All Souls' Rising (50 page)

They drew their horses up above the trail and took positions behind a ragged line of boulders overgrown with fern. There they waited, fifteen minutes, twenty. The captain’s watch ticked in his pocket. There was no talk, but the exchange of fretful glances. The doctor had laid his rifle across a stone, and crouched behind it, aiming at leaves on the trail. The blacks, being barefoot, made no sound when they came up, but seemed to have materialized from nothing beyond the forward bead of his gunsight. There were four of them, dressed in breechclouts or ragged field trousers and all with muskets of the same make. Their leader was a big Congo with broad flat nostrils, and pockmarks all over his face that the doctor thought must have come from a bout with
la petite vérole
. He stopped the others and sniffed slowly, a luxurious inhalation, turning his head in a slow contemplative curve, eyelids lowered so that only the whites showed. Feeling the force of his attention, the white men all held their breath.

Arnaud wanted to gun them down at once, but Grandmont and the captain held him back; it was well that they did so, because ten minutes after the advance scouts had passed along the trail, the main body came up. The leader, who was also marked with smallpox scars, rode horseback, and from his saddle horn hung by their hair a number of bloody desiccated severed human heads, flies buzzing eagerly around them. The doctor wondered how the horse could tolerate the stench of rot. The men who marched in a regular column behind their mounted chieftain all carried muskets and their bare chests were crossed with bandoliers; there looked to be more than a hundred of them.

It took them some little while to pass, and the white men waited a half hour more when they had gone, before they led their horses cautiously down to the trail. While they were waiting, the captain watched the doctor sighting down his rifle barrel and felt strangely reassured by his proximity. Within the hour they had come to the place where the vultures were turning but down the defile there was only the carcass of a long-horned cow who must have strayed there, already mostly devoured or decayed, the bones showing whitely through the rotten hide.

They passed. Next day they crossed a corner of the plain as speedily as they were able, disliking the exposure when their strength was so slight, and swiftly began ascending the pass that led to Ennery. Toward sundown of that day they came down out of the jungle through the terraces of coffee trees that were the outlying cultivation of Habitation Thibodet. They crossed the irrigation trenches and rode alongside the bristly green
carrés
of cane. As they filed through the quarters, the
gérant
Delsart came out the door of a cabin, buttoning up his pants. When he looked up and saw the doctor at the head of the troop he staggered back as though it were a ghost, just catching himself on the cabin’s wattled wall.

They rode down to the stables where the doctor dismounted and scared up a couple of grooms to see to their horses. It did seem after all that many of the Thibodet slaves
had
remained on the plantation. But the windows of the
grand’case
were shuttered and silent.

The doctor swung his saddlebags up over his shoulder and started toward the house. The porch bowed and groaned under his feet…long in need of a shoring up. He stepped into the dusky outer room, blinking. The musty interior space was all striped by bars of reddish sunset light admitted through the palmiste strips of the jalousies. The doctor blinked and turned about. A calico cat startled him by appearing out of the shadows to curve and purr against his shins. Atop a tall chest, a fancy clock ticked mutedly, the disk of its pendulum sweeping between four twisted brass columns that supported the works, like a canopy covering a cathedral altar.

Through the rear door there came a scurrying sound. The cat pulled away from the doctor’s boots and loped after it. The doctor proceeded in the same direction, his footfalls dampened by a runner of carpet. Thibodet’s house was scarcely a mansion but its appointments had a greater air of permanence than those of many Creole residences. Elise had brought some of the carpets and furniture out from France with her trousseau; the carpet which the doctor stalked along had once lined a hallway of their house in Lyons.

He stood within the door frame of the master’s chamber. The great carved bed where Thibodet had died was undisturbed, its rich coverings silted over with a skein of dust. Atop the near pillow a glossy black beetle as large as a teacup clicked and shifted its mandibles. The doctor leaned over and brushed it to the floor; it shifted itself under the bed, without haste.

