Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  He kept following the twistings of the path, scarcely aware of the embedded stones that gouged into the arches of his bare feet. Someone, maybe more than one, was coming down from the hûnfor, and Moustique stepped out of the trail, clinging to a sapling. Scus’m, a man’s voice muttered. Two figures he could not make out completely, though he caught flashes of a white sleeve, white headcloth. When they had passed, he swung down into the groove of the trail and continued. The drumbeat quickened, drawing him up like a jerk on a leash tied around his neck. The trail made a sudden twist to the left and steepened sharply. Moustique helped himself up the rise with one hand furrowing the crumbling earth, then straightened in a clearing of packed clay. The brightness of the stars and moon amazed him as he came out of the tree cover. In the center a thick pole was wound around with a carved snake, and spiraled with a painted rainbow. There was a fire that cast no light, and the hounsis, swaying and singing, were turned blue-silver by the moon and stars—white shirts and headcloths glowing.

  Kulèv-o

  Damballah-wèdo, papa

  Ou kulèv-o

  Kulèv-o

  Kulèv, kulèv-o

  M’ap rélé kulèv-o

  Damballah-papa, ou sé kulèv

  Kulèv pa sa palé . . .

  O Serpent

  Damballah-wèdo

  you are a serpent

  Serpent, o serpent

  I’m calling the serpent

  Father Damballah, you are the serpent

  The serpent does not speak . . .

  The part of Moustique’s mind that registered these images was shrinking, blinking as it fell away like a revolving coin. His body moved in perfect unison with the steady uprush of the drums, as he broke the line of hounsis and moved toward the poteau mitan. That otherworldly cry came from his own thick throat—he hardly knew it. His head threw back, the stars spun round and up and up like flecks of butter in a churn. The drumming sucked the stars into whirlpool, then everything went bright.

  “Li konnen prié BonDyé?” A man’s voice, with the rough-silk feel of a cat’s tongue.

  “Li kab chanté Latin, mêm.” A girl, her voice bright with pride.

  Moustique turned onto his shoulder and opened one eye upon the hard-packed dirt.

  He knows how to pray to the white man’s God?

  He can even sing in Latin . . .

  But now the voices had stopped. Moustique felt attention turn to him—he saw the man and the girl indistinctly through his half-closed gummy eyes. The flutter of their white garments sent his mind off-balance again. Nothing was clear, not where he was or how he had come there. Above the clearing, the sky was paling into dawn. Moustique heard cocks crowing down the gorges, and listened for the morning reveille of Toussaint’s army at Habitation Thibodet, but then he remembered Marmelade, and Delahaye, and he sat up sharply, flinging out an arm.

  “Dousman.” Marie-Noelle supported his elbow, held his hand in hers, without the slightest pressure. Gently. His eyes yawed crazily around the clearing. He was still in the hûnfor, but the hûngan, with his cat’stongue voice, had disappeared. He got to his feet; the movement dizzied him.

  “Dousman . . .” Marie-Noelle was still supporting him, balancing him by his right arm. He looked at her, confused.

  “Té gegne youn espri nan têt-ou,” she said, quietly. Come with me.

  She led him toward the trail head, guiding him with the pressureless contact of her hands. He felt the fragile clarity of someone waking from a fever. Everything was lucid, but nothing in his consciousness resolved into the elements of self.

  There was a spirit in your head . . .

  The dawn was damp, and agreeably cool. Moustique’s knees were a little wobbly, but he felt his strength returning, along with his presence of mind, the farther they went down the trail. Marie-Noelle’s light touch was pleasant, cool fingers just feathering his palm, and her demeanor was pleasant too—as if they’d always stood in this relation, whatever it might be.

  Sunrise was baffled by the cover of the trees, but when they came out into the border of the town, the full light struck them and the church bell began to ring. Moustique, returning further to himself, felt a personal jab of panic.

  “Oui,” said Marie-Noelle, and thrust the priest’s slop jar, emptied and rinsed, into his hands. “Yes—hurry.”

