Necessary Sins

by Elizabeth Bell

  What use did flattery have— Then she realized what he meant: Forty-nine years and eight childbirths would not deter the lusts of black men. Marguerite grabbed the boots from her son and did not bother with stockings, though she glanced longingly toward her wig. Somewhere on the first floor, Gabriel’s monkey began screeching.

  “Pellé and the boys and I will try to scare them off,” Matthieu promised. “But if we can’t… You have to hide.”

  In nothing else but her chemise, she stood, and found that Étienne’s boots almost fit her. “Hide where?” Apart from that road, beyond the outbuildings, they were surrounded by cane fields, and if those were on fire…

  “Étienne suggested the new latrine. I can’t think of a safer place.”

  “It hasn’t been used yet, Maman,” their son put in before she could protest. “It’s not even finished.” Fluidly he passed the rifle’s sling over his head and under his right arm, then took the lantern from his father. In that moment, he looked so much older than thirteen.

  Matthieu pressed the foreign weight of the pistol into her palm. “I’ve loaded it and put it at half-cock. Remember: you have only one shot.” She opened her mouth to object, but he silenced it with his own, kissing her quickly—yet so fiercely it frightened her even more than the gun.

  “Come on, Maman.” Étienne seized her hand. Marguerite had only a moment to glance back at Matthieu, who tried to smile. Their son towed her past the other bedchambers and down the staircase without stopping. At the bottom, she tried to pull against him, to catch a glimpse of Narcisse and Gabriel; but Étienne was surprisingly strong. “There’s no time, Maman.”

  She surrendered to his momentum. Through the back gallery and down the steps they raced, out into the night glaring orange and furious. They did not need the lantern. From the cane, knives of flame slashed at the sky. Black plumes of smoke surged all the way to the stars.

  To the right, she was sure she heard the shrieking of their horses in the stable, and passing far above their heads, the angry hum of Matthieu’s bees. Behind them, she thought Gabriel yelled a question and his father answered. Then the snap and roar of the fire in the cane filled her ears as the ghastly light filled her vision.

  Étienne pulled her closer and closer to the flames, to the heat, until at last he halted at the edge of the new latrine. Marguerite doubled over, but she could not catch her breath; she inhaled only burning air.

  Her son set the lantern near the pit and tapped the top rung of the ladder. “You go first, Maman.”

  She hesitated, still gasping, looking over her shoulder past the plumeria trees to the house. She heard a gunshot and started.

  “We have to hurry,” Étienne urged, taking the pistol from her.

  She had no choice. She descended cautiously, keenly aware that she was nearly naked, with nothing beneath her chemise but Étienne’s boots, without even a cap. At least the half-dug latrine was not as deep as she’d feared—not quite six feet. Inside, she could breathe more easily. Her son knelt at the edge and handed her back the pistol as well as the lantern. In the candlelight, she scanned the small floor of the pit for a flat spot. When she’d set down the lantern and the pistol, she looked up to find her son still above ground. He was pushing the ladder at an angle into the latrine, till its top sank below the surface of the earth.

  “Étienne, what are you doing?”

  He checked the flintlock mechanism of his rifle. “I have to help Papa.”

  From the direction of the house, shouts now—and more shots.

  Étienne turned toward them as well. “I have to help Gabriel and Narcisse.”

  “No, Étienne!” She reached for his ankle, but he had only to step away from the pit, and in an instant he was lost to her. “Étienne!” She sucked in a terrified breath and tried to hoist herself above the earth. But the breath was all smoke; her lungs seized with coughing, and she collapsed into the latrine.

  She did not know how much time passed before she recovered enough to move. Her eyes tearing, she groped for the ladder and dragged herself upwards into a ceiling of heat. She held her breath as best she could, but the stench of burning overwhelmed her and took on a new edge, harsher than the cane. She supposed she was roasting now. She dared not open her eyes any farther, but—

  Her left foot slipped between the rungs, and she fell hard against the ladder. It wobbled sideways under her weight and dumped her back into the latrine. She coughed and moaned and extracted her leg, pulling it protectively against her. Bruised but not broken, she hoped. At least she could breathe again.

