by Cave, Hugh
"It's all right." Sam stepped to the door and peered into the living room. Damn. There was no couch, no sofa, nothing at all he could be horizontal on. "I can sleep out here on one of these chairs," he said grudgingly.
Mildred said, "After being on a mule since daybreak, and with more of the same tomorrow? No, Sam."
"But—"
"We can both use this room," she said firmly to the woman, forgetting the housekeeper did not speak English. Getting a blank look that made her aware of her mistake, she turned impatiently to Sam. "Tell her, will you?"
"Daddy's not going to like it," Sam said.
"Daddy isn't here and needn't know. I won't have you scrunched up in a chair or sleeping on a floor all night!"
Sam said to the housekeeper, "The m'selle says we can use this room. No problem."
"Good." She was obviously much relieved. "Then I'll go and see about your man and the mules, and start supper."
"We have some food."
"No need. I bought a goat today."
Where, Sam wondered, would friend Oriol sleep? On a mat somewhere, no doubt. He didn't care enough to bother asking. To hell with you, Jack; go measure your flour.
He looked at Mildred. She must be dead tired, yet she looked more alive than he had ever seen her look in Vermont. "All day long you've been surprising me," he said. "Now this."
When she smiled, something altogether unexpected happened to her daughter-of-Daddy face. "You know something?" she said. "If I weren't worried about my father, I'd be having the time of my life. All this is so new."
"You're liking it?"
"Loving it."
"Why? Tell me why."
"Later," she said. "Right now I want to draw a bath. I must smell as high as that beast I've been sitting on."
"Both of us. There used to be a shower out back. Let me check."
There still was, he discovered, but he wondered how Daddy's little Vermont girl would like it. You stood under a bucket that had holes punched in its bottom, and you pulled a chain. This allowed water to flow from a pipe into the bucket and down through the holes. Cold water, of course. Returning to the room, he found Mildred awaiting him in a black bikini.
"Don't laugh," she said when his eyes popped. "I bought it at least two years ago and have never worn it. I only brought it along because it weighs nothing."
She was a good-looking woman, Sam decided. All curves and all in the right places. But why, for God's sake, did the moment remind him of a time Kay Gilbert and he had showered together at the Calman, solemnly and silently soaping each other all over before a night in bed?
Leading Mildred to the shower, he explained how it worked, then, after she had finished, took his and returned to the room to find her dressed in clean clothes and anxious to wash out the ones she had worn all day. He himself had only just finished dressing when there was a knock on the door.
The fathers' housekeeper said, "Supper will be ready in half an hour. Would you like a drink?"
"Love one."
"Oriol says he will eat with me in the kitchen. Do you have any clothes you want washed?"
Solemn as a church, she went away with Mildred's clothes and his, to return in a few minutes with a tray bearing a bottle of rum, two glasses, an earthenware jug full of water, and some ice. The rectory had a kerosene refrigerator, Sam remembered. As he fixed the drinks, his eyes fell on the water jar, which brought to mind the singing govis in Dr. Bell's room at the pension.
How had Mildred's old man made the govis sing and the drum throb that way?
He handed Mildred a drink. Downing it, she passed it back for a refill as though the two of them had been boozing together for years. "Nice," she said. "It's been quite a day, Sam."
"Hasn't it, though?"
"I'm hungry, too. Goat, did she say? I could eat a horse."
"Never eaten goat?"
"Now, where in the world would I have eaten goat, when I've never been out of New England before?" Her laugh ran around the room, rippling over the walls, caressing the two cots. If she had never slept in the same room with a man before, Sam thought, she must be a little nervous. Daddy had kept the cage door locked until now, more than likely.
