Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  When the meal was done, Claudine and the other women set about cleaning up after it. Arnaud beckoned the doctor outdoors. A bottle glinted in the starlight. The doctor reached for it gladly.

  “We are a little rough here, still,” Arnaud said. “Concerning the amenities.”

  “Ah, but the rum is good,” the doctor said. “Shall we go up?” He pointed to the path ascending behind the house. Arnaud gave him a startled look.

  “Oh, there’s no danger.” The doctor slapped at the back of his neck. “Only, the mosquitoes down here.”

  They climbed single file up the trail to the pocket in the cliff which Arnaud had made his last line of defense, and sat down on the rocks, passing the bottle between them at slow intervals. The night was very quiet and clear. Under the starlight in the compound below, the doctor could see the progress made on Moustique’s chapel. The sanctuary was now enclosed by three walls of woven palm leaf, and rows of benches had been placed before it, in the open air. Above, a bright, pale crescent rocked the darker orb of the old moon.

  “Toussaint has declared a new distribution,” the doctor said reluctantly.

  “Oh?”

  “Everything is to go into the government treasury,” the doctor said, “save the quarter share of the cultivators, and the costs of production.”

  Arnaud’s jaw clicked shut. “I shall have trouble with my people.”

  “It’s for the war,” the doctor said. “The soldiers must be paid . . . sometimes, something.” He stood up and caught water from the spring in his cupped hands and sipped at it, to cut the rum. “You won’t have to deal with it directly.”

  Arnaud stared at him. “And why is that?”

  “You’ve been conscripted. I’m meant to bring you with me down to Port-au-Prince.”

  Arnaud exhaled heavily. As the air went out of him, he slumped forward, elbows digging into his knees. “The property will go to ruin,” he said. “And after all our trouble.”

  “No, no,” the doctor said. “Flaville will be here to manage it for you.”

  “Oh, undoubtedly.” Arnaud jumped up, slapping the tight fabric of his breeches, and began to pace the narrow area. “I am certain that Flaville will manage very well—for himself, as so many of Toussaint’s officers have begun to do. While I am sent away to be shot in their wars.”

  “Calm yourself,” the doctor said.

  “It is easy for you to recommend it.”

  “After all, you are not intended to be cannon fodder,” the doctor said. “You’ll be given a command, parallel to Captains Vaublanc and Maillart, for example. Toussaint wants to rally all the experienced officers.”

  “That means he must be expecting heavy losses,” Arnaud snapped. “And I have had no part of the military in all my life.”

  “He knows that you served in the militia, and in the maréchaussée.”

  “And I know that he served as Bayon de Libertat’s coachman,” Arnaud said. “My Christ, but the world has turned upside down.”

  “So it has,” the doctor said. “Which way do you like it better?”

  “Which way do I—” Arnaud stopped in his tracks, and sat down on a boulder.

  “You won’t go unrepresented here,” the doctor pointed out. “There is Claudine, and Fontelle.” He paused. “And Cléo.”

  Arnaud thumbed his jawline, looking down over the compound. “I am to serve under Dessalines, then.”

  “Yes, under Dessalines,” said the doctor. “Along with the others I mentioned.”

  Shifting his seat and stretching out his legs, Arnaud studied the half-built chapel where it lay bathed in starlight. “When must we go?”

  “As soon as possible,” the doctor said.

  “Let it be Monday.” Arnaud sniffed. “Our bush priest means to consecrate his church the day before.”

  “I had not known you to be so fervent in religion,” the doctor said.

  “Oh, I shall be like a medieval baron, it seems, with my own prelate, and a chapel within the walls,” Arnaud said, with a dry laugh. “All this religiosity—it may be a little too much for me, but it appears to be healthful for Claudine.”

  “Yes,” said the doctor, as he reached for the bottle. “She does seem to do much better now.” Better than when the world was right side up, he thought, but did not say it.