  Still supine, she assessed her person. Her hands and forearms radiated heat, and the skin of her fingers was painfully stiff when she slid them into Étienne’s boot to check her ankle. Her hair—her natural hair, cut close to the skull—was strangest of all: unnatural now. Clubbed. Brittle. Forlornly she stared upward through the rungs of the ladder. What could she do for Étienne that armed men could not do?

  From this pit, she could see nothing but a few bright stars, and then smoke swallowed even those. There was no moon. She worried that the negroes might see the candlelight. Careful of her left ankle, she made herself sit up and crawl to the lantern. She grabbed the pistol, then blew out the flame. She heard no more gunshots, only cries that sounded like animals, or savages.

  She retreated to a corner of the latrine, till something hard and bulbous jabbed her in the spine. Terror twisted her stomach. She scrambled away in a crouch, gritting her teeth at the sudden pain in her ankle and aiming the pistol wildly. She squinted hard but saw only shadows. She wished she had not extinguished the lantern. She had no way to relight it.

  She backed away the few feet she could, under the ladder again. It must be Indian bones, she reasoned. She pulled her knees against her body, protected from the naked earth only by her son’s boots and the muslin of her chemise, nearly as thin as netting.

  Was Delphine hiding somewhere like this? How many plantations would these negroes attack before they were crushed? Surely even savages would spare a woman eight months with child.

  Marguerite clutched the pistol and stared up at the lurid firelight above the pit. She knew that if a black face appeared, she would have the strength to shoot. And then what? The explosion would only draw more of them.

  Perhaps Matthieu had intended her to use the shot on herself. But suicide was sin, mortal sin, whatever the reason… Then again, she was already damned.

  Not if she made an Act of Perfect Contrition. God might still forgive her, if she was truly sorry, if she repented not from fear of Hell but love of Him. She closed her aching eyes. Why hadn’t she remembered her rosary? If only the bones in this pit belonged to saints and not savages. She didn’t care what Étienne said, they were all the same: red or black. How she wished he were here to argue with her…

  New, precise pain seared into the flesh of her knee. Her eyes flew open to find an ember of cane perched on her chemise. She smacked at it and only burned her palm. She tossed aside the pistol and flipped the ember from her skirt, but the muslin had caught fire. She grabbed one fistful of dirt after another and threw them at her legs until the flames died.

  Beside her, the ember pulsed dimmer and dimmer like an injured insect. “The Virgin’s chemise is full of fireflies.” Her lungs convulsed in a mad, noiseless laugh, that the Creole expression should come to her now. Marguerite had never understood it, but she knew it was some kind of blasphemy. Not even the Mother of God was sacred on Saint-Domingue. How could Marguerite expect her intercession? She doubted Saint Dominic would listen either; the colony was an insult and not an honor to him.

  She recovered the pistol. She thought it was still at half-cock, but she wasn’t sure. Gabriel had given her that shooting lesson almost a year ago, after the mulatto uprising. The danger had been over; she’d nodded indulgently, but she hadn’t really—

  A sound speared through her, worse than her twisted ankle, worse than her burns. She knew who made the sound, though there was no way she could
know. She had heard Matthieu howling with laughter; she had heard him bellowing with anger; she had heard him groaning with pleasure; but in their twenty-three years together, she had never heard him scream. Now, he would not stop.

  She clenched her eyes shut and tried to cover her ears without letting go of the pistol. Her own whimpers became desperate whispers, a prayer to drown out those screams: “Pater noster, qui es in cælis…”

  Perhaps the sweet stench of the cane would simply suffocate her. “Thy kingdom come.” She would welcome it, to be anywhere but this world where subjects imprisoned their King, where slaves raised their hands against their masters.

  “Thy will be done…” The words choked her like the smoke. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those—who trespass…” She couldn’t say the rest, but in her head, she chanted: Deliver us from evil. Deliver us…

  If the Lord turned His face from anywhere, she knew it would be from here.

