The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Is the French corps thinned so badly as that?” Tocquet made a sound between a laugh and a cough. “We’ve heard it was disastrous at La Crête à Pierrot but—in any case, I have just told you I want no part of the military. My thoughts are my own. I am no soldier.”

  Boyer smiled. His sidewhiskers rustled against his collar. “There are those who say you are a bandit, Monsieur.”

  Paul grew tense in his shoulders and his scalp. One did not safely trifle with Xavier Tocquet; everyone knew this. But from the corner of his eye he could see that Tocquet only returned the smile.

  “I think you mean a pirate, General. I may fairly be called a pirate, for I descend from the flibustiers of La Tortue, without whom all Saint Domingue would still attach to the crown of Spain.”

  “I meant no offense.”

  “You certainly meant to prickle me, General. But I am not offended.” Tocquet produced a flask from an inner pocket and, at Boyer’s nod, dropped a little rum into the general’s coffee and then into his own.

  “Martial Besse will command the expedition to La Tortue,” Boyer said. “Perhaps you know him. He also sailed on La Vertu.”

  “Not well, but . . .” Tocquet’s eyes grew distant. “I may help you in this affair—as a guide, but no commission. It is a long time since I have been on La Tortue.”

  “Oh, do, do help us.” Madame Leclerc switched in her seat at the adjacent table and draped a languid arm in Tocquet’s direction. “I have heard that La Tortue is the most charming island, and I do very much desire to see it.” She put a long trill in the r of desire, and fixed on Tocquet her most vivid smile. Paul was impressed, in a way unfamiliar to him, by the smile and the rolling r and the softly rounded alabaster arm. But Tocquet’s eyes remained detached.

  “Madame, I will render what service I am able,” he said, still without looking directly at Madame Leclerc. His regard seemed to pass between her and Tante Elise, away above the turtle tank and the high wall beyond it. Paul felt that his aunt was pleased with Tocquet’s unresponsiveness, but Madame Leclerc was not at all pleased.

  “You were speaking of General Rigaud, I think?” she said. “I heard that he was so very piqued at the surprise of his arrest that he flung his sword overboard from the ship, rather than surrender it. Can it be true?”

  She tossed her head and intensified her smile. Boyer twitched. A spot of color appeared below his cheekbone. “I am not informed of any such detail,” he said. Tocquet made no comment, but masked himself in a cloud of tobacco smoke.

  Madame Leclerc seemed to be preparing another sally, but before she was ready, the green parakeet hopped down from her shoulder to her wrist and spoke to her: “Comme tu es belle.”

  “Ah,” said Madame Leclerc. “My pet is always complimentary. Unlike some.” She shot another glance at the two men, then turned her pretty shoulder to them, drawing herself in on the bird. Paul was staring frankly now. He had heard of birds that talked but never met one.

  “Come here, boy.” Madame Leclerc had not appeared to be looking at him, but she had certainly been aware of his eyes. Paul glanced quickly at his mother, who almost imperceptibly nodded. Madame Leclerc was beckoning to him with a graceful curve of that languid arm; a triad of silver bracelets tinkled on the wrist unoccupied by the parakeet.

  “Just put your finger behind his feet . . .” And the lady’s soft fingers were on his forearm. Paul was perplexed by her touch and the sweet scent of her and the close focus of her attention. It was easier to concentrate on the bird.

  “Yes, like that,” she said. “You see?”

  When Paul touched the back of the parakeet’s scaly legs, it took a neat backward step onto his forefinger. He smiled. The little claws were tickling him.

  “Don’t show him your hand from the front,” Madame Leclerc warned. “He will peck it. And his beak is quite sharp.”

  The parakeet screwed its head around and blinked one eye at Paul.

  “Comme tu es belle,” it declared.

  Madame Leclerc began to giggle. Isabelle and Elise tittered along with her; Nanon looked up briefly from her basket of sewing.

  “It may be that he is a little indiscriminate,” Madame Leclerc said. “But he is unfailingly determined to please.”

  She turned to Isabelle. “As for his singing, well—” With a jingle of bracelets, she clapped her hands sharply. “Moustapha!”

