Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Between Toussaint and Biassou, the situation seemed to be worsening, and the doctor was inclined to suspect the growth of a breach between Toussaint and the Spanish high command. There had been no word from either Maillart or Tocquet on their mission to Laveaux, and though Tocquet’s mysterious vanishings were routine, the doctor thought Maillart was overdue.

  “Or of course you might devote yourself to further perfection of the arts of love,” Elise seemed to be saying.

  The doctor renewed his attention to her; she returned his gaze calmly, not to say brazenly, her small rose-petal lips slightly parted, her blue eyes amused. Such a conversation between them would have been unthinkable in France. For that matter, in their father’s house Elise would never have thought to appear outside her bed chamber in the extremely diaphanous garment she now wore . . . but in Saint Domingue it was all attributed to the heat. In truth, Elise had thrived here, the doctor had to admit, where many Frenchwomen died or withered or went mad. In most respects, by contrast, his sister seemed to have become a Creole.

  He was the first to break their gaze, turning to look back toward the pool. “I should have liked to brick that rim,” he said. “But for the moment there’s no possibility.”

  “I think the stones look well enough.” Elise’s sugar spoon clinked against her coffee cup. She cocked her head toward a child’s voice—a peal of laughter, then an indistinguishable word. “Is she—” Elise said. “No, she’s going to wake Paul.”

  “But it does lack something,” the doctor said, still staring at the pool.

  “A fountain,” Elise said, following his glance.

  “I thought of that,” the doctor said. “But there are no means.”

  “No.” Elise laughed and shook back the blond waves of her hair. “Goldfish, then.”

  The doctor snorted. “Why not swans?”

  “Or water lilies,” Elise said.

  “Why yes!” the doctor began, but just then the two children came tumbling out onto the gallery, Paul and Sophie. The little boy toppled over, catching himself on his palms and looking up, puzzled. Sophie, who was not quite two years his senior, stooped soberly to help him up. Zabeth put her head out the doorway, saw that the children were attended to and withdrew. Paul marched over to the doctor, who lifted him to his knee and kissed his solemn, ivory-colored face.

  “Bonjour, mon cher.”

  “Bonjour, Papa.”

  Paul straddled his father’s knee. The doctor jogged him idly, speaking again to his sister.

  “Well, there is a place with water lilies . . . of a kind,” he said. “A pretty little pond, up in the mountains.”

  “Is it far?” Elise toyed with her daughter’s long black curls, drawing the dark-eyed girl against her hip.

  “I’d say an hour’s ride,” the doctor said. Paul began to twist up in his lap; the doctor tore off a bit of the sugared bread to give him.

  Elise became animated. “Oh, do let’s go together,” she said. “I’m bored with rusticating here—Xavier’s been so long away. We might make an outing for the children.”

  The doctor considered. “Well, if we wait for Nanon to get up . . .”

  “But no,” Elise said. “She’ll sleep till noon—you know her ways. And by then it will be much too hot. No, it’s better we should go at once.” She stood up and began calling orders to the kitchen.

  Within the hour they had left the compound, the doctor carrying Paul before him on the saddle of his horse, and Sophie riding with Zabeth, sidesaddle on a donkey. The children giggled and called to one another, their voices waking voices of the birds. Elise, who had dressed in one of Xavier’s piratical blouses and a pair of trousers cut so full that each leg appeared to have a skirt of its own, rode astride a white mule. An unlooked-for talent, the doctor remarked, and certainly an unlooked-for posture. Elise shook her hair back carelessly and let him know that she had ridden mule-back all the way over the mountains from Spanish Santo Domingo, during which journey she had often found herself in postures more unexpected than this one.

  The doctor fell silent, listening to the liquid trilling of the birds moving in the trees overhead. They had ridden to the height of the coffee plantation and now were circling the rim above the steep valley of Habitation Thibodet. Through the foliage, they caught glimpses of the buildings below, and the tents and ajoupas of Toussaint’s military encampment, with smoke beginning to rise from fires where the men were preparing the morning meal. Then they had crossed over the ridge and were descending a snake-like trail that wound the crevices of the far side of the morne, twisting through tall, saw-bladed grasses and clumps and clusters of bamboo. The doctor carried a coutelas which he used to slash overgrowth from the trail, restraining Paul with his left hand cupped over the child’s round, firm belly.

