“Thieves! Murderers! Stop!”
Fanfan the pig was squealing even more desperately than her master, for two men with coutelas had hemmed her into a fence corner. Massicot rushed up and threw himself on the back of one. Half a dozen others appeared and swarmed around them. The struggling men toppled, rolled on the ground. The doctor slipped a hand into his straw macoute and covered his pistol grip, but there was no clear shot, and in the shadow of the fence, no one had yet noticed him; he could watch everything that was happening as one observes a dream. Massicot’s greasy gray hair came loose from its queue—a big square hand had pulled it loose. “Fanf—” he started, and trailed off in a gurgle. The black hand raised his severed head and jammed it down on a pointed fence paling.
The roof of the house burst into flames and several of the surgeons came rushing out the back, closely pursued by a dozen more of Dessalines’s soldiers. Most scattered in the alley, but one jumped up into the limbs of Massicot’s mango tree. The doctor crouched in the shadow of the fence, hiding his face from the burst of firelight. Bienvenu hovered over him. Two black soldiers circled the manguier, jabbing at the surgeon’s calves with their coutelas points.
“Shoot him,” said one, and the other replied, “Don’t waste the powder.” A third soldier made a leap and caught the surgeon around the shins and dragged him down, screaming like a girl. One of the others opened his belly with a coutelas; the surgeon went on screaming and tossing his head as the black men stirred his guts out onto the ground. Fanfan’s squeals were silenced now. A crew of men huffed as they lifted her to hang from her back trotters from a branch of the same mango tree. Blood drooled from a wide fatty gash in her throat. Someone took a coutelas and disemboweled her, rather more fastidiously than they had the surgeon. Impaled on the fence pole, Massicot’s head gaped upon the scene, its slack jaws revealing many blackened, rotting teeth.
Bienvenu snatched at the doctor’s arm; they ran across the alley and dove into a low hut, rolling in dust and dirty straw and feathers. The doctor’s hand came up sticky with a broken egg. He shook it loose and wiped it on the straw and found that he was grasping someone’s forearm— Descourtilz, half hidden under straw.
“Has Massicot lost his pig at last?” said Descourtilz, but a black man on the other side hushed him at once, as Bienvenu covered the doctor’s mouth with his hand and camouflaged his head with a handful of dung-smelling straw. For some time they lay silent there, the doctor inhaling Descourtilz’s sour breath, for they were nose to nose. The flames of the burning house came flickering through the lattice of the chicken coop. The doctor could not lose the image of Massicot’s head, the dead stare on the carcass of his Fanfan, expression dulling as the eyeballs dried in the heat of the blaze. The dream-distance had been torn away, so that the doctor had to struggle not to vomit in the straw. Two silhouettes blocked the firelight on the lattice, then with a chuckle someone threw in a torch. Straw and the roof were alight at once. The doctor lunged and broke the lattice with his shoulder and came up running, scattering smoldering straw. Descourtilz must have made off in the other direction; he seemed to have drawn off pursuit.
Flanked by Bienvenu, the doctor ran till he was winded, then slumped panting against the hot stone wall of a burning house, pressing a hand against the stitch in his side. Dessalines’s men had broken into the rum stores and were drunk and had lost all discipline—the prohibition against wasting powder forgotten, they fired their overcharged guns in the air or into cows and chickens or anything that stirred. A gang rounded the corner and bore down on the doctor and Bienvenu.
“Aba blan!” the lead man shouted. Down with the whites! He swung his blade at the doctor’s neck. The doctor twisted away as he ducked— not far enough, but the blade was stopped by the bone at the top of his skull. The blow set off a chain of colored lights across his brain, and both ears rang amazingly. He was down on his knees and elbows, blood pouring into his right eye.
“Ann koupé têt tout blan yo!” Let’s cut off the head of all the whites! The coutelas swung down, and stopped with a clang. Bienvenu’s blade had parried it.
“Li pa blan,” said Bienvenu, in a deep and terrifying tone the doctor had never before heard. He’s not white.
“Pa blan?” the leader hesitated.
“Li gegne peau clair anpil anpil,” said another of the group. He has very, very light skin . . .
