The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Then Lamartinière screamed for the firing to stop, and as the cannonade and musket volleys faded away, a trumpet or a conch shell sounded. Out of the woods northeast of the slope, the cavalry of Monpoint and Morisset appeared to sweep the field. Through his spyglass the doctor discovered Placide, riding down a fleeing French grenadier, cleaving his head with a saber as casually as if splitting a length of firewood, then riding on to slay the next. He lowered the instrument and let the scene blur. When he looked again, the field was empty except for the dead—at least four hundred of them.

  The whole business had taken less than one hour. All the men in the trenches were laughing and cheering, and the cannoneers were hugging each other. The doctor felt neither joy nor sorrow. He stood, the spyglass hanging numb in his left hand, until Bienvenu appeared and called to him, then gave him a nudge and spoke again, “Come, Doctor, please, you must come now, they are just bringing in the wounded.”

  25

  In Toussaint’s eyes the low stone outline of the powder magazine took on the aspect of a tomb, and from its farther end there bloomed the black cross of Baron, as it were wrapped in chains. Reasonably there was no cross, but reason had no application. His reason had been unseated by the fountain of dread that gushed up in him, responding to the black-toothed powers that rushed on him from without. Blood was the conduit of the dread expanding with every beat of his pulse. His heart clenched tight; his head ached terribly. The black cross burned against the sky.

  He could not think it only a trick of sun or fever or the two combined. Baron was manifest in the cross. Toussaint’s spirit had been sucked out of him. He was nothing, an empty bottle, wind whistling in the uncorked neck. All at once the warmth of fever drained from him too and in the shuddering chill that followed, he sank against the rough set stones of the magazine wall. The darts of pain his chattering teeth fired in his damaged lower jaw struck him from a long way off, though he wanted to reach toward the pain, restore himself in his body. His eyes were closed, the sun red on the lids. The black cross went on blazing behind his eyes. The deep drumbeat of his heart kept pumping out the fear. Within the cross’s junction point appeared Baron Cimetière, wearing the face of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. His lips were parted but his teeth still set together, and from behind the teeth came the shrill and stuttering gravedigger’s cry— ke-ke-ke-ke-ke—or was it the cry of a hawk overhead? Dessalines has sold me! Toussaint thought, or said. Somehow he had risen, moved away from the wall of the powder magazine; he was no longer cold but hot, his whole head swimming. Dessalines is my Baron . . . Had he spoken aloud? . . . the little white doctor looked at him strangely as he passed, and seemed to speak, but Toussaint did not hear. Dessalines has sold me to the French.

  He staggered out the gate, and almost tumbled into a trench in progress that he’d ordered to be dug, but at the last moment he regained his balance and wobbled onto the narrow trail that led into the bitasyon east of the fort. High on a cane pole ahead of him was the small red square of a hûnfor flag. As he walked toward it, it disappeared, hidden by the branches of the trees. He was passing among the wounded from the battle at Ravine à Couleuvre, and it seemed that some of them stretched out their hands to him and that he heard them call the name they gave him, Papa Toussaint. He did not stop. He must take his weakness out of sight, hide it from all view.

  But someone was following him. He turned, with an effort that pained his head, and saw Guiaou. At that he felt a flicker of gratitude, far off on the horizon. Guiaou would never sell Toussaint. The trail ascended as he followed it. The fork he’d chosen led neither to the hûnfor nor to any dwelling of the bitasyon but came instead to a little spring. Low to the ground, the water bubbled out of an ogive slit in the rock. By the spring someone had placed a triple govi. Toussaint touched a fingertip to the water—cold shot up his arm to the shoulder. With that shock came a moment of clarity, and he saw that in the moist ground around the spring, behind the govi, and among stones on the slope above, grew armoise, bourrache, and romanier.

  Dessalines had not sold him yet. Nor had Baron yet taken him, down to the gate of death. Those two things were yet to come. And he had yet some way to travel before he reached that crossroads. At that understanding Toussaint began to feel a little calmer. The dark beating of his fear and helplessness shrank, folded in on itself, and rolled a little distance from him. He stooped and plucked a bud top of romanier and rolled it in his fingers and smiled at the fragrance.

