The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Bienvenu only looked at him sadly. Lead poisoning had added an extra dimension to the experience of the men who sucked the balls— who were already sufficiently deranged by starvation, dehydration, and exhaustion. The doctor groped in his pocket and to his surprise discovered in the lining a pair of English pennies. One of these he proffered to Bienvenu.

  “Take this,” he said. “Use this instead.” He held the brown circle between thumb and forefinger, in what suddenly struck him as a parody of priesthood. That notion inspired a desire to laugh, but he bottled it up—one must not open the door to hysteria.

  Bienvenu spat the sloppy musket ball into his hand and accepted the penny in its place. The doctor laid the second coin on his own tongue. After a moment, a little saliva started. He felt his dry lips cracking under the heat of the ascending sun. From the red aura of his closed eyelids emerged a white-haired Negro who held out to him a paper inscribed with letters of blue fire. The doctor recognized the hand of his son Paul, but here was no ordinary recital of the week’s events. Grâce, la miséricorde,Papa! The letters flamed into his face. Grâs-o, Grâs-o, n’ap mandé grâs-o . . . The doctor recoiled. I am not God! his mind burst out. May God forbid that I should be invested with the powers of a god.

  Like as not there was no God.

  With that thought his eyes rolled open. Beside him, the violinist Gaston was masticating a strip of leather cut from the leathers of his boot. He offered another to the doctor. If he let his eyes go out of focus, the scrap of leather more or less resembled a strip of meat dried on the boucan.But the doctor had no appetite for it. For the moment, the copper on his tongue sufficed him. It occurred to him to wonder whether copper was more or less toxic than lead.

  Gaston passed the strip of leather to one of the trumpeters, who accepted it with all appearance of gratitude.

  “I won’t be needing these boots anyway,” Gaston said, gesturing at the shredded uppers. “Nowhere to walk!” But then the violinist noticed that Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière was coming with the water ration, and he fell silent in anticipation.

  The doctor took the penny from his mouth and held it in his hand. Marie-Jeanne gave water with a silver serving spoon that hung from her sash on a fine chain. From the gourd she carried she filled the spoon just short of the brim and slipped it between the jaws of Bienvenu. The doctor watched his Adam’s apple working. Then his own turn came; he stretched up his open mouth as meekly as a baby bird, his eyes fixed on the short knife which rode in her sash between the spoon chain and her sword. Two days before she’d slit the throat of a man so maddened by thirst he’d tried to snatch the water gourd from her—done it as neatly as any peasant woman letting blood from a hog or snapping the head off a chicken. It had been a mercy killing, for the others of the garrison would surely have torn the offender limb from limb.

  Marie-Jeanne’s shadow passed over him. The doctor held his water ration in his mouth as long as he could before he swallowed. Gaston gulped his straightaway, washing down his meager meal of shoe leather.

  Now Marie-Jeanne had refilled her gourd and was coming to help the doctor tend his wounded. For each, a spoon of water inserted through the burning lips. The doctor steadied each head as Marie-Jeanne gave the water, and Bienvenu restrained the limbs of those most likely to convulse. There was nothing else to be done for them. No fresh bandages, no more herbs, no water to brew them if they had existed. Most of the wounded were well off their heads from fever or unremitting pain. Sometimes the doctor tried to quiet the loudest of them with massage or comforting whispers. Sometimes he thought he’d do as well to strangle them.

  As they worked, the doctor stole glances at Marie-Jeanne, admiring her as one might admire an icon. Starvation had burned her beauty brighter. The white bone of her skull shone through her ivory skin like spirit. As they worked, her spidery fingers might by accident brush his, and when this happened she would often smile at him. For all she was exhausted as the rest of them, there remained an energy in her touch which could for a moment restore his will and sense of purpose.

  Then there was musketry from the direction of the river, followed by a commotion at the gate. Marie-Jeanne straightened, letting the spoon drop against her skirt, the gourd neck dangling from her right hand. The doctor stood up too, to see the arrival. He recognized the white-headed man who came dashing in as one of Dessalines’s elder officers . . . and also as the messenger of his hallucination earlier that day. But in this reality the envoy brought no letter from Paul. Instead he went straight to Lamartinière, saluted, then drew out of his tattered collar a cord which held a heavy silver ring.

