All Souls' Rising (29 page)

He was stumbling across the packed ground toward the black hole that had been his house. The thing in the shed was peculiarly addressed to him, he knew; it was a message, personal, as if someone had come in the night and nailed a crow to his front door. He fell on his all-fours and vomited into the ashes of his dwelling and stayed there with his head dizzily drooping, strings of spittle hanging from his lower lip. Something was gouging into his palm; he sat back on his heels and lifted the object to examine it. A silver fork, fire-blackened, melted and twisted into a new shape of deformity.

He stood up and flung the fork away. In the ashes a few yards away, a glint of something caught his attention, a surface reflecting a section of the sky like a still pool or a well brimful. Thirst drew him to it, but he found nothing but a mirror, the gilt frame burned away. Crouching over it, he saw a face, filthy and bloodshot and roughened with beard, unknowable to him. After a time he worked his fingers on the ground and began methodically to darken his cheeks with ash.

He took to wandering, in and out of the fringes of the jungle and the slopes that bordered the plain. At first he’d thought of going to Le Cap but he was afraid to expose himself on the wide waste open spaces that lay between him and the town. Eventually the logic drained away from the fear and it became a simple animal aversion. The ruined landscape was now so featureless to him that he did not know how to place himself within it.

His feet healed, toughened to a horny gloss. He would not wear his boots, but carried them strapped to his waist with a rag of his discarded shirt, as panniers for the food he was able to forage. He ate wild fruit, or raided abandoned provision grounds at dusk. Wild goats and wild hogs sometimes passed, but he was never able to run one down. Once he found a stand of mushrooms and ate them greedily, but they made him violently ill and sent him into delirious dreams. Whenever he came near other men he fled from them, because they were not of his own kind. He coated his body and face with mud, to guard him from the sun, and from others’ sight. At one point he began scoring the leather of his boots with sticks or stones to mark the days, but too much time had passed for him to reckon before he began the habit and, after making some thirty such scratches, he gave it over.

A day came when he’d left a jungle trail to hide himself from something he heard coming. Horsemen, twenty or more in single file. A few regular army dragoons and the rest militia, these were the first white men he’d seen. He watched them with mere curiosity from a rock above the path, until their captain’s voice broke the air.

Arnaud came scrambling down then, willy-nilly, spooking the captain’s horse so that it reared. The captain struggled to bring his mount under control, and Arnaud waited meekly as the animal shivered and snorted and rolled its eyes. He’d known this officer once by name: it was M—, M—, Maillart. Who watched him with an utter lack of comprehension.

“Do you not know me?” Arnaud croaked. Getting no answer, he crumbled some of the mud from his chest, scraping the skin to bare it further to the captain’s eye. “It is white, do you not see? I am like you.”

Chapter Nineteen

D
OCTOR
H
ÉBERT SAT ON A STONE
high above the riverbank. Behind him was the bustle and whir of Biassou’s camp; ahead, large boulders tumbled down into the water and partway across the river stream. Near the water a calabash tree was growing, oddly decorated with cords the blacks had tied around the gourds to shape them as they grew, for later use. Round the tree’s foot sprouted rich red-blossoming fronds of what the doctor had heard from Toussaint was a sort of ginger.

A tickling on the back of his hand distracted him. Looking down he saw a small olive-green beetle with one yellow spot in the center of its back, walking over the hairs on his skin. Involuntarily he started and the beetle cracked its carapace and flew in a silent whirring of its transparent wings. The doctor raised his head toward the river, where five or six of the captive white women stood waist deep in the cold water, laying out clothes on boulders and scrubbing them with smaller stones. From the bank, a gaggle of black women gossiped among themselves, and occasionally called out instructions and commands. This latter group was dressed in a mélange of slave garments and finery looted from the plantations. Many of the clothes the white women were laundering might formerly have been their own.

The doctor’s eye was on one of them in particular, a dark-haired girl wringing out a white chemise: Hélène. There was something about her that recalled Elise to him, though they hardly resembled one another, unless in bearing or in attitude. The doctor had not seen his sister for so long he sometimes wondered if he’d know her, if she did appear before him, changed as these women had been transformed. Hélène spread the chemise out on a boulder and scoured it with hands chapped and reddened by the cold water; her lips were pursed, and he thought that perhaps she was even humming as she worked. He studied her profile, wondering what Elise might be doing at this moment (if she were still alive) and if he’d ever see the niece he’d heard of. He had attended Hélène for a time after Biassou had discarded her, and had, a week previously, believed that she would likely die. She had been cruelly used by the black general (as he styled himself), probably by others in his retinue as well, and for her unwillingness she’d been injured in more ways than one, and cast off all the sooner. The doctor had treated the weals on her thighs and buttocks with herb poultices Toussaint had taught him to prepare, embarrassed to see the damaged flesh and touch it, doubting that his ministrations would be of great use. But the girl had surprised him by rallying suddenly, as if the ordeal had cut through to a powerful resilience at her core, and she seemed stronger now, more cheerful than she ever had before.