  Guiaou appeared on the path behind him, advancing slowly, but with no hesitation. More terrible than the deep knife scars that plowed the side of his face was the alarmed concern that poured out of his eyes. Toussaint had seen that look many times since Ravine à Couleuvre, flowing out of any eyes that saw him weakened by the fever: Suzanne, Saint-Jean, Placide, and any of the many others who had invested all their future hope in what Toussaint might achieve in the quick passage through these violent days. Most of all Isaac, who doubted his own decision, who envied his brother Placide now—Toussaint had seen it—less for the gallant figure he cut in the honor guard, for his chance at adventure and glory of arms, but more for his having been moved by his spirit to express, fully and unreservedly, the love for his father which Isaac certainly also felt. And so many others had recently regarded him so, down to the least soldier of his armies. Even the blanc, Doctor Hébert, had that look in his eyes just now.

  These ideas wavered before him as Guiaou came up. Both his eyes were clear, though one hid deep in the furrows of scar.

  “Mon général,” Toussaint heard him say. “Why do you wander? You are unwell and ought to rest.”

  “Fey yo . . .” Toussaint could not succeed to finish his sentence. The herbs. His sore tongue stuck in his head. He opened his hand to disclose the crushed floret of armoise.

  Guiaou leaned near, for the daylight was fading, then nodded. “W’ap chita isit la—m’ap vini.” He gestured; the old wounds on his warding arm aligned with the knife scars on his face, the scars all rimed with white, like salt. Sit down there and I will come. Toussaint reeled in the direction indicated. A short way across the slope from the spring, a stand of bamboo arched over a gentle hollow in the ground, filled with dry leaves of the bamboo. A sort of natural tonnelle, an arbor. Toussaint stepped within it, achingly lowered into the twisted, rustling leaves. Guiaou had understood and was gathering herbs around the spring—not only the romanier, Toussaint saw, but the bourrache and armoise too. But of course he had sometimes assisted the blanc doctor, and so must have learned some of the uses of herbs that Toussaint had taught the doctor himself long before. So the virtue of his own teaching returned to Toussaint now. This thought encouraged him. He sank backward, resting against the close-grown, springy canes of bamboo. There was still a little red sunlight filtering through the fluttering leaves. He felt his fever shooting up. The crisis. He saw Guiaou as he had presented himself for the first time years ago, with his scars more freshly healed, cured by the salt of ocean waters. Guiaou had walked halfway across the country to join Toussaint’s army. Before that he had fought for the colons, though, in the regiment known jokingly as the Swiss. As a reward the white men had taken the Swiss to sea in a ship and cut them to pieces and thrown them to the sharks. Few but Guiaou had survived, perhaps none. Guiaou had brought the story to Toussaint, though maybe he had not understood it perfectly—had not seen how the colons could not dare return slaves to the field who had learned war. Guiaou, maybe, saw just the pure monstrosity and not the cause behind it, but that was enough to hold him ever faithful to Toussaint.

  When he first came, Guiaou had been afraid of horses, and of water, but now he rode with the best of the cavalry, and he would cross water too, if Toussaint asked it of him. And surely there were dozens and hundreds and thousands of others in and out of the army whose spirits were as strong for Toussaint as was Guiaou’s. Against the others, those with different hearts, who would not return to the field any more, who would not work beyond their daily need of food, who believed fre
edom to be a license to laziness, who preferred marronage, and libertinage, to any duty of citizenship. And at their head had been Moyse. How Toussaint had loved him . . . He had delayed his arrest for weeks after the rebellion had been crushed, hoping at least that Moyse would recognize his danger and leave the island, but Moyse had waited, stubborn as ever (and certainly he had known very well what was sure to come), to be made prisoner and brought before the firing squad. Toussaint’s thoughts were rushing, spiraling, as the fever rose toward crisis; he knew this but still could not control the thoughts. Guiaou had gone to Santo Domingo for Toussaint, and returned with the terrible news that Paul Louverture had given way to the French, and only because Toussaint’s letter had not come to him. But Guiaou had not been obliged to cross water. Only mountains. Deyè mòn gegne mòn. Behind mountains always are more mountains. And Guerrier. Guerrier had gone to Santo Domingo with Guiaou, was it not so? There was some resemblance between these two, though Guerrier bore no scars. The readiness of Guerrier to lay down whatever tool he’d used before and take up the musket Toussaint offered him. Take up his musket for Toussaint.