  Toussaint rode out of Marmelade near midnight, his white stallion Bel Argent flanked by the cavalry of his honor guard. Placide found his place among their ranks, near Guiaou, Riau, and Guerrier. He’d slept for nearly two hours after the meal, and felt himself somewhat restored. Sometimes indeed he did doze in the saddle, but when he popped awake from these short respites he felt in full possession of his faculties. At one of these awakenings he remembered his red mouchwa têt and in the darkness bound it to his head.

  Their progress was not as rapid as Toussaint would have wished, for most of their infantry was composed of armed field hands, who far outnumbered the regular troops. These men, though eager to fight the blancs, lacked the training needed to carry them on a fast forced march through the mountains.

  For that reason they did not reach the north edge of the Savane Désolée before first light on March 24, and Toussaint, unwilling to expose his force in that open country by day, began circling southeast under cover of the hills. All during the day he continued to rally more men from the bitasyons, uncaching more muskets from their scattered hiding places. As their numbers grew, the march grew more disordered, and Placide, with Morisset and two dozen of the cavalry, rode to the rear to urge these foot soldiers onward, for all the world as if they were herding cattle.

  At midafternoon Toussaint called a halt, to wait out the harshest heat of the day. While the men foraged bananas from a plantation on the slopes, Toussaint sent more messengers to search out Dessalines and Charles Belair. Though he’d sent other dispatches both last night and that morning, no word had yet come, and the silence seemed to worry him. Placide volunteered to go to Dessalines, but Toussaint refused him, on the pretext that he did not know the country well enough, and sent Riau in his place.

  By sunset no news had come from any quarter and Toussaint put his men back on the march. They moved for four hours as the brief twilight deepened into darkness and halted again in a flat, dry country called Savane Brulée, not far at all now from Petite Rivière. Toussaint sent for Morisset and Guiaou and Guerrier and ordered them to go forward to scout the French rear. This time when Placide asked to accompany them, Toussaint allowed him to go.

  As they drew near the lines surrounding the fort, Placide began to smell the charnel stench from the ravines below the town, blended with smoke from the half-successful burning. The odor was fainter now, though a pall hung heavily over the place. A waxing half-moon had begun to rise, throwing enough light to pick out their silhouettes a little too clearly. At the pole of the sky, the Great Bear hovered. They darted across the Cahos road and into the shadows of the trees beyond. Here in these woods the honor guard cavalry had sheltered in the first days of the siege, but now Hardy’s division had occupied the ground and pushed the siege line beyond the woods in the direction of the fort.

  “Come back,” Morisset hissed in Placide’s ear. Cautiously they moved west of the road and began to circle down below the town, working their way behind the lines of General Pamphile de Lacroix. As they came near the heaviest smell of the ravines, Morisset reined up his horse and after a moment’s hesitation dismounted.

  “What?” Placide asked him.

  “We may do better on foot,” Morisset told him. “There are enough black turncoats among these blancs now. We might deceive them if we are seen—but leave your helmet here.”

  Guerrier remained near the ravines,
where the reek might discourage investigation, holding four horses and three helmets. Morisset, Placide, and Guiaou crept ahead on foot. They’d climbed perhaps two hundred yards when an artillery piece boomed and a fishhook of sparks curled down into the walls of the fort from the knoll above it. A moment’s darkness, then the explosion flowered. Placide did not know if he imagined the moan that followed, or if it came from inside himself.

  “Keep quiet,” Morisset hissed urgently. “This way.” They were all a little blinded by the flash. A voice spoke out harshly, ahead and to the right.

  “Qui vive?”

  Without hesitation, Morisset stepped out into the glow of a torch just illuminated. Placide moved with him.

  “We belong to the Ninth,” Morisset said and saluted.

  The sentry was black, but a French corporal sat on a stone behind him. The black sentry ran his eyes up and down Placide and Morisset.

