The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “You are wrong,” Dessalines said. “Sooner or later our whole people will rise up against the French all as one.”

  “I know it,” Toussaint said. Guiaou’s eyes turned to him. The yellow madras cloth made a tight line above his eyes. He stroked his jawbone as he spoke, as if the words pained him when they came out. “But Christophe has undone us. Now the Cordon of the North is lost, we must come to terms, if only for a time.”

  “Christophe,” said Dessalines. “Christophe would never have dared to burn Le Cap without your order. And he would never have taken his head to give to the blancs at Le Cap without your order either. This I know.”

  “Believe as you choose.” Toussaint’s voice was hard. With his next words, it softened slightly. “When the rivers have overflowed we will fight them again. When the rains and the fevers have come. But now—let us wait for them to weaken. These new soldiers who have just come in the ships make them too strong.”

  “You are wrong,” Dessalines said. “We ought to hold out in the mountains until that time you talk about.” His left hand tightened still harder on the snuffbox. Guiaou was surprised his fingers did not bleed. “Never, never betray ourselves to them.”

  “Give me that box,” Toussaint rapped out. For a moment, Dessalines looked purely astonished. Guiaou thought for a moment he would refuse. And then? He shifted his weight slightly, so that his hand swung a little toward the handle of his coutelas. At the edge of his eyes he felt Bienvenu watching him. But Dessalines relaxed and sent the box spinning across the table toward Toussaint.

  “You hate tobacco,” Dessalines said.

  “Yes,” said Toussaint. He left the box where it had stopped; he did not touch it. “Maybe you are afraid that the Captain-General will hold you to account for everyone you massacred at Saint Marc and Port-au-Prince and Petite Rivière.”

  “I am not afraid of anything,” Dessalines said, and then, as his eyes dropped away from Toussaint’s, he added: “to do with the Captain-General.”

  Toussaint nodded to Riau, who went on reading: As soon as the state of the troops commanded by Dessalines shall have reached me, I will make known my intentions as to the position they should occupy—

  And Toussaint raised his hand. “He will not pursue you for anything that you have done until this day,” he said. “This I have arranged for you, though not without much trouble.”

  To this Dessalines gave a terribly twisted smile. He turned his face toward the shuttered doorways.

  “And also this—he swears, before the eyes of the Supreme Being, to respect the liberty of all people of Saint Domingue.”

  “And you believe it,” Dessalines said.

  “He has sworn it,” Toussaint said. But this time it was his eyes that skated away. He got up, soundlessly, and left the room. Placide and Monpoint rose and followed him. Riau and Guerrier and Guiaou remained. Dessalines was staring at the snuffbox; the lamplight gave it a coal-like glow. He seemed to constrict still more tightly upon himself.

  “If I yield one hundred times,” he muttered, “I will betray them one hundred times.”

  Then he too got up and left the room, pocketing the snuffbox as he passed.

  Guiaou swallowed. No matter the water he had just drunk, his tongue was sticky and his throat dry. The departure of the generals did not lighten the weight he felt on his chest.

  “Will you come with us?” Riau was speaking to Bienvenu. But Bienvenu, instead of answering, dropped himself into the chair where Dessalines had sat. He looked at the polished sheen of the tabletop intently, as if he could still see the reflection of Dessalines’s snuffbox there.

  “If I give myself up one hundred times,” Bienvenu repeated, “I will betray them one hundred times.” He raised his head. The lamplight made his eyes look yellow.

  “With Toussaint it is the same,” Riau told him. “Even if he did not say so.”

  Now Guiaou was watching Riau, who seemed to draw the confidence Guiaou had lost up through the ground beneath the floor, through the soles of his booted feet. In his heart Guiaou believed that he himself owned more of Toussaint’s trust, but Riau, who had the secret of the words on paper, owned more of Toussaint’s knowledge.

  Bienvenu passed a hand across his face. “Is it true?” he said.

