Master of the Crossroads (38 page)

“You may call it kindness, all this education proffered him by his father, if of a strange variety. But it was not. No, there was a more sophisticated cruelty at the bottom of it, long in the planning and slow to bear its poisoned fruit. Choufleur learned the tastes and the prerogatives of
blancs
only so that he might more keenly feel his privation of them. Feel with the cut and burn of a whiplash how, although he had the desires and capabilities of a
blanc,
in reality he must always be only the puppet or servant of
blancs.
That his joys would always come only on sufferance of a master and that he himself had right to nothing, not even to his name.

“Now I must tell you how cunningly the father applied salt to the wounds of the son, once the moment was right. At the time of which I speak, Jean-Michel had lately entered his young manhood, while Nanon, whom you are seeking, was a girl of perhaps fifteen. Now, my son knew something of women already, as Maltrot had introduced him to brothels in the towns on the coast. But he knew nothing of love. Nonetheless, he had some capacity for love, as I saw when he and Nanon began to walk together.” Her voice caught slightly. “I may say that if they had been left to their own devices, you might be hearing a different story now, or more likely you would not be hearing it at all.”

“Permettez-moi,”
the doctor said, and raised the calabash. Madame Fortier held out her glass to be refilled.

“Thank you,” she said. “Useless to ponder what might have been. The reality of what occurred is that the Sieur de Maltrot had also observed the awakening of interest and affection between my son and the girl Nanon. Perhaps he had already taken note of her beauty, which was then in its first flower. So when the moment seemed most propitious to his purposes, he exercised his seigneurial right—also of course his right of property—to ravish the girl away from my son and make her his own concubine. He used her after his ordinary custom for some weeks at Vallière, very much in our presence though not absolutely before our eyes. Afterward he took her to Le Cap, where he established her as a
fille de joie,
and where one imagines that you, sir, must have first made her acquaintance.”

“It is true that we first met one another at Le Cap, Madame,” the doctor said.

Madame Fortier had put her head to one side and was looking at him curiously.

“I would argue that we came to one another freely,” the doctor said. “And that her choice in the encounter was still more powerful than my own. Though perhaps you would not believe me, and it may be that I am mistaken, too. But please continue—your story is more than interesting to me.”

“Ah,” said Madame Fortier, and turned her face to the starlit valley. “Well, having carried out these actions, Maltrot perceived that perhaps he had gone too far for his own security, and that Choufleur might murder him outright without regard for the consequence, which consequence would of course have been very dreadful. Whereupon he freed both me and my son. This step surprised both of us very much. You may know that it was the habit of many libidinous
blancs
to free their slave mistresses and their bastard progeny, often from the moment of their birth, but Maltrot had never given the least sign of any such intention. However, he did free us both. I went away with Fortier, but Maltrot sent Choufleur to France, there to further his education for two years at the expense of his father.”

Madame Fortier took up the snuffbox from her lap and turned it so that it glittered in the light. “Of all I loathed about that man,” she said, “I most detested his manner of taking snuff. For he always used it as a seasoning for some abomination he had devised, before or after, if not both. But he has taken his last pinch.” She opened her knees in a gesture that seemed almost lewd, letting the box fall back into the hollow of her skirts. “His precautions, canny as they were, were not sufficient.” She closed her thighs to hide the box, and rolled her weight toward the doctor. “Tell me, have you looked inside?” Her eyes shone on him strangely. “Do you know what it contains?”

The doctor swallowed. “The amputated sexual member, evidently mummified, of a human male.”

“Why, you are absolutely correct!” Madame Fortier snapped her knees apart so sharply that the tightening skirt fabric catapulted the box into the air. She reached to catch it in one hand and, laughing gaily as a girl, offered it to the doctor. “Your prize, sir, it is yours to keep—so far as I am concerned. My son, who returned from France a nicely finished article, presented it as a compliment to me. Tangible proof he had severed the organ that planted the seed of him in my womb. Oh, he lured his father into the mountains during the insurrections of ninety-one, and he had a whole roster of details to tell me of the revenge he took when once he’d trapped him there—but I would not hear it, and I would not accept the box. Though I am more than happy to know the man is dead. I might have predicted that my son would next offer the box with its contents as a sentimental keepsake to Nanon . . . though not that it would pass into your hands. I would not have predicted any part of you.”

