Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  In the echo of the shots I heard the high, shrill scream of a blanche. I turned to see Isabelle falling in a faint. The Captain Maillart caught her in his arms and carried her away. I did not know how she had managed to get herself there to see the killing, though I did know her reason. All the black people knew that she had borne a son of Flaville’s at Vallière and afterward given it to Nanon, though none of the white people seemed to know it.

  I was sorry that Bouquart was killed, and that Zabeth would have to find another father for the child they had made together. In the days that followed, I sometimes thought of Chacha Godard’s head going down beneath the waters, and the same words in my mind— what they did to us, we have learned to do to ourselves. But I was not sorry that it had not been my time to go, that I could keep on breathing and living and sometimes kiss my children.

  Moyse was not killed at once, even after so many others had died under Toussaint’s rage. Toussaint met with him once in a friendly way, and pretended to believe that Moyse was not to blame for the rebellion. He even sent Moyse out with a party of soldiers to put down small risings that were still going on in corners of the plain and to the west of Le Cap. I thought then that Toussaint really did love Moyse, as much as his sons who had been taken away to France, and that he wanted Moyse to go off and hide in the mountains and save his life. But Moyse did not do this, either because he did not understand, or because he did not care anymore what happened to him. Instead he went to Port-de-Paix with his patrol, and there Maurepas arrested him and put him into the guardhouse.

  There was a trial for Moyse at Le Cap, but all that time Moyse was kept in the fort at Port-de-Paix. Toussaint did not go to see him die, as he had watched Flaville and the others be blown to little rags of flesh, but he sent Riau in his place to watch it. I had no choice but to go. It was a lucky thing that Toussaint did not order me to be one of the firing squad.

  When Moyse stood facing the guns in the Port-de-Paix fort, he called out in a loud, strong voice. Maurepas heard him, everyone did, but I thought his words were meant for Riau.

  “Tell my old uncle,” Moyse shouted. “Tell him my one eye has been looking into the other world for a long time. Tell him I see him walking there as well, among the shadows.”

  Then Moyse called on the men to shoot. Feu! mes amis, feu! he said. The muskets spoke together, and Moyse was silent.

  I did not bring this message to Toussaint, and no one else did either. But it fell to Riau to tell Toussaint that Moyse was dead, which I had seen with both my eyes. When he heard this news, Toussaint put his face in his hands and wept without sound, and the water ran out from between his fingers. He had given the order himself, as I knew, but this time his grief was real.

  40

  The doctor threw the back of his hand half consciously toward the other side of his bed, and woke completely with a start of alarm when he found it cool and empty. Where was he? He sat up, bracing his back on the headboard, collecting himself one scrap at a time. The Cigny house, but he was still unused to the larger room he and Nanon now occupied on the second floor.

  She was not there, but not lost either. Elise, who was also staying in the house at the moment, had insisted that he not see her all that day. This seemed a fond notion, given all the circumstances, but Nanon had accepted it with a secret smile, and if it pleased her the doctor had no reason to object. On the contrary, he was grateful for his sister’s good will toward the enterprise, even if she had chosen to manage it with a very firm hand. In fact, all three women in the house had formed a temporary cabal, had shut themselves up in a room for the night and barred the door against the men.

  He rubbed the fuzz on the back of his head, and shifted his bare feet to the floor. A warm band of sunshine came through a crack in the tall wooden doors to the balcony. He put on trousers and a loose shirt and went out to stand overlooking the street. Queer tremors of anticipation ran over him, though he laughed at this reaction. It was to be his wedding day.

  The balcony doors of the next room were open wide, and the doctor put his head in cautiously to check the room before he entered. Paul and Paulette were sitting cross-legged on the bed nearest the window, telling each other a story in low whispers. On a smaller bed, wedged into the corner lest they should fall, François and Gabriel were sleeping. With a familiar twinge of slight anxiety the doctor tilted his head toward them to verify that they were breathing.

