The cannons were banging away again, like hammers in my head. The sky was dotted with brilliant clouds, so pure and clean it was near enough to make me weep for the glory of it, but the salt breeze stank of corpses. I took my bloody handkerchief away from my face. “Is there no alternative?”
“But of course, my dear friend the American!” said Négraud. “If you are rich or have friends with money, perhaps we can arrange for your welfare. The commandant has condescended to observe this bourgeois custom in such cases as yours. How about it, then—are you rich?”
“It depends on what you have to sell.”
“Please, sir,” whispered Sergeant Cahoon, “what’s yer man sayin’ there?” Ghastly pale with a filthy rag wrapped around his head, he shivered despite the heat. I was surprised to see it in a Marine.
“The dog wants a bite of our breakfast.” I couldn’t talk very well. My nose was flattened all over my face. I wasn’t sure which was buzzing more, my head or the flies on the pool of human ooze in the corner of the little courtyard.
“No beastly idioms, please,” snapped the Englishman. “Do you be a good chap and speak plainly.”
Treadwell was his name. It came to me in a flash. I was pleased to remember it, but he seemed to have left his manners somewhere. A bayonet through the thigh will do that to a fellow, I thought. “He says we better find some money if we want to eat.”
“But this is monstrous! Supposed to arrange for our pay till we’re exchanged and extend us credit in the meanwhile. And we’ll be exchanged soon enough. Tell him that.”
Lieutenant Négraud nodded as I translated. “This may be true in your case, young Englishman,” he said, “since Britain is at war with France. Although this unpleasantness could have been avoided had you stayed home. But hospitality,” he said to me, “it goes out the window when the cupboard is bare. The empty-handed guest is not welcome, my dear friend the American.”
“But you’ve already stolen everything we own,” I said. “Our money and swords, my epaulet, my silver watch with so much engraving on it that it can’t possibly be valuable to anyone but myself—everything.”
He shrugged. “You still have your clothes and boots, not to mention your lives.”
I translated for Treadwell.
“I shan’t pay a share for the sergeant,” said he. “Work is the rightful lot of the enlisted man, anyway. He should be billeted among the ranks, not with officers.”
“Lieutenant Négraud,” I said, “what’s become of the enlisted men who were captured?”
“The private soldiers are all dead,” he said flatly.
“Not a gentleman, y’see,” Treadwell was saying. “Neither are you and this nigger, in any sense that matters.”
“All dead?” I asked while he babbled. “Every one of them?”
Négraud pursed his lips. “Well . . . every one of them we caught, anyway.”
“Mr. Treadwell, will you pipe down?” I said. “There ain’t any ranks left for him to join.”
“Don’t be stupid. A score of my niggers surrendered, at the least. And I saw perhaps a dozen Marines and sailors withdrawing at the double-quick. Which is to put it kindly. Anyway, I shan’t billet with a sergeant. One doesn’t associate with his kind of fellow.”
The madder I got the more my head hurt, and the more my head hurt the madder I got. “Well, his kind of fellows is all dead or scattered now,” I shot back, “so shut your hawse-hole. And if you’re so fucking concerned about rank, you can address me properly. Why, damn your eyes, sir! A navy lieutenant outranks an army lieutenant, as I guess you know.”
“Well I do beg pardon most humbly, sir.” He fell back on the hot stones, laying his arm across his eyes to hide his tears.
I turned away in disgust. “Say, listen,” I said to Négraud. “I’m not really a legitimate prisoner of war anyway, and neither is the sergeant. We should be sent to the jail in Guadeloupe.”
“How do you figure this? You were caught bearing arms against us.”
“But our countries are not at war.”
The lieutenant shrugged. “It is my opinion that in such a case you are criminals who should be executed at once. But this is a question for the big officers, hein? And as for your nigger friend, a picturesque ending will be his fate soon enough. The Englishman—him I do not know about.”
Juge just sat, holding his head and staring at his feet.
“The point is,” I said, “we are here, and if you were going to murder us you would have done so by now. We would not be bickering about our upkeep otherwise.”
