The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  By the time the sun was hot overhead, the Northern Plain had begun to burn, all across the cane fields from the coast. The smoke grew heavy, and the sea breeze carried it across the road, thick with flakes of ash and hot cinders. The travelers masked their faces with dampened cloths. People began to come streaming out of the cane, in flight from the smoke and fire. Tocquet and Arnaud quizzed a few of these as they crossed the way and learned that Christophe was advancing along the coast road from Terrier Rouge, driving Boyer back toward the gate of Le Cap. They were fighting plantation to plantation across the whole plain too.

  After a muttered consultation, Arnaud and Tocquet picked up the pace. The road they traveled converged at Le Cap with the road by which Boyer was retreating, and if Boyer was really routed, they would do well to get there before him—before Christophe had sealed the entrance to the town.

  Claudine drove the wagon, eyes fixed on the edge of the sky, holding the team at a steady trot. The road was rough, and the smaller children began to whine at the jolting. Nanon and Isabelle and Elise rode close by the wagon. Tocquet and Bazau trotted in the rear, keeping an eye on the road behind, while Arnaud and Gros-Jean cantered ahead to reconnoiter. Until they reached Haut du Cap, no one interfered with them. They were in sight of Le Cap’s first defensive earthwork when a large armed band swarmed across the road.

  At the sight of them, Arnaud felt his resolve harden. Now the danger assumed a material form, his terror was gone. He was thrilled, even, at the rushing return of his confidence—his self, as he’d been accustomed to know it. Though they’d been riding hard for an hour, there was still a reserve left in his horse. He could empty his pistol, then ride on wielding his coutelas till he had broken through or been killed. But the wagon and the women would not make it through.

  Arnaud reined up, and Gros-Jean beside him. The man who seemed to lead the band was missing his right ear. A faded brand of the fleur de lys on his left cheek marked him as a thief, most likely, or a runaway.

  “You are Michel Arnaud,” he said. “We know you.”

  “Wi Wi, nou rekonnen’l,” came other voices. Arnaud heard his name move through the band. Arnaud felt a little surprised, for his face was covered to the eyeballs in a dampened kerchief to filter the smoke. He was intensely grateful not to be afraid. Nor did he feel the blind, consuming anger which had often carried him through such moments, only a near-indifferent calm. He studied the first man who had spoken, but could not recognize him. That did not mean that he might not have lopped off that ear with his own knife, or planted the brand on that face with his own iron, long ago in the time of slavery.

  A few French sentries showed themselves within the earthwork. They meant to do nothing, Arnaud could tell; there’d be no sortie, no rescue. Probably they were too few. From across the Haut du Cap river, which was partly concealed by a stand of cane to their right, came a noise of shouting and gunfire. The branded man’s head revolved in that direction.

  “Christophe,” he said. “There is Christophe—he is chasing Boyer.”

  The noise swelled as it approached. Arnaud sensed the sentries in the earthwork were attending to it also. He touched his pistol grip for a moment, then pulled the masking cloth from his nose and mouth and dropped it, then dismounted, letting the reins trail. He took a step away from his horse.

  “I am Michel Arnaud,” he said. “If you have some account with me, we may settle it now.” He opened his empty hands, a few inches away from the pistol and coutelas strapped to opposite sides of his belt. “But let these others pass on to the town.”

  The branded man was hesitating. He still seemed to be distracted by the noise of the fighting beyond the slow brown drift of the river, though nothing had yet come into view. The cane, and smoke rolling over it, obscured everything. Arnaud coughed. Behind him there was a crash, and though he didn’t like to take his eyes off the branded man and the others he faced, he risked a quick glance over his shoulder. At Elise’s urging, Sophie and Zabeth had rolled one of the rum barrels over the rails of the wagon; it spurted a little bright liquid through a cracked stave as it landed, and a good number of the band swarmed eagerly over it. Claudine, meanwhile, stood up from the box, her skin pulled tight to the bone of her face, staring a thousand miles through the horizon, her left hand with its missing ring finger raised palm out as if to test the wind.

