The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Ambush. A boulder came tumbling through the brush and Guizot dodged it, then craned his neck to see it hurl into the empty air of the gorge. A gang of blacks was firing at them from ledges on the other side, but they were out of effective range; the real danger came from musketeers in the jungle just above the winding trail along which Rochambeau’s column was stretched. Sergeant Aloyse quivered and pointed at Guizot’s side, impatient for instruction.

  “Form a line!” Guizot shouted. He drew his pistol, though he could see no target. “Forward!” Shoulder to shoulder with Aloyse he began scrambling up the slope from the trail. Nothing for it but to sweep the ambushers out of the bush, though there would be some cost. Somewhere below he seemed to hear the whinnying of a wounded horse. A ball whined by his ear, and then he saw one black in ragged trousers, cartridge box across his shoulders. He fired his pistol, did not know if he had hit or missed. A flight of arrows came out of the leaves like a covey of startled quail.

  Arrows! Guizot gaped at them. “Fire!” he said. His line let off a reasonably concerted volley. “Bayonets!” Was that his voice or the sergeant’s? Aloyse was slipsliding just at his side, bayonet at the ready. Guizot came face to face with a young black woman in a mud-streaked dress, with a great lopsided head of wiry, matted, leaf-strewn hair. As he read her face from the shadows of the leaves, she released her bowstring and retreated. A thump on his upper left arm, like a punch. It took him a moment to realize the arrow had struck him. He could not feel it, but it had pierced his sleeve.

  “Avancez!” he cried, dropping his discharged pistol into the holster, drawing out his sword in its place. The woman who’d shot him had disappeared among the broad shiny leaves, but he still seemed to feel the brown heat of her eyes. His men were coming along eagerly enough, but no enemy stood to receive them. Guizot pushed up the slope, his boots slithering over mats of half-rotted leaf and loose soil, flourishing his sword with his right hand, clutching at saplings with his left. The left arm seemed to operate normally; there was no pain. A boulder came hurtling down on them through the brush and he sidestepped and turned to watch it fly out over the gorge. Puffs of smoke were rising from the musket fire along Rochambeau’s line, which reached out of sight along the hairpins of the trail, and Guizot got a glimpse of the general himself, a stubby figure under his black shako, picking his way forward and exhorting the men as he passed.

  “Avancez,” Guizot ordered again. He broke out of the trees onto a shallow terrace of red earth: more broken cornstalks and the branches of uprooted manioc, stripped of its tubers. On the other side of the provision ground, half a dozen men and the woman with the bow were hurrying away, toward a black cliff wall that towered above. There they must certainly be brought to bay. Guizot put on speed, stumbling over the soggy ground. He had outdistanced all his men, except Sergeant Aloyse, never mind the arrow wagging in his arm. Where he’d imagined the ambushers must turn and make a stand, they were going up the cliff wall with scarcely a break in their pace, springing nimbly from foothold to foothold, stone to stone. All were barefoot, though one wore a complete uniform of the Fifth Colonial. In his effort to follow, Guizot had to scramble on hands and knees, sword blade banging over the rocks. The ascent was nearly vertical, and he was winded now, pouring sweat through his wool clothing. He could feel an apoplectic heat in his face. The wagging arrow shaft snagged on a bush and the shock of pain brought him up short.

  Sergeant Aloyse braced a hand between his shoulder blades to support him from below. Guizot could hear a whistle in his breathing. The ambushers were going up the cliff wall as easily as spiders, still walking upright over angles that Guizot could not have managed by worming along on his belly. He watched the swing of the woman’s mud-clotted skirt as she climbed.

