The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  He was tired now. His sleep twice broken. And it had been an effort to use that tight-folded packet of rage to repel Amiot’s searching hand from the yellow mouchwa têt. Though the headcloth had its own protective properties. Pa touché! Let the commandant so much as lay a finger on the knot in that yellow cloth, and Maît’ Kalfou would hound him to the very bottom of his dreams.

  Disagreeable as the searches were, there was relief, a kind of novelty, in leaving the cell. Even to be naked in another room, and alone—for Amiot’s attentions conveyed no human presence—meant no more than the nuisance of a circling dog.

  The emptiness of that other cell still held traces of the spirit of Mars Plaisir. Before he had been taken off to some other prison, the valet had been permitted to attend his master here. They passed their hours in praise of Suzanne and Placide and Isaac and Saint-Jean. Through the vestiges of Mars Plaisir, Toussaint still could feel a hint of his wife and his three sons, whenever he was led naked to that space.

  Where were they now? He knew they lived, but his inner eye would not reveal them. He knew he would not see them again in the body.

  A chunk of wood collapsing in the fire broke him out of his half-dozing state. A handful of coals, glittering red as jewels, had scattered on the hearth. Painfully, Toussaint stooped for the fire shovel and scraped the coals back into their bed. He tensed his diaphragm to hold back the cough and waited for the wave of it to roll past him.

  Pain was general now, all through him. There was the pain of all his joints, from the ague of his fever, or only from the cold. But that was nothing. No real threat. The dangerous pain began behind his left eye and flowed under his cheekbone, and back along his lower jaw. It occupied his temple and the tube of his ear, crawled down through his left lung and, from the bottom of it, gripped at his entrails. Bending and stooping set off this whole recoil, so he avoided those movements as much as he could.

  From where he crouched now he could reach the trencher, so he took it up, meaning only to dump the contents into his slop jar. The gluey oatmeal was almost inedible even when fresh and warm (Amiot was meaner with sugar than Baille had been), and after the guardsmen had stirred through it, in search of some ludicrous fantasy of contraband, Toussaint had no taste for it at all. But when he lifted the lid he discovered, atop the mush he had expected, a piece of sausage and a chunk of pale yellow cheese.

  That was Franz, the old guardsman. His doing. Toussaint flushed with a sudden feeling. It had struck him earlier, in the other cell, that Franz had somewhat absorbed the spirit of Mars Plaisir. He’d taken his hand in the way of Toussaint’s own people, with warmth but no pressure. There was no blanc on earth who clasped a hand that way.

  He sat down on the chair by the hearth, bit off a small piece of the sausage and rolled it in his mouth, looking for a pair of teeth sound enough to manage it. A bright burst of saliva started up at the first taste. The flavor of garlic was very strong. He chewed, painfully, thoroughly, before he swallowed. The cheese interested him also. But he laid the trencher on the table and waited to see what would happen.

  Franz was a seasoned soldier, that much was evident from his bearing, from his age and the long pigtail he still wore. Toussaint supposed he had likely fought with the first sans-culottes, and maybe he had been with Bonaparte in the days before Napoleon had exalted himself to the status of First Consul. The more Toussaint’s body weakened, the more Franz grew solicitous of him, though in extremely discreet ways none other could detect. In Franz’s eyes he thought he saw the gleam of devotion of men like Guiaou and Guerrier. The need and the trust he had found in such faces had driven him a long way over his road—it had become a part of his own power.

  His entrails clenched to expel the sausage. Toussaint lunged across the room to vomit in the slop jar. Empty, he replaced the lid and leaned his weight on it. At last he recovered enough to stand, to rinse his mouth with water and settle himself again into the chair.

  Somewhere during his bout of nausea, he’d counted seven strokes of the castle bell. If there were no surprise searches in the meantime, which depended on the will of God, he’d have five hours before the trencher was removed. In that time he would pass the food through his system in one way or another, so that Franz’s action would not be discovered. Probably the cheese would be easier to keep down.

