The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  30

  The red mouchwa têt Guiaou had given to Placide was plastered to his head with sweat and caked with dust. On the shortened staff wedged in the scabbard by his left knee, the French tricolor he’d wrested from Daspir hung slack. At day’s end it was still very hot, and the air heavy. He rode four places back in Morisset’s cavalry column, down the switchbacks leading to the pocket in the hills which held the town of Marmelade. Above the horses, swirls of reddish dust rose into the setting sun like smoke.

  Toussaint waited, as if expecting them. He’d set a camp table under an ancient almond tree at the edge of the town square. Placide dismounted, finding his legs gone soft beneath him. Guiaou, who’d stepped out from Toussaint’s side to catch the reins of his horse, sustained Placide with a hand beneath his shoulder. He smiled to see that Placide wore the headcloth, and Placide, from the depths of his fatigue, did his best to return the smile.

  He would have gone to Toussaint then, but Morisset was ahead of him, saluting before the camp table, then sitting down at Toussaint’s gesture, to commence making his report. Placide turned aside and led his horse to water. Guiaou caught up the reins before the horse could drink too deeply, and began to lead it slowly around the perimeter of the square. Placide sank down and crossed his legs, beneath a yellow palm. Presently he unknotted the red cloth from his head and rinsed it in the stone basin of the well and squeezed a little cool water from it: a drop on his wrists and temples and the hollow at the base of his skull. In the twilight a little breeze began and cooled him further, but the air was still so harshly arid that the red cloth dried quickly. He folded it into a small neat triangle and held it under his hand on his right knee.

  He only knew that he had dozed when he heard the church bell ringing. Startled, he scrambled to his feet, slipping the red cloth into his trouser pocket. Now Toussaint came to him, wordlessly kissed both his cheeks, and led him to the church. Placide sat on the front bench between his father and his officers: Morisset and Monpoint, Gabart and Pourcely. His head was still heavy; the readings and chants of the vespers service braided into dream images that rushed upon him whenever his eyes slid shut: the upward rush of foot soldiers’ faces as his horse crashed down on them, the endless serpentine coils of the mountain trails, and suspended at each turn a wooden skull like those on the rosary Toussaint manipulated with one hand while the priest intoned the scripture . . . then suddenly, a vista of the sea, and the wounded sphinx-like face of Lasirène turning her half-human countenance toward him, then away, disappearing beneath the waters with a pump of the jeweled flukes of her tail.

  Morisset roused him with a nudge, to take communion. The dream image still glittered behind his eyes as he knelt before the chalice and the plate, and it seemed that it organized all his confusion into sense. But at the taste of sour wine he lost the sense of it. He got up and followed his father and the others out of the church. They were all going in to supper, but Toussaint held him back a little, beneath the almond tree.

  “What can you tell me of what you have seen?” he asked.

  “But you must have already heard it all from Morisset,” Placide replied, dismayed at a tinge of querulousness he heard in his own tone.

  Toussaint covered his mouth with his hand. It was full dark now, and the wind shivered the branches of the almond tree.

  “From Morisset I heard that you disobeyed my order and rode to Gonaives from Grand Morne on the night after we drove the enemy back from Périsse.”

  “Forgive me.” Placide lowered his head. A couple of almonds had fallen in that rising wind; he pushed the fleshy pod of one through the dust with his boot toe. “I could not stop myself.”

  Toussaint took his hand away from his jaw. “Morisset has also told me that you acquitted yourself very well at Gonaives that night—and since, around La Crête à Pierrot.”

  “I am happy to have his good opinion,” Placide said.

  “Yes,” said Toussaint and turned into the wind. Invisible in the tree limbs overhead, the settling crows squawked and whistled. “I was impetuous myself, when Gonaives was burned. In my anger and my disappointment, that day I abused God. But now again I pray both day and night, that BonDyé favor our cause.”

  “May God hear your prayer,” Placide said. “It goes hard for our people at La Crête à Pierrot. Morisset must have told you, but the garrison there has been cut off from water now for days, and Dessalines was driven back from Nolo, so he cannot relieve them. They are surrounded by an ocean of the enemy.”