  Arnaud faced forward. Now he heard Claudine’s name, whispered around the band. Some of the men who blocked their way were looking up at her with a kind of awe.

  “Give us all the barrels,” the branded man said.

  Arnaud shook his head. “One.”

  “Don’t be a fool, man!” Tocquet had ridden up to the head. “Give them the rum and get on your horse.” He turned to the branded man. “Take all the barrels and welcome to them, but as we go.” As he spoke he leaned down to catch the harness of the lead mule in the team. At his urging the wagon creaked slowly forward. Arnaud vaulted into his saddle with the verve of a youth of twenty. The branded man made a fishtail motion with his arm, and the men in front of them began to shift out of the road.

  Two of the band had jumped into the wagon and were rolling barrels off to their fellows who walked behind. They paid no attention to the women and children crouching in the straw of the wagon bed. Ahead, Arnaud saw with enormous relief that the sentries were dragging the heavy wood gate of the earthwork open. Half a dozen muskets were leveled in their direction, though, and one little four-pound cannon.

  “Get those brigands off your wagon!” one of the sentries shouted. One of the men jumped down at once, though three barrels remained to be unloaded. The second man ignored the call. Grunting, he hefted a barrel to the rail and rolled it over. Gros-Jean rode up and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Fok ou desann,” he said, and pointed to the soldier who held a lit fuse above the touch hole of the little cannon. You must get down. The second man glanced in that direction, flashed Gros-Jean a quick grin and jumped off the wagon, leaving the last two barrels behind.

  Arnaud counted his party as they came through the earthwork— all were present and accounted for. The guard was very light here, as he’d suspected, no more than a platoon and short-handed at that. A little determination would suffice to overrun this post. But through the closing gate he could see that the men of the band were doing nothing more than rolling the rum barrels further out of musket range. Then the gate was closed, and the sentries had waved them on their way. Around the next bend of the road appeared the stone gate posts of the town itself.

  “Ah, Michel . . .” Tocquet rode up alongside Arnaud, and reached to touch him lightly on the shoulder. Thrown together as they’d often been, the two men didn’t naturally like each other much, and it was rare for Tocquet to use Arnaud’s first name. But Arnaud understood that the quick touch was meant both to compliment his courage and to reproach him, lightly, for his recklessness. He faced Tocquet, who still looked at him curiously.

  “I never owned my strength,” Arnaud said, surprised to hear himself utter it.

  “No man does.”

  Though Arnaud expected Tocquet to have spoken, the voice belonged to Bazau, who flanked him on the right. He glanced at the black man, but Bazau was looking through the gate posts, his profile calmly smoothed of all expression. They cleared the gate to the sound of hooves and harness and the more distant noise of fighting toward the coast. None of the three of them said anything more as they continued their way across the fire-blackened Rue Espagnole.

  28

  The little painted pendant went on troubling Maillart, for he couldn’t determine what to do with it. As it would certainly be compromising to Antoine Hébert’s sister, he ought probably to have got rid of it—tossed it into the canal with the rest of the trinkets out of Toussaint’s trophy box. The order to treat any white woman who’d consorted with a black as a prostitute had rather shaken the major. There’d be more than one colonial dame brought low if that directive were broadly applied. More than one of Maillart�
��s own acquaintance. He wondered, too, what lay behind it, what other disagreeable orders there might be.

  And still the pendant’s image reminded him so of Isabelle that he could not quite bring himself to dispose of it. It was not her portrait, yet it recalled the brightness of her eyes, the coyness in that finger laid over lips stung red by kissing. At moments he thought private, he’d cup the pendant in his hand and study the image on the small ceramic disk, wondering where Isabelle was now, if she had reached some place of safety. He was confident she had, for Isabelle was a cat who fell on her feet, though by this time she might have consumed a few of her spare lives. He’d caught young Captain Paltre a time or two, peering over his shoulder, trying to see into his palm, but then Maillart would fold his fingers over the teasing face and drop the pendant back in his coat pocket. He could not quite control the habit of worrying it between his thumb and forefinger there, but the surface of the disk was thickly glazed, so that this handling did not wear away the image.