  A fold of her skirt brushed his leg as she turned away. Moustique scurried toward the church, pausing to set the jar down on the threshold of the priest’s house. The congregation had already begun to assemble when he went in, but Delahaye paid him no mind—distracted perhaps by the party of gens de couleur who had already taken their positions in the front benches.

  The priest stood before the altar, tall, lean, almost spectral in his best vestments, the ends of his purple stole twitching from a slight rotation of his hips. He spread his large hands over the people below him.

  “Dominus vobiscum . . .”

  As customary, Moustique led the mumbling response. “Et vobiscum te . . .” He took a darting glance over his shoulder. Marie-Noelle sat on one the rear benches, not far from the hûngan, a small, elderly man with a crown of white hair over a dark face wrinkled like a nut meat. The other back seats were filling with men and women dressed in white, many among them who last night had served the loa.

  L’Abbé Delahaye collected herbs and flowers and kept large books in which he sketched the plants, pressed their leaves, and noted down their uses if there were any. A couple of afternoons each week he sent Moustique out to gather plants for him, and encouraged him to talk to people about their value. On this pretext Moustique returned to the bitasyon where the hûnfor was, seeking out the hûngan who, as was usual, doubled as a leaf doctor, doktè-fey.

  Moustique had some rudiments of herbal medicine from observation of Toussaint; also his own father had taken some interest in the subject, though less systematically than Delahaye. From the hûngan he learned more, though little enough that was new to the priest. To be sure, Moustique did not report to Delahaye that the hûngan had also begun to teach him the names and natures of the loa, particularly Damballah, the spirit which had chosen to possess him. But in two weeks’ time, Moustique was assisting in the ceremonies at the hûnfor, wearing the white clothes and mouchwa têt of a hounsi, chanting an Ave Maria or a Pater Noster and perhaps some other fragments of memorized Latin scripture, before the African spirits were invoked.

  The world of the church and its saints mirrored the world of the hûnfor and the African mysteries, just as (the hûngan explained) the surface world of living people was mirrored by the Island Below Sea, inhabited by souls who had left their bodies: les Morts et les Mystères. Flushed with this new understanding, Moustique felt as if he were empowered to walk on water. His life had come into a delicate balance, unlike anything he had ever known before. He was at peace within himself. Even Delahaye appeared satisfied with Moustique’s newfound calm. If he returned belated, with the slop jar, blinking in the full light of day, the priest did not reprove him for his tardiness, but was pleased that the boy seemed to have finally got beyond his sense of shame. Of course, Delahaye had no idea where Moustique went at night.

  Moustique began to understand that Marie-Noelle was, like himself, a doubled entity. Her daylight self—the priest’s dutiful cook—was modestly, piously Christian. Her moonlit self was something other, engaged with the mysteries of the hûnfor. But with each encounter of those days and nights, Moustique felt her other image attached to her like a shadow. He felt the two images floating closer and closer until at last they would be one, and so it seemed inevitable to him when one night he woke in the small hours with that sense of being called, though this time there was no drumming. The priest’s snores ran on as usual. The moonlight, shattered by the jalousies, spread in long, flat rays over the objects in the room. Moustique rose carefully, slipped through the door. His feet fell silently on puffs of powdery dust. No drumming but the beat of his own blood. The silence seemed perfect everywhere, and no one w
as about, but he felt that sense of expectation, almost choking in his throat, still leading him. He went counterclockwise around the corners of the priest’s house. In a pool of moonlight near the cold ashes of the cook fire, Marie-Noelle stood still and calm. When he appeared, her balance broke, and she took a few steps away from him toward the shadows, her movement lilting, then paused, poised on the balls of her bare feet, looking back over her shoulder.

  He overtook her just within the shade of the ajoupa where she had stayed before. Her right hand lay against his collarbone lightly, slightly cool, the barest touch. Their left hands were joined together, as if they were going to waltz. Dousman. Moustique did not know if one of them had said the word aloud. Gently, sweetly . . . dousman. Her taste was the sweetest experience that had ever graced his senses.

