The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  At the first volley Dessalines had prompted the musicians to strike up a martial air by smacking them on the calves with the flat of his sword. The drum and trumpets made themselves faintly heard, but the violin was completely inaudible over the noise of artillery, however desperately Gaston sawed it. Dessalines moved behind the players, grinning. The French advance had come to the edge of the ditches. The doctor saw an officer with a dimly familiar face sail his hat over the walls of the fort, then charge after it, with some shouted exhortation. There was a humming around his head, like bees; he didn’t realize it was bullets till Descourtilz pulled him down from his perch.

  Together they crawled toward the wall of the powder magazine for better cover. But Dessalines, who’d lost his smile, had resumed his post by the open door. “Turn them back!” he shouted, “Or—” He shook his torch toward the open doorway. Half a dozen French grenadiers had reached the top of the wall and were fighting hand to hand with the defenders there. Dessalines appeared to change his strategy; with a shout he rushed into that fight. The doctor saw him dance atop the wall. A bullet sheered off one of the tall feathers in his hat, but except for that he seemed untouchable.

  Then Dessalines came panting back and ordered the musicians to sound the charge. Unbelievably, the gates were pushing open for a sortie. The doctor risked another peep over the wall. Now it was Dessalines’s men chasing the French down the slope, jabbing bayonets in their kidneys. The French made a rally, turning the tide, but mitraille blew away this charge like the others, as the blacks again took cover in the ditches. And now, as the trumpets continued to blare, Morisset led the cavalry out of the woods to sweep the field.

  The doctor dropped down to the earth of the fort. Though the cannons had quieted, his ears still rang. Descourtilz hunkered by the ajoupa, scraping together a heap of the musket balls that lay on the ground like hailstones. Finally the trumpeters stopped blowing, one of them laying his palm over his deflated chest as he lowered his instrument. Dessalines was leading a cheer, stabbing his torch high into the air. Black soldiers in the highest state of excitement were dancing their victory on the edges of the parapets. Bienvenu returned to the doctor, breathless, sweating, streaked with blood that seemed not to be his own.

  See to the fire, the doctor reminded himself, and the herbs and poultices and bandage rolls. Behind Bienvenu came the fresh wounded; there would be much work to do.

  Captain Daspir was riding with Leclerc’s staff when they met Boudet’s division in near-complete rout by the black cavalry, a hundred yards below Petite Rivière. There passed a moment of sick confusion; then Daspir and Cyprien set themselves to rallying the fresh troops into squares, as the fleeing men took cover behind them. In fact the cavalry charge did not press them very hard once their lines were well formed, but retreated up the road west of the town.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Leclerc was sputtering. “You yield before these unorganized savages?”

  He was berating General Boudet, who came hopping toward him on one leg, supported by a lieutenant on his left, his hurt leg swinging, his face drawn and pale with pain.

  “See for yourself,” Boudet said through his gritted teeth, and sank to a sitting position on a cartridge case. A surgeon knelt before him and began cutting away the blood-stained leather of his boot.

  “Forward,” Leclerc ordered, trembling. Daspir and Cyprien joined the march, which proceeded south of Petite Rivière. In the ravines between the town and the river they discovered the putrefying corpses of several hundred slaughtered white civilians. Some of the men began to curse, others to vomit, but Daspir had no reaction left in him, after similar scenes at Saint Marc and elsewhere, although here the odor was most unpleasant and the corpses hopped with vultures and crawled with flies. He exchanged one stupefied glance with Cyprien and rode on. Presently they reached a new scene of carnage: hundreds of fresh-slain French soldiers carpeting the slope below La Crête à Pierrot.

  Stunned silence obtained as the men moved into line. Above, the noonday sun was broiling. Within the fort, the French flag snapped on a long staff. Cries of mockery came from the walls. Daspir’s heart thumped uncomfortably against his ribs. His mouth was brassy; he took a sip of tepid water from his canteen. The black cavalrymen had also flown the tricolor, he remembered. A youth with a red headcloth had carried it into the charge.

