Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  He stepped shin-deep into the water and crouched down to wash the jar. The morning mist was lifting from the river, and he saw a party of girls upstream, kneeling to dip water for their houses, Marie-Noelle among them. Their laughter belled out when they saw him, ringing with innocent delight that a creature so absurd as himself should have appeared for their amusement. Ducking his head above the cold stream, he felt his face break out with inflamed patches that ran down his throat past the loose collar of his shirt and spread across his collarbone. Delahaye addressed him always as Jean-Raphael, but in a reckless moment he had disclosed his nickname to Marie-Noelle, and this information had become the centerpiece for many pleasantries.

  “Ti-moun prêt, sé moustik li yé!” they called after him, and tightened their lips to make the insect whine. The baby priest is a mosquito . . . His gangly limbs were like the legs of a mosquito, his long nose of a blanc might give a mosquito’s sting. Moustique refused to look back at them, but even if he could not hear their jokes and laughter, he would have been as acutely aware of them, sauntering a few yards behind him, hands and hips lazily swinging, the water jars effortlessly balanced on their heads. He understood that Marie-Noelle tormented him partly from annoyance that he had deprived her of much of her work for the priest—Delahaye had reassigned the most menial tasks to him, although the girl still came to his house to cook, for the priest would not tolerate Moustique’s cooking. There was a limit, he declared, to the mortification of the flesh.

  He set the washed jar down on the priest’s doorsill, then untied the priest’s two donkeys, the jack and the sweet jenny each marked with a crude cross on the flank, and led them out to forage. When he returned, the priest was at matins. Not many of the faithful had assembled, it being a weekday (and in any case all the white planters had been killed or driven into refuge on the coast). Some few black men and women had come down from the hills, hoping for a Jesus ouanga, a taste of power from the mighty god of blancs. Moustique’s own father had been free enough in dispensing such charms, but Delahaye was stricter—he would not baptise anyone more than once, provided that he recognized the convert on a later application. Part of Moustique’s duty, indeed, was to identify new Christians who came again to repeat the treatment.

  He served at the altar as he had been taught. After the service, Delahaye heard his recitation. Moustique spoke with some difficulty, his mouth full of saliva; he could smell the maize cakes Marie-Noelle was frying over the cook fire behind the house.

  “‘For if the first fruit be holy,” Moustique carefully pronounced, “‘the lump is also holy, and if the root be holy, so are the branches.

  “‘And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive branch, wert grafted in among them, and with them partakest of the root at fatness of the olive tree;

  “‘Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.’ ”

  Delahaye nodded pensively, signaling with his forefinger for Moustique to continue. The priest assigned him a chapter to memorize each day, first in Latin, which was mere noise to the boy, then in a French version—good French, for if Moustique should lapse into Creole, Delahaye would rap him across the knuckles with the back of a wooden spoon. And yet at other times the priest would drift, captured more by the sense of the passage than the phrasing.

  “‘Thou wilt say then, The branches were broken off, that I might be grafted in.

  “‘Well, because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith, be not high-minded, but fear:

  “‘For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee.’ ”

  “Yes . . .” Delahaye said, presenting the flat of his palm to stop the recital. “Yes, that will do.” His eyes cleared and focused on Moustique. “Let us break our fast then,” he said, and touched the boy’s hand in a kindly manner, as he sometimes would. “My wild olive branch.”

  Moustique followed him, his puzzlement mute, from the church to the house. As soon as they were seated, Marie-Noelle served them quickly and then withdrew. They ate the maize cakes flavored with dark cane syrup, washed down by cold water from the river. Delahaye discoursed on Latin grammar, comparing certain passages of the morning’s text to the French translation. Moustique nodded, miming comprehension, whereas in truth the only thing that he had grasped was that while French was for white men, and Creole for black, Latin was the language spoken by God.

  “You may go to the washing,” Delahaye told him as they picked at the last crumbs, “after the dishes, of course.”