  They’d been on the march out of Port-au-Prince for several days, since news had come that General Debelle had been pushed back, with surprising losses, from a little fort above Petite Rivière. Maillart knew the fort, and thought little of it. The place was well chosen, to control a key point of entry to the interior via the Grand Cahos, but the fortification itself did not amount to much, and though it stood on a high cliff above the Artibonite River, it was too easily attacked across the inconsequential slope rising from the town.

  And yet it seemed to be their target. Captain-General Leclerc appeared to believe that here Toussaint had gone to ground. Maillart did not much think so. Toussaint did not willingly put his back to any set of walls. But maybe he’d been forced to it; it might be true, and so the major kept his opinion to himself. For the past two days they’d been maneuvering inland, and General Boudet had detached the advance guard to press as far east as Mirebalais, under command of the Adjutant-General d’Henin, who’d taken some losses capturing a small redoubt, then found the town in ashes. D’Henin returned to Boudet gray-faced, with a tale of three hundred white corpses weltering in their blood where they’d been hacked to death on Habitation Chirry, and all the countryside in flames.

  Now, toward the close of day, Boudet’s reunited division moved along the south bank of the Artibonite toward the town of Verrettes. Maillart contrived to feel mildly optimistic on this ride, despite the nervous whispering of d’Henin’s men. He rode along to Paltre’s left, fingering the pendant in his pocket. Verrettes was scarcely more than a village, but pleasantly situated not far from the river, and there a major might commandeer a roof for the night, perhaps even a bed. Perhaps there would also be supplies to requisition. They’d been traveling since Port-au-Prince on moldy biscuit from the ships. Though Maillart had some skill in supplementing such rations, the pace of their march had been brisk enough that he’d been able to supply himself with no more than a few pieces of fruit.

  His stomach responded to the thought of a regular meal with a couple of interested growls. Maillart tightened his diaphragm and stood up in his stirrups, peering ahead. On the outskirts of Verrettes a skirmish line had appeared, and a few shots were fired, though at such long range that the balls were spent when they reached the French column. Pamphile de Lacroix ordered the drummer to beat the charge. The skirmishers, mostly un-uniformed field hands, scattered easily enough, though some still sniped at the French flanks from the trees.

  “We are not so terrifying as we were,” Lacroix muttered, as he made his way back down the line to Maillart.

  “That band of irregulars presents us no real threat,” the major replied.

  “No,” said Lacroix, with a distant smile. “But I don’t like their confidence.”

  The departure of the skirmishers revealed a pall of smoke. Maillart’s heart sank. Verrettes was burned too—yes, the houses were destroyed from one end to the other, he saw as they rode to the central square. The Place d’Armes was carpeted with the bodies of white men, women, children. Some preserved an attitude of supplication in their deaths, kneeling slumped against the walls, their empty hands stretched out for mercy. The blood was not yet dry on the ground. Maillart saw a woman who seemed to have been slain by a bayonet or a lance that had first passed through the trunk of the infant she held to her bosom. He looked away quickly but there was nowhere safe to look except for the darkening sky.

  Captain Paltre leaned sideways out of his saddle and puked on the ground, then straightened and rode on, his eyes glazed, a trail of vomit at the corner of his mouth. Maillart wished he would collect himself enough to wipe it away. Paltre had reported a similar scene when he’d entered Saint Marc with Boudet’s division, just shortly after Dessalines had put the town to bayonet and torch. Apparently he was not yet hardened to such spectacles.

  Buzzards walked comfortably among the dead, shrugging their black wings, like old men stooping in black tailcoats. From their attentions, many of the corpses stared from empty eye sockets. Against a tree in the center of the square, something flopped and groaned. Lacroix hurried in that direction, then called for a farrier to come with tools to draw the heavy nails that transfixed the white man’s palms to the living wood. His swollen tongue hung out of his mouth. Maillart gave him a drink of water.

  “Who did it?” Lacroix said.