“
Madame,
you flatter me.” The doctor felt the negligible weight of the snuffbox dragging his knuckles down to the back of his knee.

“Oh, I do not mean to. A delicate love offering, is it not?” said Madame Fortier. “Do you think my son a savage? You may be correct on that score also. But his is the savagery of a
blanc.
Oh, he is not yet done with killing his father, for the father lives on in his own blood, and owns him still.”

“I am sorry for your trouble,” the doctor said.

“Save your pity for yourself,” Madame Fortier said. “I have other sons, with Fortier, and I am free, though Choufleur is not.” She rose to her full, astonishing height, her skirts falling to her ankles. “For that young woman I do feel sympathy,” she said absently. “There was sorrow in her eyes when they were here—yes, they have been here, but I do not know where they have gone. To Le Cap or more likely to Vallière.”

“But Vallière is in the hands of the Spanish, or of Jean-François.”

“Oh, I do not think my son will be at risk. He knows Jean-François very well, and it is not so long since he was fighting on that side. You may yourself have difficulty in going to Vallière, but in any case, I advise you not to follow. I do not hate you,
blanc
—but what can this woman be to you save a piece of your property stolen by another? I fear that my son has come to regard her in much the same way. If you would be sensible, let her go.”

Madame Fortier swung and parted the curtain of reeds with one hand as if she would reenter the house. Then she walked back to stand over the doctor, reaching her right hand down to him. He took the hand, which was square-cut and seemed strong to him, though its fingers applied no pressure to his own.

“Bonne route, blanc,”
she said. “I wish you no harm, but I will not see you tomorrow.”

Madame Fortier was true to her word, though next morning a housemaid did appear to present the guests with a tray of coffee and a flat round of sugared cassava bread. The doctor’s head hammered from a surfeit of rum, and coffee seemed only to add the symptom of queasiness. His spirit was unquiet as well. But he and Riau saddled up and rode out before the sun had cleared the ridges of Morne à Chapelet. All day they labored to retrace their path to Dondon, stopping only for the doctor to harvest certain herbs for the composition of wound salves. And once he halted above a gurgling ravine to empty out the snuffbox over the rocks and the rushing water below. He had meant to toss the box itself away after its contents but at the last moment changed his mind and put it back empty into his pocket.

They rode on. By the time they rejoined Toussaint’s force, the doctor had sweated away all the effects of the rum and felt nothing but a dense fatigue, in which no vestige of a thought could form itself.

Next morning Toussaint’s army, divided into five columns, poured out of Dondon. The doctor, riding with Toussaint’s own column, was so situated as to have the long-range view of the other four lines of troops, wrapping themselves into the mountains above Grande Rivière. With the addition of the three columns which Villatte was supposed to have dispatched from the north, the entire attack would whip around the valley of Grande Rivière like the tentacles of an octopus.

But for the next several days the doctor was able only to confront what came immediately into his hands. With Toussaint’s vanguard he rode in the attack on Camp Flamen. The first fort barring their way to this camp was overrun with slight resistance. Toussaint paused long enough to learn that posts on the neighboring heights of the chain had been taken as easily by his other columns and sent an order to Dessalines to join him at Camp Flamen.

But here the defense was more determined, so the doctor was soon submerged in poulticing and bandaging or amputating hopelessly shattered limbs. The hideously scarred Guiaou, whose touch had a strange gentleness, as well as strength enough to hold a man still while the doctor sawed off his arm or leg, assisted him. Once the battle was over, Riau came to help him too, so that all three of them worked together, seamlessly, communicating by gesture more than speech. Camp Flamen fell to them that afternoon and Toussaint began a foray toward Cambion, but dropped back at nightfall because of ambushes.