  Moustique’s heart lowered. Wash day was in some ways his worst experience of an ordinary week. He looked out the open door in the direction Marie-Noelle had gone. A wisp of smoke from the dying cook fire drifted across the open front of the ajoupa where the girl had slept, before his own arrival. The little lean-to stood empty now, though Moustique would have gladly slept there himself, farther from the snoring, if Delahaye had allowed it.

  “Above all you must beware of concupiscence,” Delahaye suddenly announced, drawing the boy’s attention back from the world beyond the door. “Lasciviousness, lust of the flesh. Through this sin was your father lost to God.”

  Moustique flinched, swallowed, and got up to clear the table.

  The young girls washed downriver from the older women, and Moustique washed downriver from the girls. On other occasions he had gone upstream from all of them, half-hiding himself in a patch of reeds, but the women frowned and the girls complained loudly that they caught his dirt drifting down the currents. Today he crossed the gravel shoal in full view of their party, swinging his bundle of cloth down on the sand at the water’s edge. The sun was hot across his back, but the water was so cold that when he first put a foot in, it shocked him clear to his back teeth. He sighed, unfolded a cassock on the surface of the water, then plunged it under and began to scrub it with a long bar of handmade soap.

  This was, absolutely, women’s work: another station on his pathway to humility. His father, the French Jesuit Père Bonne-chance, had been a humble man; Moustique had felt this for himself, before his father’s execution, and his feeling was confirmed by Delahaye, who had known him reasonably well. There was much virtue in your father, Delahaye would lecture him, even a vocation for martyrdom, as was proved, and yet he shut himself out of the community of saints, because . . . Because, Moustique reminded himself wearily, he had fallen into the snare of love for women, notably Moustique’s mother Fontelle, and had used his male member to plant the seed of children in her belly, the germ of Moustique and his sisters.

  He spread a sheet across a boulder and began to scour it with a rounded stone. His palms were wrinkling now from soaking in the water. For some time the girls had been chaffing him in their loud, laughing voices, but Moustique, wrapped up in other thoughts, had scarcely been aware of them. Was this the beginning of humility? The divorce of his mind from his surroundings was certainly something new. And the girls, seeing he did not react to their teasing, had lost interest and begun to splash each other. Moustique understood the source of their resentment—he did not belong here at this hour of the day, no more than any man, and if not for his presence the girls would have been free to strip off the dresses they were wearing and scrub them clean and then swim naked while their clothes dried on the rocks. As it was, the splashing game had soaked the whole pack of them to their necks, so that the wet fabric clung transparently to the rich chocolate flesh, breast and buttocks and belly and the shadowy cleft between the thighs . . . Moustique’s mind skittered sideways, crossing over fragmentary passages half-remembered from a very curious French novel his father had kept hidden (so he thought) and which Moustique and his sisters had partially puzzled out in secret sessions, blushing and giggling in embarrassed titillation.

  Now his skin was all afire again, and his wicked thoughts were concentrating in the arrow shaft of sin, which sprung forward and strained against the cotton of his breeches. Moustique sank d
own to his knees, waist-deep in the water, but it was useless now. The girls had begun to grin and gesture—they knew they had him back on the skewer—and the water was not cold enough to quench his heat. But his mind slipped free of his body again, as it had done a few minutes before, and though he felt the physical symptoms of his shame, the blush and bulge, these no longer mattered to him. Was this humility? He stood up out of the water, his empty hands loose at his sides, and looked at the girls frankly, making no effort to conceal himself. The fattest and most impudent of the group cocked her forefinger at his crotch.

  “Moustik sa-a, li kab piqué dè fois!” And she erupted into a laugh so powerful she fell over backward into the shallows with a tremendous splash. It was a fine witticism and the others quickly took it up, shrieking and pointing as they cried, “This mosquito can sting two times!” Moustique stood still, almost relaxed, and gazed at them with something like indifference. Marie-Noelle, he noticed in a distant way, had not joined in the laughter of the others.

