The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Ah,” she said, looking up at the doctor. “I had been wondering if you would come.”

  “I didn’t know we were expected.” The doctor hopped off his donkey and followed Paul in through the gate. “I hope we do not trouble you. It was a fancy of my son’s.”

  “An inspiration,” said Madame Fortier. “You are quite welcome. Though we are in disorder here. At this hour I have only water to offer you.”

  “We wish for no more,” said the doctor, whose throat was in fact rather dry from the dust the crowds had raised around the market.

  “Agnès!” Madame Fortier raised her voice. “Poté nou dlo tannpri!”

  In a moment a slender girl of perhaps thirteen appeared with a blue-tinted bottle and a couple of glasses, which Madame Fortier took from her hands.

  “My niece, Agnès,” she said. “I present Paul Hébert, the son of Nanon and of this gentleman.”

  Agnès stood poised, light as a deer, her lips slightly parted. Her hair hung in loose waves around her honey-colored face. She was meltingly pretty, the doctor took note.

  “What are you looking at?” Madame Fortier said. “Go on—take him into the garden.”

  Agnès plucked at Paul’s wrist, withdrew her hand quickly with a laugh, then covered her mouth with her fingers, looking abashed. With a glance at his father, Paul trotted after her, around the corner of the house, where a gang of carpenters was raising the frame of the roof above the second story. The lowering sun silhouetted them sharply—one turned the point of his beard toward the doctor and raised a hand. Uncertain, the doctor returned the wave.

  “You will excuse Fortier, I am sure.” Madame Fortier squinted at the carpenters. “One hopes to achieve the roof, before the rains begin. But come,” she motioned. “There is shade.”

  The doctor followed her to three low chairs grouped under an almond tree in the corner of the wall. The trunk was scorched but the leaves were full—it had not been so much damaged in the fire. As if unconsciously, Madame Fortier spilled a little water from the bottle onto the struggling grass before she poured their glasses full and gave one to the doctor. She set the bottle on the empty chair between them.

  The doctor sipped his water, clean and sweet and just a little lemony. From behind the house the voices of the children rose and fell. They were out of sight beyond the garden shrubbery. The doctor felt nothing at all of what he had expected here.

  “It will not be so opulent as when you knew it before,” Madame Fortier said. “We lack for time, and hands, and material—well, all that you know.” She swung her hand in an airy circle toward the clatter of reconstruction of other houses beyond the wall. Within this enclosure, the plan of the house which the Fortiers were restoring was much the same as it had been before, though only a quarter of the ground floor had its solid walls; the rest was a skeletal framework. But—he had expected to be smothered in these images, and instead he had to force himself to re-create them—there he had entered, and there was the gambling table, where Choufleur presided over the cards, and there the spot nearby where Nanon stood, the chain locked around her neck drooling links to the floor, looking through the doctor with her dead eyes, without a ghost of recognition.

  “The place held evil memories for me too,” Madame Fortier said. “In my youth, I was much mistreated here by my son’s father.”

  “The Sieur de Maltrot,” the doctor said. “I wonder that you should return here.”

  “With all the fighting, one cannot peacefully remain either at Vallière or at Dondon,” she said. “Besides, I own it, since my son is dead. I own it with everything it holds. Sa nou wé ak sa nou pa wé yo.” All we see and all we don’t.

  The doctor turned to look into her face. “You’ve done something here. It’s not what I expected.”

  “I asked for the mambo from Morne Calvaire to send away the most troubled spirits.” Madame Fortier took out her short black pipe and packed it from a small drawstring bag of tobacco. “Those who remain are more beneficent. We offer them water, no rum or blood.”

  The doctor nodded, watching her light the pipe. “It does feel peaceful,” he admitted.

  “Yes,” said Madame Fortier. “One hears that you mean to kill that Captain Paltre.”

  “News of my business seems to travel widely.”

  Hammers clattered on the roof tree, then stopped. The doctor looked toward a cloud of blue butterflies hovering above the shrubs that closed the garden.