Supper was an event. Both a little high on Barbancourt plus fatigue plus relief at having found a haven for the night, they might have been slightly silly, anyway, Sam figured, but were certainly made more so by what was placed before them in the rectory's little dining-room. It was goat soup, served from a huge aluminum tureen. In it swam assorted vegetables. You knew it was goat because the animal's head was in it, too—the whole head, big as life in the middle of the dish. Its eye sockets stared at Mildred, and she stared back at them, speechless for a moment, while Sam said, "Thank you, Madame," and the housekeeper said, "I hope you are accustomed to our kind of cooking, M'sieu, and please call me Françoise."
"Françoise," Sam murmured.
She departed, smiling.
"What are these things?" Mildred asked, finding her voice. With a spoon she lifted from the tureen a number of white objects that appeared to be nuts of some kind. The soup was filled with them. "Are they Haitian?"
"Taste one."
She did, and looked at him in astonishment while nibbling it. "Garlic?"
He grinned. "And not Haitian. At least, not so far as I know. Haitians use garlic, of course, but not like this. I suspect the curé here is a French paysan, like Père Turnier before him. Incidentally, when I was here with Jack Ulinsky, we had dishes of these garlic corms at every meal, even for breakfast. Everybody stank to high heaven and nobody gave a damn."
She ate the ones she had fished from the tureen and was just tipsy enough to be comical when she gravely nodded. "I like them."
I like you, Sam thought.
She ladled out soup for them both and tried it. "This is good, too. You know something, Sam? This trip is becoming an education."
You keep on being so unexpectedly nice, Sam thought, and it may indeed be an education. For both of us, maybe. Why did he keep seeing her in that black bikini?
But why, on the other hand, did he keep thinking of that shower at the Pension Calman?
Françoise came with slices of roast goat in a pepper sauce so fiery it made their eyes water. Then with two glass cups of Jello that hadn't jelled. Then with coffee. Finished, Sam went into the kitchen to tender their thanks and compliments.
"By the way, Françoise, did some other strangers pass through here yesterday?"
"Not yesterday, M'sieu. But I heard that a white woman came through this morning with a little girl and a guide. Someone said she was a nurse from that hospital in the Artibonite."
"Going where?"
"To Bois Sauvage, the guide said, but I doubt it. He rode through here again in mid-afternoon, alone, and it is certain he could not have reached Bois Sauvage and returned in that short time."
Sam felt something tighten in his chest. "He came back alone?"
She nodded.
"Did he say why?"
"I don't think he stopped to talk to anyone, M'sieu. In the morning when the woman and child were with him, yes. In the afternoon, no. That's what we have heard, anyway."
Why, Sam wondered, would Kay Gilbert have hired a man to guide her into these mountains and then have sent him back? Did she plan to stay in here a while, as he and Ulinsky had? If so, where would she stay?
Full of questions that made him want to do something —but what?—he returned to the dining room. He said to Mildred, "Would you like to see something of this village before we turn in? There won't be time in the morning."
Maybe—just maybe—he could find out more about Kay than the housekeeper had been able to tell him. "I'd love to, Sam, but it's dark out there."
He glanced out a window and saw she was right. Thanks, probably, to the goat soup and his delight at her acceptance of it, he hadn't noticed. You frequently failed to notice the coming of night in this country. There was little twilight. You suddenly and unexpectedly found yourself groping in a blackout, espec
ially if you happened to be in a country village like this where there were no street lamps. There'd been kerosene lamps on the table at supper, he realized now. Amazing, his intense preoccupation with other things.
"We have flashlights," he said. "And there's some kind of moon. Stars, at any rate."
"All right."
He went to their room for the flashlights, and they set out through the village, Mildred casually taking his hand when the track became a series of gullies.
Past the Garde d'Haiti post with its wide flight of concrete steps flanked by tall palms.
Past wattle-and-clay houses, not a straight line in the lot, topped with roofs of rusting galvanized iron.
Past the village market, now just an empty forest of dark and spooky poles supporting roofs of thatch.
Stars and moon provided some light as Sam had predicted, though not much. The flashlight beams aroused the village dogs—gaunt, bow-legged curs that slunk snarling and barking out of dark yards but were careful not to challenge too boldly and ran with their tails between their legs when lunged at.
