Master of the Crossroads (83 page)

Isabelle felt the wetness of her tears against the pillow. “If I live,” she said, “I will ruin them too.”

“Do not say that!” Nanon hissed. “Listen to me. I will not let you go this way. When I was alone, and with child, and helpless, when the whites were killing women of my kind all through the streets of Le Cap, you took me in and saved my life and you saved Paul.”

“But . . .” Isabelle was thinking that she had not taken Nanon in with her whole heart, but had done it at the doctor’s insistence, and that at the time she had partly resented it. But there was no way for her to say such a thing, not now. So she did not, but let Nanon go on massaging her hand, until she began to feel that maybe Nanon was right about everything.

“Man Jouba,” she muttered at last.

“What?” Nanon’s breath was warm and sweet against her ear.

“Send for Man Jouba,” Isabelle said. Then she slipped backward, toppling into the delirium of her pain, and for a long time she knew nothing more.

When she came to herself again, it was night and she was alone. All the house was very quiet. She did not know if it were the same night, but thought it must be at least the next. Nothing in her memory was clear. There had been dreadful pain, which had now abated. The memory of pain was never perfect.

Outdoors, the wind shivered the leaves and branches, and a cool current swirled through her room. Somewhere in the house nearby an infant voice began to wail, but was as quickly muffled by a breast.

She rose, but was stopped for a moment by a thrust of the pain she had forgotten. She bowed over, pressing both hands against the spot, gathering her flattened, slackened belly. It passed, and she straightened and reached for her robe. Fastening it around her, she crossed the hall to the opposite bedchamber. In the orb of light of a single candle, Nanon lay abed, suckling a tiny jet-black infant.

“You see,” she said, as if she’d been expecting Isabelle’s appearance at that moment. “He is already strong. Oh, he is like a little bull.”

“Li foncé anpil,”
Isabelle remarked.

“C’est ça,” Nanon agreed. “He is very dark.” She looked up. “He has already needed his strength,” she said. “The cord was wrapped two times around his neck. Without Man Jouba, you would both be dead.”

“Yes,” said Isabelle. “I shall certainly send her a present.” She paused. “I must do it quickly, before my husband learns of this event, and I am murdered.”

“This child will be mine,” Nanon said calmly. “Brother to my François, but you shall name him.”

“Gabriel,” said Isabelle. “Let us call him Gabriel.” She studied the black baby, who pummeled the breast with one hand as he sucked.

“But it is all impossible, this scheme,” Isabelle said. “The servants know, and Madame Fortier . . .”

“Madame Fortier has taken good care to know nothing for certain,” Nanon said. “What she may know, or suppose, she will not tell. I think no one at all understood your condition, before we had reached Dondon?—but if need be, we will say that your child was born dead.” Nanon shook her glossy black hair back over her pillow. “That much is near enough to the truth, besides.”

“But Man Jouba.” Isabelle said. “The servants.”

“Man Jouba has gone back to the mountains, where no one will find her if she does not want to be found. The servants will not speak of it, not to anyone who might harm you.”

“Nanon,” Isabelle said quietly. “What of yourself, and your own situation?”

If a shade crossed Nanon’s face, it did not linger.

“Now that is a thought for another day,” she said. “Tonight I am thinking only of you, and of these two children.”

As if she had signaled him, François began to cry. When Nanon shifted to reach for him, the black infant lost his hold on the breast, slipped down and began to wail.

Isabelle lifted the crying baby and held him to her. He was not comforted by the movement, but howled louder than before. He felt much heavier than the other infant, denser, as if he were entirely carved from the cliff rock of the mountains. Tears were running down her face, and her own milk had started, seeping out through her robe.

“No,” Nanon said. “You must give him up. Give him to me.”

Isabelle obeyed her. She settled Gabriel at Nanon’s other breast, so that he and François could nurse together.

“Marassa yo,”
Nanon said with a crooked smile. “You see? They are my twins.”

Isabelle saw. She knew she must not reach for what she saw. She must be grateful for her life and whatever it gave her, for the two children fastened to her friend’s breasts, and the dark hand groping blindly toward the light one.