  In something over an hour they had arrived at their destination, before it had grown truly hot, though the damp, still air had raised a sweat on them and on their animals. The pool was sheltered on three sides by bearded fig trees and a green calabash, and on the fourth it backed into a face of rock some thirty feet high, overgrown with slender hanging vines that sprouted small, pale flowers. Water seeped from springs in the rock, and the surface of the pool itself was covered with the violet flowers called bwa dlo, along with floating, flowering plants that much resembled European water lilies.

  Elise dismounted and breathed deeply, hands on her hips as she arched her back to look up at the rock face and the vines. “C’est très joli, ça,” she said. “A waterfall of flowers.”

  She twisted her hair up at the back of her head and, with Zabeth, began spreading a checkered cloth over an area of grass a couple of yards above the edge of the pool. Together the women laid out the food that had been prepared for the excursion: green oranges, small fig bananas, cassava bread, a bit of cold chicken . . . The doctor took a bottle of white wine (Tocquet’s extraordinary foraging skills had furnished them a supply) and sank it at the pool’s edge where it would cool. He pulled off his boots and stockings, rolled his trousers and waded calf-deep in the water, which was cold enough that he felt the first shock in his teeth. The bottom was covered with fine, shaley gravel. He turned and looked up into the trees surrounding it. Zabeth was staring at the calabash tree and the doctor looked in the same direction; since he’d last come here someone had tied up several of the green gourds to shape them for future use as vessels. Also there were several red rags tied to branches, for no material purpose. The doctor experienced a moment of doubt. The pool was on the trail toward Camp Barade, on the outskirts of Toussaint’s direct influence. Stragglers from the camps of Biassou or Jean-François were likely to be much less well disciplined than Toussaint’s men . . . still, it was calm here now, and they would not stay too long.

  He climbed out of the pool and went to join his sister, who had curled catlike on the cloth, her legs tucked under her, chewing an end of her own hair at the corner of her mouth. The food was still covered with napkins on the plates and woven trays. Paul followed him, suddenly petulant.

  “Pa oué Maman?” he complained. “Where’s Mama?”

  “There now,” the doctor said, kissing his forehead absently. “You’ll see your mother soon enough. Now go with the Sophie and Zabeth.” He turned the boy about and gave a push which sent him trundling back down toward the pool. When he looked up, Elise was frowning.

  “You are too indulgent with him,” she said.

  “One might say the same of you, with Sophie . . .” The doctor’s tone was mild enough. It was traditional, after all, for Creole children to be hideously spoiled.

  “It is not at all the same.”

  The doctor looked away. Zabeth had tied up her skirt behind, to wade into the water with the two children. Paul was well distracted now, scooping up flashing bits of mica from the bottom and letting them fall in the sparkling water. It was idyllic here, and yet the doctor sensed a whole hidden agenda in his sister’s words. There’d been perhaps a particular reason she’d wished to make this exc
ursion without Nanon.

  “You mean the difference of a son from a daughter?” the doctor said, with a certain sense of heaviness. “After all, they are both little children.”

  “Childhood is sweet,” Elise said. “But as adults, those two can never live as cousins. Neither here, nor in France.”

  The doctor looked at his sister. Her hair was loose around her face, her breasts fell unrestrained against the coarse cloth of her husband’s shirt . . . She was wearing trousers, for God’s sake; she rode astride a mule. It was very strange to hear her instructing him in the proprieties of this country. Elise was no more farouche than many other Creole women, or not much more, and yet whenever he looked at her, he thought of their manner of life in their father’s house in France. It now occurred to him, for the first time, that she might be measuring him against a similar standard. His sense of heaviness increased.

  “You sound very much like your friend Isabelle Cigny,” he said.

  “That’s reasonable,” said Elise. “It was she who first educated me in all the ways of this place.”

