All Souls' Rising (5 page)

I was dancing in a wave, rising and falling. I did not need to move my body anymore because the wave moved it all of itself in time to the changes of the drum. The wave came up over my head and then went down and then again. I could still hear Ogûn’s song although no one was singing it out loud any longer.

Ogûn travay-o

Ogûn pa mâjé

Yé o swa Feraille dòmi sâ supé
…

Ghede stood before me, watching. His lips were thin and his eyes were glassy and wide so there was a white line all around the balls of them. Ghede put his head on one side and then on the other. I could not hear what he was saying because I was shrinking far away. Riau was shrinking, shrinking far away. He felt the pushing in his head as Ogûn pushed out his
ti-bon-ange
to make space in the head to put himself. The drum changed and the wave closed over Riau’s head and Riau was gone and there was Ogûn.

Ogûn Feraille! Ogûn turned his back on Ghede. Ogûn took up a cane knife and swung it in circles around his head as he walked around the
poteau mitan
. He put the cane knife down into the middle of the fire and left it there to burn with heat. The sun had struck into the edge of the sea and was sinking in a blood-stained mist. The edge of the cane knife was glowing red hot when Ogûn took it from the fire and kissed it with his lips. Ogûn touched the knife with his tongue. The hot iron had no power to burn him. Ogûn Feraille! He took the shining cane knife and stabbed it into the wet dirt of the dying spring. The hot blade sizzled and went dark and Ogûn cried out in a loud voice that he was hungry too and that his hunger was greater than the hunger of Ghede.

O
N THE NEXT DAY
Riau was tired. The muscles in his arms and legs felt stretched and rubbery, as if he had been swimming a very long way against a very strong current. Merbillay put a piece of mango on a leaf down beside him and went away without saying anything. Riau ate a little of the mango, chewing the pulp a long time. It seemed hard for him to swallow it.

Riau saw his cane knife sticking out of the dead spring and went and picked it up. For a long time he sat with it on his knees. The heat had made a rippling pattern on the surface of the metal and there was a white ashy dusting where the blade joined the hilt. When someone called to him, Riau got up and put the cane knife into his waistband and began helping the rest of us get ready to leave. We had decided to go away from the mountain all together, and Riau was coming too although for the moment it seemed to make little difference to him whether we had decided to go or remain.

We cooked the meal into flat cakes and ate the fruit that we could gather. For two days there was no spring or stream and we got water by cutting vines and draining them. We did not go so very fast because Ti-Jeanne was always lagging. There were two children who could go as fast as anyone, and one boy named Epi who was too small, and so we took turns carrying him. When I had him on my shoulders he held on to one of my ears and said
Riau, Riau
, whispering it over. By then I had returned all the way from Ogûn and I was once more I. On the sixth day we found the small stream called Petit Ruban that runs out of the ravine onto the plain and turns at the edge of the cane fields at Habitation Arnaud.

Then we all hid ourselves behind the rocks because a whiteman on a horse was crossing the stream. He was on the way to Habitation Arnaud but he did not know it. It was plain from the way he looked about himself that he did not know where he was at all. The horse was tired and walked with its head low. Jean-Pic wanted to follow and pull the whiteman down from the horse, but Achille said that it was not wise. There was no powder for his gun and he did not know whether the whiteman had a gun in his saddlebags. Jean-Pic said that he could take the whiteman so quickly and quietly that whatever might be in his saddlebags would be of no use to him but only to us. Achille said that if he failed he would bring out the
maréchaussée
, or perhaps even if he succeeded, for someone might be expecting the whiteman to arrive somewhere. If we were hunted through the low country not all of us would get away.

The whiteman went riding away down the road and instead of following we turned with the stream and went along the edge of the outermost cane piece, which was bordered by a thicket of orange trees. The stream was low but it was still running and the oranges were ripening there. We all picked and ate a few. Achille made Merbillay go back to pick up some peelings she had dropped. The hedge kept us from sight of the field but when we had gone a little way farther we could hear the voice of the
commandeur
crying out harshly.

We sat down quietly then and waited until the
commandeur
had gone by on the other side of the hedge and away into another part of the cane piece. We could still hear the sound of the cane knives cutting not very far away. There was a low gap in the hedge that a dog might have been using, and Jean-Pic and I crawled through. I did not like to be in a cane field again. The cane was very dry, too dry, and the long leaves were brittle when I touched them.

Jean-Pic put his hand on my arm to make me be still and he parted the cane leaves to look through. On the other side a man was bent over working. There were old scars on his back from the
commandeur
’s whip and a fresh stripe which might have been from that same day. His head was in a tin cage with four foot-long spikes sticking out on the four sides of it, closed on the back of his neck with a rivet. He put down his knife and went down the row to where a woman was working with a calabash of water beside her. When he lifted the calabash we saw that he could not drink because there was a mesh gate over his mouth, locked by a key. He wet a rag and worked an end of it through the mesh and stretched out his lips and tongue to suck on it. Then he put down the gourd and came back to the place where he had been working.

“
Ho, gâso brav
,” Jean-Pic said, speaking in a whisper that carried like a breeze. The slave jerked his head to the side and the spike in the front of the cage rattled among the leaves. His eyes found Jean-Pic on the other side of the row of cane.

“Be still,” Jean-Pic said. “What happened to you, did you run?”

“No,” the slave said. “I ate. They caught me chewing cane in the field.”

“Ah,” Jean-Pic said. “I don’t hear anyone singing in this cane piece.”