“Gegne peau clair men li pa blan pou sa!” Bienvenu insisted. He spun his coutelas to clear the leader’s blade. The leader took a step back from the doctor. Everyone was looking curiously at Bienvenu, and one of them reached out to touch his sling.
“Where were you wounded?”
“Ravine à Couleuvre.” Bienvenu drew himself up tall. “I fought the blancs there with Papa Toussaint, and this one was there with us.” He gestured at the doctor. “This is the one who cares for my hurt, and for many others who were hurt there.”
“Oh, oh.” A murmur went round. Someone handed Bienvenu a bottle of rum. He covered the broken neck with a rag of his shirttail as he drank.
The doctor stood up wincingly and probed the side of his head. The coutelas must have been quite dull. Though the cut bled freely, it was shallow, stopped by the bone. No fracture, in his estimation. Bienvenu passed him the bottle and he took a long pull, not minding that the sharp edge cut his lip.
“Santé, tout moun,” he said. Your health, everybody. He took another gulp of rum and his own blood.
“Li pa blan?” some doubter asked again.
“Fé li chanté!” said another man. Make him sing! He capered in a loose ellipse, hopping on one leg and clapping as he chanted.
Nanon prale chaché dlo . . .
crich li casé . . .
Nanon’s going to look for water
but her jar is broken . . .
With a last clap and a giggle he broke off.
“Li pa blan,” Bienvenu said authoritatively. “He doesn’t sing either. Now, let us pass.”
“Ou mêt alé.” The leader stepped aside and nodded. You may go.
Halfway up the slope to the fort, they were overtaken by several horsemen. The doctor had no more strength to run; he turned around to face his doom. But the patrol was led by Placide Louverture.
“Doctor Hébert!” Placide blurted. “You should not have left the fort. It is not safe for you tonight.”
“No.” The doctor’s exhale was almost a sob. He looked down at the blazing roofs of the town. It was not so spectacular as the fire at Le Cap, because Petite Rivière was so much smaller. However, a few of the screening trees had caught fire from the roofs. From the darkness of a shallow gulch to the north of town came frequent intermittent screaming.
“No,” said the doctor. “It’s not safe.” He felt sure that if he began to laugh or cry he would never be able to stop, so he did neither. With one shaky hand clutching Placide’s stirrup, he made the rest of the climb to the fort.
Next morning he woke to an aching head and a pall of ill-smelling smoke rising from the charred foundations of Petite Rivière. On the hilltop, all was quiet. The sentinels in the fort went about their business in good cheer, quite as if there’d been no massacre the day before, and they let Bienvenu and the doctor through the gate without any questions.
Bienvenu assumed Fontelle’s place at the kettle; he insisted that the doctor clean and compress his own wound before he attended the others in the camp. When he’d completed the morning round, the doctor returned to the fort in time to see Descourtilz walking up the hill, a lancet held high in his right hand and a roll of bandages spooling from the crook of his left arm. These medical emblems gained him an unchallenged admission at the gate. He found the doctor by the wall above the river.
“Ugh,” he said as he came to a stop and looked over the walk in the direction of the fuming ruins. “So you too made it through, I see—we are the lucky pair. What a bloody business—have you got anything to eat?”
“Of course,” said the doctor and produced a couple of
small potatoes from the morning meal. Descourtilz laid down his bandages, stuck the lancet into his belt, and bit into the first potato savagely. “Forgive me,” he said, glancing sidelong at the doctor, as wind from the river riffled his black hair around his head. “I—”
The doctor waved away the apology. He’d awakened himself to the wolf-like hunger that a brush with death inspired. Unconsciously he fingered the stain on his bandaged head.
“What happened?” Descourtilz mumbled through potato.
“Someone wanted to chop off my head,” said the doctor. “The program of the evening, as you know.”
“Too well,” said Descourtilz. His unshaven neck pulsed as he swallowed.
“But you have certainly had your own adventures,” the doctor suggested.
Descourtilz wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked off over the river and the plain. The doctor noticed that his face and hands and forearms were dotted with drops of dried blood from a webwork of fine scratches.
“Oh,” he said. “I survive by miracles—I would scarcely credit them myself, if I heard them from another.”
“What of Pinchon?” the doctor said reluctantly.