  “And just so, God has delivered the enemy into our hands.” Toussaint smiled openly into Placide’s astonished face. “Look well, they have nearly abandoned their defenses in all the rest of the country to wear themselves out upon that rock, and now it is we who surround them— I, and Dessalines in the Cahos, and Charles Belair below the Artibonite. By tomorrow night, or the next at the latest, I’ll close my grip on the Captain-General, though he does not suspect it.”

  “I might have killed him,” Placide said. “I nearly did, but my horse was spent, and could not overtake him.”

  “Yes!” Toussaint clapped him on the shoulder. “But God shows his hand in your failure too, for it will be better that I take him as a prisoner, and return him to France, that he may account to the First Consul for the violence he has brought to our country—this war he has waged on us for no just cause.”

  Placide’s weariness split away from him like a husk of an almond lying on the ground. The passionate comprehension of his dream washed over him again. It seemed to him that all his father said was possible.

  From behind the house across the square, where Toussaint had made his headquarters, there streamed an odor of rice and beans, simmering with pork fat and onion and hot peppers. Placide’s nostrils could pick out each ingredient, he thought, and he felt a pang at the hinge of his jaws.

  “Ann manjé,” Toussaint said. Let’s eat. He touched Placide’s arm to guide him toward the house where the table would be laid for them, where the other officers had already gone. “And afterward . . . we’ll move tonight, upon the Captain-General at La Crête à Pierrot.”

  “You planned it all,” Placide said. “From the beginning.”

  “Not quite.” Toussaint wiped away another smile. “But since Ravine à Couleuvre, I planned it so.”

  With that he stopped and faced his son. He needed to look up a little, for Placide was distinctly the taller.

  “But you,” he said. “You would do better to go to the Cahos to join your mother and Isaac. You are too much exhausted from these battles.”

  “No,” said Placide. He held Toussaint’s deep eyes with his. “I’ll ride with you.”

  On the morning of March 24, Captain Daspir rode with Maillart and General de Lacroix to visit the posts surrounding the fort. He could handle his horse well enough with his left hand, though his right was scarcely serviceable. In raising his arm to shield Leclerc, he’d sprained his right shoulder severely enough that still he could not draw a sword or lift a pistol. It was beginning to rankle him a little that the Captain-General had so far failed to take any notice of his sacrifice.

  It was quiet at first along the lines, but then, when the dawn light was strong enough for Pétion’s artillerymen on the knoll beyond the fort, the bombardment recommenced. Birds fled, shrieking, across the river, over the surrounding lines. Maillart shaded his eyes with his sun-baked hand, looking up at the shells crashing down within the walls. Each sent a shower of earth and gravel splashing over the parapets. On the corners of the fort, the red flags of “no quarter” stirred slightly in the morning breeze that was rolling the mist back from the mountains.

  Then there was a pause in the shelling, and they rode on through the sudden silence. Beyond the ringing of his ears, Daspir began to hear a regular whacking sound, accompanied by the grunts of a laboring man, from the post they were approaching. The sound was like that of a woodsman laying an ax into a tree, but what trees there had been at this turn of the riverbank had long since
been cut and trimmed to fortify the siege lines. When they came around the bend of the river, they discovered an infantry sergeant, stripped to the waist, panting and sweating as he beat an ancient Negro from his shoulder to his buttocks with a cane.

  “Why, he’ll kill him,” Daspir said, in his surprise. A number of men stood watching the flogging, among them the brigadier who commanded the post. Also an old black crone looked on from several yards distance. Rags of a striped skirt hung from her withered hips. She leaned heavily on a crooked stick and held a small black pipe, unlit, between her gums. If the spectacle of the beating distressed or impressed her, she gave no appearance of it.

  “Here, you, whoever you are,” Lacroix snapped. “Stop that at once.” He turned to the brigadier. “What do you mean by it?”

