The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Maman Maig’ seemed to find nothing strange in this reply. “Vin’ pal’ou,” she said. Come here so I can talk to you.

  Paul approached, and Maman Maig’ took his head into her enormous, cushiony hands. Often she would do so when they met, and no matter how much he had grown since their last encounter, her hands always contained his head completely. He had the feeling that she could remold all the bones of his skull as she pleased, as if it were clay or bread dough.

  “Sa w gegne?” she said. What’s the matter?

  “Mwen pè pou pè mwen,” Paul said. I am afraid for my father. In stating the fear, he ceased to feel it. He understood now that any djab pursuing him would have been forced to stop outside the peristyle.

  “Wi, mwen sonje’l.” Maman Maig’ still held his head. Yes, I remember him.

  “Ou rinmin li. Li rinmin’w tou,” she told him. You love him. He loves you too.

  Paul nodded, his jaw pushing against her fingers. Maman Maig’ released his head.

  “L’ap tounen, wi,” she said. “Si Dyé vlé.”

  She touched his shoulders lightly and let him go. When Paul turned from her, he saw that Madame Claudine was sitting up cross-legged and looking at him. She did not speak, but her eyes seemed to confirm what Maman Maig’ had said. He will return if God so wills.

  As he crossed the peristyle, Paulette smiled at him and offered her hand. Paul took it and for a moment pressed it to his cheek—never mind that he was nearly nine years old. It was Paulette who had recognized him in the streets in the time of his begging, and brought him here for shelter, until Tante Elise had finally come for him.

  I will carry water for Maman Maig’, he thought happily. He knew the djab no longer followed him. He had gone out the lower gate of the hûnfor,which the djab had been unable to cross. He would bring Maman Maig’ water from the fountain of Place Montarcher. He knew this gesture would please her, though the children of the lakou got her plenty of water from a nearer source.

  The Batterie Circulaire was manned by colored gunners sent there by the General Boyer. Paul knew a couple of these men, and sometimes they would smile and wave to him when he passed below the wall, but none of them were smiling today. They were staring across the water at La Cornélie and muttering gloomily among themselves. A shallop, different from the one that had conveyed Madame Leclerc to shore, was just putting out in the direction of that ship. The shallop was heaped high with cargo and manned by blanc sailors from the fleet, who seemed to be having difficulty in their transit, though the water in the harbor was reasonably calm.

  The crowd which had received Madame Leclerc had now dispersed. Paul walked along the empty embarcadère. The tide was in, and where two waves collided in a corner of the sea wall, a column of water erupted with a noise like a cannon. Paul went on with the pleasant taste of salt on his lips and the sting of it on his cheek.

  A wagon had stopped on the embarcadère before the Customs House. The wagon was drawn by a single mule, and the driver sat stone still on the box with the reins loose in his hands. A tall woman was standing beside him, shading her eyes to look out at the harbor. At once, Paul felt an interest in her. In her posture was something of the haughtiness of Madame Claudine, but this woman had broader shoulders and stronger bones, and there was a greater air of calm the way she stood, looking fixedly at La Cornélie, though Paul could also feel that she was angry. He moved nearer, his footsteps silenced by the waves beating on the sea wall, until he was standing just below the wagon rail.

  The blanc sailors in the shallop were managing their sail in an unusually lubber-like manner, and suddenly the shallop rolled so far that it took in water over the starboard gunwale and seemed like to founder. Some of the cargo looked to have gone overboard in this mishap. A number of other small boats converged, and in this confusion the shallop slowly righted itself.

  “Trickery,” the tall woman said. “They are stealing the goods of Madame Rigaud.”

  She must have been speaking to the man on the box, but he made no reply. He sat motionless, sighting on La Cornélie through the long ears of the mule. He had a rich brown skin, darker than the woman’s, and a beard trimmed short and square. Paul felt somehow that he knew these people from long ago. It was the same feeling he’d had when he met Maman Maig’ for what he’d assumed was the first time.