  Riau turned to Guiaou, and raised a fingertip to trace the furrow of the old sword scar that slashed down from his temple across the flesh of his cheek. This was strange, for Riau and Guiaou had not touched one another with their hands since the time long ago when they had tried to kill one another over Merbillay. They were friends now. They claimed the same children. But they did not touch. Riau moved his finger carefully, as he might have traced a line of words over paper, and Guiaou felt blood spreading under his skin, along the edges of the scar.

  “It’s true,” Riau said. He dropped his hand, inhaled once deeply, and left the room through the door Toussaint and Dessalines had used. After a moment, the other two men followed him.

  At dusk, when Doctor Hébert returned to the Cigny house, he found Zabeth and Michau crouched in the foyer, scrubbing blood from the floor with hard-bristled brushes.

  “What has happened?” he said, though by the seizure of his throat he thought he knew. Zabeth gave him a stricken look.

  “Madamn Elise endispozé,” she said. Madame Elise has fainted.

  The house felt cold, though it was not. “Where is she?” he said.

  “Maman Maig’ has taken her.” Zabeth lowered her head over her scrub brush.

  He hurried through the darkening streets. Some people were already carrying torches, and that unnerved the doctor slightly, much as he told himself the town was secure. What was to stop them setting it afire again? Maybe it had never really stopped burning.

  He found Isabelle wringing her hands on the steps of the shell of the church atop the hill. Claudine stood beside the three wooden crosses, her brittle hair loosed in the wind and streaming out behind her.

  The doctor stopped wordless before Isabelle. “I can’t go down there,” she said, twisting her head toward the trail that wrapped around the church. “It frightens me—I can’t.”

  “It’s all right,” the doctor said. “I am here. You must go home.”

  He went to Claudine and touched her elbow. “Please take her to her house,” he said. Claudine placed his hand between both of hers. For a moment he felt the stub of her missing finger pressing a vein on the back of his hand. She nodded to him, without speaking.

  The way down from the church to the lakou was a goat path, and as he hurried through the dark the doctor lost footing on the shale and slid the remaining distance on the seat of his pants. Moustique appeared at his side to help him up. Someone shifted one of the palm panels to admit them to the hûnfor.

  Four candles burned around the central post with its rainbow twining. The candles made a yellow orb within the bluer starlight that rained down from the sky. In the shadow behind it, some twenty feet away, was a low, squat cross with short, heavy arms. It must have always been there, the doctor supposed, but he did not remember it. It was not the cross of Christ, of that much he was certain. As he turned from it, he felt something of the fear that Isabelle had mentioned.

  At the opposite end of the line the cross and central post defined, more candles had been lit around an open doorway. Hesitantly the doctor approached. The cold pressure of that dark cross lay on the back of his neck. Moustique dropped a pace behind him. Within the shelter, his sister lay on a bed of freshly cut green boughs, her eyes closed, and still as death. The doctor halted a few feet from the threshold. His breath stopped. It did not appear to him that Elise was breathing either. She was as frostily pale as the sheet that covered her.

  “Li pako mouri.” The doctor turned his head toward the voice of Maman Maig’ at his left. She is not dead yet. The massive figure of the mambo was barely distinguishable from the darkness in which she stood. He wanted to think it was all her doing, but he knew she had only done what Elise asked.

&nb
sp; “I have the knowledge from slavery time,” Maman Maig’ said, as if responding to his thought. “In that time, many children were sent back, beneath the waters, before their eyes could open on the prison of their days.”

  The doctor could find no reply. Nanon had come up on his right side, and placed her hand on the small of his back. The warmth of her palm encouraged him. He stepped forward, knelt, and lifted Elise’s limp wrist. Her pulse beat faintly, under the skin. She stirred and murmured but did not wake. He laid her arm down on the springy boughs. As he rose he saw that Fontelle and Paulette were watching him from beyond the candles.

  “Do you have the knowledge to save her?” Maman Maig’ said.

  “No,” said the doctor. “No, I don’t.”

  “Fok w priyé,” Maman Maig’ said. Then you must pray. After a pause she added, “We are all praying.”

  The doctor felt somehow calmed by this statement. He bowed to Maman Maig’, brushed Nanon’s cheek with his lips, and moved in the direction of the central post. Now it seemed to him that the cross on the other side of it must be the gateway of death itself, but yet it was not certain that Elise would pass through it.