  He drifted as his fever rose. The fever was a sort of padding against the pain. The pain belonged to someone else, was trapped in Toussaint’s body, at the bottom of a well. Now the faces of Guiaou and Guerrier hovered before him: Guiaou with his terrible scars which left his eyes the more expressive, and Guerrier’s broad features animated wholly by the same mute trust in Papa Toussaint. The truth was that men like these were rare. Riau was the more common type. Riau who would never give himself entirely, who held something always hidden behind his head, who always remained a marron in his heart. Moyse had always been the same. These latter days, when Moyse’s one-eyed visage floated up, Toussaint could say to him, la paix. No more than I, you did not live to cross the Jordan. But without you, without five hundred thousand like you, we could not have won. God’s peace be with you.

  And the absurdity of Amiot’s program of searches . . . The giddiness of rising fever made Toussaint want to laugh. There was no contraband information left to discover, any more than there was an object to find. The blancs already owned every piece of information. They knew everything and understood none of what they knew.

  Toussaint tightened the knot of his mouchwa têt. Firm pressure worked to dam the flow of pain through his head. With a fingertip he checked the tiny fold of paper beneath the cloth just above the knot. Here he had cached his final testament—let Amiot find it after his death. A footnote to the long, dissembling memorandum he’d composed for the First Consul—no more than a line or two, but sufficient to make sense of all the rest.

  You thought I was deceived by Brunet’s letter. Fool, I knew what was to come. I knew when you faced me, you faced one leader. When you removed me, you would face five hundred thousand.

  Outside, the wind had risen. Now it moaned across the grate. With the wind, a puff of fine snow spiraled through the grate into the cell. A dusting of snow on Toussaint’s face refreshed him momentarily from his fever, like the touch of a cool cloth. A scatter of snowflakes settled on his open hand, prickling at the skin like furry legs of bees. Then the flakes melted and joined in a droplet which magnified the crossing of lines on his palm. Toussaint let his arm go slack, spilling the water onto the ground, as fever washed him into sleep.

  Part Four

  THE ROOTS OF THE TREE

  March–June 1802

  Que La France envoie des forces ici, que feront-elles? Rien. Je voudrais qu’elle envoyât trois, quatre, ou cinq cent mille hommes; ce serait autant de fusils et de munitions pour nos frères qui ne sont pas armés. Quand nous avons commencé à battre pour notre liberté, nous n’avions qu’un fusil, et puis deux, trois et avons fini par avoir tous ceux des Français qui sont venus ici. Ainsi si l’on en envoie des autres, ce seront des armes pour remplacer les vieilles.

  —Moyse, Mémoires de Général Kerverseau

  Let France send her forces here, what will they do? Nothing. I wish they would send three, four, or five hundred thousand men: it would be that many more guns and that much more ammunition for our brothers who are not armed. When we began to fight for our freedom, we had but one gun, and then two, and then three, and we finished by having all of the guns of the French who came here. So if they send more, that will only be arms to replace the old ones.

  31

  The ash in the shell of Elise’s house had been settled by the rains, and much of it already shoveled away. In what had been the back garden, Michau and another man worked a saw twice as long as either of them was tall, patiently rocking it through the length of a huge log. One by one, they were trimming new timbers to span the fire-blackened masonry wall, and cutting planks to rebuild floors. Paul had been helping them until twenty minutes before, when h
is mother had told him to get out of the afternoon heat and also, by the way, to write his weekly letter.

  We are building back Tante Elise’s house, Papa, he wrote. Madame Isabelle is building her house also. Even though Monsieur Bertrand is dead, Madame Isabelle is making her house faster than we are making Tante Elise’s house, and she says that it will be even grander than it was before the fire.

  He paused, went back and scored out the clause Monsieur Bertrand is dead, so heavily that the blot made the paper soggy. Then he stopped writing altogether and listened to the noise of the saw. The garden had been razed by the fire, but a row of bananes loup-garou, which Elise had planted on a whim, had come back already, spreading broad leaves along the rear wall to make a little shade. Paul sat there, in a low wooden chair with a woven seat—they’d bought a dozen such, along with mats for sleeping, at the market which had regenerated on the ashes of the Place Clugny.