  “Koté Guerrier?” he said as Guiaou reached him, carrying herbs bundled in one hand and in the other the three-Marassa pot from beside the spring. Where is Guerrier? He felt anxious as for a small child, some helpless thing.

  “Li byen,” Guiaou said. He is well. Guiaou sat down crosslegged and took Toussaint’s head into his lap. “Guerrier is near us, mon général—he is at the fort.” Guiaou held the herbs close to Toussaint’s face so that he caught their scent.

  “B—Boulé . . .” He wanted to tell Guiaou to boil water and prepare a tisane with the herbs he had gathered. But the words would not come out. Guiaou dipped his fingers in the Marassa pot and stroked cool water against Toussaint’s temples. Why had he moved the Marassa pot from its place beside the spring? The cold was painful, but after the shock he felt relief. Parts of his being which the fever made it impossible to focus clearly together began to drift apart and float away from each other as separate spheres. As the strain of binding them together was relaxed, a warmth of calm grew within him. Guiaou would never sell Toussaint. Guiaou would be faithful to him always. Guiaou sat listening to the lizards ticking through the dry leaves of bamboo as it grew dark. He had understood that Toussaint meant for water to be boiled and a tisane to be made. He had helped in such preparations with the white doctor. But for the moment there was no fire, and he had needed the Marassa pot because there was nothing else to carry water. Also, for now at the height of the fever, maybe cold water was best. Later, when the tisane was more urgently needed, something would appear to serve the need. Guiaou went on laving Toussaint’s temples with the water from the spring. Presently he pulled his hands up to his chest and wet the insides of his wrists as well, there where the pulse beat fast and hot, so close under the skin. The general was now sleeping. Almost peacefully, it seemed. It might be that the fever had peaked, though he was still very hot. Guiaou glanced toward the sound of a lizard in the leaves and saw instead a little boy’s face peeping through the canes at the far end of the tonnelle. Then another face, a girl’s, bright with curiosity. They remained for a moment, then flicked away lightly as two birds.

  Guiaou had said nothing to the children. He had only smiled. But after they had been gone for a time, after it was fully dark, the boy and girl came back again, each carrying a bundle of firewood (the little girl balanced her firewood on her head), and behind them an old woman lugging her tripod and kettle. Between the mouth of the tonnelle and the spring, the old woman built a fire and boiled water to make the tisane. Also she filled bottles with hot water and placed them into Toussaint’s armpits and under the arches of his feet.

  In the morning when he woke Toussaint was hungry. The fever seemed completely to have passed. But before he returned to the fort and his men, he walked in a circle around the tonnelle with a stalk of armoise in his hand, then steeped the herb and washed his own feet in the liquid carefully, before he pulled back on his boots. With a smile he quickly hid behind his hand, he told Guiaou and the little boy and girl and the old woman grinning with her gums that if one used armoise so before a long, exhausting journey, one would feel neither fatigue nor any temptation to give up the course.

  Dessalines! The dread Toussaint had felt at the worst of his fever was now gone. Once something that occupied one so completely, devouringly, had departed, one could not properly remember it any more. Still Toussaint knew, as his modest force circled through the mountains north from Petite Rivière, that he had touched upon a deep root of power there at La Crête à Pierrot—a force that Dessalines would draw on. Dessalines and all the others who would mount resistance there. They would bring this force up from the earth and water into open air where it would flower into flame. Toussaint’s own death was hidden in it somewhere, and maybe the death of Dessalines too. But a great many of the blanc invaders were going to die first, there at La Crête à Pierrot . . . maybe all of them would die.

