All Souls' Rising (25 page)

Somewhere up the river, in the direction of Jeannot’s separate encampment, a peculiar sound was audible; it might have been the echo of a scream. Toussaint shook his head and led his horse in the direction of the Gallifet
grand’case
, where Jean-François was established. The distance was not very great; Jean-François and Biassou still acted together in close concert.

Jean-François met him coming from the house, resplendent in a gray uniform with yellow facings, a black cordon ornamented with white fleurs-de-lis. On his chest was pinned an Order of Saint Louis he’d taken from a house they’d sacked and the whole ensemble was completed with polished top boots, a plumed hat, and an enormous cavalry sword whose sheath squeaked against his belt as he walked. Someone in his retinue took Toussaint’s horse away to be groomed and fed, while Toussaint retained only the herb bag that he’d carried across the saddle.

“You’ve come to stay?” said Jean-François.

Toussaint pushed back his bandanna to scratch at the crown of his head. There was something floating down the river toward them, an oddly thick and pale piece of wood with a short crook at one end of it.

“It will be useful,” said Jean-François. “Since you are a
dokté-feuilles
.” With a finger he prodded the fragrant bag of herbs.

“There’s illness,” Toussaint said.

“No more than usual,” said Jean-François. “Some are wounded. Among the white people, a little fever.”

“How many whites?” Toussaint said.

Jean-François shook his head. “I haven’t counted. It’s Biassou who’s interested…”

It was the hostage white women that interested Biassou, Toussaint was well enough aware of that. He moved a little nearer to the strange object in the water. As it drifted toward the bank, an eddy turned it over and they both saw that the clubbed end of it was in fact a white man’s foot, with only the great toe remaining and the others all severed individually. The leg had been cut off just above the knee. It caught itself on a snag of sticks and stones, tendrils of hair waving out from the dead flesh of the calf.

“Caymans,” Jean-François said, under Toussaint’s interrogative look.

“Not a toe at a time,” Toussaint said. “That’s not a cayman’s appetite.”

“No—it’s from Jeannot,” Jean-François said, looking away upriver. He drew out his huge sword with a grating sound and used the point to push the leg free of the snag and back into the current.

“It must not go on,” Toussaint said. “It ought never to have begun.”

“You know they do as much to us, and more,” Jean-François said. “The white people.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Toussaint said. “We must act differently with them.”

“You say this because you are a Christian,” Jean-François said.

“We will show the white people what we are,” Toussaint said. “And also what we are not.”

Jean-François began a question, but an upheaval a way downriver distracted him. A small party of horsemen was crossing the burned fields below the Gallifet
grand’case
, surrounded by a larger throng of men on foot, stirring up great clouds of flaky ash. All of them were shouting something but nothing could be distinguished beyond the name of Boukman. A rider broke from the main body and came cantering toward them. It was Biassou, his squat toad’s body uneasy in the saddle, his hands high and loose on the reins. With some difficulty he pulled the horse up and stared at Jean-François and Toussaint, his face running sweat and his flat nostrils flaring.

“Boukman’s killed,” he said, too loudly. For a moment it seemed he would lower his tone and give details, but a convulsion passed over his features and he kicked up the horse and rode off crying “
Boukman tué, Boukman tué
,” mechanically, as if an outside intelligence governed him. It was what they were all shouting, spreading dismay throughout the whole encampment.

“Boukman,” Jean-François said, his face wrenched with genuine pain. “How could it happen?”

“Easily,” Toussaint said. “He ran in calling on Agwé and Ogûn, waving a bull’s tail around his head and thinking it would fan the bullets away from him. What’s surprising is that Biassou has
not
been killed, since he tells everyone that whoever dies in these fights goes back all at once to Guinée.”

Jean-François looked at him aghast.

“Yes, I know it may be true,” Toussaint said. He took off his bandanna and shook it out. “It’s what happens here in this world that interests me more.”

“You say we must become white men, then?”

Toussaint smoothed the bandanna over his forehead and reknotted it at the base of his neck. “You look very well in your uniform,” he said. “Have you become white? You may put on more than their dress and still remain what you are.”

“I am the grand admiral and commander-in-chief,” Jean-François said stiffly.

“Yes,” Toussaint said. “And neither of us kills our horses recklessly. So the
loa
must not kill their horses without reason. Who serves the
loa
must be served in return.”

