All Souls' Rising (3 page)

“Where many think it a hard punishment to be broken on a wheel of knives,” the doctor said. “For a mulatto or for any man.”

“Let it dissuade them from following his example, in that case,” said Arnaud. “Ogé would have raised the cultivators. It is unthinkable.”

“You speak freely,” Doctor Hébert said, with an involuntary glance at the slave who stood behind Arnaud’s chair, his face composed to a perfect blank.

“Free?” Arnaud said. “Sir, I have begun to develop a distaste for the sound of that word.”

Above them, the fan creaked on its axis, wood fretting against wood. A film of sweat on the doctor’s forehead was turning slightly chill. He moved his hand toward his wineglass and the slave behind him leaped forward to refill it.

“You are lately come from France yourself?” Arnaud inquired.

“I have been here for about five weeks,” the doctor said.

“And where were you bound when you came here?”

“From Ennery to Le Cap,” Doctor Hébert said. “From Habitation Thibodet, near Ennery. The husband of my sister was the proprietor there.”

“I do not know him.”

“I believe you are fortunate,” the doctor said. “He appears to have been seven parts scoundrel. The marriage was inadvisable—by the result at least. My sister had departed before I arrived and as yet I have been unable to trace her.”

He stopped speaking and cleared his throat, realizing that in his haste to avoid politics he had steered too deeply into personal confidences. He did not much care for the fruity smile on Arnaud’s little mouth.

“And what of his other three parts, this Thibodet?”

“Oh, I would not deny him a degree of roguish charm, when he wished to exercise it. But he was three parts solid gold. I do not mean to be metaphorical. He was an extremely wealthy scoundrel.”

“You employ the past tense.”

“He died,” Doctor Hébert said. “Quite suddenly, soon after my arrival at his house.” He had not killed his brother-in-law, but there was that about Arnaud that made him wish it to appear as if he might have done so.

“It is an unhealthy country,” Arnaud said. “Many die here.”

“Yes,” Doctor Hébert said. “I should mention that I am myself a physician. And I would repay your hospitality—”

“We have no illness here,” Arnaud said. “Though you are kind.” He pushed his chair back, and the slaves again commenced to clear the table, as though his movement was a signal.

“And yourself?” Doctor Hébert said. “In what part of France did you originate?”

“I was born here,” Arnaud said shortly, and stood up. “Excuse me.”

He picked up a candlestick and moved to a door behind his seat, which was shut with a padlock, and opened it with a key he took from his breeches pocket. From behind, his plumpness made him almost pear-shaped, and there was a hint of effeminacy in his step. The slave in the coat followed him into the room, where there must have been a draft, for the candle guttered. It was a storeroom, the doctor saw, with shelves of flour and other imported foods, many ranks of bottles, and more shelves of tools. Arnaud emerged with an ax in his hand. The slave came after him, carrying two mattocks.

“I have a little task outside,” Arnaud said. “I will return momentarily.”

“I believe I will accompany you,” the doctor said.

Arnaud arched an eyebrow, but said nothing. The doctor followed him through the outer door. The slave who had waited on him at table now stood on the gallery with a lighted torch. At a word from Arnaud he led the way down the steps into the compound; Arnaud and the slave with the mattocks went after him. Doctor Hébert lagged a little way behind the procession. It was markedly cooler outside by this time. Though there was no moon, the sky was clear and so long as he kept away from the torchlight the stars were extraordinarily bright.

At the foot of the pole, Arnaud stopped and took the torch from the slave and raised it. From a few feet back, Doctor Hébert saw the woman’s body illuminated as high as her rib cage. There was no evidence of breathing.

“Well, it is finished,” Arnaud said. He spoke to the slaves in Creole: “
Ou kómâsé travay la
.” With a reluctant sluggishness the two blacks took up the mattocks and began digging at the base of the pole, which the doctor now saw was supported by a packing of rocks and earth. Arnaud watched the mattocks swinging. He set the ax head on the ground and leaned his weight on the handle. When the slaves had cleared the base of the pole, he smacked it with a one-handed swipe of the ax’s blunt end. The two slaves sprang away as the pole fell backward. The woman’s head bounced slackly against the wood, with a dense, compact sound. The pole rolled over a quarter turn and was stopped from rolling farther by her body.

Arnaud passed the torch back to the slave who had been holding it before and stood looking down at the corpse. He held the ax in both hands across his thighs in the same way he had earlier held his cane, the handle indenting his flesh slightly. The doctor stepped a little nearer to him.

