Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Hold your position, watch and wait. The admonition ran looping throughout Maillart’s mind throughout the night, whenever he woke, which was often, and even during his periods of fitful sleep. Tempera-mentally, he was ill-suited for such a role, but he had studied it during his service with Toussaint. If he asked himself what Toussaint would do in any given situation, the answer, most often, was nothing.

  The next day passed in a cloud of rumor and indecision. Maillart would have liked to go out and look for signs of Nanon or Choufleur or both of them, but this project was also unfeasible, under the circumstances. Léveillé’s little force kept to its stronghold, awaiting developments; the noisy crowds continued to circulate throughout the town. Sometime after midnight Maillart lay down to another extremely uneasy sleep. At four-thirty he was roused by the news that Villatte had fled the town, taking the now very small number of troops still loyal to him to the refuge of a fortified camp on the plantation Lamartinière. The coup, such as it had been, was over. The colored soldiers still in the casernes were ready to renew their obedience to Laveaux, and even now the civil servants were on their way, among a large crowd of the townspeople, to release Laveaux from his cell.

  Maillart jerked on his coat and boots and, with Léveillé and a few others, reached the prison in time to see Laveaux coming out of the gate. He was haggard and filthy from his days in the cell; Perroud, a pace or two behind him, looked even worse. But Laveaux raised his right hand over the people who met him, like a priest giving absolution.

  It was dawn, though the sun’s face would be hidden for some time more behind the hulk of Morne du Cap; the light was coming up quickly. The crowd swept Laveaux directly to the main audience room of the municipal building, where he turned to face the men who had imprisoned him. Once more he raised his right hand, which trembled only slightly from his ague. He announced that, for the love of the Good, he would not seek to punish the guilty parties.

  Eighth man back in the column, Doctor Hébert rode up the south face of Morne Pilboreau. Riau was ahead of him, Guiaou behind; leading the file was Toussaint Louverture. Still stronger forces, led by Dessalines and Charles Belair, had gone before them to Le Cap. They would not be called upon to fight this time. Nor would the troop with which the doctor rode. Toussaint’s word alone had been sufficient, his finger wagged in warning more than enough. Villatte’s conspiracy was foiled without a shot.

  The doctor’s mule picked a delicate way up the switchbacks of the mountain trail. It was the same mule which had carried him to Habitation Fortier and through Toussaint’s campaign around Grande Rivière. He had come to prefer the mule’s surefootedness for mountain rides. With a paysan straw saddle the comparative discomfort of a seat on the mule’s bony back was not worth considering. He had even come to appreciate the mule’s self-interested intelligence, which was far greater than that of a horse, though not always placed at the service of the rider.

  A balloon of hope seemed to lift him toward the peak. They would reach Le Cap before night. There he might find traces of Choufleur, if not Nanon herself . . . and Paul. Choufleur had been billeted there before he had come to ravish Nanon away from Habitation Thibodet. His involvement in l’affaire Villatte was to be suspected. And Nanon, if left to her own resources, might have returned there. She knew how to manage in the town; it was where she and the doctor had first met.

  Lost in these images, he floated up the trail. His American long rifle tilted across the saddlebow like an outrigger. The weapon was too long to be side-slung in its scabbard; the barrel would have furrowed the ground.

  Farther back in the column some hoof or boot or horny bare foot dislodged a stone which fell over the trail’s edge and went skittering down the dry, dusty slopes, gathering smaller pebbles and clods as it went down. Lizards sidestepped away from the miniature avalanche. The doctor twisted in his saddle and looked back. The switchbacks of the descent behind them were giddily steep. Scrub pine and cedar ran down the gorges, to the sparse raquette trees on the dry mud flats. Dry wind had withered a corn planting on a terraced face of the hill opposite. Far below, the chalky plain fanned out toward Gonaives. A blue haze at the horizon marked the coast.