  Most of the invading blancs were still drawing tight the empty noose they had devised—empty since Toussaint had slipped out of it, after Ravine à Couleuvre. Now the slip knot would close on La Crête à Pierrot, and then let them see if their rope was strong enough to hold what it had snared. Meanwhile, the blancs had left the terrain they’d occupied on their passage south too lightly garrisoned.

  Though most of the honor guard cavalry had been detached at Petite Rivière, some horsemen still were following Toussaint, under command of Pourcely. Toussaint had picked Guiaou and Guerrier to bear his standards, riding on his either side. Behind the cavalry, the infantry companies under Gabart were stepping out smartly, and as they passed through the mountains they gathered more men—field hands and even some maroons Toussaint was able to rally to fight the blancs, armed with muskets distributed during the time of Sonthonax, or cached more recently in these hills by Toussaint himself, from his trade with the North American Republic.

  They crossed the central plateau with tremendous speed, for now Toussaint’s rear guard reported that General Hardy’s division had been sent to pursue them, while Leclerc took his main force further south. At that news, Toussaint only laughed and with a pressure of his knees moved Bel Argent into a canter; diversion of French troops from the south was just what he wanted, and they would not catch him now, till he was ready to be caught. The tiny garrison Rochambeau had left at Saint Michel bolted at first sight of black horsemen sweeping the tall grass of the high savanna toward the town, abandoning almost all their stores as they ran for Ennery.

  The stores unfortunately were scant, though there was a little powder and shot. Toussaint spent most of the night in Saint Michel, rising two hours before dawn to lead his men onward, excepting a small detachment he left to mislead Hardy toward Saint Raphael. By daybreak they had entered the canton of Ennery, where Toussaint’s mood turned very dark, as they rode through the wasted fields of Habitation Sancey and halted before the burnt and collapsed timbers of the grand’case there. Soon Guiaou came riding down from the heights with the word that Descahaux was still intact, but this news did not alter the grim set of Toussaint’s jaw.

  Toussaint hardly needed spies as such, for anyone in the roadside cases was eager to tell him that the blanc soldiers from Saint Michel had come stampeding through the night before, to infect the similarly small garrison at the village of Ennery with their panic. Quickly he ordered Gabart to march the infantry southwest of the bourg, while he himself rode straight in with the cavalry. Resistance was token when the horsemen charged—the French garrison was so quickly routed from Ennery that most of them escaped Gabart’s encircling movement, though some were killed by long-range shots as they ran pell-mell down the road toward Gonaives.

  In twenty minutes this fight was over, and the only vestige of French authority left in Ennery was Leclerc’s most recent proclamation nailed to trees in the sleepy square. Toussaint leaned out from Bel Argent’s back to rip a copy from its nail. A couple of women
and small children peered out curiously from the corners of the houses as he scanned the document, then recoiled as he crushed it in one hand.

  “Outlaw—he declares me outlaw! The brigand who has burned my house—it is Leclerc who is the outlaw, and if I wish it I will take back Gonaives from him this very day.”

  Toussaint threw the paper over his shoulder and dug his spurs into his horse. The wind blew the wad toward Guiaou’s face; by reflex he caught it in one hand. He unrolled the crumpled paper and smoothed on his saddlebow, squinting painfully at the letters.

  Art. 1er—Le général Toussaint et le général Christophe sont mis hors la loi; et il est ordonné à tous les citoyens de leur courir sus, et de les traiter comme rebelles à la République française . . .

  “What does it say?” Guerrier had ridden up beside him, with curious eyes—he remembered that Guiaou had been able to puzzle out certain proclamations during their journey on the Spanish side of the island.

  Art. 1—General Toussaint and General Christophe are outlawed, and all citizens are ordered to pursue them, and to treat them as rebels against the French Republic . . .