Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  The priest had gone out when Moustique awoke, leaving the bedroom door ajar. Moustique went to the river and washed, then returned slowly, greeting no one that he passed. His mind was a near-perfect blank. There was no sign anywhere of Marie-Noelle. He knew that most likely she would have fled to her home bitasyon in the mountains.

  Behind the priest’s house, the embers of the cook fire were dark. Shattered wood from the smashed ajoupa had been heaped across it. Moustique wondered if someone else would be engaged to cook. As for himself, he was only slightly hungry and could think of nothing to eat that would not aggravate his torn lip. Delahaye had not yet returned. Moustique went indoors, lay down and slept again.

  When next he woke, the lightless room reverberated with the snoring of the priest. The bleeding of his lip had stopped completely though it was raw and very swollen. His appetite had not yet returned. His mind was clearer than it had been before. He understood that he might regain the priest’s esteem, which was of value, but that to do so he must renounce both woman and the hûnfor. There must be other ways to God.

  He got up cautiously, the weals stinging his legs and back. He listened to the rhythm of the snores. The straw macoute he used to gather herbs hung on the wall. Moustique put into it half a loaf of bread, the silver chalice, and the priest’s stole. His shoulder was too sore for the strap, so he slipped from the house with the mouth of the straw bag clutched in one hand.

  Dark of the moon. Moustique felt his way to the corral. The little jenny came to him of her own accord, whiskering over his palm. Moustique improvised a rope hackamore, then dropped the top rail and led her out. Wincing slightly, he swung onto her bare back, and rode from the town into the mountains, not knowing where he meant to go.

  12

  South from Le Cap across the mountains, past Plaisance toward Gonaives, the road was more theoretical than actual, and Jean-Michel, known since childhood by the stable name of Choufleur but now officially addressed as le colonel Maltrot, had known as much before he decided to travel with the carriage from his white father’s plantation in the Plaine du Nord. The ridiculous difficulties of crossing the mountains with such a vehicle were no surprise to him, and yet he cursed roundly and loudly whenever it was necessary to dismount and order the wheels unshipped from the carriage so that it could be carried piecemeal by the twelve men of his escort, over rockslides and mud-slides, or across sections of crumbling ledge too narrow for the wheel span. Sometimes he cursed the men directly to their black African faces. Most of them had been slaves on his white father’s plantation, though now they were French Republican soldiers (in theory, as the road was theoretically a road and not a near-impassable goat track); at any rate they were accustomed to obeying him, whether because of his military rank or his proprietorship, Choufleur did not know, or care.

  At last they came down from Morne Pilboreau, descending the whip-snake turns on the dry mountain faces above Gonaives. They did not continue toward the coastal town, but turned westward, through another notch in the mountains which led into the canton of Ennery. Four men carried a wheel apiece, and six men hefted the carriage itself by its axles and tongue, while the remaining two went unburdened except for their weapons, and were prepared to respond in case of attack, though none seemed likely. The passage was quiet, sunny and humid. Choufleur rode bareback on one of the matched pair of gray carriage horses, his seat so assured that the lack of a saddle did not detract at all from the dignity of his bearing. Little clusters of wattled huts had sprung up on either side of the road. When Choufleur sent a man to inquire the way to Habitation Thibodet, he learned they were already almost upon it.

  Here where they’d paused to ask directions, the road was muddy and rutted but wide and level enough now. Choufleur ordered his men to pin the the carriage wheels back on the axles. While they worked, he paced, fastidiously lifting his polished boots clear of the muck. A little brown goat by the roadside bleated at him and ran to the opposite end of its fraying rope tether. When the horses were hitched, Choufleur climbed into the carriage, which went jouncing forward amid the foot soldiers, who smiled covertly at each other now they’d been relieved of their extra loads. The road surface varied from sucking mudholes to patches of raw rock that pounded Choufleur’s tailbone painfully. He would have been far more comfortable astride the bare back of either gray, but the impression to be made by his arrival mattered more.

