“I am going north,” I said. “Will you come?”
Jean-Pic looked all around, at the green trees hanging to the sides of the mountain, the red-earth cliff across the gorge, with terraces to hold up cays. He scratched the back of his head, and said, “Was it the cacique who told you to do that?”
I lifted my shoulders and let them fall. The cacique had not spoken any language that we understood, which Jean-Pic knew as well as Riau, but maybe it was after all because of the cacique, or because of Maît’ Kalfou.
“Men . . .” Jean-Pic scratched his head again, looking all around the bitasyon. It was still early-morning light, with the mist still lifting off the slopes around us. “Sé bon isit-mêm,” he said. It’s good right here.
“Sé vré,” I answered, and it was true, and yet I would go anyway. I lifted the vivres I had gathered and began walking down toward the cay. I had known Jean-Pic for a long time, since we were with Achille’s band in the north, but Achille was killed in the first risings, and since then Jean-Pic and I traveled sometimes together, sometimes apart.
Bouquart came after me, out of the corn. He moved in a fast, rolling lope in spite of the two nabots fixed to his feet, and caught me with no great trouble.
“You are going,” he said. “Why do you go?”
I lifted my shoulders. A whiteman might have answered it was because I hoped to find Merbillay and Caco again, or because of the thoughts in my head about Toussaint, or only because there were few women at Bahoruco. But Riau had no such thought. At other times I had left Dieudonné, and I had left Toussaint’s army. I had left Habitation Bréda when I ran away to the maroons and before that I left Guinée to be a slave in Saint Domingue. Now I was leaving Bahoruco. Bouquart stood with a cane knife hanging from his hand, the flat of the blade against his knee, sweat shining over his scarred chest where his breath moved, and his smile uncertain.
“I will go too,” he said, and lost the smile when he closed his mouth, watching Riau.
I looked at the two nabots on his feet, and at the muscles that swelled up from his ankles to his hips. Bouquart had told the story, how he had limped through his days in the cane field, after the whitemen gave him his nabots, but by night he had practiced walking, then running, in the secret dark by the river. Now he could run as fast with his weighted legs as any other man without. If ever the nabots were removed from his legs, Bouquart would run faster than a horse.
“Dako,” I said, agreed, and Bouquart smiled more fully.
Together we made ready to leave, putting the corn and the yams in a straw sack. I carried the watch and pistols and the candle ends in a smaller straw macoute with a strap for my shoulder, and I put the empty writing papers in there too, but the bundles of letters I left in the wall, in case the whiteman words should twist in my sack to betray me.
We left Bahoruco before midday and traveled until dark came, then walked through the next day also, but after that we slept through the days, hiding in the bush, and walked by night, because we did not want to meet any whiteman soldiers. Because the English were at Port-au-Prince we passed on the other side of the salt lake at the end of the Cul de Sac plain, over the Spanish border, and then climbed into the mountains toward Mirebalais. Neither Bouquart nor Riau knew who was holding the town that time, so we went around it on the heights until we came to the south shore of the Artibonite. The river was too deep for Bouquart—his nabots would have drowned him, and also there were caymans in the water, or might have been. We passed one day in cutting wood to build a raft, and when we put it in the water we learned that neither Riau nor Bouquart had good skill to guide it, so we drifted a long way downriver before we could reach the other side, almost as far as Petite Rivière. On the north shore people told us that the English had come out from Saint Marc to build a fort at La Crête à Pierrot, above the town, so we went around Petite Rivière to the west, leaving the river, and kept following the mountains north toward Gonaives.
The Savane Désolée was there when we came out of the mountains, all cactus, dust and salt pans, with water too salt to drink. The road was flat and open but Riau was uneasy walking it—we could be seen from a long distance in that open country. While we were walking, a dust cloud rose ahead, toward Gonaives, so we left the road and hid among the cactus and raquette trees. The army was a long time passing, with many horsemen, and even more foot soldiers, and mules dragging cannons behind. When it had gone by, and the dust settled, we went back to the road. Some camp followers were still coming along in the rear, women or old men leading donkeys packed with provisions. I called to a woman in a spotted mouchwa têt riding sidewise on a little bourik with a wood saddle.