The surgery went on through the night, and the doctor threw himself down to sleep just as Dessalines and Médor were marching their troops out for predawn attacks on Camp Roque and several other posts. An hour later Riau shook him awake and he clambered into the mule saddle (he had never found time to reclaim his horse) and rode with Toussaint’s column on the fort of Saint Malo. Here Toussaint subdivided his men again so as to attack from two directions, while his other columns reduced and burned a number of smaller surrounding posts: Cormine, Bense, Salenave, Dupuis. . . .

The doctor saw to the priming of his pistols and long gun, but Toussaint had no intention of risking his surgeon near the front line, and the campaign was so very well organized that the doctor had no need of his weapons, and soon forgot he was carrying them. He installed his surgery at Saint Malo and worked through the night again with his assistants, the howling of the wounded under his saw sometimes punctuated by gunfire and shouts from ambushes in the forests all around. Toussaint also stayed up the whole night through, receiving and sending reports and orders from the adjacent columns; occasionally he would fold his arms, inhale deeply and let his eyes roll back in his head for perhaps as long as forty-five seconds. When he exhaled and refocused his eyes, he would seem as lucid and refreshed as if he had slept for several hours.

The doctor stole another hour of sleep and jerked like an automaton back into the mule saddle. That day the columns marched closer together to support one another in case of ambush, but the doctor took the precaution to lash his knees to the saddle so that if he fell asleep, he would not fall off the mule.

They rode on for several days more, with the accompanying reduction of more camps and forts: Cardinau, Pistaud, Tannache, Ducasse. Toussaint was taking a great many prisoners, whom he dispatched along with his own wounded back to the security of Dondon. But the doctor remained near the fighting lines, dazedly carrying on his sawing and bandaging, a blood-soaked
zombi
carpenter of shredded flesh and bone. He seemed to slip in and out of awareness, a dark-feathered wing passing over his vision.

Sometimes the wing lifted on astonishing spectacles: the troops of Moyse climbing the cruel heights toward Fort Bamby, under constant cannonfire but so disciplined they never fired a shot in reply and never hesitated in their advance till they forced the wall and did in their opponents with fixed bayonets. On the heights all around, the camps of the enemy were burning, and then Riau came through the smoke of the fires to tell the doctor that soon indeed they would advance to Vallière, next day or the day after. At this the doctor’s heart quickened, as for almost the first time since the campaign began, his recollections of Nanon and Paul came fully through to him.

Next day Toussaint took his main force to the attack of Camp Charles-Sec, believing that Noël Arthaud, dispatched by Villatte, had cut the road to Vallière to prevent any reinforcement coming to the enemy. But in the midst of the fighting at Charles-Sec it was discovered that Arthaud had failed in this maneuver—the eighth tentacle had been severed or at least had missed its mark, for Jean-François rushed out from Vallière with twenty-five hundred men to join the battle. At risk of being surrounded himself, Toussaint cut his way out of the trap and withdrew behind the cordon he had now extended as far as Montagne Noire. Then, having secured the outlying posts, he took his exhausted army to Marmelade, where the men could rest and he would compose his report of the campaign to Laveaux.

“All the valley of Grande Rivière is ours,”
Toussaint claimed in the letter which Doctor Hébert, among others, helped to copy out fair.

But, in truth, the region had become a no-man’s-land which would be contested for many more weeks. The doctor hurled himself into fifteen solid hours of impenetrable pitch-black sleep, and finally woke to the dull apprehension that for his private purpose the campaign had been a failure—for the time being he had no hope at all of reaching Vallière.

17

Midmorning, Toussaint left Gonaives and rode, amid a half-dozen of his cavalry, toward the dry-bony mountains north of the town. But before beginning the scaly, lizard-backed ascent, he abruptly dismissed his escort and turned off toward Ennery. The other riders were puzzled, he could see—except for Riau, who straightaway suspected him of
marronage.
Toussaint smiled at the the thought of Riau’s lightly masked expression, and with a light pressure of his knee urged Bel Argent into a canter. It was flat and easy going here, and the white stallion could stretch his legs with small risk.