  “Those are not uniforms of the Ninth,” he said. His expression shifted, then was replaced by Guiaou’s face. The headless corpse of the sentry took a step forward and went down on one knee to reveal Guiaou behind him, wiping his coutelas clean with his fingers and thrusting it back into his belt.

  “Hurry,” Morisset breathed. Placide stepped over the body of the Frenchman, who lay dead against the stone where he’d been sitting. Guiaou ground out the fallen torch with his bare heel.

  The half-moon glared down on them like a beacon now. The ruined town of Petite Rivière was off a little distance to their left. To their right appeared a large square tent that glowed from lamps inside it. When the tent flap lifted, Placide could recognize plainly enough the diminutive silhouette of General Leclerc, waving both hands like a conductor as he spoke to a taller officer who faced him. The tent flap fell, leaving Leclerc inside—the taller man strode directly toward them.

  Placide drew himself up and saluted; Captain Daspir made as if to return the salute, but a hitch in his right arm prevented him from completing the movement. He nodded distantly and passed on without breaking his stride. His footsteps beat toward Lacroix’s lines, then suddenly stopped. Placide caught Morisset’s sleeve but could not speak.

  “Aux armes!” came Daspir’s voice. “A spy! A spy!”

  Then the three of them were running hard in the direction they had come from. The commotion in the camp was not very far behind them, but then, within a minute, firing broke out on the line to the right, beyond the tent they had discovered, in the direction of the river. From the volume, there seemed to be quite a number of men engaged, but they did not stop to study the situation. By the time they rejoined Guerrier they had shaken any pursuers.

  “That was his tent,” Placide panted. “Leclerc. We’ve found him.”

  “Yes,” said Morisset. “But what was that shooting on the line?”

  “A gang of the field hands passed this way,” Guerrier told them. His voice was muffled by a rag he’d tied across his face to block the stench. “A little while ago, I couldn’t stop them. It may be that they followed us from Savane Brulée.”

  “Toute grâce à Dieu!” Morisset said, and Placide saw his smile gleam in the moonlight. “If not for them we’d likely have been captured.”

  “And what of them now?” Placide turned his face toward the shooting, which seemed to be slackening a little.

  “Let them look to themselves—they weren’t ordered here,” said Morisset. “And we must go back quickly to make our report.”

  In the course of the long blistering afternoon in the fort, a chorus started up among the wounded. Bay nou dlo oubyen lamò! A man with a head wound had begun it—there was nothing wrong with his lungs. No effort of the doctor’s could quiet him, and soon the others had taken it up. Give us water or give us death!

  “Well, maybe we should kill them,” Bienvenu murmured.

  The doctor looked about the area. Of the nine hundred men Dessalines had left to man the fort, half or more were now dead or incapacitated. They’d been starving for days, but no one dared name the notion of surrender. It seemed indeed that no one desired to. Yet the arrival of Dessalines’s ring was certainly an event of some significance. Lamartinière was in close council with Marie-Jeanne and the surviving officers now.

  “Not yet,” the doctor mumbled. Then, shifting his penny from his sore tongue, “Let us wait till night, at least—I think that something is going to happen.”

  An hour after nightfall, Marie-Jeanne came to let the doctor and the musicians know that the fort would be evacuated. The doctor had drawn that conclusion some time before, since the men had spent the afternoon making cartridges and packing their ammunition boxes to the brim, and Marie-Jeanne had been offering water every three hours instead of every six, and by the cup instead of the spoonful. The wounded had at last got enough water to quiet them temporarily. They had not deduced, as the doctor had, that they would certainly be left behind when the able-bodied men marched out of the fort.

  Still, Lamartinière held the garrison waiting throughout three quarters of the night. The doctor lay on his mat, unable to sleep. He watched the half-moon rise above the walls, saw the Great Bear lumbering up the dome of the sky. Gaston offered another meal of shoe leather, which the doctor declined, reasoning that he’d either be dead or in range of better provisions soon enough. There were a couple of bombardments, around eleven and one o’clock, but neither lasted long or had much effect.

