HI, he wrote on the notebook. He walked up next to Mrs. Finlay, who had almost disappeared into the recliner she was so short, and tapped her on the shoulder.
“Hello, Charlie. How are you?”
He swiveled the notebook back and wrote with his favorite blue Sharpie, then turned the page toward the old woman.
FINE. CAN I PLAY A COMPUTER GAME UNTIL SCHOOL?
Mrs. Finlay frowned. When she did that, her whole face got wrinkly.
“What about inviting a friend over? Have a little playdate? Don’t you have any friends, Charlie?”
Charlie thought quickly.
WELL, I CAN ASK ONE OF THEM ON THE COMPUTER.
“On the computer?”
SURE, Charlie wrote, feeling bad already for lying. But this was important.
Mrs. Finlay glanced at him uncertainly. The tip of her tongue appeared in the corner of her mouth.
“Well, okay. But no YouTube. I heard about that one. Just see if anyone wants to play.”
Charlie scooted off to his father’s room. His daddy’s computer—the one with the Internet connection—was sitting in the corner on a rickety little desk. Charlie pulled the wooden chair closer and sat in front of the keyboard. He listened for any sounds of Mrs. Finlay’s approach but all he could hear was The Price Is Right.
He logged in to the Gmail account his daddy had let him keep for writing his mother. He clicked on the latest message from her and hit Reply.
Mommy, he wrote. How are you? I’m fine, I got a B+ on my history test, the one I was worried about.
Mommy, Daddy acts strange sometimes. I don’t want to get him in trouble but sometimes he sits in the car when he gets home and Mrs. Finlay goes home, but Daddy just sits in the garage staring straight ahead. The car is running and everything and I heard that’s dangerous. One time the garage got smelly and I knocked on the window and Daddy didn’t even hear me.
Do you think he’s OK? Maybe he has too much stress. Or his head is hurting him.
Charlie stopped and stared up at the corner where the ceiling and two walls met. He hummed a song he’d heard on the radio that morning. He thought about telling his mommy about what had happened in the laundry room, but just thinking about it made his stomach all squirmy. The car stuff was normal strange, but the basement, that was different, like a horror movie. He wanted his mommy to tell him what to do, but not to get Daddy in trouble.
What should I do, Mommy? You can write me back and tell me. Please don’t tell Daddy, he has enough to worry about. I think he just needs a rest.
I get lots of homework. Could I get an Xbox for my birthday? It’s OK if you say no but please think about it. I am being good mostly and trying not to get Daddy stressed too much.
I love you.
Charlie
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Nat banged on the museum’s front door. The windows up above were dark, the doorbell dead. He opened the screen door and pounded again.
He took two steps back and looked at the second-floor windows. Just then, a light came on in the left one, softened by a gauzy curtain.
Nat breathed in deeply.
A minute later, Mr. Atkins’s face appeared in the window, ghostly, white-blue against the black. His hair was disheveled, and he appeared angry. He opened the door. “What do you think you’re doing? It’s—”
“It wasn’t West Africa. It was Haiti.”
Atkins stood unmoving in the doorway. His lips were pressed together.
“Aren’t you going to say, ‘What was Haiti?’ Or did you know that I’d be back? You knew what I was looking for, but you said nothing.”
Atkins sighed. “I have no idea what you’re going on about. I want you to leave. Now, please.”
Nat stepped up through the door, forcing Atkins back. He closed the door behind him.
“Yes, you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about. And I’m not leaving until you tell me everything.”
“Dr. Thayer—”
Nat shook his head. “Everything, Mr. Atkins. I can’t explain why, but someone’s life depends on it.”
Atkins stared, the eyes raw and huge behind his glasses.
“Whose life?”
“A young woman named Becca Prescott.”
Atkins seemed off balance. His lips repeated the name, but no sound emerged. He turned without a word and walked back into the museum.
They walked in darkness, the artifacts from the museum, so friendly and harmless during the sun-splashed days, now giving off evil little gleams of light. Dark, furrowed arrowheads in a glass case, two long and battered muskets crossed on the wall, a brace of elegant flintlock pistols laid out on a table. Atkins went to the far wall, flicked on a light, then walked back, stopping at a display table. He took something out of his pocket and bent down to the storage area underneath. He slipped a small key into the lock on the drawer and pulled it out.
He held a thin paperbound book in his hand.
“I’m presuming you’re here about Captain Markham,” Atkins said.
Nat stared.
“I couldn’t be sure before,” Atkins said. “I don’t like to stir things up.” He fluttered through the first few pages of the book.
“They brought Markham back to Northam,” Nat said, “and charged him with murder.”
“Yes. The trial was held here.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
Nat glanced around the room. A Union flag with bullet holes through three of the stripes hung above their heads. “Who did he kill?”
Atkins shoved the book at him, turning away slightly as if it were a sample of something toxic and possibly airborne. “You can read it for yourself.”
Nat took the book in his hands. Its surface was rough, not slick and glossy like a modern paperback. It had a black spine, and the lettering on the front was in gold. The Journal of Sergeant Nicholas Godwin, United States Marine Corps, Expedition to Haiti.
