The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Come!” she said, jumping up from her stone. “We must go down quickly.”

  It seemed unlikely that Etienne would have recognized the horseman, but he ran down the path ahead of her in a state of high excitement, his velocity attracting other small children into his wake. Claudine went more slowly, careful of the grade. As she passed the house, Cléo came out onto the long porch, shading her eyes to look into the west, and Marie-Noelle joined her, wiping her hands on her apron.

  Claudine stopped at the edge of the compound, looking down the long allée to the point where Arnaud had recently hung a wooden gate to the stone posts from which the original ironwork had been torn. She watched; for a time there was no movement. Nearby a green shoot had sprung four feet high from the trunk of a severed palm, and a blue butterfly hovered over its new fronds. Etienne and the playmates he’d gathered went hurtling down the allée, scattering a couple of goats that had wandered there. The children braked to a sudden halt at the skirl of a lambi shell. Immediately the wooden gates swung inward. Flanked by the pennants of his escort, Toussaint Louverture rode toward her at a brisk trot, astride his great white charger, Bel Argent.

  Claudine drew herself a little straighter and crossed her hands below her waistline. She was conscious of how she must appear, fixed in the long perspective of the green allée. There was a hollow under her heels where once had been a gallows post. She took a step forward onto surer ground, and recomposed herself for the reception.

  Spooked by the advancing horsemen, the children turned tail and came running back toward her. Etienne and Marie-Noelle’s oldest boy, Dieufait, took hold of her skirts on either side and peeped out from behind her. Toussaint had slowed his horse to a walk several yards short of her, so as not to coat her with his dust. He slipped down from the saddle and walked toward her, leading Bel Argent by the reins. As always, she was a little surprised to see that he was no taller than she was herself once he had dismounted. Shaking the children free of her skirt, she curtsied to his bow.

  “You are welcome, General,” she said, “to Habitation Arnaud.”

  “Merci.” Toussaint took her hand in his oddly pressureless grip and bowed his head over it. Claudine felt a tingle that sprang upward from the arches of her feet—when she’d thought herself long immune to such a blush. There was a pack of rumors lately, that Toussaint received the amours of many white women of the highest standing, attracted by the thrill of his power if they were not simply angling for gain. He did not kiss her hand, however, but only breathed upon her knuckles, and now he raised his eyes to meet her own. His hat was in his other hand, his head bound up in a yellow madras cloth. The gaze was assaying, somehow. Toussaint broke it with a click of his tongue, as if he’d seen what he’d been looking for.

  “You’ll stay the night,” Claudine said. “I trust—I hope.”

  “Oh no, Madame,” Toussaint told her, and covered his mouth with his long fingers, as if it pained him to disappoint her. “Your pardon, but we are pressed—we stop for water only, for our horses and ourselves.”

  Behind him, Guiaou and Riau had ridden up, Guiaou still brandishing the rosy conch shell he’d used to trumpet their arrival. Claudine pressed her hand to the flat bone between her breasts.

  “But—tomorrow we will celebrate the Mass.”

  “Is it so?” said Toussaint, smiling slightly, with the same automatic movement to cover his mouth. “Well then. Of course.”

  Claudine fluttered at the little boys who still stood round-eyed at her back. “Did you not hear?” she hissed at them. “Go find something for these men to drink—and take their horses to water.”

  Michel Arnaud received the news of Toussaint’s arrival with mixed emotions. The word that horsemen were on the way came to him shouted from man to man across the cane fields, and by the time he stepped to the door of the mill he had the comical view of tiny Dieufait leading the huge white warhorse toward the water trough. Toussaint was here, Arnaud thought, in part to reassure himself—to touch the proofs that his government had restored conditions wherein a planter might refine white sugar. For sugar was money, and money was guns . . . Arnaud chopped off that sequence of ideas. Also of course there was the issue of inspection, and enforcement of the new and strict labor code for the free blacks. Arnaud had benefited from these rules, although his workers found them very harsh. But at any rate it was better to be inspected by Toussaint than Dessalines. The whip had long since been abandoned, but if Dessalines got hold of a laggard or a truant, he might order the culprit flogged with a bundle of thorny vines, which tore the skin and laid the flesh open to infection, so that the man might afterward die. It was true that the others would work that much harder, for a few days at least after Dessalines had passed. Toussaint had a different style—if he had not been terribly provoked, he punished only with a glare, whereupon the suspect would apply himself to his cane knife or hoe with tripled diligence, pursued by his own imagination of what might follow if he did not.