  The man who presented himself was not named Moustapha at all. Paul had known him as a porter on the waterfront and he knew very well that his name was Baptiste. Today he was not so easily recognizable, though, for he had been costumed in a Chinese silk robe that strained at his shoulders and stopped short at his knees, and crowned with an ill-balanced turban fastened in the center of his forehead with a large red glass brooch.

  But Paul was more struck by the thing he was carrying: a box of a silvery metal set with brass inlays representing songbirds on ornamental sprigs. A crank stuck out of the side, as if it were some kind of a grinding machine, but on the top there was a bird cage.

  “Go on,” Madame Leclerc told him. “Put him in.”

  Paul hesitated. He didn’t want to see the talking bird ground into sausage.

  “Well, it won’t hurt him!” Again, the chiming of her laughter. “It hasn’t seemed to help him much, but it won’t harm him.”

  Baptiste was smiling encouragingly from beneath the ridiculous turban, so Paul put the bird into the cage and latched the door. The parakeet hopped up onto the small swinging perch and sat there, shrugging its shiny green shoulders. Baptiste balanced the engine upright on its post and turned the crank. Out came a fragile, metallic melody, one which Paul had heard Madame Isabelle singing to Héloïse from time to time: “Ah, what shall I say, Maman?”

  Rapt, he reached to touch the yellow inlays on the box. Baptiste smiled more broadly and shifted the machine, presenting the crank handle to Paul’s hand. Paul turned it, shyly at first, then with more vigor. The music played fast or slow according to the speed of the cranking. But the bird was unmoved by the tune at any tempo. It swung on the perch, closing first one eye and then the other.

  “Perhaps he is not musical,” Pauline said, still laughing, throwing back her head. “Or perhaps he needs a better music master—one who knows the birds of this land.” A new thought seemed to come to her, and she leaned forward to tap a finger on Isabelle’s arm.

  “Do you know?” she said. “Another curiosity—a band of musicians were found alive in the fort at La Crête à Pierrot. Frenchmen all, and the only survivors. Four or five of them, and one other white man, I was told . . . I believe he was supposed to be a doctor—”

  Paul’s hand slipped away from the crank. Tante Elise had interrupted Madame Leclerc with questions: Where had this doctor gone to now? Did anyone happen to know his name? But Paul attended only to his mother, who’d forgotten both her sewing and her usual sidewise decorum; she was looking at Madame Leclerc head on, with her lips slightly parted and her eyes warm and bright.

  32

  No one knew which spirit was walking with Toussaint, or at least I, Riau, I did not know it. No one had ever known for certain what spirit was master of his head, and maybe Toussaint wanted to be always his own master, like a blanc. He would not give his head completely up to any lwa. Always in the days of Bréda, and afterward when he was strong, Toussaint talked of Jesus as if Jesus was his only one. But Jesus was the spirit of the blancs. I, Riau, had not been there at Gonaives, but those who were had told the story—how Toussaint tore Jesus down from the cross, and cursed him and rode over him with the hooves of his big horse Bel Argent, before he set fire to the church. And still before I heard this story, I knew that Toussaint had his other lwa, but he was always secret in that thing.

  After La Crête à Pierrot had fallen, and the French blanc soldiers were swarming all over the place where our people had been, Toussaint’s eyes were rimmed with red, and he was twisted up with rage and sorrow. There, as at Ravine à Couleuvre, the battle had not gone as
he planned or wanted. The French blanc soldiers had left many dead around La Crête à Pierrot, much more than we, even after they had killed all our wounded they found lying in the fort when Lamartinière had gone. They had lost so many that the General Lacroix had to march back to Port-au-Prince with wide empty spaces hidden in the inside of his column, so the weakness did not show. But I, Riau, heard that from Maillart a long time afterward, so maybe Toussaint did not know it either. Whatever he knew, it seemed that all those dead blanc soldiers were not enough to feed the spirit that was with him then.