  Then his days passed easily, as if in dream, for everything in the scripture and liturgy he was set to learn found its reflection in the knowledge of the hûnfor, while each time he entered the ajoupa with Marie-Noelle his dreams became actual: voluptuary visions embodied in real flesh. The moon kept waxing night by night, inflating its lopsided edges until it was a perfect circle, whitely blazing in the velvet sky.

  Then one night there was no moon. When Moustique, having parted lingeringly from Marie-Noelle, reentered the house to collect the slop jar, there was no sound of the priest’s snoring, though Delahaye lay in his usual position abed, his sharp nose jutting up like the fin of a shark. Moustique’s senses registered the change, but his mind took no account of it. He walked to the river in the wandering starlight, cleaned the jar and then returned. When he turned the corner of the church, yawning lazily, turning the damp jar in his hands, he found the priest smashing the ajoupa to flinders with an ax.

  Inevitable. Moustique could see that now. Why had he not seen it always? The empty jar had fallen from his numb hands, but had not broken. The relief he felt in this scrap of good fortune was meaningless now, he recognized. Delahaye lowered the ax and braced his hands on the haft, trembling slightly across his shoulders. On occasion Moustique had seen him preach dreadful, fiery sermons, but this was worse, much worse. The priest’s thin lips were white from pressure, red spots flared in the hollow of his cheeks where the skin stretched taut over the the bone.

  “The Devil,” Delahaye said slowly, “will be driven from you, boy.”

  Moustique stayed rooted, as if fascinated by a snake. The priest caught his wrist, spun him around, and pushed him against the trunk of a tree. Automatically Moustique’s arms rose to embrace the wood. His cheek was flattened against rough bark. The priest tore his shirt from collar to tail, ripped down his trousers to the ankles. A pause, a breath, then the first lash fell.

  The instrument was a four-foot length of green liana, cut in advance for the purpose, as Moustique saw from his one squinted eye. The vine sizzled in the air before each strike, but it did not land as heavily as a leather whip, nor cut as a knotted cord would have done. Not that Moustique had ever been whipped before. He had felt the flat of his father’s hand, but whipping was for slaves, for blacks, and not for him.

  Delahaye had evidently some experience of the work to be done. He laid on neat horizontal stripes, accurately spaced and placed, across the back over the buttocks and the thighs. He paced himself, as for long endurance, and in the intervals of breath, before he struck again, he spoke.

  “You have . . .” snap! “. . . sinned with the woman . . .” snap! “. . . but have you also . . .” snap! “. . . bowed to the Devil?” snap! “Have you invited . . .” snap! “. . . the great black Satan . . .” snap! “. . . into your heart?”

  Each blow was painful, but superficially so, a sting and a welt rising from the skin. Soon enough Moustique understood that Delahaye did not mean to do him serious bodily damage, not of the sort that would cripple, maim and scar. Still the sting of the liana brought tears to his eyes, and an expulsion of breath he would not let become a cry.

  “Christ our Lord . . .” snap! “. . . drove out the devils . . .” snap! “He sent those devils . . .” snap! “. . . into swine!” snap! “Casting out . . .” snap! “I cast out . . .” snap! “. . . beat the blood of black sin . . .” snap! “. . . out of your veins...”

  Moustique’s mind dislocated and began to travel. He had seen whippings aplenty, for under slavery they were common enough. And in the camps of the first rebellion, the black chiefs had whipped their men for various infractions, but not Toussaint. Toussaint had never ordered a man whipped, though if an offense were too grave for verbal rebuke, he might well command the offender to be shot. It was told that Toussaint had never been whipped himself, but many in his company had been, as well as ear-lopped, amputated, branded with hot iron . . . the scars were evident everywhere. Toussaint’s fearsome subaltern, Dessalines, would sometimes remove his coat and shirt and shift his shoulders in a subtle manner which caused the bands of cicatrix all over his back to writhe like fat white worms.