  But somehow Arnaud was not eager for this meeting. Let Claudine play hostess if she would; he knew she’d press Toussaint and his men to dine with them that night. If he accepted, they’d be in for a display of his famous piety on the morrow morn . . . He pulled down the brim of the wide straw hat he wore against the sun, and walked behind the mill down the crooked path which led through the bush to his distillery. Arnaud did not drink strong spirits as carelessly as he once had, but it seemed to him now advisable to test the quality of the morning run.

  There, about twenty minutes later, Toussaint came down with his companions: Captain Riau of the Second Demibrigade and Guiaou, a cavalryman from Toussaint’s honor guard. At once Arnaud, bowing and smiling, proffered a sample of his first-run rum, but the Governor-General refused it, though he saw it dripped directly from the coil. Riau and Guiaou accepted their measure, and drank with evident enthusiasm.

  “What news have you from the Collège de la Marche?” Toussaint inquired.

  “I beg your pardon?” Arnaud stuttered.

  Toussaint did not bother to repeat the question. Arnaud’s brain ratcheted backward. A couple of Cléo’s sons, whom he had fathered, had indeed been recently shipped off to that same school in France where Toussaint’s brats were stabled. They were actually Arnaud’s only sons so far as he knew, as Claudine was barren, but he had never meant to acknowledge them. He had sold all Cléo’s children off the plantation when they were quite small, but a couple of them had reappeared, a little after Cléo did. Faced with Cléo’s importuning, Arnaud had seen the wisdom of sending those boys overseas to school—which got them off the property at least. In his present situation he was not able to pay the whole of their expenses, but it seemed that Cléo had a brother who’d prospered quite wonderfully under the new regime . . .

  How the devil had Toussaint known about it? He made it his business to know many unlikely things. At least he had not put the question in Claudine’s presence; there was that to be grateful for.

  “No, no, we have heard nothing yet,” he said, with rather a sickly smile. “The boys are remiss!—they do not write their mother.”

  There the subject rested. The four of them set out on the obligatory tour: cane fields, provision grounds, the cane mill and refinery . . . At the end, Toussaint intruded into Arnaud’s books, pursing his lips or raising his eyebrows over the figures of his exports and his income.

  Claudine, with the aid of Marie-Noelle and Cléo, had organized a midday meal featuring grilled freshwater fish, with a sauce of hot peppers, tomato, and onion. Toussaint took none of this, but only a piece of bread, a glass of water, and an uncut mango. Arnaud knew or at least suspected that his well-known abstemiousness was rooted in a fear of poison. But Riau and Guiaou ate heartily, and Riau, the more articulate of the pair, was ready enough with his compliments. Then, finally, at the peak of the afternoon’s heat, it was time for the siesta.

  The mattress was soggy under her back. Claudine could feel sweat pooling before the padding could absorb it. She
could not sleep, could hardly rest, tired as she felt from the night before. The heat was still more smothering than it had been this morning. Toussaint’s arrival partly explained her mood, she thought; it was the thing she had felt coming, but it was not yet complete, and so her restlessness was not assuaged. Through the slats of the jalousies she could hear Cléo’s murmuring voice as she gossiped with one of Toussaint’s men on the porch.

  At her side, Arnaud released a snore. Claudine felt a flash of resentment, that he could rest when she could not. But he’d taken a strong measure of rum with his lunch, which was no longer his usual practice. When he lay down, Arnaud had taken her left hand in his and dozed off caressing, with the ball of his thumb, the wrinkled stump of the finger where she’d once worn her wedding ring. He did this often, almost always, but there was nothing erotic in it, and hardly any tenderness; it was more like the superstitious fondling of a fetish. Now she carefully disengaged her hand, slid quietly to the edge of the bed, and stood.

