The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  To tease the letters into their words made Guiaou’s head go spinning, and he saw nothing in those sentences of any importance to himself or to Guerrier.

  “More lies of the blancs,” he said with a smile; then, tossing the paper back into the wind, he urged his horse onward to follow Toussaint.

  Tocquet had meant to go alone to Gonaives for salt. Despite the recent devastation, he guessed that the markets would be functioning at some level by this time, even on the ashes of the town. Or if not, he could go on to the salt pans themselves, farther south. It was that possible extension of the journey that made Tocquet assume that the women would all stay behind at Thibodet. An outing to Gonaives would no longer be the party of pleasure it might have been just a couple of weeks earlier, and on the roads farther south, who could know?—Rochambeau had claimed a wholesale victory over Toussaint at Ravine à Couleuvre, but the stories coming in from people that lived in that region were quite different. By all those accounts, Toussaint had got away with most of his army undamaged, and where that army was now, no one could say for sure.

  But since their reunion on the day of that battle, Elise had not wanted to let him out of her sight, or as Tocquet sometimes thought, didn’t want to let herself out of his sight. Ordinarily such attachment would have soon made him restless, but now for some intangible reason he found that he rather appreciated it. Maybe it was an effect of war. In any case, the mission for salt was Elise’s idea from the start. It was Elise who had schemed for the pigs of Thibodet to be herded off into the jungle and hidden, by Caco and a cohort of children, from the French soldiers who’d settled all over the plantation like, as she put it, a plague of locusts. “They might have plundered Sancey for provisions,” she said, “and if they were so profligate as to burn it instead, I don’t see why we are obliged to feed them here.”

  Now that the French had marched off to the south, Elise had declared the hogs should be slaughtered—preserved meat would be easier to store and conceal than all that meat on the hoof. Tocquet would have dried all the pork on the boucan, but Elise held out for at least a few hams salted in the European way, and she wanted to sample the salt for herself. And Isabelle, who was bored and irritable since her Captain Daspir had marched off with the rest, insisted on coming along as well. So only Nanon remained behind to keep the children.

  What pleasures Gonaives had once offered were now, as Tocquet had predicted, no more. The restaurant where he and Elise sometimes dined had burned down to its foundation, though eventually they did find the management serving meals from iron tripods on the waterfront, where the sea wind blew the clouds of ash away from the kettles and the clientele. In the center of Gonaives, a few gangs of soldiers and sailors worked slowly, feebly, at the reconstruction of the headquarters and a couple of other key buildings, amid swirls of ash that mingled with the dust. Isabelle and Elise had wound their heads and faces with long scarves, so that they resembled a pair of Bedouin bandits. Tocquet and Bazau and Gros-Jean each wore an extra mouchwa tied over his face, and by the time they’d succeeded in buying their salt, the cloth was black with ash around the nostrils.

  The ash blew inland from the waterfront, and they could uncover their faces to eat. From the kettles they took bowls of riz ak pwa, plantain, and a little boiled fish with peppers, and ate sitting on low, rough-carpentered chairs made from green wood in the countryside. All of them fell to with frank appetite, even the women, Isabelle sorting bones from fish with her tongue as efficiently as any old black grann from the mountain. They had almost finished, and Tocquet was beginning to consider a cheroot and a short glass of rum, when the work gangs came pounding from the square toward the landing, dropping their implements as they ran.

  Toussaint! The army of Toussaint is at the gate!

  Bazau, his face empty, got up to calm a pack mule loaded with salt— the animal had begun to jerk its head against the tether, distressed by the sudden commotion. The women were staring at each other, more in surprise than in alarm. Now the armed contingent of soldiers began to come running up from the post, in the same disarray that the work gangs had been, though no one looked to be pursuing them.

  Tocquet got up and dusted off his trouser seat and caught the arm of a corporal who was frantically hauling the line of a little shallop moored to the embarcadère. “What is it, friend?” he asked. “Is Toussaint here— did you see it with your own eyes?”

  “Yes!” the corporal declared. “He has been on our heels from Saint Michel to here and all of his black devils with him.”