  Still in the dust beneath the candles was a shard of mirror he had left there long ago. He stopped to examine it, then started back. In the place where he’d expected his own features hung a star.

  Placide left the mass at Marmelade, well before it had concluded— before the Act of Contrition and the Peace. Toussaint would be angry were he aware of his departure, but he was unlikely to notice from where he sat on the front bench, unfolding all the torment into his heart to the all-seeing eye of BonDyé. So many times in this campaign, Placide had seen Toussaint bring his remorse to the altar, like some animal he led to sacrifice, or his uncertainty, if ever he were uncertain. Toussaint emerged from these observances both salved and resolved. But lately, Placide found no balm in them. And today the decision had already been made. In an hour’s time they would ride for Mornet, to make an official submission to the French.

  He walked along the road that climbed from the upper edge of Marmelade in the direction of Dondon. On a high, tight turn he stopped and looked back over the town square, where still the sound of singing rose from the church, with the high chime of the priest’s brass bell. It unsettled him, to the point of nausea, to be so far out of accord with his father. Though he knew his father must know better—certainly, he must—Placide would have followed Dessalines, to hold out in the mountains.

  He took the red cloth from his pocket, shook it out in the cool dawn breeze, and bound it to his head. The band of pressure around his temples and the pressure of the knot at the base of his skull seemed to steady his focus. The irritable buzzing of his thoughts was not completely silenced, but grew quieter. It was a lesser version of the silent calm the cloth gave him for battle, a calm so deep sometimes that he would emerge on the other side of it with no memory of what had taken place or what he himself had done.

  Above and below the road where he stood, many soldiers were camped in pockets on the slopes, and now Guiaou and Guerrier appeared from the mouth of a little ravine and came toward Placide— almost as if his assumption of the head cloth had called them. He smiled at the thought. He knew very well that Guiaou and Guerrier were apt to appear at his heels whenever he wandered alone from camp—it might have been at his father’s order, but he thought it more likely to be their own initiative.

  When they were near enough, he touched their hands and returned their smiles. Guerrier yawned and shivered slightly. It was early, the morning mist still lifting from the trees, and still a little chilly at this height. Somewhere in the jungle above the road a drum began to tap, then throb, and Placide turned his ear toward it; at the moment it had more of his sympathy than the doleful chanting still audible from the church. With the movement of his head he caught sight of Riau and Bienvenu coming up the road from town. The two of them must have also absconded from the mass.

  “One day we will bring you to the drums,” Guiaou said.

  Placide did not answer, though his attention was well captured. A tingle ran from the back of his head down his spine. Riau had come close enough to hear that last sentence.

  “His Papa will be angry if we bring him,” Riau said.

  “Poukisa?” said Guiaou. Why?

  “He wants to give the boy’s head to Jesus,” Riau said.

  Though they were talking past him, Placide did not mind it. Instead he found it strangely comforting.

  “Do you think so?” Guiaou said. Pressing a palm against Placide’s head cloth, he gave the smile turned hideous by his scars. “I don’t think it was Jesus dancing in his head those times we fought the blancs.” The smile faded. “But all that is under the eye of BonDyé, like everything.”

  “Sa,” said Riau. It is so.

  Behind him, Bienvenu was nodding. The edge of the sun just cleared the ridge, throwing a single beam toward the center of the square below them, and picking out an ornately garbed horseman now riding in, escorted by several drabber companions. Placide blinked and rubbed his eyes. Yes, it was his brother Isaac, wearing the dress uniform which Bonaparte had given him.

  He wanted to run, but held himself in. There was a dignity to sustain, but still he strode along so quickly that a couple of times he stumbled on the gravelly descent. Isaac jumped down from his horse to embrace him, then pushed him to arm’s length. Under Isaac’s examination, Placide felt a certain pride that his uniform was worn and stained from his campaigning, while his brother’s was pristine. Or maybe that was vanity.

  “So it is finished,” Isaac said. “There will be peace, after all your battles.”

  Placide dropped his arms, though Isaac still gripped him by the shoulders. He wasn’t sure that it was meant to sting, but his brother’s remark had stung him.