  “It surprises me a little, I suppose,” she said, twin plumes of smoke streaming from her nostrils. “You would not kill my son, though you had the chance, and though he surely would have killed you. And he had done you many injuries—he did his best to destroy Paul, and almost did destroy Nanon.” She smiled absently, then drew again on her pipe. “I liked it that you would not kill my son, though were I in your place I probably would have killed him. And he was going to die anyway, that was sure.”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “He was killed by Dessalines.” He’d been himself a reluctant witness to that action.

  “I know it,” said Madame Fortier. “But why then will you kill this Captain Paltre?”

  “There are certain injuries which can only be washed out in blood.”

  “Why, you might have had that precept from me.” Madame Fortier laughed cheerfully, and blew out another wreath of bluish smoke. “But consider fire—fire too can purify. You see, the walls here have no memory. There are not even any more walls.”

  The doctor said nothing. In part he thought that she was right, but there was a knot in him that refused her meaning.

  Paul’s head popped into view around the corner of the house. Then came Agnès, chasing him, laughing. They both disappeared between a huge hibiscus in the garden.

  “He is prospering, your boy,” Madame Fortier said. “Have you thought of his future?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He will not marry anyone on the order of Héloïse Cigny, you know. Sophie perhaps, but there the kinship is too close for comfort.”

  “He’s eight years old,” the doctor said, concealing his amazement. He’d never have thought Madame Fortier observed such details of his household—or that she had the opportunity to do so. “I can’t say I’ve felt pressed about such questions.”

  “The years go quickly. And the difference between him and Agnès will shrink as they grow older.”

  “Why, you do us a great honor there,” the doctor said, feeling a blush spread from his face to his throat. “And certainly, the girl is charming, at this glimpse.”

  “She will also have a little property.”

  “Well. There is time enough for all that.”

  “Except that tomorrow you may be dead.” She tapped the doctor on the forearm. “The whole world knows what a marksman you are, but if BonDyé should withdraw his favor, your shot may fail and his succeed.”

  “Of course,” said the doctor. “We are none of us promised tomorrow. But I wonder that you should be so concerned for Captain Paltre.”

  Madame Fortier laughed much louder than before. “I have no concern for that blanc at all. The person who concerns me is Nanon. You must not think that you are doing this for her. Neither you nor I have any notion what men came to this house when Choufleur held her here. You do not know their numbers or their names, and you could not possibly kill them all.”

  “No,” said the doctor, feeling the knot of his anger tighten and bulge. “But when I have killed this one, the others will be disposed to silence.”

  “That is one way of looking at it,” Madame Fortier said. “Perhaps not the best.” She knocked out her pipe on the leg of her chair and stood up. When the doctor rose, she offered him her hand.

  “My son burned Nanon right down to the ground,” she said. “And still she came back greener than before. I know you had a hand in her survival. Don’t leave her lonely now.”

  Riding with Paul to return the donkeys to Morne Calvaire, the doctor went adrift in an inner fog. Again he saw th
e swirling mists of La Fossette at dawn, the only other day he’d fought a duel. At the moment he’d first confronted Choufleur he’d believed Nanon was lost to him forever. When, after all, she’d returned to him, he’d been so drunk with happiness he could not think of harming anyone. He’d fired his shots into the air, while Choufleur, by luck or the grace of God, had missed him. But now he did not feel at all the same.

  The donkeys delivered, he and Paul returned on foot toward the Cigny house. At this late hour of the afternoon, clouds had gathered again over Morne du Cap and were thickening over the south end of the harbor. The wind was swirling and stirring the dust, and people were emptying off of the streets, though in the end it probably would not rain. As they turned into the last block, the quartet of young captains was approaching from the opposite direction. At that, the doctor’s hackles rose.

  Michau had opened the door for them. The doctor gave Paul a little nudge.

  “Get inside.”

  “But where are you going?” Paul turned on the threshold, raising his ivory face.

  “Nowhere,” said the doctor. “Go in now. Your mother is waiting.” That last was an invention, but Paul did go in. The doctor thumbed the string of his medical macoute off of his shoulder and passed it to Michau as he shut the door. Then he stepped into the middle of the street, running his hand around his belt to assure the readiness of his pistols.

  “Wait!” called Guizot. “We only want to talk to you.”

