The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Monpoint was looking at Placide when he uttered this last sentence, rather than at Isaac, who had taken a pace or two away from the grove and stood with his back to them. The long scabbard of his sword had cut a furrow in the dirt behind him. Placide reflected that neither he nor Isaac had ever used their swords. Placide had shot more than one French soldier with the fancy pistols Bonaparte had presented him, but he had adopted a shorter saber for the battles, handier to wield in the saddle, though not so short as Guiaou’s coutelas.

  Placide nodded to Monpoint and walked up toward the house. Suzanne and Saint-Jean had disappeared from the gallery and the breakfast dishes had been cleared away. Placide felt the weight of all Monpoint had told him, but it did not really oppress him yet. The aura of the lavé têt was around him still, so that everything seemed foreordained, even his own actions, even his words. He had soaked his mouchwa in the water of the gamelle before leaving the hûnfor, and it remained slightly fragrant where it lay folded and dry in his shirt pocket. He touched it with his thumb as he stopped on the threshold of Toussaint’s small scriptorium.

  “Honneur,” he said, the country greeting.

  “Respect,” said Toussaint, completing the formula. He looked up with an unmasked smile from the three letters he’d been examining on his desk, and offered Placide his hand.

  “They say you are going to visit General Brunet.”

  Toussaint released Placide’s hand and covered his mouth. He glanced at the three letters fanned on the table before him, from Pesquidoux, Leclerc, and Brunet.

  “Brunet has invited me.” Toussaint passed one of the letters to Placide. “I may go if I choose.”

  Placide skimmed the page: We have, my dear general, some arrangementsto make together which cannot be dealt with by letter, but which a conference of one hour would complete. Were I not overcome by work and troublesome details, I’d be today the bearer of my own response, but as I am unable to leave these days, come to me yourself, and if you are recovered from your indisposition, let it be tomorrow. One must never delay when it is a question of doing good. You will not find, here at my country plantation, all the amenities I would wish to organize for your reception, but you will find there the frankness of a gallant man who has no other wish but for the prosperity of the colony and your own personal happiness . . .

  “They say it is a trap, this invitation.” Placide swallowed, with some difficulty. His throat had gone dry, and his sense of certainty was beginning to fracture. He let the paper flutter to the tabletop.

  “Do they say so?” Toussaint looked up, his eye bright and canny as a bird’s under the line of the yellow madras cloth that bound his head. Placide returned him Brunet’s letter and Toussaint secured it under the moss-colored vase with the white frieze depicting his victories over the English. Isaac had rescued the vase, miraculously unbroken, from the ashes of the Sancey grand’case, and also the small orary that sat on the opposite side of Toussaint’s desk; he had diligently cleaned and polished both before returning them to his father.

  “Where is it that you find the snare? As you may see from the letter which the Captain-General has sent, I have only to meet with General Brunet to settle the problem of the blanc soldiers at Plaisance who are marauding all over the plantations of this canton,” Toussaint said. “And that is a problem which must be addressed.” He proffered another folded sheet. Placide opened and scanned it.

  Since you persist in thinking that the large number of troops now found at Plaisance are frightening the cultivators there, I have charged General Brunet to arrange the placement of a part of those troops with you . . . It did not strike Placide that the tone of these phrases was quite so cordial as what Isaac had described.

  “Do we want more blanc soldiers here?” he said. “And even as he sends this letter, the Captain-General has sent two ships to Gonaives with a lot more soldiers, who are full of bad talk.”

  “Do they say so?” Toussaint repeated. “Well. Maybe it is a trap after all.” He looked past Placide, who made a half-turn to see that Isaac had also come quietly into the room, and stood in the shadow left of the doorframe, the long scabbard of his sword propped out from him like a third leg or a tail.

  “To take risks for my country is a sacred duty.” He shrugged and smiled and looked at them both frankly. “To avoid risks to save my own life would be shameful.”

  “But who’ll protect the country if not you?” Placide burst out.

