Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Toussaint and his army passed Fort Picolet and entered Le Cap an hour after sundown drenched to the bone from the afternoon rain. The soldiers filled the casernes to overflowing, leaving the mulatto prisoners huddled in the cobbled court. Doctor Hébert and Captain Maillart slipped away to the Cigny house, where the servants were glad enough to admit them, though the owners were absent. From the servants they learned the curious story of Arnaud’s rescue of Fontelle and her family. They dried themselves at the kitchen fire, ate a plain supper of chicken and yams, then fell into bed where they slept like two stones.

  In the morning, the doctor changed the dressing on Maillart’s wounded thigh, and, having admonished the captain to rest his leg, set out to learn the news of the town. From Pascal, he learned that Roume and Toussaint were at odds since last night’s interview, not only over the war with Rigaud, which all Roume’s influence could not seem to arrest, but also over Toussaint’s dealings with the North American Republic.

  For some months, Toussaint had had his own representative in Philadelphia, on some mission whose details had never quite come to light, and more recently the American president had sent Edward Stevens to Le Cap in the role of consul. Roume was especially piqued, by Pascal’s account, that Stevens was delegated to wait upon Toussaint rather than himself, and that the trade agreement with the Americans had apparently been broken by General Maitland—when France and Britain were still at war!

  By Pascal’s account, there was no formal treaty—nothing for which Toussaint might later be called to account—but instead a discreet understanding that Toussaint would prevent French privateers from troubling American shipping in the waters of Saint Domingue. For their part, the Americans would let pass any French ship which carried Toussaint’s safe-conduct.

  “You may imagine, Roume was absolutely frothing,” Pascal explained. “Toussaint’s own safe-conduct—as if he were a king.”

  “I see,” said the doctor. “Then again, such transactions are best judged by their results.”

  “You are right.” Pascal drew out his watch and opened the lid. “But why should we not go down to the port? There is a ship just in from Philadelphia, which should be unloading still.”

  Indeed, when they turned the corner by the Customs House onto the waterfront, they found a great-bellied merchantman with the American colors snapping at the masthead. Gangs of porters were lugging long shallow packing cases down the gangplank—so heavy that two men were needed to heft each case.

  “Muskets,” said Pascal. “American made, of the first quality. Two thousand, six hundred and eighty of them—I saw the bill of lading myself. Of course there are casks of powder to match. And by way of a compliment, the ship will leave her ballast here.”

  “Oh?” said the doctor.

  “The ballast is lead,” said Pascal. “To be remolded into musket balls.”

  “Of course,” said the doctor. “Why did I need to ask?” In fact the only aspect which mildly surprised him was the port of call. Since the withdrawal of the English there had been a steady stream of American ships delivering muskets, powder and shot to Gonaives.

  In the afternoon, when the doctor waited upon Toussaint at the Governor’s house, he found the general busy examining a group of white children, scions of the landowners on the northern plain, who were supposed to have been preparing for their first communion. Toussaint was not pleased with their performance, did not find their answers ready or confident enough. They must study their catechism much harder, he admonished them as he sent them out, for he meant to see them again, on Sunday at the church.

  It struck the doctor that if Toussaint had leisure to preoccupy himself with devotional matters, the time might be right for him to ask leave to travel to Vallière. Approaching with his hat in his hand, he put the question.

  “No,” Toussaint said at once. “No, I shall want you here.” He tilted his head to peer out the window at the angle of the sun. “It is already Friday, and you would be absent for four days at least—No, I cannot spare you, now.”

  The doctor bowed wordlessly and turned to depart.

  “I may tell you that there has been no trouble in the region of Vallière.” Toussaint passed a hand across his mouth and his lower jaw. “I have information which I trust—it is very calm there.”

  At the Cigny house the doctor learned that Maillart had gone out, against his instructions to rest his injured thigh. He found the captain at a tavern on the Rue Espagnole, counting up his winnings from a card game. His companions in play had already left, disgusted with their luck.

  “Your leg,” the doctor said, frowning.

  “No more than a nuisance.” Maillart stacked coins, happily.

  “I want you to take a sea bath daily.”

  Maillart looked at him with total disbelief.

  “Or fetch me my saw.” The doctor grinned.

  “And what of your arm, O my physician?”

  The doctor pushed back his sleeve to show the pink pucker of healed flesh. “It has mended, thanks to the same treatment I recommend to you.”

  “Oh well, in that case . . .” Maillart muttered. “Well, where have you been all the day?”

  The doctor told him.

  “Have you any news of the south?”

  “Little enough,” the doctor said. “Some fighting around the Goâves, but there has been no important change of position—as far as anyone knows here.”

  “I do not understand Rigaud,” said the captain. “It’s all or nothing for him now—he ought to strike, and hang the risk! The risk has already been taken.”

  “Well, as we are fighting on the other side, we must profit from his error, if error it be,” the doctor said. “Some say that Rigaud is waiting for help from France.”

  “A fantasy,” said Maillart. “He has put too much trust in that letter of Hédouville’s.”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “I think you are right.”