  Paul tried to collect his concentration. The sentence still made sense without the clause he had gouged out, yet his mother would require him to recopy the whole because of this error, before she stored it in her flat straw sack, there being nowhere to send it. He wrote, Grâce, la miséricorde, Papa! We pray each day, I and Maman and my brothers, that you are safe and will soon return.

  At this his thoughts scattered. François and Gabriel did not properly pray. They were too small for that devotion. And Nanon would object to the expostulation, Grâce, la miséricorde, for reasons too cloudy for Paul to follow, though he knew it would happen. His fingers twitched on the edge of his sheet. Before his eyes, the yellow cocotier, which had been burned, had managed to push up a pale green frond, and over this a blue dragonfly was hovering, delicate to the point of transparency. This vitality encouraged and at the same time somewhat frightened him; he was troubled because there was no reason for the fear.

  A commotion began at the front of the house: Madame Isabelle had come, with news of an arrival at the harbor—they were all going down to see, Elise and Nanon and the children. Zabeth called into the back garden and Michau answered briefly before he went back to the sawing. Paul remained where he was, though he knew he would have been forgiven his task, for a time, if he ran to join this excursion. But . . . he had not seen his father since the battle at Ravine à Couleuvre. There he had expected to witness something like a tournament, but instead it had been more like a hog butchering—only with guns to add to the squealing, confusion, and noise. Paul had been safe away at Thibodet when Le Cap had burned this time, so it was not possible that he should remember flames shooting up through the roof of Tante Elise’s house, where he gazed abstractedly now. His father had passed through that fire, though not Paul . . . but Paul had been here when the town was burned in ninety-three. His father and mother had carried him through it, riding on a donkey. Paul had heard this story many times, though he was too small to remember it, smaller even than François and Gabriel were now. But maybe that passage explained the flames that were dancing now behind his eyes.

  He signed his love to the letter and folded it hastily, smudging the ink of the last lines. With the letter in his hand he went out into the street. No one had noticed his departure, and if they had they would have thought he was going to the fort. Instead he went up the hill, through the Place Montarcher, where the fountain had again been set flowing. A few black women glanced his way incuriously as they lifted their water jars to their heads. He passed them, stepping out quickly despite the heat, and hurried past the heat-wracked iron gates of the Government compound, hoping to outdistance the fear that shamed him. He was nearly nine years old.

  As a smaller child, he’d lost both parents for a time. Nanon had taken him when she went away to live with another man, a pale colored man with lots of freckles, in the days when Doctor Hébert was no more to Paul than a pleasant human smell and a warm touch. This freckled man had treated him with a careful consideration that masked his dislike, and one day he had taken him to Le Cap without his mother. He’d told Nanon that Paul was to be put into a school, but he said nothing at all to Paul on the whole journey down from the mountains, and they did not go to any school, but instead to a bad house, where the bodies of women were sold to men, though Paul had not understood that part until later. He had understood much sooner that he would not survive there, and so he had run away after a while, and lived as a beggar in the streets of Le Cap. Not in the fashionable precincts where he was walking now, for here he found nowhere to hide himself, but further down, in the banlieuesbetween Marché Clugny and the graveyards of La Fossette.

  He turned downhill from the Rue Espagnole and found the crooked trail that climbed the brow of Morne Calvaire. Somehow the little cases that lined this shaly path had escaped the torches of Christophe’s soldiers. These days, the inhabitants were furnishing their labor to the reconstruction of other parts of the town, though most of them were sleeping now, through the hottest part of the afternoon. Paul was not suffering, despite the effort of the climb, though he felt a little lightheaded by the time he reached the top. He stopped by the three wooden crosses that stood before the shell of the church, and turned into the wind to cool himself. He looked back down the path, as for a shadow.

