by Cave, Hugh
"In vodun are many things that cannot easily be explained." He had read that somewhere, in a book by one of the few writers who had seen enough vodun to be worth reading. "It is a religion beyond the comprehension of the uninitiated."
Catus, walking along the line of fires, examined each pot and filled it with oil. The hounsis thrust fresh pine sticks into their fires, blowing on them to make them burn more rapidly. Presently from each of the pots a column of smoke rose through the firelight to disappear into the darkness under the cavern roof.
The oil in the pots bubbled. The only other sound was the whisper-faint patter of the drums. Once more the girl with the vacant eyes and expressionless face was led from the hounfor.
This time when she knelt before the first fire, Catus seized her right wrist and slowly thrust her hand into the boiling oil. The kneeling figure shivered as though a chill or shock had passed through her, then was still again. Seconds passed. Catus withdrew her hand and raised her to her feet. She stared straight ahead, seeing nothing. Oil dripped from her fingers to the ground. The hand seemed unharmed.
At each of the other fires the performance was repeated. It was at the seventh and last fire that Barry saw her face change.
Was it the firelight painting false emotion on a face actually immobile? No. Her mouth had come open. Her eyes were suddenly wide. She was seized by some extravagant joy, some ecstasy. She sees something. What does she see? There was no indication of pain from the boiling oil. The girl was exalted.
Catus lifted her for the last time. She walked to the hounfor with him as though walking to paradise, head thrown back, lips moving in silent song, eyes bright as the fires of her ordeal.
What had she seen? What had happened to her? How had it happened?
With their bare feet the hounsis removed the glowing pots and set them aside. They stood up, passing their feet slowly through the flames. From the altar in the hounfor tunnel Catus and the assisting houngans brought machetes, assons, govis, and other implements used in the service. These too were passed through the flames—to sanctify them, Barry supposed. Some of the congregation edged forward. The boldest stepped to the fires and held their hands above them.
On an impulse Barry rose and moved toward the post. Halting beside one of the little chairs, he surreptitiously reached down and put his hand against the iron pot beside it. He jerked the hand away quickly, suppressing an exclamation of pain. His finger tips throbbed.
He returned to the bench and sat down, to find Micheline frowning at him.
"Did you think they were not hot?" she asked.
He answered honestly, "I don't know what I thought."
13
THE AFFAIR ENDED AT DAWN, after two hours of social dancing in which nearly all those present took part. When the drums were silent at last, Catus came to the bench. "We can go now if you wish." The houngan was soaked with sweat, exhausted.
It was impossible to talk as they made their way out of the grotto and climbed the difficult path up the face of the cliff. When they had rested awhile at the top, however, Catus said with a smile, "Well, Father, now you have seen a complete vodun service."
"Yes. I'm grateful to you."
"And your thoughts on the service itself?"
"I understood very little, of course, even with Micheline explaining it. I shouldn't want to question you until I've had a chance to think it over." Barry hesitated. "I do wonder, though—well, I can't quite see the point of having all your gods come to the service."
"The point, Father?"
"I mean, if you were able to sit down and talk over your problems with them, ask them questions—but it seems rather meaningless, their just possessing someone and then going away again."
Catus lay back on the grass and looked at the sky, frowning. It was odd, the Father's driving straight to the one thing in vodun that he himself found so troubling. Of course, it was possible sometimes to talk to the loa. He had done it. But the Father was right: it was rare indeed when the loa had anything to say that would help a man to understand them. And very often, Catus was certain, the gods were not present at all when people were possessed. The drumming and chanting made them think themselves possessed when they were not.
He wished the mystères would sit down quietly, like reasonable beings, and discuss things. What was it like, for instance, on their island under the sea and in their secret home in Guinea? What did they do when not answering the call of the drums? If a houngan were to help his people to a better life he ought to know these things, not be groping in the dark for answers the loa could so easily furnish if they would.
He looked at Barry. "We have things to talk about, you and I, I think. But not now after an all-night service. Shall we go on?"
BARRY SMELLED SMOKE IN THE AIR before they reached the end of the path, but thought nothing of it. The peasants did most of their cooking outdoors, and very often there was smoke in the atmosphere. When he stepped into the clearing a moment later, however, and saw a crowd of people in front of the church, he was alarmed.
He quickened his stride, leaving Catus behind as he hurried across the bare red earth. Near the church the smell of smoke was stronger. The assembled peasants gazed at him in silence.
He halted with a gasp in the church doorway.
There had been a fire. As he went down the aisle he saw that the whole altar had been consumed. The beams above it were scorched. The underside of the iron roof was black.
He saw something else. On the floor in front of the ruined altar lay the gray mule that had killed Toto Anestor. St. Juste was bending over it, trying to twist a rope around its hind legs. Lucille was scratching at the hard-packed ground with a shovel.
When they saw him, St. Juste straightened over the mule and the woman stopped work. They watched him come down the aisle. St. Juste said in a low, angry voice, "This was no accident, Mr. Clinton. It was set."
"I'm sure it was. Do you know who set it?"
