The Binding (34 page)

He flipped open the first page.
Printed by the Grotto Press, Northampton, Mass., 1929.
There was an introduction by a Smith College professor of anthropology.

“What is it?”

“A journal. One of Markham’s soldiers kept a diary of the . . . events.”

Nat rubbed his fingers across the cover. “Let me ask you something else.”

Atkins stood there, and Nat could feel the man tensed, expectant.
He wants the interview over. He wants to get away from me.
“What was this place?”

Atkins started. “What do you mean, this place?”

“The museum. Before it was a museum.”

Atkins’s lips curled into a fearful snarl. “Why, it was the old courthouse, of course. I said the trial was held
here
. There’s a picture of the whole thing—”

“I saw it. I thought you meant the trial was held in Northam. You mean Markham was convicted and sentenced here, in this building?”

Atkins nodded.

Nat closed his eyes. That was why Becca had come here. Stared at the little building with such hatred. Because the traveler’s first host had been hanged in this place—after the traveler escaped to another. And the men of the squadron were in the crowd with all their relatives. Atkins was staring at the book with distaste. His peeled-grape eyes swung up to meet Nat’s. “Just bring the damn thing back when you’re done.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Excerpts from the Journal of Sergeant Nicholas Godwin, United States Marine Corps, Expedition to Haiti.

Port-au-Prince, September 26, 1919: Rain this morning, letting up just after eleven. The heat has become a constant presence after two weeks in this country, and one finally begins to get used to it. Private Bailey said that during the first few days, he felt he was going to choke because there was nowhere to get cool. No rivers to jump into, like back home, no promise of relief at night. We have been issued with tropical khakis, which keep our skin covered from the punishing sun but must be washed frequently to avoid smelling and infestation with the native bugs. We will have to have a laundry day in one of the local rivers soon, if we can find a clean one; we must risk the banana spiders and the tarantulas, which can grow to the size of footballs. As it is now, there is no need for the
cacos
to post sentries. You can smell us from thirty yards distant, if you don’t hear us tramping along the country roads.

The men arrived in good spirits to the harbor here. But the Corps has been in Haiti for four years and the population has clearly had its fill of the occupation. We heard stories back in the barracks of the Haitians welcoming the first Marines with bottles of rum and dancing. That, clearly, is all over. The looks we get on the road range from the stone-faced to the malevolent. We will have to watch ourselves closely, although the Haitians know that any attack on an American soldier will end only in death.

The hardtack sent from Florida appears to have been infested with maggots. Private Prescott discovered them while dunking the offending biscuits in his coffee this morning. We went through our supply and found two more infested. Captain Markham stares at us and tells us, eat the hardtack or go foraging. The men do not consider this an adequate answer. We’ve tried drying some in the sun, but what the Haitians don’t steal becomes as hard as New Hampshire granite. We will have to requisition another supply when we reach Gonaïves.

At least we’ve been given a mission, as of yesterday morning. The task of locating a
caco
leader, Bule Alexandre, a politician of some sort who has turned against our presence here and gone rebel, is our assignment. Captain Markham gave us a talk this morning that was notable for its bluntness: “Get Bule is our mission. Get Bule is our only mission. Don’t bother me with anything else, any nonsense from the Haitians or requests for food or water. We will get Bule or die trying. Is that understood?”

Captain Markham is neither popular nor unpopular among the men as of now. We are all, of course, from Northam and its vicinity and knew of each other growing up, though Markham grew up several miles from us, which in our parish of Massachusetts is equivalent to half a county. We didn’t know him well. He was assigned to us just before we sailed from Baltimore, after the death of our beloved Captain Croton from dysentery. Markham is certainly ambitious, as we all discovered rather quickly, and Haiti has clearly become his path to advancement. With no wars to fight, it is missions like this that will make one’s career in the Corps. I can’t expect that to motivate our regular soldiers, who would just as soon sunbathe on the canal banks and shoot the occasional miscreant for target practice, but they will be driven forward.

September 27th: We are headed north toward the last known sighting of Bule in the city of Saint-Marc. As we tramped from village to village today along the cow paths—Haitians do not seem to know the meaning of paved roads, despite the “corvée” law, which states that they must all contribute labor to building them—we are met with blank faces. Our interpreter, Joseph, asks at every crossroad and every market town what the latest is on Bule. The name brings terrified looks; the women often suck their teeth in dismay. And yet the Haitians profess no knowledge of this man. They are pathetic creatures, dressed mostly in oily homespun outfits that look like muslin. They have a smell, different from ours. They smell like the earth.

Captain Markham is growing frustrated and has instructed Joseph to let our hosts know that anyone found hiding Bule will be treated with the utmost harshness.

September 28th, evening. We are camped at a town near La Chapelle, a regular hotbed of
caco
activity, according to Joseph. The stares in the village are perhaps a bit harder than on the road here. Otherwise everything is the same: the same dusty roads, the same hordes of black faces attending our every move, the same smell of burning sugarcane and cow manure. One gets the impression along these roads that the occupation is faring badly. We see scrawled messages in which the name Rosalvo Bobo, no friend to the Americans, is prominent. The poor hate us for the corvée laws; the rich hate us for stealing away the fat they skimmed from public works. The middle classes, generally speaking, do not exist.