  “And all of them ravening to drink human blood?” Tocquet kept his tone neutral, but Bazau slumped into the side of the mule, to bury his laughter in the sacks of salt.

  “Yes, and thousands of them,” the corporal panted. “They have massacred Leclerc at Petite Rivière, down to the last man.”

  “Who told you so?” Tocquet said more sharply.

  “It’s on the wind.” The corporal shot a quick look around their faces, then jumped down into the boat. All along the embarcadère his fellow soldiers were doing the same, in such a hasty confusion that several of the boats risked capsizing. On one of the warships moored farther out, a cannon coughed out a plume of smoke—a signal, maybe, as there was certainly no enemy in view.

  The corporal looked up from the rocking shallop. “We are all lost if we don’t get off this cursed island. Are those white women? They had better come too.”

  “Well, yes.” Tocquet looked to Elise. “I think I mentioned that there might be trouble. You might best wait it out on one of the ships, while we see what it amounts to.”

  “Nonsense,” Elise said. “I won’t leave you so.”

  “Even if it is my bidding?”

  “If I were so biddable, sir, I would never have come away with you in the beginning.” Elise’s color was up in her cheeks and her eyes were bright; she looked well, with the wind ruffling her hair. Tocquet turned from her and spat into the water, to signify an annoyance he didn’t entirely feel. Then he looked at Isabelle.

  “I won’t,” she said, before he could speak. “Nanon is alone at Thibodet and I won’t leave her and I won’t leave the children.”

  “You had rather die?”

  “Yes.” Isabelle stuck up her chin. “I had rather die if it comes to that.”

  “Well damn you both for a pair of donkeys!” Tocquet snapped. “I never saw such stubborn women.” He looked toward the shallop but it had already pushed off, the men leaning into their oars as they pulled for the ships. A black-backed gull swooped down and knocked one of their abandoned bowls into the water and rose with a scrap of plantain in its beak.

  “Come on then,” Tocquet said. “Get yourselves mounted, if you won’t hear reason, and we’ll see what it is we have to face.”

  They saw no sign of Toussaint until they’d reached the Pont des Dattes, where they found his corps ranged on the other side. It was nothing like the horde that corporal had been gibbering about—Tocquet took in that much at first glance. Toussaint had only a light force of regular troops and cavalry, though still probably enough to overwhelm the little French garrison left at Gonaives. Behind the regulars waited some hundreds of wild-looking men from the mountains, many of them armed with muskets which looked very much like the ones Tocquet had recently brought in from Philadelphia.

  “Salut, Governor, good day to you.” Tocquet raised his hat two inches from his head and then replaced it. “You may advance with no fear if you like—the French have already taken to their boats.”

  “Have they done so?” Toussaint, sitting his white stallion, touched his hat brim lightly.

  “Yes,” said Tocquet. “The town is yours for the taking, though I can’t say there’s very much left to take.”

  “None of this ruin is my doing!” Toussaint said hotly. “I did not tell the Captain-General Leclerc to force his way on shore with cannon and sword. No more did I order General Rochambeau to slaughter all my garrison at Fort Liberté—”

  “It is not our doi
ng either.” Isabelle unwound her scarf to reveal her face—her voice emerged sharp and clear. “We have lost much in this struggle ourselves, and seen our homes destroyed.”

  “Yes,” said Toussaint with some impatience. “I know you, Madame Cigny—I am familiar with your losses.”

  Isabelle stopped, one hand on her throat, where she wore the key to her gutted house in Le Cap, along with her other amulet.

  “Leclerc’s men have burned my house as well,” said Toussaint shortly. “There is next to nothing left of Habitation Sancey.” His eyes shifted. “And you,” he said. “Xavier Tocquet. How will you judge between me and the Captain-General?”

  “I won’t,” said Tocquet, his voice quiet. “I do not judge such questions. We have known each other for a long time, Governor, and you know me as well as that.”

  “For the love of God!” Isabelle said. “We know you to have a compassionate heart, Governor—surely you mean no harm to this man, who is now our only protector.”

  “For a weak and helpless woman like yourself?” Toussaint covered his mouth with his hand.

