The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Go, then,” Morisset said. “Do you need a fresh horse?”

  Placide shook his head. “No, mine has rested.” Though the bay he rode was not Bel Argent, it did come from Toussaint’s personal stable, and Placide thought it stouter than most of the honor guard’s horses, though the guard was generally well mounted. Morisset stretched out a hand and brushed the knot of the headcloth, letting his hand slip down from Placide’s shoulder as Placide trotted away.

  They entered the field at a gallop from the Grand Cahos Road. Placide, a length behind Monpoint, managed the staff of the flag with his left hand and the reins with his right. At the first shock he seated the staff in the scabbard, switched hands on the reins, and drew the sword Napoleon had given him. His eye had tightened on Leclerc from the moment they rode into view. Later he would reason through his motives: how Toussaint always took care to blame Leclerc personally for this war, rather than the French nation or its leader. How strangely suitable it would be all the same for Leclerc to be struck down with the weapon Napoleon’s treacherous hand had placed in Placide’s. But at this moment there was no such notion in his head; there was nothing at all, only the wind flowing in and out of the bottle.

  Maillart was a dozen yards away when the little group surrounding Leclerc disappeared in a cloud of dust. At first he thought the Captain-General had been directly hit by a cannonball or an exploding shell. Later on it turned out that the ball had struck somewhat short and thrown up a fist-sized stone into Leclerc’s groin; not a lethal injury but more than enough to flatten him. Daspir picked him out first where he lay, and scrambled down from Maillart’s horse, landing at a run. He’d managed to hang on to his sword amid all the confusion when his own horse had been shot down. Now the trumpets blared from the fort behind them and were answered again from the tree line across the way, and already the silver-helmed horsemen of Toussaint’s guard were thundering down on them. Daspir had learned to flinch at this sight. He forced himself to keep going. Leclerc lay foetally curled, breathless, clutching his groin, his pale face smudged with dust. Maillart fought to control his dancing horse. He could not see General Lacroix anywhere. He turned Monpoint’s blade with his own as the black commander barreled past him, thinking, Damn it! Remember all the rum we’ve shared? The next rider carried Maillart’s own flag, and he thought, Riau, Riau; it was what he had dreaded, and Riau often wore such a red rag into battle, but the face under the tight band of the headcloth belonged to Placide Louverture.

  Maillart was frozen. He would not strike the boy. But Placide was riding for Leclerc, whom Daspir had assisted first to his knees, then, unsteadily, to his feet, as Placide rode down on him with his head floating empty under the red cloth and his whole being poured into his right arm, the force and direction of the blow. Daspir just managed to get his own sword up, awkwardly angling his blade above his own head, like raising an umbrella in a rainstorm. Placide’s falling blade snagged on Daspir’s hilt, and Daspir, with his arm crooked over his head, unbalanced by Leclerc’s weight on the other side, felt the muscle tear behind his right shoulder in the instant before Placide’s horse struck him in the back and knocked him winded into the dirt.

  Look at him ride, Maillart was thinking, imagining that Toussaint would feel the same surprised pleasure if he could see his son now. Placide had managed to turn his horse in an unbelievably short space, the animal’s hindquarters scrubbing the ground, then thrusting up again into the charge. Unconsciously, Maillart spurred up Eclair. He’d have to meet Placide this time, now that Daspir had been knocked out of the action and Leclerc stood bewildered, dust-blinded, no weapon in his empty hands, with Placide bearing down on him, admirably single-minded on his target. As Maillart recognized that he himself would be inevitably too slow, too late, the cavalry commander Dalton appeared from the dust cloud and snatched Leclerc across his saddlebow like a sack of meal (due to the nature of his hurt, the Captain-General would be unable to bestride a horse for many days). Placide’s sword flashed through the space where Leclerc had been a split-second before, with such force and penetration that the point hacked a divot from the ground.

  Maillart rode by. He could not wheel his horse in twice the time it took Placide—the boy was going to catch him from behind. But instead Placide rode past, ignoring Maillart, bent on Dalton as he carried Leclerc away. All of the French were routed again. Daspir popped up under Maillart’s horse, spitting a mouthful of grit. When Maillart caught his right arm to help him up, Daspir’s face went a stark, cold white. He managed to scramble up behind Maillart, then fainted dead away from the pain as soon as he was seated.