  The entrance to Habitation Thibodet was marked by two delicate brickwork columns, fixed with hinges, though there was no gate. A sentry emerged from the shadow of each column and the two men barred the way, symbolically, by crossing the bayonets fixed to their muskets. Choufleur leaned out the carriage window, displaying his uniform coat and the left epaulette.

  “I am looking for General Toussaint Louverture.”

  “He isn’t here,” one of the sentries replied, and exchanged a glance with the the other. Both men were barefoot and shirtless, and wore identical cartridge boxes strapped across the shoulder. The one who had spoken had the letter V branded on the smooth, flat muscle above his left nipple.

  “You may pass anyway,” he said. The two men lowered their bayonets and the carriage rolled unevenly past them.

  The drive to the grand’case was wet without being boggy; looking down from the carriage window Choufleur saw that it had been seeded with many small stones to keep it from turning into a swamp. On either side the fields were cultivated, mostly in beans, and the plantings all looked in good order. There were only a few carrés of cane, but Choufleur grudgingly admitted to himself that the pwa rouj were more practical just now—efficient provision for the troops.

  The carriage wheeled in front of the grand’case and halted by the cane mill. Choufleur beckoned one of his men to open the door for him, then climbed out and straightened his back gingerly. He adjusted his coat and shot his cuffs. The artificial pool in front of the house made a nice effect, with its stone borders planted with flowers and its surface afloat with water lilies. The house itself was nothing extraordinary, a single story of whitewashed wood, but the carpentry was skilled, and the building was well set off by tall coconut palms above and behind it, and by channels of sparkling water that rippled down on either side to join, gurgling, in the central pool. The railings of the gallery were trained over with purple-flowering bougainvillea. A black house servant in a plain cotton shift stood with her fingers grazing the rail, regarding the arrival with some of the astonishment Choufleur had hoped for.

  He nodded to her and cleared his throat. “You may announce the Sieur Maltrot.”

  The girl hesitated, exhaling through her parted lips, then turned abruptly and ran barefoot into the house.

  Elise had been dozing under her mosquito net in the bedroom when she heard Zabeth’s voice calling, “Le Sieur Maltrot, li fek rivé!” She was some few minutes organizing herself to greet the guest, all the more unexpected for the fact that the Sieur Maltrot had disappeared during the first months of the insurrection and was generally assumed to be dead. The French nobleman had been a peripheral member of the circle of her friend Isabelle Cigny, as well as an acquaintance of her first husband, Thibodet, but his famous cruelty showed plainly enough through his rather antique manners, and Elise had not liked him, had not in the least regretted his loss, and was not overjoyed now to hear that he had returned from the grave. Therefore she sighed as Zabeth helped her pin up her hair and slip into a less revealing robe. She dallied over Sophie’s cot—the child was napping away the day’s most suffocating heat, murmuring almost inaudibly in sleep, her face bright with a sheen of perspiration. Elise brushed an insect from the netting, and then, with a quick glance at the mirror, went tripping toward the front door.

  Nanon had preceded her onto the gallery, where she stood with her long nails pressed to her wide lower lip—an attitude of perplexity, perhaps even dismay. Elise, standing in the doorway, looked past her and saw that that the new arrival was not the Sieur Maltrot at all, but one of his bastard mulatto sons, the eldest sh
e thought, who had been educated in France and returned with the airs of a white man—she took in also that something had already passed between him and Nanon, though it did not seem to have been speech. As Elise walked toward the gallery rail, Nanon turned abruptly and swept past her, eyes large and dark and her lip bitten red against the unusual paleness of her skin, into the shadows of the house.

  “Ah, of course, Madame Thibodet,” Choufleur said breezily, as he smirked and extended his limp hand toward her. He had already mounted to her level, with no encouragement from her.

  “In fact it is Madame Tocquet,” Elise corrected him, and smiled in a way that showed her top teeth only.