  On Saturday a party of mulattoes came, coffee planters from the hills roundabout, to dine with the priest before mass on Sunday morning. Moustique had encountered most of them a time or two before, but had not learned their names, no more than they had inquired after his . . . although he saw that he was noticed by appraising, not entirely friendly eyes. If Delahaye had explained his presence to the guests, he’d done so out of Moustique’s earshot. They were griffes or marabou mostly, from the point of view of color, so Moustique was lighter-skinned himself than any of them.

  Marie-Noelle had prepared griot of pork with rice and beans and a few stewed greens, but she remained outdoors beside her fire, while Moustique served the table. He was not invited to sit down, but caught snatches of the conversation as he passed the plates and refreshed the rum and water the company drank in place of wine. Most of the talk concerned the war. Toussaint had been battering Saint Marc since midsummer, and without success, but he had defeated the English almost everywhere else he had met them, at Marchand and Pont l’Ester and Verrettes. From this last position he had quickly turned to drive the Spanish from Petite Rivière. The sheer speed of his maneuvering was remarkable, all agreed.

  Toussaint was certainly a man of cunning, said the oldest man at the table, fondling his peppery beard as he spoke. Perhaps even a man of genuine talent—but no one could prevail indefinitely against European soldiers. A marabou youth across the table hotly rejoined that no campaign of the British General Brisbane had managed to dislodge Toussaint from the Cordon de l’Ouest.

  “So for the moment he remains our master,” said the bearded man, “for better or for worse,” and someone noted that every plantation and settlement in the mountains was much calmer since Toussaint had established his chain of posts from Gonaives to the heights above Mirebalais, and someone else complained that his cultivators (he just stopped short of saying slaves) grew restless in the proximity of so many black soldiers, and many ran away to join Toussaint’s army . . .

  At the head of the table, Delahaye listened, silently attentive, his fingertips unconsciously worrying a whorl in his close-cropped gray hair, until he noticed Moustique lingering, and gestured at the empty pork platter.

  Moustique went outside to the fire. The sky was darkening, slate-blue, the wind shivered the high palms, and crows flew crying among them. In the nearest bitasyon above the town, there was a quick, sharp rattle of drums, trailing off, then beginning again. Marie-Noelle refilled the pork platter from the iron kettle, her eyes lowered, almost demure. She was usually quiet, Moustique remembered, when apart from the pack of other girls; still something in her manner seemed to have changed.

  When he went back with the dish of pork, the young marabou was loudly declaring that Toussaint had a better hope than anyone of driving all the white people from the island once for all. One of the older men pointed out that such a result would hardly be in their own interests—practically all of them had relatives who were collaborating with the British at Port-au-Prince and points farther south.

  “Yes,” the bearded man agreed, “and equally you must not forget that Toussaint has sold himself to the French, to Laveaux—”

  “Laveaux is a good man,” Delahaye put in.

  “Laveaux is the tool of Sonthonax,” the bearded man said, “who would set the most ignorant, savage Africans above us—”

  “Sonthonax has left the country,” the young marabou snapped.

  “So he has,” the bearded man said, leaning forward as he lowered his voice, “and on the eve of his departure he gave his commissioner’s medallion, along with its powers and prerogatives as I have heard, to Dieudonné, who is no more and no less than a wild maroon from the mountains. And he told him—as you may not know—Sonthonax told Dieudonné, So long as you see mulattoes in your ranks you will never be free.

  A considerable silence followed, during which Delahaye noticed Moustique again and sent him out for more rum and a plate of cut fruit. When he returned, the young marabou was in the midst of a hot reply to some resumed thread of the conversation: “—and what of Rigaud, who is of our race, and of the French Republican party? What of Beauvais, who is one of us too, and undoubtedly a man of honor?”

  “I do not see that either of those men has thrown in his lot with Toussaint.” The bearded griffe leaned forward, raising his voice slightly as he balanced his weight toward the younger man. “And perhaps they err in casting their lot with the French Republic. If we gain by being made equal with the blancs, we lose as much by having those hordes of wild Africans set equal to us.”

  “But—” the young marabou began.

