Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “It is a lovely principle,” Isabelle Cigny jingled across her supper table that evening, “but in practice—well, my friends . . .” She spread her hands above the different platters. “For example, our repast. Perhaps I parrot my husband’s views—he will be desolate to have missed you yet again!” She inclined her head to Maillart and Arnaud in turn.

  “Likewise,” said Arnaud.

  “My regret is sharpened,” said the captain, “by the thought that we dine at the grace of his markmanship.” For the meat was wild dove, shot in the cornfields by Monsieur Cigny. The birds were sweet and tender . . . and worth about two bites apiece; Maillart could happily have eaten twice the number available for his consumption.

  “Precisely,” said Isabelle. “One may imagine that wild game is free for the taking, yet as mon bonhomme would put it, game costs something in powder and shot—precious commodities in this difficult time, to be sequestered with difficulty—and with some small risk—from military requisitioning.”

  This time she fired her glances at Maillart and Flaville. “Gentlemen, I presume we speak in confidence.”

  “But of course,” said Maillart, while Flaville stretched in his chair, smiling with apparent pleasure at her performance.

  “Well,” she went on, “as for the corn and the yams and the greens, they too have their price in labor. Labor diverted from the coffee and the cane. How is that ‘fourth share’ to be extracted from such a situation? Why, our cultivators do well to feed themselves twice daily! Am I unjust?” She fluttered her fingers at Arnaud.

  “By no means, Madame.”

  “And that is not all,” Isabelle said. “The gravity of the predicament is just this—oh, my husband would certainly say the same if he were present.” She smiled around the table, her eyes skimming their faces, all attentive but for Claudine, who maintained her customary air of trance.

  “All very well for our . . . cultivators, that they should be free,” she said. “Oh, let me applaud their freedom . . . Vive la liberté!” She raised her arm dramatically, but the toast fell flat, as she had doubtless intended it should. “Yet those people did not come to us free of charge, and the merchants and brokers of the Bord de Mer, whether here or in France, do not forgive our debts for their revolution.”

  “Well said,” Arnaud pronounced, then went on to develop the theme in bitter detail, using his own examples.

  Maillart went to bed, early, for he did not want to give the fact of Monsieur Cigny’s absence any time to work upon his mind—not that it should make any difference, for Cigny had always been an absentee husband, in all the time Maillart had known his wife. He lay down awaiting insomnia and did not know how deeply he had slept until he woke, all of a start, his ears vibrating with the fierce cry of a woman’s joy.

  He knew that voice, oh so well . . . but now it had a more abandoned note than he had ever heard. For Isabelle had always been the mistress of their pleasure, riding him like a pony bridled to her desire. Who would enjoy her favor now?—he and Arnaud were the only white men on the premises, and the captain recalled how gently Arnaud had taken the maimed hand of his poor mad wife between his own two palms, how patiently he’d coaxed her to their chamber. However vigorous his infidelity, it seemed unlikely he would stray tonight, and anyway he had by his own account a taste for darker delicacies.

  It was not inconceivable that Isabelle might have adopted the practice of Lesbos, but again there was the lack of a candidate. Surely not Claudine—that was unthinkable. Once Isabelle had recounted to him certain adventures undertaken with a mulattress, companion of her unmarried youth, in colonial slang her cocotte. At the time he’d been both excited and repulsed, and now the strain of his arousal was positively painful, so that he was tempted to relieve it by himself—but he put the thought away from him, and it subsided. Perhaps he had only dreamed that voice, he thought, as he yawned backward into sleep, or again, it might have been Isabelle who dreamed.

  Major Flaville, though he left them his men as an escort, did not accompany them on their return to Habitation Arnaud, but rode to inspect camps farther to the east. Maillart regretted this circumstance soon enough, for there were great disturbances in the fields all along the way. On several occasions his company found itself menaced by blacks shouting across the hedgerows, A bas blanc! A bas l’esclavage! Sometimes more particular epithets were directed to Arnaud, whose past reputation seemed to be quite generally known.