35

In the late morning, Doctor Hébert came riding up the tattered
allée
to Habitation Arnaud, yawning and half asleep in the saddle. These last weeks he had been whipsawed all over the country by Toussaint, who needed to be everywhere at once to discourage Rigaudin conspiracies; since the cluster of attempts on his life, Toussaint had also become still more chary than usual of staying too long (more than nine or ten hours) in any one place.

But today Toussaint was on his way to Port-au-Prince (or so he’d claimed, though he might just as well appear somewhere else) while the doctor had been detached from the immediate staff and was traveling now under escort of Joseph Flaville and a small cavalry squadron. They did not hurry. In the fields of the plantation, men were cutting cane and loading it onto ox-drawn wagons. Flaville took a detour and selected a stalk, peeled and tasted it with a critical expression. For the past year, Flaville had had the management of a couple of nearby plantations whose original owners had not made bold to reappear, and so had become a student of the quality of the crop. He chewed and after a moment smiled his approval. He sectioned out a length of cane to distribute among his men, who bit great sweet chunks from their shares and laughed as they rode on through the warm sunshine.

As they came clattering into the main compound, the doctor was roused from his doze and pulled his mare up sharply. A work of construction was afoot, exactly where that shed had been, and Moustique was busy directing it.

“Ki sa y’ap fé?”
he inquired of the boy who came out from the stable to take charge of his mount. What are they doing?

“They are raising a church,” the boy told him, with a brilliant grin. One of Claudine’s catechumens, the doctor imagined.

He dismounted, took off his straw hat, and began unconsciously to scratch at his dry scalp as he considered the history of that square of ground. Once it had housed Arnaud’s vicious slave-catching mastiff. Then Claudine had used it to martyr her maid. Now it looked as if Moustique meant to place the very sanctuary of his chapel exactly there. Perhaps it was fitting. Moustique noticed him and waved, with a smile. The doctor wondered how he’d hit on the spot, if someone had told him, or if he had simply been drawn to it somehow. There was a numinosity to places where blood had been shed.

Flaville had also noticed the construction and ridden in a wide ellipse around it, toward the cane mill. The doctor replaced his hat and followed him, on foot. He found Arnaud in the lower level of the mill, supervising the hands as they spooned with their long ladles from the tanks. The two skilled refiners had gone out to meet Flaville, almost as if they had expected him to come.

“What news?” said Arnaud, genially enough, as he wiped his hands on his shirttail.

“Beauvais has left Jacmel,” the doctor said, after a moment’s consideration. There was other news, in fact more urgent, but he was not eager to deliver it.

Arnaud stepped a little nearer, so he could lower his voice. “Has he come over to our side at last?”

“No,” said the doctor. Interesting, he thought, that Arnaud should identify Toussaint’s side as his own. “He’s fled the country, since Roume declared him in rebellion. Apparently he means to go to plead his case in France.”

“Ridiculous.” Arnaud walked out from under the roof’s overhang and spat on the ground. “He was a fool to think he could conserve his neutrality in such a situation.”

“Oh, Beauvais is a man of honor,” the doctor said. “One might say, meanwhile, that his conscience has given him a twisted path to follow.” He cleared his throat. “His men are very discontented with him, according to the spies.”

“So Jacmel
will
come over.”

“Unfortunately, no. Jacmel has declared for Rigaud and set in for a siege. I’m not sure who commands there now, perhaps Pétion.”

Arnaud grimaced. “The man is capable.”

“Yes,” said the doctor. “But gravely outnumbered all the same. Dessalines has the town completely encircled by land, and Toussaint hopes for help from the Americans at sea.”

“That’s something,” Arnaud said.

“It may be a great deal. Rigaud was ill advised to send his corsairs against the American merchantmen.”

“Let’s have a drink on it, then.”

“Willingly.”

Somewhat to the doctor’s surprise, Arnaud began walking away from the
grand’case.
He followed, along a rocky trail, toward the invisible rippling of a spring. Yellow butterflies flickered around the shoots of red ginger at their feet. The doctor began to smell smoke, and fermentation. They turned a bend in the trail and came in view of a rectangular open shed covering a fire, a cauldron, hood and coil. An old women tended the cauldron, using wooden implements strapped to the stumps of her hands. She did not look at them.