  Claudine rose, in the first thin light that leaked in through the jalousies, and slipped on a shift and a calico dress. She turned, facing the bed, and as the light began to grow in the room she watched her husband sleeping. Under his lids, Arnaud’s eyes slipped and darted. His face assumed an aspect of ire, then shock. He flung up an arm as if to ward off an attack. Then his face drained into calm, and he rolled over onto his side and went on sleeping.

  She left the bedchamber, closing the door delicately behind her. Arnaud had ordered a strong cabinet to be built of mahogany and fitted into a rear corner of the central room where they ate their meals. Claudine unlocked it with a small key from the ring at her waist. The cabinet was meant for the safekeeping of silver and fine china, but whatever such articles she’d once possessed had been stolen or smashed when the plantation was sacked in ninety-one. Now it held only some homefired crockery, some utensils and cheap glassware.

  She stooped and lifted the folded stole from the bottom shelf, and also gathered the gourd cup beside it. She’d got the cup by arrangement with a woman with a special skill in binding calabashes. There were two round protuberances at either end of a long neck. The gourd could be balanced on the smaller of these, and the larger one was cut across the hemisphere so that the whole resembled a large brown wineglass. Carrying these two items, she left the house.

  Outdoors, Cléo was lighting the kitchen fire. She stood up as Claudine passed, and raised a hand in greeting. Claudine smiled her reply, and walked on. The dust on the path was loose and cool beneath her bare feet. As the mist lifted, the breeze set the fronds of the young coconut trees to trembling. Farther along, the dense expanse of the cane fields absorbed the tremor. She hesitated, closed her eyes and looked again. There was no smoke, no fire, but only the green cane standing, raising its leaves like the blades of spears.

  She passed the cane mill and turned in the opposite direction from Arnaud’s new distillery. The odor of burned sugar and rum gave her a momentary pang, but the breeze turned and carried the smell away from her. She went through a screen of mango and corrosol trees to the place where the rows of slave cabins had once stood. Most of them were now marked only by a few scraps of charred, decaying board amid squares of ash overgrown by new greenery. Small lizards were busy everywhere in these ruins. Those of the former slaves who still remained on the plantation had raised new ajoupas on the borders of gardens they’d cleared for their own benefit. Of the few little cases that had been rebuilt here, Fontelle and her children now occupied the nearest.

  Moustique slept in the open air, apart from his sisters, on a pallet of leaves in the shelter of a lean-to roof against the rear wall of the case. Claudine inspected him for a moment, as she had studied the sleeping form of her husband. Moustique took his rest more calmly than Arnaud. His face was milk-colored, with the faintest tinge of coffee. There was but small trace of the blunt, rounded features of the Père Bonne-chance; he had the long nose and long jaw of his mother.

  When she knelt to set the cup and stole beside the pallet, Moustique’s eyes came quietly open. His gaze took in the objects, then expanded to include Claudine. He sat up and gathered his knees in his arms, leaning against the wattled wall of the case. If he’d been startled, he did not show it, but there was a question in his eyes.

  “A gift for the church,” Claudine began. She settled herself on the ground, crossing her legs under her calico skirt. She lifted the stole and unfolded the ribbon of fabric across her lap.

  “This I sewed for you myself,” she said, with a hint of shyness.

  Moustique reached out his forefinger and touched the embroidered pattern of doves descending, scarlet on a white background.
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  “I am not a good seamstress,” Claudine said. “Often I prick myself with the needle. I am sorry for those brown flecks, but they are marks of blood.”

  “Your work is very fine,” Moustique said. He lifted the gourd cup and peered into the fibrous windings of its interior.

  “When the spirit is present,” Claudine said, “one has no need of precious metal.”

  Moustique set down the gourd and looked at her inquiringly.

  “With these things you may replace the stole and the silver chalice, which ought to be returned to l’Abbé Delahaye.”

  Moustique cast his eyes down, looking at her bare feet and the pale film of dust which covered them. Claudine drew her legs in farther, so that her feet were hidden in the pool of her long skirt.

  “How to begin . . .” she said. “What do you remember of your father?”

  Moustique bowed his head, then raised it, his eyes full of pain.