And as for Bule? The same responses.
Non. Non, monsieur. Mwen pa konnen nonm sa a.
I must take care not to learn their massacred French here or I will be laughed at back in Northam when trying it out on Mrs. Futter, our neighbor who spent many years on the Left Bank.

Weather is changeable, rain in the morning, burning hot by noon. My skin is turning the color of my father’s good saddle. Private Ford’s heatstroke seems to be better; in any case, Markham orders him to march.

The men are grumbling. They want to return to Port-au-Prince. Being out in the bush has separated us from the basic conveniences of life. We have not had letters from home since our arrival; the hardtack continues to house grub worms, and the local fare is nothing to be desired.

At dusk, we witnessed something interesting to all of us. We were coming up on a village—you can smell their cooking fires along the path before you come into the clearings—and heard what seemed to be rifle shots. A flat crack, then another. We all crouched immediately on hearing these reports, and Markham, in the lead, waved his arm to get us off the path and into the scrub trees that line the roads—gnarled nightmare things. We spaced ourselves appropriately; then on Markham’s whistle (I could no longer see him), we advanced on the village, whose name I never learned.

From the fringe of the tree line, we saw what was making the sounds. A man with a whip—off-white, not a bullwhip surely—was prancing around and snapping it on the ground. It sounded like a pistol shot or a red penny firecracker on the Fourth of July. The villagers hadn’t seen us or, believe it or not, smelled us. They were entranced by what was happening. (I saw a few bottles of rum being passed as well.) Markham, fascinated, held his finger to his lips and so we watched.

A man was apparently being “possessed.” He was a tall, stocky, well-built young buck in a red shirt and brown half-pants, his feet bare. His face was covered with tan-colored dirt—later I assessed from rolling on the ground. A good fire was burning in the middle of the village, and the man was falling, rolling, turning, almost pitching into the flames, circling around it, before one or another of the villagers would pull him away with a yell. He seemed quite oblivious to his own well-being and jerked and twisted in the most remarkable fashion. The fire drew him like the proverbial moth.

“Saw a puppet show once,” Private McIlhane whispered in my ear. “Damned if it didn’t look just like that.”

I quieted him, but my thoughts ran along the same lines. The man was being twitched hither and thither as if by an invisible hand. There was a woman watching, and I thought I saw her lips move once or twice, just as the poor puppet snapped his back and cried out.

Crack went the whip. The rum was passed and chugged. And the man went deeper into his frenzy.

For a moment, a chill ran right down my back. He was being pushed and pulled, babbling desperately as if he wanted to escape, as if he wanted relief from something. We craned our necks and peered from the tree line as the sparks flew from the fire from him brushing against the burning logs. Private Dyer whispered, “Wouldn’t mind some of that liquor—” but Markham cut him off with an angry hiss.

It became clear that the woman I mentioned, her clothes a little better than the others, was the mistress of ceremonies. The bewitched man would come to her and clutch his hands, babbling, and she would wipe his forehead with a cloth and whisper to him. We’d been warned about
voudoun,
but here it was, in the flesh, and here was its apparent master. A village woman, of all things.

A little boy came wandering to the trees—going to relieve himself, perhaps—and we drew back. But it was too late. He spotted us and lit out like he was on fire. We came out of hiding and proceeded toward the assembly. One of the men tried to wave us off, screaming something, I would guess, about this being a religious ceremony, but Private Thayer clubbed him with the butt of his Springfield. There was a rush at us after that, but we leveled our rifles at the two dozen or so Haitians and they quieted down right smart. Except for one.

The man who was being “possessed” came at Private Ford with his eyes aflame and his babbling at a horrible volume. In his hand was a bottle, its end smashed on a rock, now dripping golden rum. Markham shot him at eight paces, but the man—so great was his intoxication with the
voudoun
spirit—walked through the bullet “as if it were flying dirt,” as Thayer said later. Bailey fired another shot with the man’s chest only two feet away from his bayonet, and the impact of this, a direct hit on the heart, sent a cascade of blood spurting to the ground and over Bailey’s khaki pants. Thayer was caught on the shoulder with a large dollop. The man sank to the ground and quivered there, like a speared rat. As he died, he spat out some words at us.

Joseph, our translator, claimed not to have understood the man’s last remark, but I suspect he was afraid to tell us the content.

The villagers were predictably outraged. They attacked us like a pack of wolves, darting forward only to shy away from the ends of our rifle barrels. The possessed man lay there, shaking and bleeding until finally he stopped. How he lived even ten seconds with his heart blown wide open I do not know.

Markham barked for us to take the woman into one of the houses. Thayer and Bailey grabbed her. She didn’t resist, only looked on us with contempt.

“What are you going to do?” I asked Markham.

Markham usually brooked no questioning, but he was pleased with himself, I guess, so he deigned to answer this time. “She’s the chief of these savages. I’m going to sweat her.”

You could see he was taken with the whole thing. Markham has been asking villagers about the
voudoun
since we got here. He is beginning to believe that we are being practiced upon, that somehow the Haitians are disguising Bule by casting spells on us.

After Markham went into the house, it wasn’t long after that we heard screams. Female screams, of course. The villagers were on the edge of the fire, and their eyes were wide. They were crying out, scuttling around and hugging each other. I dreaded the arrival of the dead man’s family, for we would have had a hard time with them, but they never showed. I kept an eye on the body as the screams from the house continued.