  Automatically the doctor touched the mirror shard in his right pocket, then, switching the reins from hand to hand, the empty snuffbox in his left. In this way he recentered himself. In the crushing heat, it dizzied him to screw his head around, but he thought there was no danger of sunstroke. He reached to check the brim of his straw hat. Beneath it he also wore a head cloth, as many of the soldiers did. He had learned that in full sun his bald scalp was apt to blister even through the weave of a hat. The rest of his exposed skin had been fired the color of a chimney brick, and only the bleached hairs on his forearms and in his beard betrayed that his blood was purely European.

  As in a mirror, an image appeared to him. Toussaint as he had first seen him years ago, before he had taken the name Louverture, on mule-back and unarmed but for the sack of medicinal herbs he held against the pommel of his saddle. In those days Toussaint’s sole title had been “Médecin du Roi,” which meant in effect that he was camp doctor for Jean-François and Biassou. Dreamily it came to the doctor that he himself had now inherited a similar position.

  The men ahead of him were disappearing over the summit of Pilboreau, and in a moment more the doctor’s mule crossed over. He found himself in the midst of the crossroads market. Toussaint had called a halt, to rest the horses from the climb. Those men with means to buy or barter were trading with the marchandes for fruit, while others sipped warmish water from the canteens or gourds they carried with them. Carefully, the horses were given a very little water. Riau untied the neck of his salt bag and let his horse lick granules from his palm.

  “Pinchinat has gone back to Les Cayes.”

  Toussaint’s voice. The doctor looked up. Toussaint did not seem to be addressing anyone in particular, but a loose circle had formed around him, including the white officer Vaublanc, Riau, Quamba and Guiaou. The doctor could not imagine why he should have chosen this moment to begin discoursing on Pinchinat, though he knew the old colored gentleman was a rhetorician to reckon with, and an active intriguer on the part of the mulatto faction for the last ten years at least.

  “Do you know?” Toussaint continued musingly. “Some say the words of Pinchinat are more dangerous than bullets.”

  The doctor considered. Toussaint must have been chewing on the subject all during their ascent. He would not raise it now without cause, though the doctor could not divine what his reasons might be. There was an endless fascination in pondering Toussaint’s motives. Why, for example, had he delayed so long in coming to Laveaux’s aid in person? One reason, the doctor had already thought, was that he would not shift from his position of greatest strength until the business at Le Cap had been concluded . . . favorably. Another, as he now reflected, was that Gonaives was a better post from which to gather intelligence from the interior and the south.

  “He is old now, Pinchinat,” Toussaint continued, “but still more cunning than a spider. Well, a spider can weave all day and still a man knocks down the web with one stroke of a green switch. So Pinchinat has run back to Rigaud in the south. When we come to Le Cap, we will not find him there . . . but it was he who brought the spirit of disobedience to Villatte, I think. And from where, mes amis? where did that spirit come from?”

  Toussaint, who seemed to have been looking out over the treetops in the direction of Marmelade, now focused on Riau.

  “One must not forget the Swiss,” he said. “We have heard that it was Pinchinat who sent those soldiers to be murdered on the ship. All that web was of his weaving.”

  Riau remained impassive, still as a tree. Only his eyes shifted for a moment to Guiaou, then back to some invisible inner space.

  “Yes,” Toussaint said. Now his glance included them all. “As many times as the web is knocked down, the little spider returns to weave again.” He laughed and covered his mouth with his hand for a mome
nt. When he uncovered it, the smile was gone.

  “Mount up!” he said, in a loud voice. All down the line the cavalrymen obeyed him. Within ten minutes the column was strung out over the ridge above the Plaisance Valley, the leaders already descending into the verdant jungle shade.

  Captain Maillart happened to be standing near the gate of the casernes, chatting with one of the men on post, when Doctor Hébert’s mule turned in from the Rue Espagnole. It was just sundown, and clouds boiled above Morne du Cap; the wind rose and the leaves shivered on the trees, though it would not rain. Captain Maillart offered a hand to help his friend down from the mule saddle. The doctor slipped to the ground and wobbled on his rubbery legs, bracing himself on the captain’s shoulder.

  “Well met,” said Maillart. “Has Toussaint come at last?”

