“Ma chère, I was afraid for you,” he said. “There was a story that reached Le Cap, of a woman in trouble with childbirth.”
He thought he felt her weight shift toward him. But she reversed herself, with a slight pressure on his hand. “Come.”
He followed her into the dark bedroom. She lit a candle, cupping the flame in her hand. She shushed Paul, who had surged up to the edge of the cradle. In the flickering light, the doctor saw two children curled together, sleeping. They looked healthy enough, though one would not have taken them for twins. The lighter boy had a curious pigmentation: a current of black pinpoints running over the milky skin of his face. The other, smaller one was almost altogether black.
“But they seem to be very well,” the doctor said. Now he did feel the relief he wanted, though he was not sure why. He put his finger into the cradle and lightly touched the cheek of the bigger infant. The baby stirred, though without waking; the small hand came up automatically and closed around his finger.
“Do not wake them,” Nanon murmured. “They will cry.”
He turned to her, wondering. Her closed face. Again he felt himself on the brink of understanding, but it seemed better that he not cross over.
“Paul,” he said gently, “go and get your supper.”
When the boy had left, he disengaged his hand from the cradle and with the same finger lifted a heavy lock of hair from Nanon’s face. There was an ache all through him—blend of a strange sadness with desire. She looked up at him. He cupped her ear.
“I wish to be married,” he said.
Nanon turned, disengaging herself from his touch. Her face lowered like a flower wilting on the long stem of her neck.
“But what is it?” he said, confused, alarmed. Then he realized what she must be thinking: that he had found some eligible white woman and meant therefore to put her aside.
“No, no,” he said. Both hands now on both her shoulders, to turn and bring her nearer to him. “I mean, to you.”
He hung in darkness, over a torrent which roared in the sulfurous bowels of a cavern, twirling, left to a limit, then right to a limit, and very near to falling with each turn. He was hanging by just his left forefinger, and it was only the grip of the paler child, François, which kept him from pitching into the laval flow. Worst of all was his horrible, parching thirst. He had no strength to struggle, but somehow felt himself drawn upward. There was hope, then light. A gray light like the dawn. He saw the face of the black child, Gabriel, but larger, fixed like a stone idol. His own face was coming nearer to the parted lips of the child. At the moment of their kiss an immense flow of cool water poured from the infant’s mouth into his own, quenching his thirst and refreshing him.
He woke like a shot, sweating and trembling, yet at the same time happy and assured. Nanon was twined completely around him, her body touching every surface of his own. This was sweet, but in reality he was quite desperately thirsty. Carefully he untangled himself, stroking her long back as she murmured in her sleep. He pulled on his breeches and groped toward the door. His blind hands found a water jug on a stand. He lifted it and drank deeply and wet his fingers to stroke them over his face and the few remaining sprigs of hair on his head. Through the crack in the door he could see a light on the gallery, and he slipped out of the room and went toward it.
Tocquet was sitting at the table, turning the pages of a heavy ledger in the light of a small oil lamp. The parrot perched on the top rail of his chair, both eyes closed and apparently sleeping.
“Salut,” Tocquet said as the doctor came up.
The doctor sat down across the table from him, without replying. The banana stalk from Thibodet was on the table, slightly blackened after three days in the saddlebag. After the exertions of the day and evening, the doctor was rather hungry. He peeled a banana and began to eat.
“This Fortier woman knows her business,” Tocquet said, studying the close lines of script. “Someone has been making a good thing out of this place, and I do believe it must have been her. And her records are very meticulous. The plantings, the harvest, purchases and shipping. Every death and every birth—if it’s only a cat, she has written it.”
In the dark hills beyond the house, the siffleur montagne sang in a voice like water. The doctor inclined his head toward the sound.
“Of course, our lovely ladies of leisure have not been quite so exacting since. At least, not with the ledger.”
“Isabelle is not to be discounted,” the doctor observed.
“No,” Tocquet said. “Nor yet Nanon.” He turned back pages in the book. “But this is the hand of the other.” He reversed the book, holding it open for the doctor’s inspection. The words seemed to flutter in the wavering lamplight. The doctor leaned nearer, squinting.
To the quarteronée woman, Nanon, was born, 6 January 1800, a male child, quarteroné, to be called François.
“Well, then.” The doctor sat back, noncommittal. Tocquet picked up a cheroot from the table and bent to light it from the flame of the lamp.
“You have the name of an eccentric fellow,” he said, blowing smoke up toward the still fan blades overhead. “Yet he who takes you for a fool would be the greater fool himself.”
“You flatter me,” the doctor said.
“Do you flatter yourself? I know your dislike of the formula, but the union of a quarteronée with a blanc does not produce another quarteroné. Madame Fortier deduces a mixed-blood father. I am impressed with her perspicacity. Moreover, if two children had been born on this day, she would hardly have failed to make note of the second. As you are a master of medical science, it cannot have escaped you that those two children in there are not quite the same age, and that no kinship is apparent between them.”
“Oh,” said the doctor, tilting his head. The birdsong, which had stopped, now resumed again.
