All Souls' Rising (24 page)

He climbed back onto the mule and they continued in the direction of Ouanaminthe at a much more rapid pace than before. Still it was twilight again by the time they entered the town, coming along the Dajabón road and crossing the levee that had been raised along the riverbank. The levee was lined with men standing almost in military postures, though they did not seem to be soldiers. It was already too dark to distinguish their faces at a distance but Arnaud thought it strange that no one hailed them.

In the lead again, he rode up the street in the direction of the government house. Before he could reach it a throng of men surged across the street to bar his way. Many were armed with muskets similar to the ones his mules were bearing, and they were all mulattoes. Arnaud realized that he had not seen a white man since entering the town.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he shouted at a man who had caught his mule’s bridle and so held him arrested. In answer another mulatto poked a bayonet toward his belly, and for the first time he felt a twinge of fear. He looked over his shoulder, but Orion was gone.

Then someone called out a command and the bayonet was lowered from his ribs. A man was striding across from the houses with an air of authority, and the other mulattoes turned expectantly to face him. Arnaud squinted in the dusk and with a flush of relief he recognized the freckled features of Choufleur.

“You’ve come in good time,” Choufleur informed him.

“Yes,” Arnaud said. He looked over his shoulder again; some men were unloading the first two mules in the train and handing out the muskets to other, unarmed mulattoes who were coming out of the side streets in increasing numbers.

“But this must stop at once!” Arnaud called out, and looking at Choufleur, “You must stop them.”

Choufleur said nothing. In the dim, the patterns of his freckles were swimming on his face, though his green eyes were steady and sharp on Arnaud as he lifted his hand. Arnaud wondered if the half-breed expected a handshake. As he was thinking this, Choufleur caught his wrist and tugged him rudely down from the saddle. Arnaud shouted incoherently, more from the insult than the pain of his wrenched leg. He would have slapped Choufleur but two other men had pinned his arms behind him.

“What do you mean by it?” he said. “Where is my servant?” He could feel that his wrists were being tied together with a prickly length of sisal cord.

“You have no servant,” Choufleur said. “There is nothing that you own.”

Arnaud spat at him, but Choufleur stepped aside and let the gob fall in the dust. One of the men behind him gave him a rough shove and tripped him so he fell onto his knees. Choufleur closed a hand on the back of his neck and pressed his head into the dirt, scrubbing his face across his own spittle. Then he jerked him to his feet by his hair.

The two other men hustled him forward, one leading him and the other behind. All down the pack train mulattoes were shouting with pleasure as they received the new weapons. Arnaud caught sight of Père Bonne-chance beyond this throng, standing beside the buildings in his black robes, the sole still point in the confusion swirling around him. Arnaud stared wildly and the priest seemed to look back at him, but with no reaction—as if Arnaud had been rendered invisible. A prod of a bayonet sent him hurrying on.

He was brought to the cellar of a private house which might have been used to store wine, but was empty now except for another white man who had been badly beaten about the face. The faint light that drifted in from a grating near the ceiling was scarcely enough to reveal his battered features, but he raised himself on his elbows and called Arnaud by name. Coming nearer, Arnaud recognized a Ouanaminthe planter named Robineau, some ten years his senior and a slight acquaintance.

“What’s happened?” he asked. “What’s happened here?”

Robineau’s front teeth had been smashed out so his reply was indistinct. “The mulattoes…” he muttered, and did not go on.

“
Évidemment
,” Arnaud said. “Where did they get the guns?”

“Ogé,” Robineau mouthed. “I heard that. The guns were hidden from the Ogé rising.”

Arnaud grunted and walked toward the grating. By standing on tiptoe he could obtain an ankle-level view of the street, full of men hurrying to and fro, calling out to one another in Creole, some carrying torches now. It was awkward to keep his balance without the use of his hands. He crossed the cellar to where Robineau was propped against the wall and lowered himself into a squat.