  Cléo sat on the edge of a stool, in a pose which showed the graceful line of her back as she bent her attention on Captain Riau, who stood below the porch railing, looking up at her. “Where are you going with Papa Toussaint?” she asked him. Claudine heard a flirtatious lilt in her voice.

  “To Santo Domingo,” Riau said. “Across the border, at Ouanaminthe—” It seemed as if he would have continued, but he saw Claudine in the doorway and stopped.

  “Bonsoir, Madame,” he said, lowering his head. “Good evening.” His military coat was very correct, despite the suffocating heat—brass buttons all done up in a row. As soon as he’d spoken, he turned away and began striding down the path toward the lower ground. There was room in the grand’case only for Toussaint himself, so Marie-Noelle had found pallets for his men in the compound below.

  Cléo turned toward Claudine, her face a mask. That same face with its long oval shape and its smooth olive tone, which Claudine had once hated so desperately. The years between had left some lighter lines around Cléo’s eyes and at the corners of her mouth, but she was still supple, still attractive, though Arnaud no longer went to her bed. In her frustration, Claudine stretched out her hands to her.

  “What was that shout in my sleep last night?” she said.

  Cléo’s face became a degree more closed.

  “M pa konnen,” she said. I don’t know.

  Claudine felt a stronger pulse of the old jealous rage. The one face before her became all the faces closed against her, yellow or black, withholding the secrets so vital to her life. In those old days she could not visit her anger directly upon Cléo (Arnaud had protected the housekeeper from that), so she had worked it out on others in her vicinity. She took a step forward with her hands still outstretched.

  “Di mwen,” she said. Tell me.

  Cléo’s expression broke into an awful sadness.

  “Fok w blié sa,” she said, but tenderly. You must forget it. She took Claudine’s two hands in hers and pressed them. Claudine felt her anger fade, her frustration melt into a simpler pain, more pure. It was too hot for an embrace, but she lowered her hot forehead to touch Cléo’s cooler one, then let the colored woman go and walked down the steps.

  In the compound below, Claudine drifted toward her schoolhouse, no more than a frame of sticks roofed over with palm leaves, which the children would replace as needed. There were some solidly made peg benches, and a rough lectern Arnaud had ordered built as a gift to her. This afternoon, four of the benches had been shoved together to make room for two mats on the dirt floor. Guiaou lay on one of these, breathing heavily in sleep, and Riau on the other, his uniform coat neatly folded on the bench beside him. His eyes were lidded but Claudine did not think he was really asleep; she thought he was aware of her presence, though he did not show it. She could see her own spare reflection warped in the curve of the silver helmet he’d set underneath the bench.

  Pursued by Etienne, Dieufait ran by outside, rolling a wooden hoop with a stick. The two children disappeared among the clay-walled cases. Grazing her fingertips over the lectern, Claudine left the shade of the school roof and walked toward the chapel. En route she passed the little case inhabited by Moustique and Marie-Noelle. The cloth that closed the doorway was gathered with a string, and glancing past its edges, Claudine saw Moustique’s ivory feet hanging off the edge of the mat where he lay. Marie-Noelle was on her side, turned toward him, and between them their new baby lay curled and quietly sleeping.

  Envy pricked at Claudine again as she went into the chapel. There was no door, properly speaking, but close-hung bead strings in place of one whole wall, which could be pulled back to open a view of the altar to the compound outside. The interior space was very small, built on the same plan as a dog shed that had once stood there. The walls were whitewashed, and eight pegged benches like those in the school were arranged in a double row. Claudine sat down on the farthest bench from the altar—no more than an ordinary wooden table. Above it hung a crucifix carved in mahogany from the fevered imagination of one of the Africans of the plantation—or maybe it was drawn from life, for certainly there had been horrors enough, in the last ten years of war, to inspire such a grotesquerie as he had made.

  Claudine sat still, her back rigorously straight, hands folded in her lap. The bead curtain hung motionless behind her, and on the roof the heat bore down. She could not pray or think or breathe. That drumbeat she almost thought she heard was only the pulse in the back of her neck, a headache rising; it would not move the spirit through her.

