The War of Knives

by Broos Campbell

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “I know many things.” He was about as dignified a cuss as ever I seen. “In this case I know it because your friend ’ave arrived before you.”

  “Mr. Connor’s here? Good.”

  “I regret he is not.” He stood aside. “Will you make the entrance?”

  “Say, you speak English.” Always a firm grasp on the obvious, me. A rumpus rose behind me as the sentries tried to shoo Joséphine away from the front steps.

  Bertrand shut the door. “When my charges do not ‘ave the French, it is well I ’ave their language. Dutch, Spanish, I ’ave the facility with all the language.”

  “There’s a lot of us here, I take it?”

  “No, just the two of you. You may leave your bag there. Follow me, if it please you.” He ushered me into one of the two downstairs rooms, bowed again, and drew the double door softly to. I heard him grunt like he was hoisting a weight—my carryall, which if I’d known it was burdensome I’d have hauled it for him—and then I heard the treads creaking in the stairwell as he tottered up to the second story.

  The thick stone walls made the room almost cool. Gaps between the slats in the drawn shutters let in slender bars of light and little breaths of steamy air. Over against one wall stood a table laden with fruit. Not as good as cider, but good enough to a dusty man. I tore open an orange and squeezed its juice down my throat. As I picked up another a voice said, “I shouldn’t if I were you.”

  Franklin sat at a table against the wall with little piles of books and papers spread out in front of him. “That fruit, Mr. Graves,” he continued, “is kept for the convenience of General L’Ouverture. Not that he would begrudge you any—he lives in constant dread of poisoning. Although an orange is probably safe enough.”

  I threw it on the floor. “Tarnation! I wish you’d spoke up sooner.”

  “I wanted to see if it’s true.” He picked up the orange as it rolled under his chair. “How do you feel?”

  I stood awhile and then said, “I’m well, I guess. No thanks to you.” I sat down in the nearest chair. It was chipped and splintery and had a seat of woven cane, but at that moment it seemed the most wonderful chair ever. “Where’s Mr. Connor? And why’d you ride off and leave me like that?”

  “Juge was amused by your predicament and would not let us go back for you. But he has gone off on some errand of his own, now, and Connor has ridden out to look for you.” He sliced the orange rind into a long spiral with his little silver penknife.

  “I might’ve broke my neck. Damn near did, too.”

  “You are sure you feel entirely well?” His eyes were hidden behind the reflection on his glasses. “No nausea? No uncertainty in the bowels? No sudden rush of saliva?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good,” he said. “I shall have to take your word for that, of course. However, I trust you. You are too innocent to lie.”

  “I ain’t innocent!”

  He chuckled—more of a grunt, really, as if his bowels griped him. “I do not think I have ever heard a man say that before. Usually a man swears he is as innocent as the newborn babe.” He set the spiral of rind on the table. “But perhaps I should have said naïve. Do you know anything of the situation here?”

  “Some. D’ye think there’s any drink around?”

  “I do not know. There might be some coffee left in that pot.” He held a segment of orange up to the light that slipped in through the shutters. He looked at me. “No tremors? No headache? No blurring of the vision?” He smiled as I frowned. “I am joking, Mr. Graves.”

  “I don’t think it’s very funny.” The expressionless Franklin was annoying, but ignorable. This smiling and laughing Franklin made me nervous.

  He popped the orange segment into his mouth. “Do you desire to retain your ignorance?”

  My head hurt, and my feet hurt, and I was sleepy. I wished Franklin would shut up. I tipped my hat over my eyes and slouched down in my chair. “I’ve agreed to give Mr. Connor some help as an interpreter when I can spare the time,” I said. “I didn’t want the job. I don’t even seem to be qualified for it. Just about everybody around here who knows French talks like they got a mouthful of rocks. When Mr. Connor asks me what they’re saying, I’ll have to make half of it up.”

  “Really? You would fabricate?”

  I peeked out from under my hat. He had raised an eyebrow. “No. I’ll tell him whatever I can make out.” I thought about the dirty officers outside. “Some of ’em speak French pretty good. And sometimes I can tell what’s being said in Creole, even though I can’t speak it.” It seemed important to emphasize that last point.