Arnaud lifted a bottle from the coil’s tip and in the same motion replaced it with a long-necked gourd. He drank and offered the bottle to the doctor. The rum was clear, thick, extremely strong.

“You have made great strides here since my last visit,” the doctor said cheerfully. He glanced sidelong at the woman who keeled the great kettle over the fire.

“We make every effort,” Arnaud said. They took another drink apiece and then they returned in the direction of the mill.

It was the hour of midday repose. Flaville had gone off, with his men, to one of the neighboring plantations. The doctor checked on his mare in the stable, drank a mouthful of water, and found himself a hammock strung in a grove beyond the
grand’case.

The shadows were long when he awoke, and he could hear the voices of children singing at Claudine’s little school. He rolled out of the hammock, pulled on his boots, and strolled idly toward the sound. A girl’s voice called out a greeting; he turned, still groggy with his sleep, and saw Fontelle and Paulette under the roof of the kitchen
ajoupa,
turning a young pig on a spit.

During what remained of the day, he heard the recitation of Claudine’s students, and inspected the infirmary, where all seemed to have gone smoothly since his last call there. Paulette, whose skills he knew, had taken over some of the duties of nursing, but under the gentler regime there was less injury and illness for her to see to. After darkness had fallen, they all gathered in the main room of the
grand’case
to eat. The assembly was sizable, including Cléo, Fontelle, Moustique and his three sisters; a long puncheon table had been knocked together to provide places for them all. Before falling to, they all joined hands while Moustique muttered a mostly inaudible prayer.

The food was good, and plentiful: rice and beans and fried plantain, a piquant sauce with soft green cashews to complement the pork. There was little conversation. At Fontelle’s glance or the flick of her finger, one or another of her daughters would rise to refill platters or refresh drinks. In former times, the doctor reflected privately, Arnaud would not conceivably have allowed any colored person to sit down at his table—not even Cléo, though she had certainly shared his bed, in the bad old days. Now all of them, even Claudine, seemed entirely at ease in their positions. The doctor’s only discomfort was that he had been sent to interrupt this harmony.

When the meal was done, Claudine and the other women set about cleaning up after it. Arnaud beckoned the doctor outdoors. A bottle glinted in the starlight. The doctor reached for it gladly.

“We are a little rough here, still,” Arnaud said. “Concerning the amenities.”

“Ah, but the rum is good,” the doctor said. “Shall we go up?” He pointed to the path ascending behind the house. Arnaud gave him a startled look.

“Oh, there’s no danger.” The doctor slapped at the back of his neck. “Only, the mosquitoes down here.”

They climbed single file up the trail to the pocket in the cliff which Arnaud had made his last line of defense, and sat down on the rocks, passing the bottle between them at slow intervals. The night was very quiet and clear. Under the starlight in the compound below, the doctor could see the progress made on Moustique’s chapel. The sanctuary was now enclosed by three walls of woven palm leaf, and rows of benches had been placed before it, in the open air. Above, a bright, pale crescent rocked the darker orb of the old moon.

“Toussaint has declared a new distribution,” the doctor said reluctantly.

“Oh?”

“Everything is to go into the government treasury,” the doctor said, “save the quarter share of the cultivators, and the costs of production.”

Arnaud’s jaw clicked shut. “I shall have trouble with my people.”

“It’s for the war,” the doctor said. “The soldiers must be paid . . . sometimes, something.” He stood up and caught water from the spring in his cupped hands and sipped at it, to cut the rum. “You won’t have to deal with it directly.”

Arnaud stared at him. “And why is that?”

“You’ve been conscripted. I’m meant to bring you with me down to Port-au-Prince.”

Arnaud exhaled heavily. As the air went out of him, he slumped forward, elbows digging into his knees. “The property will go to ruin,” he said. “And after all our trouble.”

“No, no,” the doctor said. “Flaville will be here to manage it for you.”

“Oh, undoubtedly.” Arnaud jumped up, slapping the tight fabric of his breeches, and began to pace the narrow area. “I am certain that Flaville will manage very well—for himself, as so many of Toussaint’s officers have begun to do. While I am sent away to be shot in their wars.”