  “And what of my brother?” Elise, too, unwrapped her head, and shook her blond hair down on her shoulders. The spark of amusement left Toussaint’s eyes, and it seemed to Tocquet that the black general sank more remotely into himself, as he turned his head rather stiffly toward her.

  “He who has saved the lives and limbs of so many of your soldiers, Governor, and served you tirelessly for so many years. Where is he now, my brother?”

  “Doctor Hébert was safe and well when I saw him last at Petite Rivière,” Toussaint said. “It is my heartfelt wish he may continue so.”

  “Petite Rivière!” Isabelle hissed. “We have just heard that Leclerc and all his men were destroyed by your armies at Petite Rivière.”

  “Did you indeed?” Toussaint smiled on her openly. “Well, that may be. But if it has already happened, I have not been told of it.”

  He wiped away the smile, then glanced over his shoulder with a snap of his fingers. “Guiaou—Guerrier.”

  The two rode up quickly.

  “Escort these people to Habitation Thibodet.”

  “Oui, mon général.” Guiaou saluted.

  “You will be seen safe home,” Toussaint said, turning toward Tocquet.

  “Accept our thanks,” Tocquet said. He was sweating a little, in spite of the breeze. “And can we safely remain there?”

  “That has become a difficult question,” Toussaint said. “Though through no fault of mine. Recall: before the Captain-General landed, you might remain peacefully at home or travel wherever you would in the colony, without fear. But now . . . You might do better to go north.”

  “To Le Cap?” Isabelle put in.

  “Yes, to Le Cap,” Toussaint said, tightening his reins as Bel Argent began to sidestep. “But you must do it quickly.”

  Descahaux had been set to rights by the time Toussaint returned there in the late afternoon. The French soldiers had not much disrupted the place; possibly they had not realized it was one of his personal properties. Suzanne and the family always preferred the more comfortable situation of Sancey. There was nothing so very grand about the grand’case of Descahaux, though the house was well placed to catch the breezes and offered splendidly wide views of the mountains ranging behind each other on all sides. Deyè mòn gegne mòn . . . Toussaint came here for solitude, or sometimes, admittedly, for trysts.

  He’d instructed Guiaou and Guerrier to scout further on the ways from Ennery to Marmelade, once they’d deposited the blancs at Thibodet, and at sunset they’d come back with the news that the road was open. The French general Desfourneaux occupied Plaisance. But Toussaint would only have to knock in a few French pickets to reach Marmelade from Ennery, and that would be his movement for the following day. Though he was happy to have frightened the French into their boats, it was against his strategy to reoccupy Gonaives so soon—bitter as it had been to lose the port. When all the French had been destroyed or driven from the island, he would rebuild Gonaives, but for now he’d draw his strength from the mountains.

  I lift up my eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my hope. There was the Bible’s answer to Deyè mòn gegne mòn. He rose from his caned chair and took a few steps to the gallery rail. Dusk settled into the long, deep valley; the mountains ranged away toward the horizon in blue-green shades of smoke. He turned and faced Gabart and Pourcely, who sat quietly in chairs on the opposite side of the gallery from the table where Toussaint’s writing implements still lay. In the confusion he’d been separated from the most skilled of his secretaries: Riau, Pascal, Doctor Hébert, but there was a young griffe in Pourcely’s command who wrote a fair script, and Toussaint had already dictated his order to Christophe, before the light began to fail. Christophe would rally the Second and Fifth Demibrigades and move north, raising men in the hills of Grand Boucan and Vallière and Sainte Suzanne and Port Français; in a few days’ time he should be able to start insurrection on the Northern Plain, and possibly even threaten Le Cap.

