Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  On the second night Arnaud came back in a state of high excitement—it seemed he’d discovered the mulatto family of a French priest, the Père Bonne-chance, who had been of service to him in the past. Elise was puzzled by his elation. She had not known him before this meeting, but he had had a very hard reputation which preceded him wherever he went; for example, he was thought to have sold his own colored children into slavery. Therefore he seemed the last person on earth to be so transported by the discovery of a priest’s concubine and her pack of colored brats. Though it was just such a colored brat that Elise herself was hoping to find, and if she failed she would not recover her own happiness either.

  At the end of the second day of fruitless search, Elise realized that she had not really considered the possibility of failure. The mission itself had given her such new heart that she had not thought of what might happen if it did not succeed. She could scarcely think of Xavier, and how was she to face her brother? For the moment she did not have to face him, for he was out at Haut du Cap, with Toussaint, at Habitation Bréda. Toussaint was holding himself aloof from Sonthonax and the Commission, as if he were an independent potentate whom the French agent must flatter and court. This subject was discussed, with some rancor, by Messieurs Arnaud and Cigny over each evening meal.

  On the morning of the third day, Elise and Isabelle happened to be passing the house of the Sieur Maltrot again, though without intending to stop, when one of the servant girls came running after them in the dusty street. A slip of a thing, no more than ten, she whispered to them behind her hand that she thought that Paul might have been taken to a certain house in the town whose very mention made Isabelle turn silent and grave.

  They could not investigate in person, Isabelle said, when the girl had scurried back to the house. Pas question. No decent woman could be seen even on the same block as that establishment. But she would make inquiry; there were other ways. Indeed word came to them that night, by way of Major Joseph Flaville, that Paul had been in that house for several days, but that he had run away.

  The thrill with which Elise received this news was soon replaced by discouragement. If Paul was alone and adrift on the streets of Le Cap, they ought already to have run across him. And if not, what hope was there? At supper she could scarcely follow the talk, and that night she slept poorly.

  Next day she and Isabelle sallied out as before, this time to search the poorer quarters of the town where indigents fetched up. They explored the huts on the marshland near the cemetery ground of La Fossette, and then the marché des nègres at the Place Clugny. Elise sensed Isabelle’s interest flagging. The excursions on the arm of her disguised friend were losing their novelty, as the likelihood of finding Paul declined.

  But as they were leaving by one of the byways running out of the Place Clugny, Isabelle snatched at Elise’s sleeve and pulled her back the way they had come. The street was crowded with market stalls and market women, so that Elise could not make out what her friend had seen.

  “What?” she said, “What is it?” But Isabelle did not hear her, Elise realized. A handcart loaded with flour inched past, and a string of four mules went by in the opposite direction.

  “Maman Maig’,” Isabelle said. “I am sure it is she!”

  On the opposite side of the street a gigantic black woman sat on a block of stone, eating fish and rice with her fingers from a halved calabash.

  “Who is it?” said Elise.

  “The midwife,” Isabelle hissed. “She attended Nanon when the boy was born.”

  They stood before the black woman, who did not look up. With an unaccustomed diffidence, Isabelle explained whom they were looking for, mentioning his connection to Maman Maig’. All the while the black woman went on eating. Her fingers were shiny with oil from the food. It was not clear if she were listening or not.

  “Pa konnen,” she said, when Isabelle had stopped talking. I don’t know. The denial seemed universal, as if Maman Maig’ knew nothing on any topic at all, or nothing she would tell these questioners. But she did look up, not at Isabelle, but at Elise, who felt a ring of sweat breaking out where the band of Tocquet’s hat compressed her skull. The black woman’s eyes were narrow, squeezed slantwise by rolls of fat. Elise felt that her disguise was penetrated, not only that but all her being. The cloth binding her breasts cut into her ribs, hindering her breath. The energy that had animated her drained away and was replaced by unbounded hopelessness. Then Maman Maig’ was not looking at her anymore, and Isabelle was leading her away, toward the Cigny house for shelter from the sun.