  “I’m no assassin,” the doctor said. “Speak your mind. I did not expect you before tomorrow morning, that is all.”

  Guizot’s heart shrank at that declaration. He had doubted the hope of his peacemaking project all day. The doctor had given him no encouragement during the coach ride to the hospital, and Guizot had not learned anything at all from Maillart. Though once he’d seen him, from a distance, walking across the Place d’Armes, it seemed the major did not hear his call, or had even intentionally ignored it. At last he and Cyprien and Daspir had prevailed upon Paltre to make this visit, though without assurance of how he would be received. Unfavorably, as it looked now. But it was a little late to withdraw. Guizot exchanged a quick glance with Cyprien and together they urged Paltre a pace or two ahead.

  “Doctor Hébert,” Paltre began stiffly. If there were more words, they had caught in his throat. The doctor studied him in silence. Severe hangover would have been his first diagnosis. The scab where the stove wood had scraped his cheekbone was very dark against his greenish pale skin, his eyes were hollow, and he was sweating a nauseous aroma of stale rum.

  “Doctor Hébert,” Paltre repeated. “Allow me to present my most—”

  “My most humble,” Cyprien prompted from a pace behind.

  “—my most humble apologies for my heedless speech of yesterday afternoon. Allow me, I—I—”

  “I beg you,” muttered Cyprien, looking uneasily up at the Cigny house.

  “—I beg you, allow me to recall those words, to swallow them as if they had never been spoken.”

  The doctor sustained his passionless stare. He could not find the tight coil of his anger. In its place was only a draining fatigue, a deep weariness of the whole situation.

  “As my excuse, I must plead mal de mer, the seasickness from which I often suffer, and which did plague me on the sail from La Tortue, along with the exhaustion of a long campaign—all that must have confused my senses, so that I mistook your lady wife for someone altogether different, who wholly lacks her modesty, her chastity, her grace. Far it would have been from me to injure your wife’s reputation, whether in word or thought or action—”

  “I accept your apology.”

  The voice came from above. Both the doctor and Paltre looked up sharply. Nanon stood on the balcony, with Isabelle and Elise on either side, each woman framed by a narrow arched doorway behind her. The spiral of the evening breeze loosened strands of their hair and fluttered the hems and sleeves of their garments.

  “Madame Hébert,” Paltre said. His eyes darted anxiously among the three women. A blend of hatred and fear fumed out of his pores, with the stale rum. “It is most gracious of you,” he choked out.

  He bowed to the women, then turned to the doctor, holding out his hand. The doctor stared at it till it wilted.

  “Your apology has been accepted,” he said to Paltre. “You may go.”

  When Paltre’s hand dropped, it settled on his sword hilt. His Adam’s apple pumped in his throat. For a moment the doctor willed him to draw. But Cyprien and Daspir closed in on either side of Paltre and brushed his hand free of his weapon.

  “Come on,” said Cyprien. “It’s over.”

  Paltre turned and walked away between his two companions. Guizot lingered for a moment, looking at the doctor, who finally acknowledged him with a nod and a half-smile. He understood that Guizot must have put some effort into this reconciliation, and maybe it was better to end it so.

  Nanon now stood alone on the balcony, her hair stringing loose from her chignon and blowing across her face in the dampening wind. Perhaps Paul had sensed something and gone to fetch her, the doctor thought. He went indoors and climbed to join her. The knot of his anger had been sundered, but he was not sure what it left him to say. She faced him, her brown eyes warm and wild. The wind blew her loose gown tight against her: a simple, tea-colored dress with the round collar ornamented with an embroidered trumpet vine of her own sewing. A spatter of raindrops blew into her face, and the doctor felt the cold dots on his bald spot.

  “After all that has been between us,” she told him, “no thought and no word and no opinion matters but yours and mine.”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “I suppose that was what Madame Fortier meant to tell me, in her way.”

  “Madame Fortier? I had heard she had come to town.”

  “I called on her this afternoon—Paul took me there. She sends her greetings to you.” The doctor paused, thinking what he had said was true enough to the spirit of their encounter, though Madame Fortier had not been so explicit. Nanon moved a little nearer to him, trailing one hand along the iron railing of the balcony. He looked down. “It seems that she and every one I’ve spoken to since yesterday has wanted to dissuade me—and I suppose it’s better so.”

