Master of the Crossroads (25 page)

At the head of the table, Delahaye listened, silently attentive, his fingertips unconsciously worrying a whorl in his close-cropped gray hair, until he noticed Moustique lingering, and gestured at the empty pork platter.

Moustique went outside to the fire. The sky was darkening, slate-blue, the wind shivered the high palms, and crows flew crying among them. In the nearest
bitasyon
above the town, there was a quick, sharp rattle of drums, trailing off, then beginning again. Marie-Noelle refilled the pork platter from the iron kettle, her eyes lowered, almost demure. She was usually quiet, Moustique remembered, when apart from the pack of other girls; still something in her manner seemed to have changed.

When he went back with the dish of pork, the young
marabou
was loudly declaring that Toussaint had a better hope than anyone of driving all the white people from the island once for all. One of the older men pointed out that such a result would hardly be in their own interests—practically all of them had relatives who were collaborating with the British at Port-au-Prince and points farther south.

“Yes,” the bearded man agreed, “and equally you must not forget that Toussaint has sold himself to the French, to Laveaux—”

“Laveaux is a good man,” Delahaye put in.

“Laveaux is the tool of Sonthonax,” the bearded man said, “who would set the most ignorant, savage Africans above us—”

“Sonthonax has left the country,” the young
marabou
snapped.

“So he has,” the bearded man said, leaning forward as he lowered his voice, “and on the eve of his departure he gave his commissioner’s medallion, along with its powers and prerogatives as I have heard, to Dieudonné, who is no more and no less than a wild maroon from the mountains. And he told him—as you may not know—Sonthonax told Dieudonné,
So long as you see mulattoes in your ranks you will never
be free.

A considerable silence followed, during which Delahaye noticed Moustique again and sent him out for more rum and a plate of cut fruit. When he returned, the young
marabou
was in the midst of a hot reply to some resumed thread of the conversation: “—and what of Rigaud, who is of our race, and of the French Republican party? What of Beauvais, who is one of us too, and undoubtedly a man of honor?”

“I do not see that either of those men has thrown in his lot with Toussaint.” The bearded
griffe
leaned forward, raising his voice slightly as he balanced his weight toward the younger man. “And perhaps they err in casting their lot with the French Republic. If we gain by being made equal with the
blancs,
we lose as much by having those hordes of wild Africans set equal to us.”

“But—” the young
marabou
began.

“I salute your youth—” the bearded man quelled him with an upraised palm. “But it is no time to be hot-headed, not even for young men. Admire Toussaint if you will—he is admirable both in his courage and his cunning. But he has placed himself at the head of the new-freed slaves, and if he seems to carry them wherever he will, it may just as well be that it is they who are driving him from pillar to post. His shift of allegiance to Laveaux was very sudden, was it not—and are you so completely confident that he will not turn again to some other party, or that he serves any ends but his own? You may very well admire his gifts and his accomplishments, but both before and after, you should fear him.”

An assenting murmur ran round the table, as the bearded man braced his palms against the table and sat back. Moustique searched Delahaye’s face for a reaction, but the priest remained as inexpressive as Toussaint himself would have in such a case. Since the execution of his father, Moustique had grown to depend upon Toussaint’s protection, and so this discussion confused him as much as it evidently had the young
marabou
—so much so that his head began to ache. He left the room without waiting for Delahaye to dismiss him.

It was darker now, the stars appearing, and for the moment the drums had stopped. Marie-Noelle was walking in a spiral pattern between the fire and the trunks of the tall palms, seeming to take pleasure in the light grace of her steps. She was dressed in white, as if for church, and her skirt belled out around her slim legs as she turned. Moustique felt a heart-stirring as he watched her, and wondered if she meant for him to feel it, but her eyes were downcast always, as if unaware of him. She turned and stepped and turned again, the white skirt catching starlight, firelight, starlight.