  To his surprise, Maillart saw that he was overtaking Placide now. He did not raise his weapon. It was too difficult, when he had to hold the unconscious Daspir on by clamping the arm wrapped around his waist. He passed Placide. They were running, all the French were in full flight; they would not stop before they reached the ferry landing at the river below the town. Placide was losing ground on them, Maillart could see over his shoulder. Now only a splotch of the red rag was visible, now only the flag high on its staff. Then he was gone. At last Placide’s concentration admitted the voice of Monpoint, shouting for him to slow down, turn back. He had too much outdistanced the rest of his squadron, and now the bay was flagging. He drew on the reins and walked the horse, still staring after the stampeded French army. The only thought his mind would hold was that, after all, he had been wrong not to have changed horses.

  The two trumpeters and the drummer were wind-broken and exhausted from blowing and beating through the whole day’s fighting. Gaston, however, sat up crosslegged like a grasshopper, still bowing his fiddle through slow, melancholy, country airs that scarcely varied one to the next. The noise was nerve-wracking, but it did mask the screams of the men of the Ninth, who had been turned over to Lamartinière after their capture.

  Bienvenu had passed a hard day in the fighting, and the doctor excused him from nursing duties, that he might go to watch the tortures which were this evening’s entertainment for the troops. During the day the doctor had got some nursing help from Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, when she was not occupied by sniping on the wounded French below the walls, using a long rifle much like the doctor’s, with a skill all the men applauded. Yet when she nursed, there was a forcefulness in her calm that seemed to make a man stop bleeding at her touch.

  This evening, however, Marie-Jeanne had gone to join her husband. Encouraged by Dessalines, himself somewhat irritated by a chest wound he’d acquired from falling against a stake, Lamartinière was visiting the worst punishments anyone could imagine on the men of the Ninth who’d turned their coats to fight for the French. From all this, the doctor had averted his eye, but Descourtilz spied on the proceedings for a little while, then crept back to the doctor’s post to whisper the details: “The first was skinned alive, then they tore out his heart and drank his blood; the second was castrated and had his guts pulled out of his belly into the fire while he still lived; they broke all the bones of the third and then—”

  “Shut up, for Christ’s sake,” the doctor said. “Be quiet and help me with these bandages.”

  Descourtilz left off his narrative and joined in the work. They had organized a hospital shelter along the north wall of the powder magazine. The area was easiest to protect from the sun, and if Dessalines did blow up the fort, the end for the wounded would at least be quick.

  At the opposite end of the fort, most of the garrison clustered around the men who were being tortured. Lamartinière had taken a high tone, at the beginning: “I want to have the satisfaction of destroying, myself, these miserable traitors who’ve served in the ranks of the French, against the liberty of their brothers.” But as he moved into the work, a blood rage transformed him; he ceased to resemble his civilized self. The throng of men blocked the doctor’s view, though if he glanced in the direction of the moaning, he could see the red flickering glow of the fire at the center of the ring. The crowd expanded or contracted, shuddered or rippled, s
houting or sighing its appreciation of each fresh extravagance of cruelty. Above it all, the violin whined.

  “How do you turn your back on such monstrosity?” Descourtilz finally said.

  “It won’t be altered by my looking at it,” the doctor said. The work was finished; he sat on the ground with his back against the rough stone wall of the magazine. A few stars gleamed above the shattered saplings on the hill beyond the wall. He scratched at the edge of his head wound, under the bandage.

  “In ninety-one I was prisoner in the camps of Grande Rivière,” he said. “What I saw there is most likely beyond the imagining of anyone here. And I missed being done away with here as narrowly as you, down there in the town . . .” He hesitated. “In the end I think there’s no good facing it. I know it’s there. But I don’t want my mind filled with the images.”

  The violin struck a sour note, then limped back into tune. The throng around the torturers sucked up a very deep breath.

  “They are all savages,” Descourtilz said bitterly.

  “They are a people of extremes,” the doctor said. At that moment he believed that he might rip someone’s heart out himself if the action would win him a drink of rum. He felt that Descourtilz’s assertion was wrong, but it was difficult to articulate his reasons.

