A man with a large, shaggily bearded head emerged from the bush and moved idly toward them. The others all seemed to defer to him. Romain, Romain, some whispered as he passed. He stopped by the doctor’s horse and stroked a finger down the octagon barrel of the rifle which hung in its sling by his right knee. Romain peered up at the doctor, grunted, and moved on. Some of his lieutenants were fishing into the loads of the pack animals. One, discovering the rolled cayman skin, started back with a cry.
Romain walked toward him. A pair of men loosened the strings that secured the skin and unrolled it, backing away from each other to keep it from dragging on the ground. The slack skin of the cayman’s legs went dangling; the onlookers murmured as they circled it. At the release of the raw odor, the mule pulled to the length of its lead and stood tossing its head, fighting the man who held it.
Romain touched the cayman’s eye hole, on the groove where the bullet had entered.
“Ki moun ki té touyé’l?” he said. Who killed it?
“Him,” Riau pointed out the doctor. Romain raised his head to survey him again, and took another long look at the heavy rifle. His eyes were as murky yellow as the cayman’s had been.
“This blanc is a doctor,” Riau announced. “Also a doktè-fey. He is a doctor for Toussaint. He was with Toussaint at Ravine à Couleuvre, and with Dessalines at La Crête à Pierrot.”
Romain walked the length of the cayman’s skin, heel to toe, his hand gliding over the surface of the green leather. The ends of his hair locks were finished with small white cowrie shells that ticked together as he moved.
“With Dessalines too? Kon sa, sé pa blan li yé. ” At this remark several men laughed, Riau included. Like that, he is not a blanc. The doctor let himself relax a little, though he also wondered what credit this statement would be worth to him if and when they returned to precincts controlled by Leclerc’s army.
Maillart had untwisted in his saddle and loosened his reins. At Romain’s signal, the two men furled the cayman’s skin, fastened it, and began to load it onto the struggling mule where it had been before. The mule settled down once the bundle had been securely tied.
“Kité tout moun yo pasé,” said Romain. Let them all pass.
They rode on, escorted now by a couple of dozen of Romain’s men, a few of them mounted on donkeys or small ponies, most trotting along on foot. In an hour’s time they could see, from the heights of Limbé, the red sun lowering over the calm expanse of the Baie d’Acul below them. By the time they had reached the low ground, darkness had covered. Heavy clouds had rolled over from the mountains and blotted out all light. Riau and Romain’s men seemed to make their way onward by sense of smell; the doctor simply let his horse be carried along in their current.
When they reached the gateway of Habitation Arnaud, they heard drumming beyond it. The wind stirred in spirals in advance of the coming rain, and the air in the doctor’s lungs felt thick as water. Romain’s men scattered across the compound when they emerged from the allée; cries of excitement now mingled with the drums. The doctor and his group hurried for the shelter of the barn, with raindrops already smacking the dirt around them. Once inside, they turned to face the deluge that came down. Now there was nothing to see but roaring water. The doctor took a calabash bowl from his medical bag and held it at arm’s length into the rain, then drank and passed it among the others.
When at last the rain had stopped, they left their horses tethered and walked out under a canopy of stars. The drums had not resumed, but there was some hubbub in the direction of the cane mill. The doctor glimpsed a flicker of lamp or candle light on the rise where Arnaud had rebuilt his house. He walked in the direction, and the others followed him.
Cléo and Isidor sat on the narrow puncheon porch, each smoking a small round pipe. A bowl of well-picked fishbones sat between them on the floor, with a little cat watching it from beyond the eaves of the roof. Cléo looked at them indifferently as they came toward the small circle of light; she did not rise.
“Monsieur and Madame Arnaud?” the doctor inquired.
“Tout blan-yo pati,” Cléo said. All the whites have left. She squinted at the shadow where he stood, then nodded, with a half-smile. “Is it Doctor Hébert? You are welcome. You may stay.”
The doctor stepped onto the wooden floor. Riau followed him, stamping his wet boots.