  “And meanwhile Toussaint passes his hours catechizing first communicants?”

  The doctor shrugged. “He takes his religion seriously.”

  Although Toussaint would not give him permission to leave town, he also made no call on the doctor’s services for the next two days. There was time enough for him to drag the captain to the sandy cove across the headland. Maillart, it turned out, did not know how to swim and was embarrassed by that failing, but the doctor pointed out that he would get the same benefit by standing waist-deep in the water, and after two days of this practice the wound did begin to improve.

  On Sunday everyone was specially enjoined to attend the mass. Toussaint’s soldiers lined the roadways, filled in all four sides of the Place d’Armes. In the middle of the square, all the mulatto prisoners of the northwest had been collected, and those from the Le Cap region had been brought up from La Fossette. Each group seemed further disheartened to meet the other—it looked as if they had been summoned to their own execution.

  From the steps of the church, Toussaint Louverture presided over the square. When the little phalanx of first communicants arrived, all bearing lighted candles in their hands for the occasion, he stopped them before they could enter, and in a voice which carried to all four corners of the Place d’Armes, addressed them on the duties of mercy and the blessings of compassion. He expounded on these central Christian virtues for nearly twenty minutes, while the doctor and the captain exchanged glances of perplexity, and the priest and his acolytes looked out the door with barely suppressed impatience, and candle wax dripped down on the hands of the mystified children.

  Finally, Toussaint let it be known, as an example of his general precept, that the colored people had now been punished enough. According to the duty of mercy and forgiveness, they would now be released. They were to be given a change of clothes (for the captives from the northwest were by then in a state of abject near-nakedness) and allowed to return to their homes, be it even as far as Môle Saint Nicolas, without interference from black soldier or black citizen. Still more, they must be
treated as brothers by all who met them along their way.

  They left Le Cap at dawn next day, Toussaint and the better part of his army, in urgent haste for the southern front. That night they spent at Gonaives, and left in good time the following morning. Toussaint chose to travel by coach across the Savane Désolée and the Artibonite lowlands, with the doctor seated across from him, listening to dictation. The doctor had Toussaint’s portable writing desk shakily balanced on his knees, and was taking notes as best he could, though he knew his sheet would amount to no more than a maze of blots and illegible scrawling. He’d have been happier in the saddle, where he hoped to return; a couple of Toussaint’s honor guard were leading their horses behind the coach.

  At Saint Marc they stopped for a meal and to water the horses. Then Toussaint pressed on, ahead of his main force, escorted by twenty men of his honor guard and a few staff officers, including Maillart. The doctor and Toussaint had resumed their places in the coach. But on the outskirts of Arcahaye, Toussaint stopped speaking and let his head loll back on the hard leather cushion. For perhaps ten minutes he seemed to doze, or otherwise depart from consciousness (though his eyes stayed open just a crack). Then his head snapped forward and his eyes went wide.

  “That mare of yours,” he said to the doctor. “She still gives trouble?”

  “What?” said the doctor. “Oh, it is hardly worth mentioning.”

  “But let me see if I can correct her.” Toussaint grinned and called to the coachman to halt.

  Stiffly, the doctor climbed down to the roadbed. One of the helmeted guardsmen brought up both the mare and Toussaint’s white charger.

  “Ou mèt alé,” Toussaint advised his driver. The coach rolled off, following the group of horsemen at the head of the line.

  With a smile, Toussaint indicated Bel Argent. The doctor swallowed, let out the stirrup as far as it would go, and swung himself up with more of a show of confidence than he really felt. The white stallion shifted under him like an earthquake. This was more horse than he was used to, but he nodded to the guardsman, who released his grip on Bel Argent’s bridle.

  Toussaint was whispering or breathing into the ear of the doctor’s mare. He had left his general’s hat in the coach, and without it he looked quite nondescript, except for his uniform coat, and even that was unornamented beyond the simplest insignia of his rank. He bestrode the mare and rode her forward. The coach had turned a bend in the road and was momentarily out of sight.

  The doctor found that the best way to manage Bel Argent was to let himself be managed, as one allows oneself to be led by a superior dance partner. A case where the horse knew more than the rider. They were bringing up the very rear. Ahead, the mare spooked at something, maybe a glint of reflection from the stream beside the road, and commenced that skating sideways step, but Toussaint drooped forward over her mane, murmuring something which seemed to calm her. Then he came straight in the saddle again. Without the hat, in his red headcloth, he might have been some ordinary peasant, except of course for the quality of his horsemanship.

  The light was slanting through the trees that lined the road as they came down into the area called Sources Puantes. The air was thick with the sulfur smell of the springs that gave the place its name. The doctor found himself unnerved, for no good reason he could think of. He stared glazedly at Toussaint’s red mouchwa têt. The brimstone smell oppressed him; his skin began to crawl. Of a sudden he remembered that Maillart was at the head of the column, though he could not have said why this thought so alarmed him. A light squeeze of his calves was enough to bring Bel Argent into a smooth canter. They flowed forward, passing the coach.

