Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Soon afterward the little girl became sick with a fever. Zabeth was still deeper in terror for that, because she loved Sophie as much as she would love the child Bouquart had put into her belly, who was still waiting to come out. Zabeth’s voice brought all the old women down from the hills around Ennery to the grand’case, and she even sent for Riau too, because she knew that Toussaint had taught me some of what a doktè-fey knows, and she believed that I knew whiteman’s medicine from the doctor too, which was not true, except for bonesetting and cutting off ruined arms and legs. When I came to Sophie, I saw at once that she did not have a fever that would take her away from this life. Her spirit was weakened because her father had not come back or sent any word for so long, and then the mother vanished also, even if Sophie cared as much for Zabeth as for those other two. But she would not die. When I came, the old women had already chosen the right leaves to send that fever away from her. And in a few days Sophie had left her bed and was not really sick anymore, though she was pale, and quieter than before.

  I did not think so much about Sophie or any troubles of the grand’case because at that time I had a trouble all my own. This was because Guiaou and Riau had come to be at Ennery at the same time. We each must go where orders sent us and they had not sent us to Ennery together, not for a long while. But after all the men of Dieudonné came to join his army, Toussaint was so very pleased that he let Riau and Guiaou choose where they would be sent next. I chose Ennery, and it seemed Guiaou must have said the same, and that was how it happened. There was not so much fighting just then anyway. Even when Villatte tried to make his rising, Toussaint left Riau and Guiaou at Ennery, though he took a lot of men north to take care of that trouble.

  That was the first time I saw the new child born to Merbillay. A girl child, and Guiaou had planted the seed of her. Her name was Sans-chagrin, but Merbillay and everyone called her Yoyo.

  So many babies and small children were in the camp with us now. It seemed I had not noticed them until I saw Merbillay holding this new baby in her arms. In slavery time we did not see so many children because women did not want to bring them into the world to be slaves, and many women found one way or another to stop the children coming. It was different now, and women were glad when the babies came, and I was glad to see Merbillay and this new girl baby smiling at each other, though I had no voice in her naming.

  I saw those smiles from a distance, though. It was Guiaou who stayed in the ajoupa with Merbillay, and Caco, and the new child Sans-chagrin. Since Riau had been there last, Merbillay had coated the stick walls with layers and layers of clay to make thick walls that passed no light, so it was a real case now and not an ajoupa. There was no wooden door, only a pale blue cloth hanging over the doorway, which in the day was tied like a woman’s waist so light and air could come inside, but those clay walls would keep a man out still.

  Once, when I knew Guiaou had gone down to the river, I went to that clay case. Merbillay was lying on her mat because it was the hot time of the day, and the baby was asleep beside her. It took some little time for my eyes to see because I was not used to the darkness the clay walls made. At last I could see my banza still hanging from the rooftree like always. Merbillay saw it too, and she got up slowly from the mat—I watched her moving, and her face and arms were shining and slick with sweat, but she was not smiling now. She took down the banza and gave it to me, and even our hands did not touch as I took the banza by the neck. When I went out with the banza in my hand, I thought that I would not be going back to that case any more.

  Much higher on the hill I had an ajoupa which was made only of sticks and leaves, not clay, so it was cool and full of wind and sunlight. I hung my banza there, and there I kept my coat of a captain hung on crossed sticks to keep its shape—if I was not wearing it, for every day I went with other officers and the white captains Maillart or Vaublanc to train new men, and keep the old men ready. But in early morning or at evening the officer coat would hang on the crossed sticks, with the watch ticking in the pocket where I could not hear it. I would not wear even a shirt, and the air would run all over my skin, and I would be playing the banza. I played sad tunes that had no words to them, the same few notes repeating. Sometimes Caco came up to my ajoupa by himself as if the tunes had called him—we would listen, or I would hang the banza from the roof and we would go and do some other thing together.

  I did not go to look for Caco at that clay case anymore, but only waited for him to come to me. Sometimes for days he would not come. I would walk near the clay case, but it seemed whenever Guiaou was not there then Couachy was somewhere nearby, watching. Guiaou and Couachy had fought against the English together in the Artibonite and after that they walked like brothers together.

  And I, Riau, had walked in the same spirit with Guiaou, especially in the fighting around Grande Rivière, when both of us had tried to help the whiteman doctor heal the wounded men. Since then, since Dieudonné was sold, a crack had opened up between us like a crack in the earth opens when it has been too dry. Yet I thought I must not blame Guiaou for Dieudonné when really I was angry about the woman. If I thought more deeply, I knew also that it had been Toussaint’s hidden hand which moved Guiaou in the taking of Dieudonné, but in those weeks at Ennery I did not usually let my thinking go so far in that direction.

  Bouquart asked why I did not start with some other woman, and he named women who were ready to come to me. I knew them anyway, there was more than one and some of them were beautiful. One liked me for the captain’s coat, and others for different reasons. I saw their smiles, but my spirit did not draw me to them.