“And what will become of the infant now?”

Arnaud snapped his head around. “How did you come to know about that?”

“My profession,” the doctor said drily, and pointed. “She had not even time to pass the afterbirth.”

“Time?” Arnaud said. “She killed her child the moment it was born. She stole a nail and drove it through its head.
That
nail.” He raised the ax high and struck down at the impaled hands, severing them both crisply at the wrists. The doctor was impressed by the force of the stroke.

“It was a child of the
pariade
,” Arnaud said. “Some sailor’s bastard, a half-breed like your Ogé.” He swung the ax again, and again. It took him four or five blows to cut through the ankles and he was breathing hard when he had done it.

“There,” he said. “Let them raise that.”

Doctor Hébert glanced at the two slaves, who stood as woodenly as they had behind the dinner table. “Do you really believe that they can raise the dead?”

“It is not a matter of what I believe.” Head down, the ax angled out from Arnaud’s hand, describing a pendulous arc over the dead woman’s head. “I paid twelve hundred pounds for that, and not eight months ago. Breeding stock, if you like. It is ruinous. If not abortion, it is suicide. They are animals.”

“One does not ordinarily torture animals,” the doctor said. “I have never known an animal to be a suicide.”

“You are a sentimentalist, perhaps,” Arnaud said. “You believe they are like little children.”

“I believe they are like men and women,” Doctor Hébert said.

“Indeed,” said Arnaud. “Then you must be a Jacobin.”

“I consider myself to be a scientist,” the doctor said.

Arnaud stared at him, then sighed. “You have lost your way,” he said. “If you were going to Le Cap you have strayed considerably. There is a passable road from here to Marmelade and there you may rejoin the
grand chemin
.”

“Thank you,” the doctor said, looking back toward the
grand’case
and the small yellow squares of its candlelit windows. Behind the house the dog had recommenced to bark. “Well, I see that it is late. I had better retire.”

“I am in a position to offer you a glass of brandy,” Arnaud said.

“I think I had best decline,” the doctor said. “I have had a long ride today and look forward to another tomorrow.” He bowed and walked out of the circle of torchlight.

There was a glow from the crack beneath his bedroom door when he approached it, but he thought nothing of this; a slave had probably brought a candle while he had been in the yard. Head lowered, he sat down on a chair and dragged off his left boot, not looking up until something suddenly blocked the light. A woman stood between him and the candle, which glittered through the loose weave of her clothing and outlined every detail of her body in black. The doctor had not yet got used to the degree of undress Creole women affected. He stood up abruptly and stumbled forward on his unshod foot. The woman hooked her hands into the waistband of his breeches and sat down backward on the
paillasse
, drawing him down after her.

The doctor was obliged to brace his hands on her shoulders to keep his balance. The bare skin was a bluish white and hot to his touch. He had suspected some misguided extension of Arnaud’s hospitality, sending a mulattress to his bed, but it was the same woman he had seen on the gallery when he arrived, Madame Arnaud, presumably. She had let her hair down; it hung in thin pale crinkles into the loosened throat of her negligee. Her face still had a prettiness about it, but was puffed out of shape, and the spots of high color at her cheekbones looked unnatural, though they were not paint. Her eyes were gray-green and the left pupil had shrunk smaller than the right because it was nearer to the candle. The eyes were aimed at Doctor Hébert but he would not have ventured to suppose what they saw in his place.

Removing her hands from his waistband felt like plucking the claws of a dead bird from a branch. He took a step backward, unsteady between his bare foot and his booted one.

“I am sorry to see that you are unwell,” he said. “I do not think it very serious, however. An agitation of the nerves. You must rest for three hours in the heat of the day and of course take care to avoid the sun. Have your cook prepare a strong
consommé
each evening. Lemons and oranges are plentiful here; I would suggest that you partake of them often. It would be best to abstain from spiritous liquors for a time. Some wine, perhaps, to strengthen your blood. But for the moment, sleep will be your great restorer.”

Madame Arnaud had gathered her hair and was holding it with one hand at the nape of her neck. A thin blue vein wriggled beneath the clear skin of her temple. Doctor Hébert recalled what her husband had said,
For a shot of rum, she would do anything
. However, it was common usage to keep the storeroom locked wherever there were so many house slaves. Also common usage for the mistress of the house to keep a key.