“I am satisfied that they are my children,” he said.
“You are.” Tocquet looked at him with a hint of a smile.
“You take what you’re given,” the doctor said. “As they are offered to me, I claim them.”
Tocquet looked as if he would say something, but he did not. He got up and tipped ash from his cheroot over the gallery rail, then came and stood beside the doctor. Again he failed to find a word, but he was smiling openly now. He gave the doctor a couple of heavy pats on his bare shoulder, as one might reward a reliable horse or dog. Speechless still, he went into the house.
The parrot was still roosted on the chair rail, and part of a glass of rum remained on the table near Tocquet’s place. The doctor reached for it and sipped. In the trees, the nightbird went on singing. The parrot stirred, ruffling the feathers of its neck. It turned its head to the right and the left, inspecting the doctor with one eye and then the other.
“M’ap prié pou’w,” the parrot said.
38
The war against the gens de couleur in the south was the bitterest, the angriest, that there had been since the first rising, but I, Riau, I did not own this anger. It was all around me, like the wind before the rain, but it did not blow inside of me. Other men were full of the spirit of rage. That same storm of anger took the colored men also, and threw them against our people like scraps of bagasse on the wind. There was such hate that men would throw down their guns and attack each other hand to hand. For that, some people called it the War of Knives, but as often men would throw the knives away too and fight with nails and teeth. That fight where Dessalines killed Choufleur was not the first of its kind, and not the last one either. But after Aquin no one wanted to listen to Rigaud any more, and the colored men could not call together enough men for a battle. We hunted them across the land like goats.
Sometimes, the war spirit came to Riau’s head—Ogûn-Feraille, with his iron sword flashing points like shells exploding in the sky. It was that way at Grand Goâve, when Ogûn rode the body of Riau into the fighting, so that afterward I did not know what had passed, unless someone told me. That way also at the bridge of Miragoâne�
��without a spirit in the head a man could not go into that bloody water under the cannon, the slaughter was too frightening. But Riau was not many days in that battle before the doctor called me out to work in the hospital again, and Guiaou also.
After Aquin, after Rigaud ran away on his boat and Toussaint came to Les Cayes, the doctor left very quickly to go north, because he was hungry to find his woman again if he could. Toussaint went north again also, not long after, leaving Dessalines in command of the Grande Anse and all of the Southern Department. Since the army of the colored men was broken, no more of our men were being hurt, or very few. Those who were in the hospitals had either got better or died, so Riau and Guiaou were taken out of the hospital and sent back to the work of killing again.
There still was much killing to be done, and it was ugly work, and I, Riau, did not like it. Rigaud had kept his word in tearing up all the trees and poisoning all the streams everywhere on the Grande Anse where he retreated, and it was for us to paint that desert with another coat of blood of all the men he left behind when he sailed away, some said to France, until all the south was like the hell where Jesus sends the people who have made him angry. Dessalines ordered many men killed in the same way he had killed Choufleur, only without first breaking the neck. One must put the sword point into the bounda of the living man and drive the sword all the way up as far as it would go. Sometimes there would be hundreds killed that way in a single day, and sometimes it took them a long time to die, after the sword had been pulled out. There were no hospitals for them.
At other times boatloads of colored men were taken out on the ocean to be drowned. I liked this way even less than the other, because of the sharks, and the story Guiaou told of the Swiss and what became of them, all but him. The colored men went into the water with their throats cut sometimes, or with only light cuts about the arms and body, bleeding enough to bring the sharks. Sometimes Guiaou was on those boats himself, or not there really—Agwé would be riding in his head, because without his spirit he had great trouble crossing water. With the sunlight burning from the water, I saw how the curved coutelas rose and fell in Guiaou’s hand, and I wondered, but Guiaou was only serving the colored men the way that they had served the Swiss. Afterward, we never spoke of it. It was a long time after before I would eat fish again, because I could not stop the thought of what the fish had been feeding on.
If a colored man stood firm and showed himself ready to fight to the death, sometimes Dessalines would not kill him. He found places for such people in the army, and they were well accepted there. But those who begged for mercy did not find it. Toussaint had published a promise of mercy from Les Cayes, but that promise was not very much respected. All during that time, Toussaint was somewhere else. When news came to him of the killings, he would throw up his hands and put on a face of misery and say, I told him to trim the tree, not uproot it. Often there were some whitemen watching when he said this, or one of the priests who were always near him in those days. Of course it was not possible that Toussaint did not know what Dessalines was doing. Still, it was Rigaud who had left all the trees in the south with their roots in the air, Rigaud who had sent his men to try to kill Toussaint so many times, when Toussaint was coming through the crossroads.
It was not possible, either, to leave the gens de couleur with men enough to make another army. Toussaint was thinking that if Rigaud had gone to France, maybe France would be persuaded to send out soldiers for Rigaud. I saw him thinking this, though he did not say it where I could hear, and I do not think he said it to anyone out loud. I saw myself that it was possible, and that we must do what we were doing in case it did happen. But I was glad when the order came from Toussaint to come away from that bloody place and bring my men back to Ennery.