  So on an evening I sat alone inside the ajoupa, playing to myself as I would do at that hour, following the voices of the birds outside. I sat on the ground in a corner with my back against a post, but through the space of the doorway I saw the clouds rushing across the sky and all the birds were hurrying too, because of the rain, except the rain would not really come, because the season was past. When I heard footsteps, I thought maybe Caco was coming, but the feet were heavier than his, and I saw through the woven walls of the ajoupa the figure of a woman on the path. Between the cracks and sticks of the wall her face and her form were broken up, though I saw she was wearing a long red cloth wound many times around her head. Maybe it was one of those women Bouquart had spoken of. I began folding away into myself to hide from her. But when she stepped into the doorway, it was Merbillay. Guiaou was not away with the army then. He was somewhere on Habitation Thibodet, but Riau was not thinking of him then, and neither was Merbillay.

  A few raindrops spattered into the dust behind us as she came in, and a few more flattened on the palm thatch of the roof. She was a long time unwinding that red spangled cloth from her head. We did not speak of anything at all. With the heaviness of rain, the air between us was like water, so that each of her movements made a swirl that touched my body, though we were not yet near enough to touch.

  After, a shaft of sun came through the scattering sounds and made the shape of a flattened circle all in green and gold over a few small carrés of cane field in the valley. Merbillay and I looked down at this together, feeling a calm and a stillness between us. All the time she kept inside the doorway though, and I felt how she did not want to be seen by anyone, and a little seed of anger was somewhere in my head, though not yet opened.

  After this day, Merbillay came to me sometimes, without warning and without a word. I would not know when she was coming, and still I could not go to her. Each time she came, the hot, sharp sweetness was stronger than the time before.

  In the next days the doctor’s sister returned. She had gone away in the darkness riding in man’s trousers and all alone, but when she came back, she was riding sidesaddle like a regular white lady and escorted by five of Toussaint’s ninety new guardsmen with the tall, shiny helmets, and with her was the boy, Paul. Then there was a lot of happiness in the grand’case, and Zabeth shouted and cried in joy, and soon the story of all that happened came out to us in
the camp through Bouquart—how Elise was in harmony with her brother again because she had found the child (though they had not found Nanon at all) and how Choufleur had wanted to sell the boy, to make him disappear.

  I, Riau, was glad for the people in the grand’case, because I was in friendship with the doctor since a long time. Also I had watched Sophie with a different eye since Zabeth had called me to her treatment. Even after the fever left her, she had been pale and sad, like a ghost, but now the light returned to her eye, when she saw her mother and Paul again. Pauline, who was the daughter of that marron priest and Fontelle, had come with them too, to help Zabeth with the little children . . . but they were more like three or four small children, laughing and playing together.

  But it was not finished yet, because they had not found Nanon anywhere. That doctor did not have the proud ways or the manner of other blancs —he was so much another way that you might fail to see him when he was there, but when he had once set his teeth into something, he would not let go very easily, no more than a big caïman from the river. I knew this, and I pictured him with the mirror ouanga he kept in one pocket and the snuffbox ouanga he kept in another pocket far away as if it would be like gunpowder and fire if he and Choufleur ever met, and I saw that in the end they must come together. Their story was not finished yet, and neither was mine.

  I saw before my eyes a newborn baby stuck on a long spear, with arms and legs still wriggling, though it must soon die. By the force of pity you wished for it to die soon to end its suffering and end the suffering you felt when you had to look at it that way. And yet I, Riau, had looked at sights like that with another feeling. In the time of the first risings, Riau had done certain things, or certain things had been done with his body which I did not now remember, either because he was ridden by a lwa or . . .

  Choufleur must have wanted to wipe out that boy, Paul. To make it like he had never been born. I felt that this must be the truth. But the blancs had been the first to put babies on spears, before the risings, when they rode against the colored people of the west.

  Then I walked down to where the clay case was. I felt a purpose in my head without knowing what it was. Only it was many days since Merbillay had come to my ajoupa on the hill. That whole part of Habitation Thibodet was like a little town now because people had been living there so long. Most of the other ajoupas had been finished with clay walls too and the paths were packed down hard between them. There was a chicken, here was a goat, there was a donkey nuzzling stubble by a housewall. Merbillay sat on the low clay sill of the doorway with the new baby at her breast.

  The sun was exactly on top of my head and burned down through my body and legs and on into the ground hot enough to boil the water that pools beneath. Merbillay looked up at me with a still, stone face, and I looked at her without knowing what to say or do.

  Couachy came from the corner of another case, walking quickly and speaking in a loud voice. “Ki problèm ou?” The wrong words, too loud. What is your problem? Riau had no quarrel with Couachy, but when he spoke, the seed of anger bloomed in my head and filled it up with its stinging red flower.

  For a moment I did not know exactly what was happening, only I heard Merbillay’s voice, high and shrill with anger, but not the words. Only the surge and pull of blood and muscle, jolt of bone. Then I saw that Guiaou had come from somewhere to stand with Couachy, and Bouquart was by me, holding my elbow. Merbillay stood in the doorway with Yoyo held high on her shoulder and beginning to complain for the loss of the breast, and Merbillay was still cutting at all of us with her tongue, but at the same time her eyes darted everywhere to be sure it would not be safer for her to run inside the house with the baby. I saw Caco’s face too, looking around her hip at us.

