The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “He’s been their prisoner, like ourselves,” Gaston called from where he crouched beside the water vases, against the wall of the powder magazine. “He’s nothing but a doctor.”

  “Oh?” said the captain. “Then how does he come by those arms he carries?” He raised his pistol and bit his lip as he steadied the wrist of the hurt arm in its grubby sling. The doctor took in that his left arm was hideously swollen; suppuration stained the sleeve. But this thought was idle. He knew he could shoot the captain between the eyes before he could fire, and have a ball left in his other pistol for the pigtailed sergeant, or maybe the general in his shako (though the general would be a longer shot), and he knew he would do none of these things. The feverish captain, however, looked very likely to shoot him.

  There was nothing more to say. The doctor flipped the penny to the center of his tongue. Now there were no survivors. The tangle of new-bayoneted corpses by the wall now stood for the sum of his labor here, and yet these dead were still his own. Their bodies swam before his eyes and merged into a single skeletal figure, white-eyed, grinning, dressed in formal black, approaching the doctor now with an oddly delicate courtesy. Baron de la Croix, or Baron Cimetière—he whom the blacks worshipped as Lord of the Dead and of the graveyard. It was time for the doctor to offer his coin. But strangely, Ghede was shaking his head and turning down his palm in a gesture of refusal. With a clatter of hooves, Major Maillart cantered up through the gate, nearly bowling over General Rochambeau in his haste. He slapped away Guizot’s pistol with the flat of his saber. The pistol discharged when it struck the ground, and one of the grenadiers shouted in alarm as the ball snapped by his ankle.

  “Antoine!” he cried. “My Christ, how did you come here?”

  Maillart jumped down and threw an arm over the doctor’s shoulders. Holding him so, he turned to Guizot.

  “What do you mean by it?” he said. “This man is one of us—and my oldest friend in this country.”

  But the captain did not seem to register this question. He made no effort to recover his pistol either. His face was rigid, and he did not seem to be aware of the tears that rolled over his cheekbones and splashed on the ground beside his boots.

  “Let him be,” the doctor said. “You can see he’s not himself.”

  He slipped out of Maillart’s embrace and took a step toward Captain Guizot, reaching for his empty hand.

  “I’m only a doctor, you see,” he said. “You’d better let me have a look at that arm.”

  Fort de Joux, France

  March 1803

  The snow continued to sift down, blunting the edges and points of the parapets and towers into indistinct, soft rounds. Amiot walked the battlements, gazing in the direction of the chasm and the sheer cliff wall beyond it, though both were completely hidden now, obliterated by the shifting curtains of snow. In fact he could not see a yard beyond his nose. It had been snowing for three days straight, and yet to Amiot it felt more as if the snow had never stopped since the first of January, when he’d relieved Baille of his command of the Fort de Joux. The snow obscured the light of the dawn, though Amiot knew, from the recent tolling of the castle bell, that dawn was soon to come.

  Like every sound, the bell’s tones were swaddled and muffled in wrappings of snow. There was no wind; the whole world seemed afloat. The snow had risen halfway to the tops of Amiot’s boots, so that it was real labor to trudge through it. When the light grew strong enough, he would order the soldiers to clear it away.

  He passed a sentry, his hat made shapeless by the snow collected on it. Amiot was perhaps invisible to him, for the sentry did not salute as he passed by, but only coughed into his hand. Amiot decided not to notice this small dereliction. He had after all been pacing this area for upward of a half an hour. When he reached the corner of the wall he stopped and turned. What was the end of his exercise? Since his last search of Toussaint’s cell, he’d not been able to return to sleep.

  Amiot inhaled profoundly, snow stinging his nostrils, drawing cold threads of the thin mountain air to the bottom of his lungs. In a moment he felt the invigoration of the deep breath coursing in his blood, but his mind remained remote from that refreshment, heavy and drooping. Truly, there was something debilitating in this duty. Amiot had felt only contempt for Baille when he’d departed, a man grown old beyond his years in a few months of untaxing service—who’d never had heart for the regime he was required to impose. Without a trace of sympathy or interest, Amiot had watched Baille’s figure shrink and stoop away, but now he began to feel that the miasma of the former commandant’s weak will still infected the rooms which he himself now occupied.