  “When this festivity is over,” he said, “they’ll be as mild as little children, most of them.”

  “Not Dessalines,” said Descourtilz, and paused. “I know what you mean—but isn’t that the most horrible thing of all?”

  “No,” said the doctor. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Descourtilz merely grunted, then stretched out on his side. A few minutes later, Gaston left off his fiddling. It was finished; the men were drifting away from the embers of the fire. Bienvenu came slinking along the wall toward the doctor’s ajoupa, a little abashed, like a dog that’s done mischief.

  “Gegne clairin,” he said, offering a gourd. There’s rum.

  The doctor took the gourd with an inexpressible gratitude. After his first gulp he discovered his fingers had got all sticky with blood from brushing Bienvenu’s hand. Quickly he scrubbed them off in the dirt. Bienvenu had gone to sleep instantly, peacefully; he lay on his back and snored. The doctor took another, more contemplative swallow of rum and weighed the gourd in the palm of his hand, guessing it to be half full at least. Carefully he stoppered it and put it out of sight, in the straw bag where he kept his healing herbs.

  Though he was exhausted, he could not sleep. Maybe it was the blood smell steaming from Bienvenu that disturbed him. For half an hour he twisted one way or another on his mat. At last he sat up and took one more short sip of rum, then began walking along the wall in the direction of the gate. The stars were now brighter overhead, and he could pick out a few constellations: the Corona Borealis, Hydra, the Crab. By the last coals of the bonfire, Dessalines and Lamartinière sat muttering. The doctor turned his face from them as he passed. The rum put a distance between him and the idea that had come to him on the mat: he was not very likely to leave this situation alive.

  At an embrasure beside the gate he stopped and looked out along the cannon barrel. Under the rounded roof of stars he could discern some indistinct movement among the hundreds of corpses scattered over the field. His glasses were smudged, but when he took them off to clean them they slipped through his numb fingers, rang off the cannon barrel, and went spinning away. When he leaned out to snatch for them, he overbalanced and was falling too, whirling, nauseated . . . he saw the glasses shatter against a stone. Then he was on his feet again, suffused in the warm smell of Nanon, and Nanon was handing him his glasses.

  The doctor blinked and caught his breath. He steadied himself against the wall. Where he’d thought he’d seen Nanon stood the commander Magny, looking at him with mild interest or concern. His glasses were in his hand, unbroken. He polished them on the hem of his shirt and put them on.

  “Dogs.”

  Was it himself or Magny who had spoken, or maybe the sentry who had just joined them from the gate? In any case the dogs were there, great bristling, brindled casques out of the mountains, packs of them, moving among the cadavers to feed.

  “It is not acceptable,” Magny said. He looked at the doctor, as if for confirmation, but the doctor could not draw his eyes from the view. In the bluish light of the icy stars, the wild dogs hunched their shoulders and lowered their heads and jerked their jaws to loosen and gulp cold chunks of human flesh.

  “We’ll put an end to this.” Magny turned and muttered something to the sentry. Ten minutes later they were leading a sortie from the fort, to drive away the dogs and pile the bodies between stacks of wood for burning.

  29

  In the days since the battle at Ravine à Couleuvre, Sergeant Aloyse had adopted a more tender attitude toward Captain Guizot. Before, he’d treated the captain with the sort of kindness a grown man might show to a boy at risk of hurting himself. But since Guizot had dragged Aloyse clear of the wreckage of the exploding powder magazine, the sergeant mixed a measure of respect with his concern. Indeed, Guizot found that his various prodigies of activity that day, however slim their actual result, had won him admiration from more than a few. His orders were obeyed with more alacrity by all his men, and General Rochambeau, when he addressed his remarks to Guizot, no longer alluded to the escape of Xavier Tocquet.

  Their instructions were to proceed inland, across the Grand Cahos mountain range to the town of Mirebalais: a key, so it was told, to controlling the interior. Toussaint might retreat to this pocket of the mountains, some had speculated. It took them two days, however, to begin the march. There were enough French dead to be buried that Rochambeau was moved to lie about their number in his report, and time was needed to get the worst wounded in condition to be evacuated to Gonaives, and the more lightly wounded fit enough to march with the division.

