The Binding

by Nicholas Wolff

  You could see he was taken with the whole thing. Markham has been asking villagers about the voudoun since we got here. He is beginning to believe that we are being practiced upon, that somehow the Haitians are disguising Bule by casting spells on us.

  After Markham went into the house, it wasn’t long after that we heard screams. Female screams, of course. The villagers were on the edge of the fire, and their eyes were wide. They were crying out, scuttling around and hugging each other. I dreaded the arrival of the dead man’s family, for we would have had a hard time with them, but they never showed. I kept an eye on the body as the screams from the house continued.

  “Fix bayonets!” I called out. The Marines have come through here many times since ’15, so the Haitians knew what would happen if they charged. They spat at us, some of them, and I had to restrain Private Post and Private Ford, for we needed no more bloodshed.

  The screaming from the house, though, I have to admit, was horrible even for us. I have no qualms about dealing harshly with the cacos, but this was a woman. No words were spoken, but the looks from the men were troubled. Except for Private Dyer and one or two others, who seemed to enjoy it.

  As second in command, I never considered accompanying the captain into the house. My duty lay in guarding it. I know now that Markham is depraved and lacking in the most basic human virtues. But he is still our fellow Marine, as well as our leader, and the thought of stopping him never entered our minds. The Haitians are unruly and obstinate, and the cacos kill us when they can. Many soldiers in Haiti have done the same, some perhaps worse.

  But we sensed something different about that “interview,” as Markham would later call it. Perhaps it was the dark atmosphere of the ceremony that preceded it. But I suspect it was that woman’s agonized, bone-chilling screams.

  I had the sense she was calling to someone.

  * * *

  October 1st: Something occurred last night that has shaken us all.

  What little we can glean about the whereabouts of Bule place him last in Gonaïves, on the western coast, so we adjusted our route accordingly. Last night, we were sleeping outside a small city called Dessalines. We had pitched our tents and cooked our meals over open fires before retiring at eight. Sentries were posted, of course, although this is not known to be rebel territory. The night was still, the air barely moving, which is the particular curse of this country that seems not to be in the Caribbean but suspended over some Mesopotamian desert. At about 9:15, I heard a cry. It was Private John Prescott, who was second man on the watch. This exclamation was then followed by a shot. I was up in an instant and found my revolver already in my hand as I pulled back the tent flap. There I saw Prescott backing up, his gun pointed out at the trees, the bayonet blade catching the last glimmers of the fire.

  “What is it?” I asked. I could see other heads poking out of the three other tents.

  Prescott was deprived of speech. He backed up until I caught his shoulder roughly with my hand and stopped him.

  “Marine, what is your report?” I demanded.

  “It . . . it was him,” Prescott said. His voice was quivering and low. I felt terror in his body; if I had not held him up, I believe he would have fainted.

  Markham came out of his tent, his hair wild.

  “Who?” he demanded.

  “The man in the red shirt,” Prescott said. “The man we killed.”

  “That’s nonsense,” I said. “These Haitians look—”

  “It was him, as sure as I’m standing here.”

  “Where’s Monk?” Markham said, referring to Private Monk, the first man on the watch. He hadn’t appeared, despite the commotion.

  Prescott gave Markham a haunted look.

  “That’s just it, Captain. That’s why I fired my gun. The man in the red shirt was dragging him off. Monk’s throat was . . .”

  I was watching Markham’s face, and the range of emotions that came across it is still present with me. First confusion, then a dawning horror—what we were all feeling, I believe, at that fateful moment—and then something I can no more describe than I can understand. I will call it fascination. I got the sense that he wanted to believe that the man in the red shirt was with us again. But the campfire was throwing flickering shadows across all of our faces, and I believe this last impression was a trick of the light. I forgot it almost immediately.

  Since Markham stood rooted to the spot, I called for search parties to be assembled. Someone piled fresh timber on the fire, which roared to life, and we began to inspect the tree line. The first party took torches and set out, while a second one, which I directed to head west, wasn’t twenty paces away when they called out.

  “Here!” The man’s voice—was it Dyer’s?—was filled with a screeching terror. I felt it myself. The woods were as dark as ink, and the image of the man in the red shirt, arisen, was with us.

  I ran up. There was something lying on the ground. I called for a torch and brought the flame down close to the earth and saw a pool of red, viscous matter. I knew immediately that it was blood. But gouts of it, sprayed in a radius of five or six feet. The men stared at it in a kind of trance.

  “This is where he took Monk,” Prescott said.

  We followed the blood trail with torches as we ran forward into the forest. But it gave out after forty yards. I didn’t say anything, but I knew that the human body has only so much blood and that it was more a case of Monk’s veins being emptied than any attempt at misdirection by the killer. He didn’t seek to hide his tracks. The opposite, in fact, was true. In chasing after him, trying to avoid the red gouts on the dirt, I had the distinct impression that the murderer would have been well pleased had we caught up with him, as he made no attempt to take the smaller animal paths that branched left and right off the main path he was on.