  Gabriel was still somewhat the smaller, though he would not be so for long. Already he was heavier than François, as if a greater weight had been compressed into the smaller space of his compact, dark body. François was longer, leaner, and seemed in all ways more tentative, more fragile. Now Gabriel, snuffing, turned on his side and thrust a stubby black arm across the belly of his pale-skinned brother. François’s mouth worked, as if at the breast. They stirred, nestled together, went on sleeping.

  With a suppressed giggle, Paul and Paulette scurried out of the room, leaving the doctor alone with the smaller children. With a crafty hand, he enclosed one small rib cage, then the other, feeling the pump of respiration, the faint, steady beat of the heart. He had only to close his hand to extinguish the life. In his time he had seen infants this age or still younger impaled and hoisted upon spears. White, African, mulatto . . . it was the way in which one race announced its intention to wipe another wholly from the face of the earth.

  The doctor raised his hands from the bed and looked at his tingling palms. The remembered horror did not frighten him today. It was part and parcel of the things he knew, a truth of the world he had come to live in. He was engaged to defend the lives of Gabriel and François and Paul with whatever power was in him. With that thought his hands grazed around his waist, but he had not yet put on his belt this morning, much less his pistols. He did not mean to bring his hand near any weapon, not today.

  On the stairs he found himself thinking of a bit of prestidigitation Toussaint had recently adopted, since the latest rebellion and the executions of Flaville and Moyse. Toussaint before a throng of field hands or a division of the army, holding a glass container with a few grains of white rice sprinkled over unhulled brown, or a handful of white beans layered atop a quantity of dark-roast, unground coffee.

  “Do you fear I am too close to the whites?” he was wont to ask. “Do you fear the whites will come to rule this country once again?”

  It was, of course, a rhetorical question. A few brisk shakes of the jar, and the white grains disappeared entirely among the dark.

  Downstairs, his way was blocked by Elise. Over her shoulder the doctor could see Paul and Paulette eating bananas, their eyes bright with amusement.

  “What a creature,” his sister chirped. “Do you mean to be underfoot all morning? Go out and find something to do with yourself.”

  “Let me take the boy, then,” the doctor said mildly. He beckoned to Paul, and Elise removed her arm from the door frame to let the boy come through to him.

  Together they walked down the slope toward the quay. On the waterfront, they turned in the direction of the Customs House. Profiting from the cool of the morning, the porters were busy in all directions. Some merchantmen of the North American Republic were taking on loads of coffee and raw sugar and molasses, while others disgorged barrels of flour, casks of wine or gunpowder, long, flat cases needing two men to carry, which the doctor knew contained new muskets. He called Paul nearer to him and took him by the hand. Whenever they came down to the port together, he was reminded of those weeks the boy had spent alone and abandoned in this area, surviving on the wits he could muster. Paul had never said much about it, though he had frequent nightmares in the first months following his recovery. Now he chafed at the restraint and soon broke free of the doctor’s hand to scamper on ahead.

  They passed the Customs House. Paul had stopped to gape at the cannon in the battery opposite the grove of trees which ornamented this area of the waterfront. The gunners smiled and saluted him. The doctor’s son was well known to all of them. Paul c
ame nearer, shyly at first, and was allowed to bestride a cannon and try the touch hole with his finger. The doctor took a seat beneath the trees. The sun, just fully risen in the east, struck metal reflections from the water. Against the dazzle he could make out sails coming in at the harbor mouth, and when he shaded his eyes, he could also see the smaller pilot boats bringing them in.

  A porpoise broke the surface of the water, out ahead of the pilot boats. One rolling fin, then three, then five. One of them jumped clear of the water in a shower of shining droplets and fell back sideways with a tremendous splash. The doctor looked for Paul, to show him, but the boy had run farther along onto the parade ground between the Batterie Circulaire and the Arsenal.

  The doctor leaned back beneath the trees, adjusting the brim of his straw hat against the glare. The increasing sun brought waves of warmth, and the breeze of the morning was dying. He felt calm, even drowsy, though at the same time he could still feel the wings of the butterflies stirring in his stomach. He turned his head idly in the direction of the town and saw a tall, erect figure approaching. As he watched, this form resolved itself into the person of Captain Maillart, wearing his best dress uniform complete with various decorations for valor he had lately been given, topped off with a dizzying orchid pinned to his lapel.