He walked down the narrow passage and into the smaller room beyond the next partition. It was not so different from the room he’d slept in at Arnaud’s, or from a spare room at any other
grand’case
in the colony. As the single window was quite small and faced away from the sunset glow, it was rather dark inside. The bed was a low wooden frame strung with rope to support the mattress. The doctor dropped his saddlebags in a corner, divested himself of all but one of his pistols, and turned to hang his duster on the accustomed peg. Here he’d lain night after night, pondering the disappearance of his sister and listening to Thibodet’s delirious ravings as they floated over the top of the partition, wondering if he’d desire to cure this man of his disease, supposing it had lain in his power to do so.

He went back out onto the gallery where Maillart, Vaublanc, Arnaud and Grandmont had seated themselves in chairs. As the doctor approached them, Maillart looked up.

“No sign of your sister, then?” Maillart said.

Before the doctor could reply, Delsart came up hurriedly and swept off his hat to make a low bow. As he straightened, the doctor observed that his handsome, rather swarthy features were marred by several venereal sores.

“There will be eight to dine and pass the night,” the doctor said. “Have we hands enough to manage that?”

“Without a doubt,” Delsart said. “I shall give the orders now.” He struck out briskly for the outbuilding housing the kitchen, only staggering slightly from his visible drunkenness.

“If that’s your manager,” said Maillart, “I’d say you haven’t by any means returned too soon.”

T
HE MOON WAS FAT AND SLEEK THAT NIGHT
, only one day short of the full. It rose early, large and yellow, and whitened and shrank as it climbed the sky. During the moonrise the white men dined inside the house, drank a decent amount of brandy, and went early to bed, as all were fatigued from their days of hard riding.

Propped up on his low bed with his back against the wall, Doctor Hébert flipped through a botanical book he had left in this house at his last departure, but his attention failed him. Damp had worked its way into the paper and a gray-green mold was forming a filigree over the print. The doctor could not force his mind beyond this pattern.

The doctor let the book fall shut, and closed his eyes, but his mind was still too active for repose. After a little time, he got up and carried the candle into the master’s room. A maid had come to clean at his instruction; the floor was swept and the bed freshly changed. The doctor pulled open the big mahogany wardrobe and fanned his hands across Elise’s dresses which hung there. Many of them were expensive, but they had not been aired for a long time and the damp had somewhat damaged them; a few were stained with mildew. Some he recognized from France, but most were new. Unlike Elise to abandon it all here. The wardrobe door drifted from his hand; he clicked it shut.

In the main room, some brandy still remained in the bottle. Delsart had run very heavily into Thibodet’s stock, but the supply had been large to begin with, so there was still a reasonable amount in store. The doctor took the bottle by the neck, then changed his mind. The moon shone so brightly at the windows that the light of his candle was inconsequential. He snuffed it out and went onto the gallery.

The chairs stood empty along the board floor. It was quite pleasantly cool, and there were no mosquitoes just at the moment. Under the brilliant moonlight, the doctor walked down through the quarters and beyond. The wind drifted caressingly through the cane, the long leaves whispering together. This rustle receded as he began to climb the terraces of coffee trees. The stiffness of the ride was loosening from him, and he felt cheerful and alert.

Where the coffee trees ended and the jungle climbed uninterrupted over the mountain, he stopped also. Habitation Thibodet was spread before him like a pale shawl in the moonlight, which silvered the irrigation ditches that marked out the
carrés
of green cane. No human light shone from any building, but in the quarters a woman’s low voice rose to sing a mournful tune in some African tongue. The doctor wondered passingly if it was an infant she was soothing, or if she sang to please herself, for her own comfort. At his back the jungle insects had composed a wall of sound. If he had chosen, the doctor thought, he might have gone farther into that warm wet darkness, with small fear. So much at his ease he was, he had not even troubled to bring along a pistol—though it was strange, for this wild place had seemed pregnant with menace when he’d first come here months before, and certainly it was no safer now.