“Calm yourself,” the doctor said.

“It is easy for you to recommend it.”

“After all, you are not intended to be cannon fodder,” the doctor said. “You’ll be given a command, parallel to Captains Vaublanc and Maillart, for example. Toussaint wants to rally
all
the experienced officers.”

“That means he must be expecting heavy losses,” Arnaud snapped. “And I have had no part of the military in all my life.”

“He knows that you served in the militia, and in the
maréchaussée
.”

“And I know that
he
served as Bayon de Libertat’s coachman,” Arnaud said. “My Christ, but the world has turned upside down.”

“So it has,” the doctor said. “Which way do you like it better?”

“Which way do I—” Arnaud stopped in his tracks, and sat down on a boulder.

“You won’t go unrepresented here,” the doctor pointed out. “There is Claudine, and Fontelle.” He paused. “And Cléo.”

Arnaud thumbed his jawline, looking down over the compound. “I am to serve under Dessalines, then.”

“Yes, under Dessalines,” said the doctor. “Along with the others I mentioned.”

Shifting his seat and stretching out his legs, Arnaud studied the half-built chapel where it lay bathed in starlight. “When must we go?”

“As soon as possible,” the doctor said.

“Let it be Monday.” Arnaud sniffed. “Our bush priest means to consecrate his church the day before.”

“I had not known you to be so fervent in religion,” the doctor said.

“Oh, I shall be like a medieval baron, it seems, with my own prelate, and a chapel within the walls,” Arnaud said, with a dry laugh. “All this religiosity—it may be a little too much for me, but it appears to be healthful for Claudine.”

“Yes,” said the doctor, as he reached for the bottle. “She does seem to do much better now.” Better than when the world was right side up, he thought, but did not say it.

Claudine rose, in the first thin light that leaked in through the jalousies, and slipped on a shift and a calico dress. She turned, facing the bed, and as the light began to grow in the room she watched her husband sleeping. Under his lids, Arnaud’s eyes slipped and darted. His face assumed an aspect of ire, then shock. He flung up an arm as if to ward off an attack. Then his face drained into calm, and he rolled over onto his side and went on sleeping.

She left the bedchamber, closing the door delicately behind her. Arnaud had ordered a strong cabinet to be built of mahogany and fitted into a rear corner of the central room where they ate their meals. Claudine unlocked it with a small key from the ring at her waist. The cabinet was meant for the safekeeping of silver and fine china, but whatever such articles she’d once possessed had been stolen or smashed when the plantation was sacked in ninety-one. Now it held only some homefired crockery, some utensils and cheap glassware.

She stooped and lifted the folded stole from the bottom shelf, and also gathered the gourd cup beside it. She’d got the cup by arrangement with a woman with a special skill in binding calabashes. There were two round protuberances at either end of a long neck. The gourd could be balanced on the smaller of these, and the larger one was cut across the hemisphere so that the whole resembled a large brown wineglass. Carrying these two items, she left the house.

Outdoors, Cléo was lighting the kitchen fire. She stood up as Claudine passed, and raised a hand in greeting. Claudine smiled her reply, and walked on. The dust on the path was loose and cool beneath her bare feet. As the mist lifted, the breeze set the fronds of the young coconut trees to trembling. Farther along, the dense expanse of the cane fields absorbed the tremor. She hesitated, closed her eyes and looked again. There was no smoke, no fire, but only the green cane standing, raising its leaves like the blades of spears.

She passed the cane mill and turned in the opposite direction from Arnaud’s new distillery. The odor of burned sugar and rum gave her a momentary pang, but the breeze turned and carried the smell away from her. She went through a screen of mango and corrosol trees to the place where the rows of slave cabins had once stood. Most of them were now marked only by a few scraps of charred, decaying board amid squares of ash overgrown by new greenery. Small lizards were busy everywhere in these ruins. Those of the former slaves who still remained on the plantation had raised new
ajoupas
on the borders of gardens they’d cleared for their own benefit. Of the few little
cases
that had been rebuilt here, Fontelle and her children now occupied the nearest.