  “I salute your youth—” the bearded man quelled him with an upraised palm. “But it is no time to be hot-headed, not even for young men. Admire Toussaint if you will—he is admirable both in his courage and his cunning. But he has placed himself at the head of the new-freed slaves, and if he seems to carry them wherever he will, it may just as well be that it is they who are driving him from pillar to post. His shift of allegiance to Laveaux was very sudden, was it not—and are you so completely confident that he will not turn again to some other party, or that he serves any ends but his own? You may very well admire his gifts and his accomplishments, but both before and after, you should fear him.”

  An assenting murmur ran round the table, as the bearded man braced his palms against the table and sat back. Moustique searched Delahaye’s face for a reaction, but the priest remained as inexpressive as Toussaint himself would have in such a case. Since the execution of his father, Moustique had grown to depend upon Toussaint’s protection, and so this discussion confused him as much as it evidently had the young marabou—so much so that his head began to ache. He left the room without waiting for Delahaye to dismiss him.

  It was darker now, the stars appearing, and for the moment the drums had stopped. Marie-Noelle was walking in a spiral pattern between the fire and the trunks of the tall palms, seeming to take pleasure in the light grace of her steps. She was dressed in white, as if for church, and her skirt belled out around her slim legs as she turned. Moustique felt a heart-stirring as he watched her, and wondered if she meant for him to feel it, but her eyes were downcast always, as if unaware of him. She turned and stepped and turned again, the white skirt catching starlight, firelight, starlight.

  He lay sleepless in the priest’s front room, the sound of Delahaye’s snore throbbing at him through the wall, textured by the more distant drumming which the snoring only partly masked. Sleep was like a surface of salt water, so buoyant that it would not let him sink. His mind scuttled spider-like across it, shrinking from the most dreadful images in its store. The scene of his father’s execution sometimes still appeared to him in dreams or waking nightmares such as this. They chained his father to a wheel and broke his bones with hammers till he perished. At first, he blessed his executioners but soon enough his prayers turned into screams. And all this was for nothing, for no cause: Père Bonne-chance had merely been confused with some other renega
de priest who had assisted in tortures and the rape of white women during the first insurrection of ’91. Even Delahaye admitted that in this case his father was purely without blame. Then God has no justice, Moustique had said. Delahaye smashed his knuckles with the spoon and set him to memorizing long extracts from the book of Job.

  Moustique got up cautiously from his pallet, light-headed, at the edge of nausea. He padded barefoot over the floor, lifted the latch and went outside. Just beyond the threshold he paused, listening: the racket of the priest’s snoring still shook the walls of the house, uninterrupted. Silvery light spilled over his cheek and his arm. The moon was a crescent, sheltering three stars. When he stepped away from the wall of the house, the jenny raised her head in the corral and came to the palings, whickering softly. Moustique stroked her nose and let her warm breath play over his fingers. In the invisible cleft of the dark hill above, the drumming became more insistent.

  He walked through pools of moonlight from the church and square to the edge of the town, and with scarcely a beat of hesitation began climbing the corkscrew path that curved over an extended claw of the mountain’s foot. Darkness enveloped him, the moon cut off by the trees. His mind worked, but with no influence over his legs. Delahaye would be furious, if he should find out. Moustique’s own father would have disapproved, perhaps more mildly. Moustique did not know one drum from another, so he did not know if he was bound for a secular celebration—bamboche or calenda—or a service for the pagan gods of Africa. In Jeannot’s camp, where Père Bonne-chance had carried his mission in the first months of the rebellion, drums and ceremonies had been a prelude to the slow, elaborate, fatal torture of blanc captives. But all this information and the business of thinking about it became more and more distant, miniaturized, the higher Moustique climbed on the trail, while much more fully present were the drums and his own response: his limbs coming into tune with his heartbeat and the strengthening pulse at the base of his skull. From the darkness above, an unearthly cry broke out, an otherworldly entity that voiced itself on a human tongue. Moustique’s arms flowered into gooseflesh, but he could not make out if the sensation was pleasure or fear.