  As this notion crossed his mind, the woman looked down and took him in. Her gray hair was swept back from her face in rays like the petals of a sunflower.

  “Paul,” she said, after studying him briefly. “It is Paul, I think. The son of Nanon.”

  “Yes,” said Paul. “Nanon is my mother.”

  “And your father is that blanc doctor,” the woman said. “A strange man. I remember him.”

  Paul nodded. For a moment he wondered if the mention of his father would allow the djab to recover his trail. But his mind remained tranquil as he looked up at this tall colored woman.

  “I am Madame Fortier,” she said. “And here is my husband, Fortier, who has no conversation. You were at our house in Dondon with your mother, long ago. You were much smaller then, but still I know you.” She stretched down her hand. “Come up here where I can talk to you.”

  Paul took her hand and pulled himself up onto the wagon. Madame Fortier sat down on the box, tucking in her skirt to make room for him.

  “Do you know what is happening out there on the water?” she said.

  “No,” said Paul. He looked at the shallop, which was again under way for La Cornélie.

  “General Rigaud is on that ship,” Madame Fortier said. “The blanc Leclerc has had him arrested on some pretext and now he will be deported to France. That little boat has all the goods which Madame Rigaud brought out to start her life here again with her family. Those blanc sailors have pretended to capsize the boat so they can say that the goods were lost under the sea, but in reality they have already stolen them.”

  Madame Fortier took a deep breath while Paul considered this information. “Rigaud and his family will go to France as paupers now. That is how the blancs are, always. They pile trickery onto their treachery, and then more betrayals on top of that. And do not think that they are finished. No, they have only just begun.”

  “You talk too much to a little boy,” Fortier said, without turning to look at them. His gaze was still centered between the ears of the mule.

  “He is small, but he has intelligence,” Madame Fortier said. “His father has very much intelligence, however peculiar he may be, and his mother . . . no fool. You would see it in his face if you looked at him.”

  “So much the worse,” Fortier said, without turning his head. Instead of hostility, Paul heard a dry hint of amusement in his voice. And he liked how Madame Fortier spoke of his father in the present tense. It made him feel that Maman Maig’ ’s prediction would work out favorably.

  “We took no part in the quarrel between Rigaud and Toussaint,” Madame Fortier said. “But it is difficult not to become entangled in such complications.”

  In his mind, Paul was fretting over a few unclear memories aroused by her mention of a house at Dondon. He could remember coffee trees, on a steep terrace. The freckled man had brought them there, he thought.

  “There is no peace in our mountains now,” Madame Fortier said. “Not at Dondon and not at Vallière. Neither the blancs nor Toussaint’s people seem to be able to hold either one of those places for more than a week. First it is Sans-Souci, and then the blancs climb up from Fort Liberté, and then perhaps it is Christophe and then more blancs coming out from Le Cap . . . well, it is very troublesome.” She waved her hand. “Most of our workers have gone off with Sans-Souci, and the rest have been frightened away by the blancs, or conscripted by them, one or the other . . .”

  “Sans-Souci will never give in to them,” Fortier said unexpectedly.

  “No,” said Madame Fortier. “He won’t. But Sans-Souci does not know how many blancs there are in France. If enough of them are willing to come here, they may kill
him.”

  “Toussaint did not know how many blancs there were in France either,” Fortier said.

  “No, he didn’t,” Madame Fortier said. “But now who is putting too many words in the ears of this little boy? I don’t think I have ever heard you talk so much, before company.”

  She turned to Paul again. “I have not been to France myself, but one of my sons was there. Jean-Michel, though more likely you knew him as Choufleur—I can’t think that you remember him very fondly, if you remember him at all. He told me there were more blancs in France than there are trees on this island, and France is only one of their countries. You see that many of these blanc soldiers were sold to the French from other lands of the blancs. There is one called Germany and another called Poland.”

  But Paul’s thoughts were now skating away from her talk. Choufleur. That had certainly been the name of the freckled man: Choufleur. He had forgotten that name a long time ago and did not want to remember it now.