  All symptoms of the cold Guizot had carried down from the rainy plateau disappeared the day after the battle, but his arrow wound from Grande Rivière swelled and began to fester. All through the day, the puncture leaked a putrid matter into its bandage. By nightfall the captain was usually somewhat feverish. Sergeant Aloyse cared for him and helped him conceal the worsening injury. The chief medical officer of Rochambeau’s division had succumbed to fever on the march from Saint Raphael, and his instruments were now manipulated by a man more skilled as barber than surgeon, if one judged by the ugly stumps of his amputations.

  They limped into the Cahos mountains, hindered by inaccurate maps and unreliable, perhaps treacherous, guides. Maybe no map could ever convey the interminable twisting and spiraling of the jungle pathways that always only revealed another more demanding ascent beyond the peak just mastered. As for the guides, all they ever would say was “It is a little way farther.” Still, it was a relief to leave the stinking battlefield in the ravine, where vultures still worked to pick the corpses from their shallow graves in the loose gravel of the shoals. And though it was cold where they camped on the heights, the incidence of fever lessened as they climbed. If not for his fear of losing his arm, Guizot might have felt optimistic.

  Was Toussaint ahead of them, flying to Mirebalais? Guizot had actually brushed his sleeve, on the desert plain of Périsse. But their intelligence was none too reliable—they hardly knew the whereabouts of the other French divisions. The switchbacks of the trails twisting through the Cahos mountains left their compass needles spinning beyond reason. The endless self-resembling turnings of their movement were punctuated by ambushes every so often—quick skirmishes offered by mobs of half-naked, barefoot blacks, sometimes led by men in more regular uniform and sometimes not. These were Dessalines’s men, was the rumored report, though the notorious black general did not reveal himself in person. Other rumors told that Dessalines had engaged with General Hardy on the slopes of the mountain called Nolo, and been beaten back eastward toward Mirebalais, but Rochambeau’s scouts could not certainly confirm those rumors.

  The ambushes and skirmishes
did small damage so far as casualties were counted, and yet they wore away at the morale of Rochambeau’s men—to be picked, constantly harassed, by an enemy that would not stand to fight. Guizot was increasingly aware of how rapidly this army of shadows always parting before them closed to reoccupy the territory over which Rochambeau had just passed. He knew Sergeant Aloyse was aware of that also, though the two of them did not discuss it.

  Toussaint was not waiting for them at Mirebalais; not even a cat had been left alive in that place. A pall of smoke hung over the cleft in the mountains, above the pocket of river valley where the town lay in its ruins. Miles before they’d reached the place, they knew they’d find no shelter there. The plantations too had been put to the torch for a half-mile radius around the town. They entered at sundown, eyes burning, coughing from the lingering smoke. Guizot had tied a dirty kerchief over his face; it soon grew black around the nostrils, but it did little to block the foul smell of his own festering wound. Oddly, there were no human corpses in the town, though the wells had been stopped with the carcasses of draft animals.

  They camped a quarter-mile upriver, on the right bank of the Artibonite. Aloyse hauled water and worked on Guizot’s arm with hot compresses, until the captain had slipped into a feverish sleep. In his dream he saw the hurt arm blackened to the shoulder, rot spreading across his chest to corrupt his heart. But when he woke the wound looked little worse than it had the day before and the fever had slackened; his mind was clear. A messenger from the Captain-General had reached Rochambeau at dawn: they were to move northwest again, along the right bank of the Artibonite toward the coast. They’d find the enemy brought to bay at last when they joined Leclerc at Petite Rivière.

  With that envoy came the news of the massacre at Habitation Chirry; it was there that Dessalines had marched the whites of Mirebalais to be butchered. Later that morning their line of march traversed a ridge that gave them a long view of pale mutilated bodies scattered over the burnt stubble of what had perhaps been a cornfield, three hundred dead of every age and sex with the vultures among them still more numerous. Rochambeau would not stop for a burial detail, and the men did not protest his urgency, but tramped on doggedly, burning eyes fixed ahead. They marched for an hour after dark, but when the sky clouded over they were obliged to camp, near enough to Verrettes that the rot-stink of that other field of massacre reached them from across the river, borne on the south wind, mingling in Guizot’s nostrils with the rot of his own arm.