He tapped his nose and grinned. “You have found me out. The truth of the matter is that the commandant saw your colors last night and sent orders that you were to be captured if possible. He wishes to speak with you as soon as you have been settled comfortably.”
“And if we are indeed settled comfortably, I’m sure there will be something in it for you.”
“Ah well,” he smiled, “all is good in the world. Come, gentlemen, I show you to your suite. The sergeant will stay here.”
“No,” I said. “As officers, we require a servant. He’ll go where I go and eat what I eat.”
Négraud shrugged. “If you can pay for his dinner, what do I care? Follow me, please, gentlemen.”
Juge and I supported Treadwell between us while Cahoon wandered behind, trailing his fingers along the stones of the wall as if he were afraid of getting lost.
Négraud took us through a gate that led into the lane we’d fought in last night. The cobblestones were sticky with congealing blood. A soldier was using a shovel to scrape up toes and fingers and whatnot.
“Good day, Jean-Paul,” said Négraud. “Quite the harvest, hein?”
“Oui, citoyen lieutenant,” said Jean-Paul.
Négraud indicated the goo the man was dumping into a barrel. “For the dogs and pigs,” he said to me.
Joséphine had been taken away. I closed my mind to a vision of her dismembered body hanging up in some kitchen somewhere.
Négraud took us around a corner and pounded on a large iron gate. “Something nice for the gentlemen,” he said to the soldier who swung the gate open. “An upstairs suite with a sea view.” He held out a hand. “But stay, corporal. I take them up myself.”
“Upstairs?” said I, as we passed into the central yard. Mulatto soldiers sat against the walls or slept in the dirt. A man or two looked at us without curiosity.
“Certainly, upstairs,” said the lieutenant. “This floor is reserved for our own fellows. Drunkenness and other minor crimes.”
I looked up. The inner walls were lined with little barred windows. Here and there a black face peered out. “I do not complain, of course,” I said, “but the dungeon is more usual, is it not?”
“You cannot expect to be put in the dungeon!” he laughed. “The dungeon, he is our bomb-proof. No, no, if someone is going to catch iron from that ogre Dessalines, it will be you fellows.” He swung back an ironbound door that led to a stone staircase and motioned us through, saying, “Up-up-up, my ducklings!” After we had climbed two flights of stone stairs, he led us down a corridor and opened a door with a great clanking of keys. “I trust this will serve the gentlemen,” he said, with an ironic bow.
We settled Treadwell into a pile of greasy-looking straw in the corner. “It will do,” I said. “Unless you have something better?”
“I regret we do not.”
“Very good, then.” I turned to grin at Juge, but he was helping Cahoon lie down next to Treadwell.
“Lieutenant Négraud,” said Juge, “fetch a surgeon at once. These men are very bad off.”
Négraud gave him an evil look around his massive hooter. “I am sure he is very busy after your little nastiness last night, but I will pass the word.”
“And water. Clean water, immediately.”
“Surgeon, water. Sure, sure,” said Négraud as he left.
The door fell to with a clang, leaving the room in darkness except for a square of light f
rom a small window opposite the door. As I waited for my eyes to adjust, I felt bits of plaster and small wriggling things misting down from the rafters onto my head. Dessalines’ guns sounded like corn popping in the distance. I heard a shout in the street followed by a metallic rumbling.
Juge’s teeth flashed in the dim light. “A round shot bounding down the street,” he said. “May God in his infinite mercy see that it takes off a few legs before it comes to rest. Come, help me make our friends comfortable. And by the way, Matty, please do not call me Juge in front of the gens du couleur. They will discover who I am soon enough.”
Even the unflappable Juge seemed startled a few hours later when a short sturdy white man with wings of gray hair poking out from under his bicorn strutted into our little cell, carrying a lantern in one hand and an enormous black bag in the other.
“Je suis le Colonel-Docteur Pepin,” said the man. He swept off his bicorn in a bow and set his bag on the floor. “No time for the niceties,” he continued in English. “Where is the patients? Ah yes, I see them.” He jammed a pair of pince-nez onto his beak and removed the bloody handkerchief that Treadwell had used to patch himself. “La baïonnette, she is a nasty weapon. But then they all are nasty, n’est-ce pas? Yes. Hmm.”
