All Souls' Rising (56 page)

“
Maîtresse?
Oh!” She sank to the floor and gazed at Sophie. “Look at the child.” Zabeth winked, then wrinkled her nose like a rabbit, while Sophie put her finger in her mouth and smiled around it.

Elise sat down on the edge of the bed and began dragging at the heels of her riding boots. Immmediately Zabeth moved to help her. As the the second boot sucked off, Elise gasped with the pleasure of relief. “Oh, Zabeth,” she said. “I’m glad to see you.”

Zabeth smiled up at her with real good cheer, her fine teeth bright in her full, pleasant face. Elise saw that her own feeling was genuinely reciprocated.

“And my brother?” Elise said. “I had heard that he was here…”

“
Maîtresse
, he would be desolated to have missed you—he has gone on an errand of business to Le Cap.”

“And will return?” Elise drew her legs up onto the bed, too weary to attend to Zabeth’s answer.

“Yes, of course, he will return, within the fortnight,” Zabeth said. “A bath,
maîtresse?
”

“Oh yes, a bath.” Elise stretched her back against the coverlet, half closing her eyes as she flexed her cramped toes. “A bath, with plenty of hot water.”

A
BOVE THE PROVISION GROUND
, Toussaint’s camp was flawlessly neat, free of debris, the ground hard-packed by movements of the men and horses. Tocquet and the two French officers dismounted outside the general’s tent. As they did so, a hand pulled back the tent flap, and Toussaint stepped out and straightened in their presence. Maillart was somewhat surprised to recognize the man—he remembered seeing him, inconspicuous among the other blacks who’d delivered Doctor Hébert and the other prisoners to Habitation Saint Michel—but he looked different now. In the uniform of a
maréchal de camp
he seemed much more imposing, though the cavalry sword suspended from his sash looked almost absurd against his short jockey’s legs. His posture was very straight, and he looked at Maillart and Vaublanc unblinkingly for a long time while Tocquet explained to him their reason for being there. The whites of his eyes were in fact somewhat yellow, with an amber, tobacco tint, like the eyes of many aging Negroes. Still, something in his look seemed to hold the captain in thrall, so that when Toussaint spoke he saw his lips move but did not hear a word of what he said.

Another black, in a captain’s uniform, held up the tent flap, and Toussaint and Tocquet went in. Automatically, Maillart made to follow, but the black captain barred his way.

Tocquet looked back from the gloom of the tent’s interior. “No, no, he’ll see you later,” he said. “After he’s done with me.”

Vaublanc smirked, then turned three-quarters away from Maillart and stared at the ground. Across the beaten earth from them, a mule hitched to a gun caisson lifted its tail and defecated. Immediately a man ran out from behind the general’s tent and spaded up the steaming dung and carried it down to scatter on the potato vines in the provision ground.

There was a drumbeat, not the drums of
vodûn
, but a regular French military snare. A division of men was drilling to the beat, the officer called Moise commanding them. Some few of these black infantrymen wore complete Spanish outfits, while most were as irregularly garbed as militia. An effort had been made to give them a more uniform appearance with a standard issue of belts, slings and cartridge boxes. Certainly their weapons, short smooth-bore muskets each fixed with a bayonet, were standard, and most of them seemed quite familiar with their handling. Maillart saw that the commanding officer had dispersed the green recruits in among the veterans, so that the inexperienced men could be supported, wherever they looked, by someone else who knew the drill. As it looked, there were many more green men than seasoned, but all in all there was much better order and discipline among them than Maillart could conceivably have anticipated.

The familiarity of the drumbeat lulled him into a sort of daze. He was much wearier from their traveling than he’d known, he was swaying, whirling on his rubber legs…When Tocquet tapped him on the shoulder, he started fully awake.

“He’s ready for you now.” All traces of the intimacy that had grown among them in the mountains was now gone from Tocquet’s smooth and neutral tone.