“Sa ou gegne pou nou manjé?” Riau said. What have you got for us to eat?
“Pa gegne anyen anko.” Cléo shrugged. There’s nothing left. The doctor’s stomach grumbled at this remark. His avocados, he recalled, had dispersed themselves among Romain’s men. He searched for expression in Cléo’s handsome ivory face, but found no hostility, only disinterest. He put his head into the house. The air smelled damp and rather uninviting.
“Take any room except the first,” Cléo said from where she sat.
“Thank you,” said the doctor. His throat itched for rum. Riau appeared at his right hand.
“We can go down to look for Moustique,” he said. “If they start that bamboche again, we may find something.”
The four of them retraced their steps down the trail by which they’d come. As they neared the cane mill, the doctor noticed other shadows milling ahead of him, beyond the building, and caught the sharp smell of fermenting cane. Arnaud’s distillery was in service. His mood began to brighten.
“Have you got money?” Maillart whispered in his ear.
“Of course,” said the doctor. Maillart pressed his shoulder. Brushed by damp branches, they reached the distillery’s coils. A line had formed for gourds of fresh clairin. The doctor found a coin to pay for his.
“Santé,” he said, swallowing as he passed the container to Maillart, who drank and passed it to Riau. Guizot hesitated when the gourd reached him from Riau’s hand, then took it and drank his measure and coughed.
“Dousman alé loin,” Maillart said unexpectedly. He clapped Guizot on the back, then moved past him, returning toward the open ground beyond the cane mill on the trail they’d come by. Guizot looked to the doctor for some explanation.
“It means . . . don’t drink your rum too fast,” the doctor said. He collected the gourd, took another small swallow, and stopped it with the plug of rolled leaves. Guizot was still looking at him, his starved face pale in the starlight.
“Or, ‘the softer you go the sooner you’ll get there,’ ” the doctor said. “That would be another way to put it. It is one of Toussaint’s favorite proverbs. Along with patiens bat lafòs.”
“Patience beats force?” Guizot’s laugh was harsh, incredulous. He shook his head, then fell in behind the doctor, who was following Riau and Maillart.
Unerringly Riau led them toward the smell of roasting goat. A boucan had been set up among the little cases by the church, and women were serving out peppered goat with plantains baked whole in their skins. Romain’s men got their portions first, and Riau with them; the three blancs lagged a little behind and were served among the women and the children.
Then they drifted toward the sound of the drums, each balancing a shiny green plantain leaf which did duty as a plate. Guizot bit into a piece of his goat and choked on the peppery gravy.
“Dousman alé loin,” Maillart chided him again. There was the slightest edge of hysteria in the laugh Guizot returned. The doctor looked at him with a distant concern. In this country, a mind too singular was easy to break.
A few people seemed to look askance at Guizot’s uniform—there was enough firelight here and there to make it more visible than might have been preferred—but any hostile muttering was soon hushed. Maillart and the doctor were already reasonably well known in these parts, and Romain’s safe-conduct seemed to hold for all three blancs here. Besides, the mood was sufficiently amiable. It was a bamboche, as Riau had said, a party of pleasure rather than any more serious ceremony. A wooden fife carried a melody above the drums, and the airs it played were old French country dances, though grafted onto rhythms out of Africa. Riau, who’d dispat
ched his meal very quickly, had stepped out to dance with one of the girls. The doctor felt Guizot begin to soften beside him, under the influence of hot food and drink. The young captain had been tense as a terrier all day, and such an effort was exhausting.
The doctor cleaned his fingers as best he could on the plantain leaf and let it drift away from him. He stooped for the gourd he’d held between his feet while he was eating. As he drank, Moustique appeared at his left hand. The doctor swallowed and offered the gourd. Moustique held it for a moment without drinking.
“Ba’m nouvel’w,” the doctor said. Give me your news.
“All is well,” Moustique said. The doctor studied his profile. Moustique was still rail-thin as ever, but had outgrown his gawkiness, and seemed much more comfortably settled in himself.
“Your family?” the doctor inquired.
