The Binding (37 page)

“That’s one good Haitian,” Markham said as he walked by.

Prescott and I continued immediately toward the back, to prevent Bule from hopping the wall back there. We saw faces in the windows, but mostly children. At the foot of the wall, I found another carbine. I had to assume there was another guard not mentioned by Joseph, but it was clear he’d climbed over the wall and made his escape.

“Bule!” I heard Markham call from the front. “Show yourself!” And then we saw it: a man dashing from the side doorway toward an outbuilding thirty feet across the dust. All I got was a glimpse of a powerful face and a bare chest, and then the man was inside the hut like a flash.

“Don’t shoot!” Markham cried, but we knew that already. The captain wanted him alive, at all costs. That he had made very clear the night before.

“Joseph!” Markham barked. Our translator was standing just inside the gate, frozen in place. “Get that nigger over here,” Markham called out.

Joseph staggered over.

“What is this hut?” Markham indicated the small house Bule had run to.

“A place for his . . .” A Creole word, then: “For his work.”

Markham’s ears perked up. “For his sorcery?”

Joseph nodded.

“Weapons?”

Joseph shook his head no.

“Tell him to come out.”

Joseph said nothing. Markham chambered a bullet and our translator complied.

A voice from inside, deep, in Creole.

“What’s he saying?” Markham said.

Joseph cried, snot running out of his nose. “He says he will cut my testicles off.”

“Tell him I’m not here to kill him.”

Joseph snorted. His eyes were fixed on the hut.

“Tell him!”

Joseph shouted something in Creole. The answer came back at once, a strange name at the end.

“He says he will kill you before you leave Haiti, Captain Markham. And your blond wife will follow.”

There was no need for him to translate the name. Markham had a strange look in his eyes. A combination, I think, of rage and . . . wonder.

“Rebecca,” he said softly. “He said Rebecca.” Instead of being angered, Markham laughed out loud, almost with delight. “I’ll be damned! How does he know that?”

Joseph said nothing, just hung his head.

“Captain, let us go in there,” I said.

“Check first at the window.”

Prescott and I bent over and ran to the wall of the little house. There were linen curtains covering the two windows, moving slightly in the breeze. I put my back up against the near wall, then swiveled and pointed my gun through the open window, pushing the curtain aside. I saw Bule sitting on a table, his feet up on a bench. He had in his right hand what looked like a rosary. In the other was a statue of a small, grotesque figure that I’d seen in the
voudoun
altars in the villages we came through. The sorcerer’s eyes were closed, and his lips moved in a soundless chant. There was a candle burning next to him, and next to his thigh was the dried head of some small animal, well-worn through rubbing.

The room was otherwise bare. A thick wooden beam ran the length of the room, exposed on all sides.

Bule must have run to the little house to have access to these things. Certainly no weapons were visible.

“Don’t move,” I told Bule in Creole. I nodded to Markham that it was safe, and he walked toward the front door. Through the window, I saw him enter the place, followed by Dyer, who soon held the witch doctor at gunpoint. I left the window and was the third man into the hut. On the way in, I ordered Prescott to bring Joseph.

“Look at him,” Markham said to me. He was grinning. “This is one remarkable savage. Not even hiding from us.”

Bule ignored him, only raising his face to the hut’s ceiling, his neck muscles straining as the intensity of his incantation seemed to increase. Joseph stumbled into the little room after being pushed by Prescott. He peered at Bule, and his face twitched fearfully. He whispered something in Creole, but Bule continued to chant silently, his body relaxed.

“Tell him I will interrogate him now,” Markham said. Joseph was in a sad state, trembling and even whining at points.

“Did you resurrect the man we shot on the way to Gonaïves?” Markham demanded.

Bule had apparently finished his chant. “Go back to your barley fields, Captain,” he said, as translated by Joseph. “Your power is useless here.”

Markham’s eyes sparked. His father grew barley on twenty acres outside Northam, that I knew.

“There are other kinds of power besides yours,” Markham said. He motioned to me. “Tie him to that beam. And bring some kindling, just in case.”

We did as instructed, finding some rough rope made of God knows what plant, which had been used for tethering a milk cow to its stake in the other corner of the yard. I cut it and brought it back to the hut, and we grabbed Bule roughly, then stood him on the table and secured his hands above the beam. The kindling we tossed under the bench. Bule looked at me with contempt smoldering in his eyes. He resented being handled by us, that much was clear. Joseph collapsed in the corner, and we could not stop him from crying out.

I had the feeling Bule was memorizing our faces. It was then that the coppery taste from the previous night returned to my mouth, and I spit on the packed-earth floor.

“I will talk to this man alone,” Markham said to Dyer and me. “Leave Joseph.”

It was my duty to speak up. I went to the captain and spoke low enough so that only us two could hear. “Captain, our orders are to bring Bule in alive.”

Markham’s eyes flashed at me. “Dismissed, Sergeant.”

“He’s not just another Haitian, Captain. Headquarters will be—”

Markham dropped his head low and fairly hissed at me, “I won’t speak to you again.”

I wasn’t fighting for the Haitian’s life. He was nothing to me. But Monk had died in pursuit of this man, and orders were orders.

I motioned for Dyer to leave. I gave Markham one last look, but his eyes were already on the prisoner.

We went out into the yard. The main house was deathly quiet. Then I could hear Markham’s voice, low, and after Joseph’s babble I heard the responses of Bule, even lower. But I could not make out the words.