  “Another. There will be others always now. Charles Belair, or Dommage, Sylla, or Sans-Souci.” He masked a smile as he stood up, and gathered the letters from the desktop. “Perhaps even Dessalines or Christophe.” He folded the letters together and slipped them into an inner pocket, then smoothed down the front of his coat and took a step forward, toward Placide. “It might even be you. Or Riau, or Guiaou, or any of the others whose names we don’t yet know.” As Placide’s knees weakened slightly, Toussaint kissed him and passed on. Isaac stepped forward and received his kiss. Toussaint turned back in the doorway.

  “Where one is cut down, another will spring up,” he said. “A dozen others. Always. You must remember that.”

  Placide followed him out onto the gallery. “Let me go with you.”

  Toussaint shook his head. “No,” he said. “I want you to go down to Gonaives and have a look at those ships you mentioned. It is an order,” he said, when Placide hesitated.

  “Oui, mon général.” Placide pulled himself upright in a salute which Toussaint crisply returned. Behind him in the yard Riau and Guiaou and a dozen other riders waited, one holding a saddled horse for Toussaint, who softened slightly as he lowered his hand.

  “N’a wé,” he said, looking closely at Placide. “Si Dyé vlé.”

  Elise sat on the gallery at Thibodet, sipping coffee and watching the sunrise gild the grass around the pool in front of the house. The purple blooms of bwa dlo were just beginning to open to the morning’s warmth. She took a spoonful of soupe giraumon, and rubbed her thumb along a vine of bougainvillea that was climbing the gallery rail. Ought it perhaps to be cut back? But the blacks all thought it had the virtue to keep bad spirits away from the house, and maybe they were right.

  Sophie, her gown rumpled and her eyes blurry with sleep, was holding both Mireille’s hands and helping her to walk, so carefully, down the steps toward the shining pool, while Zabeth’s Bibiane managed on her own, backing down on all-fours, her head twisted over her shoulder to follow the progress of Mireille. Zabeth stood watching at the top of the steps, hands propped on her hips, until Michau, as he passed through the yard with a sack of charcoal, called some teasing remark to her. Zabeth whipped away, flaring out her skirt, but even as she spun her face turned back toward him, eyes and smile flashing. In this twist Elise saw the fabric of Zabeth’s dress stretch over a belly rounder and harder than it had been the month before.

  So. Elise allowed herself a smile, as if at the sunshine and the antics of the children; she could even share this smile with Zabeth, as she went into the house to fetch more bread. Not quite a year since Toussaint had commanded Zabeth’s last man to blow his own brains out, but she had found a place in herself for new love and new life. Elise’s eyes went swimming, so that her family and servants moved like bright reflections on wind-ruffled water. That was something like what Maman Maig’ had said.

  She grasped the vine and raised her head to let the tears run back, looking up at the notch between the mornes where the road toward Dondon lay, and beyond it Grande Rivière, where Sans-Souci would still be fighting, if he had not been captured or killed. She felt the dead place under her navel, the spot where Zabeth was now fertile and ripe. There would be no more children for Elise, and probably no more such adventures.

  Tocquet’s hands settled on her shoulders, lightly rolling tension from her back. Since her recovery, he was more attentive, almost solicitous. He kept closer to home. How often Isabelle must have known this sensation; the touch of one man with the thought of another.

 
; “What is it?” Tocquet said.

  A tear must have spilled onto her cheek. “It’s nothing,” Elise said, unclasping her hand from the bougainvillea. “I pricked my thumb.”

  Tocquet stooped to kiss away the brilliant dot of blood. Down the drive came the sound of horses, but Elise did not turn to look. She raised her face to her husband and said, “I’m lucky to be alive.”

  As they turned in at the Thibodet gate, Captain Daspir spurred up his horse, distancing himself from Guizot, Ferrari, and Aloyse, and overtaking Major Maillart at the head of the column. He leaned across, and Maillart bent his ear to him.

  “It’s true what you said,” Daspir told him.

  “What,” said Maillart. “What did I say?”

  “All the black generals are to be deported, in the end,” Daspir said, lowering his voice as he leaned closer. “Once the disarmament is complete.”

  “The disarmament.” Maillart snorted so vigorously his horse whickered in response. Leclerc’s effort to disarm the populace had so far been a complete fiasco. Toussaint had taught them all too well that the musket was the physical embodiment of freedom.