  Two hours before dawn, Marie-Jeanne returned to him, with Bienvenu following her this time. She gave the doctor her water gourd and indicated the two remaining vases, tucked against the wall of the magazine. No need for any explanation; this reserve would easily last the time remaining.

  “You might come with us,” Marie-Jeanne told him. “Lamartinière would accept your coming. But I think you will be safer here.”

  The doctor considered for a moment. “I’ll stay with our wounded,” he said.

  Marie-Jeanne inclined her head.

  “If you should make it safely to Le Cap,” the doctor said, “please, if you would, find my wife Nanon and my son Paul, and tell them . . .” He couldn’t think what she ought to tell them. “Say I was well when you left me here and that I will come back to them as quickly as I can.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Marie-Jeanne. “Si Dyé vlé.” She opened her arms and the doctor stood to receive her embrace. Drily she kissed him on both cheeks. The bones of her fingers were hard against his spine. It was an odd thing he had noticed lately, how flesh shrank from the fingers first— though Marie-Jeanne’s whole person was now thin as a wraith. The doctor wondered if he’d ever hold Nanon again. Marie-Jeanne released him and walked away down the slope.

  The doctor settled his back against the wall. Bienvenu squatted next to him, as was his wont.

  “Go on,” the doctor said.

  Bienvenu seemed to hear nothing.

  “Go,” said the doctor. “The blancs will kill you if they find you here.” He gave Bienvenu a little nudge. Bienvenu got up and collected his weapons.

  “Kenbe là,” he said. Hold on. He walked after Marie-Jeanne without looking back.

  Around the gateway the men sang softly, no French verses now, but Creole songs to honor their old gods of Africa. The doctor was sure of this, though he could not make out the sense of the words. If God wills, Marie-Jeanne had told him, she would deliver his message. Of course his own chances of survival were probably better than hers at this point. He watched, under the moonlight, as her bones carried the veil of her flesh out through the gate, shoulder to shoulder with her husband, leading that whole throng of walking skeletons.

  The musicians seemed palpably unburdened by the departure of the troops. Gaston began to jig in the lacy, gnawed remnants of his boots. He tucked his fiddle under his chin and sawed out country dances.

  “Be quiet, can’t you?” the doctor finally snapped. Then, more softly, “You’ll wake the wounded.”

  Gaston shot him an injured look, but laid the fiddle down. He went to the vases and, somewhat osten
tatiously, dipped himself a gourd of water.

  The doctor was digging up his rifle; it seemed that the hour for that had at last arrived. He brushed the dirt from the cloth that had shrouded it and sat with the octagon barrel cool against his hands. All at once firing broke out from the direction of the town, and the doctor jumped up and joined the musicians at the embrasures. Strangely, the muzzle flashes seemed to be located behind the French lines—surely if Lamartinière had made it so far, he would hurry his retreat without seeking an engagement.

  As the doctor formed that thought, there was another eruption of musketry, on the near side of the encircling line, a little to the west and closer to the fort. He exchanged a puzzled glance with the violinist.

  “What do you make of it?” Gaston said.

  “I don’t know,” said the doctor. If there was an effort to relieve the fort, then wouldn’t Lamartinière have stayed inside it? But after all he didn’t really know what meaning had been attached to Dessalines’s ring.

  When the firing stopped, he went to his mat and loaded both his pistols and the rifle. After a twenty-minute silence, shooting began on the hill above them, much nearer this time, so close the doctor could hear the curses of men taken by surprise. Eventually the racket ceased. The four musicians stretched out on the ground and soon began to snore.

  The doctor sat crosslegged with his weapons arrayed on the mat before him, remembering his parting words to Bienvenu. If he called the Frenchmen blancs, then what had he become himself? Dawn might bring the answer to that question. Exhausted as he was in every fiber, he hadn’t the least desire to sleep. Though he’d finally drunk something close to his fill, he still held the penny on his tongue, the copper taste bitter and bright. At the worst it might be enough to pay his way across the Styx. He watched the stars begin to fade, and streaks of blue bleeding upward into the black of the night sky.

  “Aux armes!”

  Maillart ran toward Daspir’s voice, not twenty paces from him in the dark.

  “A spy! A spy!”