  The doctor looked down at the two children splashing in the pool. Sophie floundered deeper into the water and suddenly sat down, perhaps unintentionally, her skirt spreading on the water around her. She looked distressed at first, but then began laughing. Zabeth laughed with her, a bright smile splitting her dark face, and scooped some water in a mock threat to put it on Sophie’s hair. Paul spun aimlessly beside the two of them, his palms stroking the lily pads like fan blades.

  “It’s well enough for now,” Elise said. “But the system here will divide them as they grow. You must see this.”

  The doctor looked down at the pool again. There was little to choose between the skin tone of the two; Sophie was even slightly the darker, for she had taken her father’s coloring—this assuming that her father was in fact Xavier Tocquet, and not Elise’s former husband, the late proprietor of Habitation Thibodet.

  “What I see is the ‘system’ here lying in ruins,” the doctor said. “With revolution here and in France . . . it is a great uprooting.”

  Elise sighed. “Some things can never be revolutionized.”

  The doctor said nothing. Elise sat up straight, crossing her legs like an Indian.

  “What of the future?” she said. “There are some who live in such liaisons, and even openly; it is not unheard-of, though—” She looked at him pointedly. “One must never take such a woman to wife. But the children of these unions create difficulties in time.”

  The doctor felt his first flash of real irritation. “There are irregularities in your own career, madame ma sœur, which I have forborne to reproach you with.”

  Elise failed to blush as expected; she returned his glance calmly, her blue eyes clear.

  “To summarize . . .” The doctor tugged at the point of his beard. “I arrive in this country to find you absconded from your husband, absolutely disappeared—yes, I admit he was a brute, but we now speak of law and propriety. You abandon him, you dash off who knows where, to Santo Domingo as I am eventually to learn—I don’t know if there were other stops on your itinerary—with a man apparently your lover, this Xavier Tocquet, whose own reputation seems very extraordinary. Let me say that for my part I much prefer your second choice to your first, but still, Madame, your manner of arranging yourself provokes notice, does it not? As for the child of the first marriage, whom you have stolen away in your elopement, I discover—from your bosom friend Isabelle Cigny, no less—that her legitimacy is somewhat in question. Well, the matter is finally settled decently enough, for across the Spanish border you are married to our Monsieur Tocquet. But I have taken care not to ask the date of this marriage, lest it be discovered bigamous, for I do know very well the date of your first husband’s demise, since it was I who attended his final illness, during your very conspicuous absence from your place at his side.”

  Elise, who had caught her lower lip in her top teeth at the mention of the marriage, now released it thoughtfully.

  “Are you quite finished?”

  “Is it not sufficient?” the doctor said. “I don’t mean to quarrel with you, but think of our father’s house—our mother, ten years in her grave. Imagine how such an affair would be viewed in Lyons.”

  “In Lyons, we would make a pretty pair, the two of us.” Elise laughed, and after a moment the doctor joined her with a reluctant chuckle.

  Sophie came up to the grassy slope, holding out her dripping skirt in a giggling display. Elise made a movement of mock retreat. “Keep your distance, child,” she said. “Yes, yes, you may take it off.”

  Sophie undid her skirt and frolicked, naked, back into the pool. The doctor noted that Paul had already disrobed. Zabeth was spreading their wet clothing to dry in the sunshine that poured over the slope.

  “The truth of it is,” Elise said, “the society here will forgive almost any faiblesse d’amour, and much more easily than in Europe—so long as it does not cross the color line. I don’t say there’s justice in it, but things are as they are. You acknowledge the boy—perhaps it’s right that you should. But what of his education? His future, what will it be? And if there should be other children?”

  “I have lost the habit of pondering the future here,” the doctor said, and realized as he spoke that his words were true. This place seemed to be without a sense of time. There was the moment as you lived it; all others were illusory. Nanon had helped to teach him this, in her somewhat specialized fashion. Then again, there had been many occasions in Saint Domingue when his mere survival to the end of the day, or to the next dawn, had seemed future enough—as much as he could contemplate.

