All Souls' Rising (27 page)

It wouldn’t do to wonder what had happened to the rest of her. The horse was still screaming, hoarsely now. It would break off for a time and then start over. Somehow it bothered the doctor more than anything else that happened all that day and he knew he would be hearing it ring in his head for a very long time afterward, supposing he survived long enough to enjoy this experience or any other. A great commotion started up around the foot of his tree. The doctor parted the palm fronds and looked down. Several rebel slaves in the tattered cotton breeches of field hands were gesticulating at him and chattering loudly among themselves in Creole. The doctor couldn’t make out one word of what they said. The only arms they had were cane knives and he was a little relieved to see no guns among them. His dragoon pistol had been lost, it occurred to him now, when the horse fell or else earlier in the headlong flight.

Another man stepped into the clearing, carrying a sort of pike improvised by splinting a cane knife to a long pole from the sugar mill. The others clustered around him as if he had some special knowledge or authority. When he had spoken one ran off and the others drew a little back. The new man set the butt of his makeshift pike on the ground and stared up at the doctor. He was quite tall, emaciated, with a long face and a sorrowful expression. One of his ears had been lopped to a stump and the other was large and wrinkled like an elephant’s ear. He gazed at the doctor sadly, intently; the doctor found he couldn’t hold the stare. His own eyes went wandering over the treetops. There were other trees nearby he might have better chosen, taller, with branches for his seat and more leaves to hide him from the ground. The tall man said something to him in Creole, a question evidently.

“
Comprends pas
,” the doctor said. He showed an empty bleeding hand and smiled foolishly. The tall man lifted his pike over his head and probed, without especial vigor. The point of the cane knife pressed into the arch of the doctor’s bare foot. Too dull to cut with such a light thrust but the pressure hurt his ankle. There was nowhere to go. He bowed out his back and worked his knees a little higher in the tree, all the long fronds clashing loudly together with the movement. The crown of the tree bent sideways with the shift of weight and the doctor found himself hanging almost upside down, while the tall man nudged the pike into his thighs and buttocks. The other bystander laughed and clapped and capered a little. The tall man’s expression was gloomy and disinterested, like a bored child teasing a toad with a stick.

The doctor slipped a little way down the tree trunk, which righted itself elastically. But the tall man could now reach as high as his heart with the point of the cane knife. The doctor slapped the flat of the blade away from him, wondering if he might work it loose from its binding and get possession of it, but it seemed futile to try this project or even to succeed at it. Away out of sight the horse’s screams cut off with a gurgling sigh, and then another man entered the area below the tree, riding bareback on a mule. He spoke sharply to the tall man, who lowered his pike and backed away. The mule rider craned his neck and addressed the doctor in passable French.

“You look like an ape up in that tree,” the mule rider said. A red bandanna was bound tightly over his whole head, knotted at his skull’s base, and he was otherwise dressed in surprisingly fresh-looking coachman’s livery. He sat the mule as if he had sprouted from its hide. On his knees lay a pendulous cloth sack full of some sort of plant matter and pillowed across that a short military musket with a bayonet fixed.

“Are you an ape, or a man?” the mule rider said. “It’s hard to know.”

The doctor was too astounded to reply. He just stared back. The mule rider’s eyes glittered darkly under the tight crimp of the bandanna. A sprig of gray hair was caught under the edge of the cloth. He too was elderly for a slave in the colony, late forties or early fifties perhaps. His jaw was long and underslung and full of long yellowish teeth separated by little spaces which his half smile revealed. The mule’s long ears revolved and it dipped its head to nose at the base of the tree.

“Not a soldier,” the mule rider said musingly, studying the doctor’s clothes. “Not a planter. Not Creole, certainly. You’ll be some sort of artisan, perhaps, or one of the adventurers that come here.”

“Antoine Hébert,” the doctor said. The sound of his voice pronouncing the words made him feel faint and giggly. “I was born in Lyons and trained in Paris as a doctor.”

“A doctor.” The mule rider pursed his lips and nodded. “
Médecin
.”

“Yes,” the doctor said. He still felt like giggling, or weeping perhaps. “And yourself?”