  Leclerc shook his head slightly as he surveyed the field, his small, delicate features stiff with anger. “We will avenge these men within the hour,” he said, then turned to Daspir and Cyprien. “Go back and bring up the ammunition wagons. Who commands in Boudet’s stead, Lacroix? Let him bring what men he finds able to the field.”

  They left Leclerc conferring with General Dugua, who had assumed the wounded Debelle’s command. Their detour to avoid the ravine of the massacre brought them nearer to the dully smoldering ruins of the town. Cyprien covered his face with a scented handkerchief; Daspir simply tolerated his cough as they passed. He rode toward the supply wagons, but paused a moment to watch the surgeon working over Boudet’s foot. The general had had his toes shot away, it appeared, and he also had a nasty suppurating wound on one hand. Behind him, a weathered-looking officer with long mustaches and a major’s epaulettes was remolding a captain’s broken nose between his thumb and forefinger. Daspir took a second glance at the wounded captain and recognized the disfigured Paltre.

  “My God, what has happened to you?” Daspir jumped down from his horse at once. Paltre made an effort to answer but could only spit out blood.

  “Be still,” Maillart said and turned to Daspir. “It’s all from his nose, he won’t die of it. A friend of yours? He’s a lucky man, and a brave one too— if not a bit of a fool. You might go get his hat for him, if you’re returning to the attack.”

  “His hat?”

  Maillart straightened and offered his hand; Daspir clasped it briefly.

  “He threw his hat into the fort and tried to go after it,” Maillart said. “It’s a miracle he’s hurt no worse than this. I think every man who followed him died.”

  Daspir gaped. Paltre struggled up and spat out more blood.

  “I’m going,” he said. “If Daspir goes, I go back too.”

  “Calm yourself,” Maillart said. “You’ve proved your courage! You can’t go on till the bleeding stops. There’s no sense in it.”

  Daspir opened his mouth to explain their bet and the competition. Was it likely Toussaint was in that fort? Leclerc had certainly thought to find him when they marched this way from Saint Marc. He would have asked Paltre to confirm it, but at that moment Cyprien rode up to remind him that he should be hurrying the wagons up to the line.

  The fort was silent, motionless, though the cannon mouths breathed a little smoke, and Maillart’s ears still hummed with the din of the recent battle. The carpet of dead men on the slope appeared to wriggle. Maybe it was only the shimmer of the broiling noon heat. But no, a couple of wounded men were trying to crawl down the slope to the new French line. Three men broke from Leclerc’s ranks to help them, but one was immediately picked off by a marksman hidden in the fort—dead before he hit the ground, though his heels still drummed in the dust. The other two soldiers shook their fists as they skipped back. Another long shot dispatched one of the wounded men who’d kept on crawling.

  There’s a man with a rifle, Maillart thought. He considered his friend Antoine Hébert, such a surprisingly good marksman with his long American gun. The notion momentarily froze him, but of course the doctor would not be anywhere near this place and would not be firing on the French if he were; he was always reluctant to use his unexpected talent against human life. But surely the sniper in the fort must be armed with a similar weapon.

  Leclerc had brought a good number of black troops with him out of Saint Marc, men of the Ninth Demibrigade, incorporated into Debelle’s force after the surrender of Maurepas. Some hailed from the Thirteenth Demibrigade as well. Leclerc had put them in the front line, but they seemed a little reluctant to
advance across this killing ground. Maillart knew these were no cowards. He had trained some of them himself, in earlier days, when Toussaint first began to organize a real army. Under Maurepas they’d repulsed both Debelle and Humbert, defeated them really, and inflicted considerable losses too. In fact, Maurepas might never have surrendered if Lubin Golart had not turned his coat and joined the French generals. Golart had been a subcommander of the Ninth and was able to bring his regiment over to the French; he’d hated any partisan of Toussaint’s ever since the War of Knives; and moreover he knew the terrain around Port-de-Paix as well or better than Maurepas. These men of the Ninth were brave and well trained, Maillart knew, well seasoned in battle also, and if they hesitated now it was because they knew what was going to happen.