  Caco had told him stories of the djab, bad spirits astray that might pursue and torment a person, most often by night but sometimes even by day. Paul missed Caco, who had stayed behind at Ennery. Neither had found anything to say to the other about what they had seen at Ravine à Couleuvre. If Caco missed his own father, and Riau was mysteriously absent from his lakou more often than not, he never said anything about that either. Now, as Paul looked down the empty trail he’d climbed, it came to him that his djab today was no more than a thought that he could not properly identify, though he knew it was bound up with the letter and the impossibility of sending it. Nanon kept all his letters in her special flat macoute, against the day his father would return.

  A sighing sound rose from the waterfront, and Paul raised his eyes to see. A crowd had gathered along the embarcadère, and all the people sighed in gratification, as Madame Leclerc was borne ashore in a litter, from the shallop that had carried her from her ship moored in the harbor. She had returned this day from Port-au-Prince. The dumpling of a little boy who followed her must be her son, Dermide—Paul had not met him but had overheard Sophie and Robert discussing his petulance and cruelty.

  The figures on the waterfront were diminished to the size of puppets; yet Paul could make them out quite clearly from where he stood. There was the mayor Télémaque, and Madame Isabelle and Tante Elise, both women holding huge bouquets of flowers. Apart from them, among strangers, stood his mother, holding the hands of Gabriel and François, while Sophie and Robert and Héloïse stood by. At this distance Paul could not see Nanon’s face but he knew her eyes would be slightly downcast, for she never looked directly toward a center of attention, and showed pleasure only by the slightest curve of her wide lips.

  Another moan of joy from the crowd, as Madame Leclerc’s slippered foot touched the ground and she came up standing from the litter. A green speck rode on one of her fingers; she cupped it with her other hand. Paul realized that it must be the bird Madame Isabelle had given her. That would be a triumph for Madame Isabelle. And indeed, Madame Leclerc went to her first of all the group and kissed her cheeks, then turned to bury her face in Tante Elise’s flowers.

  Paul looked farther out over the long oval of the harbor. Besides L’Océan, which had delivered Madame Leclerc, there was another new ship on the moorings: La Cornélie. He had no idea what its presence signified, but he took note. In the time of his orphanage, he’d learned to remark the arrival of every new boat, which might mean propitious times for begging.

  He’d meant to give his letter to the breeze that always blew here, but now . . . Behind him, a few charred timbers were all that remained of the roof of the church. The walls had mostly survived, though smoke-stained and cracked by the heat. No fire burned here today, except the sun.

  Behind the church a
nother path tracked down the hill among little cases and ajoupas that also had not been burned. Paul went that way, the letter crumpled in his hand. A hen and her chicks scrambled up from a dust bath and scattered out of his way as he passed. Where the trail went through the hûnfor, a few of the shield-shaped panels of woven palm that enclosed the area had been set aside. Paul walked into the sense of safety he’d been seeking; the feeling washed over him like warm water. There were no drums today, no dancing. The place was given to ordinary use. Paulette and Fontelle were laying out wet clothes on the rocks to dry, and among them Paul recognized a few of his own garments and some of his mother’s. Somewhat more to his surprise, he saw that Madame Claudine lay sleeping on a mat on the western edge of the peristyle where the palm panels threw a little shade; he knew she frequented this place, but this was the first time he had ever seen her with her strange eyes closed.

  What drew him now were the small fires flaring from the mouths of several cup-sized iron pots, arranged around the poteau mitan: in each a blue flame set within an orange one, like the pattern of a feather. He moved toward the pots, confident now, stooped, and held his letter to the nearest flame. The paper blazed up all at once. Just when it would have scorched his fingers, he rose, twisting away from the pots, and released the wafer of ash into the wind.

  “Sa w’ap fé?” The vast figure of Maman Maig’ filled the portal of the kay mystè. Behind her, the small red and blue squares of cloth danced on their strings. What are you doing?

  “Mwen voyé youn let pou pè mwen,” Paul said, unabashed. I am sending a letter to my father.