“Dead,” said Descourtilz.
“Well,” said the doctor. “He always thought himself unlucky. I suppose that in the end he was.”
“You might say so,” Descourtilz said. “We were caught up together when all of us paroled to the town were locked up in the depots again. Père Vidaut came and winkled me out of that place, just before the killing began, and Pinchon too, for he stuck to me like a barnacle. We were made to appear before Dessalines, and he ordered that we must die with the rest. By that time they had already begun bayoneting all those who were left in the warehouse, I think. Then Madame Dessalines, who is a saint, spoke up for me, and said I might be useful as a doctor, and so she stayed his hand for a moment. And when Dessalines was distracted, she took us to her own chamber and let us hide under the bed. But then Dessalines came there too, with some of his officers—if one may call them that, the savages—to plot the massacre. He showed his whip scars, and reminded them all of the abuses of slavery, to stir their blood thirst. The whole time my leg hung out in the light, because Pinchon had got in under the bed first, and would not make me enough room, so finally someone saw it, and I was hauled out, and Pinchon too. They cut Pinchon to pieces there in the bedroom while I watched, but somehow, I can’t say why, Dessalines sent me away to his wife again.”
Descourtilz cleared his throat. “I had run enough risks in that house, I thought, so I ran to seek shelter at Massicot’s, but the old fool would keep opening the door to see that no one bothered his pig. Well, they set the house on fire in the end, all the same. By the grace of God that old Negro you found with me in the shed appeared—Pompey, I shall never forget his name, though I didn’t know him when he first approached me—in fact I thought he meant to kill me, but it seems I had cured him of something once, or so he believes. After that chicken house was burned, he got me away from the murderers and hid me in a hedge full of thorns—you see I have been scratched to ribbons—and so I passed the night.”
“And the priest?” the doctor said. He was thinking of Fontelle and Paulette and what might have become of them in Père Vidaut’s care.
“If he still lives, I don’t know,” Descourtilz said. “But he is a brave man, and determined—he kept coming to the prisons, though the guards would beat him, and he got many people out, with bribes or by pretending to have orders, as he did with me. I don’t know what became of him after that. I would be dead if not for him, I know. What barbarity it has all been.” He looked again at the cushion of smoke above the town, with its rank smell of charring flesh. “But I think the worst was when I was lying half under that bed, waiting for them to discover me, and the whole time Dessalines and his men were talking of nothing but death . . .”
The doctor looked where Descourtilz was looking. He fingered the folding spyglass that lay in his pocket, but after all there was nothing down by the town that he wanted to see more closely.
That afternoon Dessalines marched out of the town with a good number of the men Toussaint had left him. Descourtilz was sent away at the same time, to go with ambulances to the neighboring peak of Morne Calvaire, but no one gave any instruction to Doctor Hébert. Maybe Bienvenu had been telling the truth the night before and he had somehow lost his whiteness. With no mirror, there was nothing to remind him of his color, now that Descourtilz had gone. The soldiers in the fort were friendly toward him; indeed he seemed to move among smiles. No one seemed to remember last night’s bloodbath, though most of them had probably been a part of it.
The garrison left in the fort was light: a total of seven hundred men, about, under command of Lamartinière and Magny. The two cavalry squadrons were still somewhere outside the fort, though there was no sign of them, and Placide Louverture must still be with Morisset, the doctor thought. But none of that cavalry appeared for the next two days. Maybe Dessalines had abandoned Toussaint’s plan and there would be no great battle here after all. There was, so far, no sign of any French approach.
Three days after the burning of Petite Rivière, the doctor was roused by Bienvenu from his afternoon siesta and hustled to the wall. Bienvenu needed his sling no longer—he could gesture expansively with his right arm. The doctor rubbed his eyes and wiped his glasses and looked where he was urged. The camp was evacuating itself from the hillside opposite. Most of the wounded from Petite Rivière had either recovered or succumbed by now, though some still went limping on sticks and rough crutches. And in fact the whole bitasyon was emptying out: children and the old and infirm carrying bundles on their backs, women balancing baskets of hastily harvested yams and corn on their heads.