Maillart lowered his head to pass under the tent flap. Within, no lamp was lit, only daylight straining through the canvas, so that Maillart, as he took the place indicated for him on a camp stool, thought that he could be seen much more clearly than he could see. Toussaint sat on a similar camp stool, a wooden lap desk balanced on his knees. The black man in the captain’s uniform stood behind his chair.

“Your name, sir? Your rank in the French army? Which is your regiment?”

Maillart related these statistics. He had expected Toussaint’s searching look so he was surprised that it was withheld. Toussaint had turned his face sideways, seemed not to look at Maillart at all, seemed only to be listening. Above his seat, the face of the black captain was hawk-like, cruel; there was anger there but Maillart could not know if he was the object of it.

“Tell me, sir, why you are out of uniform.”

Maillart told of their circumstances. He had launched an account of their discomfiting meeting with General Cabrera before it occurred to him that it was not strictly necessary for him to do so. What was there in the black general’s disposition that invited such extraneous confidences? Toussaint had taken off his hat, but his whole head was bound up in a madras cloth, triple knotted at the base of his skull, after the fashion affected by many slaves and by some wealthy planters. Against his crisp field uniform it made a strange impression. Toussaint asked him another question; Maillart replied. Each time, he told more than he must, and found himself, surprisingly, giving a full account of his relations with Laveaux, the expulsion of Desparbés, and the battle that had erupted between the mulattoes of the Sixth and the Regiment Le Cap.

The black captain had taken the desk from his general’s legs and begun making notes. Maillart kept talking, adding details—a strange fit of glossolalia. Toussaint gave no sign whether he had any prior knowledge of the events of which Maillart was informing him. When he did turn his full gaze on the captain, Maillart was startled by the full force of it. Emerging from the shadows of the tent, Toussaint’s eyes were more penetrating. They probed his face through to the bone, searching his features inch by inch, as if the black general thought to sculpt his portrait.

“Well, I am satisfied with you, captain,” Toussaint said at length. He stood up, and Maillart followed suit, clicking his heels.

“You will retain your former rank,” said Toussaint. “You will report directly to Major Moise.” He made a quarter-turn toward the black captain at his left. “Captain Riau will find you the suitable uniform—without mothholes, but with buttons.”

Maillart saluted. “Thank you, sir,” he said. He thought of permitting himself a smile, but Toussaint had remained wonderfully inexpressive.

“Since the troubles began,” said Toussaint, “We have learned much of European warfare.”

“I can well see that,” Maillart replied, somewhat impulsively.

“We have still much to learn.” Toussaint remained correct, unbending. “You will remain with Captain Riau. Captain Riau will make you familiar with your men. You will instruct Captain Riau in the arts of European war. Each of you will be a guide and teacher of the other. Do you understand?”

“
Oui, mon général
.”

This time, Toussaint returned Maillart’s salute. The captain was warm with a blush as he stepped out of the tent into the full day-light, so that Vaublanc looked at him oddly when they passed. Maillart had resolved, days before their arrival here, to treat Toussaint with complete military courtesies, but what confused him was that he had done so without thinking.

Twenty minutes later Captain Maillart, now arrayed in a good, newish uniform from Toussaint’s supply store, stood to stiff attention on the impromptu parade ground while Captain Riau, in a loud harsh voice, announced him to the troops. Now he could see them clearly, much more clearly. Perhaps three-quarters of them must have come straight out of Africa: Congos, Mandingues, Ibos and Senegalese…a year or five years since they would all have been fighting each other with bows and lances and clubs. Now, but for the masks of tribal scarification, the filed teeth, dyed locks and feathers braided in the hair, there was not so much in their bearing to distinguish them from the Creole blacks and the scattering of colored men.

He began to command them. They obeyed him readily, smartly enough, marching, wheeling, forming into squares, then columns—though it occurred to him that many probably could not comprehend his French. When they reversed direction from him, at his order, he saw on the backs of many the cicatrix lacings of ancient whippings. For all of that, their spines were stiff enough.