"No. We were asleep. But he meant to burn the house too. I heard him prowling and called out to him. He ran."
"What is the mule doing here?"
"Look for yourself."
Barry walked around the animal and saw that its throat had been slashed. The ground near its almost severed head was soaked with blood. It was this blood-soaked earth that Lucy had been trying to scrape up with her shovel and put into a bucket.
"I don't understand," he said.
St. Juste said grimly, "It's another filthy trick to turn the people against you, Mr. Clinton."
That was it, of course. Some enemy, knowing he was at the service, had led the mule into the church and slaughtered it here before the altar, then set fire to the church, to make the islanders think the mysteres were angry about Toto's death. Quite likely the church would have been a smoking ruin if St. Juste had not heard the man prowling. These walls were only wattle under their cracked veneer of mud. The roof-supports were wood. The arsonist had planned a totally destroyed church with the slain animal lying in the wreckage, a spectacle that would have made quite an impression on the superstitious minds of the islanders.
"Who could have done such a thing, Father?" Lucille demanded.
Who could have done it? Who were his enemies? He turned his head and saw Catus in the doorway, watching. He beckoned, and the houngan came silently down the aisle.
"This was no accident, Catus," Barry said. "Who did it?"
Catus frowned at the mule, at the heap of charred timbers that had been the altar. An altar, to Catus, was a sacred thing. Vodun, too, had its pé. "Someone who wishes to drive you from the island, obviously," the houngan muttered, scowling. "I don't know who that is."
"Well, we know a number of persons it could not have been. What time did this happen, Clement?"
"About four o'clock. A little before."
"It was no one at the ceremony, then. To get here at four, the fellow would have had to leave the grotto at three, and it was impossible to leave at that time or anywhere near that time. The tid
e was in. That eliminates a lot of people." It eliminated, Barry told himself, almost too many people. He ticked off in his mind the ones he had had any dealings with: Catus, Micheline, the Cesars, Pradon Beliard. Later, no doubt, he would think of others. In any case, it eliminated just about everyone.
Of course, the guilty man might have been at the service and slipped out earlier, before the tunnel became impassable. But that was hardly probable. There would have been no point at all in his waiting until four o'clock to set the fire if he had reached the clearing at, say, two or three. No, the man responsible for this was someone who hadn't been in the grotto at all. But who hadn't been there?
He stopped trying to think. "What are you doing with the mule?" he asked St. Juste.
"It's got to be buried, Mr. Clinton. I've dug a hole just behind the church."
"I see. There wasn't a chance, I suppose, of getting it out of here before the people saw it?"
St. Juste drew his lips thin and glared at Lucy. "There might have been, if some women weren't so stupid. She started running around like a plucked chicken, screaming her fool head off. We had an audience before I could shut her up."
Lucy hung her head. "I thought the church would burn down, mon Père."
"It's all right, Lucy. They'd have found out in any event." Barry turned to St. Juste. "Here, let me help you."
Together they finished roping the dead animal's legs.
"I don't suppose I could have dragged the brute out of here anyway," St. Juste said with a shrug. "Not even with her helping me."
It was not an easy task even with Catus hauling at the rope too, but they managed eventually to drag the mule to the hole. Some thirty persons were on hand now, watching every move, but Barry ignored them. At least, he thought while shoveling the red earth into the grave, this answers my problem of what to do with one gray mule. Returning to the church, he applied the shovel to the blood-soaked ground before the altar.
"Will you rebuild the altar, Mr. Clinton?" St. Juste asked.
"No. I'll use a table. As soon as we've had something to eat, I'm going to start building the church on the ridge. We've no time for this one."
That was something the arsonist perhaps hadn't known, he told himself—that he was already planning a new church. He hoped the fellow would be disappointed.
BIG LOUIS CAME AT NINE O'CLOCK, faithful to his promise despite his weariness. Barry was mildly surprised. It was one thing to sit on a bench all night watching a ceremony as he had done; quite another to beat a drum all that time. He could well understand why Louis' shoulders sagged and his speech was thick.
They wouldn't accomplish much on the ridge, he supposed. Still, it was important to make a start. Doubly important after the arson attempt.
He handed Lucy a letter he had written. He was following Catus' advice and requesting the hospital in the capital to send a report of Toto's death to the magistrate, with a copy to himself. It seemed the only thing left to do. He had put the letter into an envelope addressed to Alma Lemke, with a note asking Alma to see that it reached the mainland. If sent the usual way, across the channel to Anse Ange by sailboat, it might not get there.
"A boy named Présilus is coming this morning for medicine, Lucy. Tell him that if he wants it he must take this letter to the plantation at once, and bring back a note from Mrs. Lemke saying she received it. Do you understand?"
"Oui, mon Père."
"There will be others coming around. Tell them the clinic is closed. I no longer intend to help people who try to injure me. If they want to be looked after from now on, they'll have to pay for it. Not in money, of course, but in other ways. I'll be on the ridge if they want to know more about it."
"Oui, mon Père. And I'm glad."
He shouldered a bag of cement and nodded to St. Juste and Louis, who were already laden and waiting.