  “And Maman?” he said, to cover his resentment.

  “She is well, and sends her love to you,” Isaac told him. “She stays now at Vincindière, till everything is settled, but then she will come back to Ennery.”

  Placide nodded. “I am glad to know that she is well, and to see you so,” he said.

  Isaac still gripped the points of his shoulders and searched his face, his eyes under the red band of the head cloth.

  “You’ve changed,” he said thoughtfully, and the sour bubble of Placide’s ill-feeling burst into warmth.

  “Yes,” he said, and pulled his brother to him. “But you—you have not changed.”

  Then Toussaint was coming out of the church, surrounded by Monpoint and Gabart and Morisset and the others, and Isaac broke from Placide and ran to him. Placide stood aside from their embrace, thinking that after all it made some kind of sense that Isaac should somewhat resent how he’d been so much closer to their father since their return. Even if it was Isaac’s own decision that had brought this difference about. You will give in to the French, after all your battles—well, Isaac had not phrased it quite that way. But Placide was struck by another, iron-hard thought: Though I must bow my head to them, I will not give it.

  An hour before noon, Captain Daspir was summoned by General Hardy, who, with no explanation, led him to the stables behind the barracks on the Rue Espagnole. A pair of grooms was just leading out an enormous white stallion, who tossed his head and fought their close grip either side of the bit, eyes rolling.

  “I’ve seen that you are something of a rider,” Hardy said. “Do you suppose you can man that animal?”

  “It would be my honor to try,” Daspir said.

  “Have at it, then,” said Hardy. “Others have failed.”

  Daspir found it necessary to dry his palms on his trouser legs before he caught the stallion’s mane and swung himself up. No sooner was he seated than the horse broke free of the hands on the bit rings and snapped his head up sharply, with a rear. Daspir had just time to turn his face aside, or his nose would surely have been broken. As it was he was half stunned by the impact, but maybe that saved him, for his first responses were
all instinct; he could not spoil them by thinking. Bel Argent bunched his legs and erupted in a great wriggling buck—Daspir felt the horse’s spine worm under him like a dragon’s. He held on with his knees, firm but not too tight. The reins were loose, and when the horse landed he decided to run. Daspir didn’t fight him. As his head cleared, he took up some rein but put no pressure on the bit. The gate from the stableyard to the Champ de Mars was open and Bel Argent stampeded through it. A couple of sentries dove out of the way. Daspir’s eyes were streaming. The hedge that bordered the parade ground was rushing up toward him and he knew that this horse could sail over it with no hesitation, but he didn’t know what was on the other side, and it was time to exert some kind of control. He tightened the left rein slightly and the stallion turned and galloped more smoothly now, along the hedge.

  Daspir resumed breathing. He let Bel Argent make two full-tilt circuits of the Champ de Mars, then brought him gradually to a canter, then a trot. He was riding Toussaint’s horse. Delighted, he rode the stallion through the stable gate, still snorting and picking his feet up high, and reined him to a stop before General Hardy.

  “Excellent,” Hardy said. “Your abilities have not been exaggerated, Captain. You are to go with these gentlemen to Mornet—the Captain-General has a rendezvous there with Toussaint Louverture, but he is unable to be present.” Hardy smiled, a little ironically. “We wanted to see you well mounted, as the distance is considerable, and the hour already late.” He handed Daspir a sealed packet. “Here, take these dispatches; they are directed to Toussaint.”

  Guizot was a member of their party, riding a distinctly less spirited horse, and also a handsome young black colonel, Robillard. Two squadrons of cavalry provided them with a rather heavy escort—and would certainly slow their pace. Bel Argent led the procession; Daspir felt no more than a passenger, till he was inspired to divert them all from the Rue Espagnole to the Rue Vaudreuil. As he’d passionately hoped, Isabelle Cigny was taking the air on her balcony, and Daspir greeted her with a great flourish of his hat. Isabelle smiled with what appeared to be genuine amazement. She fluttered her handkerchief, and Daspir thought she might have blown him a kiss, but just then Major Maillart appeared beside her on the balcony.