“Ki moun ki pasé la?” I said. Who are the people passing there?
“Sé l’armée Toussaint Louvti yo yé.” She threw her head back, grinning, and whipped the air with the little stick she used to drive her donkey. “Yo pralé batt l’anglais!” She rode on.
The army of Toussaint Louverture, going to beat the English. Bouquart wanted to follow them, but Riau wanted to go north, out of the desert to the green of the mountains. We rested through the high heat of the day in the thin, dry shade of the raquettes, and I gathered salt from the flats and put it in a cloth bag I carried in my small macoute. When the sun turned red and began to fall, we walked on along the road, and in the darkness we turned from Gonaives on the trail toward Ennery. We rested and traveled through that night and at dawn had come to the coffee trees on the heights of Habitation Thibodet.
Most of Toussaint’s army had left that place, it was plain, gone to the fighting at Saint Marc. There were some few black soldiers left to guard the habitation and the camp, and sick or wounded men in the hospital, where Riau had helped the whiteman doctor Hébert before I ran from Toussaint’s army. Many of the women had stayed behind the army, with their children, and now they were coming out of their ajoupas, lighting cook fires and beginning to grind meal.
I left Bouquart to rest in hiding in the bush beyond the coffee trees, and I went down softly through the ajoupas. That ajoupa I had raised was still standing where it had been, but the roof was larger now and someone had woven palmiste panels to make walls. The banza I had made for playing soft music hung still from the ridgepole where it had hung, and Caco, my son Pierre Toussaint, lay sleeping on a straw mat, curled like a kitten. Merbillay was standing just outside, working a long pestle up and down in a stump mortar. Her arms were smooth and strong and she wore a blue dress and a red headcloth with gold threads on the edges. I plucked a note on the banza and she turned and peered into the shadows of the ajoupa, first looking to see that Caco slept safely, then finding Riau’s face.
“M’ap tounen, oui,” I said, no louder than a whisper. Yes, I have come back. Her face went blank as the surface of the sacred pool at Bahoruco. A moment passed, and then she smiled and came underneath the roof with me.
Riau slept afterward for a time, tired from the long night of traveling. I thought Bouquart must be sleeping too where he was hidden above the coffee trees. When I woke, Merbillay was still by me, lying on her back with her eyes open to the cracks of light in the woven walls. I spread my hand across her belly and felt the hard curled shape of a new child.
Merbillay sat up sharply then, and so did I, turning my shoulder from her. Caco had waked and looked at Riau with his bright, curious eyes.
“Vini moin,” I said. “Sé papa-ou m’yé.” Caco hesitated, till Merbillay clicked her tongue, and then he came to me quickly. He had grown very much—his legs hung below my waist when I lifted him to my chest. I carried him outside the ajoupa, kissing the short hair on top of his head. When he began to squirm, I let him down and he ran away toward the voices of other children.
Merbillay came out from the ajoupa, with all her clothes adjusted. Our eyes looked every way but at each other. At last I kissed my fingers to her and began climbing the hill to look for Bouquart. Anger was rising up my throat, but if my thought went outside of Riau, it said that Riau had left with no word
or warning and had been gone more than one year. Why would Merbillay not take another man? But the anger with its bitter taste was hard to swallow back.
Doctor Hébert had gone to the fighting at Saint Marc, I learned, and in the grand’case was his colored woman Nanon with her son and also the doctor’s sister with her man, the gunrunner Tocquet, and the child who they had made together. When I studied the grand’case from the hill, I saw that the rotten places had all been repaired and much work done to channel the water to a pool in front. Grass began to grow there now, and flowers, where packed earth had been before. But I stayed away from the yard below the gallery of the house, for Tocquet was a man to know one nèg from another.