At a place where two paths intersected, Sam halted to examine a five-foot-high wooden cross worn smooth as glass, apparently from much stroking. Globs of old candle wax encrusted the circular concrete slab at its base.
"Voodoo?" Mildred asked.
"Baron Samedi guarding the crossroads. The candles are lit for special favors, such as protection on a journey."
"If I had one, I'd light it for us."
"Would you? Why?"
"Why not?" she said, smiling.
But soon after that, Sam sensed a change in her. She seemed to lose interest in walking about the village and paid less and less attention to what he was telling her. He had some good stories, too, he felt with a twinge of disappointment. Father Turnier, for instance, had told about a too-persistent village tax collector who, at the people's request, had been run out of town by a bocor. Then the bocor had been arrested and fined for forbidding the rain to fall because he wasn't paid for his job on the tax collector. You wouldn't hear tales like that in a Vermont college town, now would you?
But Mildred was tired. It had been a hard day, and the rum before supper had probably made her sleepy, too. Taking her by the hand again, Sam headed for home, choosing the shortest way back that he knew.
One more stop was a must, though, when his light picked out a small, weathered, blue and white sign on a humble house by the path. The sign said, "Bureau Postal."
He began laughing.
"Something?" Mildred asked vaguely as they halted.
"I mailed a letter when I was here before, just to see if such a post office could be real. I sent it to Victor Vieux at the Calman." Dropping her hand, he went a few steps closer to the railed veranda, peering at the sign and remembering.
"He never got it, I suppose," Mildred said behind him in an out-of-focus voice.
"Would you believe he did? And in less than a week. Amazing things happen in Haiti. The crazy part of it was, I never thought he would get it so I didn't actually write a letter, just mailed him an empty envelope, not even a return address. Then when I got back to Port I didn't happen to see him for a while to tell him what I'd done, and poor Victor spent all that time wondering who in Vallière could have mailed him an empty envelope, and why. It nearly drove him up the wall. He didn't know Ulinsky and I were going in there, remember. We ourselves didn't know." Still gazing at the sign, Sam waited for her laughter.
She didn't laugh. Didn't even answer him.
Puzzled by her silence, he swung around.
She was no longer there.
16
"Hey!"
Lurching back into the middle of the path, Sam aimed his light up the hill toward the distant rectory. Mildred hadn't gone that way. With such a stiff climb facing her, she could not have got out of sight so soon..
He swung around and stabbed his light down the hill, where the path made a turn. She could have gone that way. Must have gone that way, unless she had run in between houses.
He ran after her, yelling, "Milly! Milly! Where are you?"
Except for the occasional barking of a dog, the village was quiet now and his voice carried far in the stillness. It bounced off the clay-walled houses past which he raced and came back to him as more than one voice. He rounded the corner and saw a deserted stretch of road with another turn ahead. On his left a door opened, letting out a rectangle of lamplight. A man stepped out to peer at him.
"Compère, did you hear someone pass by here just now?"
The fellow pointed, and Sam ran on, the beam of his flashlight sweeping the path ahead. He was waking up half the village with his yelling, he realized. All kinds of doors were being opened. Had the hour been later, they probably would have stayed shut, but it wasn't late enough for werewolves and evil spirits.
When he called out to ask if anyone had passed, people pointed, saying that they had heard running footsteps. Following this phantom trail, he found himself on a narrow path winding down to the river. Not the main road to the fording where the kids had been drawing water, but a side path twisting away from the village. It led, he knew, to a stretch of rocks and deep pools where the women went to bathe and do their washing.
Why was Mildred following this track? How did she even know about it? How, for God's sake, could she even see it in the dark? For she was not using her flashlight. Not once had it even winked on. Could a total stranger run through the twisting paths of a mountain village at night without a light? Impossible!