  “I understand the languages are similar.”

  “They’re as different as a Highland burr and a Kentucky twang— the same language generally, but kind of hard to follow.”

  “But you’re in the Navy. You’ve spent time in these islands. Have you acquired nothing at all of the language?”

  “I told you already,” I snapped. “I can say, ‘Bring me some rum’ and ‘Which way to the whorehouse’—and not much more, see? I calculate Mr. Connor will find that kind of thing pretty helpful around here.” My sarcasm was lost on him. “Listen, I’m just supposed to make a survey for the commodore and report aboard of the nearest American man-o’war. And I ain’t saying any more’n that to nobody.”

  “Not even to Connor?”

  “Well, of course to Connor! I guess I can trust him, anyway. And don’t say I can’t. Don’t.”

  He wiped his knife and fingers with his handkerchief while he thought about that. He folded up his handkerchief and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he folded up his knife and stuck that in his pocket, too. I thought about three or four things in the amount of time he took to think about just that one thing. I thought about the missing Croatoan, for instance, and how I was going to fix my pantaloons without I had a sewing kit, and how I should’ve gotten my saddlebags off of Joséphine before she wandered away. I hadn’t gotten very far with any one of them thoughts, though, by the time he spoke again.

  “The situation here is extremely intricate.” He touched two fingers to his cheek. “An enemy one day is a friend the next. And the day after that, an enemy again. Take Pétion. He admires Toussaint and used to follow him, yet now he has become a symbol of mulatto resistance to Negro rule. Rigaud would be lost without him.” He wound the orange rind up into a little coil. He let go and it sprang open again. “Knowing which man to trust isn’t the trick. The trick is knowing how long to trust him.”

  Now, I knew as well as anybody that the best way to keep a man from getting your goat is to not let him know where you keep it tied. A mild answer turneth away wrath, I thought, but what came out was, “Now what in tarnal damnation does that mean?”

  He flicked bits of rind off of his fingers. “Set a thief to catch a thief.”

  I looked down my nose. “Thieves is worser than buggers, in the Navy.”

  He rubbed his temples. “You miss my point. Listen. A man is a tool like any other. A knife, say, can be used to kill a man or cut his bonds, but the knife itself is neither good nor evil.”

  “A man ain’t a knife. A knife ain’t got free will.”

  “Does a man have free will when he does God’s work?”

  I thought of Surgeon Quilty, opening up the assassin on his operating table. “Why, have you stole a knife?”

  “Feh.” He began gathering his books and papers together. “I might have saved my breath.”

  “And I mine, sir.” I got up, feeling like I had a stick up my ass. “I need some air. The stuff in here stinks.” I stomped off through the front room.

  “Speaking of stinks, we’re to share a bed,” he called after me. “You’re not prone to nocturnal eructations, I hope.”

  “If you mean do I fart in bed, don’t you worry about it. I’ll just kind of waft ’em over the loo’ard side.” I paused with my hand on the latch. “Get you some eau de toilette for your handkerchee, if you’re d
elicate.” It was childish, and I regretted it as soon as I said it. But dog me if that man didn’t rankle.

  The officers’ jug lay broken in the dirt. Joséphine stood over the shards, twitching her tail and blinking at me. The last rays of sunset shone through a gap in the clouds to the west, and then the sun dropped behind the hills. The eastern horizon showed a pale glow where the moon was rising. The evening rain began to fall. A sergeant came with the change of watch and hung a lantern on a hook by the door. The relieved sentries marched off with him, replaced by a pair that looked somewhat more promising. They wore shoes, for one thing, with white duck gaiters, leather shakos with a brass plate in front, and high-waisted coatees in the new English style. They clomped up the steps and stood beside me out of the wet. I said, “Bonsoir.” One of them nodded but otherwise ignored me. That’s what a Marine would’ve done, and I took comfort in it.

  It was too late for counting guns or sketching maps that day, and I didn’t feel like chasing after Connor. I undid my neck-cloth and wiped my face and neck with it and wondered what to do. It’d been wrong in me to speak so provocatively to a man who went around unarmed. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t fear that had stayed his tongue.