  The women, Claudine and Isabelle (who had elected to see her friend installed in her husband’s home), rode in sedan chairs supported by poles, each carried by a pair of retainers of the Cigny plantation. This antique mode of transport solved, in rather a bumpy fashion, the problem of roads impassable for carriages, but in the present situation, the captain thought, it might also give the wrong impression. Down with white people! Down with slavery! There were moments when Maillart suspected that the Cigny litter bearers might drop their loads and flee, but when he loosened his pistols in their holsters, the action seemed to calm them. He thought Quamba and Guiaou would hold firm, and at the worst they could abandon the chairs and take the ladies pillion. But the worst did not come to pass, and in the late afternoon they reached Habitation Arnaud in good order, having endured no worse than shouted maledictions.

  Work in the fields and in the cane mill had altogether ceased. Arnaud, his face darkening, went to demand an explanation of his commandeur. He left Isabelle to help settle Claudine in the house, while Maillart dropped onto a stool on the porch, washing the dust from his throat with water, beginning to think of a glass of rum.

  The buzz of angry voices reached him from the compound below. He saw Arnaud surrounded as if by a swarm of ants, at bay with his back to the mill’s broken wall, a hundred-odd blacks half circling him. Seeing nothing else to be done, Maillart jumped up and dashed down the trail, thumbing his pistol butts as he ran.

  He found Quamba and Guiaou lingering by the horses, and was relieved to have their support; both carried good muskets, and Maillart had heard of Guiaou’s wonderful efficiency at close quarters with a coutelas.

  “Ki problém yo?” he asked shortly as they strode toward the irritable crowd. What is their problem?

  “Yo pa vlé travay.” Quamba shrugged. They don’t want to work.

  Arnaud stood with his cane cocked in his right hand, as if he would strike the commandeur, who faced him, just a step or two out of reach. Arnaud’s concentration was so narrow that he seemed unaware of the others’ approach. Maillart could not make out what the black man was saying—there were too many voices grumbling at once—but he saw Arnaud toss the cane deftly from right hand to left and with the same motion draw a double-barreled pistol from beneath his shirttail. In the abrupt silence, his voice rang clear.

  “Pull me down if you have the heart for it,” he declared. “You may tear me limb from limb, but first, I tell you, some of you will die.”

  The silence held, and after a moment Maillart was moved to shout out, “Kité nou pasé!” Let us pass . . . Several of the blacks at the rear of the throng turned to take note of Quamba and Guiaou, who held their muskets at the present-arms position. A corridor opened in the crowd, and Maillart beckoned to Arnaud, who walked slowly to join them, his cane trailing and his pistol pointed to the sky.

  “Doucement,” the captain advised. “We must not look like running.”

  “Of course,” Arnaud answered. They were backing up, with maximal dignity, weapons still at the ready. The crowd of blacks was scattering into smaller knots, which moved as if to flank them. When the moment seemed right for them to turn, the captain was astounded to find himself facing Claudine Arnaud, upright and rigid and staring like an angry hawk, with Isabelle a pace behind her, holding onto her elbow.

  “What the devil are you doing here?” the captain snapped.

  “I could not restrain her,” Isabelle said, with an ill-tempered flush of her own. “I could not let her come alone.”

  Maillart sniffed. But he had noticed tha
t those little knots of angry blacks approached no nearer, and perhaps it was the figure of Claudine which held them back.

  Unmolested, the little party reached the lower mouth of the trail to the house, and began climbing, with Maillart, Quamba and Guiaou bringing up the rear. Flaville’s men, the captain noticed, had vanished altogether.

  “Give me a whip and the right to use it,” Arnaud puffed as they gained the porch. He laid down his pistol and propped his cane against the table edge—both hands gripped emptiness as he spoke. “I would peg out that insolent black bastard and flog him till the bones showed through—I’d put a stop to this rebellion—”

  “Sir, you would be dismembered after,” said the captain, with a significant glance at Quamba and Guiaou. “As you yourself so recently described.”