Chapter Thirty

N
OW WHEN WE HAD BEEN IN THOSE
Spanish mountains for some weeks, the people all were very hungry, because there was not much fruit to find, and no meat at all to eat. Also Toussaint said we must not hunt with guns because we had not so many bullets or powder then, or any way to get more of those things. All we could do was dig for roots and take birds by glue or by smoking them in their trees, but soon the birds were eaten and new ones did not come. It was always raining there. The clouds sat so low on those big mountains that it rained there even in the summer heat.

Then that one who had run from Habitation Arnaud, who we called Aiguy, was fighting with another man. The fight was about a woman whose name was Achuba. They fought in the old way, using round-headed clubs with nails, and Aiguy was very quick and clever with his club. He broke the head of the other man and left him bleeding, leaning against a tree with the white of his bone showing through the blood and black hairs. The man was hurt almost to his death, and Aiguy was afraid then, because Toussaint was against this kind of fighting, and would sometimes shoot the ones who fought so, especially if there came a death. And I, Riau, I too believed that it was foolish we should fight each other in this way.

Then Aiguy wanted to go away, and also we were very hungry. Aiguy had a story that on the plains of the Spanish whitemen beyond the mountains there were hundreds of cows who ran wild so that we could take them. Merbillay and Achuba were hungry for meat, and that is how we came to go. We took the boy Epi with us, who had been a small boy in Achille’s band but had grown bigger now, to help us cure and carry meat if we did find it.

I left my musket there at the camp and one of my pistols too, also my
banza
and some other things I did not want to carry, and my horse I left with the horses of Toussaint. A horse could not go where we were going anyway. Maybe Riau always meant to go back, leaving these things behind the way he did, but when we left I was not much thinking of return. Before we went I made two good spears, using scrap iron I could shape in the heat of the blacksmith’s forge, and binding the iron blades to the shafts with lianas in the old Carib way. I had one of my pistols also to take with me but I meant to save its bullets for killing whitemen later on.

We could not go so quickly in these mountains, which were steep and sudden and all cut through with crevices dug by streams. No trails were here or any Carib road that we could find. Merbillay was carrying Caco in a sling across her back. By that time he could walk a little, but he could not have followed in this country. On the third day we found two brown and white goats and killed them with our spears. So far away in the bush away from men, the goats were not even very shy. We were happy then, that night, eating goat meat around the fire till our bellies were tight and hard like melons and our faces shone with fat. The she-goat had milk in the udder for Caco to drink, and I cut small pieces of meat with my knife and Merbillay chewed them for him. So we were happy, only Aiguy wanted
tafia
to drink, but I, Riau, I did not care.

Next day we built a frame across the fire for drying the meat we could not finish fresh, and Achuba and Merbillay were scraping the two goat hides with stones to clean and soften them. Next day we went hunting again, Riau and Aiguy, and came onto a boar-hog before we knew we’d find him. I put the blade of my spear between the boar-hog’s shoulders but this did not stop him charging me. Thinking how it would be before, I had lashed a crossbar on my spear a foot below the blade when I first made it, but the boar came so hard and fast that the crossbar broke and the shaft went through him like a drink of water. I slipped on the mud and wet leaves, and he knocked me down and maybe he had killed me, but Aiguy came then and killed him with the other spear.

Then we had hog meat to eat beside the goat. The boar was big and very fat. He had cut my legs with his yellow tusks, but not so badly I could not walk. We stayed in that place where we had camped for three or four more days, eating and drying the extra meat. My legs were hurting where the boar had gashed them, but I had learned some herbs from Toussaint, at Bréda and later on when he was teaching herbs to the whiteman doctor. I sent Merbillay into the jungle to look for
guérit-trop-vite
and when I used this for a few days, my wounds were closed and dry.

After this, we all went back to Toussaint’s camp. Aiguy wanted to go on into the Spanish country. I, Riau, would have liked to see those hundred cows he spoke about, but I had heard another story how the Spanish whitemen used killing dogs to hunt maroons, dogs bigger than Arnaud’s, big as the cows themselves or nearly. I thought Aiguy feared to go back because of the man that he had hurt, but I told him it would all be forgotten by the time that we came to the camp again. We had big packs of dried meat to carry, so we went even more slowly returning.