  One saw that day that he was old, and tired from his long riding and hard fighting, though the spirit that was in him forced him on. I thought that Ezili Jé Rouj was with him that day, after Lamartinière received Dessalines’s ring and fought his way out of the fort with the men he had still able—she who would claw at her own face and maybe even tear her own eyes out when things had not passed as she wished them to. No man should be too long with Ezili Jé Rouj, for she is one to ride her horse to death when she is angry, and she is almost always angry, but Toussaint rode under her as far as the mountain east of La Crête à Pierrot, Morne Calvaire, where Dessalines had finally come.

  Then Toussaint’s eyes were red and furious and his mouth was bitter when he spoke. If Dessalines had waited only one more day to send his ring to Lamartinière, then Toussaint might have struck the French from behind their lines, and Dessalines too from the other side, so that they would have killed every blanc in the French army, or at least have captured the Captain-General Leclerc. Dessalines listened without saying anything back, but his knuckles were gray on the snuffbox he clutched in his left hand, and I saw what it cost him to keep his tongue still. He had fought as hard in those last weeks as Toussaint or anyone, except perhaps for Lamartinière and the others who had been trapped in the fort, and I saw too that he was getting sick from fever.

  But the spirit of anger left Toussaint, and he smiled on Dessalines, and spoke to him more calmly. Dessalines was too strong a leader for Toussaint to treat him poorly now. Toussaint sent Dessalines down to Marchand where he could cover the road that ran from Saint Marc to Le Cap through the Savane Désolée. But we rode on into the Petit Cahos, where Toussaint’s family was. During that ride, we stopped in the day’s worst heat at Toussaint’s habitation at La Coupe à l’Inde, where he kept many horses, and Toussaint left Bel Argent there, since the big horse had been ridden too hard for too long and needed to be rested. Others of us who needed to changed our horses there as well, and then we rode on toward the Grand Fonds.

  Then and in the days that followed, no one could see what spirit was with Toussaint. He was smooth like the surface of the ocean when the big fish has gone under and the circle that his tail makes has already disappeared.

  When Dessalines came to Marchand at last he was very sick with the fever, so that for some days he could not stand, and when he did get up again he found that no more than sixty soldiers were with him still, or so the story was told later. Dessalines shot two of the captains who brought him this news, and after he had done that, the other captains who still lived found him enough soldiers to make him more content. But at that time Toussaint had gone to Grand Fonds, where he had sent his family when the French blanc soldiers first came down through Ennery, so he did not know exactly what Dessalines was doing. Suzanne and Isaac were staying there, at Habitation Vincindière, but Saint-Jean who was the youngest son had been made a prisoner of the blancs, while they were running from Ennery. Placide was with the other officers, Gabart and Pourcely and Monpoint and Morisset, at Habitation Chassérieux, where Toussaint made his headquarters now, a little way from Vincindière.

  In the early morning we were riding into the clouds over the Petit Cahos mountains, where the wet gray fog lay thick among the trunks of old palm trees and tall pines. We had to go carefully along the trails because there were ravines so well hidden in the fog we could only know their places by their echoes or the sound of rushing water deep inside them. But when the sun had risen, the fog turned pale and floated away, like fingers of a hand letting go of the mountains, so that by the time we came to the plateau of Chassérieux it was very hot. Here a lot of people who had run away from the French blanc soldiers in the Artibonite had come, and they had put up ajoupas all over the flat ground there, and other soldiers had come there too, away from different fights with the blancs all around the country.

  Toussaint did not go at once to find Suzanne and Isaac at Vincindière. He raised a tent in the center of the flat land among the people, to make shade against the midday sun, and he called for men who knew how to write. I, Riau, was one, and another was his son Placide.

  First Toussaint gave us words for Bonaparte, who was the chief of all the French blanc soldiers in France. He had a letter from Bonaparte that he must answer, and in this answer he said that Bonaparte should take away the Captain-General Leclerc, and send someone else to talk to Toussaint, because it was Leclerc who had caused all the trouble and fighting, when Toussaint had never intended to make any trouble with the blancs at all. This letter took a long time to write because of the way the words had to be twisted, and after that we had to write another one, to the General Boudet who had gone down to Port-au-Prince again, after the fighting around La Crête à Pierrot.