  “True enough,” said Arnaud, looking at his own palms with a certain bewilderment. His shoulders sagged. “The times have changed.”

  He beckoned the captain into the house. Isabelle had persuaded Claudine to stretch out on the bed; she had taken off the other woman’s shoes and loosened her clothing and was alternately fanning her, or dabbing at her temples and throat with a damp cloth. Oblivious to this activity, Arnaud passed through to the second room, where he knelt, unlocked one of the chests, and began unpacking arms and ammunition.

  Maillart felt his spirits lift a little. “You anticipated this,” he said.

  “I would have been a fool if I had not,” Arnaud said. “Come.” He hoisted a stand of weapons and motioned for Maillart to the same.

  Arnaud led the way behind the house and up another trail that climbed against the cliff face, to a cleft in the rocks, within convenient reach of the spring. There he set down the guns he carried. Obeying his gesture, Maillart looked out from the cover of a chin-high boulder and saw that he commanded not only the house with the clearing and trail head before it, but also, at a greater distance, the whole compound below. He let his breath out with the hint of a whistle.

  “So that is why you moved the house site.”

  “One reason among several,” Arnaud said. “We have our arms, plenty of powder and shot. There is water as you see, cornmeal and a few other provisions. If your men are reliable, we may maintain a watch both here and below and so hold the house. In case of serious attack we may fall back here to these rocks, where we shall not be easily dislodged.”

  “It is well conceived,” the captain said. “If things continue to go amiss with your plantation, you might consider the military.”

  Unsurprisingly, Arnaud’s cook did not report for duty. Isabelle busied her pretty hands to cook some cornbread. A few bananas remained of the captain’s stalk, and Arnaud had a little store of tasteless, leathery dried meat. Isabelle chattered throughout the meal, with no more and no less than her usual vivacity. She drank a glass of rum and water, and now and then, when Claudine seemed agitated, reached out to take her hand and soothe her. Maillart, who knew her easy manner was not unconsciousness but courage, admired her speechlessly.

  The drums began at moonrise. Maillart was on watch, behind that high boulder, but there was nothing to see. The compound was empty except for pools of moonlight. In the low ground, hidden by the trees, the drums muttered and grumbled, starting and stopping without resolution, then began again more confidently, the interlocked rhythms gathering, swelling. At their peak, when Maillart’s whole nervous system waited for a scream, Claudine came out of the house, pursued by both Isabelle and Arnaud. From his height, the captain watched their dumb show: Claudine darting this way and that in her long white gown, nimbly eluding the hands that would confine her. Quamba and Guiaou had moved to bar her way from the trail head, but Claudine flung herself directly into the bush, where she was lost for a few minutes to Maillart’s view.

  Guiaou produced his coutelas and hacked a path in for Arnaud. Claudine must have caught herself in strangler vine and shake-hands briars, for Arnaud soon led her out onto the open ground before the house, a long swath of fabric torn from the hem of her dress and trailing on the ground. Isabelle took her other elbow, and the two of them conveyed her indoors.

  Within fifteen minutes, Arnaud had come up to relieve the captain’s watch. Maillart protested that he was before the hour, but Arnaud said that as he could not sleep or rest, it was better for him to take the next watch, and be replaced at midnight. He did not seem to want to talk of what had just passed with his wife, or anything else either, so the captain left him and went down to the house.

  It had been arranged that one white man and one black would keep watch at all times. Quamba stood erect, posted at the trail head, while Guiaou lay on a grass mat nearby, his head pillowed on his hands. Maillart could not make out if he was sleeping or gazing at the moon. He went into the house without saying anything to them.