  Indeed, he’d ordered two searches that night: the first at midnight, the second at four. In the course of both, the prisoner had been stripped to the skin, his few belongings shaken and tumbled, his clothing picked over with a needle, the crevices of his cell probed with the point of a knife . . . as usual. It was all too usual, perhaps, to be effective. Of course there was no object to find; the prisoner could not have kept a fly’s wing hidden against such an onslaught of investigation. It was in his misshapen head that something might still be concealed . . . some final shred of information, an idea or a thought.

  The searches were meant to dislodge that last secret, be it the hiding place of Toussaint’s rumored treasure, or some further detail of his dealings with the English . . . who knew what. But Amiot suddenly thought, where he stood in the snow, that perhaps the searches were too regularly spaced; he bore them himself by timing them closely to the changes of the guard, but Toussaint was also an old soldier, and would be as used to that routine. It was Amiot’s rest that had been disturbed; after midnight he’d slept but lightly, and after four not at all.

  There was the difficulty. Amiot could alter the rhythm of the searches. Make them only an hour, or less, apart. But he must attend each search in person. No man had leave to enter or open Toussaint’s cell except in Amiot’s presence. Then what if he should lose his controlling grip on his own mind before Toussaint lost his? But surely that was hardly possible. He, Amiot, was the stronger. Certainly he was the younger. He had survived many bloodier battles, and would win this one in the end.

  “Sir, it is time.”

  Amiot started. The falling snow was still thick all around him but now it swirled with a milky light. Day had not broken, but rather infiltrated, while he was . . . what? Had he been asleep on his feet like a horse?

  “Time?” Amiot twitched at the dimwitted sound of his reply. It was the guardsman Franz who’d addressed him, his lump of a nose shining red in the snow.

  “The prisoner’s morning meal is ready.”

  “Of course,” said Amiot. He must attend this service too, without exception. He spread his lips in a freezing smile. “And let us organize a search.”

  “Another?”

  Amiot searched the other’s face for superciliousness, found none. And yet he did not like this guardsman. Franz was Baille’s man; moreover, Amiot suspected him of secret sympathy for the prisoner. Franz had a wife and at least one child in a neighboring canton of Switzerland, and on his days of leave he managed to make his way to rejoin them—even in such weather as this. It did not do to post such a man so near to home and family. Franz was insufficiently uprooted; he retained the mute resistance of a peasant standing on his miserable plot. But much as Amiot studied him, he found no clear evidence of insubordination.

  “Yes,” he said, in his most clipped tone. “Another.”

  While the search detail was organized, Amiot waited by the fire of his bedchamber, rubbing his hands over the uncertain flames, relieved as the feeling burned back into his fingertips. Reckless to stand so long in the cold, unconsciously, but this time there would be no harm. His feet were number still, at first, but by the time Franz let him know that all was ready, he could feel the dampness of melting snow along the seam of his boots, and his feet ached reassuringly along the descent toward Toussaint’s cell.

  A skein of ice h
ad formed across the planks that traversed the standing water, frozen now to slush, on the floor of the second vault. Amiot slipped and had to catch himself with a palm against the chilly wall. Franz glanced back at him, expressionless, then looked away. Setting his teeth, Amiot marched ahead. He carried the ring of keys himself, and relocked every door behind them once they all had passed it.

  Then he was turning the heavy iron key in the lock of the last cell door. At a light push it swung silently inward. At his arrival this door had grated loudly whenever it was shifted, but Amiot had ordered the hinges oiled.

  In the wide hearth, Toussaint’s fire was ash. A vague snowy light, filtered through the grating at the opposite end of the cell, was enough to reveal the prisoner asleep, or at least unmoving under a tangle of bedclothes.

  “Toussaint!” Amiot called, loud with false heartiness. “Your breakfast is served—it is time to rise.”

  In a tunnel of blanket an eye appeared, just one. No other movement.

  “Réveille-toi!” Amiot cried gaily. Wake up! At his gesture, one of the guardsmen crossed the room and twitched away the blanket. Another set down the covered trencher of thin oatmeal just to the side of the doorsill. He’d brought five guardsmen, in addition to Franz, and they spread along the walls of the cell, holding their torches high.