Madame Arnaud put her head to one side and smiled at him with a queer jerk, the style of coquetry one might expect from a marionette on strings. The smile erased itself as quickly as it had appeared, and she rose and moved past him in short tripping steps and left the room. As she opened the door to depart, the doctor thought he might have seen Arnaud standing on the gallery, fidgeting with his cane. He shut the door after her and leaned on it with his palm. His head felt light and his stomach was uneasy, and when he pulled his hands away, he saw they had acquired a tremor. He undressed rapidly, hanging his garments one over another on the last peg on the wall. Kneeling beside the
paillasse
he crossed himself and said Our Father once hurriedly. At the rear of his mind the phrase repeated,
O let it not be fever
.

After the brief prayer he swung his legs up onto the bed and covered himself and lay there, concentrating on composure. The fevers here could cut a man down almost as quickly as the guillotine. The doctor breathed with care, deeply and deliberately, in and out. In a high corner of the room, shadows wavered over a spiderweb. When he reached to pinch out the candle, his hand had grown perfectly steady once more. But a little light still reached the room, over the partition walls, which stopped a few inches short of the ceiling. In the next room he could hear the sound of someone breathing. He lay in the half dark, rubbing the burned tallow from the candle between his thumb and forefinger, thinking uselessly of one thing and another. Thibodet had seemed in perfect health the day he had arrived. Afterward, his affairs appeared a wretched tangle, despite the evidence of great wealth somewhere, or perhaps it was only because the doctor understood so little of plantation management. He did not much trust the
gérant
, who appeared to have partnered his brother-in-law in most of his debaucheries. Perhaps he too would die before long. In a week Thibodet had lost half his body weight and his skin had shrunk and yellowed on his skull and a black effluvia poured from his every orifice, soiling the bed faster than the slave could clean it. He lashed his head from side to side and cried that he had no notion where Elise might have gone, though he hoped she was at the devil. She had had as many lovers as he, he declared, and had probably eloped with one or another, to Jamaica or Martinique. She might have sailed in an American naval vessel, she might have run away to join the maroons. Thibodet bolted up and turned to vomit into a pan. The movement tumbled him out of the bed and the doctor felt himself spinning too, delirious, as he saw her coming painfully toward him on the stumps of her ankles, arms outstretched. Madame Arnaud, or no, it was Elise herself, younger than she ought to have been, her face at sixteen, seventeen. Her gown was hanging off one shoulder. Blood spurted mightily from her severed wrists, and as she reached out to embrace her brother she opened her mouth and howled like a wolf. The doctor was on the floor beside the
paillasse
, bunched on his knees and knuckles, gasping and trembling. He shook himself and sat back on his heels. Now it was completely dark in the room, and a cool sweat bathed him. In the shed outside, the howling declined and broke off into that same deep-throated barking as before.

No, it was not fever, the doctor thought with a slight inward smile. Merely an agitation of the nerves. He got up and found his trousers on the peg and put them on. Barefoot and bare-chested, he went out to the gallery. A breeze was shivering the cane mats that closed either end of the long porch. In the exhilaration of his escape from the nightmare, the doctor felt preternaturally sensitive; he could have counted the hairs on his chest when the breeze lifted them, or numbered the splinters on the post when he placed his palm against it. He was not leaning for support, but only caressing the wood.

Behind the house the dog stopped barking and he heard the scratching of its claws against the dirt as it began to run and then the muted smash of its body against the heavy door. There was something else. He went down the two steps from the gallery and started across the compound, toward the ragged line of trees that scattered away from the denser hedging of the entrance
allée
. His feet were tender; he could feel the powdered dust caking up between his toes, and whenever he stepped on a pebble, he winced a little. By the time he had reached the trees his eyes had adjusted to the starlight. Beyond them the land dipped gently down and rose farther on and he could see one field after another checkered by the tight shrubbery of citrus trees that divided them, and he saw the starlight shining on the narrow channels that brought the water in. Where the cultivation ended the land rose sharply up and up and was a mountain, and he could not have measured the height of it if not for the stippled patterns of stars that began to appear at its limit. That was where the drumming came from, one pattern so low he could not really hear it, only feel a dim vibration of the small bones in his ears, and another drum sounding higher, beaten intermittently, like a voice calling to someone and waiting for answer and calling again. Surely it would have awakened any dreamer. The doctor’s hands were curled over the prickly twigs of the two trees he had stopped between. His heart and lungs were working powerfully and there was a potent sense of health and vigor that seemed to rise through the soles of his bare feet and work through every vital part of him. He stood still there for quite a time and then began to circle around the edges of the compound.