These sudden reversals of direction were common enough—a constant rupture of his pattern of movement, so that he always arrived without warning where he was least expected, so that his ways from crossroads to crossroads were unpredictable and unknown. But for months Toussaint had hardly gone anywhere unescorted; he must have a few of his best riders round him, trusted men who were gradually being shaped into a sort of personal guard of honor, as well as his surgeon, his secretaries . . . Well, let them wonder. He smiled again at the thought of Riau—as if he, the general Toussaint Louverture, would desert the army of thousands he had created.

He leaned forward in the saddle, the reins curling upward through his lightly closed hands, which hovered above the white mane of Bel Argent. A pleasant breeze stroked his face and pulled at the corners of his hat. Within the grip of his lean thighs, the muscles of the horse’s back flowed like water, a wave rolling ceaselessly forward without breaking. There was no need for any thought.

Such moments had become rare for him. Soon his mind began to work again. He reined in Bel Argent before the stallion could overheat himself, leaning forward to gently stroke the warm and slightly sweaty neck, and walked him slowly down the road. Already they had reached the gate of Habitation Thibodet, and Toussaint might have been tempted to enter to check on the progress of the cultivation and the status of the garrison there—but he did not. He would press on to Marmelade, which had been his original destination that morning, though he’d arrive there by a different route.

Beyond the gateposts, as the road began to rise, he turned from it and pressed the stallion up the steeper slopes toward the ridge, skirting the outermost coffee trees. He could hear the voices of women singing as they gathered the red berries—that was good—but he kept out of their sight behind a screen of trees, leaning still farther forward now as Bel Argent mounted the difficult grades. Then he felt himself brushed, along his right profile, by someone’s regard, and turned to lock eyes with that scarred one, he who had come out of the Savane Désolée with his tale of what had happened to the “Swiss.” An instant of recognition, and Toussaint was gone behind the trees, leaving the cultivated land altogether now, climbing around a thicket of bamboo. What was his name, that scarred one? Now he would report that he had seen the General Toussaint, passing in ghostly silence on the back of his white horse.

Or perhaps he would not speak of it. The name came to him: Guiaou. Toussaint remembered now that there was some trouble between him and Riau. Something to do with a woman, certainly . . . he did not exactly remember, but whatever it was had moved him to post Riau away from Ennery. Perhaps no more than an inkling . . . But Riau could not be too tightly constrained or he might bolt again altogether, or try to. Riau had several useful skills, and Toussaint did not want to be obliged to order him shot. Besides, he was fond of Riau, whom he’d adopted long ago when the boy was first brought out of Guinée as a
bossale
to Habitation Bréda. Of course, he had been
parrain
to many others in those days of slavery. And to be the General Toussaint Louverture was to be father of sorts to four or five or six thousand men.

He took off his general’s hat, as if it were to blame for the direction of his thoughts, and fastened it to his stirrup leather. The hat rode by his left knee, its red and white plumes flexing with the motion of the horse. Bel Argent, shoulders straining slightly, broke out of the bamboo onto the trail at the top of the ridge. The mountain air was distinctly cooler, and Toussaint’s headcloth, sweat-soaked under the hat, began to dry.

He was deep inside his own lines here, and safe as safe could possibly be, in this country at this time. He let the white stallion choose the pace: a brisk, spring-loaded walk. Today for the first time in many days, there was no particular reason for haste. And solitude was most welcome to him. His mind ran empty, clear and light. There was nothing, only a global awareness of the damp smells of the jungle, shifting of shadows and ticking of insects in the leaves.