A mulattress, Marotte, called her to the bank. Hélène waded till she was no more than ankle deep, her thin legs storklike under the wet mass of skirt strapped up around her thighs. She shook out the chemise and displayed it to Marotte’s critical eye. The doctor could see no blemish on its striking whiteness, but Marotte frowned and sent her back, with large theatrical gestures, to continue the washing. Hélène took it meekly enough, expressionless as she carried the chemise back to the boulder she’d been using as a washboard. The black women tittered among themselves at some insult Marotte called after her as she went.

Behind them there began an outcry, men’s voices raised in anger in the camp. The doctor went quite rigid when he heard it; he could even feel his testicles retract. Among the rebels there was always some faction in favor of killing all the white prisoners on the spot, though as a rule they were not so badly treated in this camp, where some of them, like the doctor, were free to wander as they wished, like officers on parole. But since he had seen the white man flayed in the blossoming tree, the doctor had been wary of where his wandering might lead him. There was a fear that twisted his vitals and never really left him, tremulous below the outward aspect he struggled to keep mute. But in the camp the tumult quickly died, and he relaxed a little, watching a green-headed hummingbird flick among some vines beside him and pause to hover before a barely opened bud. The hummingbird flew. Restively the doctor shifted his buttocks on the stone. He reached into his pocket and took out the shard of mirror he’d picked up from the ruin of Nanon’s rooms and somehow managed to retain all through his wanderings. Cupping the small reflection in his palm, he scanned his face section by section: eyes bloodshot and sunken darkly in the sockets, face scratched and grubby, rough beard growing down his throat.

Again Marotte ordered Hélène out of the water. The doctor pocketed his glass and raised his head to look. The white girl shook the dripping chemise out at her arm’s length, revealing that the fabric had gone threadbare under too much scrubbing, holes appearing in it here and there. Marotte raised her voice and cursed Hélène for her stupidity, begging her to look more closely at the damage her carelessness had caused. The doctor remembered the mulattress from Arnaud’s house, and he thought it was there she must have learned the language and the gestures she now employed. These were the caprices of Madame Arnaud which Marotte was reenacting, as was strictly natural, certainly—as chains of being bound her to do. There was, after all, something quite impersonal about it. The two woman were of a height and similarly slender, though Marotte was perhaps ten years the elder. The doctor watched her slap at Hélène’s face, but weakly, meaning to shame her more than to do real physical hurt. The white girl turned her head just ahead of the blow, so the yellow hand just grazed her cheek in passing, and remained with her face averted, eyes cast down.

Toussaint was coming over the rocks, his small jockey’s body erect and surely balanced, despite his slick boot soles. He snatched the chemise from between the two women and held it at eye level. Inserting his fingers in one of the larger holes, he ripped the whole thing down the middle. Cowed, the black women fell silent on the bank. Toussaint said nothing, as if the tearing were enough to rebuke Marotte’s perversity. He passed between the women and came up toward the doctor, methodically tearing the cloth into long strips they’d use for bandages, once dry.

As he reached Doctor Hébert, Toussaint turned and glanced back toward the women, smiling faintly in one corner of his mouth. Marotte had turned her back to Hélène, disdaining the white girl as she gathered up the washing. The black women’s voices recommenced, a little softer than before. The doctor watched Hélène raise the sodden bundle to her head; she could not balance it as a black woman would, without using a hand to steady it. He got up and followed Toussaint’s beckoning. By now the ankle scarcely pained him at all, but his cracked ribs had healed more slowly, and he felt a jolt from them upon first rising from his seat.

The sick and wounded lay on pallets in a grove uphill from the main encampment, under a wall-less
ajoupa
thatched over with palm leaves against the rain. There were a few white people here, mostly fallen ill with fever, and many more blacks, some wounded in skirmishes with the white men in the hill forts all around, others from fighting among themselves, which was almost equally common. Toussaint made rounds as a white doctor might, but with less presumption, stooping to speak softly to each invalid who waked. Unlike the other blacks who held position, he had not tricked himself out in any quasi-official regalia, wearing only his coachman’s livery still, the worn green coat with its old stains, bare of the decorations the other self-appointed officers liked to flaunt. Still, the odd assortment of
hûngans
and leaf-doctors over whom Toussaint had at least a nominal authority paid as much respect to the faded bandanna knotted over his head as they would to a general’s bicorne cap.

It was something to be a
dokté-feuilles
, Doctor Hébert had come to recognize. He felt that his own education had begun anew from the first days he’d been held in the encampment. Despite the rustic situation, Toussaint adhered to a standard of cleaniness higher than that the doctor had known in many French hospitals, and he had for the most part dissuaded the lesser
hûngans
from practices such as packing wounds with dirt. As for Doctor Hébert himself, he’d largely been demoted to the status of surgeon, amputating injured limbs that were past saving, a point on which he and Toussaint did not always agree.