“Toussaint,” the mule rider said, disarmingly, looking at the doctor sidelong. “Just old Toussaint.” A practiced obsequiousness in his tone. His eyes glinted below the bandanna and that simpering note left his voice. “Do you want to stay up in the tree and be an ape?” he said. “Why don’t you come down here and be a man with me?”

“I’m afraid,” the doctor admitted. It surprised him how good it felt to say it.

“Of course,” Toussaint said. “So are we all. Except the pure fools.”

Chapter Seventeen

P
ÈRE
D
UGUIT, THE PRIEST OF
L
IMBÉ
, visited the white women held prisoner in Jeannot’s camp at Habitation Dusailly. As always when he first entered their enclosure he loudly offered a prayer for their well-being, and then solicited confessions, though none were forthcoming. A stout lady in middle age transfixed him with a stare of pure fury. The younger women simply turned their faces from him.

Père Duguit was a tall man, skinny as a thrashing stick, with long angular boney features, tunnel eyes and eyebrows tufted like the ears of a cat. The hem of his cassock was all in rags and he wore sandals so soleless he might as well have gone barefoot. His feet were painfully riddled with sores full of burrowing worms—a mortification, as he sometimes observed with a certain air of spiritual pride. A slight fever lingered with him also, though he took it as a form of intoxication.

His mind wandered, along the mazy windings of his fever. He looked about himself, dazed as if drunk. The grove of new-growth sabliers in which the white women were contained was fenced about with creeper weavings, more a symbol of a line they must not cross than any effective physical barrier. There was in any event nowhere for them to flee. The Creole ladies among them had erected some flimsy lean-to shelters, thatched with banana leaves; these were partially successful in keeping off the rains, which increased with the advance of the season.

Père Duguit squinted up toward the mountains which rose beyond the river. Another small dark squall was idling over the slate-gray peaks; it was unclear if it might blow in their direction. Between them and the river stretched a cinder-strewn desert which had once been a cane field, and farther off there was a planting of bananas that had survived the holocaust, long flat leaves twisting like mule ears in the breeze. At the edge of the jungle proper there stood an outbuilding or small house that must have gone to ruin many years before the insurrection. A full-grown tree thrust out of the wrecked roof, with orange blossoms upturned like cups toward the uncertain sky. The priest was startled to see a brown nanny goat poke its head over a plank that barred the dark doorway of the crumbling building—surprised that no one had killed and eaten it. His stomach contracted round a vacuum. Perhaps the goat was being kept for milk.

The wail of a crying baby brought the priest’s attention back to the women’s enclosure. Some of the white women were attending as best they might to the infants who’d survived the first carnage of the insurrection, and a few older children ran about with a weary carelessness, their faces smudged with dirt. Père Duguit watched a lank-haired Creole wife awkwardly try to suckle a baby who until the change of circumstance would have been put to wet nurse; the mother had not enough milk and the child was crying. Another woman was watching too—milk began to move in a spreading stain on the fabric of her chemise. Murmuring, she took the crying child and loosened her garment and began to nurse it. Père Duguit regarded her; he knew this woman from Acul, and knew that she’d lost her own newborn the night the first plantations burned. That child would be in Limbo now, the priest reminded himself automatically. He studied the nursing woman, breast and thigh, and she stared back at him, her jaw set, an iron hostility burning out of her rust-red eyes. She was well formed, but would not suit Biassou—a problem of comportment.

He passed on, observing the younger girls with sidelong glances. Some of the black women had come into the enclosure and were bringing out the older women they’d taken to be servants, those who were too old to interest the black men as concubines or who’d been so used and then abandoned. These would be taken to the river to wash clothes, or to dig in the provision grounds or to grind meal and do cooking. The stout woman went out among them, and Père Duguit was pleased to see her go, misliking the uncharitable way she always looked at him.

As he paced, his gnarly hands twining together behind his back, he caught a sort of flinching movement from the corner of his eye. Something that he’d learned to value. He moved in. The girl was sitting on a stump, her head cast down. There’d been some others standing near her but they dispersed sullenly as he approached. Hélène was her name; she was eighteen or nineteen, probably. Père Duguit did not know just where she’d come from, though perhaps she was also from Acul. Her head of dark hair was neat and clean—remarkable really, as these captives were infrequently given enough water to wash. He took her chin in his hand and examined her face. Her lips trembled and her eyes were full, so he was unprepared for the quick slash of her nails across his cheek.