“Marie-Noelle has taken the children to Le Cap,” Moustique said. “That is why you do not see them here. They went with Monsieur and Madame Arnaud and Nanon and Madame your sister with her husband, and all the children too. Also Madame Cigny went with them. They are all well.”
He paused. The doctor felt the rum flushing through him along with the gladness of relief. He’d come to Habitation Arnaud thinking that the others would have stopped here, but had not dared put that question to Cléo and Isidor. And if Moustique had sent his own wife on with them, the doctor’s instinct was that they must all in fact be safe.
“They are all well except for Monsieur Bertrand Cigny,” Moustique said. “He was killed when Sylla’s men struck his plantation, and his own atelier rose against him.” Moustique inclined the gourd and let a drop fall on the ground, then made the sign of the cross before he drank. He offered the rum to Maillart, who did not at first seem to notice it. His eyes had widened at the last news, and he covered the lower part of his face with a fist.
Guizot was paying no attention; he stood rapt, watching skirts whirl by in the dance. The girl Riau had chosen was exceptionally pretty; the doctor’s eye was on her too. Her slender back curved over the crook of Riau’s arm like the stem of a wild flower. She dipped, came straight, and spun away from him, her dotted calico spinning out from her slim hips, her eyes bright in a dark chocolate face. Riau caught her close again, stooped to whisper something in her ear. The girl protested, laughing, beating her palms lightly on his chest. Riau leaned closer, urging still, and the girl’s face quieted and resolved. She broke from Riau and moved boldly toward Captain Guizot, eyes shining on him. With a phrase of Creole he could not understand, she caught his hand and pulled. Guizot remained as obdurate as a post.
“Dance with her, you idiot,” Maillart said. He’d recovered himself enough to take his tot of rum. “If you’d turn away a belle like that, there is no place for you in the French army.”
Guizot yielded and let himself be drawn among the dancers. He had a reasonably quick step, the doctor noticed, and though the girl was infinitely more graceful, she adapted herself so flawlessly to him that soon Guizot was lit by an unconscious smile.
Then the music halted and dancers drew back. Into the orb of the space they opened stepped Cléo and Isidor. As the fife took a minuet, she returned a courtesy to his bow, and they began a pas de deux. Cléo was not so fluid as the young girls, but more accomplished, achieving grace with a smaller, more neatly contained effort. The younger people all stood by, swaying and smiling and clapping to the drum beat. It was quite as if the master and mistress had come down from the château, the doctor thought, to lend a little honor to a peasant festival. And surely, the rusty frockcoat draped upon Isidor was the property of Michel Arnaud, while Cléo’s gown was some long-closeted finery of Claudine’s.
As if this couple had slipped into the skins of the absent others. The doctor was startled by that thought. He felt a scaliness creeping over him, and was struck by the oddly vivid fantasy that he was being absorbed into the skin of the cayman he had shot. Surely he had not drunk so much as that—yet his fingers were numb, accepting the gourd from Maillart. It was the drums. The drums were doing something to the back of his head where it joined his spine. He could no longer hear the fife, though he could see the man who was playing it.
Moustique had turned away from the dance and was walking off into dim starlight. The doctor followed him, trailing the rum gourd from his knuckles, into the mouth of a green brushy tunnel. As the drums grew more distant, the vertigo against which he’d warned Guizot also receded.
The doctor emerged with Moustique into a circle open to the sky. In the shrubbery walls of the enclosure were numerous little niches lit by candles. Moustique went to one of these and began to spoon water over several squat clay jars. In his movement was a preternatural calm.
“What do they hold?” the doctor asked.
“Spirits of the ancestors.”
“Have you got the Père Bonne-chance in there?” The doctor’s voice missed the jocular note he’d tried for. Indeed it seemed he could scarcely croak. “Your father?”
“No,” Moustique said. “His spirit wants to be with the saints of Jesus in the sky. These are Fontelle’s people, out of Dahomey.”
