Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Presently the black soldiers dismounted one by one; they sat on a curbstone holding their horses loosely by the reins and talking quietly together in Creole. Tocquet got down too, handed over his horse to one of the others, and walked in an aimless circle around the yard, fanning himself with his hat though the air had cooled considerably. A sickle moon hung over Morne du Cap, cradling a star. Maillart kept waiting, to no result. Finally he climbed down from his horse and stalked across to the building where he’d been accustomed to report to his former superiors. When he entered the corridor he could see through the open doorway to his left a mulatto in the uniform of a French colonel, seated at a desk and writing by candlelight. As Maillart crossed the threshold, a black soldier jumped up and barred his passage with a musket held crossways like a stave.

  “You must wait!” the soldier said, as he backpedaled Maillart out into the hall. Across the musket stock, Maillart caught the eye of the officer at the desk, who had once styled himself the “Sieur de Maltrot” after the French nobleman who was his father, but was more commonly known as Choufleur.

  Then the door closed in his face. Maillart turned and found Tocquet, looking at him coolly, an unlit black cheroot pinched at the corner of his mouth. If not for the other’s presence, Maillart might have stamped his feet and shouted; as it was he struggled to contain himself. Tocquet turned away from him without saying anything and went back out into the yard. The man had followed him soundlessly—even wearing riding boots, he walked as quietly as a cat.

  Where was Laveaux? Maillart stared at the boards of the door. It occurred to him that he had not seen any white officer or enlisted man since arriving at the casernes. Since serving under Toussaint he had grown accustomed to a darker color scheme in the ranks, but here it might well be a trouble sign. After a moment he heard Choufleur’s voice in the other room.

  “Bring him in.”

  The door opened. Choufleur did not rise to greet Maillart, or offer him a seat. He continued writing for a moment, the pen’s plume wavering between the two candles either side of the paper, before he looked up. His features were African but his eyes were bright green and his skin very pale, except for the spattering of chocolate-brown freckles all over his face—as if the white and Negro blood in him had somehow remained separate in the mix. Maillart had last seen him across the groove of his pistol barrel—had in fact been trying to kill Choufleur, during the mutiny of the mulatto Sixth Regiment.

  “I have come with messages for General Laveaux,” Maillart said stiffly.

  “Yes . . .” Choufleur said, lazily, and as if he were responding to some completely different idea. “Yes, I do remember you—though not your name.”

  Maillart opened his mouth to supply this information, then stopped himself.

  “Of no importance.” Choufleur leaned back in his chair and waved his hand airily—a long-fingered, graceful hand, freckled like his face. “You were certainly one of those royalist officers, I recall.” He rested his elbows on the desk top and squinted more closely at Maillart, who began to wonder just how well Choufleur might remember their previous encounters.

  “I have it now,” Choufleur said, snapping his long fingers. “Were you not the friend of that queer little doctor—Hébert? Who had taken up with the femme de couleur, Nanon . . . is that alliance still in effect? Where are they now?”

  “At Habitation Thibodet, near Ennery.” Maillart was surprised into this reponse. He wondered why Choufleur would ask so pointed a question, and on such an irrelevant matter.

  “I have come to see General Laveaux,” he repeated.

  “There was a child, as I recall,” Choufleur said musingly. “Of course, one does not know if it were his, in fact—does he acknowledge the child, your friend? Or did it live?”

  Maillart felt his neck swelling in the collar of his shirt. “My dispatches are of some urgency,” he said.

  “As you like,” Choufleur said airily, shifting his seat to glance at the dark window. “Laveaux is at Port-de-Paix. In his absence, Villatte commands, but as he is not here at present, you may give your messages to me.”

  Maillart tightened, aware of a compression of breath and blood in his throat, as though he were being throttled. He drew himself up and touched his waistband. Under the cotton weave of his loose white shirt he could feel the handle of a dirk and the butt of his pistol. He had come on this journey in civilian clothes, dressed in the same fashion as Tocquet, and concealing his weapons as a pirate would. Both a French and a Spanish military uniform were packed in his saddlebags, but it would not have done to come here wearing either.