  Toussaint had now swung to a sitting position on the edge of the cot, his left arm folded over his chest. He’d been fully dressed beneath the blanket: the brown woolen trousers and smock, the baggy coat, a round hat over the tails of the yellow kerchief he always insisted on wearing, apparently two or three pairs of socks. As if he’d been lying there ready for escape . . . but of course, it was only the cold that plagued him. With all that clothing he still seemed to shiver.

  “Well, get up then,” Amiot told him. “You may put your clothes on the back of the chair.”

  Toussaint uttered a terrible cough. It took a long time, and shook him from his heels to the top of his head. At such times it seemed there was no more Toussaint at all, but only the cough animating the body. Then the paroxysm dwindled, or Toussaint succeeded in calming it.

  “You have searched me twice tonight,” Toussaint said. His voice was thick with phlegm but otherwise neutral. “Once at twelve and again at four.”

  “And so?” Amiot raised his eyebrows high with his smile, but Toussaint did not rise to the lure of mockery.

  “It is morning now,” said Amiot. “Another day.”

  Toussaint stood up and began to disrobe, draping his garments over the chair as Amiot had told him. Amiot watched to see if he still trembled in the cold but found no sign of it. At last the old man stood naked, all except for his yellow kerchief on his head and a sling he’d recently affected, which supported his left arm.

  “Forward march,” said Amiot. “You know the way.”

  Toussaint stepped out ahead of him, erect, his pace secure. Once he stopped, at the spasm of another cough, but this time he suppressed it, held it back unuttered. He was still master of himself, Amiot thought grudgingly, if nothing else. When the spasm had passed, he nudged Toussaint between the shoulder blades with a short, silver-tipped ebony stick, to press him toward the doorway. At the threshold he turned back toward his men.

  “Search everywhere,” he reminded them. “His clothes, his bedding— don’t forget his food.”

  “His food?” Franz glanced from the trencher chilling by the door to Amiot’s face. Might that be counted as insolence?

  “You heard my order,” Amiot said. “Search his food.”

  Toussaint waited, standing in the center of the adjoining cell, which had been briefly occupied, once before, by his so-called valet, Mars Plaisir. Or he was not waiting at all but simply standing there with the calm indifference of an animal, even to his own nakedness. All furnishings had been removed, and of course there was no fire. Amiot circled Toussaint, tapping the silver-shod stick into his palm, searching for any sign of a tremor in the cold. There was none. He used the silver tip of his stick to lift Toussaint’s testicles and probe between his stringy buttocks. Nothing; he had expected nothing. He’d got the idea of these indignities from horrified descriptions of colonial slave markets published by Les Amis des Noirs. Finally he commanded Toussaint to open his mouth wide and hold it open. For fear of his breath, Amiot did not look very closely inside, but used the stick’s tip to roll Toussaint’s upper and lower lip away from his few remaining teeth.

  Throughout, Toussaint remained as unresponsively still as a mahogany carving, his web of scars like errors of the carver’s blade. Amiot felt his own battle scars beneath his clothing. Though Toussaint was so much the older, he had come late to military life, so perhaps his years of service were no more than Amiot’s. Amiot’s scars twisted like red worms on his pale skin, and if he chanced to look at them he remembered pain. Toussaint’s scars looked like curls of foam on a still black sea, and Amiot could not imagine that he felt them.

  “Franz!” he called. “Come here, I want you.”

  In a moment Franz had appeared.

  “Support his ‘injured’ arm,” Amiot ordered him. As Franz complied, Amiot slipped the sling from Toussaint’s left wrist and pulled it a little roughly over his head. The sling was contrived of a rag of old shirt, greasy at the points of contact with wrist and neck. Amiot rolled the cloth this way and that. There was nothing to be found in it.