  “I had it from Guizot, some time ago,” Daspir said. “About the deportations. Rochambeau speaks of it loosely, when he drinks. And I remembered that you wanted to know . . .”

  “Well, thank you.” Maillart looked him in the eye and touched his hat brim. Daspir nodded and fell back, as the Thibodet grand’case came into view around the curve of the drive. Good of the captain to have given him that news, Maillart supposed. It must mean no hard feelings over Isabelle. But in a way he’d rather not have known. He did not much care for his present mission either, though he could not have avoided it without casting his own loyalty in doubt. Soldier’s luck and a soldier’s pay, he thought in the jogging rhythm of his horse’s trot. And of course for the younger officers it would be a great thing to be in at the kill.

  “Hello the house,” he called out heartily. “No fever here?”

  “Fever? There is none,” Nanon replied from the gallery. Behind her the doctor emerged barefoot, wiping his glasses on the shirt he carried wadded in one hand.

  “You’ve come in force,” Elise said, standing to survey the sixty horsemen of their detachment. “Let me send to find out what can be found from the kitchen—but you, Major, come up and take some soup.”

  “No, no.” Maillart grinned and belted out his loudest voice. “We’ve only come to greet you—we can’t stop. We must join General Brunet at Habitation Georges.”

  “I’ll ride with you that far,” the doctor said. “Let me get my boots.”

  “Oh no,” said Maillart, “I don’t think, really—”

  “I won’t be a moment,” the doctor said, shrugging into his shirt, and then Guizot was chiming in: “Of course you must come—it will be a grand outing.”

  In five more minutes the whole cavalcade had reversed direction and was moving back the way it had come, with the children gamboling after the horses toward the gate, and the doctor bringing up the rear, astride a mule, his rifle balanced across his knees, having professed the intention to bring back wild meat for the table.

  “What did they come for if they won’t stop?” Elise directed the question toward Nanon, but it was Tocquet who responded.

  “I don’t know,” he said musingly. “But they seem to have left us a good dozen sentries.”

  Elise stood up and shaded her eyes. It was true; four dragoons were lingering at the lower end of the drive, and several more had circled behind the house and the cane mill and were fanning out across the rising terraces of coffee.

  “Whatever for?” Elise said lightly. Tocquet was lighting one of his cheroots, though it was a little early in the day for him to begin to smoke.

  “A kindness of the major, I suspect,” he said. “To see us safe.” He turned toward her, his whole face crooked. “I think they must be going to arrest Toussaint.”

  Isaac had unbelted his sword, for it was uncomfortable to sit and read with the hilt of it sticking into his side. He’d hung scabbard and belt and all over a waist-high post of the gallery rail and propped back his chair against the wall as he delved the story of Paris and Syrinx out of the Latin, how the nymph escaped by changing herself into a reed which the satyr then harvested to trim into a flute. It was a slow pleasure, won with difficulty, but Isaac gave it all his patience, knowing that while Toussaint prized a fluency in Latin, he did not really understand the language as blancs did, but could only scatter a few phrases he had picked up from church liturgy. If Placide had made himself a warrior for their father, Isaac might evolve into a scholar, and so, in the peace which was now begun, might prove of equal value to his brother, if not greater.

  He was so well drowned in the depths of this reading that he was slow to notice the noise of shooting from the direction of the road. By the time he had laid down the book and risen, his mother had come out to stand at the head of the stairs, the blue headcloth tight above her eyes, gazing through and beyond the line of French grenadiers who, bayonets lowered, had flushed a crowd of skirmishing field hands out of the woods around the lane. Saint-Jean had pressed himself against her, and Suzanne held him under her crossed hands, in front of her, both of them facing the soldiers as they advanced.

  Guerrier and Bienvenu ran up the steps, well ahead of the others in retreat, Guerrier clasping his right arm to his side. Blood came trickling through his fingers. Bienvenu snatched Isaac’s sword from the post and thrust it toward him, as Guerrier said between his gritted teeth, “Hurry, there is still time to get away, a horse is waiting in the stable yard—”

  But Isaac’s feet were rooted to the floor. “If they have already killed my father—” he began. His whole face was numb, not only his tongue. “There is no reason for me to save myself.”