  “J’écoute,” Choufleur said.

  Maillart willed himself to relax, exhaling consciously, letting his stiff shoulders fall. He thought of Toussaint, not knowing why the image of the black man came to him. Next to the door behind him was a chair and Maillart drew it toward the center of the room, sat down, and crossed his legs.

  Choufleur leaned over the desk top toward him. “I remember you, Maillart,” he said. “You were one of those who refused to receive me in the Regiment Le Cap—for this.” He touched the skin on the back of his left hand, below the braid of his uniform cuff. “But I receive you more generously. I remember too that you are a deserter, Maillart. You might be hanged for a royalist—we conduct such executions here.”

  Maillart said nothing. The candle flames wavered. Choufleur’s shadow distorted itself across the rear corner of the room.

  “Your dispatches,” Choufleur said.

  Maillart kept silence. He felt oddly relaxed now, drained of ill temper, of injured pride. The fatigue of his journey was perhaps responsible. He studied Choufleur in the yellow light: he was rather a handsome man. His close-cut reddish hair showed to advantage the elegant African shape of his head. Maillart’s way of observing such details had changed during the time he’d spent in the interior. But the swirl of freckles across Choufleur’s face remained constantly perplexing. Maillart said nothing. There was power in silence. If you held your own stillness, your interlocutor might lose his balance, tumble forward into the hollow space you set before him, and fill it with more words. Maillart had sometimes found himself in such a spot with his black general, blurting out sentences he’d never meant to say.

  “Je vous attends,” Choufleur said, but nothing more. Perhaps he was not to be drawn in such way.

  “I mean no offense,” Maillart told him. “But my commander’s instructions are very explicit. My messages are for the ears of General Laveaux only. I regret to be unable to oblige you.”

  “Your commander.” Choufleur’s eyebrows arched. The freckles swam with the movement of his skin.

  “I have come directly from Toussaint Louverture.”

  Choufleur laughed—a startling, silvery sound. The laugh was not bitter or mocking but had a tone of amused astonishment. It struck a note of sincerity for which Maillart was completely unprepared. He was moved to smile himself, but suppressed that response.

  “The world is a very strange place,” Choufleur said. “Do you not find it so?”

  Maillart rose from the chair he’d taken. “Undoubtedly.”

  “How the world has changed since last we met! That you should serve under an ignorant slave who was, not long ago, the Comte de Noé’s barefoot coachman. And who does he serve, your Toussaint ‘Louverture’?” Choufleur released the surname with an opprobrious twist. “Who is that old man’s master now?”

  Maillart remained silent, wondering if Choufleur really believed that Toussaint still had a master. He let himself be the first to break their stare. Choufleur turned to the soldier who’d remained standing at the door throughout their conversation, and barked out orders that he should lead Maillart and his companions to a billet where they could pass the night.

  “But we will take lodgings in the town,” Maillart protested.

  “The gate is closed here for the night.” Choufleur’s voice was peremptory as before. He was no longer looking at Maillart; he had taken up the plume of h
is pen. But as Maillart crossed the threshold, Choufleur did look up, as if to halt him with a glance.

  “That plantation, what was it called? Near Ennery, you say?”

  “What?” Maillart turned in the doorway, mildly confused.

  “Hébert, your doctor, and his woman.” Choufleur was impatient.

  His first flash of anger at this prying felt distant from Maillart, heat lightning on the horizon. He looked at Choufleur for a moment without reply. Then: “The matter seems to interest you.”

  Choufleur swallowed. “Not particularly.”

  Maillart went out. The soldier led him and the others to a single room on the opposite side of the barracks. He unlocked a door and gestured at the dim interior, then went away and left them there. Inside were a single low bedframe strung with rope, and hooks for hammocks on the walls, but there were no hammocks or any other bedding.

  “We’re prisoners, then?” Tocquet’s eyes bored into Maillart’s face.

  “For the night, possibly.”