“A little
cat
,” he hissed, and caught her wrist as she tried a second time. He twisted her arm down toward her bosom, and leaned in closer to smell her breath, as a buyer might do with a slave on the block. Her jaws were clenched but somehow he was convinced all the same that the breath would be sweet. Her mouth worked and he saw that she would spit at him. He let go her arm and drew back out of range.

“You must cultivate humility, my child,” he began. “Meekness and complaisance are most pleasing to God.”

Hélène dropped her head, turning her face aside, and he admired the whiteness of her throat as it emerged from the torn neck of her dress. That burst of spirit seemed drained from her now, but still it was a becoming pose, and her figure was good. He ran a hand across his cheek. It stung where she had scratched at him, but his fingertips came away clean; she’d drawn no blood. He flushed a little, perhaps from his fever, as he went on explaining to her in a low tone the opportunities for humility which would be provided to her on that night or the next.

A few moments later he was walking across the main compound of Habitation Dusailly where Jeannot was encamped, chewing absently on half a cold yam he had picked up somewhere. Pus pumped out of his infected feet as he walked, but he was scarcely aware of the pain, or of the orange pulp of yam squeezing out the corners of his mouth. He was approaching a long brick building formerly used for the roasting of coffee, where the imprisoned men were now locked up. Within sight of the iron gate, the priest tossed away the end of his yam. From behind the grille, one of the prisoners cursed at him.

“You throw your food to the rats,” he complained, “while we’ve had nothing these last two days but three rotten bananas and a bit of an ox’s ear…”

The prisoner’s lips were also cracked with thirst, so much so he had difficulty speaking. Père Duguit stopped at the gate, a thin smile on his lips, and breathed in the stench of human excrement. The prisoners were in irons and had no choice but to let their feces fall at their heels and remain there. There were some twenty whites. On a camp bed was stretched a half-conscious, militia officer, his back caked with blood from the two hundred lashes he’d received the previous day. There were also a few blacks who still professed loyalty to the white masters, and these too had been put in chains.

A drum began beating, off to the rear. Père Duguit recognized the approach of Jeannot’s cortège. His own heart swelled and throbbed in time. “
Mes enfants
,” he said in a loud voice. “
Il faut savoir mourir, notre Seigneur Jesus Christ est mort pour nous sur la croix
.” Then his heart ballooned into his throat and he was unable to say anything more.

Jeannot marched into the compound surrounded by the blacks and mulattoes who were closest to him. The drum continued to pulse slowly as the black Chacha Godard unlocked the gate and led out the white prisoners. His heart still beating powerfully, Père Duguit contemplated his instruction to them.
You must learn how to die, as our Lord Jesus Christ died for us on the cross
.

Jeannot watched the captives for a time, silently. Sometimes he would lecture the prisoners before beginning, but today he said nothing. He was a small man, muscular and coal black, with a Chinese slant to his eyes. He wore a military coat with no shirt beneath it and his chest and belly were glossy with palm oil. His eye stopped on a
grand blanc
who’d been captured with the rest.

“White man, you are too tall,” Jeannot said. “Chacha, will you lower him for me?”

There followed a brief struggle which ended with the planter flattened on the ground, a black kneeling on each of his arms and a third sitting on his head. His bare ankles protruded from the legirons. Chacha Godard walked toward him casually, carrying a two-handed woodsman’s ax. Père Duguit watched avidly, pricked his ears for the crunch of bone. Abstractedly, he picked a crust of yam from the edge of his lip with a long horny fingernail. The other whites looked down inexpressively—to close one’s eyes or turn away meant joining the victim, if Jeannot noticed it, and they were to a degree inured to such sights by the events of the past few days. The drum continued grumbling throughout.

When the operation was complete, Jeannot took a step nearer to evaluate the result, chuckling in his throat as the blacks tried to balance the moaning planter on his stumps. With no feet to retain them the irons had slipped loose. Jeannot concluded that the white man was now too short, and ordered that he be hung upside down from a tree limb to see if this procedure might lengthen him to a happy medium.