Jean-François looked at him narrowly.

“It isn’t Boukman,” Toussaint said. “It’s any life that’s wasted.” He smiled and shook his bag of herbs. “Come and show me to the ones who need these things.”

Chapter Sixteen

T
HE UNIFORMED FOOTMAN
laid a tray of coffee on the table before Isabelle Cigny. Her spoon jingled cheerfully against the edge of a china cup. Doctor Hébert watched the movements of her small white hand. When she beckoned him, he came forward and accepted a cup and saucer and returned to his chair. Captain Maillart, meanwhile, leaned forward from his seat on the sofa to help himself to a plate of cakes. He turned to offer one to the girl Marguerite, who sat beside him there.

Doctor Hébert inhaled steam from his coffee, without yet tasting it. The odor of the sugared brew reminded him oddly of the smell of burning that blew daily from the plain. Isabelle Cigny looked up at him teasingly, as if she had read his mind.

“Our sugar is still of a perfect whiteness here,” she said at large. “We do not follow the vicious saying of that English minister.”

“
Pardon?
” said Marguerite. She looked blandly about with her large blue eyes. She had declined the proffered cake, leaving her hands demurely folded on her lap.

“William Pitt has remarked on our misfortune,” Captain Maillart said. “‘It seems that the French prefer their coffee
au caramel
.’”

The doctor surprised himself by blurting out a laugh (although he’d heard this bitter jest before). Madame Cigny looked at him rather sadly, three fingers pressed against her small pink lower lip. The doctor’s eyes slid away from her, toward Nanon, who sat apart from the others at a small sewing table in the corner, a basket by her feet and work on her lap. By her position in the room it was unclear to what degree she might or might not belong to this social group, though of course an untrained eye would probably not have doubted her
perfect whiteness
. She had not taken coffee. Her dress was vastly simpler than before, merely a pale loose shift a little better than what a household slave might wear. Her eyes were lowered to her sewing. The doctor had had no opportunity for as much as a private word with her, nor was he certain he’d have sought her intimacy, were it more available to him. Though he came here often, twice a week, he had little idea how to comport himself with her in these half-public circumstances. She tossed a lock of hair from her face and bent again to her work; the movement was not quite enough for him to catch her eye.

“
Oui, vraiment
,” Marguerite said almost tonelessly, peering into the sugar bowl. “
C’est évident
.”

Captain Maillart looked at her, at a loss for a direction to continue. He had been trying to flirt with the girl for the past half hour, but she was most unplayful.

“And you,” Madame Cigny said to the doctor. “You will be leaving us as well, I understand.”

“Yes,” the doctor said, and sipped his coffee.

“You tear yourself away”—Madame Cigny developed her theme with a brittle vivacity—“from our fair city, with its…spectacles. The gallows and gibbets. The execution wheels.”

“Painfully,” the doctor said. It was not an ideal choice of word. “Affairs at Habitation Thibodet have been neglected…”

“During your long absence,” Madame Cigny said, helping him along, “and will require your most earnest attention.”

“Yes, as you say.”

“No word from the mistress?”

The doctor shook his head, understanding her to mean Elise. He smiled at her, in thanks for her tact. It had entered his mind that his sister might have returned to the plantation, especially if news of her husband’s death had somehow reached her. But he had had no communication from anyone there and so could not know if the plantation itself was still in existence, for that matter.

“I do wish you would dissuade this child from undertaking such a foolhardy journey,” Isabelle Cigny said, looking at Marguerite, who was perhaps four years her junior. No one answered her. The doctor set his cup aside, on a small table. Marguerite had been offered hospitality at the Paparel plantation, in Marmelade, and she was intending to set out for the place the next morning, escorted by Captain Maillart and a party of militia.

“You might do very well to stay here,” Madame Cigny said directly to Marguerite. “I will gladly open my house to you. In any event we seem to have become a hostelry for displaced persons…of various sorts.” Coolly she glanced at the doctor, who dropped his eyes toward the toes of his boots.

“You are kind,” Marguerite said, “yet I have always preferred country living to the distractions of a town.”

“It must be admitted,” said Madame Cigny, “that for the moment our town is less than an ideal setting for a girl such as yourself—much as I regret to say it. Still I wonder at your journey. Is it wise?”

