“I would not tell it to Nanon,” she said, letting his hand drop at last. “But I’ll tell you: it does content me to watch them die, when I know I have done all I could to save them.”
40
Morning brought a rainbow up from the sun-spangled ravine east of grand’case of Descahaux. Placide, who had slept but poorly, looked on the colored band with pleasure. The ribbon ascended from the mist of the stream at the bottom of the gorge and, after a curve no greater than that of a saber’s edge, disappeared into a cloud above. It seemed to give the day some unexpected promise.
His mother raised the coffeepot, but Placide shook his head. Isaac was oblivious as she refilled his cup, his nose sunk in a leather-bound volume of Ovid. Since their return to Ennery, Isaac had buried himself in the studies that had occupied their time at the Collège de la Marche, preferring the pages of whatever book to anything in his actual surroundings. Only the day before, he had returned from a mission to Le Cap bearing a letter from Leclerc to Toussaint, but he had little to say about that expedition—no more than a monosyllabic grunt. This morning he did not even notice Saint-Jean, though the boy sat on the edge of his chair, waiting for Isaac to look up.
Placide got to his feet and kissed his mother’s cheek. He rubbed the head of his youngest brother and went from the gallery to find his horse. When he had mounted, he touched his thumb to the mouchwa têt he now kept folded in his shirt pocket, then turned his horse in the direction of Sancey, where crews were clearing the rubble of the buildings the French had burned.
Above, the rainbow had begun to fade and dissipate, its color dissolving into the vacant blue of the sky, and in spite of the bright sunshine Placide felt his mood begin to sink. There was a chattering in his head he could not seem to stop, a perpetual inner argument that would not let him sleep. The chattering cycled through a thousand questions: Where would new tiles be found to roof the Sancey grand’case? Why had his father given in to the French? And why had his generals seemed to betray him? Who would transport brown sugar to the port at Gonaives? And when would the struggle be rejoined? All in a random jumble of small issues with great ones. Why had so many French soldiers recently been sent to their vicinity, like a plague of grasshoppers devouring everything in the canton of Ennery?
The sunlight spilled on two men hacking at a hedgerow, just at the bend of the road ahead. Two ordinary laborers, they appeared to be, but one of them turned up a face that shone brilliantly through its maze of terrible scars, and saluted Placide with a coutelas whose spoon-shaped blade was almost unique to Guiaou. Placide returned the gesture automatically, and as he rode past he realized that the other man had been Guerrier—and by the time he reached the next turning in his road, he remembered that he’d seen Guerrier’s old musket half hidden in the thorny branches of the hedge.
When had they come? But now Placide remembered that only yesterday he had seen Monpoint—he was now quite sure it had been Monpoint, though he was in civilian clothes and at some distance—commanding a work detail in the coffee trees of Sancey. And if some others in that konbitlooked familiar, that was because they had lately been his comrades in Toussaint’s honor guard.
They must have been filtering in for days, weeks even, now that Placide assembled his memories. Indeed, he didn’t know how he’d failed to put them together before. He’d been oblivious as Isaac. But the guardsmen were here, metamorphosed into field hands, or so disguised; if they were not precisely under arms, Placide was suddenly quite convinced that they must all have their arms as ready to hand as Guiaou and Guerrier had theirs.
The flush of that excitement stayed with him through the day. For an hour or two he rode with his father from one field to another, and in the afternoon he made further rounds on his own—for Toussaint was giving him more responsibility these last few weeks, as Placide gained competence in the management of coffee and cane fields, the mills and drying barns. Wherever he went Placide now recognized more and more of his old companions of the guard. Half-consciously adopting his father’s gesture, he’d cover his mouth with a hand whenever he met another one of them, to hide the smile of complicity.
At evening he felt calmer than usual at that hour, when often the chattering of his head would come to a disagreeable crescendo; he understood better now why some men tried to smash it down with rum. Instead of drinking, he walked into the fruit trees behind the Descahaux grand’case. Between that orchard and the house, some roses that Suzanne had planted had withered in the heat, but the hibiscus flowers were luxuriant and the scent of orange and lemon was strong and sweet. Among the citrus trees he came upon Guiaou as if by design; Guiaou took his hand and led him out of the far end of the grove onto a narrow trail where Guerrier, trailing his musket, fell into step behind them.
