The Binding (38 page)

It was soon after the murders of my comrades that I came upon him. We were driving in our auto-truck toward Gonaïves to bring supplies to a unit there—tents, medical bandages, and boots, as I recall, to replace the ones that tended to rot away in the tropical heat. We were passing through a small town whose name I do not know, and Haitians were lined up on either side of the road.

I was in the passenger seat, with Private Shaughnessy from Colonel Fine’s unit doing the driving, when I happened to glance out of the window and caught sight of Joseph in the mass of black faces watching the truck push its way through the streets. I cried, “Stop!” and dismounted immediately. Joseph didn’t run away but only observed my approach with red-veined eyes and a slack expression.

He was much altered; the neat and even dapper man was gone, and he stood now in poor clothing: a much-used gray shirt, filthy at the cuffs and stained, with a pair of ragged black half-pants. He might have not changed the outfit he was wearing for the previous weeks, I would guess. This educated man was now indistinguishable from the mass of peasantry. I hustled him into the back of the auto-truck, made room among the provisions, and spoke to him there for the rest of the journey.

It was an odd conversation. The raw smell of
clairin
—Haitian moonshine—came across the short space between us, and his speech, at least early on, was slurred. He slipped into Creole on several occasions, and I had to call him back to English, that we might continue the conversation.

“What happened in that hut?” I asked him finally.

He guffawed. “You
blans
! More curious than children. You must know everything. You must have everything and you must know it, too.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said, impatient with his new freedom with me.

“What would you like to know?”

“What did Markham ask Bule? Was it about the leadership of the
cacos
?”

Joseph leaned over as if he were to impart a great revelation, breathed a mouthful of
clairin
fumes into my face, and solemnly intoned: “No.”

He sat up, laughing.

“Do not become too familiar, Joseph.”

He gave me an insolent stare. “What then?” The gaiety passed out of his expression—perhaps it was the last fumes of intoxication—and the lines of his face hardened. “Why don’t you ask Markham?”

“Because he’s insane. He won’t talk to anyone.”

Joseph laughed softly to himself. “What does he eat?”

“What do you mean?”

“What does he
eat,
the captain? Your
blan
food or
griot
?”
Griot
was the local pork dish, the food of the common people here when they could afford it. I didn’t respond. “He loves his
griot
now, yes? Yes, I’m sure.”

Again he leaned over, but this time his face was serious, as if he really wished to impart a secret with no one hearing, although we could barely make ourselves heard above the shifting of the auto-truck on the road.

“Markham is dead,” he whispered. “He just doesn’t know it.”

“What do you mean?”

Joseph stared at me contemptuously. “Just what I said. Markham believes he lives. Maybe he believes that he’s been unjustly accused. Maybe he believes he’s back in America, romancing some woman. Or perhaps he is suffering unimaginable torture. He experiences what Bule allows him to experience.”

This was madness, and I looked at Joseph as I would a man ranting about the end of the world. With pity and solicitude. But his face was so calm, his voice as reasonable-seeming as a pastor back home discussing some minor event. It made me uneasy, and I found myself at a loss for words. What could he mean that Markham was living some kind of shadow, hermetic life?

“You are not like your captain,” Joseph said finally after a minute or two of silence. “You are satisfied with the world you see, eh? Markham, oh, much different. Much. When I first met him, I expected him to carve me with his knife and ask about the
cacos.
That’s what the Marines do, that’s all they’re interested in. We have a saying, you know, us Haitians: the Americans came to Haiti to see the color of our blood.”

He glanced back at the receding landscape. “But Markham invited me to sit down as if we were courtiers at the presidential palace, and he offered me brandy from his private flask. He didn’t ask a single question about the rebels.” His eyes back on me, intent. “All he wanted to know about was Bule. You thought he was in those ‘interviews’ grilling the Haitians about the
cacos,
but he wanted to know the sorcerer’s secrets. How he did his . . . magic. Yes? How he enchanted Francelow—that is the man he shot in the village—during the ceremony of
voudoun.
And then other questions: What had Bule done with Monk? And more so,
how
had he done it. Very strange questions for a
blan.
”

I gaped at him as we bounced on the benches, the landscape of rural Haiti dancing beyond the canvas flaps.

“Ahhh, yes. Captain Markham was curious. He told me he had always been curious about the spirit world, that he had attended séances back in his home, and was a member of the Rosicrucians. He called himself a seeker.”

There was a certain correspondence between what I was hearing and Markham’s odd behavior.

“And that was his downfall,” Joseph said.

“Why? Bule died in the fire at his compound.”

Again, disdain in the Haitian’s eyes. If he’d looked at me that way in the street, I might have struck him down. But I wanted to hear what he said.

“Bule,” Joseph said, his eyes unfixed and his voice hoarse, “is the greatest sorcerer in Haiti for three or four generations. Since the time of Charlemagne Herivaux, or that is what they say. But even he had limits.” Joseph sat back against the canvas. “You see, everyone in Haiti goes to Bule, but everyone fears him, too. They will not open up themselves—” Here he put the palms of his hands together, then slowly peeled them back, as if to reveal something inside. “No, they have defenses against the likes of Bule.” He slapped his hands together quickly and held them grasped together. “They know what he will do. They will not allow him in.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Exactly. Be happy you don’t understand. I told Markham this. I said, your seeking will get you more than you bargain for. But he was determined.”