“Would you be so kind as to get this rope off me?” He wiggled his fingers, which were beginning to swell from the pressure on his wrists, and waited, but the touch he expected did not come. He glanced over his shoulder.

“I don’t think…I shouldn’t…” Robineau looked uneasily toward the door. “
Mieux que vous restez comme ça
.”

Arnaud deflated, rolling off his heels to sit down on the cold flagstones, which were thinly covered with dampish straw. In Robineau’s tone and fearful expression he recognized that mood of abject helplessness he’d always sought to inspire in his own slaves, and he felt it would be a matter of minutes or hours at most before he sank into this state himself. The grated window slowly glazed over into total darkness. Arnaud lowered his head. His shoulders ached and he could do nothing to ease them. The mixture of dirt and spit was drying on his cheek and he was unable to wipe it. With his boot he shuffled the straw in front of him into a little mound.

Presently the door opened and Choufleur entered, carrying a candle. “Get up,” he said, pointing to Arnaud.

Arnaud squinted at him, blinking at the candle’s flame. Robineau had twisted his face away from the light. Arnaud raised himself again into a squat and when he saw that Choufleur made no move to help him rise he pushed himself all the way up unassisted, scraping his shoulder along the wall for balance.

At Choufleur’s gesture, he preceded him out of the room and mounted the stairs, the freckled mulatto coming behind with the candle. When they reached the street Choufleur clamped his arm above the elbow and guided him toward another building, nearer the government house. By now there was less commotion in the street, but Arnaud could hear musket shots from the edge of town, along with shouts that suggested celebration more than battle.

“I want to show you something,” Choufleur said.

They entered the second house and Choufleur conducted him to a ground-floor room, furnished as an office. There were many mulattoes gathered round the desk but no one took note of their entry, and they remained standing in the shadows by the doorway. The others were all drinking wine from the necks of various bottles which they held. Arnaud’s eye was reluctantly drawn to a large light-skinned man dressed in elaborate military uniform, raising a wine bottle and bubbling it with its butt thrust at the roof.

“Candi,” Choufleur muttered. “
Vous n’avez pas fait sa connaissance?
”

Arnaud said nothing. The group around the desk parted and now he could see, seated behind it, a white man with graying hair who must have occupied a post of authority there, though now his arms were bound to the chair and he was so tightly gagged that the corners of his mouth were bleeding. His eyes were round and watery in the light of the oil lamp that stood on the desk. Candi set the wine bottle down and picked up the corkscrew that lay beside the lamp.

Choufleur’s hand tightened on Arnaud’s arm. “
Regardez
,” he said. “
Attention
.”

Candi wound the old cork meticulously from the screw, and lightly tried the point of the instrument against the ball of his left thumb. He stooped, smiling, and placed the screw gently against the white man’s eyeball and with a slow precision began to turn it in. The white man went rigid against the chair back, and from behind the gag came a strangulated retching sound. Arnaud’s eyes squeezed shut and he bit into his lip. He heard Choufleur’s voice in the dark, rapturously tonguing an English phrase.

“
Out, vile jelly
,” and in French again, “Does it not remind you of the blinding of Gloucester?” He noticed Arnaud then, and slapped him so that his eyes popped open. “Watch, or you will take his place. You must see.”

Arnaud obeyed, his lids pinned back. He was having difficulty with his breathing.

“Take out the gag,” Candi said, and one of the others quickly did so. What came from the white man’s mouth was a kind of sigh, an
aaahhhhh
. One eyelid sagged over the bloody socket while the other eye rolled evasively. Candi sighted down the length of the corkscrew. The white man’s howl was deafening when he drove it in, with a delicate gradual rotation that finally brought his knuckles flush against the other’s cheek. Candi’s teeth clenched, his forearm tensed: he yanked. There was a sucking
plop
, followed by a shout of appreciation all around the room. The eyeball was larger than Arnaud would have thought possible, and pudgy, like a dumpling. It depended from a number of white twisting tentacle-like cords, till someone reached with a knife to cut it completely free.