The doctor couldn’t guess the reason for this exodus, till Bienvenu took the spyglass from him and crossed hurriedly to the embrasures overlooking the Artibonite. Well past the river and below the town, he could now make out a worm of dust, sidling along the road across the plain. When he recovered the spyglass from Bienvenu, he could make out French battle flags and a few horsemen riding back and forth along the infantry column.
They were still an hour off, or more, but the atmosphere in the fort had electrified. The artillery men were all priming their cannon, laying out charges of mitraille. The doctor retreated to his ajoupa, where he turned back a corner of his sleeping mat and dug his fingers in the loose dirt to touch the cloth-wrapped barrel of his rifle. If he ran down to meet the French column, would he get a bullet in the back as he left the fort? He touched the scab on the side of his head. Maybe it would be better to follow the people of the bitasyon to the trail they were taking deeper into the mountains. Or simply sit it out where he was.
Before he could come to any conclusion, the gate of the fort had been shut. He watched the advancing column until daylight faded. The French had camped somewhere below the town. Lamartinière and Magny were rushing back and forth between the fort and the surrounding ditches and new watch posts just established further out from the walls. Attack would most likely come at dawn.
The doctor lay awake for a long time on his mat, wondering how Fontelle and Paulette had progressed on the road north, trying to picture them bringing the news to Nanon or Elise or Paul or Xavier Tocquet that Doctor Hébert was waiting out the trouble at La Crête à Pierrot. The doctor had studied the column well enough before darkness to reckon its strength at two thousand or better—two thousand crack French troops of the line against a few hundred of this black army and no more than a dozen cannon at the embrasures of this little fort. The place would be overrun in an hour. Yet he thought he had a chance to survive, if the French grenadiers identified him as white, if the defenders did not decide, in some rage of defeat, to blow up the powder magazine.
The new sentry posts were quietly alert below the walls. In the woods to the northeast, firelight was trembling—probably against orders the doctor supposed, when he got up around midnight to relieve himself. The
stars of the Great Bear hung from the top of the sky, illuminating the body of a sergeant who’d been caught asleep at his post and tossed on the ground before the trenches to encourage others not to doze. Bienvenu did not have guard duty—he slept innocently, profoundly, on his mat beside the doctor’s. When he resumed his own place the doctor was expecting several more hours of insomnia, and so he was very much surprised to wake at first light and find Bienvenu gone. A rattle of musketry drowned out the usual morning cock crow.
The doctor ran to a parapet and raised the spyglass to his eye. He picked out the back of Bienvenu’s head in the middle of a skirmish line deployed across the slope between the fort’s ditches and the burned shells of the town. Since Bienvenu had brought him safe out of the massacre, the doctor had felt the liveliest interest in his well-being, but this skirmish line was going to be destroyed in the next few minutes—there were only a hundred men or so, lightly supported by snipers in the trees on either side, against two thousand French grenadiers already charging with bayonets lowered, and doubtless enraged by the carnage they’d found in whatever was left of Petite Rivière. The slight grade of the ascent did not slow them at all. The skirmishers shot off their muskets, fell back, turned, and ran for the fort—it was the rout the doctor had expected, though all around him the cannoneers had begun to light their matches. Lamartinière and Magny ordered them not to shoot—they’d only mow down their own retreating men if they fired now. The doctor fixed his glass on Bienvenu, who had not been shot, had not been bayoneted, who incongruously seemed to be laughing as he rushed to the edge of a ditch and tumbled in.
“Feu! Feu!” Lamartinière and Magny cried with one voice. The whole skirmish line had vanished in the ditches, so there was nothing now between the cannon mouths and the French charging into point-blank range. The doctor had picked out two generals on the field, and both went down in the first volley of mitraille. One got up and staggered away, supported by subalterns, as the cannons went on crashing, recharging, firing again . . . but the other lay on his back where he had fallen, pumping blood from a huge wound in the chest. There were hundreds more musketeers who’d all along been hidden in the trenches and they now kept up a steady fire, while cannons recoiled, recharged, belched more mitraille. Some black troops, surprisingly, were covering the French retreat. The doctor twisted the lens of his spyglass and made out the insignia of the Ninth Demibrigade—Maurepas’s men from Port-de-Paix. Could Maurepas have surrendered?
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 54