Père Duguit knelt near the planter’s lightly swaying head, to offer him extreme unction, but he seemed incapable of response. Footless as he’d now become, he swung from nooses at his knees, and his severed ankles drooled blood onto the ground where his loose hair was dragging…Père Duguit finished the ceremony and walked away to a seat behind a board laid across two kegs, a desk of sorts where he waited until his services would again be necessary. His eyes slipped out of focus for a moment; the board blurred and then reclarified. A strange metallic sort of millipede was crawling down one of the barrels, shiny as a polished bayonet. Strange how it seemed to advance without moving its multiple sections. The priest tracked it into a heap of yellowing leaves, where two mantises were engaged in their devouring act of copulation. Père Duguit thought to separate them, but knew it was impossible; they would suffer themselves to be dismembered before they would desist.

Jeannot had meanwhile caused two other whites to be bound to ladders. At his gesture, Chacha Godard went up to one of them and struck him a lazy blow with the ax. The stroke bruised as much as it cut, but there was a popping sound and a gasp from the victim that suggested it must have broken a rib. Chacha laid the ax aside, drew a small sharp knife from his belt and approached the second white man. He pushed up his chin and made a shallow cut all along the jawbone, not piercing anything vital.

Jeannot stood by, a watch in his hand. Père Duguit knew from past experience that it would be precisely fifteen minutes before he ordered the next cut. He bethought himself of writing a note to Biassou, detailing the evening’s delectation. There was paper and a stub of charcoal in a cloth bag swung from his cassock’s belt. He spread a bit of paper on the plank and licked the charcoal and began.

“
J’ai disposé la dame une telle à vous recevoir cette nuit
…” He thought for a moment, picturing the attitude of Hélène when he had first noticed her. “
Vous n’avez jamais eu de telle jouissance, mon cher Biassou, que celle qui vous attend ce soir
…”
^*9

Idly he looked about. The drummer’s long flat palms caressed the skin of the drum’s head, but despite the noise from the drum the priest felt that he could also hear the sound of Jeannot’s watch. Of a sudden, the planter began to scream and thrash, scattering droplets of blood in a semicircle from his stumps. A barefoot black walked up and kicked him in the face; his head snapped back and his screams subsided to a gurgle. The priest was thrilled to his fingertips. He closed his eyes for a moment and pictured random scenes from the Inquisition, each sin and heresy meticulously extracted. His face stung slightly and he saw Hélène’s face as she’d looked when she had struck him. He opened his eyes and wrote again.

“
La petite de fait la reveche mais apportez de la pitre pour la disposer à souscrire à vos désirs
…”
^†10

Jeannot turned his watch over in his hand and coughed out an order. Chacha Godard took out his knife again and drew his thumb down along the blade to the point. In the woods all around, the birds were chattering, and the beat of the drum became harsher and drier. Père Duguit looked abstractedly at the two men bound to the ladders. He signed his name to the letter and folded it in three.

T
HE WHITE MEN HAD BEEN DYING
on the ladders for four hours, sixteen cuts apiece, when Choufleur and the Sieur Maltrot strolled up to join the rear of the audience: the white prisoners who were bound to watch, and those of the blacks bloodthirsty enough to appreciate this spectacle. Maltrot arranged himself in a cantilevered pose, like a Greek statue, resting the tip of his sword stick on the toe of his opposite boot. His brocaded coat was dusty with travel and his breeches were sweat-stained where they’d been in contact with the saddle, but apart from these details he appeared much as he would have on the street of any city. Choufleur stood foursquare, his arms folded, wearing a white shirt open at the neck.

Maltrot twitched, and moved his hands restively on the pommel of his cane. Jeannot had given a low grunting order and, under the direction of Chacha Godard, three blacks were untying the first white man from his ladder. They carried him, dazed and bleeding, to a
zaman
tree in whose trunk had been set an enormous butcher’s hook, seven or eight feet off the ground. Standing on a stack of packing cases, the blacks raised the white man and adjusted his jaw above the hook’s point. Chacha Godard yanked him down sharply by the waist to set the hook, using such force that the point broke out one of the man’s lower teeth as it curled around the jawbone and emerged from his mouth.