  “Yes,” she told me. “I was there too. I saw how he suffered. But there was more.”

  Moustique lifted the gourd cup again and stared into the bottom of it. “He was kind,” he said. “Indulgent, careless—even my mother complained of that. If something or someone outraged him, his anger could be terrible. But to us he was always kind.”

  “And to me as well,” Claudine said. “He gave me absolution and brought the grace of the Holy Spirit to heal the disorder of my mind. You must understand, I had done the unforgivable. Wherever I looked, I saw burning.”

  With his two hands, Moustique drew the gourd cup against his breastbone and looked at her across the rim of it.

  “You must know, he was an innocent,” she went on. “When they broke him on the wheel, his blood washed away my agony.” She raised her left thumb, pricked and swollen from her clumsiness with the needle. “Do you not see? Through bloodshed it is to be washed clean and through fire it will be purified.”

  Moustique’s eyes narrowed. “When Baron mounts upon your head, he says that it must be for four hundred years.”

  “So many have told me,” Claudine said. “But we do not know where in those years we live. The Angel of Apocalypse says there shall be no more time.”

  Inside the case, Fontelle’s voice was faintly audible, and the answer of one of the girls. Presently Paulette came out of the house, a clay vessel smoothly riding on top of her head, going to fetch water from the stream. She glanced at them once and then away.

  “Meanwhile,” Claudine said, “we must live our days. Where there is sin there must be atonement. I am given to tell you that they suffer worse who are not permitted to atone. Your father gave me a penance, but this penance has become my joy. I cannot bring a child from my own body, but now I have many children here.”

  Moustique’s face slipped and shifted in the glaze of tears that covered her eyes. She blinked them free.

  “You yourself are father to a child,” she told him. “A son, who has now four years.”

  Moustique colored and looked away. His blush was the rose shade of a white person’s, she noticed. His lashes were long and delicate, like his sisters’.

  “A priest is not meant to father children,” Moustique muttered.

  “That may be so,” Claudine said, “but if all priests were faithful in that rule, you would not exist yourself.”

  Moustique set aside the gourd cup and stood up, dusting himself and looking about as if he could not choose a direction.

  “Sit down,” Claudine said. “From your own experience, you must know you would be wrong to leave your child without a father.”

  Moustique remained on his feet, arms folded over his chest.

  “Return the articles which were stolen and accept these in their place—they are freely given,” Claudine said. “Then you may claim your child, and the mother.”

  “You have been speaking to l’Abbé Delahaye, have you not?”

  “I have seen him,” Claudine said. “If you do as I suggest, he will not harm or prevent you.”

  “He will believe I am sold to the devil,” Moustique muttered.

  “Because you also serve the spirits?” Claudine raised her eyebrows. “But you should believe what you yourself teach: that one may serve Bon Dieu and the mysteries of Guinée together, without contradiction.”

  She stood up and shook out her long skirt. “Also,” she said, “this is no scheme of l’Abbé Delahaye, but the motion of the Holy Spirit, which came through your father to me and which now moves through me to you.”

  Moustique gaped. She curtsied to him, smiled, and walked away.

  That night the three women prepared the meal together as before, but when they had cleared away the dishes, all three of them disappeared, leaving their men with their rum on the dirt-floored porch. Arnaud and the doctor sat in silence, for a time, on three-legged stools against the wall. When the drums began, it felt to the doctor as if he had been hearing them all the while in the beat of his blood.

  Below, the women entered the compound from the foot of the trail that led down through the stand of bamboo from the house. Cléo, Fontelle and Claudine, all dressed in white and wearing white headcloths. They walked together in a leftward loop around the rear of the church and joined a column of other white-clad women which was snaking its way up the far slope into the jungle.

  Arnaud sat speechless, with a fixed regard, balancing his twisted cane on its point and letting it fall from one hand to the other. Now and then he tasted his rum. The doctor, who could think of no word to say to him, was silent also. When the first cry of the possessed rang down from the hill, Arnaud trembled as if he had himself received the shock. The doctor got up then, and laid a hand on his shoulder. Arnaud glanced up at him as if he might speak, but did not. After a moment he shifted just enough to break the contact. The doctor thanked him for his hospitality and went indoors to sleep.