  The ambushers were pulling themselves over a horseshoe rim on the cliff top a hundred feet above, into a burst of yellow sunlight among ancient, vine-tangled trees. Guizot stuck his sword into a crack between two rocks and began to recharge his pistol. He took a slow aim, bracing right hand over left, at the man who wore the uniform. Then something oblong blocked the light: a chunk of log dropped toward them. Guizot flinched to avoid it, pressing himself into the stone; the log fell past and splintered on boulders below. He straightened and raised his pistol again. The woman had laid aside her bow to lift a naked infant to her shoulder. Over the child’s bare back, she looked down on Guizot. He had a sense of calm appraisal, though she was much too far away for him to see her face. Behind her, one of the men put a conch shell to his lips and sounded it; there was that skirling sound from the night before. Guizot held his fire. Another of the ambushers took hold of the woman’s hand and drew her away from the cliff rim, out of sight.

  A spill of clear water ran down the black rock. All firing had stopped and in the damp silence Guizot heard the trickle of the spring. A throbbing of drums began, above the cliff wall, answered by others on the far side of the gorge. Vines hung down from the lip of the cliff, their small round leaves dotting the black rock with leaves. A few dozen white butterflies floated up the cliff wall from below, spiraling like smoke in a chimney.

  Guizot holstered his pistol and caught hold of his sword hilt, loosening the blade from between the rocks. The sergeant’s hand came away from his back, and he turned, awkwardly, making ready to descend. His men were beginning to gather on the terraces below, looking up at him and Aloyse curiously. His arm began to throb in time with the drums, and he saw that the sergeant’s eyes were narrowed on the spot where the arrow shaft had pierced his woolen sleeve, the bloodstain widening with his pulse.

  Sergeant Aloyse was determined to keep his captain safe from the regimental sawbones. He called on a friend from another company, who’d survived Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign. The Egyptian veteran cut the arrow shaft below its speckled feathers and pushed the point through, while Guizot closed his teeth on a leather strap to keep from screaming. He gave the captain the stone point for a souvenir, then cauterized the wound with a metal ramrod heated red-hot in the fire. In the course of that operation Guizot bit clean through his leather, but he was convinced of the necessity, since Sergeant Aloyse had warned him how fast a wound might fester in this heat.

  Their losses in the ambush had been light; it was more a nuisance than anything else. It slowed them down. For the next several days it was the same. Sans-Souci harassed them with snipers, surrounded their line of march with skirmishers. None of the enemy would stand to face an organized assault, so they could easily be driven off from any point, but they would as soon return. It wore upon the nerves of the French soldiers, who grew weary of the endless climbs that never seemed to achieve a peak, and irritable with their short rations. Some began to sicken from the combination of suffocating, sweat-soaked days with damply chilly nights. Others showed signs of dysentery, probably from gnawing at the hard green fruit which was all that had been left on any tree. Guizot’s best comfort was that his wound showed no sign of corruption. Also, he seemed to have won his sergeant’s warm respect. Aloyse was solicitous of him now, boiling water every night and fussing over his bandage.

  They were meant to pacify the whole region of Grande Rivière before they moved on, but this will-of-the-wisp resistance seemed impossible to suppress. If it disappeared before their march, it sprang up again behind them. Rochambeau, of a choleric temper at the best of times, lost all patience in a week of this futile maneuvering. Concluding to leave Grande Rivière to its elusive defenders, he marched his men onto the Central Plateau, where with small difficulty they occupied the town of Saint Raphael.

  Here, finally, they found stores: dried beef aplenty and more on the hoof, with barrels of flour and dried beans, yams and cassava, and all sort of fruit. There was also a good supply of tafia, the local rum produced by a distillery on the southern outskirts of the town. Guizot was dispatched by Rochambeau to ensure that this enterprise would continue its operations. Sergeant Aloyse could not have been better pleased with this assignment, and he had soon arranged for Gui
zot’s company to better protect the distillery by camping within and around it, with officers taking shelter from its roof. There was a sour smell to contend with, true, but this placement gave them control of distribution to the rest of Rochambeau’s troops, not to mention the easy access for themselves— though Aloyse and his brother sergeants took care that the men did not drink so much as to become disorderly.