The way led down the hill to a low place where they crossed the stream at the bottom of the ravine on stepping stones. When they reached the other side, Guiaou asked Placide if he had his mouchwa têt with him, then indicated he should put it on. Once Placide had tightened the knot at the base of his head, it seemed that the buzzing in his brain was almost completely compressed away. Since the surrender he had forgotten how it had always been so, when he fastened the cloth around his head before a battle.
The trail wound over the contours of two more mornes, passing under cover of dense trees, then emerging on a rising slope above the coffee trees of Habitation Thibodet. Placide stopped and turned into the wind, looking down toward the grand’case, where Saint-Jean sometimes went, with Riau’s son Caco, to play with the white and colored children who lived there. Above the valley, the sky was fading into darkness, but toward the coast a great bloom of cloud was tinted by the setting sun, reminding Placide of the rainbow’s morning promise.
On the crown of the hill above them, a small red flag flew square from a long bamboo whip, within a palisade of crooked sticks. Guiaou and Guerrier led Placide through the gate. Inside, Riau was waiting with Bienvenu, and Quamba and the woman Placide knew as Caco’s mother, Merbillay. There were some others whom he did not recognize. His eyes were drawn to Merbillay, who was more finely dressed than usual and had her hair wound high in a red turban with shiny gold fringe, but he was not looking at her as a woman. She had the hieratic beauty of one of the stone carvings the Tainos had left in the caves underneath this land. All of the people stood as still as trees planted around the edges of the peristyle.
“W’ap vini,” said Quamba. You have come. Now Placide remembered what Guiaou had said, on the road from Marmelade to Dondon, the day they rode to Le Cap to surrender. One day we will take you to the drums. Though the light was swiftly failing, he saw a tall drum leaning against the central post, hairy goatskin shrunken and straining around the pegs, but there were no drummers. The wind lifted and the flag whipped on its pole, and Placide felt a fluttering of the loose ends of cloth below the knot of his mouchwa.
Arms folded over his chest, Quamba stepped nearer, so he could look through Placide’s eyes to the very bottom of his head. He was near enough to inhale Placide’s breath. His own smelled faintly of cinnamon. Placide relaxed, as if salt water buoyed him.
“Well,” said Quamba. “I will make a service to help you to receive the spirit.”
He had not changed his posture or expression, but now there was a question in his eyes. Placide nodded. He had come for this, though without knowing that he knew it, and such a long, long way. The roll of the hilltop under his feet was like the swell of the waves under the ship that carried him from France.
Quamba unfolded his arms to discover a dry gourd strung with beads. When he moved it the seed inside and the beads outside combined in a sound like the rattle of a snake, and someone lit a candle and raised it to the four directions, and someone touched the head of the drum, though in no pattern: once, twice, three times the hollow note, and on the third beat the darkening air was shattered by a scream that rocked Placide to the bottom of his heels.
He stared: Bienvenu had fallen and was kicking and tearing at the
dirt. Or he ripped his fingers into his scalp, weaving his head as if it had filled with a swarm of bees. The voice that came out of him was harsh and shrill and querulous, the voice of an angry woman. Guiaou and Merbillay and Guerrier had surrounded him—or her, for Bienvenu was only harboring this furious woman, Placide saw—they spoke to her in low, ingratiating voices, stroking her, soothing her. “No, no, Maîtresse,” Guiaou was murmuring, “you have come before the hour . . . let us go now.” He showed her something hidden in his palm, and Bienvenu’s hand grabbed for it but Guiaou backed away, and the being that inhabited Bienvenu followed the lure, supported by Merbillay and Guerrier. Finally they passed through the gate outside. Placide had not turned to watch. His hair stood stiff on the back of his neck. Outside the enclosure there were sounds of some scuffle and then the harsh female laughter declining. Guiaou and Guerrier and Merbillay came back inside, Guiaou quietly turning to close the gate behind them.
