The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Bay’l dlo nan je’w,” she said, encouraging. Give him water from your eyes. Her voice was gentler than Elise had ever heard it. “You are coming back to the world now.” She held Elise’s head between her hands. “There is no death,” she said. “There’s only change.”

  Isaac was troubled, Placide felt, when Captain Paltre toppled from his place at the table, and convulsed with his vomiting on the floor. Isaac might even have gone to assist him, but Placide touched his knee beneath the table to hold him back. He himself felt only an abstract interest. The illness of Daspir or Guizot would have touched him more.

  Toussaint was watching, his attention pointed, as Doctor Hébert went down the table to direct Paltre’s removal from the hall. He said no word and made no gesture, but Placide felt a phrase from long ago appear in his mind, as plainly as if his father had repeated it aloud. Konpè Général Lafièvre . . .

  The banquet did not last much longer. When Toussaint had concluded his courtesies with Leclerc, all of them mounted and rode from the town. By midnight they had regained the camp of General Fressinet on the Mornet plateau, and there they halted for what remained of the night. Toussaint slept soundly, next to Isaac, surrounded by two thousand of his guard, but Placide volunteered for the watch. A very considerable guard had been posted, considering that all hostilities had officially ended. Placide stayed with Riau and Guiaou, who remained alert but completely silent, till the first roosters began to crow at dawn.

  At first light they rode to Marmelade, and there Toussaint dismissed his guard, as he had agreed with Leclerc to do. For a quarter-hour he spoke to the men, praising their courage and their devotion, and finally recommending them all to the way of peace. When he had done, he embraced all of the officers, and many of the men came to embrace him too, and some could not stop themselves from crying. Placide felt himself begin to weaken, from the exhaustion of the last day and night and the longer, deeper weariness of the whole campaign, but he kept his eyes dry, distracting himself by changing into civilian clothes and packing away his uniform and helmet. The red cloth Guiaou had given him he kept folded in the pocket of his shirt.

  Guiaou and Guerrier had vanished with the main body of the guard, which was meant to report back to Leclerc at Le Cap, but Riau and Bienvenu were riding with them still, part of the much smaller escort that accompanied them from Marmelade on the ascent of Pilboreau, divested of their uniforms, though carrying their arms. Only Isaac still wore the dress uniform of Bonaparte’s gift, seemingly unaware of its incongruity.

  On the height of Pilboreau, Dessalines awaited them, with a larger force than now rode with Toussaint. Both generals dismounted, to confer for half an hour’s time. Toussaint let Dessalines know that although Leclerc was not willing to give him a military post immediately (as he had done with Christophe and most of the other generals), Dessalines’s surrender had been accepted with Toussaint’s, and he need not expect to be pursued. If Dessalines did not seem wholly content with this news, he did not voice any objection to it either. In silence, he rode away with his men toward Marchand, where he was supposed to retire to Habitation Georges.

  Toussaint was bound to follow the same road, as far as Ennery, where he’d elected to retire on his plantations, but he lingered a little while on Pilboreau, so as not to follow too closely on the heels of Dessalines. The market at the crossroads was uncharacteristically silent; indeed no trading was taking place, and the women did not even cry their wares. All were silent at their places, but gradually more and more people began to filter out of the foggy trees on either side of the road, men and women and children alike, until the crowd of onlookers numbered some hundreds.

  At last, as Toussaint climbed to his horse, a woman in a spotted headcloth called to him.

  “Papa Toussaint, have you abandoned us?”

  Toussaint took off his hat and stared for a moment into the crown of it, then looked at the woman who had spoken, and swept his gaze over all the people who were there.

  “No, my children,” he said finally. “Your brothers are still under arms, and the officers are at their posts.”

  As they moved out, the crowd moved with them, but silently, and conserving a little distance—the people never came within hand’s reach. When Placide had passed this way in their first return to Ennery, he’d felt the boundaries between himself and all the others wash away, and the bitterness of the difference between that day and this one was so large he had to struggle to swallow it. The others all rode with their heads bowed low, and even Isaac looked a little uncertain—not quite so happy as he had been earlier, to be restored to the bosom of France.