  Have pity on me, Saint Margaret… Huddled in the dark, waiting for death or delivery—was this how her patroness had felt, after she had been swallowed by the Devil in the form of a dragon?

  Was it morning yet, in France? Her brother would be saying Mass. Offer it for us, Denis… Unless he was in prison, awaiting his own executioners. When she came out of this pit, would there be anything left?

  She should have gone back with Étienne. Why hadn’t she gone back? Saint Monica, Saint Anne, Blessed Mary, all you holy mothers—only spare my children; only spare my children…

  Chapter 4

  [Blacks’] griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them.

  — Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)

  She waited and prayed until silence fell thicker than the ashes, until her throbbing eyes found it easier to call shapes out of the shadows: the unfired pistol; her burned knee poking through the filthy muslin; the toes of Étienne’s boots; the ladder. This must be morning: the sky was grey instead of black.

  She could not remain in this pit forever. Marguerite crawled to the ladder and used it to drag herself upright, ignoring the pains in her left leg. She stared at her hands and saw the blisters for the first time. She tried to swallow, but her throat was dry as bone.

  Cautiously she raised her eyes, sensitive to any trace of movement in the world above.

  She found neither threat nor ally, only ravaged earth. To the east, their cane was still burning. Past the plumeria trees with their eerie white blossoms, she should be able to see the house. She set the pistol at the edge of the pit and pulled herself from the latrine rung by rung. Where the belvedere of bedchambers should have been hung only smoke—and below, charred boards, smoldering embers. Marguerite’s heart seized. No one had been inside, surely…

  She snatched up the pistol and tried to call Matthieu’s name. It came out as a croak. Better that way; better not to make too much noise; what if one of them heard her? Still she needed water desperately. She reeled toward the well, grasped the crank, and drew back her hand. What if they’d poisoned it, as Makandal had planned?

  Étienne’s ajoupa stood relatively untouched, its palm fronds only singed. She sighed with relief and started running as best she could. He might have hidden here. “Étienne?” she whispered. Pistol first, she ducked beneath the leafy roof of his museum.

  In the murky light, her eyes skimmed over the boards displaying Étienne’s treasures: arrowheads; bits of pottery; little fetishes fashioned from conch shell (one of them clearly a penis, which she had insisted he throw back where he found it); ribs and limb bones from the latrine pit; the skull he’d brought her yesterday; another one; and—the head of her son.

  Marguerite clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle the surfacing scream and nearly dropped the pistol. She stumbled backwards, trying to convince herself she hadn’t seen it, but the shelf leaking blood drew her eyes irresistibly like metal to a lodestone, and it wasn’t just Étienne, it was all of them, all her sons, set there amidst the bones.

  She staggered only a few steps before the bile overtook her, before her knees gave out, and when she opened her eyes again her stomach convulsed again—it did not stop, because she was kneeling next to the body of one of the older boys, she couldn’t even tell which. She wanted to squeeze his hand, as if it could comfort either of them now; she wanted to go back and close their eyes—she should, she was their mother, how could she be afraid of them?

  She stroked the trigger of the pistol. But the sugar works on the rise pulled her attention away from her sons: the machine for crushing cane stalks, the channel for the juice, and below, the boiling shed with its row of vats. Under the roof, the form of a man leaned over the clarifier vat. Her legs shuddering beneath her, she made herself stand.

  As she limped toward the boiling house, the man did not move; he only stared into the first vat as if it were a wishing well. Realization weighted her steps. The tilt of the man’s body was too severe, too complete. His feet did not quite touch the ground. She halted just outside the roof. The man’s face was submerged in the grey-green juice, his bald head boiled crimson. He had been drowned in the sugar, his blood streaking it as though some part of him had burst.