  Through the bean-seed curtain he heard Claudine’s voice complaining as in fever, and Isabelle’s, calm and soothing. He parted the curtain with one hand. Claudine twisted on the bed, turning her face to the wall. Her shoulders stiffened, then relaxed. Isabelle watched her, stroking her back, for a few minutes, then raised her head. She stood up and came to meet the captain in the doorway.

  “I gave her rum,” she said. “She did not want it, but I made her take it. It will help her to rest.”

  “I feel I might benefit from a similar treatment,” the captain said.

  Isabelle smiled distantly. “Wait on the porch.”

  Maillart went out and took a seat. His hackles rose and fell involuntarily with the rhythm of the drums. Dogs must feel this way, he thought. Then Isabelle came with the rum and the water.

  “Ah, merci,” said the captain, drinking deep. Mais, ma belle, he thought, it is your touch that cures, far better than rum. He did not say it. Isabelle took a seat beside him and gazed in the direction of the sentries at the trail head.

  “Sometimes I think one ought to let her go.”

  “She would never return from such an expedition,” the captain said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I have a strong suspicion.”

  Isabelle did not reply. Maillart looked at her moonlit face, a sad expression, or perhaps only wistful—or possibily it was only some trick of the light. He drained off his rum and stood up.

  “I must go and sleep if I can, before my next watch.” He bowed to her and went into the house.

  What a curiosity, friendship with a woman . . . Maillart lay down expecting the white fog of insomnia to settle over him, detailed by frustrated lust. But he was asleep as soon as his head touched the pallet, and woke to find Arnaud shaking his shoulder. “Your watch, mon cher.”

  In the shadows by the trail head, Guiaou had replaced Quamba. Maillart nodded to him, then splashed some water on his face from a pail on the porch floor. Refreshed, he climbed to the post among the rocks and turned his face to the fields below. The drums had stopped; it was two hours until dawn. The thought of the sleeping celebrants made Maillart’s own head heavy. But he stayed sufficiently alert until first light, when Arnaud climbed up to join him.

  “Look there, would you? Just over there.”

  Maillart shaded his eyes, searching. He saw a smudge of smoke, then began to pick out ant-like forms beneath it. With a skirling of conchs, the image resolved into a mob of men with torches.

  “They’re going to the mill.” Arnaud cursed, then dashed down toward the house and passed it without a halt, rushing down the trail toward the compound. Maillart followed more slowly, for fear of falling and breaking a leg. Arnaud was galloping toward the mill; he had not paused at the house even to collect his cane.

  Maillart took a moment before he followed, for he must organize Quamba and Guiaou, and check the priming of his own pistols. Isabelle appeared in the doorway of the house, fingers pressed to her lower lip. The captain shook his head at her, then went down with his men.

  Arnaud had interposed his body between the mob and his precious mill machinery. He might be a fool, the captain thought ruefully, or he might be a
monster of cruelty, but no one could call him a coward. Maillart had been in the country long enough for his instinct to gauge the state of crowds, and this one was very near the point of explosion, though the appearance of himself and his men with their muskets balked them for a moment longer.

  Through the silence of that reprieve came the thumping of hoofbeats on hard earth, and all attention turned to the mouth of the allée. Joseph Flaville rode into the compound, in the midst of a party of five other horsemen, their mounts all in a lather. Flaville, his face sweat-stained, his uniform collar rucked up in the back, looked as if he had been in the saddle all night.

  His eyes slipped over the two white men without acknowledgment, then fixed on the crowd of blacks. Each man had armed himself in some fashion, with a coutelas or hoe or long pointed stave. Some of them merely carried lumps of stone, but the men in the front rank had a few rickety-looking old muskets among them.

  Flaville caught his breath, drew himself up in the saddle, and raised his right palm like a priest giving absolution.

  “Pa brulé champs. Pa touyé blan.”

  He waited, then his hand began to descend, light as a feather, fingertips combing the humid air. As the hand came down, all tension began to drain from the crowd, and the men began to disperse, mumbling.