At night I came to Merbillay, bringing Bouquart with me under cover of the dark. She cooked for both of us, and we ate without much talk. That night I lay again beside her, awake for a long time listening to her breath in sleep, until the moon was high, and I went out, down behind the stables, where the forge was dark and untended. A brown horse hung his head over a stall door and whickered to me, and I saw it was Ti Bonhomme. This horse had belonged to Bréda before, and Riau had ridden him with Toussaint’s army too. I went to him and gave him salt from the bag I had gathered in the desert, and felt his soft nose breathing on my palm.
During the next day, I carved a wheel for Caco and pinned it to a long stick for him to push and play with. In the night I lay again with Merbillay, but at moonrise I went out quietly and found Bouquart and led him down behind the stables. We fired the forge, Bouquart helping with the bellows, as I showed him. When the forge grew bright, some few people came from the ajoupas on the hill and watched from the shadows outside the firelight, but no one challenged Riau, I don’t know why. When the forge was well heated I made the tools ready and cut the nabots from Bouquart’s feet, first the right and then the left. They fell in their hinged halves, like heavy melons, and when each one opened there was a sigh, from the people watching out of the darkness, like a breath of wind.
Bouquart looked up at me, his eyes shining in the firelight. He wet a finger in his mouth and touched it to a spot where the hot metal had blistered his skin. Above his ankles where the nabots had been, his leg hair was all rubbed away and the skin was polished and shiny, with black marks on the tendon from chafe wounds that had healed. Bouquart stood up. When he took his first step, his knee shot up so high it nearly hit him in the face. He walked farther, then ran and leapt, so high he touched the barn roof with the flat of his open hand. Ti Bonhomme the horse whinnied from surprise and pulled his head back from the stall door. Bouquart landed in a squat, then stood up, smiling from one ear to the other. In the shadows the people laughed and clapped, and some began to come forward toward the light, the women’s hips moving as though they would dance.
We stayed for many days at Habitation Thibodet, I did not count how many. It was calm there all the time. In the daytime the women worked in the coffee or in the provision ground, while the few men who remained did soldier tasks and cared for the horses. All day I kept inside the ajoupa, sometimes playing the banza softly, with the heel of my palm damping the skin head so that the sound would not carry. Or I would go into the jungle with Caco. I had seen no man there I knew by name (except the blancs in the grand’case). Those Riau had known in Toussaint’s army had all gone to the fighting at Saint Marc, and the whiteman doctor went there also, Merbillay had told me, or perhaps some had been killed, or run away as Riau had done before. But still there might be some man in the camp who would know Riau by sight.
I spent my days in the ajoupa or in the trees with Caco far from the camp, and by night I lay with Merbillay. We had not spoken of the new child coming, yet it lay between us whenever our bellies came together.
The news came that Toussaint’s army was returning. The English were not chasing them, but still they had come back to Gonaives. It was told that Toussaint had come into the town one time, but the English had sent ships with cannons so that he and his men were driven out again. It was told that a cannonball struck Toussaint in the face, but his ouanga was so strong the cannonball did not kill him, though it knocked out one of his front teeth. Toussaint, it was told, had captured Fort Belair and begun to put cannons on Morne Diamant to fire into Saint Marc from above, but during the work a cannon fell on his hand and crushed it, and for this he had come back to Gonaives to wait for healing.
By afternoon more soldiers had come into the camp at Habitation Thibodet, though not Toussaint himself, and not all of his army. From the ajoupa I heard the voice of the whiteman Captain Maillart and the voice of Moyse calling out orders, they who had been brother captains with Riau before. All day I stayed in the ajoupa, silent, though Caco called me from outside, and I was glad of the woven walls which hid me.
After darkness came and the camp was quiet, I lay beside Merbillay again, but this night we did not touch. It seemed a long time before she slept. Then I got up quietly and took the small macoute, which I had made ready before. The moon had not yet risen so it was very dark, but before I had gone many steps from the ajoupa, Bouquart rose out of his sleeping place, whispering.
“You are going.”
“Yes,” I said, “but you can stay.” I told him he had only to go to Moyse or the blanc Maillart to be made one of Toussaint’s soldiers. I had seen his eyes admiring the soldiers in the camp.
“But you.” Even in the dark I saw Bouquart’s eyes turn to the ajoupa.