  But the body was too short and stocky to be Matthieu—it was only their overseer, Pellé. She released a breath and leaned against one of the roof supports. To her left rose the channel for the juice, a neat narrow man-made river descending from the machine. The great geared wheel and the three iron grinders stood motionless now, no oxen to turn them. Marguerite frowned. Why was the channel stained with blood as well; it would have to run uphill from Pellé in the vat…

  Her gaze followed the channel to the machine again, and she saw it. A ragged, white-cored, horribly branched red thing erupting from the grinders meant to crush cane. That couldn’t be a…

  The closer she came, the more she sank towards the ground, the more she began to crawl. Grass and dirt and ash ground into her burns, her ankle throbbed, yet she hardly felt it. She reached the machine but refused to look up at the grinders, to see any closer what she knew was there. Still gripping the pistol, she dragged herself around the side of the base. Her eyes groped ahead of her, saw—blue and ivory stripes. Matthieu’s banyan.

  The pistol dropped from Marguerite’s hand. She reached out to grip the edge of his robe, to convince herself this was not some mirage of smoke and madness. Beneath her fingers, the silk was horribly smooth, horribly real. She sank into the ash and sobbed and did not care who heard.

  The skirt of his banyan pooled on the ground, concealing most of Matthieu’s legs. He must be kneeling. Among the folds of silk hung his pale left hand, white as marble. Above her, she could just see the back of his shaved head, sagging forward in death—so close to the still grinders, to the place where his right arm disappeared into the machine and the stripes of the banyan became blue and ivory and red.

  She crawled to him, pulling herself upwards with the robe, wanting to pull him free of the grinders and yet dreading what she would reveal. Dear God, he was still warm, but she knew it must be only the heated air of this inferno. She wrapped her arms around his back; she buried her face in the open throat of his shirt; and she felt a shudder that was not her own.

  Marguerite cried out, let go, and fell to the ground. She gaped up at the groaning corpse. “Matthieu?”

  His eyelids fluttered. He was trying to say her name.

  “I’m here! They didn’t find me!” She ducked beneath his good arm and kissed his neck, his jaw, his cheek, whatever she could reach. “Thank God, Matthieu!” She fought to support his weight. She knew she mustn’t put any more pressure on what remained of his right arm. Or…should she look for the machete they kept here to free the slaves? “I have to find a doctor!”

  He answered in a murmur she couldn’t understand.

  “What?” She had to hold her breath so she could hear him.

&
nbsp; “Too late…”

  When she gripped his undamaged hand, his fingers felt like ice. She bit into her lower lip, tasting blood with the vomit. Too late for a doctor. Too far to go. For a Priest, as well. But there was still a chance Matthieu could die in a state of grace. “All right. All right. Do you remember the Act of Perfect Contrition?”

  Matthieu only repeated hoarsely: “Too late.”

  “It’s not! I’ll help you—”

  “Not sorry.”

  “You must, Matthieu! If you don’t—”

  “Only sorry— My fault. Our sons…”

  Marguerite pressed her face into his neck, willing away the images. If he didn’t know, she couldn’t tell him.

  “Safer in France,” he muttered.

  He did know. Merciful God—merciless God, had the fiends made Matthieu watch while they…

  “Forgive me, m’amour.”

  “Of course I do; but—”

  “Find Delphine,” he whispered fiercely, “and our grandson.”

  Did he mean the child yet to be born?

  “Please.” He was shivering in the heat.

  “I will; after—”

  “His eyes—remarkable.”

  Whose eyes? But she stumbled then beneath Matthieu’s weight; he felt heavier suddenly. She planted her feet, struggled, stood with him, admitted: “Matthieu, I don’t understand.” She held her breath, waited for him to reply. He must be gathering strength. “Matthieu?”

  Nothing.

  “I’ll go to Delphine, but what did you mean, about…”

  He was so still.

  Gingerly Marguerite slid her fingertips over his lips, felt for breath. She felt nothing, but surely it was only weak, surely he’d only passed out again. She was trembling too much to tell. She closed her eyes and kissed him, clung to him.

  Only their daughter remained. Almost Matthieu’s last words: “Find Delphine.”

  “I love you,” she whispered into his ear. She let go and turned without looking back. She only stooped to retrieve the pistol.