  Bouquart and Guiaou were shouting also, and maybe Riau was saying something too, but Couachy was silent; his tongue came out of his mouth only to touch the blood that seeped where his lip was swollen. Seeing the blood, I thought that fighting might really begin among all of us. But Bouquart pulled me back very hard with his hand on my elbow, and then Quamba came.

  Quamba walked to us in that quiet and slow way he would have walked toward horses who were fighting or frightened, rearing or tossing their heads or struggling against a tether or trying to break out of some stall or corral. Every one stopped shouting when Quamba came, even Merbillay. She stood with her mouth still open, but no words came out anymore, and Yoyo stopped and whimpered and turned her head on her shoulder, to look. Quamba came between us all with his soft, gentle step, and he spoke in a voice so calm and soothing that we did not need to hear the words, no more than a horse would have needed to understand them. Quamba had worked upon Guiaou’s fear of horses, and Riau knew him even before that. Also Quamba had taken the asson, at the hûnfor above Ennery, and this too gave him respect with all of us.

  My head was still all hot inside so that I could not understand what he was saying. But his words were calming, and his hands moved smoothly on the air between us, as if he were testing whether he might touch Guiaou or Riau without being stung or burned.

  “La paix,” said Quamba, to Guiaou and then to me. Bouquart drew on my arm and I let myself go back with him. Then we turned together, Bouquart and I, and were walking away from them all and away from the clay case, and after a few steps I shook my arm free of Bouquart’s hand.

  “La paix,” Quamba called in a slightly stronger voice, though not really loud. I looked back and met his eye to show that I had heard him. But there was no peace in me anywhere.

  The next day Merbillay came again to the ajoupa on the hill. And afterward she came even more often than before. There was hardly a day when she did not come. I was glad, but part of this gladness was mixed with anger, and I knew there would be some more trouble.

  Then, after some days, the blanc captains Maillart and Vaublanc came up the path to my ajoupa. I was so much surprised to see them there, I wondered if maybe they did not have an order to arrest Riau. But they only stood outside the ajoupa, breathing hard as whitemen do when they have had to climb a hill. They spoke about the weather and the fineness of the view. It was true that you could see a long way from that hilltop, all over the deep valley and around the mornes which closed it in. The white captains asked my leave to come inside the ajoupa. There was not a lot for them to look at in there, but Maillart asked that I take down the banza and play a little, and afterwards they took it up and turned it over and passed it between them, comparing it to instruments they knew from France, though it seemed it was not very much like any of those.

  Then the two white captains left the ajoupa and made ready to start down the path, only Maillart turned back to me suddenly and placed one hand carefully on my chest and took in a deep, important breath.

  “You must not fight Guiaou,” he said. “Riau, I tell you as—as your brother officer.”

  So that was what it had been about, from the beginning. I said nothing, though I had the angry thought that Maillart, even if he had been my parrain to teach me the whiteman ways of fighting, Maillart was not my father. The words of the Creole song came in my head. We have no mother. We have no father. We come from Guinée . . . but we did not come out of Guinée because we wanted to.

  Maillart would not have understood any of that. I saw that he had come out of friendship, perhaps brotherhood, even if he could not say the word without some difficulty. Another blanc would not have come at all. I had not even known that Maillart bothered himself to know where Riau stayed at night. He was shaking his head now, smiling a little, in the manner he might have had with another white officer.

  “Women,” he said. “They are to admire, to serve, to enjoy, perhaps . . . but not to die for.”

  “But if you were in my case, you would fight a duel,” I said.

  The Captain Maillart turned some of those colors that rise so easily in a whiteman’s skin. He could not very well say that it was not the same for me. I did not know if he thought this either.

  Vaublanc, who had been
watching us, spoke then. “You are an officer, and Guiaou is not,” he said. “You cannot challenge an enlisted man. No more can you accept his challenge, or even notice it.”

  Blanc rules. Maillart was nodding to agree. I thought, yes, if I wore my officer’s coat, I might order Guiaou what to do, and Couachy too (but neither of them was in my company), and yet this would not make the problem of the woman go away. What would Maillart do if his woman went with a man not an officer? I did not ask him this, though, because I could not think of any time when a blanche had done such a thing, so maybe it was not possible.

  The white captains must have thought they had said enough, because they made ready to go down the trail again. When Maillart had taken a few steps, he stopped and looked at me again.

  “There was a time when I was in your place,” he said. “And I did not fight the other man.” He looked at me to know if I thought that fear had prevented him, but I did not think so, and then he went after Vaublanc, down the trail.

  I took leave for one night and one day and went to another higher mountain where there was bwa danno. I cut a danno from the ground, measuring it to be longer by two hand’s lengths than Guiaou’s coutelas. I had thought a lot about that coutelas, because Guiaou was very quick and skillful with it, and he preferred it to a gun.