“So in the hut, on that final day, he didn’t ask about the
cacos
either? He didn’t ask about the rebel networks, about who was supplying them? What did he burn him for, then, if not to find out these things?”

Joseph shook his head no.

“He said, ‘Bule, I admire you. I want to learn your secrets. Tell me and you will live.’ ”

“Impossible!” I nearly shouted.

Joseph laughed. “Believe what you want. But those were his words. I, too, was shocked. Shocked because I saw Bule thinking, thinking.

“He laughed. Bule knew that Markham couldn’t grant him life. If you Americans didn’t kill him, the Haitians would make them, Dartiguenave”—the president of the Senate—“and some others in the government. He’d grown much, much too powerful and now they had the chance to do away with him without being . . .” Joseph had a smile on his lips. “Contaminated. So he spit on the ground. Markham sprang at him, shouting bloody mur-deerrr. But Bule only went quiet. And soon, I knew it was done.”

“What was done, Joseph?”

Instead of answering me, Joseph glanced up at the bright day. “I’ve been waiting for him.”

“For Markham?”

Joseph laughed. “Markham is dead, I tell you. As am I. But let me ask you this—” His face was grave as I ever saw it. “The things Markham removed from the two soldiers. What was done with them?”

I gaped at him. “The organs, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t possibly—”

Joseph’s voice rose. “They are part of Bule’s power now. He was feeding his spirit, do you see? You
must
not let them be offered to the fire. If those organs are brought to the flame, Bule will grow even stronger. And that will not be so good for you.”

“For me?” I said.

“How many children do you have, Sergeant?” he asked, with concern in his eyes.

“That is none of your affair.”

“Let me give you this one piece of advice. When you return to America, move as far away from Captain Markham’s home-place as you can.” He coughed. “And should you find your family plagued by strange illnesses and terrible ends, do not think that you are the victim of bad luck. Seek the evildoer among the descendants of your squadron. The squadron, Sergeant. That’s where you will find the traveler. Do you understand me?”

Joseph had clearly passed into the realm of delirium tremens, or outright madness. I could get no more sense out of him after that. He simply stared at the ribbon of road spilling out behind us, as if lost in reverie. After a few more questions, I gave up.

I felt Joseph had been wrongly done by Markham, and I was struck to see him so fallen. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a few dollars and handed them to him. He took them without thanks. “Tell your driver to let me out here.”

I did, and Joseph marched off, swaying as he went, the
clairin
still not out of his system.

I resumed my seat next to the driver, but I saw only that yard in Saint-Michel-de-l’Attalaye and Markham stumbling from the hut. I went over and over it again, but I couldn’t make any sense of Joseph’s ramblings. Did he mean that Bule had cursed Markham somehow? Or were the two in league together, consorts in some evil I still didn’t comprehend?

It was a long trip to Gonaïves, and I wished to God I had never come to Haiti.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

J
ohn Bailey stood in front of Stephanie Godwin’s door and rang the bell. A light rain drizzled on the flagstones behind him. It sounded far off, a feeble rattle, as if the electric current in the house were running low. Nothing moved behind the three diamond-shaped windows in the wooden door; no breath of wind stirred the little lace curtains that covered them on the inside.

He took a deep breath. If he was going to tell his boss that zombies—no,
nzombes
, as Nat had told him—were running wild all over Northam, he needed to get his ducks in a row. He had to be able to say Chuck Godwin was wandering the woods and have his wife, Stephanie, to back him up on that little fact. That’s why he was here. To get her on board in case he needed to go to the chief.

He didn’t know what else to do. Nothing else made sense right now.

John clomped his size-13 boots impatiently on the red-colored porch. He couldn’t believe he was standing here, but that was his life now. The shock of Charlie holding John’s gun in his mouth hadn’t left him; it had simply joined the other stream of images that had turned everything into a continuous walking nightmare.

Finally, the thin lace curtain that hung over the bottom window trembled and John saw an eye with pale flesh around it regard him from the corner.

“Mrs. Godwin?” he called. “It’s Detective Bailey. Can we talk for a minute?”

The curtain dropped, and it was as if the eye had never been
there. The door didn’t open. No sound came out of the house. John grimaced and leaned on the doorbell. What was the city coming to, when people stopped talking to cops? John walked along the porch, whose red paint was chipping and showing the cement beneath, and ducked his head to look in the picture window.

The living room was sunk in a green aquarium light, dark at the edges. There was a red knit throw on the couch, trailing down to the carpeted floor, as if someone had been taking a nap and just gotten up.

He returned to the railing, turning his back to the house. He looked up and down the street. What the fuck was going on here?

Something caught his eye to the east. It was in the Raitliff Woods, high up on a slope. Must be half a mile away. Something glowing red.
Did some idiot start a fire up there?
John thought. He watched it for a moment, trying to remember the last time he’d seen flames in that forest. Never, that’s when . . .

He shivered, gritting his teeth. He watched to see if the flames, which were sending up a pall of dirty gray smoke, were spreading. But the fire wasn’t moving. Maybe it was kids, he thought; kids playing Lewis and Clark, roasting some marshmallows or passing around a bottle of cheap schnapps, had let their campfire get out of control and touched off a grove of pines. But he was uneasy, and he couldn’t take his eyes from the flames that were sending a dark plume of smoke into the drifting mists that covered large swathes of the forest.