All Souls' Rising (37 page)

The blood mood was broken, and the mob had begun to dissolve and drift away. There was the ringing sound of Riau pounding rivets into the irons with a blacksmith’s hammer as he made his way around the circle of white men. The doctor sat on his heels, waiting his turn. He was watching Biassou, who stood in slack confusion, the sacrificial moment snatched from under him. Toussaint approached him, braced his arms on Biassou’s shoulders. They spoke for a moment, too low to be overheard, then Biassou broke away and stalked off through the trees.

It grew calm enough for Doctor Hébert to turn to the priest and briefly examine the cut above his eye, more superficial than he would have supposed from the amount that it had bled. “You’re a free bleeder,” the doctor began to say, with an attempt at half a smile, but one of Toussaint’s guards chopped a musket barrel down on his wrists, knocking his hands away from the priest’s face and, grunting in a low harsh voice, warned him not to speak.

How automatically one thought of them as
Toussaint’s
guards…The doctor knelt rigidly like a man at prayer, numbly obedient, looking at nothing but the trampled ground between his knees, until Riau came to him. He was a long time selecting a set of irons, which he fit loosely over the cracked rotting uppers of the doctor’s boots. After he had driven in the rivets, he ran his finger around inside the shackles and gave the doctor a look of some significance which the doctor could not fathom. Riau reached out and squeezed the muscle of his shoulder, giving him a little shake, then his eyes went blank and he passed to the next man.

Still the doctor was facing forward, his feet sticking straight out before him now. Toussaint had remained at the edge of the trees, after Biassou’s departure, and now the doctor saw him take his headcloth off and wring it out slowly, hand over hand to the sweat-dripping corners. He shook the kerchief out into a square and let it billow in the breeze, then tied it carefully around his head again before he left the clearing.

Twilight came down, cool, gray and cloudy. Two big green parrots flew from tree to tree. Toussaint’s guards still loosely enclosed the prisoners, less to keep them in than to protect them from a fresh assault, the doctor surmised. They were free to move about within the circle if they chose. Only the men had been put in chains, the women and children left as they were.

The doctor got up and shuffled to the edge of the ring. When a guard noticed him, he gestured at his breeches; the guard nodded and waved him toward the tree line. There he unbuttoned and relieved himself with a painful difficulty. His urine was bloody from the blows his kidneys had received.

He closed his trousers and shuffled back, crossing the center of the circle. The chain on his shackles shortened his step, but he was more discommoded by the simple weight of the iron. He came upon the erstwhile procurator of Vallière crouched among some of the other men and a few of the older women. His teeth were almost chattering from agitation as he spoke in a low urgent whisper. The doctor squatted down among them. “What has happened, do you know?”

“The lunatics at the Assembly rejected the proposal.” The procurator sprayed his face with a nervous spittle as he spoke. “Would not even have it read or hear it. Would not treat with them at all till every man surrendered, in advance.”

The doctor’s heart bulged and contracted. He must have known this, he felt now, from the moment that he woke that afternoon, but it was still a shock to hear it.

“
O mon Christ
,” the doctor said. “It
is
madness, truly.”

“And the commissioners?” someone said.

“What about them?” the procurator said in a breaking voice. “What can they do?
C’est foutu et c’est tout
. Do you understand that? We are already dead.”

A woman moaned and mashed her face into her tattered sleeve. The doctor stood up in his shackles, his sudden movement dizzying him. The inner walls of his mouth had gone as dry and rough as sandpaper. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe, but instead of a blanket of comforting darkness he seemed to see that tree so redly flowering, tonguelike stamens lolling from the blooms as if they’d lick the raw flesh of the white man who’d been skinned alive there. What difference was there, under the skin? He’d believed Toussaint had saved them, but probably it would have been better if they’d all been shot at once. He took a step and then another, the bare pressure of his shinbones against the bands of iron. He kept on going among the others with that same shuffling gait of any other member of the walking dead.

I, R
IAU, WHEN
I
CHAINED THOSE WHITEMEN
, I nailed the chains as tightly as they would have done on me. But with the doctor, I put the irons outside his boots, and loosely too. In the dark, if he had taken off the boots, he might have twisted his heels out of the irons, I set them loose enough for that. But he did not understand it, though I shook him by his shoulder to try to make him see. I did the same for the little fat father also (he was not so fat anymore by that time) and I saw by his eyes that he knew what I was doing, but I saw too he would not run away.

I did so because I didn’t want those two to have to die then, even if I would have been happy to have killed the others all myself—all the whitemen and whitewomen who were there. It was not that they were kind, the doctor and the priest, because the kindness of whitemen is so shallow it does not even go so deep as their thin skins. But because I had helped them as much as they helped me, building them a shelter and hunting food for us to eat, and we had eaten and slept all together like brothers, and with our women and the children in the one
ajoupa
. I wanted to save them because they were mine. But neither one of them knew how to live in the bush alone, and if they had run away they would have been caught and shot, surely, that night or the next day. So it was useless, what I had done. That was a word Toussaint put into my head,
useless
. But it happened that they did live longer, at least for a little while.

When I heard that the
colons
in Le Cap had turned away the messengers and spat on the paper where the two-faced words of Jean-François and Biassou were written without even letting the words begin to speak, I was ready to start killing the whitepeople again. I chased down to where they were holding them, with all the rest of us, and I would have torn them into pieces and scattered their arms and legs across the ground. I was ready to kill like Biassou, though that was
useless
also, because the two-faced words of that paper would have freed Biassou but not Riau. Then Toussaint came and stopped the killing before it could begin.

It is not true that Toussaint loved whitemen, not so much as people sometimes said he did, at least not always. But he would never kill without a use in it. Almost never.