  At dawn the next morning they were summoned to the church by someone clanging on a pot lid. Claudine sat on the front bench, to Cléo’s left, surrounded by the children she instructed. Arnaud took his seat beside her; the doctor settled across the aisle. Most of last night’s celebrants were also present, still wearing their white garments. Claudine’s face was haggard from her sleepless night, but she looked exalted.

  “God is relation,” Moustique preached. “God is others. God is love.” He wore a different stole, the doctor noticed, embroidered with awkward, lumpy doves in red. The silver chalice was gone too; it had been replaced by a gourd.

  The doctor bowed his head as the sermon went on. He felt the heaviness of his breathing, the darkness of his interrupted sleep. All through the night he had rolled on the wave of the distant drumming, but now he could not remember his dreams.

  Moustique raised the circle of cassava above his head and tore it down the middle. He passed his hands over the gourd cup, singing the Latin words of the consecration. Behind him, to his left, a young boy thumped a drum to match his movements. Through the tingling haze of his drowsiness, the doctor moved forward and knelt at the rail to take communion. He glimpsed Claudine kneeling near him, her face shining and running with tears. Then the leathery bread was in his mouth, and Moustique brought the gourd chalice to his lips. The water was heavy, cool and sweet. Moustique put his hand on the doctor’s forehead, applying a quick, firm pressure as he repeated the principal text of his sermon: It is no longer I who live, but the Christ that lives in me.

  Next morning the doctor was witness to a scene of tenderness between Claudine and Arnaud as they parted on the wooden gallery of the grand’case. He sat his slightly restless mare and looked at them sidelong and reflected on the ties that bound them. The man’s hand lingered on the woman’s cheek. Then Arnaud turned quickly away and came with rapid steps to his own horse.

  They rode out. Arnaud made no further complaint against his conscription; he did not mention it at all, though his face tightened as he surveyed the workers in his cane fields on their way down to the main road. In their earlier conversation the doctor had not found it necess
ary to make the point that Toussaint, amid all the current turmoil, had suffered a moment of mistrust in his alliances with the old grand blancs. While it was true that capable officers were always in acute demand, it was even more true that Toussaint did not want to leave any one of Arnaud’s class in a position to engage in conspiracies or even raise open revolt behind his lines. The doctor imagined that Arnaud understood all this well enough and that there was no use speaking of it.

  Three days later, the two of them had joined Dessalines’s encampment surrounding Jacmel. Despite his first reaction, Arnaud fell into his service with a will. Toussaint had seconded him to Christophe rather than Dessalines, an arrangement he seemed to prefer. As for the doctor, he was kept thoroughly occupied in the hospital tents, for the resistance at Jacmel was desperate in proportion to its hopelessness, and there were many casualties, as Arnaud had predicted.

  The morale of the black soldiers was not at its best. Moyse’s notion, that this conflict was a misbegotten war of brother against brother, had caught on among them. Prior to his descent on Jacmel, Dessalines had rallied his troops by night on the plain of Léogane. While the supplies and ammunition were being distributed, stars had begun falling all over the sky, like a rain of burning fire. The men were thrown into terror by the starfall, which they took as an omen that their spirits had turned against them. Also, on the more practical side of the matter, Jacmel was one of the best-fortified towns of the colony, and Beauvais had prepared it well for a siege before he decamped.

  Toussaint himself arrived to direct the early phase of the assault. Under heavy fire from the Jacmel forts, he built his own redoubts along the beach, to discourage any relief effort that might come by sea. Then he sent Christophe and Laplume on a night attack against Grand Fort and Fort Tavigne, which lay outside the entrenchments of the Rigaudins. In this engagement, Arnaud distinguished himself by successfully exhorting his men to hold Tavigne, continuing to face fire himself, though wounded in the shoulder. Grand Fort was also taken in the first rush, but a desperate effort of the defenders recovered it for Jacmel before the night was done.