  “Yes,” said the doctor, turning to unship his long rifle. “Or nearly—he has stopped at Haut du Cap, at the Bréda great house. For council with Pierre Michel and some others. He will enter the town tomorrow morning.”

  Maillart nodded. The troops who had marched with Charles Belair and Dessalines had already overflowed the casernes. The colored officers who had so recently returned to obedience navigated warily among their black counterparts; so far a proper courtesy had been observed on all sides. With the men Toussaint had brought, the influx of black troops would approach ten thousand, and this was more, much more, than a show of mere brute force.

  The last time such a number of blacks had descended on Le Cap (admitted to enter by Sonthonax in one of his most desperate moments), they had had come to rape, kill, loot and burn, and had left nothing but smoking foundations when they departed. Now Toussaint’s trained men had filled the town, in a state of perfect discipline and good order. The great majority of them were nearly naked but for their arms which they kept so carefully, and lived and marched on next to nothing—a yam or an ear of corn or a piece of fruit twice daily. And yet they carried themselves upright with a fierce pride. They held themselves in: there had been no looting, no foraging, no forced requisitioning, no drunkenness, no insults offered to the women of the town. A boatload of European troops would not have conducted themselves half so well if landed in this situation, as Maillart knew from more than one experience. Toussaint’s men were healthier, cleaner, better disciplined, and as reliable in the field, perhaps more so. The captain had come to feel more pride in them than in any other men he’d led.

  “Have you toured the town?” he asked the doctor.

  “I came straight here from the gate.” The doctor took down his saddlebags. “And you—what news?”

  “Oh, I’ve been everywhere.” The captain turned his face away, looking out onto the street. “She isn’t here, Antoine.”

  “You’re sure of that.”

  “What knowledge is wholly certain?” the captain said wearily. “I have not turned over every stone, but I’ve looked in all the likely places. I did discover Fleur—do you remember her from the theater, the promenade du gouvernement? Her beauty has suffered, sad to say. Such tropical roses are fast to fade—” Seeing the doctor’s face, he cut himself short.

  “Fleur would have known, if anyone,” he resumed in a subdued tone, “had Nanon appeared here. One must suppose that she did not. Choufleur was here, and up to his neck in all this affair, as anyone might have imagined. By my best intelligence he has fled the city with Villatte, to the camp they made ready for such an eventuality.”

  The doctor nodded, hefting his baggage; his eyes were lowered to the ground.

  “Well, brace up, then,” Maillart said, his heartiness ringing a little false on his own ear. “Courage—that camp can be reduced in fifteen minutes whenever Toussaint chooses—Villatte could hardly muster fifty men to defend it now. We’ll get to the bottom of it all in time. But now let us stable this beast of yours and look to your own nourishment.”

  Next day the doctor undertook his own search, with the help of Riau, who had come into town from Habitation Bréda with Toussaint. Maillart had been over much of the same ground, and the doctor found no better answers, even with Riau inquiring at back stairs and in the servants’ quarters. No one had seen her at the Cigny house, which Choufleur had occupied up till his abrupt departure, nor at the late Sieur de Maltrot’s town house, which Choufleur had begun to restore. No trace of Nanon in any of the haunts she had frequented before her liaison with the doctor. Nor was there any sign of Paul.

  At last he called at the apartment near the Place d’Armes where he and Nanon had lived for some weeks together before the town was burned. The place was now occupied by a staid mulatto family, whose matriarch was most unwilling to admit them. She feared the black face as much as the white, no doubt, for while a white colon might have come to reclaim the dwelling, a black officer might arrive simply to seize it . . . She answered their questions through a two-inch crack in the door. No, she had not seen such a woman. No, she’d seen no sang-mêlé boy.