Candi held the eyeball high on the screw and grinned and laughed at it. He did a little dance step, boot heels clicking on the floor. Arnaud’s bowels will-lessly released and he felt that he was soiling his trousers. Choufleur turned and inspected him with an extraordinary satisfaction.

“But probably you have not read Shakespeare at all,” Choufleur said. “You see that my education is superior to yours.”

Without saying anything more, Choufleur returned him to the cellar across the street, and went away closing the door silently behind him. Robineau had disappeared. The clump of straw was wetter than it had been, dripping actually, when Arnaud stirred it with his foot. It reeked of blood. Arnaud was loathe to sit down anywhere. He was aware of the stench and the clinging damp of the feces that coated the insides of his legs. The white man’s scream still buzzed, distorted, in his inner ear. In his mind’s eye the dead horse appeared, bloated with its necrid gasses. He stood below the grating, straining to see out; there was a column of men tramping along the street. In the aureole of their torchlight the face of Père Bonne-chance appeared.

“I will hear your confession, my child, if you desire it,” the priest said.

Arnaud wondered if he might not be hallucinating. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” The priest vanished from beyond the grating, and a moment later the door swung open.

“But how did you get in?” Arnaud said.

“It wasn’t locked,” the priest said. “There’s no lock on it, but you’ve been distracted. Hurry, you must go in front.”

When they reached the street the priest pushed Arnaud’s head down so it was bowed and went along half a pace behind him, chanting a paternoster in Latin. The column continued to pass in the opposite direction alongside them, most of the men now blacks dressed as field hands, but carrying the muskets Arnaud had inadvertently provided. Some glanced at them curiously as they went by, but took no further notice.

Père Bonne-chance led Arnaud down another street toward the levee and thence out onto the Dajabón road. There were bonfires lit on the levee’s height and men were crying out to the stars and firing off their muskets at the sky and pouring rum from broken barrels onto the flames to make them leap. They had not got very far along the road from these festivities before they heard a party of horsemen approaching from the opposite direction.

“Quickly,” the priest said, and hauled Arnaud down the steep bank into the river. The water was suddenly, surprisingly deep. Arnaud felt the priest’s hand cupped under his chin, supporting him, till his flailing boot found footing on a rock. He could hear the jingle of harness as the horses passed, though he could not see them. The priest’s hands worked around his wrists and as he gratefully fanned his fingers over the surface of the water he saw the length of sisal rope go drifting downriver, twisting palely in the current like a snake.

“They would have killed you,” Arnaud said. “Did you not see what inhuman monsters they are?”

“It may be that they follow the old dispensation,” the priest said. The skirts of his habit came floating up around him. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

“They might have done worse than kill you, indeed,” Arnaud said, scarcely listening to his own words. With delight he felt the river purging the filth from between his legs.

“Oh, the ones who are superstitious would fear to harm me,” the priest said. “Those who are educated would dislike to offend the Church.” He clambered out onto the bank and peeled out of his robes and wrung them out. Arnaud followed him, pulling off his own wet things, scrubbing his trousers on a stone as he had seen slave women do.

“But you are not really even a priest,” he said.

“Because I am not chaste, you say this,” Père Bonne-chance said. Arnaud could see his bullet head thrusting about in the strange light. The stars were mostly obscured by persistent smoke and they were now well away from the fires on the levee, but the sky gave off a weird red glow reflected from the burning cane fields.

“But I must believe that God approves of love,” Père Bonne-chance said. He bundled his wet robe on his shoulder and began walking barefoot and naked along the roadside. Arnaud followed, naked himself but for his boots, which he was too tenderfooted to go without.

The priest looked back once over his pale and hairy shoulder. “No love is wasted,” he said, with a faint smile. Arnaud nodded, though he did not understand. Boots squelching, he kept on following the priest into the dark.