He flipped open the first page. Printed by the Grotto Press, Northampton, Mass., 1929. There was an introduction by a Smith College professor of anthropology.
“What is it?”
“A journal. One of Markham’s soldiers kept a diary of the . . . events.”
Nat rubbed his fingers across the cover. “Let me ask you something else.”
Atkins stood there, and Nat could feel the man tensed, expectant. He wants the interview over. He wants to get away from me. “What was this place?”
Atkins started. “What do you mean, this place?”
“The museum. Before it was a museum.”
Atkins’s lips curled into a fearful snarl. “Why, it was the old courthouse, of course. I said the trial was held here. There’s a picture of the whole thing—”
“I saw it. I thought you meant the trial was held in Northam. You mean Markham was convicted and sentenced here, in this building?”
Atkins nodded.
Nat closed his eyes. That was why Becca had come here. Stared at the little building with such hatred. Because the traveler’s first host had been hanged in this place—after the traveler escaped to another. And the men of the squadron were in the crowd with all their relatives. Atkins was staring at the book with distaste. His peeled-grape eyes swung up to meet Nat’s. “Just bring the damn thing back when you’re done.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Excerpts from the Journal of Sergeant Nicholas Godwin, United States Marine Corps, Expedition to Haiti.
Port-au-Prince, September 26, 1919: Rain this morning, letting up just after eleven. The heat has become a constant presence after two weeks in this country, and one finally begins to get used to it. Private Bailey said that during the first few days, he felt he was going to choke because there was nowhere to get cool. No rivers to jump into, like back home, no promise of relief at night. We have been issue
d with tropical khakis, which keep our skin covered from the punishing sun but must be washed frequently to avoid smelling and infestation with the native bugs. We will have to have a laundry day in one of the local rivers soon, if we can find a clean one; we must risk the banana spiders and the tarantulas, which can grow to the size of footballs. As it is now, there is no need for the cacos to post sentries. You can smell us from thirty yards distant, if you don’t hear us tramping along the country roads.
The men arrived in good spirits to the harbor here. But the Corps has been in Haiti for four years and the population has clearly had its fill of the occupation. We heard stories back in the barracks of the Haitians welcoming the first Marines with bottles of rum and dancing. That, clearly, is all over. The looks we get on the road range from the stone-faced to the malevolent. We will have to watch ourselves closely, although the Haitians know that any attack on an American soldier will end only in death.
The hardtack sent from Florida appears to have been infested with maggots. Private Prescott discovered them while dunking the offending biscuits in his coffee this morning. We went through our supply and found two more infested. Captain Markham stares at us and tells us, eat the hardtack or go foraging. The men do not consider this an adequate answer. We’ve tried drying some in the sun, but what the Haitians don’t steal becomes as hard as New Hampshire granite. We will have to requisition another supply when we reach Gonaïves.
At least we’ve been given a mission, as of yesterday morning. The task of locating a caco leader, Bule Alexandre, a politician of some sort who has turned against our presence here and gone rebel, is our assignment. Captain Markham gave us a talk this morning that was notable for its bluntness: “Get Bule is our mission. Get Bule is our only mission. Don’t bother me with anything else, any nonsense from the Haitians or requests for food or water. We will get Bule or die trying. Is that understood?”
Captain Markham is neither popular nor unpopular among the men as of now. We are all, of course, from Northam and its vicinity and knew of each other growing up, though Markham grew up several miles from us, which in our parish of Massachusetts is equivalent to half a county. We didn’t know him well. He was assigned to us just before we sailed from Baltimore, after the death of our beloved Captain Croton from dysentery. Markham is certainly ambitious, as we all discovered rather quickly, and Haiti has clearly become his path to advancement. With no wars to fight, it is missions like this that will make one’s career in the Corps. I can’t expect that to motivate our regular soldiers, who would just as soon sunbathe on the canal banks and shoot the occasional miscreant for target practice, but they will be driven forward.
* * *
September 27th: We are headed north toward the last known sighting of Bule in the city of Saint-Marc. As we tramped from village to village today along the cow paths—Haitians do not seem to know the meaning of paved roads, despite the “corvée” law, which states that they must all contribute labor to building them—we are met with blank faces. Our interpreter, Joseph, asks at every crossroad and every market town what the latest is on Bule. The name brings terrified looks; the women often suck their teeth in dismay. And yet the Haitians profess no knowledge of this man. They are pathetic creatures, dressed mostly in oily homespun outfits that look like muslin. They have a smell, different from ours. They smell like the earth.
Captain Markham is growing frustrated and has instructed Joseph to let our hosts know that anyone found hiding Bule will be treated with the utmost harshness.
* * *
September 28th, evening. We are camped at a town near La Chapelle, a regular hotbed of caco activity, according to Joseph. The stares in the village are perhaps a bit harder than on the road here. Otherwise everything is the same: the same dusty roads, the same hordes of black faces attending our every move, the same smell of burning sugarcane and cow manure. One gets the impression along these roads that the occupation is faring badly. We see scrawled messages in which the name Rosalvo Bobo, no friend to the Americans, is prominent. The poor hate us for the corvée laws; the rich hate us for stealing away the fat they skimmed from public works. The middle classes, generally speaking, do not exist.