  When the door had shut, the doctor stood with his head bowed, staring down at the pitch apple tree beside the portal. On one of the fat green leaves Nanon had scratched the child’s name Paul, above the date of his birth. The inscription was there yet, the letters yellowed but still clear. They said pitch apple leaves held up as well as wooden tablets, maybe even stone. After a moment the doctor took out his penknife and added the family name to the leaf. Paul Hébert. He trimmed a corner from another leaf and put it into the snuffbox, but the gesture felt hollow to him even he performed it. And what if the pitch apple tree should be a tombstone? As he put away the knife his hand met the shard of mirror and he gripped it so hard the edges hurt his palm. He’d found it here, after a riot in the town, when Nanon’s rooms had been vandalized, her mirror smashed. So many times it had held her image . . . if only the fragment could function as a magic eye (as Riau believed it did) to show her to him now.

  He felt that Riau had been watching him intently all this time, but still was surprised at the sadness—compassion, it was better said—in the other man’s face when he turned to meet it. Riau was also offering something in his right palm, a heap of the coarse salt crystals he’d gathered at the pans near Gonaives.

  “Faut goûter sel, mon cher,” he said. “You must taste the salt, and wake—she will not come back to you.”

  All the streets were flowing toward the Place d’Armes, and Riau and the doctor let themselves be carried by that stream. In the center of the square, Governor-General Laveaux was revealed on a platform, presenting Toussaint Louverture to the throng of his own soldiers and the multicolored citizens of the town. In all the colony, Laveaux announced, no one was closer to him than Toussaint. No one had served himself, and France, as loyally, as skillfully; there was no one whom he trusted more. Therefore from this day forward Toussaint was proclaimed Lieutenant-Governor of Saint Domingue, and would be not only General-in-Chief but also Laveaux’s second in command in all aspects of government.

  “Here is the savior of constitutional authority,” Laveaux announced in his peroration, “a Black Spartacus!—come to avenge all the outrages carried out against his race.”

  At that a shout went up from the people, but throughout Laveaux’s speech Toussaint stood with his head humbly lowered. At times it seemed he might even kneel to embrace the Frenchman’s boots. But when Laveaux had concluded and the popular shout had faded to an echo, Toussaint pulled his shoulders back and grasped Laveaux’s hand and raised it high, together with his own, calling out in his most forceful voice, “After God, Laveaux!”

  Sometime in the later watches of that night, Maillart woke to the noise of terrible cries. The doctor, with whom he’d shared his room, was suffering some nightmare as if he were under attack. The captain called his name and groped to wake him with his touch. Because the sky was overcast, there was no hint of light in the room, and no breeze, so the space was suffocatingly close. Maillart could see nothing, nothing at all, but the doctor, moaning, flailed an arm at him, then somehow hooked it over his neck. They were wrestli
ng against the edge of the cot, then among the folding legs when it overturned. Maillart clawed at the doctor’s forearm, fighting for breath. He’d known his friend was stronger than he might appear, but this force seemed almost supernatural.

  “Antoine,” he choked. “Antoine!”

  “Annghh,” said the doctor. His grip relaxed. “What is it?”

  The captain pulled free of him and delicately probed his half-crushed windpipe. “How should I know?” he said.

  “Annh,” said the doctor. “What?—forgive me.”

  “It’s nothing,” said the captain. As he spoke, a fresh wind carried the cloud off the moon, and a tendril of breeze came into the room with the new light. Maillart felt the anxious sweat beginning to dry and cool on his skin. The doctor righted the cot and stretched out on his back. The captain returned to his own bedding.

  “Such a dream . . .” the doctor murmured. “I was in the river. You can’t imagine how deep, the water. And the trees on the bank were so huge, so ancient—they must have been there when Adam and Eve were in the garden.”

  Gooseflesh broke out all over the captain’s exposed skin. The moonlight held steady and bright in the room. He turned his face to look at the doctor, who lay with his head gathered in his palm, his short beard jutting toward the ceiling.

  “I was swimming,” he went on. “But it seemed my strokes did not break the water. There was moonlight everywhere as there is now. It was very cool, and calm, and leaves were floating all around me. Leaves and lilies. Then I went under. I don’t remember if I dived. But I went down, through planes and currents of leaves below, and when I passed through each of these layers, there would be more of them still further below. So very deep . . . the light of the moon followed me all the way down, because the water was wonderfully clear. It was like swimming down through time . . . Eons and eons of it.