He lay sleepless in the priest’s front room, the sound of Delahaye’s snore throbbing at him through the wall, textured by the more distant drumming which the snoring only partly masked. Sleep was like a surface of salt water, so buoyant that it would not let him sink. His mind scuttled spider-like across it, shrinking from the most dreadful images in its store. The scene of his father’s execution sometimes still appeared to him in dreams or waking nightmares such as this. They chained his father to a wheel and broke his bones with hammers till he perished. At first, he blessed his executioners but soon enough his prayers turned into screams. And all this was for nothing, for no cause: Père Bonne-chance had merely been confused with some other renegade priest who had assisted in tortures and the rape of white women during the first insurrection of ’91. Even Delahaye admitted that in this case his father was purely without blame.
Then God has no justice,
Moustique had said. Delahaye smashed his knuckles with the spoon and set him to memorizing long extracts from the book of Job.

Moustique got up cautiously from his pallet, light-headed, at the edge of nausea. He padded barefoot over the floor, lifted the latch and went outside. Just beyond the threshold he paused, listening: the racket of the priest’s snoring still shook the walls of the house, uninterrupted. Silvery light spilled over his cheek and his arm. The moon was a crescent, sheltering three stars. When he stepped away from the wall of the house, the jenny raised her head in the corral and came to the palings, whickering softly. Moustique stroked her nose and let her warm breath play over his fingers. In the invisible cleft of the dark hill above, the drumming became more insistent.

He walked through pools of moonlight from the church and square to the edge of the town, and with scarcely a beat of hesitation began climbing the corkscrew path that curved over an extended claw of the mountain’s foot. Darkness enveloped him, the moon cut off by the trees. His mind worked, but with no influence over his legs. Delahaye would be furious, if he should find out. Moustique’s own father would have disapproved, perhaps more mildly. Moustique did not know one drum from another, so he did not know if he was bound for a secular celebration—
bamboche
or
calenda
—or a service for the pagan gods of Africa. In Jeannot’s camp, where Père Bonne-chance had carried his mission in the first months of the rebellion, drums and ceremonies had been a prelude to the slow, elaborate, fatal torture of
blanc
captives. But all this information and the business of thinking about it became more and more distant, miniaturized, the higher Moustique climbed on the trail, while much more fully present were the drums and his own response: his limbs coming into tune with his heartbeat and the strengthening pulse at the base of his skull. From the darkness above, an unearthly cry broke out, an otherworldly entity that voiced itself on a human tongue. Moustique’s arms flowered into gooseflesh, but he could not make out if the sensation was pleasure or fear.

He kept following the twistings of the path, scarcely aware of the embedded stones that gouged into the arches of his bare feet. Someone, maybe more than one, was coming down from the
hûnfor,
and Moustique stepped out of the trail, clinging to a sapling.
Scus’m,
a man’s voice muttered. Two figures he could not make out completely, though he caught flashes of a white sleeve, white headcloth. When they had passed, he swung down into the groove of the trail and continued. The drumbeat quickened, drawing him up like a jerk on a leash tied around his neck. The trail made a sudden twist to the left and steepened sharply. Moustique helped himself up the rise with one hand furrowing the crumbling earth, then straightened in a clearing of packed clay. The brightness of the stars and moon amazed him as he came out of the tree cover. In the center a thick pole was wound around with a carved snake, and spiraled with a painted rainbow. There was a fire that cast no light, and the
hounsis,
swaying and singing, were turned blue-silver by the moon and stars—white shirts and headcloths glowing.

Kulèv-o
Damballah-wèdo, papa
Ou kulèv-o
Kulèv-o
Kulèv, kulèv-o
M’ap rélé kulèv-o
Damballah-papa, ou sé kulèv
Kulèv pa sa palé . . .

O Serpent
Damballah-wèdo
you are a serpent
Serpent, o serpent
I’m calling the serpent
Father Damballah, you are the serpent
The serpent does not speak . . .

The part of Moustique’s mind that registered these images was shrinking, blinking as it fell away like a revolving coin. His body moved in perfect unison with the steady uprush of the drums, as he broke the line of
hounsis
and moved toward the
poteau mitan.
That otherworldly cry came from his own thick throat—he hardly knew it. His head threw back, the stars spun round and up and up like flecks of butter in a churn. The drumming sucked the stars into whirlpool, then everything went bright.

