us succeeded.”

  “There is still time,” Cyprien pointed out, reaching for the bottle. “So long as the old rag-head remains at large.”

  Maillart glanced about the group. The lack of enthusiasm was striking. And no wonder, since they were surrounded by nearly two thousand corpses of their people, slain in evidence of the old rag-head’s determination. In former times, he might have said as much aloud, and begun a quarrel. Now he only wished he were somewhere else, though he couldn’t precisely imagine where he wanted to be.

  “What an ass I was to propose it!” Guizot burst out. His eyes glittered oddly. “I had no idea—none of us did. It is all folly.” He winced with another effort to lift his left arm. “I’m sorry,” he said, faltering. “At this hour, I . . . forgive me. I am no company.” He moved to where he’d spread a blanket and lay down.

  Maillart and Aloyse exchanged a glance, then both of them moved toward Guizot together. Not drunkenness, Maillart thought as he touched his forehead; it is fever. Sergeant Aloyse was loosening the captain’s sleeve.

  “Well,” said Maillart, after a moment. “This gentleman is in need of a sawbones.” He coughed. “In my opinion.”

  Daspir turned his face away. Paltre and Cyprien both looked a little nauseated, but they kept staring at the suppurating wound.

  “A fine young man, and brave,” said Sergeant Aloyse. “I would not like to see him lose this arm.”

  “To save his life?” Maillart said. But the sergeant was doggedly changing the soiled dressing—with a certain skill, Maillart took in. As the wound was handled, Guizot moaned a little in his feverish sleep.

  “Sea bathing,” Maillart said. “That cleans a wound.” Of course the sea was too far off. Where the devil was Antoine Hébert? He’d liked to have had the doctor handy for more than one reason. Yet if he were dead, somehow Maillart thought he would know it.

  “I had a packet of herbs against proud flesh,” he said. “But I used it all on General Lacroix.”

  The sergeant glanced up at him.

  “I don’t know their names to look for more,” Maillart muttered.

  The sergeant shrugged. He’d finished the bandage.

  “Come on,” Maillart said. “Let’s take a turn.”

  The killing ground on the slope below the fort was pale with rags and bones under the starlight. The bodies there had mostly been picked clean, though the odor of corruption lingered. Maillart saluted the pickets and passed outside the line, walking a little way up the grade. Daspir and Aloyse trailed him. When Maillart stopped, the sergeant passed him.

  “Better not go farther,” Maillart said. “There’s a marksman
up there who can see in the dark, I swear.”

  Aloyse stopped. “But what do I hear?”

  Maillart turned his ear to the fort. On the night there came to him a frail melody of a violin and a chorus of ghostly voices singing.

  Allons enfants de la patrie

  Le jour de gloire est arrivé

  Contre nous de la tyrannie

  L’étendard sanglant est levé . . .

  “My God,” said Aloyse. “They are singing the ‘Marseillaise.’ ”

  He turned abruptly to Maillart. “I sang that song across Italy and Austria and in the streets of Paris—with my brothers in arms, who today are all dead. Wherever we sang it we came to set the people free.” His voice cracked as he turned toward the music. “No enemy of ours could sing that song.” Again he faced Maillart. “Can you tell me, Major, what have we come here for?”

  Maillart looked at Daspir, who lowered his eyes. Aloyse was gazing toward the fort and singing himself now in a half-whisper.

  Aux armes, citoyens . . .

  Formez vos bataillons . . .

  Marchons! Marchons!

  Qu’un sang impur

  Abreuve nos sillons . . .

  He broke off.

  “We’re following orders,” Maillart finally said, but it didn’t really seem an adequate reply.

  Guizot and Aloyse both slept through dawn reveille, though Paltre wanted to roust the sergeant.

  “He wakes to grief,” Maillart said. “Let him alone.”

  With Daspir he rode to scout the environs of the fort. Already men were dragging caissons of powder and shot and shell up the hill to Pétion’s guns. Maillart and Daspir dismounted to enter the reconfigured earthwork on foot. Mist silently lifted from the walls of the fort. Maillart wanted to cling to the quiet, before it was torn by the day’s bombardment. The sun, as it cleared the mountains, picked out a blood-red flag on every corner of the walls.

  “What’s that?” said Daspir, a little nervously. “What does it mean?”

  “No quarter,” Maillart said. “No surrender.” He cleared his throat and spat on the ground. “It means they’ll fight until the last man dies.”