Putting his nose over the wound, he sniffed first delicately and then robustly.
“Not yet the putrefaction.” He fondled the proudflesh at the edges of the puncture, gazing at Treadwell’s face. “Quite warm to the touch. This hurts you, m’sieur?”
“Unbearably.” Treadwell’s face grew paler and the sweat stood out in beads on his forehead, but he didn’t cry out or even make a face.
“Yet m’sieur must bear it,” said Pepin, not unkindly. “I recommend rum or cognac, if it can be found, and if you can buy it. But, he is well enough for now. I bind the wound—là, et là—in her own blood and hope for the best. Later, perhaps, I amputate. There is no medicine, but between you, me and the lamppost, I think it does no good anyway. Keep the flies away, and I prescribe the moustiquaire as well.”
Next Pepin scrubbed Sergeant Cahoon’s scalp with a rag, peering into his face as he did so. “Only a graze to the scalp, which does not account for his condition.” He looked into the sergeant’s mouth, smelled his breath, counted his pulse. “You have the chills, eh? Dreadful pains in the head, the back, and the limbs?”
“Oh, God aye. ’Tis like the very divil poundin’ on his anvil, and so it is.”
“The fever is high. The bowels, they are costive?”
“What’s costive, Mr. Graves?”
“He means are you seized up.”
“Oh aye. ’Tis the great shame to me.”
“The urine, she is scanty and albuminous?”
“What’s ‘yoo-reen,’ sir?”
“Piss.”
“Oh aye—scanty’s the word, sir, and never a truer one spoken. Dunno about albu-whoosis, though.”
“Like the egg white,” said Pepin.
“Oh aye, ’tis that I can barely squeeze it o’t, sir, when it comes a-tall. ’Twasn’t always this way.”
Pepin bled him, saying, “This should provide great relief.” But afterwards he drew me aside, supposedly to examine my nose under the light of the little window, and said in a low voice, “He should have calomel at least, but there is none left. And you must make for him his own pallet, as far away as you can manage. I will speak to that jailer with the big nose about moving him to another cell, but I fear it is already too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Yes, poor fellow,” said Pepin, as if he’d answered my question. “I will check on him again in a few days. Should the fever return after a period of recovery, let me know tout de suite.
“And you,” he said to me in a louder voice, “in my expert opinion, have received a nasty bump on the head and a kick in the face. If you do not die, you will live. Hold still.”
And with that he seized my nose and yanked it. A horrible crunching noise filled my skull, and for a moment I was blind with pain, but when I ventured to touch my nose I found that it was near about straight again.
Pepin packed up his things and settled his hat on his head. “Now, my friends, to the business. How is it you propose to pay me? I assume the jackals have stripped your pockets.”
“Pay you? I thought . . .”
“You thought what? That a learned man such as I works for free?”
“But I—you’re an army surgeon!”
He held up a finger. “I am the physician, not a lowly surgeon.”
“My apologies, sir.” There was no point in showing contempt, and perhaps harm, though I was hard-pressed to disguise it. I tugged off my left boot and fished around in the little inside pocket. I held out a small handful of gold and silver, which I hoped he would think was all I had. “You might as well have it as anybody else,” I said. “Go on. Take it. Don’t wait for any more, because there ain’t any.”
But Pepin selected only a Spanish quarter real, worth two bits American. “Merci. Now I am retained as the personal physician to you and your friends. Do not hesitate to call me if I am needed. ’Voir.”
“Au revoir, monsieur le docteur,” I said, both ashamed and relieved. “Merci beaucoup.”
“Pas de quoi! Don’t mention it!” Stopping at the door, he glanced out through the Judas window and then said, as if he had just thought of it, “Besides, I may have the favor to ask of you sometime, hein?”
“Moustiquaires,” snorted Juge when the doctor had left. “Where does he think we will get mosquito nets here, when he cannot even put a clean bandage on Treadwell? Fah.”
We made Treadwell and Cahoon as comfortable as we could, which wasn’t very, and looked around. Aside from Treadwell’s pile of straw— which was now greatly diminished, we having appropriated most of it to make a separate bed for Cahoon—by way of furniture we had a battered table, a pair of plank benches and a few empty crates. A lantern with a stub of candle in it hung from a hook in the ceiling.