  Now Elise had summoned up the future; it appeared before him as a cloudy menace which he had no ability to plan for or control. He stood up, nodding and blinking, and dusted off the back of his trousers.

  “Where are you going?” Elise said.

  “A little botanizing,” the doctor muttered vaguely.

  He made a wavering motion with his left hand and turned from her, walking around the borders of the pool and then behind the bearded figs. It was peaceful here, and through the streams of the trees’ hanging roots, he caught glimpses of the children, their pale skins flashing in the water, heard them laughing as they splashed each other. But his mind continued to track forward on the path Elise had laid out for it.

  What, after all, would become of the boy? In the larger scheme of things the doctor knew that his sister was right: such children did bring difficulties, being neither black nor white. In principle they constituted a third race, and their weight in the politics and warfare of this country was considerable. But the doctor had not applied such reasoning to the case of his son Paul, who had, unmistakably, the ears of his own grandfather, who had appeared to him in the guise of a small and amiable human animal. Now the word son seemed to thunder in his ears, and also he felt that his conversation with Elise was somehow a betrayal of Nanon (though he himself had said nothing to betray her—had he?). Such thoughts were misery; he must put an end to them somehow.

  Meanwhile Toussaint had been some days away from the camp at Ennery, at Marmelade perhaps, or at one of the other strong places that ran from Gonaives back to the Spanish frontier. He explained his comings and goings to no one, arrived and departed with small warning.

  At dawn of the day following the family picnic by the lily pond, he appeared on the gallery, and took coffee in silence, failing to rise to any conversational bait that either the doctor or Elise trolled past him. Breakfast done, he retreated to the cane mill.

  Doctor Hébert spent the balance of the morning on hospital rounds, changing dressings and attending to some scattered cases of fever or dysentery. There were two infirmaries now: the one he had established for the slaves of Habitation Thibodet, and another in the tented encampment of Toussaint’s soldiers. Most of the injuries were accidental at the moment, for there had not been much fighting of late, though some of the black soldiers nursed old wounds, slow to heal. The
doctor was attended on his tour by the woman Merbillay, who had a growing skill with herbal brews, and by the newcomer Guiaou, who seemed fascinated with any medical proceeding, his interest perhaps inspired, the doctor thought, by the scars of the terrible wounds from which he had himself recovered.

  At the noon hour he lunched with Nanon and Elise on the gallery of the grand’case. The meal passed pleasantly enough, but with little conversation. The air was heavy and still and it seemed almost too hot and oppressive to talk at all. The encounter came to a silent conclusion; Tocquet struck fire to his cigar and smoked. The other white people retired for the customary afternoon siesta, retreating from the most intense heat of the afternoon. The doctor lay abed with Nanon, comfortable in her affection, although he was too uneasy in his mind to rise to her caresses. At length he took her hands and folded them together and held them with one of his own; Nanon smiled at him, unoffended, and rolled her back to him. He lay with one hand cupping her belly, breathing the sweet scent of her hair and the nape of her neck and listening to her sleeping respiration, but he himself could not sleep. Or perhaps he dozed, for the light had changed when he finally disengaged himself and rose from the bed. In the crib on the opposite side of the room Paul lay on his back, snoring delicately, his lips slackly apart. The doctor watched him for a moment, then dressed quietly and went out onto the gallery, carrying his boots.

  Toussaint sat alone at the round table abstractly looking out over the rail, one hand on the knee of his uniform trousers and the other curled near a tall, clear glass of water. Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead, in the creases below his yellow headcloth. He made no movement to wipe them away, nor did he turn to greet the doctor, who hesitated at the table’s edge, but with a motion of his hand invited him to sit. Seated, the doctor looked over the pool he had engineered with a certain satisfaction. There was no sound except for the purling of the water and the cackling of a crow on the eaves of the grand’case. Toussaint turned to him with a faint smile and was apparently about to speak, but just then his younger brother Jean-Pierre came dashing up the steps, calling out that Moyse and Charles Belair had been arrested on the order of Jean-François and that they and perhaps some other junior officers were being held under guard at Camp Barade.