  She lay on a low daybed still in the same shirt and trousers (Isabelle had ordered them washed and pressed the night before), having only removed her boots and loosened the shirt at the throat. Above her the attic walls slanted to a peak. At one end of the room a round window like a porthole cast a magnified round of sunlight across her hips and legs. She occupied this little room because Arnaud and his wife were installed in the larger guest room on the floor below. Nanon had stayed here, Isabelle had told her, in the last weeks of her grossesse.

  She could not sleep, nor truly rest. The room was too warm, close under the roof, at that hour. Isabelle had urged her to lie down in her own bedchamber, or on a divan in the parlor on a lower floor, but Elise had very much preferred to be alone. She flattened her hands over a point below her navel, pressing against a curious pain where the light had concentrated. The pressure seemed to bring an image, in no way like a dream, of the black woman they had met this afternoon, her face lowered and intent, her hands maneuvering out of sight. A woman cried out terribly; there was a flash of intense white light. She saw the infant Paul, scarcely recognizable, suspended upside down between black hands, like a flayed rabbit, his skin purple, blood-streaked, his head a cone-shaped, clay-like mass. He mewed, and the image faded.

  Nothing. The room throbbed. Elise sat up. She was streaming sweat, but did not feel it. With the hat and boots in her hands she crept down through the dozing house to the front hall. A footman watched her curiously as she put on her boots, but he said nothing when she let herself out.

  Now she walked very much like a dreamer, and with a dreamer’s clarity of intention, though she herself could not have said what that intention was. It led her toward the Negro market where they had been that morning. Elsewhere, the streets had emptied of pedestrians, due to the midday heat, but the Place Clugny still buzzed and swarmed. Elise grew dizzy. Her intention failed her. Bewildered, she began to retreat. Like a marionette with its strings abandoned, she wanted to fall in a jangling heap. At one of the corners of the market square she sank down onto a block of stone. There was a swelling pain in all her joints as if they were ill fit together. A dreadful weight pressed down on her head, so that all the bones of her spine were crushed against one another and twisted into discord. A black circle rimmed with gold appeared before her eyes, and whether she opened or closed them, it pulsed at the same rate. Sunstroke, she thought, but the word had no import. She saw no way out of the blaze of heat and light.

  But then a shadow interposed itself between her and the sun. Elise was washed in a water-cool draft like the shade of an ancient tree.

  “Levé.”

  She opened her eyes and saw Maman Maig’ filling the sky above her, the black face neutral, vatic, like the face of an Egyptian statue.

  “Rise,” the woman repeated. She held the palm of her hand several inches above the crown of Elise’s head, then arched her wrist and raised it. Elise felt all the knots in her body unraveling as she came floating to her feet.

  With her dream-certainty restored, she followed Maman Maig’ across the town. The black woman never once turned back to look at her, but an invisible filament connected them like a leash. They went diagonally across the Place d’Armes and thence into a northbound street. At its end, on a knoll below the mountain, Elise saw a small white church whose name she did not know. It seemed that the church was their destination. But when they came nearer, Maman Maig’ turned away toward
the waterfront, and a wall of housefronts blocked the church from view.

  Here the four-square order of the town disintegrated, disrupted by the roots of the mountain clawing into the edge of the grid. The church was hidden, somewhere above. Maman Maig’ went in through a rusty iron gateway, then somehow fit herself through a crack in the opposite wall of the small, square courtyard they had entered. Elise followed devotedly. The path was so narrow she could not understand how Maman Maig’ could maneuver so easily. But they went up and up, a tight spiral twisting between house walls made at first of plaster, then baked mud, finally of sticks and straw, unwattled. There was a dark beat at Elise’s temples; her sense of direction was lost. Finally they came out into a wide open space, like a ballroom Elise thought for some reason, though it was only an area of packed earth surrounded by little huts, with a pole in the center painted in a spiral pattern like the path they had just climbed.

  A deliciously refreshing breeze blew on the back of her head and her shoulders, and she turned her face into it. The sweat dried quickly. She took off her hat. The wind was coming off the water, and down below, beyond the red-tiled roofs, she saw the sail-less masts of ships bare and skeletal as winter trees in France. When she turned back, Maman Maig’ was no longer there, but the disappearance did not worry her.