  She felt a mixture of reaction which included outrage at his effrontery (presenting himself here under the name of his white father!), the desire to order him driven from the property by dogs, with cudgels; while at the same time she scrutinized the good cloth of his uniform coat, the brocade and the buttons with the look of real gold, and in the middle distance the fancy carriage and the black soldiers of his escort, all of which inspired her with a vague uncertainty—and then there was that flash of uninterpretable something that had passed between him and her brother’s concubine.

  Choufleur was going on, assuming this and that with the same airy confidence, still limply holding the hand she had reluctantly offered him, while he pronounced the usual platitudes about the length of the road and the lateness of the hour (though in truth it was not very far past midday and the sun was broiling directly overhead). It was bewildering to look at those swirls of freckles on his face, as if two sets of different features were present there, but neither completely resolved. Elise found, however, that she had made up her mind.

  “But of course,” she said in her sweetest simper, and turned toward Zabeth, who waited a pace behind her, to her left. “Go and change the linen in the west room.”

  Well satisfied by the success of his entry to Habitation Thibodet, Choufleur passed the afternoon in a self-guided tour of the plantation and the encampment surrounding it. There was no more than a skeleton garrison in the military camp, for almost every ablebodied man had been drawn off to the fighting in the Artibonite Valley, but women and the half-grown children and a handful of old men were keeping up the cultivation creditably: the coffee trees on the upper slopes looked as prosperous as the red and brown beans in the low ground, and there would even be a small harvest of cane, to be processed into brown sugar at the mill. Choufleur was impressed, if grudgingly, and somewhat more disagreeably aware that things looked better managed here than on his own lands in the north.

  The men of his escort had fanned out through the encampment to scrape up new acquaintances or in a couple of cases to renew old ones from the north, recovered here and now by hazard. Sifting their gossip, Choufleur learned that Toussaint had not been seen here for two weeks or more, though he might reappear at any time, and that the French doctor Hébert had been absent for as long, serving as medical aide in Toussaint’s forces. The only white man on the place was Tocquet, the smuggler, husband of the French madame, and he came and went most unpredictably.

  All this looked very satisfactory to Choufleur. He returned to the grand’case as the afternoon rain blew up, and rested in the room which had been prepared for him, letting rain sounds soothe him till Zabeth knocked lightly on the doorframe to summon him to dine.

  The meal was served on the gallery to a small round table of four. “We have sometimes a more various company,” Elise trilled, “but at present all our officers are absent, with their troops.” She joked that they still made up the number for a card party.

  Choufleur had been seated opposite Nanon; she was composed, but more than demurely silent, keeping her eyes downcast over her plate, and speaking only when spoken to. Choufleur did not address her directly, but let the conversation unfold as it would.

  Elise rebuked Tocquet for cleaning his nails at table with the foot-long blade of his knife, but the gunrunner only smiled at her lazily and finished his manicure before hiding the knife away somewhere under the billow of his untucked white shirt. Choufleur had dealt with him, years earlier, during the first months of the insurrection when Tocquet had regularly brought guns from the Spanish over the border to the rebel slaves—he might well still be engaged in such traffic, for he was not one to be inhibited by shifts of political allegiance. The very notion of his marriage to the Frenchwoman seemed astonishing (Choufleur wondered if perhaps it were no more than a figure of speech), although the woman was certainly delectable. Choufleur had seen her a few years before, from a distance at Le Cap, and marked her as one of those European roses who would quickly droop and wither, in this climate. On the contrary, she had bloomed and flourished. Her blond hair was fuller and thicker than he remembered, her eyes a brighter blue, her cheeks plump and tasty-looking, like the skin of a well-ripened peach.

  Frenchwomen did not truly interest Choufleur, however. He could appreciate his ambivalent hostess as he might a painting or a well-performed passage of music, but she did not stir his blood. He turned to Tocquet and began to quiz him on recent military movements in the area.

  “One might compare Toussaint to a chess player,” Tocquet said, after some hesitation. “A strategist—he has the long view.” He forked up a bit of his grilled fish and considered while he chewed. “This accident when his hand was hurt on the heights above Saint Marc cost him a tempo, as in chess. For that, the Spanish and the English could combine to recover Verrettes. But when Toussaint was back in the field, he surprised them in the interior and took Hinche.”