The sun was still powerful, so we retired to the shade of a palm tree. From here, we heard the voices from inside the hut rise in volume, with Markham’s insistent and Bule’s haughty. Ten minutes later, Joseph came staggering out. He was babbling something.

“What is it?” I cried.

“
Fou,
” he spat. “The captain is
fou.
”

“What’s
fou
?” I asked Dyer.

“I believe it means ‘crazy,’ ” Dyer said. “Tell us something we don’t know.”

Before I could call back to Joseph, there was a pistol shot, and Joseph’s arms splayed out in the air and he fell face-first into the dirt. He was shot in the shoulder. The report had come from inside the hut, Markham’s sidearm surely.

“Goddamn it,” I said, and started toward the hut, but already a wisp of smoke escaped the window. Then another. I called out to Markham and was answered by a strangled animal cry.

“Let him burn,” Dyer said behind me.

I came to the doorway, and there I saw something I will never forget. The captain had heaped the kindling—dried cane leaves and cedar branches—onto the table, under Bule, and lit it. The fire was licking at the Haitian’s bare feet, and the table had already caught as well. But Bule didn’t pull them away; as the smoke billowed, he was staring with a diabolical intensity at Markham.

I sensed that it was Markham, not his prisoner, who had cried out.

The smoke was thick, billowing, and I saw the flames puff out from Bule’s clothes. He began to scream.

Markham stumbled past me.

Dyer ran for a bucket, and the two others propped their guns against the house and moved inside. But I could feel the heat press against me as the hut went up. I staggered back and nearly collided with Markham. He was on his knees in the yard, and on his face was a look of such horror that I called out his name and asked if he was injured.

But he was mute, even when I shook him. I found he couldn’t speak. Not for another three days did the captain find his voice.

November 10th: I have been down at heart and so have neglected this journal for near on a month. But an unfinished account of what transpired in Haiti will be worthless to anyone so unfortunate as to want to read this sad tale, so I must relate the final details. The public will know them soon enough, as Captain Markham is in the brig at Fort-Liberté and will be transported back to Northam for trial and, I have no doubt, execution. The families of Ford and McIlhane demand this trial in Northam, and I can understand the logic of the thing. The testimony will be given where their loved ones can attend and stare at the murderer as he is brought in chains. The Corps agreed to this, in part, I’m sure, to mollify public opinion and keep the Haitian mission protected from even further public scorn.

What I will relate is this: Markham was a changed man as we made our way back to Colonel Fine’s headquarters in Cap-Haïtien. His unwillingness to talk troubled us all, but after the first day we gave up trying to coax him into speech; he seemed lost in his own thoughts and deeply disturbed by them as well. The killing of Bule would have not affected his status with the Corps by itself; there are tales of many such “interrogations” that we have heard from outfits that have served us longer. But Markham was nevertheless deeply shaken. His face was troubled, his brow constantly beetling with perplexity, and even his speech changed at times—he was prone to outbursts of intense anger. At other times, he seemed lost, almost childlike.

Four nights after the death of Bule, as we slept in camp alongside Colonel Fine’s unit, I heard the sounds of commotion in my dreams. I woke with a start and found an indescribable sight: Captain Markham was on the other side of the campfire outside my tent. His form was illuminated by the flickering flames, and they cast terrible shadows across his face. But I will say this, and this I will testify in Northam: his lips were curled in an expression of nothing less than joy.

His bayonet was raised above the figures of the sleeping men. I was too late to do anything to save them. Markham had nearly completed his crime—the murder of Privates Ford and McIlhane.

I do not know how I sensed the situation so quickly. Perhaps I saw unconsciously the blood on the bayonet, or I intuited that the captain had lost his reason from the mad expression on his face. But I reached for my revolver and shot Markham once in the thigh, missing on the second bullet. When I came to him, dashing past the remains of Ford and McIlhane on their bedrolls and catching only a brightly lit glimpse of their savaged faces, he was raving at me, laughing and crying out in gibberish. His leg was shattered—I saw the bone at five paces—but he seemed to feel no pain. I shouted at him to be quiet, but he was beyond reason, and I had to strike him with the butt of my pistol to silence him.

I will not go into detail about the state of the bodies. There are full details in the charging documents that I provided to the Marine investigators and have no wish to revisit. As is commonly known, Ford and McIlhane were already dead or near death when I checked them. But that, of course, was only the least diabolical of Captain Markham’s actions that night. When I came upon him, he had just finished removing the organs of Private Ford and had already cut up McIlhane around the midsection. Three organs—two kidneys and a heart—were carefully laid out on a clean piece of buckram that the captain formerly used for storing his sidearm. I will remember that sight for the rest of my life and for as long as my poor spirit lingers in the afterworld, of that I am sure.

I can write no more of this night. And I cannot account for Markham’s actions, except to say that I believe that he was unbalanced to his core.

November 13th: I have only one more thing to add to this sad narrative, and it concerns our translator, Joseph. I had long been curious about what passed between Markham and Bule on that fateful day when the captain ordered me from the hut and spoke to the prisoner only in the presence of Joseph. I searched for our translator after the events; he had survived Markham’s bullet, that I knew, but after being treated at one of our field hospitals, he quickly disappeared into the countryside. We hired a new translator in Plaisance, but all efforts to find Joseph were unsuccessful. The Haitians did not even wish to speak his name.