  The sergeant stopped beating and leaned on his cane. The old man turned on his side and drew his knobby knees up to his chest.

  “This pair was trying to get up to the fort,” the brigadier began, with a gesture that included the black crone, and all at once several of the bystanders began to dispute that version, saying that the old couple had been seen coming out of the fort instead. General Lacroix hushed the dispute with a gesture.

  “At all events, we take them for a couple of spies,” the commander said.

  Lacroix shrugged away the accusation, and stooped to help the old man up. At first, the old man did not seem to take the meaning of the hand extended to him. Then he did grasp it and struggled to his feet. Lacroix let go his hand and took a pace back from the rank smell of him—the scent of corruption even reached Daspir where he sat his horse several yards away. The old man had a full head of stone-white hair turned gray with dirt and matted with debris. There was no iris to his eyes; they were all black pupil floating in the yellowed whites. The dark eyes gave him an unearthly aspect.

  “They’ve been searched,” Lacroix said. “Interrogated?”

  “There’s no sense in anything they say,” said the post commander. “We meant for the stick to encourage their tongues.”

  Lacroix glanced at Maillart, who took a step forward, wrinkling his nose.

  “Di mwen, granpè, sa w’ap fè isit?” he said. Tell me, grandfather, what are you doing here?

  The old man turned his strange eyes on Maillart and bleated like a sheep. Maillart looked at the crone and rephrased the question for her. She made no reply at all, only mumbled her pipe in her gums from one side of her mouth to the other, always staring into the middle distance across her hands folded over her stick, with a gaze of rapt senility. Of a sudden the shirtless sergeant shifted the stick to his left hand and smacked the pipe out of her jaws with his right. The old woman seemed almost unaware that she’d been struck, though she missed the pipe, and searched for it with her rheumy eyes, and finally found it on the ground some yards away. In agonized slow motion she leaned over to retrieve it, working her way hand over hand down the cane she leaned on. Finally Maillart crossed the distance, retrieved the pipe, and offered it to her. He said something more to her which she seemed not to comprehend at all. He laid the pipe in her wrinkled palm and folded her fingers over it.

  Perhaps she’s deaf, Daspir thought, as he watched this comedy. He wrapped his left arm around himself, reaching to rub the torn muscle below his right shoulder blade.

  “A pair of idiots,” Lacroix pronounced. “What harm can there be in them?”

  “They had this,” the sergeant said. He opened his hand to reveal a silver ring strung to a loop of greasy cord, depicting a big dog’s head or maybe a bear’s. Mouth open in a fanged snarl, it appeared to slaver. It had two chips of a dull red stone for its eyes. The officers passed it hand to hand; it made a solid weight in the palm. Maillart looked as if he would speak when the ring came to him, but he kept his silence and handed the ring to Lacroix.

  “It does us no credit to molest such crippled simpletons, or rob them of their treasures,” Lacroix said. “Let him have his ring, and let them go.”

  A little sullen at this rebuke, the post commander opened the loop of string between his hands. The old man turtled his head through it, whimpering a little as if this movement pained him. The ring dropped into the hollow of his collarbone. Then the sergeant handed him his cane.

  “So,” Lacroix snorted. “You were beating him with his own stick?” But the sergeant did not seem to hear him; he had turned away to button up the tunic he’d resumed.

  Daspir watched the old couple creep toward the bank of the river, leaning heavily on their canes, both of them bent almost double. The bombardment had not yet recommenced, and the ringing in his ears had almost stopped. It was here that the rebels of the fort had come for water, until the establishment of this post put a stop to it. Now the light was flat on the river’s snake-like turning and a wind riffle on the water had a scaly glitter. The old man and old woman had waded chest-deep. Feeble as they were, they must surely drown, Daspir was thinking. But the movement of the water seemed somehow to ease their limbs.

  “They swim quite well for a pair of cripples,” Maillart remarked.

  Lacroix was staring, his lips parted, though he did not yet speak. Daspir noticed that the old couple had relinquished their canes and let them drift downstream away from them. When they came out on the opposite bank, it was as if they’d been bathed in the fountain of youth. They jumped to their feet and began dancing the chica, bumping hips and bellies and buttocks, shouting a stream of insults at the French across the river.