  “An exchange of equal value, you would say?” Choufleur stroked his chin.

  He knew much of this intelligence from dispatches, but was more interested in Tocquet’s reading of the raw information. Tocquet was like a crow flying over a battlefield, all-seeing, but with no particular stake in the fortunes of any one army. Also, since Toussaint reported directly to Laveaux, information did not flow in Choufleur’s direction as freely as it might, owing to a mood of tension which seemed to be growing between the French commander and the mulatto military administration at Le Cap.

  Tocquet shrugged. “If we remain with the notion of chess, position can matter more than material.”

  “But do you imagine he can really out-general European officers?” Choufleur said, testing. “An old Negro, uneducated . . . he has seen nothing beyond the shores of this island.”

  He was aware that Elise had stiffened, just perceptibly at his choice of words.

  Nanon, her head still tilted over her plate, rearranged her grated vivres and her riz ak pwa; it was not clear whether she were attending to the men’s conversation or not.

  Tocquet smiled out of one corner of his long, thin-lipped mouth. “Oh,” he said, “to have lived to Toussaint’s age in this country is proof of sagacity, is it not? How many ‘old Negroes’ have you seen here? Concerning his generalship, I myself do not believe he can be outmaneuvered in the interior. He knows the country too well, and can move his men very much more quickly than European troops will ever travel over such terrain, in such a climate. As for your European officers, not one of them has offered him any serious difficulty until Brisbane, and that in the Artibonite, where it is open country.”

  “Some say his sagacity may amount to deviousness,” Choufleur said. “Do you suppose this allegiance he’s sworn to the French is genuine?”

  Tocquet looked at him, scanning his uniform coat from the brocaded cuff to the epaulettes, long and lingeringly enough for Choufleur to feel a beading sensation behind his eyes, like water just before the kettle boils. But Tocquet removed his gaze in time to break the tension, looking out over the gallery rail, where a little rainwater still dripped on the bougainvillea vines, and on into the dark.

  “I have heard,” he said, “and it may be true, that Toussaint invited Brisbane to parlay at Gonaives. To discuss, so to speak, a realignment of the forces he commands . . .”

  Choufleur, who had known nothing of this, felt a prickle
down his spine.

  “It appears that Brisbane himself may be an exception to the rule, but by and large, as I’m sure you know, our British invaders prefer to purchase their enemies rather than to fight them.”

  “You interest me greatly,” Choufleur admitted. “And what next?”

  “Well, it seems in the end that Brisbane thought better of attending this meeting in person,” Tocquet said. “He sent subordinates with his proffers and proposals. Whereupon Toussaint was outraged and arrested the lot of them—for attempting to suborn and corrupt the virtuous General Toussaint Louverture.”

  Tocquet slapped a palm on the table, hard enough to jingle the glasses, and broke into a sudden harsh laugh. Elise added her tinkling tone to his mirth. After a moment Choufleur forced himself to join their laughter, but Tocquet had already cut himself off. He pushed back his chair and bit the end from a black cheroot.

  “You may call it deviousness, low cunning,” he said. “Be damned to all soldiering, I say—honorable or not. But Toussaint is making war, not a chivalric tournament.”

  Choufleur nodded. Tocquet raised an eyebrow, then leaned forward to light his cheroot from the nearest candle.

  “Brisbane had wit enough to avoid that one trap . . .” Tocquet settled his back in his chair and exhaled a wave of smoke toward the gallery ceiling. “And Toussaint, as you will mark by these tales, has recognized him as a serious opponent. If Brisbane takes him for a foolish old Negro, I believe he is likely to lose the game.”

  Toward the end of the dinner the children came scrambling out onto the gallery, Sophie begging for a sweet, Paul tugging at Nanon’s skirt, asking to be let go to play at the borders of the pool. Elise watched Choufleur watching Nanon with Paul, until Nanon rose, murmuring, apparently glad of the excuse, and went with her son down the gallery steps into the fresh, damp night.