  As Leclerc should have known also, or at least Dugua. Maillart’s mind began to race. He was still quivering from the shock of Boudet’s rout and his own forced flight before that cavalry charge. The same thing that had happened to Boudet this morning must have happened to Debelle the week before. Dugua ought certainly to have learned that much when he assumed Debelle’s command. Now Leclerc was re-forming his line, replacing the black troops with French, who were all more than eager enough for a charge. Leclerc was going to march blithely into the same trap for a third time.

  A mostly naked black man appeared on the wall of the fort, wearing Paltre’s hat, and a rag of a breech clout. He capered like a goat on the parapets, dancing the chica, wriggling his spine and flapping his arms, thrusting out his chest and hooking his pelvis upward. From inside the walls came clapping and chanting and laughter. The man’s muscles gleamed as if they had been oiled. A few men fired from Leclerc’s lines, unbidden, but he ignored the shots. Finally he turned his back and gave his buttocks an infuriating wriggle before he jumped down into shelter behind the wall. The hat was raised once more, twitched teasingly, before it disappeared.

  “Take that fort!” Leclerc, livid with rage, was screaming. He stepped ahead of his line, whipping his sword forward and down. At once the line swept past him. Drums beat the charge. Maillart watched Captain Daspir riding into the stream. He held his own horse back. Someone bumped against him—Paltre, who’d managed to remount. His nose was held in place with a blood-soaked bandage which gave him the look of a demented agouti.

  “I’ll get my own hat back,” Paltre muttered and rode forward.

  Maillart grasped at him, angry—he was moved to pursue, but held himself in. Better not to let his anger sweep him along, as it was sweeping everyone else on the field. He had never liked Paltre much anyway, not since the days of Hédouville, but today he’d been impressed with the young captain’s lunatic bravery. And since he’d invested something in saving Paltre’s life, he didn’t like to see it wasted now.

  Yet he stayed where he was and watched, a little surprised at his own detachment. Leclerc’s small, incongruously dapper figure was setting an example for his men. He was well to the fore, his life on the line, urging, encouraging. It was what Napoleon would have done, in the days when his men worshiped him as the Little Corporal. Maillart had heard those tales from a distance. The men who’d landed at Port-au-Prince with Boudet were full of them. But it was an ill moment for Leclerc to be enacting such a dream, however bravely. This charge was driven by rage, contempt, and incomprehension of the enemy. Most of the troops had been piloted over the country by overseers or landowners of Arnaud’s old stripe, who still somehow managed to believe they had only to show their slaves the whip to return them to abject submission. In the end it was misleading guidance.

  The former slaves stood calmly, neck deep in the ditches before the fort, elbows bracing their muskets on the ground. They held their fire till the very last moment, and when they did fire the effect was withering; yet the French charge did not abate. Now it was all hand-to-hand fighting in those trenches, and the momentum of the charge had carried a couple of dozen grenadiers to the base of the wall. But now, of course, came the mitraille, mauling the French advance beyond the ditches. The storming party was cut off and would be slaughtered.

  “Look there.” It was General Lacroix, leaning into Maillart’s shoulder and pointing as he shouted in his ear, toward a small round hilltop north of the fort, covered by a sparse grove of slender trees. “Do you see that eminence?”

  Maillart nodded.

  “Take the seventh platoon of musketeers there,” Lacroix said. “I’ll wager you can do some damage from that place.”

  Maillart saluted; Lacroix thumped his shoulder and moved on. The maneuver was accomplished quickly enough, and proved to have been very well conceived. From the little hilltop Maillart could see plainly down into the fort, boiling like an anthill disturbed by a boot. After a moment he discerned that no cannon were aimed to cover the hill, and that Dessalines sat on the step of the powder magazine, conducting the fight with a lit torch he held in his right hand.

  “Kill that general,” Maillart said and fired his own pistol among the muskets, but too quickly. The range was a little long for these small arms; cannon would have been more useful. Dessalines lifted a hot musket ball from the ground at his feet, then smiled up at the hilltop. At once he got to his feet and ordered two cannon to be rolled to the embrasures facing the hill.