A blanket-like darkness covered the hûnfor, so thick the stars could not penetrate. Placide’s thoughts were scrambling up and down the inner wall of his skull like a pack of drunken monkeys bent on destruction. He did not know where to rest his eyes. But the candle was still lit, and in its aura he picked out the rainbow spiral on the central post where the drum had been propped, and that pattern closed with the rainbow he had seen that morning, restoring a wholeness. He calmed enough to understand Quamba’s words.
“Bay têt ou,” Quamba said. Give up your head.
Placide unfastened his mouchwa têt and stuffed it into a trouser pocket. Loosening the string at the throat of his shirt, he stepped forward and knelt before the wide wooden bowl that had appeared on the ground before him. Hands came through darkness to peel the shirt back from his shoulders—Guiaou’s and Merbillay’s. Placide noticed the cool strength of her fingers.
“Make the sign of the cross,” Quamba said, and Placide obeyed him. He lowered his head above the wooden gamelle, whose water released a pungent scent, colored with herbs and a trace of coffee beans. The monkeys scrabbled harder at the folds of his brain, so desperate to cling to that territory. Then Quamba raised a double scoop of water and began to wash from the hollow in the back of Placide’s neck where the knot of his mouchwa had been fastened, up and over the top of his head, back into the warm pool of the gamelle, and again like that, until the monkey fists released their hold, and Placide’s whole head was like a boil that had been lanced and rinsed and purged and healed, and the tears of his relief poured freely in the slowly cooling water. Now in the bottom of the bowl he found the stars.
When Riau walked with Placide home to Descahaux, Guiaou went to the case with Merbillay. He did not lie close beside her then (though the next night it would probably be Guiaou sleeping alone in the camp by Descahaux) but rested alone on a mat in a corner of the clay-packed walls, his head loosely wrapped in a white cotton cloth.
He was content with how the lavé têt had passed, Placide’s head-washing, which Guiaou had wanted to aid and witness for a long time. Yet it puzzled him that Ezili Jé Rouj had chosen to appear. The master of Placide’s head was meant to be Lasirène, Erzulie of the waters. Guiaou understood that better than Placide, whose mind was a little fogged by thoughts the blancs had tried to stuff in his head on the other side of the ocean (though less so than the mind of his brother Isaac). Lasirène was the woman of Agwé, Guiaou’s mêt’ têt, and that was why, from the beginning, there had been a natural harmony between Guiaou and Placide. It was certainly Lasirène who swam beside Placide through all the battles, parting the waters for him to pass through unharmed. Guiaou had wanted to help Lasirène to her rightful seat in Placide’s head, and that was how it had gone in the end, no matter that Ezili Jé Rouj had wanted to interfere.
Guiaou matched his breathing to the breath of the children who slept on Merbillay’s far side, and listened to the slight movement of a mouse in the palm thatch overhead, and to the whistle of a night bird in the trees outside. From the roof-tree, Riau’s banza hung like a big gourd. Guiaou closed his eyes. He had served today, and served to good effect. It was Guiaou who distracted Ezili Jé Rouj and enticed her out of the peristyle, coaxing her with the hollow blue bird’s egg he had been carrying to give to Marielle. Outside, Ezili had snatched the egg and crushed it, but it was worth the sacrifice. She had not spoiled the ceremony, after all.
It worried him a little still, why Ezili Jé Rouj had chosen to intrude. But that was a thought he would let go. Let Lasirène drown it in the waters. Merbillay snuffled in her sleep, turning on her side. Her hand strayed toward him, and Guiaou touched her wrist and caught the thread of her pulse and followed it into sleep.
Next morning there was no sign of a rainbow, but Placide felt as never before how the whole world was held together by a charm. He had slept deep and without thought or dream. All the dream power was outside him now, enforcing the charm, maintaining it as firm and fragile as an eggshell. His mother seemed to feel the radiance that had suffused him; her smile was special as she poured his coffee and spooned in the sugar and set before him four quarters of an orange. Even Saint-Jean abandoned trying to distract Isaac from Ovid, and came to press himself cat-like against Placide, though usually he preferred Isaac, since Isaac would sometimes beguile him with fantastic tales of France.
Inside the house, Toussaint was laughing. “Look at these blancs.” His voice rose cheerfully. “They don’t suspect anything—they think they know everything—but still they have to consult old Toussaint.”
