He stood up, panting, holding the coat by the shoulders. Everyone near him was dead or surrendered or of his own party. The stranger who had knocked down his gun barrel stood by watching him curiously.
“It looks that you don’t like the colored men,” he said.
“Sa,” Guiaou said. “I don’t like them.” He looked at the other, a small, wiry man with springy clumps of muscle bunched under his velvety skin. “What is your name?”
“I am called Couachy—and you?”
Guiaou folded the coat under one arm and reached out to embrace Couachy—they were each a little sticky from the blood of their enemies, so their skins separated with a slight tacky feel.
“M rélé Guiaou,” he said.
Before the end of that day they had reached Petite Rivière again, but they passed on without going into the village, marched an hour after darkness, and camped in the hills. Forty of the slaves who’d been armed by the English marched in the midst of their body, prisoners now. In the night some few of these slipped away and no one interfered with their escape, but on the next morning Moyse spoke to the ones who remained and said that if they would join the army of Toussaint they would be soldiers and free. A man named Jacquot, who seemed to be a leader among them, asked for what white nation or white general they would be fighting for then, and Moyse answered, for none; they would be fighting for their freedom and the freedom of other black people. Jacquot asked if their guns would be given back to them, and Moyse said that they would be given weapons after they had come to the main encampment in the north.
They went on. Guiaou began the day’s march wearing the red coat he had taken from the English soldier, but Moyse rode back down the line and ordered all the men wearing such plundered coats to take them off, so they should not be shot from a distance by others who might think that they were English invaders. Guiaou was not discontent—it was hot to wear such a coat and he had more weight to carry than before: the Englishman’s boots and his musket and the pistol he had worn in his belt.
All during their return they kept to the mornes, avoiding any passage across the open country of the plain. They kept away from any villages or other encampments that they passed, bivouacking in the bush and eating food they carried or could forage. The distance and difficulty of this route added a day’s time to their journey, but they went in great good cheer, and during the last afternoon before they came to Ennery, hunters went out and killed wild pigs and goats. That day they reached Habitation Thibodet in time to shelter from the rain beneath their own ajoupas, and when the rain had stopped, many fires were built and the air was soon full of the smell of roasting meat.
Moyse and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who remained in command during the absence of Toussaint, ordered an extra ration of tafia for the men who had been in the fighting. Guiaou sat with Quamba and Couachy and the new man, Jacquot, drinking his share of rum and eating goat meat hot from the boucan. He wondered where Toussaint had gone, since he had not returned to this encampment, but the thought did not really trouble him and after he had drunk more rum he forgot about it. For the first time he looked into the pockets of the red coat, where he found a thin gold ring which would just fit over the first joint of his smallest finger, and some folded papers with writing on them which he threw onto the boucan fire, and a gold case on a chain which looked like a watch but which when he opened it held a picture of a white woman instead. The Englishman’s musket seemed better to him than the one he had been given when he joined Toussaint, partly because of the bayonet attached to it, so he gave the other to Jacquot, who had no weapon otherwise.
As they finished eating they began to hear drumming higher up the hill and voices of women singing in the hûnfor. The talk among them stopped and for a time they listened, heads lowered and their faces turned away from one another. At last there was a general movement among them, with no word. Guiaou put the chain of the picture case around his neck, and he donned the red coat and walked with the three other men up a twisting path toward the sound of drums and voices. Within the torch-lit clearing the hûngan named Joaquim was now calling, Attibon Legba . . . vini nou . . . and the hounsis, swaying in a line before the drums, sang in response. Attibon Legba, come to us.
The hûngan Joaquim stood near a sword driven into the ground, shaking the asson to the beat of the deepest drum. With each snap of his wrist the bead chains rattled on the gourd, and Guiaou felt a shadow pass him, swooping, stooping like the small hawks of the mountains. The scream, wild and desperately inhuman, thrilled him with fear and anticipation. A pace away from Guiaou, Couachy had been struck by the god. Loa of the crossroads, Legba, had come, to open the way from the world of spirits and dead souls to the world of living people.