  Maillart reloaded, fired again, again to no effect. Either the range was simply too long or Dessalines was protected today by some enchantment. He could hear the black general’s voice very plainly, bullying his cannoneers— what do you mean by this sluggishness! Yet they seemed to be bringing the guns around quickly enough. One of Maillart’s musketeers jostled him and pointed. Beyond the fort, below the bluff, some hundreds of black irregulars were climbing from the river bank onto the main battlefield to attack Leclerc’s left flank. It was not a very well-organized movement, but there were a lot of men involved in it, and Leclerc’s men were already falling into disarray under the constant battering of mitraille.

  Dessalines grinned, and over his shoulder Maillart noticed a miserable quartet of white musicians sweating out one of his favorite martial airs, and unbelievably he thought he got a glimpse of Doctor Hébert flashing from the cover of one ajoupa to another, a roll of bandage trailing from his arm. He most definitely saw Dessalines, himself, lower a flame to a touch hole. Mitraille snapped the slender trunks of half the little trees on their hilltop. One of the musketeers dropped to the ground, clutching his knee.

  “Retreat!” Maillart saw to it someone helped the wounded man away. There was no hope for this position once cannon had been brought to bear on it, though it might be worth trying to return with their own artillery.

  Mitraille still raked the main battlefield below the fort. Returning, Maillart saw Daspir’s horse shot out from under him. He rode in. Daspir was pinned, one leg caught under his saddle and the horse’s withers, trying to pry himself loose with his sword. As Maillart reached him, the horse rolled away. Daspir’s leg must not have been too badly hurt, for he was able to scramble up behind with a little assist from Maillart’s arm.

  Excellent, Maillart thought, now I own two of these reckless puppies. He looked around but did not see Paltre. To the left of the field, the new black irregulars were enthusiastically bayoneting those of Leclerc’s troops too bewildered by the mitraille to resist in an organized way. In fact, the whole situation was fast becoming desperate. General Dugua, bleeding in two places, was being carried off the field on a stretcher. Pamphile de Lacroix had joined Leclerc, and Maillart spurred his horse in that direction. Behind, Daspir lurched off-center, then quickly regained his balance, pressing his chest into Maillart’s back.

  Morisset had made it a point of honor for Placide to carry the flag he’d captured in that last raid on Gonaives into all subsequent engagements. Sawed short for the purpose, the flagstaff could be seated securely in a long scabbard strapped to the saddle, leaving Placide’s hands free to shoot or strike. In the first charge of that morning, he’d fired no shot and struck no blow, though he’d ridden down several of the bolting Fre
nch troopers, and maybe they’d been killed by the hooves of his horse, or finished off by others riding behind him.

  When the column of fresh troops appeared from the west, Morisset had pulled his cavalry out of the battle; they rode to the shelter of the woods beyond the town to rest their horses. Placide got down and walked his mount to cool for half an hour before he let it drink. This reflexive action calmed him as much as it did his horse. He unfastened the red headcloth Guiaou had given him, mopped off his face with it, and folded it in a triangle to put in his pocket. The electric thrill of the fight still ran all through the guardsmen; the grove was heavy with the odor of their anger and sweat, mingling with the hot smell of the horses.

  Only one squadron of cavalry had entered the first charge; the second, commanded by Monpoint, waited in reserve. The two commanders watched the second French advance on the fort from the cover of the trees.

  “Which one is Leclerc?” Monpoint asked Morisset, but neither man had ever seen the French general.

  “There,” said Placide, pointing to where Leclerc had just stepped out of the ranks, to initiate the charge. Morisset grunted an acknowledgment. He shaded his eyes to squint at Leclerc where he stood with Dugua, directing the battle.

  Somehow the sight of Leclerc drained Placide of all feeling, even that uncategorizable quaver that the recent action had left in his limbs. He felt as empty as a bottle, washed and let dry. Through this emptiness, action might flow without thought. When the French charge faltered at the ditches, and Gottereau had brought his throng of armed field hands to take their share in the slaughter, Monpoint began mounting the men of his squadron for another charge.

  “Let me ride with them,” Placide said suddenly.

  Morisset looked at him, uncertain at first. Placide turned into the wind, opened his headcloth into the air that fanned back over his head, and tightened the knot on the base of his neck.