"All right, compères. Let's go."
IT WAS AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT. By the time the first clinic customer arrived on the ridge, the work was already well under way and there was an audience. Barry had anticipated the audience. Nothing of this sort could happen on Ile du Vent without one.
The man sent up by Lucy was not a patient himself; he was the father of a child being treated for hookworm. Barry, stripped to the waist and sweating from his labors, sat on the limestone outcrop and frowned at him.
"You want my help, Leon?"
"Oui, mon Père."
"Very well, I want yours. Help Louis carry stones today and I'll look after your little girl this evening."
Leon was one of those who had watched him drag the mule to the hole, a husky young fellow, not too bright, with a soft, lumpy face that resembled an overripe corossol. He glanced about uneasily, scratching the side of his slack mouth. Louis and St. Juste had stopped work to watch. The dozen peasants seated on the grass under the pomme-rose trees watched too. Barry waited in silence, sensing the importance of the moment.
"Why should I have to pay?" Leon mumbled at last. "No one else does."
"Everyone else does from now on. Everyone who's strong enough to lift a handful of gravel or a calebasse of water." Barry pushed himself erect. "Make up your mind, please. I've things to do."
"Well—"
"Good. Louis will show you where the stones are." Barry at once picked up his shovel and returned to work.
At ten-thirty Micheline Laroche came. Louis had told her the Father was starting the new church this morning. She was alone. Nodding to those under the trees, she sat down a little distance away. She was wearing the butterfly dress she had worn that day on the boat.
The Father and St. Juste were digging a trench, she saw, to hold the first course of stones that would support the walls of the church. They had lines strung up to guide them. As she watched, her brother-in-law and Leon Devieux came along the ridge carrying stones. They dropped the stones onto an already large pile outside the trench and at once trudged off again.
Why was Leon helping the Father? Catus had been sure no one would help, with the whole village buzzing about what had happened in the old church last night.
She shrugged. It was no concern of hers, who worked or didn't. She plucked a blade of grass and nibbled at it, watching the Father. It was the first time she had seen him without a shirt on. His skin was much whiter than Lemke's. She hadn't known a white man could sweat so, either. Lemke had been only damp and sticky, unpleasantly so, that night on the plantation beach. The Father looked as though he had been rubbed with cooking oil. It would be interesting to lie in his arms when he was like that . . .
I wonder if Lemke kept his promise to tell the Father how much I like him, she thought. I'll ask him tomorrow night. If he didn't, I'm going to be difficult.
At eleven o'clock Barry stopped work to talk to two more men sent up from the rectory by Lucy. They argued. One stayed to work, the other refused. The one who stayed had an ugly sore on his lower lip and had not been a patient before. I'll treat him when we go down at noon, Barry thought. The other had been dismissed days ago after treatment for an aching tooth but had returned every day since to beg more medicine. Barry had doled out aspirin, one tablet at a time, to get rid of him, and was glad now to see him go.
At noon Barry called a halt and went down to the mission for lunch, taking Louis and St. Juste with him. No one in St. Joseph worked when the sun was high. He found Edith at the rectory. She had arrived half an hour before, on horseback from the plantation, but knowing he would soon be stopping work, had decided to wait for him.
"Must you work all afternoon too?" she asked with a pout.
He laughed. He was in high spirits with the job going so well. "I wouldn't think of not working all afternoon," he told her. "We've got two workers we didn't expect, and every man counts."
He treated the ugly lip-sore and told the fellow he would need daily attention for at least a week. "But you'll have to work for it. I'm through giving you people costly medicines for nothing."
"You want me to keep coming so you can get work
out of me," the man grumbled.
"Don't come, then. Suit yourself."
With four at the table the little dining room was sadly crowded and Barry was aware that Edith was not enjoying her visit. It troubled him. She had ridden all the way from the plantation to be with him. But he could see no way to alter the situation.
"There's something I've been wanting to ask you," he said to her. "Did you speak to anyone yesterday about Toto's death?"
"No. Not a soul."
"The people knew about it last night."
She seemed startled. "But how could they?"
"We don't know. It's a mystery."
"I came straight here from the boat."
"You didn't talk to anyone on the boat? Or in Anse Ange?"
"Not a soul."
Barry looked at St. Juste and shrugged. "I suppose it will come out sometime. Meanwhile there's nothing we can do about it."
After lunch he walked with Edith in the yard, unwilling to leave the mission. More patients might arrive, and patients were potential workers. He had to smile at his change of attitude toward those who sought his help. He was a genuine villain, he supposed. But there could be no harm in it, and might even be some good. The average St. Joseph peasant was pretty shrewd, quick to take advantage of anyone who permitted it but more likely to respect a man who wouldn't. They had never held it against Felix Dufour for selling the mule, for example. He was the fool for having been outsmarted.
He sat with Edith under the campéche and took her hand. "I'm sorry about this afternoon, really I am. Can't you stay for dinner and spend the evening here? You know your way to the plantation now."
She was still annoyed. "I'm not sure that I should."
"I do have a job to do."