Legba kanpe nan baryè, the hounsis sang. Legba is standing in the gate . . .
With others, Guiaou moved to support Couachy, who had been staggered by the shock of the descent. His eyes rolled back; when they reopened, the irises were ringed clear round with white—the fixed and alien glare of the possessed. He took a limping step toward the rattling asson, turning around the vertex of its sound. He limped because his joints were wracked and twisted; Legba had made of the body of Couachy the figure of a stooping, grizzled old man, weighed down by a long straw sack that dragged from his shoulder almost to the ground. The singing voices surrounded him.
Attibon Legba
Ouvri baryè pou nou
Attibon Legba
Kité nou pasé . . .
Guiaou’s hands hummed from his contact with the loa, and he felt that the front parts of his mind were darkening. But it was Jacquot, who had also moved to support Couachy, who was taken now, he who shuddered and was transformed.
Attibon Legba
Open the gate for us
Attibon Legba
Let us pass through . . .
The gate was open. Maît’ Kalfou had risen from beneath the waters to stand in the body of Jacquot: Master of the Crossroads. Between Legba and Kalfou the crossroads stood open now, and now Guiaou could feel that opened pathway rushing up his spine—passage from the Island Below Sea inhabited by les Morts et les Mystères. His hips melted into the movement of the drums, and the tails of the red coat swirled around his legs like feathers of a bird. With the other dancers he closed the small, tight circle around Legba and Kalfou, who faced each other as in a mirror: the shining surface of the waters, which divides the living from the dead. Kalfou’s bare muscled arms had raised in the form of the cross, and his head was lowered like a bull’s before a charge. He danced as though he swung suspended from ropes fastened to the dark night sky. The drums quickened and the hounsis sang.
Kalfou sé Kalfou ou yé
Kalfou ouvri rout la
pou moin pasé . . .
Guiaou circulated among the dancers, losing his companions, until he stood before the dancing line of hounsis, watching the woman he had watched before, Merbillay, who had served him coffee. He could feel the nearness of his own spirit, the loa who was the master of his head. The front of his mind grew more and more dark, and a heavy wing seemed to pass before his eyes with a strong beating movement. With one beat he might find himself looking at some tableau from his past (such as that moment when he stood fixed at the desert crossroads, before he found Toussaint, not knowing which road he must take to pass it), and with the next he would again see what was actually before him.
Kalfou, you are Kalfou indeed
Kalfou, open the road
that I may pass . . .
Behind the hounsis were the petite and seconde Rada drums and between them the big-bellied maman tambour, whose player struck it with small mallets, his face fixed and sweat-gleaming. Guiaou saw the flashing of the mallets, a pulse behind his eyes, and the drumming was a pulse in two places where his skull was joined to his neck: Marassa, the divine twins dividing in him, tearing the personal self who was Guiaou from the other that belonged to his maît’têt, the loa Agwé. The tearing sensation was both painful and pleasant, as a snake m
ight feel ripping out of its skin, but at the same time he wanted to remain in his own senses and to look at Merbillay.
Guiaou was fixed on the crossroads once more, looking down one road and the other, setting his foot forward upon neither. He felt Merbillay’s awareness, though she did not look at him. The circle of dancers around Legba and Kalfou blew toward the line of hounsis like a hurricane blowing in on a coast. Away from the other women, Merbillay was drawn into its eye, her left arm lifting by the wrist toward Kalfou’s outstretched arms. The left hand hung like a chicken claw, slack and will-less, and a flash of alarm passed though Guiaou’s whirling head: it was hazardous to give oneself over to Maît’ Kalfou, whose intentions were twisted and unknowable. As Kalfou took the proffered wrist, a movement swelled up from the drums through the tightening circle of dancers, through Legba and Kalfou to stop upon Merbillay as if she were the tip of a whip cracking. The whiplash flung her against the ring of dancers; her eyes rolled back suddenly white in her head as she fell backward, legs kicking and arms jerking like the body of a decapitated chicken. The other hounsis caught her before she hit the ground, sustained her in a hammock of their arms, and Joaquim came to her and whispered in her ear and rubbed her head with a stiff urgent hand. When she stood again, her eyes were hard and glassy because she had become Ghede.