  There was a racket from within; they had broken into the back of the house. Sound of a slap and a woman’s shriek, then one of Isaac’s girl cousins raced with her hands over her face and cowered against Suzanne Louverture. A blanc soldier appeared in the doorway, and Bienvenu dropped Isaac’s sword to draw a pistol, but there was only a dead click when he fired, for the weapon had already been discharged. Bienvenu howled his disappointment as he vaulted over the rail, rolled, and ran after Guerrier, who had already taken the same way to the ravine.

  The soldier raised his bayonet as Isaac approached him, but Isaac shouldered past him and went to his father’s scriptorium. One officer was scattering paper from the desk; he kicked the orary which Isaac had salvaged from Sancey against the wall, bending the mechanism. Captain Cyprien was doing his best to stuff the vase depicting Toussaint’s triumphs into the pocket of his coat, though it was too large to fit.

  “Captain,” Isaac said. “I did not take you for a thief. That is my father’s property.”

  At once another grenadier backed him to the wall with a bayonet to his throat, and one of General Brunet’s aides-de-camp turned from the mantel to sneer, “Your father has no property.”

  “Why,” said Isaac, outraged, “you have stolen my plume.” In fact the aide-de-camp had taken the fine feather from the hat which completed Isaac’s dress uniform, and which had been hanging in the scriptorium, and placed it in the band of his own hat. In one hand he also held Isaac’s ornamental spurs.

  “Let the prisoner be silent,” smirked the aide-de-camp, and then as he turned back to the mantel he addressed the room at large: “Can you imagine the effrontery, to clothe the Madonna in this gaudiness?”

  On the mantel stood a foot-high image of the Virgin, a gift to Toussaint from General Clairvaux. The aide-de-camp pulled the gold coronet from her head and snapped off the hand that wore a ruby ring and broke loose her china ears to get the pearls in them. As he dropped this loot into his pocket, Isaac lunged out from the wall to stop him, but the grenadier smacked him in the ribs with his gun stock, then chivvied him out onto the gallery, prodding him in the kidneys with the bayonet. The battalion commander Pesquidoux had appeared in the ya
rd, and was handing the women up into a wagon, where Saint-Jean had already found a seat.

  Cyprien approached him again, standing near enough that Isaac could smell rum and rot on his breath. “Where is your brother?”

  “I don’t know,” said Isaac. “I thought that he had started for Gonaives.”

  Cyprien cursed and turned from him. “If we have let him slip away . . .” he said to Brunet’s aide-de-camp, who was just coming out of the house. “This one’s no worry, but the other will fight.”

  Cyprien bent to scoop Isaac’s sword belt from the floor and handed it to him. “Go on,” he said shortly. “Get into the wagon.”

  Isaac’s face burned as he buckled on the sword. That aide-de-camp was grinning at him, and the bayonet was gouging him in the back again, and all of them knew that his weapon was no more dangerous to them than a loaf of bread. Slowly he clambered into the wagon, his ribs paining him with every breath, and took a place among the others, facing backward. The sobbing of his cousin hurt his head. His mother and brother were silent, and there was no sound except the creaking of the wagon as the mules began to pull; speechless, they all watched the grand’case of Descahaux shrink away from them.

  From the moment they rode out of Habitation Thibodet, everything ran contrary to the progress of Maillart’s detachment. Huge gommiers had blown down across a section of the road, making it impassable. A normally negligible stream had somehow risen to a flood, so that they must work their way nearly two miles down the bank before finding a place that horses could cross.

  Worst of all was the doctor, who had no understanding of their errand (Maillart had not wanted him to understand it) and so behaved as if the whole journey were a hunting expedition—whenever he was not straying from the trail to harvest herbs. At last he deployed his long American rifle to bring down a wild goat from a crag some five hundred yards distant, so that the half of the detachment who’d bet on his success shouted their enthusiasm, while even the losers groaned a grudging admiration. Maillart collected from both Daspir and Aloyse, but whatever pleasure he took in his winnings was tempered by knowing that now there was nothing for it but they must recover the carcass from the inaccessible crevice into which it had dropped, and then it must be bled and gutted and dressed . . . The doctor’s mule was inured to carrying butchered game, but the blood smell panicked the horses.