  Franz was supporting Toussaint’s elbow, and clasping his left hand with what Amiot took to be excessive gentleness. Let Franz be sent away to some other post!—and why not Saint Domingue? It seemed the war was going poorly there. Captain-General Leclerc had been dead since November and Rochambeau, his successor, was hemmed up in a few coastal towns by renewed rebellions. The demand for reinforcements was unceasing, and rumor told that men had died there by the thousands. Why should not Franz become one more of those, if Amiot found a pretext for his transfer? Up to this moment, though, Franz had followed his orders faithfully, to the letter if not in the spirit.

  Annoyed, Amiot reached to snatch the yellow kerchief from Toussaint’s head, and was struck by a pulse of fear. How was this? He lifted his hand again and again felt the stab of anxiety.

  All except fools knew fear on the brink of battle. Amiot knew it well enough, and had learned to plunge through it, like a dive into cold water. But here there was nowhere to plunge.

  It was only his poor night’s sleep that weakened him. A passing thing. And there was no importance to the kerchief. Such a grubby cloth could hide nothing but head lice. Let it be. Amiot tendered the sling to Franz, allowed him to help Toussaint rearrange it. Together they walked the old man back to his cell, where, to be sure, the other searchers had found nothing to report.

  Toussaint’s fire had been rekindled and built up, and the trencher of gruel laid on the hearthstone to recover something of its warmth. Amiot had ordered neither of these things. That had been Franz, exceeding his duty. Amiot shot a cutting glance at the guardsman, then ordered them all to leave the cell.

  “Good day, Toussaint,” he said with another large smile and locked the door behind him.

  The snow had stopped when they emerged, and the wind picked up. Amiot refreshed himself with a gaze over the brilliantly gleaming Juras, into the ice-blue sky. But the wind bit him with its bitter edge. Furling his cloak around him, he went indoors. He ate three-quarters of a tasteless omelette and drank three cups of heavily sugared coffee, then turned to the clerical work of the day, a review of the reports he had been making these last weeks:

  28 January: Toussaint suffers pains in different parts of the body, which accompany little surges of fever. He has a very dry cough.

  9 February: Louverture, whose health had got better the last several days, complains of his stomach and does not eat as usual.

  19 February: The prisoner has vomited several times, which relieved him. However, he has a swollen face.

  4 March: The detainee is always in the same state of indisposition. He has a swollen face, complains en
dlessly of stomach pain, and has a very strong cough.

  Amiot rolled the papers through which he’d been leafing and thrust them into a pigeonhole. He sat back, with his ankles crossed, and looked at the cobwebbed ceiling until a belch from his breakfast escaped him. Then he bent over the desktop again, found a clean sheet of paper, and dipped his pen.

  19 March: The situation of Toussaint is always the same, he complainsconstantly of stomach pains and has a constant cough. For some days he has carried his left arm in a sling by reason of his pains. For three days I have noticed that his voice has very much changed. He has never asked me for a doctor.

  Amiot laid his pen aside. Under Baille’s command, Toussaint had had half a dozen rotten teeth drawn by a dentist, at his own request, and had been examined by a doctor more than once—in Baille’s presence, of course, and apparently on account of Baille’s excessive solicitude. Amiot watched his ink dry on the page. If Toussaint did not request a doctor, Amiot would furnish none. And if he did—

  A tap on the door broke his chain of thought—the morning mail. Amiot emptied the bag out on the table and turned over the contents. Little of interest but a packet from a friend in Paris, containing a pamphlet which recently had been printed not by the Amis des Noirs this time, but by some reincarnation of the old colonial Club Massiac— where Saint Domingue’s exiled planters, furious at the failures of Rochambeau and Leclerc and ever more hopeless of regaining their lands, could spill their vitriol against Toussaint.

  His Parisian friend had marked out a few lines for his special attention, perhaps in jest, or perhaps in all seriousness. Amiot narrowed his eyes at the passage: “. . . he ought to be chained alive to a stake, exposed by the wayside so that the crows and the vultures, charged with the vengeance of the colonists, can come each day to devour not his heart—for he has never had one—but the reborn liver of this new Prometheus.”

  Having resumed his trousers and shirt, Toussaint stood with his bare feet on the hearthstone. The anger he’d held tight in the bottom of his belly drained out toward his extremities. It warmed his fingertips more than the fire. And thanks to Franz, the hearthstone had warmed at least to his body temperature or a little above.