  Gradually the crowd fell away behind them. A few children ran behind the horses, till their mothers called them back. And always, at every bend of the descending road, appeared a couple of people, four or five or half a dozen, to watch solemnly after them as they rode deeper into solitude.

  39

  When Elise’s eyes opened, a shadow lay over her, hawk-beaked and dark. It blocked the brilliant light of the sun beyond the doorway, and so at first she was afraid, believing that the demon of that low black cross had come for her, but the words of Maman Maig’ sounded in her head, You are coming back to the world. Two hands were holding one of her own and stroking it, down into the hollow of her wrist where her pulse beat closest under the skin. She saw Dieufait with one of the little girls of the lakou, watching from beyond the threshold: curious, tentative, half amused.

  It was a little longer before the features of Xavier Tocquet came clear in the indoor shade, and as she recognized him, he let go her hand and traced a line from the corner of her eye down to her jaw below her ear. When his finger first indented her skin, she had to control an impulse to flinch, but his touch was gentle all along its track.

  “You’ve had a bad time,” he said. “But you’ve lived through it.”

  He shifted his head, and a blade of light struck through the doorway into her face. Her eyes were aching in her sockets. But before she could speak, he laid his forefinger across her lips.

  “Don’t say it.” He paused. “I haven’t told you everything. We can be better quit of this without a word.”

  He took away his finger, but Elise said nothing. She could see his eyes more plainly now; they looked distant to her, considering.

  “Sometimes one has to live alone with what one knows,” he said.

  She nodded. It seemed to her that the cool sensation of his finger sealed her voice still. He lifted a bowl from the ground and gave her water. As she swallowed, the two children smiled and ducked their heads and skipped out of the doorway.

  “Sophie is waiting,” Tocquet said. “And Mireille. Will you come back?”

  “I’m ready,” Elise said.

  The pain in her lower abdomen was duller than before when she struggled to sit up. Tocquet got an arm under her shoulders and helped her to her feet. As they stepped out together, he put his own straw hat on her head to shield her from the sun. The irregular circle of the hûnfor rocked around her for a second or two, then stabilized. Everyone who watched her emerge—Paulette, Fontelle, Marie-Noelle, and her husband’s familiars Gros-Jean and Bazau—had shrunk to the palm panels of the perimeter to seek whatever shreds of shade could be found in the midday sun.

  Tocquet released her and walked to where Maman Maig’ stood motionless beside the striped poteau mitan. When he let go, Elise felt a reel, but it was only inward; she was standing solidly enough on her own two feet. The lank, dark rope of Tocquet’s hair lay as always between his shoulder blades, secured with its thong, but when he lowered his head, she saw for the first time that the skin of his scalp showed indistinctly through the hair on top. He had taken both Maman Maig’ ’s hands in his and dropped his forehead to her breastbone, and in this gesture Elise saw that he really did value her own life and wanted for her to remain with him.

  “Eh, Madame . . .” Bazau and Gros-Jean were both hurrying toward her, solicitous, for now she really had begun to swoon, the straw
hat slipping sideways on her head as her knees began to dissolve. But Tocquet reached her first. He put one arm around her waist and the other hand under her elbow, and so, with Gros-Jean leading and Bazau following, supported her down the narrow twisting trail from the lakou to the corner of the street below, where a carriage waited.

  General Pamphile de Lacroix, clothed in the finest dress uniform that campaigning in such a climate had left him, walked from the dockside up the slope toward the Government House, in the company of Major Maillart. The afternoon heat was beginning to abate, and people of every color and station were emerging from the afternoon siesta onto the streets, yet no one took any particular notice of the French general’s passage—no more than to step just barely out of his way as he advanced. So far as Maillart could see, Lacroix did not take exception to this failure of respect. He was an amiable, practical man, far less attached to the protocols of his rank than most of the French general officers.