  “Dessalines,” the man said thickly. “This morning, Dessalines was here.” When the second nail was drawn, he slumped to the ground in a faint.

  “He won’t live,” Lacroix said grimly.

  “Most likely not,” Maillart agreed. He was trying not to look at Paltre, who sat dumbstruck astride his halted horse. Somehow the smear of vomit by Paltre’s mouth distressed him more than all this scene of carnage.

  “My Christ.” Lacroix swept his arm around the panorama. “The reports don’t give one a proper idea . . .”

  Maillart said nothing.

  “They are not human,” Lacroix said. “Whoever did such thing cannot be human.”

  “Don’t say that,” Maillart heard himself blurt. “Never say it.”

  Lacroix looked at him curiously, perhaps somewhat suspiciously, but Maillart said no more. And anyway the order was coming down the line to evacuate the ruined town.

  He had no appetite that night, not even for his ration of hardtack. They camped on the south bank of the Artibonite, squared off in battalions, to protect their equipment and horses at the center of each square. At first the men had been moved to anger by the massacre, but after nightfall their humor turned uneasy. At midnight Maillart was roused by Paltre’s nervous movements. Apparently there was a little gunfire around the edges of their camp, and the sentries were shooting back into the dark.

  “It’s nothing,” Maillart snapped at Paltre. “They won’t attack us in this strength. They only mean to steal your sleep.”

  With that he rolled over, and flattened his cheek against the leather of his saddlebag. But after all it was not so desirable to reenter his night-mares just now. He lay feigning sleep for Paltre’s benefit, remembering what he had said to Lacroix that evening. To declare the enemy less than human opened the door to every horror. Dessalines must have told himself the same today, before he put his victims to the bayonet: These are not human. Maillart had not been able to hold himself back from touching that woman, stabbed to the heart through the child she held. He had touched her on the cheek. The skin had been warm, perhaps only from the sun, but it seemed to hold some fading warmth of life.

  . . . that they should have always before them the hell that they deserve— a phrase from Toussaint’s letter, which Chancy had been caught carrying. If the message had been intercepted, Dessalines was certainly acting in its spirit all the same. And certainly there was a human intention behind it. It was terrible, but not insane. In fact it was quite a lucid intention, plain and bright. Though he liked Pamphile de Lacroix a great deal, Maillart could never say so much to him. It might after all be taken for treason. Besides, his own ideas confused him. He wished Anto
ine Hébert were near. Antoine would have known better how to put it. Really this style of thinking was more in the line of the doctor than Maillart. Maillart did not like it when his thoughts boiled so. The activity of the thoughts stopped him from sleeping.

  Or even Riau, if Riau were here now. He would say nothing on the subject, or very little, but Maillart thought Riau would understand what he himself could not formulate. Riau had a facility for acting and being without any sign of reflection, and this the major had always appreciated. But Riau had taken a message to Croix des Bouquets and had never come back from that errand.

  Maillart sat up suddenly. Of course, Riau had gone back to Toussaint. He had known it from the second day Riau failed to return to Port-au-Prince, but had not recognized the knowledge. Well, there was nothing to be done about it. The next time he and Riau met, they probably would be obliged to try to kill each other. Such was the soldier’s lot. But tonight, Maillart felt resentful of it. It seemed more difficult to shrug it off than it had been when he was younger. This obligation was the most atrocious aspect of it all, he thought. But it could not bear much more thinking.

  Eclair snuffled across the earth toward him, raised his head and whickered. Maillart clucked his tongue, stretched out again, balanced his head on the saddlebag. Above him, stars revolved in spirals. Eventually he slept.

  In the morning a handful of deserters from Toussaint’s honor guard crossed the river, meaning to come over to the French. They’d lured their captain along on some pretext, though apparently he was not privy to their scheme to change sides. Among this party, Maillart recognized Saint James, one of the very few white men who rode in Toussaint’s guard. By Saint James’s account, discreetly murmured to Boudet and his staff, Dessalines had recently conducted at Petite Rivière a slaughter similar to the one they’d just come upon at Verrettes.