As he spoke, the doctor felt himself grow sick with fear. He knew that Moustique’s chapel was built on the site of some old horror and that something connected that emplacement to this one. He was also quite sure that Nanon had been here, very near to where he now stood, and not very long ago, though he did not know the source of any of these certainties. But the fear drained out of him, lanced like a boil. He could still feel a hollow where the fear had been, there in the soft spot on the bottom of his brain.
He stood before another leafy niche, where a candle illuminated an image of the Mater Dolorosa, long bright sword piercing into her heart. Below it hung a loop of pearlescent, pale blue beads, and framed by the beads was a fragment of mirror. When the doctor looked into it, he saw nothing. Where his reflected visage should have been was empty air.
The thrum in the back of his head intensified. The doctor turned toward it, but of course it was always behind him. Riau had entered the peristyle and stood, relaxed but motionless, in the same pose he’d had with the girl.
Something changed in the tone of the distant singing. The drums had opened a deeper throat.
Jé mwen . . .
mwen pè gade
Jé mwen . . .
Mwen pè gade sa-a . . .
The doctor became aware that Riau was centered on a filament that ran through the top of his head through his coccyx, through the bottom of his heel. It coursed from the bottom of the ocean to the starlit crown of the sky with Riau’s whole being suspended on it weightless as a thread.
My eyes . . .
I fear to see
My eyes
I’m afraid to look at that . . .
The doctor’s own body began to turn on the same axis as Riau’s. The drum beat in the back of his head was lost in its own overtones, the hum of bees, urgent stroking of thousands of butterfly wings, and the song dropped into a heart-wrenching minor key.
Mwen vini lwen . . .
Kouman yo yé
Kouman yo yé
Mwen pralé lwen
Kouman yo yé
Kouman yo yé a . . .
He was aware that his body was falling, the gourd released from his numb arm to offer an oblation of spilled rum in a neat circle on the ground. He was no more with his body, but surging upward on that invisible filament with a flowering rush of speed his body, the whole circle of Moustique’s peristyle shrinking away in the bright disappearing lens of a spyglass reversed. In the center of the vanishing orb Cléo and Isidor appeared to dance like marionettes, like insects—a whistling emptiness replaced them. The stars churned into a whirlpool of silver and from the vortex stepped Nanon, unfastening her bodice, her face calm, compassionate, certain. She opened her heart, reached in with both hands, and presented to the doctor, of all strange things, his glasses.
“You fainted,” Maillart said.
“What?
” The doctor was somewhere beside the source of his own voice.
“You fainted,” Maillart said patiently. “Christ, what a night.”
“I was watching the dancing,” the doctor said. There had been something more but he couldn’t remember it.
“You are not yet restored enough from the siege,” Maillart suggested. “Or maybe it’s a relapse of your fever.”
The starry vortex whirled again before the doctor’s eye. He blinked and saw the ordinary ceiling. There was a rocking feeling in his head as if he had been too long on a boat. What were those words the drum had carried?
I come from afar,
How are they?
How are they doing?
I’m going a long way
How are they?
Now he was lying in a bed, not a hammock, with four posts solidly planted on the floor of one of the back rooms of the Arnaud grand’case. With a start, he snatched for his glasses, and as he grasped them the whole string of events from when he’d left the bamboche to when he’d collapsed in Moustique’s peristyle came into alignment.
His watch had been laid on the table beside his glasses. The doctor covered his pulse with his thumb and watched the second hand tick off a minute.
“I don’t have fever,” he pronounced.
“Well and good,” said Maillart. “You’re fit to travel?”
The doctor sat up and swung his feet to the floor. He felt unusually calm and clear, as if his odd fit of the night before had somehow rinsed his brain.
“Yes, I think so,” he replied.
Early light came leaking through the jalousies covering the windows, striping over his bare toes. He could hear Cléo’s voice somewhere else in the house, murmuring to Isidor. The sound reminded him strangely of last night’s vacant mirror. Surely, one day all trace of his doing and his being would be effaced, but somehow this thought did not disturb him now.
“Riau has gone,” Maillart said. “With his horse and his gear.”
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 77