  There were other onlookers. Even on the cliff above the village the little black children had stopped their play to gaze down at her. Among the ajoupas, Claudine and Michel Arnaud were mysteriously present—Arnaud raised a hand to the back of his head and stared at her with frank astonishment (she realized that her hair had come unpinned and fallen down her back). But Claudine, who never seemed surprised at anything, seemed no more startled now. Between the white couple stood a tall mulatto woman wearing a high turban, and an even taller, gangly colored youth with a priest’s purple stole incongruously draped over his bare, boney shoulders.

  There were others too who watched her from their doorways, but Elise had eyes only for the little boy coming toward her, hand in hand with an older colored girl. Of a sudden it seemed to her that he was the person she had most injured and offended—that it was Paul whom she did not know how to face. But he kept coming toward her as though unaware of any wrong between them, tugging at the colored girl’s hand. When he was near enough, he reached out and caught the seam of Elise’s trousers and folded it in his fingers as he looked up into her face. The wind was still blowing at her back, fluttering her hair forward across her shoulders.

  “Matant mwen,” Paul said. My aunt. And Elise was so delighted at the recognition that she did not think to reprove him for speaking Creole instead of French.

  “Of course,” Arnaud said, “I did not know the boy was yours—I took him for another of Fontelle’s family, which is numerous. And to be sure,” he added, with a faint smile, “a great many other things, Madame, were not entirely as they seemed.”

  Elise felt a slight warmth in her cheeks. She brought her knees more primly together beneath her skirt; she had resumed wearing dresses for all occasions. Tocquet’s shirt and trousers were packed away now in the saddlebags.

  “You seem very intimate with this Fontelle,” she said.

  Now it was Arnaud’s turn to flush. “In no improper manner,” he said. “She was, after all—”

  “—the wife of a priest,” Elise supplied, with a downturn of her eyes which partly masked her irony.

  Arnaud flicked his eyes toward his wife, who perched stiffly on the edge of one of Isabelle’s parlor divans, her hands crawling slowly over each other in her lap. “Though he failed in his vows of chastity, he was a priest who saved my life,” he said. “Possibly, in another sense, the life of my wife also.”

  Claudine had been staring fixedly through the high arched doorway which gave onto the second-floor balcony above the street. At Arnaud’s words she rose like a marionette lifted by invisible threads and floated to the balcony rail. Arnaud pushed himself up and followed. He set a hand lightly on her shoulder, whispered persuasively in her ear. But Claudine’s body gave a tremor from her heels to her head; both her hands curled around the railing and would not be loosened. With a murmur Arnaud left her there and resumed the chair where he had sat before.

  “Although,” he said, in a lower voice, “sometimes I find it better not to mention the Père Bonne-chance in her hearing, for it causes her mind in its vagary to revisit the scene of his execution, for which she was unfortunately present in the flesh.”

  Elise followed Arnaud’s gaze to his wife’s rigid back. She did not seem to pay any attention to talk.

  “Not far from here,” he muttered, “in the Place Clugny.” He shook his head. “But on that day in ninety-one—it was the Père Bonne-chance who brought me safe away from the rebels at Ouanaminthe, when they were killing the white men one by one with such awful tortures as I will not describe to you. He had been priest among the rebels too and had some credit with them. I came to the house he shared with Fontelle with my feet blistered and bloody from the long road, and she washed my feet and dressed them with oil.” He turned his head toward the current of air that flowed in from the balcony door. “Later when he was prisoner here, he confessed my wife and eased her of her torments to some degree . . . For those things I owe a debt of gratitude which I would repay to his survivors. Though for the moment my means are slight.”

  “And what of the girl?” Elise asked. “Paulette.”

  “She was acquainted with your brother when he was prisoner of the rebels at the camps of Grande Rivière. Père Bonne-chance had brought all his family there. He did what he could to ease the lot of the white captives and to preserve their lives. But afterward he was taken for a conspirator and jailed here at Le Cap, and in those days your brother and his woman took Paulette in to care for their child.”