  “Shoot them!” Lacroix slapped his palm against his trouser leg. A volley began, but to little effect. The old couple were running with startling agility up the difficult slope from the riverbank to the fort, the old man displaying the exuberant capers and bounds of a young goat. Bullets thumped into the ground all around them, but none of them found the target. The fort’s gate opened, and someone ran a plank across the ditch to let them cross.

  While Lacroix and the post commander were expostulating with each other, Daspir turned quietly to Maillart. “I thought you recognized that ring,” he said.

  “I may have done,” Maillart said thoughtfully. “I may have seen it on the hand of General Dessalines.”

  At the notorious name, Daspir felt a cold shock in his vitals. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Maillart said, and turned his face up to the fort. “You’d do as well to ask me why they sing the same songs in there as we do.”

  To that, Daspir had no reply. No one else in their small group had anything more to say, as they rode disconsolately along the riverbank toward the next post. Soon the bombardment began again, covering their silence. Daspir had tended to attach himself to Maillart since they’d first met in these killing fields. The man had likely saved his life, after all, and even without that, though Cyprien and Paltre despised him no little for his long moldering in colonial service, Daspir saw the value in Maillart’s experience, and besides he instinctively liked his ways. It would be very unpleasant not to be able to trust him.

  Doctor Hébert had not slept in three days. His eyes were wedged open by a combination of hunger and torturing thirst and by the mad unpredictability of the bombardment. They shelled two or three times a night, with little accuracy but frequently enough to break the rest of everyone in the garrison. By day the shells did much more damage, and at whatever hour they started to land, the fort’s defenders all began to swirl within the walls, looking for shelter, though there was little to be found; they could only swim in circles like fish in a barrel.

  A fresh bombardment began a little after dawn. In the moments following the discharge of the obusier, the doctor’s heart clenched tight and his airways constricted. He was hunkered, his back to the wall, just beside the tatters of his ajoupa, which had several times been raked by exploding iron. The first shell landed not three feet from him, but the doctor did not move, only looked at it indifferently. Bienvenu jumped up from his side and threw his body to cover it. Then indeed the doctor’s heart began to pound—he couldn�
��t bear to lose Bienvenu, who’d shielded him from so many dangers. But already the man’s skeleton was thrown into harsh black relief by the red glare of the explosion, and he’d flopped over onto his back, jerking like a fish out of water. A fountain of blood splashed from his chest. The doctor knelt over him, pressing the blood back, trying to gather it into the shattered pump of the heart. The trumpets started, with the drum and the almost inaudible violin; whenever the bombardment began, Lamartinière exhorted the musicians to play! play! . . . ever brighter and gayer airs. The only necessity was to stop the bleeding; the doctor would stop it with his whole weight. Blood was bubbling up around his wrists. Bienvenu shook him by the shoulders. The doctor looked up at him, bewildered.

  “Let him go,” Bienvenu hissed. “You have to let him go—he’s dead.”

  Bloody to his shoulders, the doctor crept back to his place against the wall. Bienvenu remained at his side, whole, as yet unhurt . . . so it had not been Bienvenu blown to bits just now, but some other, someone the doctor did not know. Unless Bienvenu’s presence now were the hallucination, the other the reality. It had become increasingly difficult to distinguish, these last days. However, the shelling seemed to have stopped. The sound of birds was audible, beyond the walls. And the music stopped, which was also a relief. The grasshopper whine of the violin had grown unbearable, though it was always faint. Sometimes the doctor thought he heard it when it was not really playing at all. There were times when he wished a shell would demolish the violinist, or his instrument at least.

  Bienvenu squatted, facing him, his dark face furrowed in concern. The grayish yellow foam around his mouth came from the musket ball he was sucking. Many of the men had taken up this practice as the shortage of water became more severe.

  “Don’t do that,” the doctor said. “It will make you ill.”