At that time there were riding with me—Guiaou, Bouquart and Bienvenu. There were sixteen others too, under Captain Riau’s order, but among those sixteen there were often changes, for sometimes some of them would be killed in a battle, or sent into someone else’s command, or one of them might even run off to be a marron again, if there was still a place in the country where marrons could hide from Toussaint’s army. Guiaou and Bouquart and Bienvenu were always there and none of them was ever badly hurt in the fighting. Also Quamba and Couachy, who were like brothers with Guiaou. Any one of these could lead the men, if Captain Riau was called to the hospital instead of to the battle. Bouquart especially led them well, because the other men admired his great strength and his fearlessness.
It did not take us very long to reach Ennery from the Grande Anse, because all of us had good horses now, taken from the colored men who had been killed. I looked for the doctor when I came to Thibodet, although I knew he would not be there, unless perhaps he had brought Nanon back from Vallière already, but there had not been time enough for that. Tocquet was gone from the plantation also, and they had taken the doctor’s son Paul with them on this journey. So only the doctor’s sister was there, with her child Sophie, but she received Riau into the house, as she would have any white officer. I saw that her spirit was very much changed since the time when she had driven Nanon away from Thibodet, and she seemed happier too, unless it was only the child in her belly that had softened her face.
Zabeth was carrying a new child too. This made Bouquart very proud, and he walked about picking his knees up high, like a warhorse on parade.
Captain Riau stayed in the grand’case, though for one night only. It seemed better to me, when the doctor’s sister invited me. I did not want to refuse her offer, and also that way Guiaou could be the first to greet Merbillay and the children, which would please him. That night I dined with Elise on the gallery—no other guests had come but Riau. I did not know what I would say to her, without the doctor or any of the white officers there. But she spoke to me very naturally and asked questions in a way which made it easy for me to answer, with news of the south and other things she seemed to want to know about. Soon I was speaking as easily to her as to anyone, though I did not pretend to be making love to her when we talked, as Maillart or Vaublanc would sometimes do when they were there.
Afterward I lay in the room where the doctor slept when he was staying at Habitation Thibodet. The bed was fine, with a mattress made of feathers, which was too hot for the weather. We had been riding long that day, and in the evening I was drinking rum, but still my ti bon ange would not leave my body to go into the world of dreams. I lay thinking, I could not stop, I heard the house creak around its pegs, and outside the wind blowing through the long blades of the leaves. There was a crafty knocking at the back of the house, and I heard Zabeth giggling as she went out to be with Bouquart.
Riau must not think of Guiaou with Merbillay, he must divide himself from such a thought, and cover his mind with darkness, though the thought with its pictures would keep trying to push itself in, like a djab, a devil at the door. For Guiaou it must be the same, when he knew Riau was with Merbillay. Still it was better that neither of us had had to kill the other, the way Choufleur had finally had to die, even though the doctor would not kill him when he could have. Guiaou and Riau trusted each other, fighting in a battle or treating the sick. That was good. Also there were two men for the children instead of just one. It was only when we were at Thibodet at the same time that it was hard. Maybe that was only because it did not happen often that way, and that if we could build a lakou together to live there forever, it would go more easily, after a time.
In the morning when I woke, our children came running through the grand’case as if it were their own—Caco and Yoyo, because Marielle was too small for such games. Sophie had made a friend of Caco by way of Paul, and now that Paul was away she wanted these other friends to be with her still more. They ran screaming and laughing through the house, and afterward played by the pool where the doctor had set his floating flowers, while Riau took bread and coffee with Elise. It made me glad to see them, but I said to Elise that I would not return to the grand’case that night, because it was better that I sleep ne
arer to my men.
Who I slept with then was Merbillay, and the small one Marielle, and I did not think of anything but them. The next night I spent in the other ajoupa, where Bouquart and Bienvenu were staying, except that Bouquart had gone somewhere else with Zabeth. I played the banza there, and sang soft songs with Bienvenu, until it was time for sleeping. So it went for five or six days, a night in one place and a night in the other, and I saw Guiaou only by daylight. Then Toussaint called me to see him at that plantation he had bought for his family nearby, and he told me to ride with my men to Dondon.
All the way we rode, the country was quiet. Big gangs of people were working at every plantation which we passed. Toussaint had made new orders now. All the country was governed like the army. For those in the fields, the men of the hoe, it was now the same as for the men of the gun in the army. They must stay at their work, to which they were ordered, and if they ran away from the work they could be shot, like deserters from the army. Also the orders kept people from clearing new ground to make gardens for themselves and their families. Everyone was ordered to work cane or coffee, to make money to pay for the war. Except now there was not any war.
All the people looked peaceful, working this way. No whips snapped over them in the fields, and they had no other mistreatment. There was plenty of food for all, and no one was made to work at night, and the time of rest in the day’s hot middle was respected everywhere. Still, the new orders seemed very tight to me. Sometimes we heard the people singing in the fields, and no one was whipping them to make them sing, but still there was the tightness in their voices.
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