A few feet outside the
ajoupa
’s roof, an old woman called Ti-Jeanne tended a fire and a boiling cauldron. Herbs dried on a latticed rack beside the fire, and she used them to prepare the various infusions. The doctor went to help her with this work. He’d learned that the plants of the colony had virtues quite unknown in Europe, and many of these were now unlocked for him. A
tisane
of
armoire
could halt the course of dysentery. For cough, one brewed a mixture of several flowers:
gombo, giromon, herbe à cornette
, and
pectoral
. A tea of
herbe à pique
was effective against fever…The doctor crumbled leaves between his fingers, combined them in the bottoms of the gourds, while the old woman ladled boiling water over them. Abstracted as he was, it took him a moment to respond to the voice of Toussaint, slightly raised to call him.

Toussaint knelt at the side of a young man, who’d been quite badly hurt in a fight, no doubt over some woman or other. He’d been struck a glancing cutlass blow on the outside of his upper arm, which stripped the meat away from the bone and left the severed muscles hanging. The doctor saw him as an immediate candidate for the surgeon’s saw, for such a mangling wound must certainly go to gangrene. Left to himself, he’d have taken the arm off at the shoulder.

Now Toussaint signaled him to change the dressing on the wound. The injured man turned his head and grinned at the doctor as he loosened the bandage, no mean impression in itself, since a few days earlier he’d have moaned in pain at the lightest touch on the injured arm. Inside the binding, the wound had resolved into an inch-wide gash from shoulder to elbow, crusted over and puckering at the edges. There was no proud flesh, no pus when the doctor probed the edges with his fingertips, though the other’s breath came hissing hard. The wound smelt clean, and it was healing from the bottom. The doctor nodded and withdrew his hand and Toussaint began anointing the cut with a paste he’d ground in a shallow wooden bowl: aloe,
guèrit-trop-vite
, and
mal dormi
—medicinal herb used in plasters. Finished, he bandaged over the ointment and stood up, smiling sidelong at the doctor.

“White people are sometimes too free with other people’s limbs…”

Doctor Hébert did not know if he were being accused or taken into a confidence. He simply nodded, feeling quite deracinated by Toussaint’s remark, as if he no longer belonged to any category. He could recall, as well, that on the worst plantations such amputations were practiced for no medical reason, but as a punishment for runaways. They had finished here. Toussaint motioned him with a finger and they walked down the slope and through the camp until they reached the riverside again.

Moored to a stake on a muddy bank were a couple of canoes made in the ancient Carib way: the trunk of a
gommier
dug out and spread with water and hot stones, reinforced with curving struts pegged against the interior, a plank on either side to raise the gun-wales. Toussaint climbed into one of these and the doctor followed, taking up the oars. Toussaint pointed and he settled to the rowing, pulling against the current of the stream. Paired pegs served as the oarlocks, the oars shuttling somewhat awkwardly between them. With his back to the prow, the doctor could not see just where they were going, but he began to break out in an anxious sweat, knowing that Jeannot’s camp was this way, up the river. But before they had gone nearly so far as that, Toussaint directed him into a back-water, an abandoned paddy of sorts where rice or indigo had once been grown. A small gray heron, red-breasted, flew over the flat expanse, and far beyond it the shadows of clouds were running swiftly over the mountain slopes.

It was very hot. Toussaint undid his kerchief and trailed it in the water, then refastened the wet cloth over his forehead. The doctor was conscious of a runnel of sweat furrowing into the creases of his belly. His fear ebbed from him; it seemed to come and go sometimes, almost without reason. Toussaint pointed to a channel between two narrowly set trees. A spiderweb tore across the doctor’s back as he pulled between them. Toussaint reached across and flicked the hairy bee-striped spider into the water.

The stream was only a few times wider than the boat, and tightly shelved in on either side by mangrove trees, the flat flanges of their roots coming down into the water. Here the doctor saw a great dirt nest of grubs or insects, daubed in the fork of a trunk; there a whole mangrove had been eaten out by termites, cleaved as if by a lightning strike. The current was almost imperceptible and he rowed without resistance, as he might on a lake. The water was a flat brownish green and in its surface the mangrove roots entwined with their reflections and the tree limbs joined below as well as above, so that they seemed suspended in a symmetrical barrel vault.

“
Sondé miroir
…” Toussaint murmured, as if to himself. He touched the ball of his finger to the water. The doctor saw it join the finger of the other Toussaint beneath the river, like a touch of life, some communion he couldn’t comprehend, though he saw that it was more than mere reflection. Toussaint withdrew his hand and broke the contact. He dug into the skin of a grapefruit and broke the yellow sphere in half; the sweet acidic tang of it swelled into the still air.

The doctor shipped his oars and accepted the half he was offered. The fruit was virtually fleshless, so packed it was with juice. They ate contemplatively, discarding the peel and spitting seeds into the still water. The boat drifted sideways to the stream. Finished, they exchanged seats wordlessly and Toussaint took the oars.