Beside him, Captain Riau stood in a posture of attention that somehow, weirdly, also seemed relaxed. Captain Maillart found him most inscrutable, though he also felt certain that his own least gestures were being very minutely observed. Maillart stared into the faces of the men arranged before him in a single line, their arms at rest. He seemed again to feel the doctor’s lips at his ear:
If a white man and a black man come together, what will you call their offspring?
The captain looked into the black and yellow faces with a curiosity he’d never felt before.
Is it something else or is it human?
Maillart was very weary; for a moment, the faces before him blurred and swam together. One face, one façade—this façade was Toussaint’s. His vision cleared. The face of this seedling army was Toussaint’s face, the one he chose to show—impossible that it could be so simply what it seemed.

Chapter Thirty-Four

W
HY IS IT THAT WHITEMEN BELIEVE THAT
only jesus could come back from the dead? All men could do it. All black men do. More paths than one lead back from the Island Below Sea. There is the
zombi astrale
and the
zombi cadavre
. Les Morts et les Mystères are also there. This thing that jesus did, to come back in the body, I, Riau, could do it too.

When the whitemen brought Riau from Guinée, that was the same as death. The ship was a big wooden graveyard for men and women of Guinée, and each with a space to lie no larger than those wooden boxes whitemen use for burying. That was the first time Riau must pass through death.

Now it was Captain Riau in the hills by Habitation Thibodet, drilling and marching and learning how to be a whiteman officer. There was this other whiteman captain Toussaint gave to me, wanting us each to be a
parrain
to the other, so that Riau would turn into a whiteman officer, and this other would learn the ways of the men of Guinée. Captain Maillart. He was not so bad a whiteman, and he taught to Captain Riau many new things about drilling and marching and all the special ways that whitemen know for fighting and killing each other. But at the end of the day when Captain Riau took off his uniform, I had to look at myself all over very carefully to be sure that my skin was not fading into white.

Now we were free black men, free soldiers, as Toussaint said, and also those Spanish generals had said so. But slaves were still there at Thibodet. Every day they went into the fields to work the cane and coffee. They went singing like slaves of a good master, like the slaves at Bréda used to sing. But when I watched them in the cane, I thought I saw
zombi cadavre
. Where was the
ti-bon-ange?
Where was the
gros-bon-ange?
No one is there in the head of a slave, only
cadavre
.

Then the little whiteman doctor went away. After all, he was not the master of this habitation, only something like a
gérant
, but the Thibodet slaves told to us that the master had died. Then, a few days after the doctor had gone, the Thibodet mistress came back from before, only she had then a new whiteman who was the gunrunner Tocquet, and had taken his name as whitepeople do. Now Tocquet was master of this
habitation
. The slaves of the fields were afraid of him at first. The little doctor was good to them, but Thibodet had whipped them all, so they waited, afraid Tocquet would whip.

Captain Riau knew this whiteman from another time, when he carried guns to us at our camps of Grande Rivière. Two black men were always with him then, Gros-jean and Bazau, and all three of them could live in the mountains like maroons. Tocquet was the strangest whiteman Riau had ever seen, and sometimes I thought he might not be a whiteman at all, but some strange pale kind of
homme de couleur
, only other whitemen treated him like one of them always. At this Habitation Thibodet, Tocquet lived in the
grand’case
with the white madame, but Gros-jean and Bazau built themselves new cabins in the quarters. Toussaint sent a detail of our free black soldiers to help them build it.

Tocquet and his white madame were very friendly with Toussaint, and often they asked him to eat at their table in the
grand’case
. Sometimes Captain Riau, or Moise or Dessalines would go with him to eat from this table, always dressed in a fresh washed uniform with the buttons newly polished and bright. Sometimes Captain Maillart went too, or the other whiteman officer Vaublanc. Around this whiteman’s table would be what they called conversation, and we ate the same as they. But sometimes Riau began to think that this friendship of Tocquet for Toussaint was like the friendship Bayon de Libertat had for his good
commandeur
.