Placide felt warmed by his father’s good humor. For the past few days, Toussaint’s spirits had been occluded, especially since yesterday, when Isaac had returned from Le Cap. There was some hovering cloud of doubt, it seemed; Sylla was still resisting Leclerc in the mountains of Plaisance, as Sans-Souci was resisting at Grande Rivière, and the Captain-General had the idea that Toussaint might be encouraging either or both of these rebellions (and might be encouraged in this idea by Dessalines, so Isaac had reported). Then there were too many French troops quartered in the canton of Ennery, carelessly looting the fruits of all the fields, and the garrison in the town itself had turned surly, no longer rendering Toussaint the military honors due to him when he passed through.
How good if that cloud had been dissolved. But when Monpoint emerged from Toussaint’s company, his face was dark. At his glance, Placide got up and followed him down the steps and around the corner of the house, into the blighted garden of tea roses.
“He says he will go to meet General Brunet at Habitation Georges,” Monpoint said unhappily, pushing the dry dirt with the toe of his boot.
“Yes,” Placide said vaguely; he was reluctant to have his sense of harmony in the day disrupted.
“But it cannot be wise for him to go,” Monpoint said, turning to pace along the desiccated rose plants, then sharply turning back. “And there were two more ships landing many blanc soldiers at Gonaives only yesterday—”
The rising sun cleared the roof of the house, striking Monpoint harshly in the face. He and Placide moved away from the house wall into the shade of the citrus grove.
“Those soldiers are boasting they have come to arrest Toussaint,” Monpoint said gloomily. “Let them come to take him here, if they have the heart to try it!” He raised one hand and closed it so tight that it trembled. Out of uniform and without his tall silver helmet, Monpoint looked a little smaller than Placide had thought him, but this gesture restored his full size. “But if he puts himself into their hands . . .” Monpoint dropped his hand and scuffed the turf between the roots of the lime trees.
“The soldiers have been boasting that way ever since the fleet sailed out of France,” said Placide, who had overheard more of his guardians’ rash talk during the voyage than any of the four captains ever suspected. “So far those boasts have come to nothing.”
Monpoint glanced up, startled by a footfall. Isaac had appeared, one arm draped over a lime tree branch. For some reason he’d clothed himself today in the uniform of Bonaparte’s gi
ft, and even had strapped on the ornamental sword.
“And you, monchè?” Monpoint said. “Have you been near enough to the blanc General to breathe his spirit?”
Placide knew that Isaac often looked sullen when he was worried. That explained the sulkiness with which he plucked a small, lumpy lime and cut the skin with his thumbnail before he replied.
“It is Dessalines more than anyone who wants to hurt my father in the eyes of the Captain-General. Dessalines who whispers and insinuates. The Captain-General showed to me letters signed by Dessalines, which tell stories that are not true.”
“What stories?” Monpoint said.
Isaac licked the flesh of his lime before he answered. “That our father is in league with Sylla at Plaisance and Sans-Souci at Grande Rivière. That he will use the battalion of Gonaives to start up the war all over again.”
“The battalion of Gonaives!” Monpoint snorted. “No one could start a war against all those blancs with that. And Toussaint is not even at the head of it.” He shook his head, looking down at the ground. “Well. I know the blancs are unhappy because they can’t dig Sylla out of his place at Mapou. But they cannot prove that your father has anything to do with that.”
No, thought Placide, it couldn’t be proved, but the fort of Mapou was not far off from Ennery. In fact it was near enough that a fair number of the men who worked at Descahaux by day walked back to Mapou to sleep at night, and so everyone knew that Sylla was doing all he could to gather and stockpile provisions and materials for war.
“But maybe the Captain-General does not believe the lies of Dessalines,” Isaac said. “He has written to my father very cordially.”
“Maybe,” said Monpoint, but without much verve. He had plucked another misshapen lime from another tree and was turning it over and over in his hands. “But why will Toussaint put his head in the lion’s mouth? Vernet and I have warned him against it, and even his brother Paul.” Monpoint shrugged and let the lime drop on the ground. “But maybe he will listen better to his son.”
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 95