Chapter Fifteen

B
Y MID
-N
OVEMBER
, the Bréda plantation still stood isolate and undisturbed like an islet in the midst of the river of fire which streamed perpetually over Haut du Cap and down to the borders of the city itself. Bayon de Libertat was absent, trapped in Le Cap from the first flare of the insurrection. But there had been no burning or looting, no outrages nor much sign of any disorder at Bréda. A few slaves had slipped off to join the roving bands, no more, while the rest remained at their work, cutting and milling the harvest of cane.

This evening however there was no one at the mill, and most of the slaves had retreated within the doors of their cabins as Toussaint walked toward the
grand’case
through the cooling of dusk. Before him, a black hen bunched herself and clumsily lifted and flew to a roost on a low branch of an almond tree. Toussaint went on with his boots whispering on the dust of the path. In the garden alongside the
grand’case
, the desiccated roses hung head downward like paper bells. He climbed the steps and crossed the gallery, knocked on the door frame and waited. In a moment, Madame de Libertat called for him to enter.

The white woman took only a light repast in the evening, some biscuits and a little watered wine. Before the rising, her appetite had been hearty enough, but this abstinence was her only visible reaction to the trouble and otherwise she behaved trustingly, as if all was as usual. When Toussaint arrived, her two daughters had already dined and left the room. She looked at him directly, one finger turning a biscuit crumb in a circle on her plate. Madame de Libertat was younger than her husband, but her eyes were pinched with wrinkles, and her skin had begun to loosen on her face, turning papery as the petals of the roses in the yard. She was solemn but not apparently unhappy. For a few minutes she questioned him on commonplaces and they talked of affairs at the plantation.

“It’s quiet tonight,” she said. “There’s no one singing.”

Without, the fronds of a coconut palm shivered together in the wind with a sound like rain. The breeze stopped and the rattle died away.

“The mill is empty,” said Toussaint.

“Yes,” said Madame de Libertat. “Do take some wine.” At her gesture a housemaid filled a glass from the carafe and passed it to Toussaint, who turned the long stem through his gnarly fingers. The cup itself was scarcely larger than a thimble. He held it without tasting.

“Madame, you have made ready?” he asked with some reluctance. He watched the water-paled liquid revolving in the glass.

“It must be tomorrow?”

“Madame,” Toussaint said. “I could not any longer answer for your safety.”

Madame de Libertat passed a veiny hand across her eyes. A peculiar low drone breathed out of her; she was praying, perhaps. When she looked at him again her eyes were watery and clear.

“And will I ever see this place again?” she asked.

“I will pray and hope for an end of these troubles,” Toussaint said, “as you must, Madame.”

“
On doit éspèrer toujours
,” said Madame de Libertat. She nodded to him. He was free to go or to remain. He stood, placing the untasted wine glass on the table, and bowed to her and left the house.

Outside the door of his own cabin his brother Paul stood waiting. Toussaint told him that he expected him to drive Madame de Libertat down to Le Cap the next morning, as they had thought. There would be a wagon following with the household goods, as well as the coach carrying the mistress, which Paul would drive himself. Toussaint told Paul that he had already placed a loaded musket under the driver’s seat of the coach; Paul nodded without asking how he had obtained the weapon.

“When you return, I will be gone,” Toussaint said.

“
Ouais
,” Paul said, unsurprised.

“Stay here—if you can,” Toussaint said. “While you can. Keep order. If there is trouble, you must try to cross to Santo Domingo or come to Grande Rivière. Or I will send you a message.”

“Yes,” Paul said. “I will be waiting.” He reached to touch his brother’s hand and walked away slowly down the row of cabins into the dark which was now complete.

Toussaint sat down on a plank bench just outside his door. Beyond the cabins, in a grove surrounding a watering pool, he could hear the voices of children. Isaac and Placide would be among them; they had already eaten and gone out. Suzanne came out of the house and handed him a bowl of soup. While he ate, she sat on the bench beside him, opening her dress to nurse Saint-Jean. It was a green soup, flavored with lemon grass and thickened with coconut milk. He ate it slowly, without talking at all. When he had finished he set the bowl down on the plank.