It happened that Biassou had run out calling for the death of the whitemen before Deprés and Raynal had finished all they had to say. Toussaint stayed back and heard them through. He heard that the two-faced paper had grinned and whispered to the commissioners who had come from oversea and now these commissioners wanted to make a meeting with our leaders.

So it was done. Toussaint calmed Biassou by telling him this thing, so he did not talk anymore of killing the prisoners for that time. Still Biassou would not go to the meeting, but Toussaint went, and Jean-François, and I, Riau, went riding with them. There were not so many of us going, even though we were expecting soldiers to be there.

The meeting was to happen at Saint Michel plantation, and this is where we were riding to. Some of the fields around this place were burned but as we rode nearer to the
grand’case
there was still some cane standing in the fields. The cane looked like maybe they had been working it, even, though I didn’t see anyone working then. We came along the road that went between the whole cane field and one that had been burned, and so we came to the other road that led to the
grand’case
. This was a long straight
allée
with tall palm trees planted on either side, many times the height of a man, with coconuts growing at their tall bushy tops. Looking down to the end of this road, we saw the
grand’case
was still standing too.

We pulled up our horses there, and Toussaint spoke to Jean-François, a little apart from the rest of us. Then Toussaint spoke to me and told me to go riding around the fields to see whatever I could see of the main compound, while they stayed there to let the horses rest in the shade of the palm
allée
. I kept riding around the cane field path. I had my good sorrel horse to ride on.

The cane was so high that I could see no more than the rooftops but when I had come around behind the buildings on the side where the little slave
cases
stood, the road climbed up on top of a bank above the cane. From this place I could look over the tops of the cane leaves and see into the main compound.

There were soldiers there like we had thought, but not so many, not so many more than we. Most of them were the walking soldiers, I saw only a few horses tethered in the yard behind the
grand’case
, where the soldiers were standing. They had not as many horse soldiers as we, I thought. I rode back then, to meet the others in the palm
allée
. The soldiers must have seen me too, because it was all open country. But they did not stir or shoot a gun, or give any other sign.

I told Toussaint what I had seen, that these whitemen were not strong enough to frighten us. Then all of us who had come rode down to the end of the palm
allée
until we had come to the place where there was a garden in front of the
grand’case
. It was a garden of flowers arranged in a design with paths in between and in the center there was a fountain, though the fountain was not running anymore, and the flowers were dying and grown over with weeds. There where the
allée
opened onto the garden, all us waited with our horses, and only Toussaint and Jean-François and two others went ahead. But we were near enough to see everything that happened.

Some whitemen,
colons
and the ones who came from oversea, were sitting on the gallery of the house. Toussaint and Jean-François got down from their horses and began walking toward them through the path of the garden, but before they could get there, another whiteman came riding out from behind the house where the soldiers were waiting. He was not a soldier, but a
colon
, and he was shouting before he had come near them, and he had a whip in his hand. He rode the horse across the flowers that were still living there, and when he came near enough he began cursing Jean-François and beating him with the whip.

I don’t think this whiteman knew who he meant to beat. He picked Jean-François because he wore his fine uniform with the ribbons and coins pinned to it, while Toussaint still wore only his old green coachman’s coat. The whiteman never called the name of Jean-François while he was beating him, but we knew his name. This whiteman was Bullet, who had been Jeannot’s master. Those were famous names for cruelty, Bullet, Le Jeune, Arnaud. Bullet made Jeannot from nothing. Without Bullet, Jeannot could never have been all that he was, and he learned many of his torture tricks from Bullet, though also he had ideas of his own.

Jean-François did not draw his sword to defend himself from the whip, or take his pistol and shoot Bullet down from his horse. He only covered up his face against the whip and came staggering back to his own horse and climbed into the saddle. Then he and Toussaint and the other two came riding back to us. We would have all of us gone away then, except for a strange thing that happened.

Some soldiers came out and caught the bridle of Bullet’s horse, and began leading him away. Bullet swore at them and for a moment he looked like he would strike them with his whip, but these were not militiamen, they were soldiers coming from France, and I think these soldiers would have shot him if he used the whip. Bullet must have thought so too, because he let them lead the horse around behind the
grand’case
, him still sitting on it with his whip hand hanging down.

When Bullet had gone, we saw that a little man had come down from the gallery and was coming toward us, on foot and all alone. We could see from the clothes he wore that he was not a
colon
, but that he must have come from oversea. Also he was not carrying any weapon when he came into the palm
allée
. Two of our men pointed their pistols at him, but he did not stop or even slow his step until he had come near enough to speak to us without raising his voice. So then we saw that he was not afraid to trust us.

He told us that his name was Saint-Léger and that the King In France had sent him on Commission. He said that he was sorry for what Bullet had done, that no one had known that he was going to do it, and that Bullet had been taken away and would not be let to come near us anymore. He said that he wanted peace and that if the generals Jean-François and Biassou would talk with him, he would make a peace between them and the
colons
of the Assembly.

Jean-François had had his fine uniform coat torn across the shoulders by Bullet’s whip. Some of the coins pinned on his chest had been whipped away, and one of the ribbons hung loose at one end. He got off his horse and knelt down at the feet of Saint-Léger.

When I saw him do this I thought of something strange. I thought how Jean-François would sometimes sell slaves himself from out of the camps over to the Spanish. He claimed that those were criminals, troublemakers,
mauvais sujets
, but it was not true of all of them. Sometimes women and children were sold, and how could a child be a
mauvais sujet?
He sold them for the money he could get, the same way a whiteman would do. Biassou had done the same, along with making
zombis
.