And as for Bule? The same responses. Non. Non, monsieur. Mwen pa konnen nonm sa a. I must take care not to learn their massacred French here or I will be laughed at back in Northam when trying it out on Mrs. Futter, our neighbor who spent many years on the Left Bank.
Weather is changeable, rain in the morning, burning hot by noon. My skin is turning the color of my father’s good saddle. Private Ford’s heatstroke seems to be better; in any case, Markham orders him to march.
The men are grumbling. They want to return to Port-au-Prince. Being out in the bush has separated us from the basic conveniences of life. We have not had letters from home since our arrival; the hardtack continues to house grub worms, and the local fare is nothing to be desired.
At dusk, we witnessed something interesting to all of us. We were coming up on a village—you can smell their cooking fires along the path before you come into the clearings—and heard what seemed to be rifle shots. A flat crack, then another. We all crouched immediately on hearing these reports, and Markham, in the lead, waved his arm to get us off the path and into the scrub trees that line the roads—gnarled nightmare things. We spaced ourselves appropriately; then on Markham’s whistle (I could no longer see him), we advanced on the village, whose name I never learned.
From the fringe of the tree line, we saw what was making the sounds. A man with a whip—off-white, not a bullwhip surely—was prancing around and snapping it on the ground. It sounded like a pistol shot or a red penny firecracker on the Fourth of July. The villagers hadn’t seen us or, believe it or not, smelled us. They were entranced by what was happening. (I saw a few bottles of rum being passed as well.) Markham, fascinated, held his finger to his lips and so we watched.
A man was apparently being “possessed.” He was a tall, stocky, well-built young buck in a red shirt and brown half-pants, his feet bare. His face was covered with tan-colored dirt—later I assessed from rolling on the ground. A good fire was burning in the middle of the village, and the man was falling, rolling, turning, almost pitching into the flames, circling around it, before one or another of the villagers would pull him away with a yell. He seemed quite oblivious to his own well-being and jerked and twisted in the most remarkable fashion. The fire drew him like the proverbial moth.
“Saw a puppet show once,” Private McIlhane whispered in my ear. “Damned if it didn’t look just like that.”
I quieted him, but my thoughts ran along the same lines. The man was being twitched hither and thither as if by an invisible hand. There was a woman watching, and I thought I saw her lips move once or twice, just as the poor puppet snapped his back and cried out.
Crack went the whip. The rum was passed and chugged. And the man went deeper into his frenzy.
For a moment, a chill ran right down my back. He was being pushed and pulled, babbling desperately as if he wanted to escape, as if he wanted relief from something. We craned our necks and peered from the tree line as the sparks flew from the fire from him brushing against the burning logs. Private Dyer whispered, “Wouldn’t mind some of that liquor—” but Markham cut him off with an angry hiss.
It became clear that the woman I mentioned, her clothes a little better than the others, was the mistress of ceremonies. The bewitched man would come to her and clutch his hands, babbling, and she would wipe his forehead with a cloth and whisper to him. We’d been warned about voudoun, but here it was, in the flesh, and here was its apparent master. A village woman, of all things.
A little boy came wandering to the trees—going to relieve himself, perhaps—and we drew back. But it was too late. He spotted us and lit out like he was on fire. We came out of hiding and proceeded toward the assembly. One of the men tried to wave us off, screaming something, I would guess, about this being a rel
igious ceremony, but Private Thayer clubbed him with the butt of his Springfield. There was a rush at us after that, but we leveled our rifles at the two dozen or so Haitians and they quieted down right smart. Except for one.
The man who was being “possessed” came at Private Ford with his eyes aflame and his babbling at a horrible volume. In his hand was a bottle, its end smashed on a rock, now dripping golden rum. Markham shot him at eight paces, but the man—so great was his intoxication with the voudoun spirit—walked through the bullet “as if it were flying dirt,” as Thayer said later. Bailey fired another shot with the man’s chest only two feet away from his bayonet, and the impact of this, a direct hit on the heart, sent a cascade of blood spurting to the ground and over Bailey’s khaki pants. Thayer was caught on the shoulder with a large dollop. The man sank to the ground and quivered there, like a speared rat. As he died, he spat out some words at us.
Joseph, our translator, claimed not to have understood the man’s last remark, but I suspect he was afraid to tell us the content.
The villagers were predictably outraged. They attacked us like a pack of wolves, darting forward only to shy away from the ends of our rifle barrels. The possessed man lay there, shaking and bleeding until finally he stopped. How he lived even ten seconds with his heart blown wide open I do not know.
Markham barked for us to take the woman into one of the houses. Thayer and Bailey grabbed her. She didn’t resist, only looked on us with contempt.
“What are you going to do?” I asked Markham.
Markham usually brooked no questioning, but he was pleased with himself, I guess, so he deigned to answer this time. “She’s the chief of these savages. I’m going to sweat her.”
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