Marguerite smiled, sweetly or stupidly, as the disposition of an observer might interpret it, and said nothing at all. Madame Cigny got up and quickly crossed the room to her. Seating herself lightly on the arm of the sofa, she took Marguerite’s face between her two hands and twisted it up toward her own. It was an abrupt movement, and to the doctor it didn’t seem entirely friendly. Isabelle Cigny was examining her visage much as a horse trader might examine an animal. Captain Maillart stared at the pair of them, open-mouthed.

Seeing himself unobserved, the doctor thought he might at least exchange a glance with Nanon. But when he looked her way she would not meet his eyes, or else she was insensible of his regard. She had stopped her sewing for the moment and sat with her hands folded over the work, which looked to be a garment meant for Madame Cigny’s infant Héloïse. The looseness of the shift she wore gave no suggestion of her body’s shape, so that the doctor, recalling what he’d been told of Isabelle Cigny’s opposition to finery for colored women, wondered if she were used unkindly here.

Nanon sat with her face half turned to the wall, so that he saw her profile. Despite her pallor, there was much of Africa in her head’s shape at this angle, the slant of the cheekbones, full and heavy meeting of the lips. Her face seemed fuller, rounder than before, or perhaps he was imagining this. Her eyes were open, but she seemed entranced; she might have been asleep or dreaming.

There was a sort of whisper and the doctor turned to see Marguerite’s head swinging away from Madame Cigny’s hands, slackly, as if its support had been abruptly severed. The girl’s plump lips were parted a little, and her breath passed through them with that whispering sound he’d heard. A strand of her honey-blonde hair had come down and with her fingertip she reached absently to adjust it. Madame Cigny was looking down on her with an expression of terrible sorrow.

Captain Maillart then jumped to his feet, loudly slapping at the thighs of his breeches. “Well then, we must be going,” he said. “Off to subdue the brigands.” He smiled wryly. “Provided we can find them…”

A
T MIDMORNING THE NEXT DAY
their party set off from Le Cap, passing through some low earthworks hastily erected since the rising; before, the city had had few landward fortifications. Now, on one of the dirt ramparts, a pike carried the severed head of Boukman, the skin shrinking yellowly to the skull, leathery lips peeling back so that the whole head grinned deathly toward the gently smoldering plain. Briefly Doctor Hébert considered whether Marguerite would term this vision one of the “distractions” of town life; for the moment she did not seem to take notice of it at all.

Their party was some forty strong, a larger group of soldiery than the brigands (as all the black insurgents on the plain had come to be known) would commonly dare to attack. Save for Captain Maillart and a couple of other officers, these were not regular army troops, but militiamen, and an uneasy combination at that. Twelve were white Creoles, young and healthy enough, but too soft from pampering for a campaign in rough country (as Captain Maillart had somewhat bitterly explained). The rest were all mulattoes, a little older on the average, and most of them veterans of the
maréchaussée
. They were ill-trusted, for many still believed that the mulattoes were wholly responsible for the rising of the blacks, but indispensable just the same.

They carried with them two eight-pound cannons, drawn by mules, but no wagons, for the ways they’d take would be impossible for wagons to navigate. For the same reason Marguerite must go horseback; the doctor was surprised to see her riding astride like a man. Indeed, she sat the pretty gray mare she’d been given most confidently. Riding seemed to bring her out of herself. She rode alongside a lieutenant of Maillart’s regiment whom the doctor knew slightly from the theater and other such occasions, and she responded to his conversational sallies with more animation than he’d ever seen in her.

The doctor himself rode behind this pair in silence, half attending to the mild flirtation going on between Marguerite and the young lieutenant. Captain Maillart, who now rode at the head of the column, had provided him with a huge dragoon’s pistol, whose long scabbard scraped at his knee with every movement of his horse. But there was no enemy, no menace within view. The trail—it could not quite be called a road—went winding beside a bank that was tall with tawny lemon grass. That amiable lieutenant leaned from his horse to pluck a stalk which he presented to Marguerite, and the doctor saw the girl smile at its fresh odor of sweetness.