  “Ah, you have absconded,” he said, coming up to the doctor’s bench, “but you won’t evade capture. They’ll have you penned up properly by the end of the day.”

  “I suppose you are right,” said the doctor. “Let me say I am content to be made prisoner.”

  “Sooner you than me, my friend.” The bench rails throbbed under the sudden shock of the captain’s weight. “Well, bon courage.” Maillart produced his flask from an inner coat pocket. The doctor unscrewed the top and sipped and arched his eyebrows in surprise.

  “That makes a change, does it not?” the captain said. “Corn whiskey, just in from Virginia.”

  The doctor sat back, withdrawing under his hat brim. The warmth of the whiskey spread in him. Despite the captain’s teasing, he did not especially feel cornered. Though if he had not elected this marriage himself, he might have been brought to it by other means. During this oasis of peace, Toussaint had found time to turn his attention to the observance of proprieties (as his outward devotion turned ever more conservatively Catholic) and in consequence a great many men of whatever hue had found themselves contracting marriage with their long-term concubines, sometimes under a certain degree of duress. The doctor was content to have volunteered for his own mission before being conscripted—Toussaint had also appeared to be pleased. For once, he was in tune with the times.

  They sat in a pattern of sunshine and shade. A flicker of warm breeze lifting the leaves around them suffused them with a citrus sent.

  “Permit me to offer you a cigar.”

  Tocquet’s voice. The doctor blinked his eyes open. Maillart had already accepted the proffer and was biting off the end of his cheroot with a great wrench of his slightly yellowed teeth.

  “I did not expect to find you out and about so early,” the doctor said.

  In fact Tocquet had gone out the previous evening for a long night of gambling and who knew what else—seeing that the women of the Cigny house were disinclined to male society. He had invited the doctor, who had declined. Though he had stayed up late enough, comparing his botanical notes to a book on a similar theme he had recently acquired, Tocquet had not returned by the time he put out his candle.

  “What is one to do?” Tocquet said. “The house is still untenable—the women.” He snorted, cupping fire to Maillart’s cigar and then to his own. “We shall all be relieved when you have settled your affair.”

  “Undoubtedly,” the doctor said. “This once, as it is a special occasion, I accept your cigar.”

  Tocquet passed one to him and stooped down to light it. The doctor inhaled shallowly, and let out a rich plume of smoke, suppressing his impulse to cough. Tobacco was one vice he had never managed to acquire. The smoke rather dried his tongue. Maillart’s flask went round again, and Tocquet kissed his fingers appreciatively at its savor, then turned to offer it to Riau, who had appeared, silently, imperceptibly, at his left hand. With a quick, bird-like toss of his head, Riau drank, and sat down, smiling, on the doctor’s other side. Tocquet, who remained on his feet, leaned down to offer him a cigar and a light. Riau took it between his teeth and drew fire to the tip. He sat back, expansively fuming blue smoke. He too wore a dress uniform, with decorations derived from several services in addition to the French, and was crowned with the tall hussar’s hat, which looked to have been given an extra-careful brushing for the occasion.

  The doctor reclined against the bench rail, puffing his cigar infrequently, just enough to keep it alight. Captain Maillart began telling some story he had heard that morning from a seaman on his way across the docks. The doctor let his eyes sink, half attending. Paul, who had spotted Riau’s tall hat, came running to his knee. Riau reached into his coat pocket and gave him something: a little pig fashioned from a piece of corncob, with sticks for legs and tail. Delighted, Paul ran with the toy back to the parade ground.

  The voices of the children playing mingled with the shrieks of gulls. The doctor closed his eyes completely, pushed back his hat brim and let the red warmth play over his closed lids, listening to the drone of Maillart’s voice and Tocquet’s occasional remark. Between the cigar and the whiskey, he had become extremely thirsty.

  Tocquet and Maillart broke off their talk. When the doctor opened his eyes, he saw that they were both watching Riau, who was balancing his way across the narrow aqueduct which fed the Fountain d’Estaing, placed in the harbor near the Batterie Circulaire to provision ships with fresh water. Riau stooped, into the glare that rebounded from the ocean’s surface, and rose again and came toward them.