  But Toussaint was distracted by the thought of Tocquet and the two white women—why couldn’t he leave them to look to themselves? Something about them continued to pick at him, though he bent his mind back to his tactics. Sylla was harassing Desfourneaux in the mountains of Plaisance, though Sylla’s force was negligible, and Romain was fighting a similar campaign in the heights of Limbé—there were two old maroon leaders who’d kept their faith with Toussaint’s army, unlike the magouyè traitors: Laplume, Lafortune, Lamour Dérance. If not for the treachery of those three, Dessalines would almost certainly have destroyed Port-au-Prince. Toussaint forced himself past his rage at their betrayals. To the matter at hand. From Marmelade he might drive Desfourneaux from Plaisance, or better yet, with Sylla’s support, annihilate him altogether. Then he would press on through Gros Morne and finally, finally rejoin Maurepas and the Ninth, who’d been resisting so brilliantly on the northwest peninsula, according to the last Toussaint had heard. But that had been many days ago, and since then there were rumors that Maurepas had surrendered. Toussaint had feared that outcome since his communications with the northwest were broken by the loss of Gonaives, but he would not accept it. He needed Maurepas and the Ninth, for that was the force he’d bring back to surround Leclerc, once the Captain-General had been baited into concentrating his whole army on La Crête à Pierrot.

  A warm scent of callaloo floated from the rear of the house across the gallery. Toussaint watched Pourcely and Gabart react, each man shifting his weight, recomposing himself, folding his hands across his stomach. At Descahaux lived one of those ancient incorruptible granns whom Toussaint trusted to prepare this dish for him—toothless, wizened as a wadded parchment, her bones as light and fragile as the hollow bones of a bird. Tonight he’d leave his usual regime of bread and water and with his officers enjoy the comfort of callaloo.

  The two white women nagged at him, though—the suddenness with which they’d disclosed their faces from the dust-guard scarves, and Elise shaking out her yellow hair. What token had she given him?—the little painted pendant, whose portrait, now that he thought of it, much more resembled Isabelle Cigny than the blond Elise. There was a trace of the racine of Africa in that Madame Cigny, though so faint she might not know it herself. Tocquet had it too, along with a touch of the Indian, blood of the old caciques, and Tocquet almost certainly did know it. Toussaint felt no great indebtedness to Tocquet for the guns he had brought, knowing that he’d sell wherever there was profit. Tocquet was a pirate, descendant of pirates; he had no loyalty but to his own interests, but this was a quality which could be respected, once it had been understood. Though Toussaint rather liked Tocquet, he felt no special interest in his survival. There was something else. Quite suddenly he recollected the rumor that Isabelle Cigny had had a liaison with Joseph Flaville; it was even whispered that she had hidden herself in the mountains to bear his child, before Flaville was executed for his part in the Moyse rebellion.

&n
bsp; Moyse again! He came at Toussaint from all sides. A drum was beating, in the direction of Thibodet, low in the valley. Moyse arose from the very same places where Toussaint liked to cache his own reserves. He flattened his hands on the gallery rail and looked out, believing he felt Moyse’s spirit rising in that drumbeat, in the evening mist and the last calls of the doves under the eaves, and brightening with the stars above the mountains. Possibly the wandering of Moyse’s disembodied soul could be more dangerous than Dessalines’s spirit still acting in its body.

  Toussaint was moved to cross himself. At once the idea returned to him, as if from an outside agent—one must order the spiritual thing before the material thing can be ordered. With that, the matter came clear to him, though it wasn’t the flash of Elise’s eye, or the proud toss of her head as her hair came down from the folds of the scarf. Toussaint’s amours with white women had never really touched him in that way; he was moved toward them by curiosity rather than passion (much like his blanche partners, as he knew well enough). In the end, they were political encounters. No, but it was what Elise had said about her brother. And Toussaint had given her a somewhat false answer, for in fact the doctor was in quite a dangerous situation. Toussaint had left him in it because he would certainly be needed where he was—he could make himself quite useful, and at bottom he was willing to serve. The doctor was loyal to Toussaint as few blancs had ever been, but Toussaint could not guarantee his safety now—through no fault of his own, that much was true; without the violence of the Captain-General none of these other blancs would have had anything to fear.

  He could not save the doctor now, but there was something he could do. Returning to the table, he lit the lamp, dipped his pen, wrote out a few quick lines, and signed below. He blew on the page and passed it over the flame of the lamp to make certain that the ink was well dry. Guiaou appeared on the gallery just as Toussaint was thinking of sending for him. He folded the paper and beckoned Guiaou within a whisper’s range.