But here was a new
bitasyon
sprung up since he had last passed this way. A new clutch of wattled cabins half completed, corn plantings spiraling among boulders up the hillside to his right. And there above him on the trail, a naked boy of three or four stood gaping down at him, slack-jawed, eyes as round and white as hens’ eggs, then plunged into the bush. Toussaint heard his voice calling to the others. He followed the curve of the trail around the clustered houses. A young woman in a blue headcloth stood watching him from a doorway as he went by. His mind began to work again. This too was
marronage,
this sprouting of villages and gardens all through the hills, as if the liberated people had indeed gone back to Guinée, or invented their own Africa, here and now. At this he felt a twinge, almost of envy. A creole born in Saint Domingue, Toussaint had never seen Guinée.

Again he thought of Riau’s wandering spirit . . . which was far from unique. Then the jungle closed behind the horse’s tail, and the voices of the children died away, and his thought left him. He rode on. No, he would not go to Marmelade today, though the town was easily within his range. He clucked to Bel Argent and turned him down from the road, crossing a narrow rivulet at the bottom of a shallow gorge, then climbing to strike the red groove of another trail beyond.

The cactus fence had grown taller around the small square
case,
but this time the two little dogs did not bark. One came to the door and sniffed the air, then turned around and lay down with its tail hanging over the sill. The old woman stood in the bare-earth yard, pounding a pestle taller than herself into a mortar hollowed from a stump.

“Bonsoir, grann,”
he said to her.

The old woman turned and bared her gums, her whole face wrinkling in pleasure, though she seemed unsurprised.

“Ou pa sezi,”
Toussaint remarked.

“It was my spirit who told me you might come.”

Toussaint nodded as he swung down from the saddle and moved to tether Bel Argent to a tree. No doubt the spirit which informed her of his arrival was the same spirit that had moved him to come. He took off the saddlebags and undid the buckles of the girth. The corners of his portable writing desk pressed his ribs through the leather as he carried his load toward the house. Notes for letters yet to be written, copies of letters already sent . . . but tonight he would not write, or dictate.

The dog got up whimpering as Toussaint stooped to lay his load within the sill. The tip of his long sword’s scabbard had dragged a trail in the dust from where his horse was tied. He unbuckled the sword and leaned the hilt against the outside wall.

“I will go and wash,” he said. The old woman nodded as she stooped to turn a golden mound of cornmeal out of the mortar onto a large clay dish.

Unbuttoning his coat, Toussaint walked around the plantings of yams and beans toward the tinkling sound of the spring. He laid his clothing and his pistols on a rock and waded into the spring-fed pool, watching his reflection disappear as it joined with his corporeal self: the slightly bowed legs and wiry arms and tightly knotted torso. The water was cold, clarifying; he could feel it in his back teeth. He went completely underneath the water. When he came up, snapping his head back with a gasp, he saw a gaggle of children assembled on the rocks, gazing at him and whispering.

The General Toussaint Louverture! The horse, the plumed hat, the big sword had conspired to give him away. In the beginning he had been invisible, a little leaf doctor in the service of Jean-François and Biassou, merely an old black man wandering the mountains with a sack of herbs, a simple
doktè-fey.
Then, the movement of his hand had been invisible, as his hands moved round him now, beneath the mirror surface of the water. He had that still, his secret hands, but now at the same time he must also be the General Toussaint Louverture with his uniform and insignia and big warhorse, at the head of his troops with his long sword flashing in the light. This, too, was necessary.

One of the bigger girls shoved a smaller boy down from a boulder; he yelped and slapped at her calf in protest. The children all scattered as Toussaint came out of the water. As he dried himself he thought of Brisbane—one Englishman who liked a fight, and who had been highly visible at long distances, in his red coat. The square line of his jaw, with the bulge of beef-eating muscle below each ear . . . though in fact Toussaint was imagining those details. If he had been close enough to Brisbane to see him so well, he would have killed him or made him prisoner.