  Morale much restored, Rochambeau’s troops set out the next day and by a speedily executed encirclement captured a fort at Mare à la Roche, taking nearly four hundred prisoners and half a dozen cannon. Later that day they reached Saint Michel de l’Attalaye and occupied the town with no opposition. Established at Saint Michel, Rochambeau received a dispatch that General Hardy, in the presence of Captain-General Leclerc himself, had won a hard fight at Morne à Boispins. Though Leclerc declared that this was the most formidable position he had encountered since he had first begun to make war, the French grenadiers finally carried the day, and so flushed Christophe’s troops out of the town of Marmelade. Conditions thus looked most auspicious for the closing of the pincers on Gonaives.

  That afternoon, Rochambeau sent Guizot with his troops to reconnoiter in the direction of the passes which opened from the Central Plateau toward the coast. They marched across great rolling grasslands, on the alert but meeting almost no one. After the mountains of Grande Rivière, the going seemed almost ridiculously easy, and the terrain was so open that the risk of ambush was nil. Now and then an oxcart crossed their way, and once Guizot saw a sizable movement on the southwest horizon, but when he inspected it with a spyglass it seemed to be a crowd of civilian refugees who’d fled the towns Rochambeau had occupied.

  Comparing his map to what he could see, Guizot thought he was heading for the range of Cahos mountains, but these had hardly seemed to grow closer after an hour’s march or more. Gray clouds billowed down all over the sky, though there was little wind. It was unusual for wind to begin so in this country, at such an early hour, and in this suffocating calm. Sergeant Aloyse stretched out a hand—a plump drop splattered in his palm. Guizot was ready to order their return to camp when one of his grenadiers called out and pointed down the road ahead. Raising the spyglass to his eye, Guizot discerned a short pack train, coming out of a cleft of the mountains that bounded the plateau.

  “Forward,” he said, feeling some degree of apprehension, though the other party appeared to be small. Sergeant Aloyse pulled his hat brim down to his eyebrows and stepped out. The pack train seemed to be coming up to them rather quickly; in fifteen minutes they had joined.

  Guizot halted at twenty paces’ distance and surveyed the other group, two blacks riding admirable saddle horses and leading a pair of pack mules, and one piratical-looking white man, also well mounted, with an immensely broad-brimmed hat and two colossal dragoon pistols strapped either side of his saddle.

  “Where are you bound?” Guizot said. “Who are you?”

  “Xavier Tocquet.” The white man took off his hat and passed a palm across his forehead. Beneath the hat he wore a black-and-white patterned kerchief, knotted at the back above the leather thong securing his long hair. Something about this headgear nagged at a corner of Guizot’s attention. The white man had a lean face, a long nose, and hard eyes.

  “We are trading, up from the coast,” he said. “Yourselves?”

  “What trade?” Guizot deepened his voice. Certainly the man had the look of a smuggler. He glanced toward the mules, whose packs were well wrapped up in canvas.

  Tocquet shrugged. “Cloth. Some spices and cinchona. We’re trading for tobacco, if you must know.” He held out his hat to catch the rain, which was still only lightly pattering. “I’m also a landowner in these parts,” he said. “And as the weather is worsening, I think we’d prefer to be on our way.”

  With a press of his knees he urged his horse forward, as if he expected the soldiers to part before him. Guizot held up his hand.

  “My commander will want to speak to you,” he said.

  “Your commander?”

  “General Donatien Rochambeau.”

  “And what is the errand of your General Rochambeau?”

  Guizot drew himself more tautly erect. “To subdue and capture the rebel Toussaint Louverture,” he said. The phrase rag-head Negro appeared in his head; it was this that Tocquet’s headscarf had recalled to him.

  “So be it, then.” Tocquet shrugged again. “I hope that you are camped nearby, as we would all do well to get out of the rain.”

  Xavier Tocquet had never seen himself as one to be enthralled by sentiment. Nevertheless he had lingered for twenty minutes or longer outside the makeshift gates of Habitation Thibodet. Ten years before, when Elise had finally burst out to join him, those gates had been a splendor of scrolled and gilded iron. How his heart had leapt up then . . . he had not really believed she would come, had already, somewhere in his head, left her behind.