Ghede stood stiff and erect in the body of Merbillay, upright and rigid as a French grand blanc, rigorous even as a corpse (for he was Lord of the Dead, Ghede). Joaquim shook his gourd rattle asson behind the ear of Ghede, while one of the hounsis tore open a murderously hot pepper and placed a seed from it in the corner of Ghede’s eye. Ghede accepted the burn without flinching, without even a blink, though any mortal being would have screamed and collapsed from the pain and fire of it, and so it really was Ghede, Baron Samedi, who called now for his special clairin, which was so hotly spiced with pepper too that an ordinary person could not swallow it. But Ghede drank deeply of this rum, then shook off his supporters and looked about himself.
Around the loa there was quiet, with here and there an uneasy smile, though farther back the drums were still traveling and the hounsis swayed in their line, but in silence. Ghede walked with a high, rubbery goose-stepping gait, looking at one person, then another. His stone-shiny eye was caught by the glitter of the picture case around the neck of Guiaou—he snapped it open and peered at the image of the white woman, then laughed and thrust out his tongue and turned away. Stamping his feet, Ghede turned in a circle, approaching others that hesitated in his area, while Guiaou circulated in an opposite direction, the picture case still dangling open on his bare chest, until Ghede faced him once again. The loa reached out to try the fabric of his coat lapel between thumb and forefinger, tugged a little, and fixed Guiaou with his stone eye.
“This blanc has gone to be with the dead today,” Ghede said. “His coat belongs to me.”
The proposition was inarguable—Guiaou surrendered the coat and Ghede slipped into it and puffed up further, springly erect as a man-part aroused, then bowed his legs and began to dance without moving his feet, rolling his hips and grinning ferociously. A three-foot staff appeared between his legs, tipped with a phallus carved in mahogany, whose smooth tip thrust with Ghede’s hip roll toward the two oval halves and the hinge of the picture that rested on Guiaou’s breastbone. Around them others began to laugh at Ghede’s game, and Guiaou felt his own smile spreading over lips still glossy with goat fat, and he answered Ghede’s dance with his own crouch and grind, until Ghede lost interest and swung away, the prick-tip of his staff seeking other partners, and then, sated with the sex dance, Ghede fell to eating, sitting splay-legged in a corner of the hûnfor with the red coattails fanned out behind him and hurling goat and pork and yams and cassava into the bottomless pit which was the hunger of Ghede.
By that time other loa had mounted their servants, Ogûn Badagris and Damballah and Erzulie, and there were more songs and still more potent drumming, until Guiaou was lost to himself and gave up his head to Agwé, so that he knew no more, himself, about anything that happened in the ceremonies. In a later quieter passage of the night he woke in his own ajoupa without knowing how he had come there. A dream was moving in him when he opened his eyes, nothing of Agwé but the own dream of Guiaou. All the encampment was quiet but for the sound of people breathing in their sleep.
The dream rose then, and using Guiaou’s limbs it stepped outside of the ajoupa onto the hillside swimming in moonlight. Then the dream began to walk, carrying Guiaou’s body by a way he hadn’t known he knew, until it stopped before the shelter where Merbillay slept on her side with her cheek curled in one hand. Behind her a child was sleeping too, wrapped in the red coat which Ghede had claimed.
Guiaou stood still, feet planted on the ground like tree roots, while his body swayed lightly like a tall palm in the breeze and the cool night air prickled on the bare skin of his chest. His dream called in its silent voice to the woman till she woke. She sat up and saw him waiting there; her face was silvered in the moonlight and her eyes were black and swimming. She looked at him for a long time, it seemed, then looked at the child, that he would not wake. As she lay down again, her wrist arched up gracefully and her fingers curved back toward the wrist in a movement that seemed to shape a bridge. Guiaou stooped under the shelter’s dry fringe of leaves, lowering his head as he went in to her.