  Tocquet struck a light to his cheroot, exhaled; a bloom of smoke spread in the room, before he stepped outside again. Maillart was abashed. His impatience to discover Laveaux—certainly they’d have done better to stop the night at some tavern and present themselves here in the morning instead. He wondered a little about Villatte . . . another mulatto officer. His stomach whispered discontentedly. There’d been no mention of any kind of rations.

  Outside, the new moon hung like a silver knife blade, above the casernes courtyard and the black hulk of Morne du Cap. The outline of the mountain was traced by stars appearing in the sky beyond it. Two of their party were just then returning from stabling their horses. Tocquet spoke.

  “Gros-jean, Alsé—anou alé, chaché manjé.” He made a drinking motion with his hand as well. They departed, Tocquet walking in between the other two. Gros-jean and Bazau had been owned by Tocquet before the insurrections, Maillart knew. Though the two blacks were now enrolled in Toussaint’s forces, that had not apparently changed their relation with their former master—which often seemed to be a partnership in mischief. They answered to Toussaint or Tocquet with equal alacrity, and no one had so far found any inconsistency in this arrangment.

  Maillart sat down on the single step that raised the door sill from the cobblestones of the barracks yard. A knot of men on the far side of the court seemed to be speaking in ordinary French. Perhaps they were remnants of the republican brigades that had come out with the second commissioners. Maillart did not expect to know them. His own regiment had been deported en masse by Sonthonax, sometime after the excecution of the King in France, after his own consequent defection to the Spanish party. The Dillon regiment, where he’d had friends, was transferred to Le Môle on the western peninsula, past Port-de-Paix. He had lost many of his friends before that time, to disease and accident and actions against the Negroes in revolt on the plain outside Le Cap. On the marshy burial ground of La Fossette his regiment had fought an all-out battle with the rebellious mulatto Sixth. Maillart had seen a close friend killed in that engagement, not two paces from where he stood himself. He had fired his pistol at Choufleur but failed to hit him. Now this leader of that mutiny was an officer in apparent good standing with the French military while Maillart himself could not safely choose a uniform to wear. The world had indeed become strange to him.

  Tocquet and the others returned across the courtyard, supplied with ship’s biscuit and smoke-dried goat meat they had managed to requisition somewhere. There was a gourd of fresh water and, miraculously, another of the new cane rum called tafia. Alsé carried a bundle of hammocks under one arm as well. There were no plates or forks or cups. They sat crosslegged in a circle to eat, passing the gourds among them. Maillart was softened by the effects of the rum. He chewed the stone-hard victuals slowly.

  When they had eaten, Tocquet produced a pair of dice and they gambled for the sleeping places. Tocquet himself won the second of the four hammocks that had been obtained. Maillart won the rope-strung bed, if that were victory. The last three men stretched out on the bare floor beside him, underneath the heavy sway of the hammocks above. Above and below, their shoulders all touched; the room was close as a ship’s cabin.

  Ti-jean slapped at a mosquito. “Sweet blood,” Tocquet mocked from his hammock. “Ou gegne sang doux.” Ti-jean cursed.

  Maillart believed he would not sleep at all, then woke near dawn with a rope burn on his cheek. By good daylight they saddled their horses and bluffed their way past the light guard at the gate of the casernes. They provisioned themselves at an inn in the town and set out on the road to Port-de-Paix.

  Laveaux’s force was quartered at the Grand Fort on the Point des Pères—a promontory overlooking Port-de-Paix harbor. In size the structure no longer lived up to its name; it had been sacked and dismantled by enemies and a smaller enclosure erected within the original boundaries. Maillart left Tocquet and the black soldiers to wait for him, sitting on the rubble of the hundred-year-old walls. He climbed to the gate of the newer barrier alone.

  In the event he was rather uncomfortable in meeting his former commander. The clothes he wore seemed the badge of his dishonor. He expected Laveaux’s glance to rake him collar to cuff, but in fact the general looked him only in the eyes, while taking his hand and greeting him cordially.