  Then as they reached the Rue Espagnole, they crossed a rumor of the coming of General Dessalines, who was arriving to present his compliments to Captain-General Leclerc for the first time since the peace. When Dessalines did appear on the street, the people who lined the narrow walkway under the balconies, men and women and children alike, of every color without distinction, prostrated themself before his passage, bowing so deeply that the dust of the street whitened their hair. Only Isabelle Cigny and Claudine Arnaud, who happened to be standing near the gate of the Government compound, took no special notice of Dessalines’s arrival. They remained upright, Isabelle willowy and Claudine somewhat rigidly so, under the parasol that Isabelle held to cover both of them. Dessalines’s eyes swept across the two women, though if he had actually taken any notice of them was hard to discern. The gate to the compound opened to him, with salutes and the sounding of a trumpet, and he strode up in the direction of the building.

  “Madame Cigny, Madame Arnaud,” Maillart said. “I present you the General Pamphile de Lacroix—my commander at Port-au-Prince and the battle of La Crête à Pierrot, and a very good soldier on behalf of us all.”

  Isabelle smiled and dropped a courtsey. Claudine offered her left hand; Maillart watched Lacroix subdue his start when the stump of her missing finger bumped his palm.

  “The General has come from Port-au-Prince,” Maillart went on. “He will remain here with us for a short time before going on to take up a post in the Cibao Mountains.”

  “Ah,” said Isabelle. “And how did you find the situation in the west?”

  “I find that my departure is precipitate,” said Lacroix. “Like that of the General Boudet not long ago. The colonial troops of that region no longer see before them the generals who led their last campaign, and so their natural mistrust becomes more active.”

  “You are frank,” Isabelle smiled, and tapped his cuff with the edge of her fan. “I like that in a general.”

  “I like a lady who will not bow before that slaughterer who has just passed,” Lacroix said. “As I noticed you did not. When I think of the massacres at Verrettes and Petite Rivière and Saint Marc—”

  “Indeed, one prefers not to think of them,” Isabelle said, as if to arrest his indiscretion. “As for the others—his power awes or terrifies them.”

  “Madame.” Lacroix inclined his head. “Your perception of that matter seems most clear.”

  “Thank you,” said Isabelle. “I am at home this evening. Major Maillart is most familiar with the way.” With a smile she stroked his coat sleeve with her light fingers, then put her hand on Claudine Arnaud’s elbow and led her, unblinking and apparently oblivious to anything that had occurred, away along the busying street.

  With Lacroix, Maillart walked into the Government compound, up the stairs through the main door, and down the corridor. In the Captain-General’s anteroom, Dessalines turned toward Lacroix, though he looked over his shoulder, at the newly plastered fire cracks in the wall, instead of meeting the French general’s eyes.

  “I am the General Dessalines,” he said in a harsh voice. “In unhappy times I have heard much talk of you.”

  For a moment Lacroix did not reply; then Leclerc emerged from the inner cabinet to give him some brief and dismissive instruction, even as he walked Dessalines inside. Soon Maillart and Lacroix were retracing their steps, back along the corridor and down the steps toward the gate.

  “He must feel himself very strong to strike that attitude,” Lacroix muttered. Maillart turned toward him to catch, in a still lower voice, almost a whisper: “I don’t suppose he will look so assured once chained in the hold of a brig bound for France.”

  “He is to be deported, then,” Maillart said, scanning his eyes suspiciously over all the people streaming past him along the Rue Espagnole. “When Leclerc has just assigned him a new command?”

  “That action is against the instruction of the First Consul,” Lacroix said shortly, as they turned uphill toward the Champ de Mars. “He has ordered quite plainly that Leclerc must rid himself of all the leaders of the insurrection. Thus far he has failed to comply.”

  Maillart looked at him curiously. The reasons for Leclerc’s reliance on black troops and their officers was no mystery; he’d heard Lacroix discuss it before. With so many of his European troops either slain or in hospital, Leclerc had scarcely any other force to rely on. But he made no comment, for the hospital was their destination and now its gate was visible, just at the end of the block.