  When we returned, Prescott described the murderer in detail. He’d caught sight of him as he passed by the flaming torch that the sentries always gathered around. The man had the same red shirt, the same brown half-pants, the same round face smeared with pale dirt as the figure from the ceremony. When I say that, after what we had seen, having been so long from civilization and the company of other white men, we believed Prescott from the beginning, perhaps you will not credit it.

  But we did. Especially Markham. He revealed to us that the woman in the village had told him, after much “persuasion,” that Bule was not only a political enemy of the current administration and of the Americans, but also a sorcerer “of the highest reputation.” When Markham sliced open the woman’s cheeks and choked her with a sash—he confessed these details blithely—she was muttering incantations, calling Bule to help her. Joseph, the interpreter, had fled in terror, but he’d translated a few of the maledictions. They were calls for our deaths.

  When Markham told us this, I watched him closely. I have begun to suspect something is amiss. Markham has sent no messengers back to our HQ updating them on the search for Bule, as has been our standard practice when on these small squadron missions. (We are without any Morse equipment in the field.) He hasn’t asked for reinforcements—as the attack on Monk certainly warrants, under our orders—or volunteered any information at all to the commanders back in Port-au-Prince. We seem to be going deeper and deeper into the Haitian firmament, losing our connection to the battalion. And Markham seems not to mind it one whit.

  “Sir, I think we need to send for reinforcements,” I said to Markham once we were back in camp and he and I were conferring. “If Bule has followers who are willing to attack us, he’s clearly more dangerous than we imagined.”

  Markham sat on his camp chair, his lank hair falling over his forehead as he stared at the campfire.

  “Do you believe this was the man we killed?” he asked.

  “It could have been a man dressed like him. For all we know, it’s a ritual here to dress in the dead man’s clothes and avenge him. Who knows what t
hese people get themselves up to? But I know that—”

  “I believe,” he said, looking at me with his piercing blue eyes, “that it was.”

  “Even more reason to get more men here. We can send ahead to Colonel Fine in Cap-Haïtien for reinforcements.”

  Markham’s scorn was palpable. “If you lack the resolve to finish the mission, Godwin, please tell me at once.”

  I could have struck him then. It was beneath my dignity to respond.

  “What about Monk?” I said finally. “Will you leave him to the savages?”

  “What I will do is track Bule and kill him.”

  “If we are at the beginning of some kind of insurrection, we have to at least let command know. And someone must search for Monk. If you insist on going ahead, then send word—”

  “So they can steal Bule away from me?” Markham said loudly. There was something in his eyes I do not pleasantly recall.

  “Sir, if we pursue Monk’s killer and another unit takes Bule, what is the loss to the Corps?”

  Markham said to me, “I will have him. No one else.”

  I continued my arguments for a few moments more, but Markham was not to be moved. We marched out of camp early this morning, with Monk still unaccounted for.

  * * *

  October 2nd: Squalls of rain today, surprisingly cold. We are still heading toward Gonaïves, a notorious haunt for rebels. I estimate the city is eight days’ march away. The men are looking forward to fresh provisions, sleeping in camp beds, and a temporary respite from this cursed mission.

  No sign of Monk or his killer. The men, I feel, will revenge themselves on any Haitian if they are not given the real culprit.

  * * *

  October 4th: More strange occurrences. I can now attest to them myself. Last night was one of the oddest of my life, and I do not wish to experience the same again.

  We had spent the day cleaning our equipment, mending our clothes, and resting. These things can only be neglected for so long: the brass on our Springfields needed polishing, the barrels needed the brush, and all of us needed to clean the dust off our uniforms. It was an industrious and tiring day, and by late dusk I was ready for my bedroll. I made sure the sentries were posted, both of them on four-hour shifts, and I crept into my tent, grateful for the eight hours of sleep ahead of me.

  I nodded off almost immediately. But soon my dreams began to perturb me. I haven’t had such insistent and bewildering visions since college, when I was an inveterate drinker. I tossed on my bedroll and the heat of the tent seemed suffocating, although in fact it was a cool night with a fair breeze. I remember a strange taste in my mouth—a strong copper taste that seemed to coat my teeth and tongue. I have not tasted such a thing before.

  I do not know how long I lay there. Without a glance at the night sky, I couldn’t tell if it was midnight or four a.m. Most of the visions fled from my mind, and all I can remember is a series of nightmarish faces, black faces, enormously large, the red veins in their eyes looming up at me.

  But what I do remember is hearing a voice.

  It came to me clearly, and its words were clear.

  “Depart this place,” it said. “Go and do not come back.”

  The voice seemed to be right outside my tent. I woke, wiping the sweat from my forehead, only to find myself blind in the dark.

  The dream didn’t dissipate. I felt a thing—a presence close to me is the only way I can describe it.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  And then a sigh. It came from just outside my tent.

  “Leave, Sergeant. Leave before . . .”

  The voice sank away, as if the speaker had caught something in his throat, but I believe the rest of what he said was “I come for you.”

  I knew the voice. I had heard it daily for many months. It was indisputably that of Private Patrick Monk.