  The others awaited him, with a certain solemnity. Riau reached them, holding a tortoise-shell dipper in both hands. With a barely perceptible flick of his fingernail, he spilled a few drops of water on the ground, then drank and offered it to the doctor, who gratefully tasted the cool, sweet water and passed the dipper on.

  Slowly the conversation resumed; the flask made another circuit. The doctor’s cigar was mostly consumed; he dropped it and ground out the spark with his boot heel. A moment later, Elise appeared, standing with her arms akimbo, under a parasol Zabeth held above the two of them.

  “The pair of you,” she said, meaning apparently the doctor and Tocquet. “What are you thinking—you are not dressed!”

  The doctor looked down at his shabby trousers. “Ma sœur,” he said mildly, “it was you who expelled me from the house.”

  Unmoved by this reasoning, Elise stamped her foot and beckoned. Tocquet and the doctor followed her in the direction of the wardrobe.

  At the makeshift altar in the white church on the hill, the doctor stood beside Tocquet, observing the benches with half his attention, wrinkling his nose at the scented water which Isabelle had dashed on his collar before he could prevent it—“It may cover the smell of drink,” she’d said dulcetly as she made her retreat. Moustique held the Bible open in both his hands, discoursing on varieties of love: eros, caritas, agape. The doctor was struck by the evidence that he and Nanon had enough friends and wellwishers to fill a small hall. There was of course Maillart, with Vaublanc and the indestructible Major O’Farrel, also Riau with most of his cavalry troop. Toussaint was absent; he’d left the town on one of his lightning tours of inspection to some destination where he would be least expected, but Christophe was there, and Maurepas, who had come over from Port-de-Paix on a military errand. There were Elise and Arnaud and Claudette and Isabelle (though Monsieur Cigny was away, on his plantation at Haut de Trou), and there were Zabeth and Fontelle and her older daughters and Maman Maig’ and a great many people from the lakou behind the church, whose names the doctor did not know.

  A drum and a fiddle and a wooden flute took up a rickety version of a minuet, and to this music Paulette came
down the aisle, walking slowly, with a shy pride, her hair pinned high on top of her head and her hand buried in an extravagant burst of orchids. Behind her stepped Nanon, her head veiled and demurely lowered. Save for the sinuous flow of her hips, she seemed completely disembodied by the wedding dress Elise had designed for her, its fabric rendered just slightly off-white by a brief drenching in weak tea, in token of the fact that Nanon’s condition was other than perfectly virginal.

  She reached his side. He could feel her warmth, and her scent was natural—again he regretted the splash of perfume. It all went very quickly: the vows, a bit of fumbling with the ring. Moustique raised a hand above them.

  “Now we see through a glass darkly,” he pronounced, “but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

  It was finished. At any rate, people were leaving the church. Tocquet had gone to join Elise, and the doctor and Nanon were bringing up the rear. Her hand on his elbow steadied him, for after all he was a little drunk. They emerged into the open air and paused on the first step below the doorsill, above the wedding guests, who had fanned out over the apron of ground before the church. There was Paul, observing Paulette in her transformation, with a certain covert admiration. Farther on, François rode Elise’s hip, while Isabelle cradled Gabriel in her arms.

  The breeze had freshened from the harbor, and the three crosses on the brow of the hill leaned into the wind. The doctor felt the hum in the hollow at the back of his neck, and with that the dead began to appear; intermingled with the living: nearest the crosses the Père Bonne-chance with his genial, slightly sheepish smile, and Moyse, the loose lid sagging over his missing eye, standing near Riau, and between Isabelle and Captain Maillart the figure of Joseph Flaville, and Choufleur was there too, looking more amiable than had been his custom, and the spirits of slaughtered children and those of the many men who had died under the doctor’s hands when his skill was not sufficient to save them and those of other men he had killed with his weapons at moments of necessity or rage or fear. So many of them had been unwilling to share the world with one another—they had rather die—but after all, they had not left the world; they were still here, unseen among the living, the Invisible Ones, les Morts et les Mystères, and now, if for this moment only, they seemed disposed to harmony.