But when we came to the camp again, they caught us by the skin and the neck all at once, Riau and Aiguy, and dragged us to Toussaint’s tent. Right away Aiguy was taken off somewhere to be beaten, only a little, not enough to break his skin, because the man he had clubbed had not died after all. But when they brought me into the tent, Toussaint shouted out an order, and Chacha Godard jumped up and screwed the barrel of his pistol into my left ear.

I stood at attention then, exactly like a whiteman soldier. Chacha had drawn back the hammer of his pistol, so eager he was to taste my death—he loved death so much he did not care it was Riau. I did not know if even Toussaint’s word could hold his hand. If it had been Riau only, or Ogûn in my head, he would have fought and snatched at Chacha’s arm. Then Chacha maybe would have killed me. But all the time I stood stock still and stared straight ahead.
Lieutenant Riau
, I spit to hear those words, like Toussaint spat the words he said to me.

Toussaint was angrier than I had ever seen, his face was swollen and all the rest of him was shaking, he jumped up and down before me like an angry dog, but his words were sharp and pointed like cat’s teeth. It was all because I was
lieutenant
he was angry. Because I was
officer
in his army and so I had
desert
, and the desert of an officer was a thousand times worse than when another man desert because if the officer desert, a thousand men could follow him. So when a desert officer was captured, the punishment was to be shot.

White bubbles were at the corners of Toussaint’s mouth when he said this, and Chacha’s finger trembled on the trigger, and I felt Chacha’s breath against my neck. Charles Belair was in the tent with us this time, and he jumped up to ask for mercy, but Toussaint ordered him to go out. Toussaint asked me if I understood what he had said.

“
Oui, mon general
,” I said. “
Je comprends bien
.” I don’t know why I said it, because I did not understand. Then Toussaint sent Chacha away too. At first Chacha would not hear the order, and Toussaint had to pull the pistol down with his own hand.

Toussaint told me to sit down. There was a shiver in my belly when I did it, and my legs pained me where the boar had hurt them, and my ears were ringing like Chacha had really fired his gun so I was already on my way to the Island Below Sea. But Toussaint was smiling to himself and looking into a sack where he kept all the books he always carried with him. He looked inside the bag and handed me one book I had not seen before.

“Read this,” he said, and opened the book on my knees. “Read this page to me.”

I looked down at the paper and through my mouth the words began to speak.

If self-interest alone prevails with nations and their masters, there is another power. Nature speaks in louder tones than philosophy or self-interest. Already are there established two colonies of fugitive negroes, whom treaties and power protect from assault. Those lightnings announce the thunder. A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he, that great man whom Nature owes to her vexed, oppressed and tormented children? Where is he? He will appear, doubt it not; he will come forth and raise the sacred standard of liberty. This venerable signal will gather around him the companions of his misfortune. More impetuous than the torrents, they will everywhere leave the indelible traces of their just resentment. Everywhere people will bless the name of the hero who shall have reestablished the rights of the human race; everywhere will they raise trophies in his honor
.

When I had done, Toussaint was smiling on me.

“What do you think of that?” he said.

I was thinking about the maroons of Bahoruco where Jean-Pic had gone, how the whitemen gave them a paper to say that they were free. I thought that these maroons were free with a paper or without one, but I did not think Toussaint would like to hear this thought. So I told him that I believed what I had read in the book must have been written by a black man, but that I had not known any black man would write a book.

“No,” Toussaint said. “It was a white man who wrote that, a priest. His name is Abbé Raynal and he is the friend of the King In France.”

So I asked Toussaint how long he had known this book and when he said it was even while I was still a slave at Bréda, I asked him why he did not show it to me there.

“The time was not then, Riau,” he said. “But now, now is the time.” He was walking up and down the tent again with his excitement, a small man in his tall soldier boots. Then he stopped to look at me.