Then also Toussant began to send details of soldiers into the fields for Tocquet. Not every day, but when the work was big—digging to plant new cane, or helping to repair the cane mill. I, Riau, went to direct them like a
commandeur
myself, still wearing my uniform of captain, but the men took off their uniforms if they had them, so when I saw them working I could not know them from the slaves of Thibodet. This seemed very bad to me. None of the Thibodet slaves wanted to run away then, because here was food enough and no whippings, and we soldiers kept them safer than any place they knew to run. No, all of them were singing there, that time. But if any had tried to run away, I thought Toussaint would send us after them to bring them back, the same like we were with the
maréchaussée
.

We did not have any drums in our camp except for drilling or any dances for the
loa
. Only prayers to jesus, even though we had no whiteman priest this time. Toussaint would make the prayers himself. The Père Sulpice was so happy with what he said to jesus in San Raphael that he had given Toussaint a rosary, without any skulls or jesus faces, only plain wood beads, and Toussaint knew how to count his prayers with this. Still in the night I did hear drumming from the mountains, where was the camp of Biassou.

In the night I was sleeping in my tent but my dream was in the fields of Thibodet. My
ti-bon-ange
went walking in my dream to see for me how things were there. The slaves were in the fields to work at night as well as day, and all of them were dressed in white, and my
ti-bon-ange
saw how all of them were
zombi
. When I woke, I heard the drum and so I went to it.

There at Biassou’s
calenda
Riau was a long time dancing but Ogûn would not come into my head. The drum tried very hard to move me but I could not be moved, I was yet I, Captain Riau. So I gave it up, and put on my coat of officer again, which I had taken off to dance. I sat down with my back against a thorn tree. Ghede came walking to me then, all stiff-legged and turning his head like a snake. He had snaky eyes that looked at me, though he was mounted on the body of Jean-Pic. I had not known Jean-Pic had come again to the camp of Biassou.

“Give me bread,” Ghede said, but Riau had no bread to give to him. Ghede took hold of the uniform coat and rubbed the cloth with his stiff fingers.

“Give me BREAD,” said Ghede. “I am hungry—you must give me something.”

I put my hand into my pocket and brought out some coins that were there and offered them, but Ghede only laughed to see them.

“I cannot eat these metal pieces,” Ghede said. “I ask you
bread
.” With his stiff arm he struck my hand from underneath so that the coins went all scattering. Ghede laughed at me, and then I felt afraid of him.

“Would Ogûn come to a whiteman’s head?” Ghede was sneering at the uniform of Captain Riau. “No better will Ogûn come to you. Besides, you are a bad
serviteur
. It is too long since you have fed the
loa
.”

Ghede pushed me in my chest and I fell down against the tree. I watched Ghede go walking away to do his feasting in some other place. The coins were spilled all around me but I had no heart to pick them up, I did not want them anymore.

It went on long, this feeding of the
loa
. I sat by the tree, thinking I would be very tired on the next morning, when it was my time to do my work of officer, dancing with the Captain Maillart. But I did not go away. After a while, when Ghede had left the head of Jean-Pic, Jean-Pic noticed me and came to talk.

I asked him if he had gone to find the maroons of Bahoruco, as he had said he would do. Jean-Pic told me that he had done this, and it was very good there, better than even he had thought. He told me how they did things there, and how he was meaning to go back there, and he asked me if I would come with him. I pointed to my uniform and said I could not go. I told him how it was to be Captain Riau, what was the meaning of
désert
, and what would happen to an officer if he would desert. All the time Jean-Pic squatted by the tree, smiling and shaking his head slowly like he could not believe what I was telling. When I had done, he told me that no soldiers would ever reach those caves in Bahoruco.

Then Jean-Pic asked me about Merbillay, if she and Caco were with me in the camp of Toussaint. I told him that she was not there, because all the women and the children had been left behind in the mountains above San Raphael, we could not bring them with us to fight the whitemen in the whiteman way of fighting. Jean-Pic smiled and shook his head, like he did not believe that either.

Then Biassou passed by, walking slowly and making a small sound with his special
asson
. He looked at me, so I got up and followed him. Jean-Pic came too.