  I was paralyzed with fear. The blackness of the tent seemed to choke me. I knew Monk was dead; I had seen his blood and no man could survive that. What spoke to me had to be a ghost, but then what was the thing that brushed against the side of my tent, rustling as it got up to leave?

  * * *

  October 7th: We have felt for the past few days that we are being tracked. We were aware in the past that our movements are often reported ahead—you cannot travel discreetly through Haiti, as the island is too small and too heavily populated—and that we rarely surprise anyone. But this is different. Our lead soldiers on patrol report that they hear movement in the trees off to the right and left as we move, mimicking our progress. Several attempts to locate this contingent of cacos, for that’s what we assume it is, have been unsuccessful.

  Captain Markham seems uninterested in pursuing any enemy shadowers. His time is used up with “interviewing” the local inhabitants as to the whereabouts of Bule. He has taken to talking to these natives alone in their huts. He is, I have to say, remarkably gifted with languages and has picked up enough of the patois to make even the services of our translator unnecessary. Sometimes screams and begging moans proceed from the huts when he is at his “interviews,” other times not. Twice we have found a corpse when the questioning was terminated. One of their faces was bashed in; the other had his nose slit up either side and an eyeball removed, as well as a fatal stab wound.

  It is hard medicine. Markham claimed afterward that the two men attacked him while he was conducting the interrogation, but I have my doubts. I am for severe pursuit of Monk’s killer, but I cannot condone the murder of innocent men. I have remonstrated with Markham about this, but he only repeats the story of being attacked.

  Lately, however, some of the natives have been emerging with nary a mark on them, and seem to have been pleased with the interview. I suspect Markham is using our discretionary funds, supposed to be used for buying flour and such, to prospect for information. I have asked him about these concerns as well, but Markham denies them. More and more, the leadership and daily business of the squadron is left to me, the captain now seeing himself as focused solely on the hunt for Monk’s killer and the tracking of Bule. Even Markham’s appearance is falling away from Corps standards; his hair is growing longer, he has not shaven in a week, and his adjutant reports that the captain wears the same underclothes day after day without washing them.

  I will bring this up with Colonel Fine when we reach Cap-Haïtien.

  * * *

  October 9th: Markham killed another man today. We came to one of the unnamed villages that dot the sides of the mountains here on the road to Gonaïves, and he grabbed a teenager off the street and instantly went with him to a local house, throwing the inhabitants out from their midday meal. They stood outside and listened in fear as a series of increasingly horrible cries issued from their home. One tried to enter, but Dyer was at the door, guarding it.

  Markham forces our hand in these situations. Once the Haitians spot any break in our ranks, any questioning whatsoever of our commander, they will overwhelm us. We can’t intervene, and in truth only a few of us would. But Markham grows stranger by the day.

  As the interrogation continued, I was negotiating the price of some peaches with a bare-chested man in a tattered straw hat by the side of the road—his harvest spread across the ditch there—when I heard an ungodly scream. The locals were battering at the window to try and get a look inside. Dyer had another mob at bayonet point. I ran to help him, calling for reinforcements to push the crowd away from the poor hut, when there came the sound of a heavy blow from inside, as if a man had been thrown against one of its wooden sides. The whole hut shivered, and the Haitian women began to wail. I got to the door and rapped on it before entering.

  I found Markham straddling the man, who was clearly near or past the threshold of death. His skull was crushed in on the left side and blood oozed out, and from his nose as well. Markham was unmoving, his hand on the man’s throat, feeling the pulse there. It was a macabre si
ght, and I cried out to Markham to ask what in God’s name he was doing.

  He said nothing, just felt the pulse winding down.

  “Leave me be,” he said finally.

  When he turned to face me, his eyes were unfixed. I backed out of the foul-smelling place and took out my revolver.

  “What is it, Sergeant?” Dyer asked me.

  “The prisoner is being interrogated,” I responded.

  I heard Dyer mutter a prayer and then yelled at the natives, “Deplase tounen,” or “move back” in their language. I have rarely seen people look at us with such hatred, but that is the order of the day.

  The house emitted no sound, but I thought I heard muttering. Almost a kind of prayer as well, but I couldn’t catch the word. What was Markham saying to a dead man?

  The captain emerged a few minutes later.

  “Did he tell you where Bule is?” I asked as he passed.

  Markham said not a word.

  * * *

  October 11th: We are two days’ march from Gonaïves, proceeding by foot in fine sunny weather. We were having breakfast this morning when the captain’s adjutant came to me and told me Markham wished to speak with me. I finished the last of my flapjacks, and went to the captain’s tent.

  Inside it was dark and musty. The fact that the captain had not been washing was clear. I could see some book next to his cot and a scratch pad full of notes. I noticed the book was in Creole.

  Markham didn’t look up at me.

  “I know where Bule is. Twenty miles west, in a village called Saint-Michel-de-l’Attalaye.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Can I ask where you got the information?”

  “A young man I interviewed two days ago. He turned out to be Bule’s nephew. He agreed to become a spy for me for the grand sum of one hundred American dollars. He wants to marry his sweetheart. I paid him twenty on account and I’ve been expecting word from him ever since. Yesterday I received it.”