“Your little son, Pierre Toussaint,” he said. “He was not born in slavery,
he
was born free. Always remember this, Riau.”

“
Oui, mon général
,” said Lieutenant Riau. But I did not need him to tell it me, there was no chance I would forget. It was Toussaint who forgot that Riau was born free in Guinée, while only he, Toussaint, was born to slavery.

Then Toussaint sat down and began to ask me many questions about Laveaux, the whiteman soldier who had finally whipped us at Morne Pélé and driven us into the mountains. He had me tell him many times over how Laveaux had looked at the fort of La Tannerie when I and Chacha spied on him from trees, and say to him the things that he had said. Times over he made me say the sentence of Laveaux—
Whatever they are, they are not savages
. Then he smiled and let me go.

After all this I was not beaten, not even a little. The dried meat we had carried back with us did not feed our six hundred for even as long as one day. But we did keep the goatskins, one for Caco and one for the baby Aiguy had put into Achuba that time while we were hunting.

In the next days, we all came together in Toussaint’s tent, Riau and Dessalines and Moise and Charles Belair, writing a letter to this whiteman soldier Laveaux. Each of us wrote the letter many ways, and Toussaint listened to all the ways and changed from one way to the other until every word of the letter was perfect to his ear. At last, when the letter was sent, it told Laveaux that Toussaint would bring our men to fight with the French against the Spanish, because there was war now between these whitemen overseas. It promised to bring the men of Jean-François and Biassou also, though Toussaint did not know for certain if he could bring those men or not, but the letter did not tell that part to Laveaux. The letter said that we would do these things only if the French whitemen would admit that all we black men and women were free, not only the soldiers but all the people of Guinée who were in the island then.

So the letter went to speak to Laveaux, and we were a long time waiting for an answer. While we were waiting, we made another letter to speak to the Marquis d’Hermona who was a soldier of the Spanish whitemen. This letter said the same as the other, but in different words that we and Toussaint were a long time in choosing. This letter told that Toussaint would bring our men to fight with the Spanish whitemen against the French if the Spanish white-men would admit the freedom of all the people of Guinée on the island also.

All this time Riau was thinking with two heads. One way I thought that I was glad of this Abbé Raynal and the King In France and how whitemen were in the world that could believe black men were free. But the mind of Ogûn in me thought that all whitemen meant evil to us and that all their words were lies and that Ogûn must kill them all or drive them back into the ocean. Then I thought Toussaint was very wrong. Then I would go down to the camp of Biassou and feed the
loa
with the others who were dancing and feel
l’ésprit
of Ogûn in my head. Alone with Biassou in his tent, I helped him make the
ouangas
against Chacha Godard, and I was happy to make
ouangas
, thinking that now Chacha had come so near to the taste of my blood he could not rest before he drank it all.

But even then Biassou was going to go over to the Spanish, to be given ribbons and coins to wear on his uniform and to have new officer names of power. Jean-François was gone already to the Spanish whitemen. So I went back, always, into the camp of Toussaint.

When Laveaux’s answer came at last, he only said his heart was with us, but he could promise nothing. And because even the promises of whitemen seemed not to be worth much, Toussaint was not pleased with this. Marquis d’Hermona did not send a letter. Instead the gunrunner Tocquet came one day. He did not bring any guns this time, but powder and shot, also some salt and flour. With him came the Père Sulpice. I did not know this priest so well even though he had sometimes come to the camp of Jeannot, but I thought he must pray to the cruel Jesus because of the beads he wore on the string of his black robe. The beads were wood and each not bigger than a fingertip and on one side the face of Jesus was but on each other side it was a skull. He used the beads to count his prayers, though I think he did not love blood so much as that other, Père Duguit.

It was this Père Sulpice who had brought Jean-François and Biassou away to the army of the Spanish whitemen, so Riau knew what he meant to do when he came to us, and so did we all know. I was happy that Toussaint did not send us out of the tent this time when Père Sulpice and Tocquet came in. We all stayed there, Riau and Moise and Charles Belair and Dessalines, to hear what words the whitemen said.