“I’m surprised no one’s eaten this yet,” said Juge, taking down the lantern and putting the lump of tallow in his pocket. “I hide it, in case someone comes looking for it.”
Behind a low door that sagged on its hinges I found an indoor seat of ease, which consisted of a rickety platform with a hole in it, laid over a stinking shaft. A sloping plank ceiling protected the user from contributions from above. That much I saw before the stench forced me to close the door again.
I dragged a couple of crates over to the window and stepped up on them. There I had a fine view of the bay and of the Croatoan lying hove-to between the headlands. I hoisted myself up by the bars and studied the ground below. Beside an alligator pear tree at the base of the wall, a little creek emptied into the bay. It was more of a bright green streak of scum than a creek, really, and I supposed it to be the outlet from the latrine.
I jumped down and put my hands on my stomach. My guts gurgled and my kidneys ached, but I wasn’t ready to face the shit hole again. I felt horribly weary and envied Treadwell and Cahoon their filthy beds.
Juge was gazing down into the latrine. “Look,” he said, “this hole leads to other apartments.”
“Well, of course it does,” I said. “Everybody above and below shits into it too, don’t they?”
He took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. “Watch the door,” he said, and heaved on the seat. With a squeal of wood on stone, it lifted right out. He stuck his head into the shaft and peered around. “Bien,” he said when he came up for air. “The shaft is wide enough that one could brace oneself with the feet and shoulders and so maneuver up and down. It looks horribly damp and slimy, but cleaner than one might think. If one were to fall, however . . .” He grinned. “Later, someone will have to see what he can see.”
Two soldiers in dingy homespun brought our supper, along with a bucket of dubious water and an unsigned note: Because you so kindly supplied us with fresh horsemeat, we return the favor by sharing it with you. Good appetite!
“From Lieutenant Négraud, I bet,” I said, handing the note to Juge and fishing a gobbet of something out of one of the pots. From the shape of it and the hairs, I figured it was a part of a muzzle, perhaps even a nostril. Trying not to think of Joséphine, who couldn’t have been the only horse killed last night, I put it in my mouth and chewed it. It tasted exactly the way you might expect a horse’s nostril to taste.
“Not bad,” I said. “Like stewed shoes, only not as tender. Mr. Treadwell, may I help you to some? The broth will do you good. And you, Juge?”
Juge shook his head. “Father Toussaint says to avoid meat when possible. And when I smell it roasting—feugh! It makes me ill. What is contained in this other pot?” He lifted the lid and sniffed the steam. “Ah, navets!”
“What’s yer man sayin’ there, sir?” said Cahoon.
“He says we have navets for dinner.”
“What’s ‘navvies’?”
“I don’t care as long as it ain’t turnips. Juge, what are navets? I do not recall hearing the word before.”
“Les navets sont des navets,” he said, meaning they were what they were. He shrugged as he chewed a mouthful. “A root vegetable. Some kind of a radish, I think.”
But I was already staring into the pot with disgust. “Turnips, by God!” said I.
Eleven
While playing at Continental privateer as a boy, I’d considered that someday a determined enemy might capture me after a desperate action. The hayloft that served as my quarterdeck did double duty as a dungeon, where my dastardly captors threw me with sneers on their cowardly lips (or with polite regrets because of the spirit I’d shown in the face of the usual overwhelming odds, depending), leaving me there to rot on well water and cornbread hooked from the kitchen. As I ate and drank I languished in a drift of sweet-smelling hay, which to my mind was dank straw alive with vermin. And after the bread and water—the daring escape!
But it hadn’t occurred to me how dull prison would be. Our primary entertainment was catching rats, which we soon discovered were a commodity of exchange. That first meal of horsemeat and turnips was the only official meal we got, but Lieutenant Négraud (and my diminishing supply of gold and silver) saw to it that we got enough to keep us alive. We suspected the guards of dipping into the pots before bringing them in, and I made the mistake of complaining to Négraud. He expressed shock, outrage, deepest concern, and then invited himself to dinner.
The War of Knives Page 15