  After a long time, the bead curtains rustled and Toussaint Louverture walked into the chapel. Claudine registered his presence without quite turning her head. Reciprocally, Toussaint displayed no consciousness of her. He walked slowly between the two rows of benches, stopped before the altar, and stood looking up at Christ’s carved wounds. After some time he crossed himself and sat down on the first bench, to the left of the cross. Reaching both hands to the back of his head, he undid the knot of his yellow madras, which he spent some time folding into a small triangular packet. Claudine had not seen him completely uncovered before. The dome of his head was high and long, the black skin gleaming on the crown. He gave his folded headcloth a couple of firm pats with his right palm, as if he meant to secure it to the bench, then joined his hands and bowed his head to pray.

  As time passed the light seemed to grow dimmer. Claudine did not know if the clouds were thickening outside or if it were only an effect of her own fatigue. She watched Toussaint, whose right hand slowly clicked through the beads of a curiously carved wooden rosary. A movement of the damp air stirred the strings of the curtain behind her, and she felt a current lifting toward the roof, where the eaves had been left open for ventilation.

  Finally Toussaint had concluded his prayer. He stood up, gathering his folded headcloth in the hand that held the rosary. When he turned toward Claudine, he enacted a startle of surprise.

  “O,” he said. “Madame Arnaud.”

  “Monsieur le général.” She made a slight movement as if she would rise. A gesture of Toussaint’s palm restored her to her seat. She watched him walking slowly toward her. His head was outsized for the wiry, jockey’s body—the great orb of his skull counterbalanced by the long, jutting lower jaw. The body, whose meagerness was accentuated by the tight riding breeches he wore, carried its burden of head with a concentrated grace that rid Toussaint’s whole aspect of any comical quality. He took a seat across the dirt-floored aisle from her, swinging a leg across the bench to straddle it like a saddle.

  “It is good to see our Catholic religion so well observed here,” he said, “when so often it is neglected elsewhere, among the plantations.”

  Claudine inclined her head without speaking.

  “I have catechised some of the children walking the grounds this afternoon,” he told her. “I find them to be well instructed. The boy Dieufait, for example, recites the entire Apostolic Creed with perfect confidence.”

  “As well might be expected of
the son of a priest.” Claudine attempted an ambiguous smile, in case Toussaint were moved to find irony in what she had said.

  “They say that you give them other instruction too,” Toussaint said. “That you teach them their letters as well as their catechism. This afternoon I passed by your school—of which one hears talk as far away as Le Cap, if not farther.”

  “Is it so?”

  “Why, yes,” Toussaint said. “You are notorious.”

  Claudine felt a bump of her heart. Behind her the strings of the curtain shivered; outside a wind was rising. She was notorious for a great deal more than her little school, and Toussaint must know something of that, though she wasn’t sure how much.

  “You rather alarm me,” she said.

  “There is no need, Madame,” Toussaint said. “Of course not every comment is favorable, as there are always some who believe that the children of Guinée must be held in the ignorance of oxen and mules.”

  Claudine lowered her head above her lap. One of her feet had risen to the ball, and the whole leg was shaking; she couldn’t seem to make it stop.

  “Yes,” Toussaint said. “My parrain, Jean-Baptiste, taught me my letters when I was a child on the lands of the Comte de Noé.”

  Claudine raised her head to look at him. He was telling her the true version of the story, she thought, which was unusual. Of late he had been circulating a tale that he had learned to read and write just before the first rebellion, when he was already past his fiftieth year.

  “If not for that,” Toussaint said, “I should have remained in slavery.”

  “And many others also,” Claudine said.

  “It is so.” Toussaint squeezed the bench with his thighs, as if it really were a horse he meant to urge on. “But your husband, Madame. What view does he take of your teaching?”

  “He indulges it.” Claudine lowered her head.

  “Does he not find himself well placed today, Monsieur Arnaud?” Toussaint seemed to be asking the question of a larger audience than was actually present; his voice had become a little louder. “With the restoration of his goods, the men back working in the fields. Why, a field hand may learn to read a book and be no less faithful to his hoe. Does he not find it to be true?”