  “Of course it is better,” Nanon said. She looked down at the point on the street where the four captains had made their appearance. “You ought to have taken his hand,” she said. “He will resent it that you did not.”

  With that she raised her eyes to his. She was so near that he could feel her warmth.

  “I don’t know, perhaps I should have,” the doctor said. “But before God and before all the world, I will take yours.”

  36

  We did not know what spirit it was that bore the doctor to the ground that night at Habitation Arnaud. The spirit strung its power from beneath the waters to the top of the sky, so that he hung like a fish on a line, but after that it did no other action, spoke no word. Moustique was there, who was both hûngan and prêt savann, and Moustique might have coaxed the lwa to speak its name through the doctor’s mouth, but he did not. I, Riau, I saw the spirit split the doctor’s head as a sprout divides the two halves of a seed, and from his shoulders bloomed a black sunflower, but nothing more followed. As he was blanc, maybe the doctor did not have the strength to carry one of the great loa on his head. So his legs collapsed beneath him, and the other blancs carried him away into Arnaud’s grand’case, and his ti bon ange returned to him in sleep, to the place in his head where the spirit had driven it out.

  When the doctor awoke he was himself again, but I, Riau, was gone. I did not need to be with those blancs any more, and so I was going back to Toussaint, though not by the straightest road. I did not know just where I was going, and yet the way before me was clear.

  I rode through the forest of Bois Caïman, where Boukman had called down all the lwa a dozen years before to help us drive the blancs out of our country. There were not many people there this time of year, but e
very space between the old trees hummed with spirits. A blanc might move through air all full of spirits and never know that they were there, as a blanc will not notice a cloud of mosquitoes before the mosquitoes begin to bite, unless it was a rare blanc like the doctor, who had grown some konesans between his ears. Then too there was Claudine Arnaud. Moustique had built that hûnfor to feed the loa who came to her, and they were always hungry, her Ghedes and Erzulies.

  In ten years the mapou had grown larger, there where the mambo cut the throat of the black pig, where Boukman, ridden by his spirit, cried into the burning sky, Kouté la libèté k’ap palé nan kè nou tou! Toussaint was there, though hidden in the shadows. He did not try to show his face or hand that night, though I, Riau, had seen him. I saw the mosquito settle on his cheek. Since then Toussaint should have carried Boukman’s words with him, as Riau carried them always—listen to liberty that speaks in the hearts of us all.

  Wind shook the high limbs of that mapou, and I turned my horse to ride away. As I left the clearing the thought came to me that the loa who brushed the doctor might be the same that walked with me, an Ogûn, not Feraille but Balendjo, the one who walks with a traveler. Riau was glad that Ogûn Balendjo was near, to carry him across the plain when he came out from under the old trees of Bois Caïman. There it was open country, and too close to all the French blanc soldiers at Le Cap, but it was the shortest way to Grande Rivière and that was why I took it. A patrol of blanc horse soldiers saw me from a long way off, but they did not have one horse as good as mine, and when they chased me their horses bogged in the low ground, because only I, Riau, knew where the dry trails ran between the boggy places.

  There were mosquitoes in the wet land of the plain, or maybe this one mosquito had followed me out of Bois Caïman, I thought. He whined around my head but did not bite, and I did not try to crush him because his voice brought me the memory of Macandal, who flew off on the wings of a mosquito when the blancs burned his body at Le Cap. They thought that was the end of Macandal’s plan to kill all the blancs, but all of our people who saw that mosquito cried out Macandal sové! We had been forced into the square to see him burn, but what we cried was Macandal is free! Those words were singing in my body, and everywhere I rode was Macandal’s country, the place of his marronage, and Riau’s too, in the time before our rising. From a long way off the thought reached me that if Macandal were not just one mosquito but a thousand times a thousand, he would drink the blood of all the blancs until they withered and dried up and blew away across the sea, like the burnt bagasse that blew from the burning cane fields. Many of those fields lay burned around me where I rode.