  “Choufleur could not keep out of the quarrel between Rigaud and Toussaint,” Madame Fortier said. “He did not choose the winner’s part, and so . . . he will not trouble you or your mother any more. You don’t have to think about him.”

  Paul looked at her. She had tracked his thoughts more closely than any djab Caco had ever described.

  “Well, you can close your mouth now,” Madame Fortier said. “It happens that my son owned a house in the Rue Vaudreuil, and since it is difficult to stay in the mountains, we are going to see how much of it may still be standing, after the fire. My husband does not care for town life”— she laid her hand on Fortier’s back—“but maybe we will only stay a little while. Where are you living?”

  Paul gave her the address of Tante Elise’s house.

  “So,” Madame Fortier said. “We may as well take you there—it is not so very far out of our way.” She looked at Fortier, who expressed no opinion.

  “But just now I am only going over there,” Paul said, and pointed to the Governor’s house, which was only a couple of blocks from the Customs, up from the waterfront.

  Madame Fortier arched her eyebrows at him.

  “Mami is there now, I think,” Paul said. “With Tante Elise, and Madame Isabelle Cigny.”

  “Well, indeed,” said Madame Fortier. “That is an interesting connection. You had better go and exploit it. Go see if your ears can hold any more.”

  Paul nodded and scrambled down from the wagon. Madame Fortier reached down to squeeze his hand.

  “You are welcome to come and see me,” she said. “Your mother too.” Her face grew momentarily grave. “Or maybe it would be better that I call on you.”

  Paul nodded again as she let go his hand. The back of his head felt like the Fortiers were looking at it as he walked up from the Customs, toward the new gate of the Governor’s house, which had just recently come from the blacksmiths. But when he looked over his shoulder, the mule and wagon had gone. There was something . . . his mother would not want to go to that house, though not because of Madame Fortier. But by good luck he knew the guard at the gate of the Governor’s house, and he was able to leave this bothersome thought outside it.

  He could hear the voices of the other children in the inner courtyard, and he went toward the sound. There he found the smaller ones, François and Gabriel and Héloïse, playing with Dermide around the rectangular stone tank that held the turtles. Paul had heard a story that these turtles had lived through the fire. Though the force of the heat had parched the water out of the tank, the turtles had found enough mud to hide in at the bottom. But other people said that those turtles had been baked in their shells and that these were new ones, brought from somewhere else.

  Paul watched Dermide—the little prince, as he’d overheard Sophie and Robert mockingly call him. As a prince might have done, he wore a red sash over a blue velvet suit that must be very uncomfortable in the tropical heat. His face was patchy red and sweating. And yet he watched François, who was walking the rim of the turtle tank as if on a tightrope, with a certain craftiness. When François came to the corner and began to turn, Dermide lunged and pushed him in.

  Paul hurried to see that his little brother was all right: François had landed on his knees, but the tank was shallow and though the splash had wet and dirtied him to the neck, he was much more offended than hurt. His eyes were angry, but François’s anger was never very effectual. Paul shifted his attention to Gabriel, who was a little smaller than his twin, and did not resemble François at all, or anyone else in Paul’s family. Though he was only two years old, his movements were more smoothly organized even than those of the older children. He strolled toward Dermide, who was twice his size, and shoved him so pointedly in his blue velvet belly that Dermide toppled over onto his back, landing hard enough to knock the wind out of him. By the time he found the breath to shriek, Gabriel had distanced himself from the scene. He’d taken Héloïse by her pale hand and led her over to investigate the turtles, though they’d all tucked up inside their shells at the commotion.

  Paul looked quickly toward the adults, who sat around several little iron tables on a tiled terrace shaded by an arbor. His mother, who was sitting a little apart from the white women, raised her head enough to see that François was not seriously damaged and that Paul was near him. The pretty woman with the green parakeet on her shoulder must be Madame Leclerc, but she was too involved in her conversation with Madame Isabelle to give Dermide’s predicament more than a passing glance. It was Sophie who, miming a grown-up sigh, got up from the table where she sat with Robert and came to help Dermide to his feet and stop his crying.