“The mistress?” Suzanne said. “I know she will be unhappy to leave this place.”

“She will not show it,” Toussaint said. “All month the countryside has been burning around us and she has not blinked at it once.”

“It’s hard,” Suzanne said. The baby rolled a little forward in her arms, revealing his sleeping face. Cradling him, she closed her dress.

“It may be hard,” Toussaint said. “I think I saw her praying.”

“And you?” Suzanne said. “What gods have you prayed to, my husband?”

Toussaint turned his head to look into the child’s smooth face. In his sleep Saint-Jean squinted and wrinkled his nose.

“What do you know of the nature of god?” Toussaint said. “We must take our gods as they come to us.”

“Jesus has been kind to us,” Suzanne said. “We have a good life here.”

“We have no life,” Toussaint said. “We are like the dead. We are yet to be resurrected.”

Suzanne’s face clouded over; she picked up the bowl with her free hand and carried the sleeping infant into the cabin. Toussaint waited but she did not return. From inside the cabin came a muted clattering. There was little enough for Suzanne to make ready, but he understood that no woman, black slave or Creole lady, liked to abandon a home. He leaned down and pulled his boots off and set them aside. His toes stretched in the dry dust under the bench. Boots were not new to him, but he had only lately taken to wearing them. He sat thinking about his forty-odd years of dependence on the kindness of white people, which kindness had indeed come more freely to him than to most. Silently he said a paternoster to himself in the dark, shaping with his tongue the Latin words he’d learned from Pierre Baptiste. While doing so he thought about Jesus, the frail white man who could transmute weakness into divine power. He thought too of the god who was Jesus’ father, whose son so little resembled him. Afterward his mind went blank and he sat listening to the insects and the leaves of the trees behind the cabins stroking each other with a slow susurration, enjoying the sensation of his feet freed from their boots, and hearing the voices of the children reflected from the pool within the grove.

I
N THE MORNING HE APPEARED
at the
grand’case
dressed in his boots and coachman’s livery, wearing the green coat with its faded bloodstains. The Libertat daughters took their seats in the carriage; Toussaint handed Madame de Libertat in to join them, solemn and mute as any slave on any such occasion. When the door was shut upon her, Madame de Libertat stretched her arm through the window, motioning as if she meant to speak, but in the end she only thanked him with a smile. He bowed and walked around the rear of the carriage, and back to the box where Paul was already seated. Toussaint ran his hand under the iron braces and felt the contour of the musket where it was strapped to the underside of the seat. Paul nodded to him, impassively, and as Toussaint stepped aside he slapped the reins across the backs of the teamed horses and the carriage moved out, squealing and jouncing toward the road.

Toussaint backed his way up the steps of the
grand’case
, watching the wagon fall into the train of the coach. Two lady’s maids and the cook were perched on the bags and bundles in the wagon bed, and Toussaint had sent two men along besides the drover, arming all three as well, in case of any trouble. He knew they would not be likely to meet any of the better-organized bands on the road today, but there was more to fear from the ill-organized ones, of which he could know nothing. When the wagons had left the yard he entered the empty house, closing the door softly behind him. His boots rang notes of vacancy on the bare floors. On one wall a forgotten mirror gathered the light that leaked through the closed jalousies to itself, like a pool in a forest. Behind a chair lay one of the girls’ fans half unfolded and beside it a large black beetle ticking erratically like a broken watch. Toussaint went out at the rear of the house, closing the door with as much caution as if he feared to wake sleepers within. In the garden the roses had wilted further and some were stretched to the length of their stems on the hardening ground.

Within an hour he was headed southeast, mounted on Bellisarius with Isaac riding pillion behind him, while Placide proudly bestrode his own mount, a mule. Suzanne also went muleback, carrying Saint-Jean in a sling. With them were fifteen men from the plantation, all the good saddle horses and half of the mules. The men now openly carried the muskets smuggled from the Spanish. Toussaint was quite certain they would meet no whites in this direction, but there was no way of knowing what else they might encounter. Once in the afternoon a handful of men emerged from the bush and swarmed in a bare rocky area far ahead of them, shouting and blowing on conch shells, but seeing the size and strength of Toussaint’s party, they did not make any closer approach.