He stumbled on down the path. It was the only path now, this one that followed the coils of the river. The stream was swift. He could hear it growling over rocks as it entered the chasm where big boulders lined its sides. The beam of his light zigzagged with the path's crazy turns, causing him to lurch into massed branches of rose-apple trees whose white pompom blossoms slapped at his face like spectral hands. In a voice now hoarse and scratchy, he kept calling her name.
Then he saw her.
She had left the path and run out onto the rocks—huge, flat-topped boulders here that ended in a sheer drop of fifteen or twenty feet to the stream racing through the chasm. He knew the spot, had stumbled upon it one day when he had been out with Pare Turnier's shotgun, hunting wild pigeons and guinea fowl for the rectory larder. A careless step on those rocks, and you could go plunging down into white water or deep, swirling pools.
"Milly, for God's sake stop!"
She was only walking now, not running, and, at the sound of his voice, she turned her head to look back. Looked right into his light while his yell crashed among the rocks and broke into shards like a flung bottle. If she took even two more steps. . .
"Don't, Milly! Don't do it!"
She raised an arm to her eyes as though his light were blinding her; then, as he stumbled toward her, she turned away. With the slow movements of a somnambulist, she took one of the last two steps she would ever take.
His right hand shot out and caught her by the belt.
It was not a sure thing, though. His headlong rush brought him down, and she fell with him, both so close to the edge that he found himself looking down over it at the rushing water. He could see the water only because it was white in the chasm's dark depths; his flashlight was back there among the rocks where he had dropped it so he could grab at her. Working his legs furiously, he dragged her away from the danger and struggled to his feet, hauling her up with him. He pulled her over to his flashlight and picked it up, shone it on her face.
"Sam?" she said, blinking.
He let his breath out and the fear went with it, leaving room now for anger. "Milly, what the hell were you doing?"
She looked around, puzzled at finding herself where she was. "What . . . ? Sam, I don't remember coming here. What is this place?"
Whatever else it might be, it was no place for a conversation, Sam decided. "Come on. Let's get out of here."
Meekly, she allowed him to grasp her wrist and lead her back to the path, then up
the path toward the village. Halfway there, his light touched something shiny beside the track. It was her flash, where she had dropped it or thrown it away. He turned it on and handed it to her.
As they walked up through the village, doors opened again. One woman, peering out with her man, called, "Is she all right, M'sieu?" and Sam answered, "I think so, yes."
Was she?
At the rectory, the fathers' housekeeper opened the front door while they were still walking to it from the gate. She held a lamp high and peered into Mildred's face as they entered. Closing the door, she said, "I heard you in the village, M'sieu. Sound carries far here at night. Is something wrong?"
"Not now, Francoise. Miss Bell wandered off and I was trying to locate her in the dark." He had to tell her something.
She continued to peer at Mildred as though wondering whether to believe him. "Would the m'selle like some coffee?"
Sam translated, and Mildred shook her head. "Thank you, no."
"A little rum, then?"
Maybe that was it, Sam thought. The rum. They hadn't drunk much, but if Mildred were one of those who couldn't handle even a little . . .
Mildred said, "I'll just go to bed, I think. May I, Sam?"
"Of course." He took her arm and walked her to the room they were to share. The housekeeper had put a lamp on a table there, the wick low because they were expected to leave it burning all night. He turned it up while Mildred went to her cot and sat down. Seating himself on his own cot, at the other end of the room, he realized he could not easily talk to her across that much space and went to Sit on a chair within arm's reach of her.
"Want to tell me what happened?"
"I don't know what happened."
"We were at the post office. I started to tell you about mailing a letter there, and you answered me. I finished the story—a long, stupid story—with my back to you, and when I turned around, you were gone."
She shook her head. "I remember the start of the story. You mailed a letter to Victor Vieux, to see how long it would take to reach him. After that. . . Sam, I don't know. I don't remember leaving you."
"Milly, you went down through the village without using a light. You went along that path to the pools without a light. God knows how you did it. What do you remember?"