“You won’t hear anyone singing today,” the slave said. “The
commandeur
may wear out his whip hand but no one is going to sing today.”

“Why?” said Jean-Pic.

“He is killing a woman today.”

“Arnaud?”

“Himself,” the slave said.

“And what is it he is killing her for?”

“She is an Ibo,” the slave said. “Bought eight months ago, out of Le Cap. Last night she delivered herself of a son.”

“Does he kill for that here?” Jean-Pic said.

“The child is dead already.” The slave licked his lips and the underside of his tongue brushed over the metal mesh. “The woman is probably not dead yet.”

“Ah, so that’s how it is,” Jean-Pic said. He asked another question and the slave began to tell him how they planned to meet at night and dance the
petro
dances. But I was not much listening any longer. Though I understood now how it must have been with the woman and the baby, I was not thinking of that either, but I was remembering those many years when I myself had been dead to life.

T
HAT NIGHT
there was a big calenda with food and plenty of clairin. I danced, but Ogûn did not come to me. In the dark outside the circle of the fires I lay with Merbillay, then slept. At dawn I woke when Merbillay slept on, and nearby Achille lay on his back with his arms thrown out and snored. Ghede had carried him all the way into the dark. I got up and walked down toward the grand’case all alone, to the edge of the stable yard where the cabins of the house slaves were. It was in my head that there might be things to take from here, salt or sugar or even gunpowder, but also I was a little afraid to go among these cabins because the house slaves would know me for a stranger. Also I could hear a dog somewhere close by, barking in a loud deep voice.

While I was thinking there at the yard’s edge the horseman we had seen on the road the day before came out of the barn leading his horse. As he was mounting I heard the dog stop barking and then the dog was charging and leaping at the horseman, not barking anymore because this dog was trained to kill in silence. I never saw the horseman shoot, only the pistol pointed at the sky with the sharp powder smell smoking out of it, and the dog lying in the dust of the yard. I did not believe this whiteman had killed the dog of his own power, such a shot from the back of a bucking horse—it was the work of a
loup-garou
. The dog’s big paws were kicking the dirt and his jaws were snapping and he still wanted to get up and kill the horseman. It was the only thing he wanted. The house slaves had come out and stood near the dog, though not too near. The horseman had gone. Then I went away myself and ran into the cane field.

The hooves of the horse were still beating down the
allée
. I could not catch him up no matter how I ran, but I knew where the road turned alongside the cane field, and I thought that I might meet the horseman there, if he chose to ride back the way he had come. I went running through the cane field with the broad leaves stroking along my back, crossways toward the orange hedge at the far corner. Then I ran into an irrigation ditch and fell and bruised my arm against a stone. When I got up again my arm was numb because my elbow had struck, and I saw that the horseman had turned and was still going at a canter, so that I would never reach him.

But they were coming into the bottom of the cane piece now, and I heard the voice of the
commandeur
calling “
Chantez! Chantez!
” Silence, and the whip’s braid uncurled through it and snapped, and snapped again at the end of a long uncoiling. I heard one voice take up a weary song and then another, I could not make out the words. I got up out of the irrigation ditch and shook myself and began to hurry out of the cane piece.

When I came near the orange hedge I could hear harness jingling and the creak of the wheels of a coach. I hid myself behind the trees and bent down a branch. The horseman had stopped to ask his way and I could see him, sitting his horse, who was still nervous, shifting and turning, like his hooves were on coals. The rider sat well, but he didn’t try to stop the horse from shying. He was a small man, with small neat hands, pale on the reins. He had taken off his hat and I could see that he was balding, the top of his head round as an egg, but speckled and peeling from sunburn. His beard was rust brown and clipped to a short point. I didn’t know why I had wanted to see him again, to see him nearer and remember him. There was nothing strange to see him near. What power he had came from his pistol, I thought then, but inside my head I saw the flash and saw the dog drop, still. I didn’t know. He had put the pistol away out of sight.

When the coachman spoke I was so amazed to hear that voice that I almost gasped out loud. Though after all it was not so far from Haut du Cap. I moved a step or two along the hedgerow to a wider gap and saw him then, sitting on the box. His coachman’s dress: the worn green coat with the brass buttons, and ribbons at his knees. His feet were bare. Both his hands were on the reins and the whip was in the stand. Toussaint had never whipped a horse or needed to.

From inside the coach Bayon de Libertat said something in a thin silvery voice. The horseman bowed from the saddle and replaced his hat and rode by. Toussaint gave the reins a shake and the coach began to creak and jingle along the road. There was white dust, I saw, on the shoulders of his coat.

The slaves had fanned out into the field and I could hear them weakly singing, some not far from me. These were not the songs of the night before, during the
petro
dances. The slaves were weary, and unwilling. It was a misery to hear them. I crawled through the orange hedge into the road and began to run again, around the three corners of the cane piece and back toward the stable yard. The sun had come up out of the mountains and I felt naked in the bare new light. The coach was standing in the stable yard as I had hoped, and he had already unhitched the horses. Of course there was nowhere to go on this road except for Habitation Arnaud.

Someone had carried the dead dog away, and there was a ragged stain where his blood was darkening on the dirt. People were going back and forth on different errands between the cabins and the
grand’case
, and I waited for them to stop, but the yard was never empty. At last I stepped out into the yard and began walking toward the barn. A chicken ran squawking from under my feet, and I was afraid then. A woman in a long checked dress looked at me curiously but she said nothing. Then I came under the high lintel of the barn door and into the shadows of the hall.