  Beyond the first riders in the column was a declivity in the road. The trees to the west were tall and thick-boled and regularly spaced. Red-gold sunlight spilled between them over the roadway, and the dark bars of the tree’s shadows filled the doctor with a reasonless foreboding.

  “Come to the rear,” he called to the captain. Maillart looked at him, then curiously at the white stallion, then again at the doctor’s face.

  “Come quickly—you are wanted,” the doctor said.

  He turned Bel Argent and rode back down the line, passing the coach in the opposite direction; the coachman raised a hand to greet him. He looked back once and saw that Maillart was following. For seventy yards the road was empty, then came more guardsmen, and finally Toussaint, riding even slower than before, his eyes fixed forward as if upon some dream.

  Captain Maillart fell in with the doctor, behind Toussaint. “What is it?” he said. “Who sent for me?”

  But already they heard the snapping of gunfire and someone’s outraged shout. The rear guard was galloping forward toward the sound, and Maillart, grimacing, spurred his force to overtake them. Toussaint, however, kept on at the same leisurely trot, as if he had heard nothing and had no concern. The doctor drew abreast, then passed him.

  Around the bend of the road, the two guardsmen were racing the runaway coach, while several others had dismounted and were firing on fleeing attackers through the trees at either side of the road. The doctor gave Bel Argent his head. The white stallion overtook the coach just as one of the guardsmen leaned down to catch the harness of the nearest horse and jerk the whole equipage to a halt.

  The driver had fallen from the box and lay doubled over the left shaft of the coach, his fingers dragging furrows in the dirt. The coach doors were shot to splinters on either side. Toussaint’s hat still lay on the seat, its red and white plumes broken by bullets, and the leather upholstery was perforated like a sieve.

  Maillart reined up beside the doctor. “Antoine,” he said. “Antoine.” But the doctor had no answer to the question in his eyes. He did not know himself how he had known.

  Only the coachman had been killed. The guardsmen made their report to Toussaint in low voices: one of the assassins had been shot down but the rest had managed to escape into the surrounding brush.

  Toussaint did not seem astonished by anything they told him. He listened gravely to the report, but made no reply. Retrieving his hat from the shattered coach, he plucked out the broken feathers, and settled it on his head. They rode on, speechless, into the gathering dark.

  34

  That first morning when she woke in the inn at Dondon, Isabelle was seized with nausea the moment she sat up. Her throat bubbled up, and she hunched over, spilling vomit onto a square of cloth she had just time to snatch under her chin. She spat, swallowed, and regained partial composure, though her eyes watered still and her gullet burned.

  Nanon was asleep, or feigning to be, and without any servant at all, Isabelle hardly know what to do next. She felt ashamed. But she rolled up the cloth into a damp, foul-smelling package, and, holding it away from herself in her left hand, she tiptoed outdoors, barefoot and wearing only her shift.

  It was still very early and quite cool. The town was unusually quiet, since almost all the soldiers had poured out of it the day before. A few chickens scratched in the dust of the main square and at the well several women were filling clay vessels and swinging them to a graceful balance atop their heads. Isabelle was ashamed to approach them, though water was what she wanted. In the other direction she could hear the sound of a stream and so she turned and walked toward it.

  A few black women sitting on their doorsteps looked at her curiously. The cloths that covered their doorways had been cinched in the middle, like a woman’s waist, for light and ventilation indoors. After two blocks of low houses like these, a ravine bordered the edge of the town. Isabelle peered over the edge and decided she could manage to get down there, skipping from boulder to boulder and holding onto the hanging vines. The effort focused her, and by the time she reached the level spit of gravel by the water, the last traces of her nausea had receded. She knelt at the streambed and let the current wash clean her soiled cloth. The stain came out easily enough when she rubbed it over the stones. She washed her face in the cold water, and took a cautious sip—only enough to moisten her throat.
She wanted next to nothing in her stomach, still.

  With the damp cloth wrapped around her wrist, she walked downstream, looking for an easier way to climb back to the town. As she followed the stream around a bend, she came face to face with another woman, younger than herself and bare to the waist as she labored over her own washing. Startled, the other woman broke into a bright white smile. Isabelle curtsied, blushing at the absurdity of her gesture, which still somehow felt right. The black woman straightened, her hands on her hips, her full breasts trembling as she threw back her head to laugh.

  Behind her, two small children played on a strip of fine sand. The infant boy was bare-naked, his polished skin a rich, iridescent black. Whenever he crawled for the water’s edge, the older child retrieved him. It was a sweet moment, and the sun was warming on her back, but when she heard a bell begin to ring in the town, Isabelle knew she had better return.

  “Koté m kab monté?” she asked, and the other woman smiled again, and turned to point farther down the stream, where Isabelle could see the foot of a much more feasible trail than the one she’d descended. She made her thanks and walked by. Halfway up the trail, she stopped and looked down through the hanging lianas, and waved the free end of the cloth at the woman and her children, but they were all unaware of her now. Nevertheless, her feeling of exhilaration sustained itself. At this instant she had nothing, was constrained by nothing but her body and the cloth that covered it, and there was no connection to her history here, except Nanon, who was herself such a mystery.