They were going through open country: low, gentle hills under a clear sky. Sometimes they crossed the now familiar fields of ash, but elsewhere nothing had been burned and the birds still sang. Once, at a great distance, they saw a band of the brigands who hooted and whistled at them from half a mile away, then scattered into the bush. Captain Maillart went a little more cautiously after this, despite the strength of his party and the fact that the gangs of brigands were thought to lack the skill and discipline for an organized ambush.

That night they spent at a fortified camp on the lower slopes of the mountain range. All these mountains were now strung with such camps, a cordon meant to keep the insurrection from breaking through to the Department of the West and sweeping down on Port-au-Prince. It was true as well, however, that the brigand blacks were also encamped all through the hills. Loath to risk open confrontation with armed whites in force, they skulked and raided as they could.

The trees around the palisade were ornamented with the rotting bodies of blacks who had been captured and hanged. A recent novelty of
country
life, the doctor thought, passing beneath them to enter the camp. Their stench was almost overwhelming; one of the very young Creoles masked his nose and mouth with a scented handkerchief. But Marguerite seemed to take no greater note of these carcasses than she would of crows crucified on a barn door to warn away their fellows.

They slept uneasily in that rough place, the Creole youths complaining mightily of their discomfort; apparently a couple of them had never been anywhere before without a body servant. Soon after first light, they were on the road again. Now the way went winding in and out of the gorges that raked the mountainsides, so that they must go three miles of twists and bends for one in a straight line. But in two hours they came down into the lowlands. Coconut trees were growing on a swamp flat and among them dozens of land crabs came up from their holes to watch the party passing. One of the mulattoes jumped down from his horse and ran among the trees to snatch the crabs and toss them into a bag, for they were good to eat. The men laughed to see him run, and Marguerite tittered, holding her fingers to her lips.

There were others who had used the trail ahead of them. The roadside was littered with cut coconut husks, and back in the trees were the blackened rings of small cook fires. As they continued they found peculiar cairns of stones and eviscerated birds arranged to signify some meaning. Captain Maillart sent scouts half a mile ahead of his main body, and let a couple of men trail back, pairing a white Creole with one of the mulattoes in each case.

In the midafternoon they overtook the advance riders, who’d halted just below the summit of a round hill. The doctor rode up, after Captain Maillart, half hearing their muttered conference. There was a sound of drumming from somewhere ahead. They dismounted and led the horses to the hill’s crown. A long slope glided down into a grassy bowl where a hundred or more of the brigand blacks were dancing to the drums, many already transported into the queer ecstatic fits that possessed them at these
calendas
. The women were equal in number to the men, and a mambo seemed to be presiding over the whole affair.

Some of the more hot-blooded of the Creole whites wanted to mount a charge immediately, but Captain Maillart dissuaded them from this. There was no possibility of surprising them across this long savannah, and at their backs was jungle where they’d easily disappear. Outnumbered as he found himself, Maillart disliked to risk the scattering of his force. The doctor knew too that he was unwilling to endanger the girl needlessly, though he did not say so.

Captain Maillart ordered the two cannon to be brought to bear and charged. They fired the first eight-pounder down on the blacks from the hill’s brow. The brigand dancers were well out of range—if the ball reached them it did so by rolling down the incline. A number of the Creoles followed up the shot with an equally futile clatter of pistol fire, disregarding for a minute or two Maillart’s order to desist. A cannoneer touched off the second charge, the gun bucked in its carriage and recoiled. By this time most of the blacks had already filtered away into the forest.

On the ground where they’d been the grass was pounded flat and there were leavings of a feast, split yams and the bones of wild hogs and stolen sheep. Also in certain more orderly areas, portions of food and fruit and bowls of milk had been laid out in offering to the pagan gods. Captain Maillart passed frowning through this scene, leading his own party tightly bunched. They pressed on more speedily after that, and by nightfall had reached the Paparel plantation, at the border dividing the canton of Marmelade from that of La Soufrière.

At Paparel they grew mostly coffee, the bushy trees ranked in terraces on the slopes, red thumb-sized pods bright on their branches. Though there was plenty of water here, the land was too steep and rocky for sugar, and only a few
carrés
were in cane. Paparel did keep a small cane mill, also an indigo works, and he grew fields of provisions for sale to neighboring plantations and the towns on the coast. But the master himself was no longer present; he’d decamped at the start of the insurrection, leaving his property in charge of the
gérant
, his wife, and two grown sons and two daughters.