  “I will take her now, if she is willing,” Elise offered. “She has kind ways with Paul, and I would welcome her at Habitation Thibodet, if her mother should agree.”

  “That would be a place well found for her,” Arnaud said. “I think that Fontelle might be brought to agree. I suppose you would certainly improve the girl’s French, and train her in other accomplishments in return for her work. I don’t know how they have bumped along in those hilltop huts, but Fontelle is a woman of some pride.”

  “Of the seven sins, pride is the most wicked.” Claudine had turned from her place at the balcony rail and stood looking down on them from the doorway with a hard glitter in her eyes. “Pride is the sow that devours her young.” Her left hand with its missing finger rose stiffly from the shoulder, accusing a vacant space in the room. “See how she comes riding on the scarlet beast! see her seven heads and her ten horns!”

  Arnaud stood by her, murmuring again, massaging her stiff arm until the elbow flexed and he was able to lead her to a seat. Claudine sat rocking slightly, her eyes closed, her lips working without sound now. Her long, dark lashes were bright with unshed tears.

  “You must pardon her distraction,” Arnaud said, with a forbearance Elise was surprised to find in him. “In any case,” he said, as he sank back into his chair, “I think your idea for Paulette is a very good one.”

  In the event, Fontelle was persuaded to Elise’s plan without much difficulty. However, Elise stayed on in Le Cap until Toussaint returned, in the hope of meeting her brother, to give him the news of Paul’s recovery face to face. There was a reasonable chance that Doctor Hébert was still in Toussaint’s entourage, though she did not know for certain.

  On the morning that she heard that Toussaint had arrived from Haut du Cap, Elise set out toward Government House, holding Paul by one hand while Paulette held the other. The boy had recently had a haircut and a new suit of clothes, and Paulette was shyly pretty in a new dress Elise had bought for her. Elise herself was more carefully coiffed and groomed than she had recently been, and she felt that the three of them looked very well together.

  There was excitement in the streets, and a general flow down toward the harbor. Villatte ha
d been lured in from his armed camp to parlay with the commissioners—then Toussaint and Sonthonax had arrested him. Today, it appeared, he would be taken aboard a ship to be sent to France for trial and judgment. Curious, Elise let the children lead her along with the crowd.

  On the quay, Toussaint’s honor guard, a group of tall and handsome-looking black cavalrymen, had pulled their horses into a double cordon, defining a pathway from Government House. Elise craned her neck, but did not see Toussaint himself anywhere. She did catch a glimpse of her brother’s bald head; he sat his horse somewhere beyond the second rank of the honor guard, looking about himself sleepily. Then the helmets of the guardsmen moved together and obscured her view. She could just make out the inscription on the silver plate: Qui pourra en venir à bout?

  A buzz ran through the close-packed onlookers, for the deportees were being marched down to the ship. From where she stood Elise could see no more than the tops of their heads as they went by. As they went up the gangplank, though, they were more clearly visible to all the crowd. An armed guard went before and after them, but they had not been charged with chains. Perhaps the tall one who looked back briefly from the deck was Villatte himself. Then they all disappeared below.

  The crowd began to scatter and diffuse, and Elise, though she peered for another sight of the doctor, had no luck. Toussaint’s honor guard—some ninety men, after all—was in the way. They formed in ranks of three abreast and went trotting back toward Government House. For the moment they seemed to have answered the question their own helmets raised: Who will be able to come through to the end?

  23

  When the sister of the doctor, who was Tocquet’s woman, ran away, the news came to our camp through Bouquart, who had it from Zabeth in the grand’case. Although we might have heard Zabeth’s voice for ourselves, as loud as she cried. No one in the camp cared very much one way or another, but Zabeth was in great trouble because she believed that her mistress would die. The whitewoman had taken pistols and man’s clothes and a horse to ride away to no one knew where. In the camp the men spoke of it carelessly—who knew what such a whitewoman would do, or why. But I, Riau, smiled to myself when I thought of the doctor’s sister going off into marronage that way, and I hoped that all the spirits would go with her and watch for her safety.