  As the afternoon sun declined behind the wall above the ravine, the doctor watched Madame Fortier watch Nanon, who crouched, beside the pallet of Captain Paltre, spooning a clear broth between his slack jaws. The other three captains leaned against the wall, also observing this procedure, scraping their shoulders on the rough-laid brick as they shifted their feet, but Madame Fortier did not spare them so much as an ironic glance. In recent days she had appointed herself in charge of the whole crew of nurses here, who accepted her authority without a murmur. What moved her the doctor couldn’t have said, though he thought it could not be any special affection for the invading French soldiers.

  Paltre choked and turned his head to one side, gagging, projecting a stream of black, foul-smelling vomit onto the ground beside his pallet. At the snap of Madame Fortier’s fingers another of the nurses came forward to clean the vile stuff up. As Paltre subsided, weak and gasping, Madame Fortier scraped a little loose dirt over the residue of the vomit with the side of her shoe.

  Paltre’s eyes drifted shut. Nanon laid a hand on his forehead, turning an ear toward the ragged sound of his breathing. Then she withdrew her hand and stood up, smoothing her skirts and coolly returning the gaze of the three captains by the wall. When they had dropped their eyes, she turned from them and walked, with the slightest swing in her step, down the rows of other ailing men toward the hospital gate, where Maillart and General Pamphile de Lacroix were just arriving.

  When she had gone, the three captains detached themselves from the wall and approached, but only Cyprien knelt beside Paltre’s pallet, and even he lacked the courage to touch him. Whatever Cyprien might have murmured was thoroughly muffled by the scented handkerchief with which he shielded his nose and mouth. Paltre did not respond to anything he said, and presently Cyprien abandoned his effort and stood up. On his pallet, Paltre stirred and moaned in his delirium. With a horsetail whisk she held in her hand, Madame Fortier brushed off a fly that had settled on his nostrils.

  “Will he recover?” Guizot said, looking at the doctor with his usual expression of devotion. He’d put this question day after day, since Paltre had first been stricken.

  “I can’t be certain,” said the doctor, and then, when he saw that all three of the captains still seemed to be searching his face, “I have recovered from this disease myself, and have sometimes seen others survive it, so at least I can say that recovery is possible.”

  The captains nodded, mumbled, shuffled their feet, and turned away. A faint breeze stirred the leaves of the tall palms as they passed under them. The
wall above the ravine had stretched its shadow across the first row of the moribund below it. The captains exchanged brief courtesies with Maillart and Pamphile de Lacroix, who stood with Nanon just within the gate. Madame Fortier watched, with her hand on her hip, until they’d moved outside beyond the gateposts. With a sniff and a shrug she moved along the rows of the sick and wounded, in the opposite direction from the doctor, who was going down to greet the newcomers.

  “Tell me, how do you get on?” said General Lacroix.

  “Neither well nor far,” said the doctor, accepting the hand Lacroix had offered. “It’s only the disease that progresses here.”

  “Truly,” said Lacroix. “I have recommended to the Captain-General that our new arrivals be sent to the eastern mountains, where all this dangerous miasma is swept away by the wind, until they are better acclimated to this place. But as you see, our situation is such that they must all be hurled into the abyss at the moment they first debark, and perish before they can render any service.”

  The doctor glanced briefly at Maillart. The candor of General Lacroix was surprising, and yet the predicament was obvious enough, at least to anyone in his own position. He held Lacroix’s gaze for a moment and then looked away, along the close-packed rows of the dying. Even in the open air the stench of their putrid humors was abominable. The scheme of transporting yellow fever patients to the height of La Vigie had not materialized—the rate of fresh infection was so staggering that it could not be achieved. In the weeks since Toussaint’s submission to Leclerc, the doctor had seen a couple of thousand troops march straight from their ships into their graves, this hospital only a way station on their passage to La Fossette. Most expired within a day or two of their first symptoms—Paltre’s long lingering was exceptional, and perhaps after all he would survive, though for many days he had seemed unable either to live or die.

  “There is no cure,” the doctor said, looking into Lacroix’s amiable face, answering what he supposed to be the unspoken question behind his eyes. “Some do recover, but by a reason of their own fortitude which I cannot explain. We can do nothing, really, to save them here.”