Brisbane was dangerous. The other British commanders much preferred to keep their troops in the coast towns, where they would be safely away from the hazards of combat, though distinctly more vulnerable to dysentery and the various fevers, which Toussaint knew were now making terrible inroads among the garrisons at both Saint Marc and Port-au-Prince. Whitelocke and his other subordinates would rather have the colonial and
émigré
militias, such as the Chasseurs of Dessources, do their front-line fighting for them—troops which far from causing Toussaint any serious concern, furnished him rather with amusement. Brisbane was very much another matter, more than willing to commit his troops to battle on the open flats of the Artibonite, where Toussaint was somewhat hesitant to commit his own. He had triumphed over his English enemy with a spectacular cavalry charge at Grande Saline, but still the risk of such flourishes was greater than he liked. At the same time, he did not enjoy the thought of British troops establishing themselves in the mountains of the interior for long enough to acclimate themselves. A body of European soldiery which had developed immunity to the tropical illnesses and had also learned something about the terrain would be a more serious threat than he wanted to contend with, and Brisbane seemed more capable than anyone else of taking his men to that level . . . Wary of a full-scale engagement, Toussaint had been tiring Brisbane’s force with constant skirmishing all over the Artibonite plain, relying on swift and swerving movements and on superior knowledge of the countryside. Then Brisbane, conspicuous at the head of the British troops as Toussaint was at the head of his—Brisbane, according to the will of BonDyé (here Toussaint crossed himself, half consciously, as he walked back toward the old woman’s cabin), had been picked off by a sharpshooter, ambushed in fact, not far from the Artibonite dam. Not killed outright, but wounded so gravely that he was carried from the field. Since then, the British campaign in the Artibonite had stalled.

There was a hazard in visibility, Toussaint thought, to have made oneself remarkable . . . he respected Brisbane, though naturally he also hoped that he would die. Regaining the
case,
he sat down for a moment on the sill, nudging one of the feisty little dogs aside so as to open his saddlebag. He took out a clean yellow square of madras and tied it over his head. The smell from the cook fire was enticing. Of course, the old woman was not really his grandmother, though he addressed her so and trusted her as if she were. He had other such honorary
grann
scattered over the country in whose huts he would sometimes award himself a short period of seclusion—no one else quite knowing where he was. With the grandmothers he could also eat without stint or suspicion; theirs was the only food he fully trusted, save what came from the hands of his own wife.

He found some fodder for Bel Argent, then walked barefoot over the packed dirt to the rear of the
case
and stood inhaling the aromas. The old woman was stirring her iron cauldron while the girl chopped up wrinkled green and orange peppers on a chip of wood—she looked up and smiled shyly to greet him and then looked away. The wind rose up to lift the leaves, and it grew cooler as the clouds rolled in, but it did not really rain; only a few fat drops smacked down before the clouds passed over. They ate outside, crosslegged round the cook fire, using fresh, broad banana leaves as plates.
Maïs moulin:
cornmeal mush with beans and a little meat with its juices, raised to a high piquancy by the peppers.

They ate seriously and talked little. The old woman did ask after Moustique, though when Toussaint told her he had absconded from Delahaye’s care, she seemed to know about it already.

“Oui, li kouri nan tou morne isit,”
she said smiling with evident approval. “Li pale ak tou lespri sa yo epi ak BonDyé tou.”

Toussaint set his banana leaf aside and drew up his knees, responding to inner twinges of annoyance. The
marronage
of Moustique bothered him more than most, mainly because it embarrassed him before l’Abbé Delahaye. The idea of the boy—running all over these mountains, as the old woman had put it, talking with all the spirits of Africa and also with the Catholic God. He’d heard elsewhere that the boy had left the area and gone north in the direction of Le Cap, but who on earth knew where he might really be? Delahaye would be especially piqued to learn that his charge had carried his smattering of Catholic doctrine to the
hûnfors.

He emptied his mind by carefully combing out Bel Argent’s mane and tail and brushing the animal’s white coat till it gleamed obscurely in the light of the crescent moon. This had been his work at Bréda, so long ago, and it soothed him still, as it calmed the horse. But now this agreeable task was almost always done by others.