  Moustique’s own father had once broken up a whipping. The slave had been pegged face down on the ground, blood from his stripes soaking into the dirt. Père Bonne-chance had hopped down from his donkey and traversed the field with his brown cassock flapping. The whip-handling overseer, he said later, was white canaille from a French prison, bandy-legged, troll-like, but with a long, muscular arm. Père Bonne-chance put his own body under the lash, letting the leather wrap around his stubby forearm. With a jerk he brought the overseer stumbling toward him and hit him with his free hand a short blow that stunned him and knocked out several of his teeth. He untied the thongs that bound the wrists and ankles of the injured slave and brought him to his own house to be treated and healed. The master of the plantation had been angry when he heard of the episode but had taken no action; the embarrassment of brawling with a priest would not do.

  Now Moustique thought of the agony his father had suffered on the wheel before his death, and his own wish to whimper shamed him further. Nothing bound him to the tree, his whipping post, but he was fixed there, without the will to move. To close off the cry building in his throat, he bit down on his lip till his mouth filled with blood.

  The beating stopped.

  “Go into the house,” Delahaye said.

  After a moment, Moustique pushed himself up from the tree trunk and looked glazedly at the priest. A swirl of golden dots ran before his eyes.

  “Go,” Delahaye said, half breathless. He stood straight, though his voice was strained, and a beading of sweat stood on his forehead. Moustique went limping toward the house, holding his torn trousers up with one hand.

  Delahaye came in a moment after him and got a fresh shirt and pair of cotton pantaloons from his own store.

  “Put these on,” he said. “Go on, dress yourself.” He turned his back and looked out the window.

  Moustique, delicately, put on the new clothing. He could not see the marks of the whipping on his back, but exploration with a fingertip let him know that the skin was welted but not broken. His worst injury was the bitten lip.

  Delahaye turned to face him. “You may sit down.”

  Moustique swallowed a mouthful of blood and remained on his feet.

  “Another preceptor might have beaten you more severely,” Delahaye pointed out. “And afterward, rubbed salt and hot pepper seed into your wounds.”

  “I know it,” Moustique said, thickly because of his swollen lip.

  “Very well.” Delahaye draped his stole over his shoulders and sat down at the table, looking up at Moustique with his clear gray eyes.

  “Understand,” the priest said. “It is not your African blood that I rebuke, but the sin which runs in the blood of all men, no matter what their color. The sin of your father, visited on you.” He paused, eyes drifting, then returning to Moustique’s face. “Saint Paul said, ‘It is better to marry than to burn,’ but a priest must not, may not marry, and fornication is a grievous sin.”

  Delahaye put his hand on the cover of the heavy Bible which lay on the table, but did not open
it.

  “‘Now if I do that I would not,’ ” he intoned. “‘it is not I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God, after the inward man, but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me to captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.’ ”

  Delahaye paused to clear his throat.

  “‘O wretched man that I am!’ ” he went on. “‘Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ ”

  Delahaye looked hard at Moustique, who swallowed more blood and kept his silence.

  “The words of Saint Paul,” the priest said. “But it is Christ only, who delivers. Kneel down, my son, and make a true confession. Repent and your sins will be washed away, even if you have bent your head before the Devil.”

  Moustique licked at his cut lip and knelt down carefully. The movement hurt him less than he had expected. He rocked back on his heels and looked up at the priest.

  “Saint Paul said also,” Moustique pronounced slowly, “‘If you live in the Spirit, you are not under the law.’ ”

  It seemed to him that Delahaye quailed.

  “My God,” the priest said. “What have I done?” He covered his face briefly with his large hands. When he took them away, his eyes went wandering, over the window and the furnishings of the room.

  “From what tree were you grafted, after all?” he said at last. “Well, boy, I have no will to beat you any more today . . .” He got up heavily, went into the bedroom and shut the door.

  Moustique stretched out gingerly on his pallet. The bleeding of his lip had slowed, so he didn’t have to swallow as often as before. In less than two minutes he was unconscious. His double life had robbed him of sleep for many days. Now he slept dreamless through the heat of the day until evening.