“Gegne problèm,” I said. There was a problem, more than one. Merbillay’s new man would be coming back, if he was not killed in the fighting. Riau knew this, though she had not said it. Perhaps I would not have left only for that, but there was another thing I knew. Toussaint would kill a man for running from his army, desertion as it was called by whitemen and Toussaint. Riau had felt his pistol barrel against my head one time before, and that was only petit marronage, two or three days of hunting in the hills. A year in Bahoruco was grand marronage.
I followed Bouquart’s eyes toward the ajoupa. “Say I will come back,” I told him.
Bouquart’s head moved toward me through the darkness. “When?”
“M’ap tounen pi ta,” I said. I will come back later.
The brown horse Ti Bonhomme had been turned out into a paddock. He came to the fence when I clicked my tongue, and I gave him salt from the bag I had gathered, and made a bridle of a long piece of rope. Holding his mane with my left hand, I swung up onto his bare back. I did not steal a saddle or a leather bridle, though I knew where they were kept, and I would not have taken the horse either except that I needed him to carry me quickly far away.
When the moon did rise, it filled the forest with the light of bones. By moonlight it was easy to ride faster. My spirit led me to a tree where hung the skull and bones of a long-horned goat and the cross of Baron Samedi. Here I reined up my horse, and looked at the ground, the fallen leaves piled under moonlight. The grave had long ago filled in or washed away, but still I felt a hollow. In this place Riau had helped Biassou to take the flesh of Chacha Godard from the ground and make it breathe and walk again, a zombi.
I felt fear in my horse’s heart, between my knees. I let the reins out and rode quickly on. The night was warm, but a cold straight line was down my back, like death. I took a lump of the desert salt from the sack and held it on my tongue, my jaws shut tight.
11
Cool, and the calm was ruffled only by the wind, shivering the heavy blades of the tall old palms. Above the bunches of their tops, the stars of morning faded, as the cocks took up their cry. A last mosquito, his namesake, whined round his ear, then stung. Moustique, whose hands were both engaged in balancing the priest’s slop jar, could not slap it. He let it feed, then fly, and felt his way forward through the warm wet darkness, his ivory toes splaying in the dirt.
L’Abbé Delahaye had assigned him the slop jar to teach him humility, he said. Moustique was meant to share the vessel, during the night, and likewise to share the priest’s bedchamber, but he preferred to sl
eep in the outer room, on a pallet, under the shadows of the chalice and censer on the table, the iron crucifix nailed to the wall—he went outside to relieve his flesh, if he must. The priest snored ferociously, and the bedroom, windowless, was too close and too completely dark.
Delahaye himself had done such tasks, which some might think degrading, during his novitiate in France. He mocked Moustique for rising before first light in hope of hiding his progress with the ordures. One who has attained humility, the priest was wont to say, cannot be humiliated. Furthermore, the boy should count himself lucky that the weather was always dulcet here. As a novice, Delahaye had performed his morning devoir walking barefoot across freezing flagstones of his monastery, while outside the roofs and the ground would be covered with snow, that frozen rain that fell lightly as feathers . . . like cotton, the priest explained, but Moustique had not seen cotton either, though once it had been grown in Saint Domingue.
Moustique listened, often without comprehension, and woke each morning well before dawn, to lie listening to the wind bowing the tall palms, the clatter of leaves distant beyond the roar of the priest’s snoring through the thin partition. Then he pushed himself up and collected the slop jar and went out into the dark.
It had rained in the night, and the earth beyond the borders of the village was damp beneath his feet. He moved to the edge of the path to avoid a party of charcoal burners he could hear coming down from the mountain with their loaded bouriks. They passed him, clucking softly to their animals, the little donkeys snorting at his scent. To his left he could hear the river running over the rocks, and he cut a new path through the reeds and emptied the jar among them, then went on in a long curve to strike the river bank at a lower point. The stars were gone, and daylight was coming up quickly now, framing the mountains and the treetops against a purple sky, new light creating the world all at once out of darkness, as Moustique came out of the reeds onto a gravel shoal.
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