“Li konnen prié BonDyé?” A man’s voice, with the rough-silk feel of a cat’s tongue.

“Li kab chanté Latin, mêm.”
A girl, her voice bright with pride.

Moustique turned onto his shoulder and opened one eye upon the hard-packed dirt.

He knows how to pray to the white man’s God?

He can even sing in Latin . . .

But now the voices had stopped. Moustique felt attention turn to him—he saw the man and the girl indistinctly through his half-closed gummy eyes. The flutter of their white garments sent his mind off-balance again. Nothing was clear, not where he was or how he had come there. Above the clearing, the sky was paling into dawn. Moustique heard cocks crowing down the gorges, and listened for the morning reveille of Toussaint’s army at Habitation Thibodet, but then he remembered Marmelade, and Delahaye, and he sat up sharply, flinging out an arm.

“Dousman.”
Marie-Noelle supported his elbow, held his hand in hers, without the slightest pressure. Gently. His eyes yawed crazily around the clearing. He was still in the
hûnfor,
but the
hûngan,
with his cat’stongue voice, had disappeared. He got to his feet; the movement dizzied him.

“Dousman . . .”
Marie-Noelle was still supporting him, balancing him by his right arm. He looked at her, confused.

“Té gegne youn espri nan têt-ou,”
she said, quietly. Come with me.

She led him toward the trail head, guiding him with the pressureless contact of her hands. He felt the fragile clarity of someone waking from a fever. Everything was lucid, but nothing in his consciousness resolved into the elements of self.

There was a spirit in your head . . .

The dawn was damp, and agreeably cool. Moustique’s knees were a little wobbly, but he felt his strength returning, along with his presence of mind, the farther they went down the trail. Marie-Noelle’s light touch was pleasant, cool fingers just feathering his palm, and her demeanor was pleasant too—as if they’d always stood in this relation, whatever it might be.

Sunrise was baffled by the cover of the trees, but when they came out into the border of the town, the full light struck them and the church bell began to ring. Moustique, returning further to himself, felt a personal jab of panic.

“Oui,”
said Marie-Noelle, and thrust the priest’s slop jar, emptied and rinsed, into his hands. “Yes—hurry.”

A fold of her skirt brushed his leg as she turned away. Moustique scurried toward the church, pausing to set the jar down on the threshold of the priest’s house. The congregation had already begun to assemble when he went in, but Delahaye paid him no mind—distracted perhaps by the party of
gens de couleur
who had already taken their positions in the front benches.

The priest stood before the altar, tall, lean, almost spectral in his best vestments, the ends of his purple stole twitching from a slight rotation of his hips. He spread his large hands over the people below him.

“Dominus vobiscum . . .”

As customary, Moustique led the mumbling response.
“Et vobiscum
te . . .”
He took a darting glance over his shoulder. Marie-Noelle sat on one the rear benches, not far from the
hûngan,
a small, elderly man with a crown of white hair over a dark face wrinkled like a nut meat. The other back seats were filling with men and women dressed in white, many among them who last night had served the
loa.

L’Abbé Delahaye collected herbs and flowers and kept large books in which he sketched the plants, pressed their leaves, and noted down their uses if there were any. A couple of afternoons each week he sent Moustique out to gather plants for him, and encouraged him to talk to people about their value. On this pretext Moustique returned to the
bitasyon
where the
hûnfor
was, seeking out the
hûngan
who, as was usual, doubled as a leaf doctor,
doktè-fey.

Moustique had some rudiments of herbal medicine from observation of Toussaint; also his own father had taken some interest in the subject, though less systematically than Delahaye. From the
hûngan
he learned more, though little enough that was new to the priest. To be sure, Moustique did not report to Delahaye that the
hûngan
had also begun to teach him the names and natures of the
loa,
particularly Damballah, the spirit which had chosen to possess him. But in two weeks’ time, Moustique was assisting in the ceremonies at the
hûnfor,
wearing the white clothes and
mouchwa têt
of a
hounsi,
chanting an Ave Maria or a Pater Noster and perhaps some other fragments of memorized Latin scripture, before the African spirits were invoked.