  Maillart faltered through congratulations on the other’s promotion—Laveaux had still been a colonel when last they had met. Laveaux’s responding smile was thin, ironical. Deep lines were graven around his mouth and eyes, despite his youth. He had lost flesh from both his face and limbs. He beckoned Maillart into a low stone room of the fort.

  “Would that I had wine to offer you,” he said. “But we are in a bad case here, officers and men alike. Myself, I take six ounces of bread a day, and drink nothing but water.”

  “But in Le Cap they seem well enough provisioned,” Maillart said. “The . . . colored officers.”

  “Ah,” said Laveaux, with the same thin smile. His chair creaked, or perhaps it was his bones, as he craned his head to look up at the low ceiling beams. “Those gentlemen dispose of private means. Whereas my own have long since been exhausted.” He fluttered a stack of correspondence with his left hand. Peering across the table, Maillart recognized, upside down, the florid signature of General Whitelocke, who commanded the English invaders in the Western Department.

  “The English offered to repair my fortunes with a bribe of cinquante mille écus,” Laveaux said. “A modest price for the surrender of my command . . .”

  “You’re joking.” Maillart was genuinely shocked.

  “Not at all.” Laveaux restacked his papers. “I have the letter somewhere—well, never mind it. The colored commanders have been offered more, I’m told. Rigaud, for instance, in the south. I might perhaps have negotiated a higher price . . .” Laveaux’s eyes narrowed and turned inward. “Also they assured me I could keep my property—which is reduced to this.” He pinched the threadbare cloth of his coat sleeve. “With my trousers and boots—not that they would bear a very close inspection. And of course my arms.” He looked at Maillart. “I must confess I miss tobacco most of all. One does not know what to do with one’s hands. It’s cheerless to sit here. Let us go out.”

  Maillart ducked under the low lintel and followed Laveaux into the open air. “But how did you respond to Whitelocke?” he inquired.

  “I informed him that, enemy or not, he had no right to offer me such a personal insult,” Laveaux said. “I demanded satisfaction—in short, I challenged him to a duel. The choice of weapon to be left to him.”

  “And then?”

  Laveaux laughed, attracting the attention of a soldier who stood watch behind the brick-and-mortar wall. “Why, to be sure a single combat would have been much more to my advantage than his—speaking strictly from the military point of view. Therefore he had small reason to accommodate me. He has shifted his ground, and now sends me appeals to my ‘nobility’ as he likes to put it, meaning my former t
itle as a count.”

  Maillart flushed and looked away across the battlements. At the edge of the little town, dark surf strummed on a gravelly beach before a single row of trees. Beyond the breakers, within rowing distance as it looked, the island of Tortuga was gloomy under its cover of jungle.

  “It is well for us that the English prefer to purchase their victories,” Laveaux said. “Otherwise we might be overwhelmed in half a day here. Look at that one—” He lowered his voice. “Not too directly.”

  Maillart glanced sidelong at the sentinel, whose tunic and trousers hung in rags. He was barefoot, starveling, a mad glint in his eye.

  “He’s representative, you see,” Laveaux said. “I must send them to post barefoot, like slaves.”

  “Have you much illness?”

  “Fortunately no,” Laveaux replied. “The men are well acclimated now—those who survive. The problem is rather starvation. We are dangerously low on both powder and shot. Nothing comes from France, not so much as a word. I write to plead my case, protest my loyalty . . . I would do as well to throw the letters on the fire and hope the smoke might be seen in Paris.”

  “And the commissioners?” Maillart said. “Sonthonax can procure you no supplies?”

  “Both he and Polverel are recalled to France,” Laveaux said. “The change in government, you know—they must answer for their excesses.” He snorted and spread his arms wide. “I am the highest French authority in all this land!”

  The sentinel turned and looked at him strangely, tattered mustachios fluttering in the strong northwest wind from the sea. Laveaux sobered and dropped his arms. He studied a small lizard walking a crevice of mortar in the wall, as if perhaps he’d make a snatch for it.

  “Truth,” he said. “I will not surrender. I will retreat from hill to hill still fighting. Albeit soon with muskets used as clubs.”