  The sun had left its height by the time these letters had been copied out and all the words put in their places so that they satisfied Toussaint. Placide and Toussaint got back on their horses then, and they rode on to Vincindière. I found Guiaou, who had been riding with Toussaint that day the same as I, and together we raised a little ajoupa to share. I had been camping with Jean-Pic before, but Jean-Pic had run away after Toussaint’s big bloody fight at Plaisance. He wanted to go north to a place where there was no fighting. Guiaou had been much with a new man called Guerrier, who had traveled with him across the Spanish border, when Couachy was killed by some trickery of the blancs, but this night somehow we decided to camp together.

  We had to go some way off from the flat ground of the plateau before we found sticks and leaves enough, because so many people had already come there. Guiaou made a place flat with his coutelas, on the edge of a ravine, and there we planted the forked sticks and put the cross-sticks in the forks, and laid the long palm leaves across them. There we had shelter from the rain, if there was not too much wind, and it did rain a little before the end of that day, but by darkness it was clear again, with many stars bright above the mountain.

  No one was singing or drumming in the camp that night, and there was not much talk around the cooking fires, or the talk was low, and there was not very much to cook, because all the people had run so fast from the French blanc soldiers. It seemed that their spirits were low to see Toussaint running from the blancs himself, because that was what it looked like he was doing. And the stories that were being told about La Crête à Pierrot would not make anyone want to drum or dance.

  Guiaou had no food with him at all, but I had saved a piece of cassava bread, and I shared this with him. We did not talk at all while we were eating, or afterward when we lay down to sleep. I was thinking of Toussaint, and in my mind I saw a picture of him meeting Suzanne and Isaac at Vincindière, but I thought how he must still wonder about Saint-Jean, if the blancs who held him were treating him with kindness. With that I began to think about Merbillay’s children at Ennery, if they were safe and well themselves, and I knew Guiaou must be thinking the same thoughts, but we did not say anything about it.

  Guiaou was asleep sooner than I was, or so I thought from the sound of his dreaming. For a long time, I could not send my thoughts away, though I tried to let them go into the sound of running water I could hear at the bottom of the ravine where our ajoupa was made. Guiaou called Toussaint Papa, as many people had begun to do, but I, Riau, had known him longer, though sometimes I addressed him as parrain. For a long time the words of the letters we had written that day ran in my head, and I wondered how many of us Toussaint might sell to save his children.


  When I first came to Port-au-Prince with Maillart, I had seen the messenger Sabès, who had come out of the ships with another blanc named Gimont, with messages from the General Boudet who waited on the ships in the harbor. Lamartinière had made them prisoner then, though they came only as messengers. Later on they had come close to being killed many times. Lamartinière treated them well at first, but Dessalines would certainly have killed them at Petite Rivière, and there were people who wanted to kill them at Chassérieux too, because the anger against all the blancs was very high; only Isaac had come over from Vincindière to protect them. It may be that he had known those two blancs on the ships that he and Placide had ridden over the ocean, or maybe he knew that Toussaint would not like Sabès and Gimont to be killed, even though Isaac had not taken Toussaint’s part against the French blanc soldiers.

  It was hard to see what Toussaint’s part was now, and maybe he was trying to hide it in the fog he turned between his hands. When he came back to Chassérieux the next morning, the first thing he did was order that Sabès and Gimont be brought before him. He did not really need to send for them at all, because they had been at Vincindière the whole time, where Toussaint had spent the night. Isaac had brought them there, where they would be safer, after he had got them away from the people who wanted to kill them at Chassérieux. But I thought Toussaint must want all the people at Chassérieux to hear what he would say to these blancs, because he spoke to them outside the tent, loud and before all the people.

  Toussaint did not look old or tired any more that morning. He was dressed in his finest uniform, one that he would never wear to ride, and he wore the big sword longer than his leg, on a velvet belt with many bright and colored stones. All our men were gathered around his tent when Fontaine brought Sabès and Gimont in, because the other officers had told them to come there. The men were sitting on rocks, or crosslegged on the ground, with knives and guns laid on the ground in front of them to show there would be no more killing just then, and farther off some of the women and children who had come up from the Artibonite were listening too. I sat on a stone beside Guiaou and listened.