“
C’est l’heure
,” Biassou said, when we came in his tent. “Chacha has not gone to his
ajoupa
, but soon he will go.”

In Biassou’s tent there were all the things we had been making ready for the
coup poudré
. Long before we had put a toad into a box with a snake to make it angry, then we had killed the toad and dried it and ground it to a powder. We had cut out the insides of a puffer fish and dried them in the sun. We had taken graveyard dirt, and dust ground from the skulls saved from that place in Grande Rivière where Jeannot had liked to throw his bones. Now Biassou was mixing all these things together, while the strings of snakebones shivered from the ridgepole of the tent, and his cats watched from the corners with their strange-colored eyes. Biassou mixed everything together, and he also put in some
pois-gratter
and some pieces of broken glass.

When it was finished, Biassou put everything into a bag and gave it to me. He shook the
asson
lightly and stared into my face, his eyes as strange to me as those cats’ eyes. I felt a feeling then, even if Ogûn had not come. I did not feel my uniform so much.

Then Riau and Jean-Pic left the tent, Riau carrying the bag. It was true, Chacha had not come to his
ajoupa
yet. Jean-Pic waited outside while Riau went in. In the place where Chacha would lie down, Riau poured the powder to make the
vévé
of Baron Cimitière. As he was going out, Riau poured the powder in the shape of a cross on the place inside the door where Chacha must step.

Then we went a little way into the jungle to wait for Chacha to come back. It was not so long before he came. When he first stepped on the burrs inside the doorway, he said a whiteman’s curse and dropped down on the floor of the
ajoupa
. I thought he must be holding up his foot to feel what it was that had bitten him, and maybe he even rolled over onto his sleeping place then, so that the
vévé
touched him with its broken glass. Then Chacha stopped his cursing and gave an awful moan of fear, because I think he must have known then what had happened to him.

In a little while it was silent there, and so we went away. I felt strange to myself all the time going back to Toussaint’s camp, and strange all the next day while I was doing my soldier work. It was not the same as cutting someone with a knife, or shooting someone with a gun. It was not even the same as the things Riau had done in those first days when we were burning the plantations.

In the afternoon, Jean-Pic came to tell me that Chacha had died in the night, and that they had already buried him this day.

F
OR THREE MORE DAYS
I
DID MY WORK OF
C
APTAIN
, being
parrain
to Captain Maillart and he
parrain
to me, but I did not feel so much like a whiteman anymore then. Chacha was in the earth three days, the same as jesus. On the third night, Jean-Pic came for me, and I went back along with him to the camp of Biassou. I wore my uniform of captain and I took my two pistols with me, and the watch, but I did not take anything else with me, not even the
banza
.

Chacha was not buried very deep, about three feet. Then it did not take so long to dig him up. Riau dug while Jean-Pic held the torch, or I would hold it while Jean-Pic was digging. The torch was made from
gommier
wood and it burned very bright, with a sizzling sound. People from Biassou’s camp could see the light of it through the trees, but I think they were afraid to come there to see what we were doing.

Chacha’s eyes were open, under the ground, as the eyes of the dead must open if you do not weight the lids. His jaws were closed tight but the lips had pulled away from them, so that he gave a dead grin of a skull. Dirt was lying on the white part of his eyes, and the earth had stained his teeth. I saw that he was truly dead enough he could not blink the dirt out of his eyes.

But then Biassou came crouching over him, like Chacha used to crouch over the bodies of his women when he still lived. Biassou pried his jaw open with a spatula of bone, and pushed in a paste of dark shiny leaves that he had mashed together, and poured in a
tisane
the leaves had been boiled in. There was nothing, because Chacha was gone, there was only
corps-cadavre
, and the
tisane
ran back out of his jaws like a cup that is overflowing. As dead as that. But Biassou’s eyes were shining in the torchlight. He put his lips to Chacha’s lips and blew his breath in him. He pushed the paste in deeper with his piece of bone, and rubbed on Chacha’s throat and pushed his jaw so that it made the chewing movement.