  He’d been sounding me out. Traitors riddled the insurrection, or civil war, or whatever you wished to call it. After Rigaud had slaughtered the people of Petite Goâve last June, the locals began calling it the War of Knives: a cut here, a slash there, and always the threat of a blade in the back. Come right down to it, all Franklin had done was mention the subtleties of alliance that made the war so tarnal difficult to grasp. But—and here’s the thing—it weren’t our war. It weren’t my business to meddle in it, any more than it was Franklin’s. But it might be my business to meddle with him, if he was poking around where he didn’t belong.

  I retied my neck-cloth and shook out my sleeves. If I was quick, I might be able to get out of doing anything about it.

  I found my way through the pelting rain to the habitation where Dessalines had his katye jeneral. I had to do a bunch of talking before I could get in, and even then I didn’t get far. The officer who condescended to speak with me knew nothing of boats or the comings and goings of ships in the bay. Neither did he admit to knowing how to communicate with ships offshore.

  “Télégraphe?” I asked, pantomiming the arms of a semaphore.

  He pursed his lips, shook his head.

  “Les feux de signalisation? Les bateaux? Les lettres?”

  My suggestions produced a Gallic shrug, the kind that begins at the belt, travels out to the fingertips, and ends with a moue of the lips. “I know nothing of the signal fires, the boats, or the letters,” he said. “However, some cannoniers of marine were landed up the coast some weeks before. They will remain independent of their ships until some unspecified time. Perhaps until Jacmel has been captured.”

  “Navy gunners, you say? English or American?”

  “English, American—there is a difference? Now go away. We are very busy here.”

  I left angry and unsatisfied. I didn’t believe the gunners had been left on their lone. They’d need food and ammunition, two things that Toussaint had little to spare. Somewhere boats must be carrying supplies and orders from the Croatoan or some British ship.

  And here was that stupid horse again, looming large and damp out of the darkness to bump me with her shoulder.

  “Dang it, Joséphine, why d’ye keep following me? Pourquoi me suis tu partout, hein?”

  She just looked at me sideways. Finally it occurred to me that she probably wanted to be fed and watered and to have her saddle removed. She followed me around the habitation till I found the stables. Catching wind of the other horses, or perhaps the hay, she trotted ahead of me across the stable yard, shoved a roan aside, and stuck her muzzle into a manger.

  A groom came out. I gave him a shilling to brush her down, not that I gave a hang what happened to her. But I didn’t say it aloud, in case he decided to turn her into soup. “She’d be pretty stringy anyway,” I told myself, slinging my recaptured saddlebag across my shoulder. “Probably not even worth the trouble of eating.” As I stood there scratching my seat and listening to my stomach rumble, I heard hooves coming my way.

  Juge splashed across the stable yard and leaped down from the saddle. “Mon ami!” he said, holding out his arms to embrace me in the French style, which I had to submit to or offend him. “You are found at last! I hope you have not forgotten my invitation for this evening.”

  “After I’ve eaten I’ll be up for anything,” I said. I didn’t recollect any invitation, but I was idle; if he had girls or drink in mind, I was just the man for it. I’d have preferred to sluice off a couple pounds of dust first, but the rain was doing a pretty good job of that and I didn’t guess the doxies around there would be any too picky. But he gave me an appraising look that stopped my musings cold. “Why, what have you in mind?”

  “Well,” he said, “I was going to go and fetch the cannons of that flying battery I pointed out to you. But after we managed to kill the horses and most of the gunners it came upon me: without the horses the enemy cannot drag his guns away, but neither can we, ha ha!”

  “But I am disappointment itself,” says I, thinking maybe I’d get my bath after all, and go out for to cherchez les femmes on my own account. “I desire to knock a few heads together.”

  He clapped his hands. “Très bien! This is what I like to hear. Come, we eat while I tell you the entertainment I have planned instead.”

  Supper was pumpkin soup—not very good and little of it. While we ate it Juge outlined the evening’s entertainment, as he insisted on calling it. “My dragoons I leave in the care of Grandfather Chatterbox,” he said. “Tonight calls for subtlety and silence. For this work I take along some of my comrades from when I first arrive to serve Father Toussaint. Take a pistol if you wish, in case things go wrong, but I caution you not to shoot otherwise. A pistol flash at night, and bon sang! You are blind, and the enemy knows exactly where you are.”