5
A turning of the road from Limbé brought their party between the river of Haut du Cap and the cemetery of La Fossette. Captain Maillart rode beside Xavier Tocquet, flanked by six black soldiers of Toussaint’s army who had been sent with them as an escort . . . or guard perhaps, Maillart thought, somewhat uneasily. To his left, Tocquet sat his chocolate gelding, seamlessly joined to the saddle. He had pulled the wide brim of his straw hat down to hide his eyes, and he rocked as easily with the horse’s motion as if he were perhaps sleeping, as the blacks sometimes seemed to sleep aboard their burros.
The color was going out of the sky; soon it would be dark. Maillart could see the low roofs of the city of Le Cap, ahead where the river broadened into the bay and anchorage. He was relieved to be reaching the town before nightfall, and yet the passage oppressed him, just in this place. The swampy ground of La Fossette was fetid and unhealthy, putrid with shallowly buried corpses, and the blacks believed it to be frequented by the demons they worshipped—perhaps they were right, the captain thought. He had his own unpleasant associations with the place. He rolled his shoulders and looked toward the river, where a large painted pirogue with a stepped mast and furled sail moved in the brown current toward the town. Two black fishermen in the boat looked at the riders on the road as indifferently as if they were transparent. Ghosts. The fishermen were shirtless, glistening; the one in the stern held a long steering oar motionless in the stream behind him. They would not have looked so, Maillart thought, if they were still in slavery.
The huge sharp rise of Morne du Cap loomed over the road, the town, blocking out a large area of the fading sky. Maillart looked at the faces of the men who rode on either side of him, equally impassive as the fishermen in the boat, and yet he knew them: Ti-jean, Alsé, Pinonbrun. He had himself shared in their training, with a success proven earlier that same day, when brigands had attacked them outside Limbé. Inwardly Maillart smiled at the term—in some quarters they themselves might be called “brigands,” by the English for example. The men who had attempted the ambush were perhaps stragglers from the bands of Pierrot or Macaya, who occupied these territories, after a fashion. The area outside Le Cap was contested between the French Republican Army (whatever remained of it) and the black leaders in service of the Spanish, though not too hotly at the moment, it appeared. But the marauders who’d attacked them seemed to be acting on their own agenda. There had been more than twenty of them, though poorly armed and easily dispersed. Maillart felt a warmth of pride in his little squad: they had not wavered. He even felt some small sense of security.
They entered the town by the Rue Espagnole
. It was suddenly, deeply dark. Men passed on foot carrying lit torches; some candles were illuminated in the low buildings on either side. Most seemed to have been hastily and partially reconstructed from the fire that had razed the town the year before, when the bands of Pierrot and Macaya had overrun it. In the poor light, Maillart could make out little of the changes. He had not been in the town at the time of the attack, though his friend Antoine Hébert had described it for him in considerable detail.
Tocquet pulled up his horse in front of a hostelry Maillart remembered rather well from his former days in Le Cap, but the captain shook his head at the implied suggestion.
“Let us go directly to the casernes,” he said, “to find Laveaux.”
Tocquet looked at him without comment, then squeezed his horse’s flanks and moved on. Maillart rode abreast of him, uneasy. His companion was a strange man, taciturn; they did not know each other well, and Maillart could seldom guess what Tocquet might be thinking. They turned and rode toward the barracks, into the shadow of the mountain at the edge of town. At the torch-lit gate of the casernes, Maillart addressed himself to the sentinel, saying that he had come with dispatches for General Laveaux. Without waiting for an answer, he led his little party through the open gate into the yard.
The sentry, a mulatto in French uniform, called to another colored soldier crossing the yard, who responded by bending his way toward the commanding officer’s quarters, though without any special haste. Maillart waited, still astride his horse. After a moment he hoisted his canteen and sipped from the last inches of stale water. Now he rather wished that they had stopped at the inn Tocquet had indicated, for a stronger libation if not for a meal. He was saddle-sore, weary, and his heart misgave him rather. He had been billeted in the place for many months, but now he saw no one that he knew.
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