They camped at the foot of the mountains near the Spanish border, while there was still good light. Toussaint took off his boots and went barefoot into the jungle, gathering fresh herbs for his sack. It was dark when he returned and Suzanne was cooking over the open fire; one of the men was helping her with a big iron cauldron. They ate in near silence, and slept ringed around the coals of the fire. Placide could not sleep, it seemed; the boy was not afraid, but excited by the journey and by the sight of the two pickets Toussaint had sent out from the camp in opposite directions. Toussaint talked to him in a low voice, identifying the night sounds and what each portended, until Placide slumped against his side and slept. Toussaint covered him and went to relieve his sentries. As for himself he required little sleep; a couple of hours, near dawn, sufficed him.

By first light, they had all remounted and when the sunlight had strengthened enough to filter through the leaves and gild the way ahead of them, the ascent had grown steep. Here Toussaint parted from his wife and children, sending them on up the higher trails in the care of five of the men he’d brought. On the far side of the San Raphael mountains was a
boucanier
’s camp where they were expected; two of the men he sent with them had been to the place with him before and he was confident they would reach it before night. Isaac rode behind one of the men, clinging with his face pressed to his shirt, but Placide twisted on his mule’s bare back for a look behind. Toussaint saw the baby’s head joggling between Suzanne’s shoulders where he was slung, but Suzanne did not look back. The trail wrapped snakelike around the mountain. He watched the smaller party out of sight around an inward turning and waited until they reappeared on the next elbow, though by then their faces were too distant to discern.

On the descent he passed the others he’d kept with him, and rode Belisarius out ahead of them all, alone. Some of the saddle horses might have kept pace with him, but not the whole string of horses and mules; they would come along a day later to Grande Rivière, which was where he was bound. He pushed hard, stopping only once to fill his gourd with water and add a few herbs to his sack:
malnommée, guérit-trop-vite, herbe à cornette
. In the late afternoon he came down into Gallifet plantation where Jean-François and Biassou were encamped.

“Happy as a nigger of Gallifet” had been a proverb of the colony, for here the slaves had been treated with much the same providence as at Bréda. But now there were no masters kind or otherwise, save Biassou and Jean-François—Boukman was raiding around Le Cap and Jeannot was camped at a little distance, near Habitation Dufailly. If happiness still obtained here, its character had changed. The Gallifet
grand’case
was still standing, alone among ruins of the mill and other outbuildings that had been burned and pulled down, and the big house now surveyed a waste of smoking ash and cinder where there had once been cane fields. On the borders of the destruction the blacks rested or wandered as it suited them. There was little shade or shelter except within the jungle green.

Toussaint came in with a stream of blacks, for there were more and more of them flooding into the camp every day, now mostly loyal slaves who would not have run away from their plantations if they had not been driven by white reprisals against any black skin within reach. If anyone gave him a second glance it was because he was one of the few with a horse and that his was better than all the others. Among the newcomers he rode the trail along the riverbank.

At a bend of the river, backed into the jungle cover, there was a tent where Toussaint dismounted. The tent was strung with curious little bones and the doorflap decorated with
ouangas
. He was looking for Biassou, but the tent was vacant except for three multicolored cats that burst out when he lifted the canvas. Also there were two large snakes coiled in a tightly woven Carib basket, curled in a torpor of black and chocolate brown. Toussaint let the flap drop.

Of the three original leaders of the rising, Toussaint now thought Jean-François the most reliable, was inclined to trust him above Boukman or Jeannot. Both of these latter (though in rather different ways) had seemed unable to recall themselves from the first delirious frenzy of revenge upon the whites. As for Biassou he had come more lately to leadership and was less of a known quantity, though the accoutrements of his tent would seem to confirm his reputation as a
hûngan
.