  The rain had let up, and the ravine of the River of Orange Trees cut a dark swash in the moonlight. My blue pantaloons passed muster for night fighting, but my white shirt and vest were right out. Juge made me strip to the waist, and then laughed. “Bon sang! Your skin is brighter than your shirt.”

  “How you exaggerate.”

  “But even so, you will stand out like the shooting star, even in the shadows.” He tugged at the tear in the seat of my pantaloons where my drawers showed. “And it seems the moon has risen. Here, we fix this.”

  He slathered me with muck from the bottom of the trench until I was as black and smelly as the dozen friends he’d brought with him. They were a ferocious-looking lot, some of them with teeth filed to a point and all of them scarified across their chests and arms. Half of them were naked as Adam—and about as unconscious of it, too. For weapons they carried the ubiquitous cane knives as well as short lengths of rope with a wooden handle athwart each end, which the Spanish call a garrote.

  “We wrap your sword in your clothes and leave them here along with your fancy hat, mon ami,” said Juge. He handed me a cane knife. “The small-sword is hesitant where the manchèt is decisive. No dainty poking about, no en garde and the touché. Just a chop or two, and you will find that a man is no more trouble without his hands.”

  The manchèt was about a foot and a half long and six inches across at the end, narrow at the tang and squared off at the tip like a butcher’s cleaver. Although it was the first time I’d held one, I found it to be less awkward than it looked. Naturally it would be easy in the hand, being designed for cutting sugar cane from sunup to sundown, but with its sturdy blade and razor edge it also seemed admirably suited for whacking men up into their component parts. Still and all I’d rather have had a cutlass, with its point for thrusting and its heavy handguard for socking a man in the head.

  Touching his lips in a final warning to remain silent, Juge led us slithering over the edge of the ravine and down in
to its gloomy depths. The air stank of corruption, but whether from corpses or stagnant water I wasn’t sure till I crawled across a soft body. Before I’d realized what it was I’d sunk my hand into its belly, releasing such a noxious vapor that I puked.

  Juge sputtered into his fist, trying to smother his laughter. “I should have warned you, mon ami,” he said when he was able to control himself, “this is the graveyard of the mulattoes. But as it is their graveyard and not our own, we do not bother to bury the dead.”

  I had vomited so violently that strands of the stuff hung out of my nose. I sneezed and spat, but said nothing. I’d been eager for a fight once I’d resigned myself to being up all night, but now I wasn’t so sure.

  Keeping to the banks of the river—more of a creek, really, running along the bottom of the steep-sided ravine—we crept downstream under the low branches of a thorn thicket for about a mile. I had no more accidents with bodies, after I learned to identify the concentrated stench and the pale phosphorescence of corrupted bones that emanated from them. I learned to avoid getting snagged on the thorns, too, after someone in the dark had kicked me a time or two for making too much noise in getting unstuck.

  I was feeling ill-used and beginning to wonder if I was being made the butt of some evil jape when at last we came to a place where the ravine bent to the left. There it narrowed sharply and the brush formed a thorny blanket from one wall to the other. Other than the brushy tunnels through which we crawled, the only open passage was the streambed itself, and it was choked with boulders. Half of Juge’s men shinned up into the trees that grew along the waterway and inched their way out along the overhanging branches. The rest of us he took farther downstream, telling off his men in pairs on either side till only he and I remained.

  “Here we wait in the ambuscade,” he whispered. “We let them go by, and then we follow. Just watch me, and you will know what to do. Until then, mon ami, absolute silence or I shall leave you to your fate.”

  Not caring to guess what that fate might be, I crouched beside him in the brush and tried my best not even to breathe. Insects filled the air with their chirring, and off in the hills the voudou drums sent their eerie rhythms throbbing through the forest. When I grew tired of crouching I lay back on the damp earth, clutching the manchèt across my chest and watching the stars pass over from east to west. About the time the moon began to peep over the rim of the ravine, I heard a clattering of stones downstream to my left and soft curses in French.