  Today she was not coming, not at all. Tocquet sat his horse; the animal shifted and crabbed under him, eager to move. Bazau had dismounted and was feeding his own horse a handful of grain. Gros-Jean had crossed the cactus fence of a yard across the road and stood flirting with a blue-kerchiefed young woman in the curtained doorway of her case. These two gave no sign of impatience, but there was no reason to stay.

  “N’alé,” Tocquet said. We’re going. Gros-Jean and Bazau were almost instantly astride. They filed to the east, in the warm dappling of yellow sunlight that leaked through manguiers planted either side of the road. Tocquet expected the weight of his mood to lift, as it always did once he’d left any place—once he was well on his way, the weight always rose from him. But today it did not, though the weather was fair and the heat diminished to a tolerable level as they climbed higher in the mountains.

  That he should be so fastened to a woman! When Elise had come to him a decade previously, tousled and uncertain, with Sophie in her arms, Tocquet had known that he must be responsible for her afterward, since he had lured her wholly out of the respectability of her marriage. So he had married her himself, once Thibodet was dead. And then? Well, he might have a woman or so, elsewhere, a black woman or a mulattress. There might be a couple of outside children—but Tocquet never rubbed Elise’s nose in that. Any such liaisons were kept far off from Thibodet, or from their domicile in Le Cap, for that matter. It was also possible that he’d had some love passage during his American voyage, as Elise seemed most recently to suspect, but that would be merely a passing fancy, nothing to which he meant to return.

  And what of her? Had she not been as chimerical with him as he had ever been with her? If she did not care for the dull strictures of the Spanish society east of the border, she could herself be quite a stickler for propriety. The subject of their worst quarrel, and a bitter and enduring one it had been, was her brother’s attachment to Nanon. And her stubbornness in digging herself in at Thibodet now, under these circumstances, was truly maddening.

  But there she would remain, unmoved. Tocquet understood, as they climbed toward the pass to the plateau, that he’d never really believed today’s tactic would work. Better perhaps that he should have taken Sophie with him. He did not like to leave the girl in the danger he foresaw—nor Mireille, but Mireille was too small to engage him personally. If he had taken Sophie, might Elise have followed after all? But she might be too stubborn even for that—there was no overestimating it. And furthermore, he had waited too long, so that he was no longer certain if it was safer to go or remain.

  The bright sky darkened as they came up through the pass. Tocquet felt all the more hemmed in by gloom. He was used to tricky times—all times were tricky in this country—but he’d never felt such a dreary uncertainty as now. He spotted the French column before he was seen, and knew it must belong to either Hardy or Rochambeau—Tocquet was assiduous as Toussaint in gathering intelligence, and used several of the same sources. He’d meant to go to the hatte he kept on the plateau near Terre Cassée, but though he might have avoided the column s
till, he decided not to try it. On this perverse day, there was a sort of sour satisfaction in watching himself—Xavier Tocquet—run his head into a snare. Permitting himself to be made prisoner, or the next thing to it, by a callow French captain with his arm in a sling.

  By the time his military escort brought him into Saint Michel, the rain was coming down in rivers. The road had become a slough of mud; the men slogged through it, ankle deep. If it kept raining through the night, Tocquet considered, the French advance would be very thoroughly bogged down. So many men would make a morass of whatever ground they moved on, in this wet. He estimated the numbers as they rode through the milling troops toward the village square—close to two thousand, by his best guess.

  Rochambeau had established a headquarters in what passed for the hôtel de ville—a ramshackle wooden building closing off the north side of the Saint Michel town square. Guizot brought Tocquet to the foot of a long table where the French general sat, studying maps in the gray rain-washed light, surrounded by several of his staff and a black freedman Tocquet knew slightly, whose name was Noël Lory. After a moment, Rochambeau acknowledged his captain.

  “What news?” he said, creaking back in his chair. “Have you explored the passes?”

  “We were prevented from going so far by the rain, mon général, ” said Guizot, “but we have met this trader, whose information may be helpful—he has just come up this afternoon from Ennery.”

  “A trader.” The small dark beads of Rochambeau’s eyes fixed on Tocquet. “You are?”