  Arm over Dermide’s plump shoulders, Sophie led him through the passage into the outer garden. Paul helped François out of the tank and dried and cleaned him the best he could, then took him in the same direction. There was a faint sooty smell in the passage but since much of the Governor’s house was built of stone it had survived the burning better than most buildings, and Madame Leclerc had devoted much energy to restoring it, so that the only differences Paul really noticed were in the decoration. The smaller trees of the outer garden had been destroyed, but Madame Leclerc had sent soldiers to dig up a lot of young palms in the countryside and planted them here as replacements. The great trunks of the older trees were scorched, but they lived still and had begun to put out new leaves. François and Dermide and Gabriel and Héloïse scattered and hid from each other among the new palms, whose long fronds were whispering now, in the cooling evening breeze.

  “I’ll watch them,” Sophie said, officiously enough to irritate Paul. Then he noticed that Robert had also come into the garden, so he left them alone and went back inside, slipping quietly along the covered arcade at the perimeter of the inner courtyard. The adults were all busy in different conversations and did not notice him.

  Monsieur Xavier Tocquet, whom Paul did not address as Tonton no matter how married he was to Tante Elise, sat with General Boyer at one of the iron tables; he had just offered the general one of his black cheroots, and Boyer had accepted it, but held it unlit, staring at it moodily as he rolled it in his fingers.

  “It was well worth the trouble to bring him here,” Boyer said, “to send him away again with such an insult.”

  “And the cause?” Tocquet lit his own cheroot and blew out a flower of fragrant smoke. Paul recognized, from what Madame Fortier had told him, that they must be talking of General Rigaud, aboard La Cornélie. He turned toward the wall behind him, where there was an interesting old map of the town to look at, but kept an ear bent on the conversation.

  “Why,” said Boyer, “it is Laplume at the bottom of it all. It was he who claimed that Rigaud would raise rebellion on the Grande Anse, beginning in the region of Les Cayes.”

  “But Rigaud never got farther south than Saint Marc since he returned this time,” Tocquet said.

  “No,” said Boyer. “Leclerc—the Captain-General did not trust him enough to send him back to his own country. But Rigaud was not going to raise any
rebellion against the French. He has proved his faith to France plainly long ago—and he would join any effort against Toussaint.”

  “That much is certain,” Tocquet said.

  “Yes,” said Boyer. “Well, you know that Laplume had taken over Rigaud’s house at Les Cayes, with all its furnishings.”

  “I didn’t know it, but go on.”

  “It is true. And Rigaud was so assiduous in petitioning for the return of his property that Laplume wanted to get him sent out of the country. For that he raised this rumor against Rigaud.”

  “And Leclerc accepted this tale with no inquiry?”

  “Judge by the result,” said Boyer. He hesitated. “The style of this action is as distressing as the substance. The Captain-General told Rigaud that they were going together to the Grande Anse by sea. Rigaud boarded La Cornélie in all confidence, in the harbor of Saint Marc, and only then was notified that he was a prisoner. Leclerc had gone aboard another ship—he has never faced the man he accuses.”

  “Ah,” said Tocquet. “These developments must be encouraging for Pétion, and yourself, and the others who sailed on La Vertu.”

  “The proverb says that virtue is its own reward.” Boyer colored slightly. His brocade coat collar seemed to make his neck more stiff. “I have carried out the order punctiliously—a soldier has no private thoughts. Madame Rigaud and her children are being sent aboard La Cornélie even as we speak.”

  “Of course,” Tocquet said. “No one would think of questioning your loyalty.” He leaned forward to light Boyer’s cheroot. “I have no part in this military, and I want none.”

  Boyer puffed. “You remind me of another matter,” he said. “There is rebellion on La Tortue—a rising in favor of Toussaint. The garrison at Port-de-Paix is . . . for the moment it is not well placed to subdue this trouble, since there is also unrest at Trois Rivières.”

  “And so?”

  “They say you are very familiar with La Tortue,” Boyer said. “If you would, perhaps, accept a commission . . .”